The Saints of Swallow Hill(6)

No, being with Warren was heaven compared to that. She could’ve ended up as one of them “mill girls,” living the dreary life expected for them once they turned eighteen, unless a marriage proposal come along. If Warren hadn’t been needing him a wife, she’d be there now, getting up and going to work at the cotton mill. Coming home to a hot or cold room in the boardinghouse, probably sharing it with another sad woman who’d fallen to the same fate until something better was offered. For Rae Lynn that was Warren. He’d been on his way to town, and he’d seen her tending the home’s vegetable garden.

He gave a little wave and called out to her. “Why, hey there. What’s your name?”

She wasn’t inclined to speak to strangers, but he smiled kindly enough, this tall, thin man in respectable clean coveralls, pressed shirt, and a straw hat. He waited politely, hands in his pockets, smiling all the while. Patient-like. She stepped a little closer to the fence.

“Rae Lynn.”

“Rae Lynn? Now, that’s a pretty name. Well, Rae Lynn. Nice to meet’cha. My name’s Warren Cobb.”

She nodded, and then Mrs. Rankin hollered, “Visitors are to come to the front entrance!”

She turned to go, and he said, “How often do you work out here?”

“Near about every day now it’s warm.”

After that, he stopped to chat whenever he went to town, slowly learning a little bit about her background, if it could be called that.

“How’d you come to live at the orphanage?”

“I was dropped off. Won’t but a little baby. Had a piece a paper pinned to my diaper and my name on it.”

He said, “It might’ve been the best thing for you. Won’t never know.”

She’d never thought of it like that, and saw he was serious. He started leaving little gifts tucked away near the fence post if he happened to miss her. Never anything big, just thoughtful gestures to show he’d been by and that she came to look forward to. A bright-red polished apple. A dainty lace handkerchief, all clean and white. A rose. As time went on, he got to asking her, always on a Sunday, would she marry him. He wasn’t the husband she expected. In her mind, her husband would have been younger. Warren was forty, and a widower, yet she was drawn to his air of maturity and his faithfulness on those Sundays.

When it came to the time of year when leaves started to turn, and a chill was in the air, she finally agreed. The why of it, she couldn’t be sure, except maybe it was her growing sense of not belonging and the idea of having her own little family was something she’d never thought possible, but now, with Warren, it was. In the fall, right before the pecans dropped, they married, and she moved to where his family once lived. She didn’t mind one bit the house was old, the wood siding silvered with age and capped by a rusted tin roof. It was her first real home. Warren said the house was called a “shotgun” shack.

She said, “Why’s it called that?”

“’Cause if someone shoots at the front door, the bullet will go straight out the back and not hit nothing. If all the doors is opened.”

Through the front door was the living room. The next room was the bedroom, and after it came the kitchen with a back door leading to the yard, and a little farther, the outhouse. Beyond the house sat an old tobacco barn, a smokehouse, and a chicken coop, which was attached to one side of a bigger barn. Though she looked for signs of his first marriage, it was apparent he’d been there for some time on his own. A woman’s touch was lacking given the disarray that greeted her. There were stacks of books beside the chair where he read at night, along with various newspapers, turpentine containers, tools, rags with all sorts of stains, and dirty plates collected here and there. She noticed the dishes. They were milk glass, rimmed in pale blue, and Rae Lynn believed they might’ve belonged to his first wife, Ida Neill Cobb.

“She had a bad heart,” Warren told her, “in more ways than one.”

Her gravestone was a little ways off, set in small clearing nearby. They’d had a son, Eugene, who now worked as a lawyer down in South Carolina.

Surrounded by crisp scented pines, this was the first house she’d ever lived in, and she made it her own. Hung the curtains she’d sewed at the windows. Scrubbed every inch of it from top to bottom. Talked Warren into painting the kitchen. One afternoon, soon after they were married, Warren stood with her on the porch, one hand on her shoulder, the other pointing out the varieties of pine they had.

He said, “And over there’s the most important kind, the longleaf, shug.”

He’d taken to calling her that, and she liked how he drew the word out in a long drawl, like shoooog.

Warren had come from a long history of North Carolina turpentiners. Over the last seven years, he’d taught her all about chipping and dipping, so now she worked alongside him, sunup to sundown. Together, they’d certainly seen their fair share of labor, her and him, toiling like fools to keep from starving. She admitted, only to herself, she sometimes wondered had he married her because he needed a helping hand. She tried not to think it was just that. She believed he loved her, in his plain, no-nonsense sort of way.

Used to, there’d be others needing work, eager to do anything, like Billy Doyle here now, his first day. Rae Lynn watched him struggle and was concerned. Anytime she worked with Warren and a new hire, she got nervous. Billy, and everyone else who lived in rural areas, were finally feeling pinched by the Depression. The prices had gone so low, farmers had to find other work to add to the little bit of money they made in order to feed their children, and pay bills. Everyone had heard of them Hoovervilles, such as they were called, springing up right outside of cities. Crude accommodations barely better than living outside. Nobody wanted to be forced to live like that, but even big landowners couldn’t hang on forever when the bank came calling. Along with soup kitchens, children going without decent clothes and barefoot, everyone was in need.