The Last Odd Day Page 4

  I stood there in the hallway, a crazy world spinning around me. Clouds building up on the horizon, practically bursting at the seams. People screaming for help, others moaning like they were facing death head-on, nurses and staff trying to create some semblance of order, and the news that a woman, a daughter named Lilly, had discovered my husband and was visiting him.

  More than eleven weeks she had been coming. Three months. Almost ninety days. Somebody who believed herself to be family had sat near O.T. and watched him, learned him, maybe even cared for him. There had been a flood of unexplained emotions, a storm blowing through hearts, and I had not known.

  4

  Emma Lovella Witherspoon. That’s what I had named my baby before she died. Emma Andrews Witherspoon is on the birth and death certificates because at the time of my labor and her passing, I could not muster up the strength or the words to tell them a middle name. They simply used my maiden one. O.T. remembered the Emma part because I had told him in the eighteenth week my decision about what she would be called. He had forgotten about Lovella.

  Emma was the name of my sister, who died when I was seven. She was younger than me by almost three years. So what I recall of her is mostly baby and toddler stuff. Crying, resting at my mother’s breast, pulling on things—the table or sofa, my legs—as she learned to walk. I know that she was weak, prone to coughs and colds, a thready breath, Grandma Whitebead called it as she held the baby over a pot of steaming herbs, worry spread across her face.

  Emma was lethargic, not very playful; she mostly stayed in the house, near my mother’s lap. But I do remember one time not long before she died when I carried her to the creek and helped her climb a tree. It was the happiest I ever saw her. I lifted her while she grabbed for the sturdiest limb, and she pulled herself up until she was standing six or seven feet above me.

  Of course I got in trouble for taking her outside without dressing her in hat and coat, for letting her get so high; but even my mother’s anger quickly subsided when she saw the glee and excitement on her younger daughter’s face and listened as she talked about what she saw from so lofty a perch.

  That’s the way I think of her even now, a little girl standing in a saucer magnolia tree, tiny cups of purple and white all around her, the sounds of her laughter, a thin voice calling out to the birds and butterflies that floated so near. I like the thought of her that way, happy and playful, surrounded by the sights and smells of spring.

  After the death of my baby, however, I wondered if I had cursed her in some way, naming her after another child, a little girl, who had died unnecessarily. I considered the possibility that my sister Emma had returned and claimed her for herself since she had been disallowed most of the pleasures of living. I even thought it was fair. But that only lasted a few days. Grief doesn’t let anything stay true for long.

  Lovella was the name of my elementary school teacher. Dr. Lovella Hughes. She was black as coal, wiry, and not the least bit interested in excuses as to why you couldn’t be or do the thing she knew you could.

  It was, of course, in the 1930s, so the minority children were not permitted to attend the white school or be taught by white personnel. Dr. Lovella Hughes was the only teacher willing to travel up into the caverns of the Great Smoky Mountains and find and educate the children that no one else even acknowledged were living up there. She was hired by the state to teach the black children and the Cherokees.

  The white teacher and the white school were in Bryson City, twelve miles away; and being half white and shaded more like my father’s side of the family, I could have passed. But since my daddy was blind, literally and figuratively, he saw no reason for me to travel so far away just to go to a white school when I could walk down my driveway and across the field to the little cabin on the reservation where Dr. Hughes taught all nine grades. That’s as high as you went in that school if you were even able to get that far. Most of the students were finished with the education system and Dr. Hughes’s enormous amount of homework by the time they were ten.

  She was hard, like wood, steady eyes and unyielding; and she would say to me, “Jean Andrews, there isn’t a reason written down or spoken why you can’t leave this mountain, go to college, and be anything you want to be. You have a gift, young lady, and God knows all about it. You just call him up and ask him what it is he’s got in mind for you.”

  “Just call him up,” she’d say, like he had a phone number and a direct line.

  She thought I had a natural inclination for words and theorizing, suggested I considered journalism or science research. When I came home and told my parents what she had said, my mother smiled and nodded, her way of showing me she was proud. My father mulled it over much like a theological proposition and said, “Words and writing is a dangerous way to make a living; I’d pick the science option.”

  I laughed at the irony of this statement coming from a blind man trying to farm on the side of a hill. But then he continued. “I never want to see no record of the stupid things I ever said. Be like a snake you only hit and stunned, he’ll be back to bite.” Then he reached out his hand, a sign to my mother, who came over to his side, bringing him a cup of coffee.

  Even though I understood my daddy’s wisdom and had seen only one newspaper in my whole life, I still liked the idea of writing. I thought that with my teacher’s guidance and support I could leave the mountains and the farming and make a life for myself with words.

  But Dr. Lovella Hughes, the only person in my life who made me think I could do something other than dig up bloodroot or ginseng, milk cows, and grow a productive garden, left the mountain just as I was finishing seventh grade. She developed tuberculosis after caring for the Crainshaw baby when the mother died and the father just ran off. Everybody knew the baby was sick, that it had taken in its mother’s bad milk; but Dr. Hughes was not about to let the child die just because he had a bad start. She cared for him as long as she could then turned him over to the state.

  We heard that she lived a long time in one of those sanitariums near her hometown of Wilson and that she was never sorry for doing what she did. The baby grew up to become a famous lawyer, a senator or judge or something. To this day I don’t think he has any idea how shaky his beginnings were and how one black woman, who rode a train, two buses, and a farm truck up the mountain to teach the children, gave him back his life.

  When Dr. Hughes left I lost the motivation to keep learning, the drive to write reports or stories. So I quit school and helped on the farm and took care of my parents. There was always something that needed to be done, cows to be milked, weeds to be pulled, floors to be swept. And with just the three of us trying to make a go at harvesting crops and managing a farm, there was no extra time for studying or planning for the future.

  Sometimes I think about how my life might have been different if I had finished high school and made it to college. I think I could have been smart and ambitious. I could have put the words together describing a life or researched the patterns of animal behavior. I could have been more interesting. But just like Dr. Hughes made a choice to put herself at risk to nurture the life of an orphan boy, I sacrificed the thoughts of being educated and clever and lived my life at home.

  We stayed up there together, the three of us, working, figuring, managing, until I turned fifteen and Mama died from a heart attack. It was her third, the first two having come over a period of four years, leaving her weak-spirited and unable to walk a row of beans or stand at the stove and cook. After her passing, Daddy lasted just a few months. His trouble, though diagnosed by doctors as the same reason for death as Mama’s, cardiac arrest, was of another sort. He simply quit living. Bleeding heart, the old folks called it. My daddy died from having been forsaken. He always thought he should go first.

  After my daddy’s death, I was briefly cared for by my father’s family, his sister and her husband. But every day I would walk the three miles to our old house and stay longer and longer, until one evening I just didn’t leave. I prefe
rred the silence and the reminders of being a part of something to a house full of noise and routine in which I did not fit.

  Aunt Carolyn would bring me food, check on me from time to time; but I found living by myself was not too unlike the couple of months I had lived with my daddy after Mama died. The only thing that was different was that the sunlight coming through the window seemed to last longer and the general spirit of the house, at least for a little while, was lighter.

  For about nine months I lived by myself like a hermit. I wore my mother’s clothes, the dresses, all made from cotton, a lavender one with faded blue flowers, a spring pink one dotted with tiny white buttons, a long black skirt that fell well below my ankles. I wore the pearl earrings she had won in a raffle and kept her silver combs in my hair. I donned her red blouse with beads on the cuffs, and I walked about the farm and even inside the house in my father’s old work boots, the brown ones scuffed and resoled.

  I lit candles and talked to the walls and the spaces in the air, like my family, even my dead siblings, was still there. I brought out the old high chair and set it near the table. I bottled milk and made juice. I cooked the way Mama had with spices of cayenne and mint. I baked bread and dried fruits so that the kitchen felt the same as it always did, hot and fragrant. I spoke to her while I kneaded and worked the dough. I asked questions. I sang lullabies. I called them to myself.

  I took to smoking a pipe like Daddy so that the smell of tobacco, sweet and mild, remained along the edges of windowsills and high in the air above my head. I read stories from his favorite books, and I told him news of the mountain. I rocked in his chair, and I would not let him rest.

  Once I realized that I was responsible for my dead family coming back, that I had asked for the spirits of those who had passed, it was too late because I had made it too easy for them to return and stay. It was all too familiar. I had created a house that was full and prankish, and eventually the dead ones were filling up the rooms and crowding me out.

  I met O.T. when I left the ghost house and went into town one Saturday to sell apples and the herbs I had harvested. He was there with his family sightseeing, visiting the mountains and the Indian reservation. It was late summer, August or September, the afternoons still hot, the sky heavy. He kept coming over to my table, tapping the fruit, rolling them across his fingers, smelling the ginseng, like he knew what he was doing.

  He was handsome, attentive, a tall young man who claimed he wanted to be a soldier. He had dark brown hair and the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was wearing work pants, denim, that were clean and unfaded. I think they were new.

  He had on a tan shirt that was bordered in a bold black thread, a design of embroidered curls, that edged along the collar. He looked as fancy as a girl; and later I asked him why he was so dressed up. He announced that he was expecting to find me, that he woke up that morning and knew his future wife was waiting for him on that day. So he took a bath and shaved and put on his nicest clothes. And when he saw me, he said, he was certain that I was the one.

  I was not nearly so convinced that we were meant to be together. It didn’t seem to matter about how much faith I had, however, because before I or his mama and daddy knew it, he was driving almost up to the Tennessee border once a month just to visit me, the one they called “that dark mountain girl who both farmed and lived all by herself.”

  O.T. was easy to talk to in the early months we were together; he was shy and ham-fisted. He made me laugh. He made me feel pretty. He showed off a lot, more than he needed to, since truth be told, I’d have left the mountain with anybody.

  It wasn’t that I hated being alone up there or that things were too hard for me, a teenage orphan. It’s just that once the house started growing my family’s spirits, it became unruly. They had no regard for me or my space. It was as if they thought that since I was by myself and I had made things so satisfactory for them, I wouldn’t mind the company of four unequal ghosts.

  There were little things at first, hardly noticeable—dishes falling off the shelves, windows being pushed open, fires being blown out. But after a while they just got too comfortable staying there with me. It unsettled me.

  Not that there were ghosts. Everybody in the mountains knows about ghosts. I expected ghosts; I lived on their property, hemmed in by the reality of death. It wasn’t their presence that bothered me; I had asked for that. But rather what became upsetting is that they didn’t respect me enough to believe I would mind their recklessness, their destructiveness. That they kept hanging around like they were sure I would keep taking care of them, cleaning up after them, staying awake for them.

  I mean, what did they think, that I would stay up there for the rest of my life entertaining them? Fixing them suppers and pallets of color for them to lie in? Keep pasting and gluing together the things they broke?

  It’s true that I didn’t have much and that I had longed for them to be with me. But I knew I was quickly reaching my limit and that I would have to make a choice to leave them to the place they wanted or die in resolution to join them.

  So I closed up the house without saying good-bye, left the ghosts to fend for themselves, and took off with a young man called by two letters rather than a proper name. He brought me to his home in Forsyth County, married me, then promptly left to fight in the Second World War. I lived with his family, trying hard not to miss the one I’d abandoned, trying hard to make myself at home, away from the mountain, away from everything familiar.

  I compensated for all that was missing by working hard. Since I preferred to be outside, I worked with O.T.’s brother, Jolly, and his father. I helped bring in soybeans, corn, and hay. I slaughtered cows, slopped pigs, plowed the fields, and put up tobacco.

  Even though his parents did not like it much when he brought his new bride in to live with them, by the time O.T. had left and come home, I was more of an asset to them than a son. I was there. I farmed the land and helped raise the youngest child, Dick. And even though his mother always seemed to be studying me like she thought I brought in trouble, I know I kept that family farm afloat.

  When O.T. returned, I had become grown and old like him. He was aged by the atrocity of war and by things he would never say out loud, and I by the costs of leaving home and being left alone too many times.

  I see now that it was not the best way to begin my life as an adult, as a married woman; but I played with the cards I got. I know I gave the Witherspoon family the best of who I was. I worked hard. I caused no conflict. I did as I was told. But even though I left home and was miles away from the mountains of my childhood and years away from the influence of an elementary grade teacher, I never forgot where I came from and what I had learned.

  My family was bonded together, across life and across death. We shared a past. We had a common story. Dr. Lovella Hughes made me think I was capable of greatness. And even though my sister died young and greatness never came about for me, because of them I am a stronger, better person. So I wanted my baby to have that too, the bond of family, the possibility of greatness.

  Emma Lovella. I gave her the name of more than just a sister, more than just a teacher and mentor. I gave her the name of a force. In the end it didn’t matter; but when I was big and full of plans, it meant the world.

  Emma Lovella Witherspoon, that’s the name I chose for my baby because that is a name with history and hope. It is a name of promise. And for my daughter, when I was planning her life and calling her by name, when I was dreaming my dreams for her, giving her a path to follow, helping her begin, it was everything I could want.

  5

  I was awake and up at exactly the moment the snow fell. The TV weather forecasters in North Carolina give reports all night when a winter storm is passing through. And when they’re right and precipitation really does fall, they follow it as it makes its way across the state.

  “Notice on the satellite radar how the snow is falling over Tennessee and making its way east. It should be here in the form of sleet or freezi
ng rain in about four hours.” Then they’ll show pictures of a storm from last year and interview the transportation crews to find out which roads they clear first. Next half hour, it’s the same thing.

  They track it like it’s a hungry beast walking toward us, threatening us, bearing down upon us. They make it seem that if we know exactly when it makes its way down our driveway and along our streets, we’ll be safer and more sound than if we were met by surprise. “The snow should fall in the southern piedmont in thirty-seven minutes.” No thief coming in the night here. The television stations will make sure of that.

  I was not out of bed timing the storm. I just happened still to be awake and decided to open the blinds on the front window and check outside. It was 11:51 p.m.

  Even in the dark I could see the heaviness of the clouds. The squeeze and grasp of the atmosphere to hold its breath. The burden of the weight. Clutching, clenching, gripping, it fought to keep itself together. Then finally in the time it takes only to blink one’s eyes, only to be caught off guard, a quick jerk of your head, the clouds burst at the seams and there came a violent release. A bounty of white flecks shaken from the ripped belly of the sky.

  Snowstorms in the mountains, when I was a little girl, were as frequent in the winter as the visits of mice in the storeroom. We expected the ground cover from November to March, sometimes April, to be crunchy and white. And because this is what I was accustomed to, I never thought much about it. Winter was white and brisk and stark. It was just the season, like dogwood flowers and daffodils in the spring, june bugs and squash blooms in the summer, rich golden leaves and dark green moss in the fall.

  Now that I have been away from the mountains and their winters for so long, I am as surprised at the changes in the landscape when a storm rolls through as are the kids who grew up at the beach.