The Dry Grass of August(11)
“Same thing.”
“What you say,” said Mary. “What you say.”
The front door opened and there was Uncle Taylor, smiling, his arms held wide.
I hadn’t seen him in over a year, not since he and Aunt Lily came to visit us before Davie started walking. But he was as handsome as I remembered, his hair bleached by the sun, his blue eyes sparkling. He grabbed me up, swinging me off the front walk.
“Jubie! How’s my favorite niece?” Even if he said that to Puddin and Stell Ann, too, which he always did, I knew he only meant it to me.
“Hey, Uncle Taylor.” I hugged him back. He smelled like lemons.
He put me down and held me out, squinting, studying me. “You’ve grown, girl. What have you been eating, spinach and baked vitamins?”
“Too much of everything, if you ask Mama.” I reached for Mary’s hand. “You remember Mary, Uncle Taylor?”
“Of course I do. How are you, Mary?”
“Just fine, Commander Bentley, just fine.”
“I’ve got a nice room for you upstairs. Y’all come on in and let’s get you settled, then we’ll go down to the beach. Jubes, where’s that good-looking mother of yours?”
“She went to the bathroom.”
He opened the front door for me and Mary. “We’ll find her.”
Mama was in the entry hall. Uncle Taylor wrapped his arms around her. “Hey, big sister, I’ve been looking for you!”
Mama buried her face in his chest. She said his name over and over. She started to laugh. “Oh, Taylor, I’m so glad to be here.” The laughter turned to crying, first like tears of joy, then like her heart was breaking. I knew that kind of crying, the hiccupping sobs that wouldn’t stop. I was embarrassed for her.
“Pauly-Wauly.” Uncle Taylor held Mama close. “You’ve had a rough time, old girl.”
CHAPTER 4
There was a time in my life before Mary, a time when Mama and Daddy weren’t fighting, when they still called each other Pauly and Willie. Maybe if I’d never known them happy, the trouble between them wouldn’t have bothered me so much. But I remember Shumont Mountain and the four-room log cabin next to Rainbow Lake where Mama and Daddy had spent their honeymoon. We moved there in the summer of 1944, a few months after Grandmother Bentley died, leaving Mama and Uncle Taylor a tidy sum. Daddy said we’d stay there till the war was over and he could start his business in Charlotte. While we lived on Shumont, he was home at night and almost never got drunk.
Our cabin was on a flat place between two peaks reached by a road of twenty-one hairpin curves that Daddy and I counted out loud whenever we went up or down the mountain, stopping at least once to let Stell throw up. The road was something that didn’t change. Years later when we went back for summer vacations, we had to go around the same twenty-one curves between Bat Cave and Shumont.
Stell was seven that summer and I was almost four, with Mama and Daddy all to ourselves in the years before Puddin and Davie. There was no electricity or running water in the cabin by Rainbow Lake, and Mama still says hell isn’t hot, it’s cold like Shumont Mountain in the dead of winter. But it was also a place of light and cattails, of tomatoes growing in the front yard, going on horseback with Daddy to pick apples, swimming together in the lake that left us smelling faintly of rust. When I remind Mama, she says, “Yes, it was those things, too.”
We arrived on Shumont just as the blackberry vines were drooping with ripe fruit, and the blueberry bushes soon would be. Mama pointed them out and said, “We could have great fun making jelly, if we just knew how.” The next time we went down to Black Mountain for groceries, she bought a book—Fruits of the Appalachians: Legends and Recipes—and read it after supper, by the light of our kerosene lamps, making a list of what she needed: pectin, Mason jars, wax, sugar, cheesecloth.
The day we made jelly, Daddy was stoking a fire in the front yard when Mama came out on the porch. He said, “You’re mighty fancy for someone who’ll be up to her elbows in berries.”
She twirled in her cotton print dress and sandals, the skirt flaring around her as she danced down the steps, her hair tied back in a pink satin ribbon.
Mama’s gold hoop earrings and bracelets flashed in the sun as she stirred the pots over Daddy’s fire, while Stell and I strained the hot berries in cloth bags, the juice running down our arms onto our shirts. Mrs. Straley, a neighbor who’d come to help, said, “You’uns is more the color of berries than girls.” I brushed at the stains covering my shirt and shorts. Stell smiled, her teeth white in her purple face.
Daddy sampled the jelly. “Tastes great! But will it jell?”
“Sure it will,” Mama said, but she sounded uncertain.
When we’d finished, two dozen pint jars sat on the porch rail, sparkling like amethysts and sapphires. Mama gave us a cake of Ivory soap. “Get in the lake and scrub the stains off. Stell Ann, watch your sister.”
I was standing waist deep, my arms covered with lather, when Mama raced down the path from the cabin. She kicked off her sandals, ran out on the pier, and dove into the lake in her berry-stained dress. When she came to the surface, she let out a whoop that echoed off the mountains. Stell sat on the end of the pier, watching Mama, who went under again, stayed down a long time, and came up out in the middle of the lake. Daddy was on the opposite shore, his shotgun slung in the crook of his arm, grinning.