The Curing Season Read online

  I blushed and looked down at the cracked toes of my shoes. So he didn’t drink, either. My mind worked over the possibilities.

  —This Sunday after church I’ll be walking home alone. I stay to help wash the Communion glasses every fourth Sunday. I’d have some time then.

  Aaron reached down and pulled me up by one hand so I wouldn’t have to struggle to stand.

  —I’ll be waiting for you a little piece up the road from the church, he said.

  Chapter Four

  All the rest of the week I had my mind set on seeing Aaron, and I was clumsier than usual. On Friday I dropped a whole load of wood on the steps and got cussed out and kicked in the behind as I was picking it up. Father threatened to get his belt on Saturday when I stood up too quickly in the kitchen and knocked over the butter churn. My arms were aching from the endless churning, and my foot loses sensation at times. I just couldn’t catch the churn before the still-liquid butter ran out onto the floor. Luckily Sibby distracted him with a note from a man who wanted him to come for a taste of his grain liquor that night, and he left without remembering to whip me.

  After Sibby and I cleaned up, the empty Saturday night stretched out ahead of us endlessly. Father was mercifully out for his taste; Mother sat in her corner and read the Bible by the light of a flickering kerosene lantern while Luke slept in his cardboard box stuffed with an old rag blanket. Man Murfree was the only farmer around who had a Delco plant, and once in a while we kids would go over there in the evening just to gawk at his electric lights and running water. He was always real nice about it, inviting us inside and showing us how the light switches worked. He always told us to bring Mother over sometime to see his electricity, but she would never come.

  On slow nights like this I longed for something other than a kerosene lamp to read by. After a time the type would start to break up and crawl across the page before my tired eyes, for all the world like hatching bluebottles. But the way Father’s farming was going, and with him drinking up what little money he did bring in, it would be a June sweetening before any of us saw anything more electric than a lightning bolt.

  For a time the only sound in the room was the pinging of the tin roof as it cooled from the blistering late-afternoon sun. WillieEd picked at his toenails with a whittling knife, a shock of dark brown hair falling into his eyes. I put down my book—Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe—and helped Sibby darn some of Father’s socks. Mother got up out of her chair and put the Bible back in its place on the table.

  —That’s enough work for today, girls, she said. —The light’s not strong enough to half see. Why don’t you get out your dolls and play?

  Sibby and I ran to the corner where we kept our old corncob dolls and brought them over to the light. Much to our surprise, Mother actually sat on the floor with us and helped us repair their smudged faces with burnt wood from the stove, drawing new eyebrows and eyes with a charred twig. She even made the dolls talk to each other in high, silly voices, which left Sibby, WillieEd, and I speechless with laughter.

  At times like this, when Father was out of the house and Mother seemed to take hold of herself, we could be positively happy. Everything was so peaceful with Father gone. But then he’d return, and Mother would shrink back into her former self. She seemed more like a shadow than a real person around him. I guess she was so afraid of saying the wrong thing and setting him off that she just figured she’d be quiet most of the time. But those little glimpses of Mother on evenings when he was away showed me that there was more to her than we probably realized.

  Luke woke up, and Mother went to rinse out some of his things while Sibby rocked him and WillieEd shook a little wooden rattle he’d carved for him. Luke generally didn’t cry much, which was a good thing given Father’s loathing for noise (unless he himself was making it). Luke had been a sickly infant, and Mother still watched over him with a hollow-eyed stare. But he looked to me as if he was quite healthy now with a good appetite for bread sopped in milk and anything else Mother could sneak him from the table. Once he got his hands on a piece of pork that fell from Father’s plate and sucked on it happily for over an hour.

  —Aint good to encourage a taste for meat in the child, Father grumped. —We aint goin to have a lot of that around if this year’s anything like the last.

  Mother just grimaced and kept spooning up her mash.

  • • •

  I spent the first part of that night tossing and turning in bed, hearing Father let himself in very late and bumble around in the kitchen. A jar of something crashed to the floor (which Sibby or I would have to clean up in the morning, depending on who arose first) before he finally stumbled up the steps and into their bedroom across from ours. I burrowed under the quilt, trying not to hear him start in on Mother, but I was never able to block out the sound entirely.

  —Get up, you ugly rib of Adam! Get out of that bed! Come see to your man, you lazy dadburn lie-abed!

  I heard something thump, and then the sound of her being dragged across the floor. Sibby sat up in bed, listening.

  —hurt your foot? Let go my hair and let me see what you’ve done to yourself. You’re tired, get into bed and I’ll bring you some coffee, came Mother’s attempt at mollifying him.

  —I said, get up woman! You’re pure-tee lazy, no two ways about it!

  Something pounded against the wall. Sibby leaped out of bed.

  —Sonofabitch, she said. —I’m going in there to see about Mother.

  Now I knew I had to go, too. I wanted to burrow farther under my quilt and not move, but I knew I had to help Sibby. She pushed her way into their room, and I trailed reluctantly behind.

  —Now see what you made me do!

  Father was screaming, hopping around on one foot. Whatever he’d broken downstairs must have been glass, because a piece of it was embedded in his heel. It was a wonder he’d made it up the steps with such a shard in his foot, but he must have been so drunk he couldn’t feel much. Blood spurted everywhere as he hopped about, but he still had hold of Mother by a hank of her hair. A great ugly bruise was spreading across her cheek, and her left eye was beginning to swell shut.

  —Father! Sit down and let me get that glass out of your foot, shouted Sibby.

  She pushed him back on the bed as I teased Mother’s hair out of his hand. When he was drunk he was much more pliable than sober, but sometimes he’d remember our interference and we’d all catch it worse the next day. He shouted blue blazes as Sibby pulled the shard from his heel and bathed and swathed his foot with a clean rag. Mother sat limply on the bed, staring vacantly at the floor as I dipped the hem of her nightgown in cold water and held it to her face. At times I felt like we were the parents, and Mother and Father the children in this household.

  I went out to get WillieEd, whom I found hesitating in the hallway, his eyes enormous. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to confront Father in this state.

  —What happened? he whispered. —Is Mama all right?

  —It’s all right, he’s cut his foot, I said. —Come help us get him situated.

  WillieEd followed me in and grabbed hold of one of Father’s legs, while I maneuvered the other and Sibby got him under the arms. Before Father’s head even touched the pillow, he was snoring. Sibby offered Mother her bed, saying she could bunk in with me, but Mother declined and gently laid herself down next to Father. Hair straggling over her shoulders, stick-thin in her faded gown, she looked like a girl wizened before her time. I doubted if she’d sleep a wink all night for fear he’d awaken.

  Looking at her ruined beauty, the pretty young mother of my childhood a foggy memory, I swore I’d never be anything like her. Back then, I didn’t understand how or why she stood it.

  • • •

  Sunday dawned bright and new. My right foot had fallen all the way asleep during the night, as it often did, and before I got out of bed I rubbed it hard with both hands, trying to get some feeling back into it. I usually avoided looking at my clubfoot, creased and striated
as it was, like a glutted sluggish earthworm curled in upon itself. I had to walk on the outside of my foot, as the inside was twisted up. The part I set my foot down on was a hard rind, and often the skin flaked off and peeled. The inner arch never touched ground, and was soft and pink as a baby’s skin. When I was a little girl I used to stroke this part with wonderment, amazed at its delicacy, but lately I avoided contact with my foot unless it was aching so badly I had to rub it. Nowadays I tried to wrest it into its sprung shoe as quickly as possible, so I wouldn’t have to look at it.

  I took care going down the stairs, as it was still very hard to navigate on my foot. I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen (Father had broken a jar of stewed tomatoes), swabbed off my face with cold water from the tin bucket, and tried to rebraid my hair before everyone else got downstairs. Father stayed abed as he usually did after his Saturday night sprees, and when Mother came down, she silently put out cold bread and a tiny slab of butter for our sustenance. She didn’t like to use the stove in case the squeaking iron hinge woke him up, as Father awakened after a night of drink was an ugly sight to behold. Mother put on some face powder to cover up the bruise on her cheek, bundled up little Luke, and made Sibby change into her other dress before we headed out the door to walk the two miles to Calvary Baptist Church. Since WillieEd had turned twelve, he claimed he didn’t have to go, and Mother had given up on trying to make him.

  Reverend Davis’s sermon seemed to go on forever. I never heard a longer message in my life. Finally it ended, but then three people accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior, which as a Christian person I should have been happy about but on that particular day I could have cried. With Communion and a special offering for the Lottie Moon mission, followed by a sermonette about Christ on the Cross after all that, it was one o’clock before I was able to collect the glasses from the emptied-out pews and take them downstairs to the quiet, empty kitchen and begin to scrub them out.

  Normally I loved to drain the tiny cups of their last drops of purple grape juice before I washed them, feeling the glow of the sweet liquid on my tongue, but today I didn’t bother. I did gulp down the leftover squares of bread, even though it was the Body of Christ. I was so hungry I figured God would forgive me. I didn’t want to faint out on the road and have Aaron think I was sickly on top of lame.

  It must have been after two before I finally finished drying the last little cup and set it back into the round tray. Gripping the iron rail, I pulled myself up the basement steps and let myself out the back door.

  I went along as quickly as I could. It was another stultifying day, the cicadas increasing their racket the higher the sun climbed. I hoped we wouldn’t have an Indian summer because Mother suffered so much in the heat, particularly since she’d had Luke. Thinking of her pregnant reminded me of Aaron, and what he might have in mind. I couldn’t help imagining some romantic beginning, him coming along on a horse-drawn wagon maybe, pulling me up beside him and giving me a romantic, Clark Gable–like kiss. A dizzy boiling began in the pit of my stomach every time I thought of it, and I knew that this would send me accursed down to hell if I died on the spot. But there was no sign of lightning in the sky, so it looked like I would survive the day and would live to repent my wicked imaginings.

  Aaron did meet me on the road past the church that day, just as he said he would. While he didn’t sweep me into any horse-drawn wagon, he did take my arm to help me around the deep ruts (which no one had ever done), making my skin tingle at his firm touch. I was sweating and panting from the effort of keeping up with him, because even though he tried to slow down for me, he still was walking far too quickly. Finally he convinced me to rest in the shade of a tree, away from the boiling hot sun. We stopped at a large oak in the middle of a field of rye, and sat under it. I remember being there, the sweet-smelling rye blowing around us in the wind, feeling like I was the happiest person on earth.

  —You get done with your business at the church? he asked me as I caught my breath.

  —Yes, I washed all the Communion cups and threw away the leftovers (a half-truth, as I threw them away down my throat).

  —They pay you for this?

  I laughed. —No, I just do it. It’s a way of being useful.

  —Hmph. I don’t believe I’d spend my time washing up alone in a church if I didn’t get paid, he said. —When I was clerking in Unionville, now that was a job. Soon as I get a little cash saved up this winter, I’m going back and get another office job.

  This was a variation of what he’d said earlier at the barnraising, and it sure sounded good to me. I had had it with Father’s meanness. I was also sick of the gore and muck of the farm, where I had to listen to pigs squealing as they got their throats cut, to see a chicken running around the yard spurting blood from its neck, its useless foolish head gasping in the dirt. Away from possums split end to end, lying in the fryer on the oven, their feet slopping over the edge of the pan. From fish eggs stomped on to hear them pop. From squirrels skint on the front porch and the dogs fighting over the tufty scraps.

  I had an idea that I wanted to go someplace where I didn’t have to see my meals murdered before I ate them; where the food was far, far away from the living animal it once was. I’d read an article in one of Job’s movie magazines that talked about vegetarianism, and I liked the idea a lot, even though I would have missed ham biscuits. I imagined that in a place like Unionville a woman might eat only vegetables and get along quite well. I said as much to Aaron.

  —Well, I don’t know about all that. I do like a fried pork chop occasionally. Although I certainly don’t like seeing the hogs getting kilt. But I’d rather be around men who can talk about more than the weather and the crops, men who read newspapers. These local hicks (I blushed, because what was I if not local, and a hick?) don’t care about anything they can’t see past the ends of their noses. All they can talk about is how much they’re gonna get for their tobacco come fall.

  I sat forward eagerly. —That’s why I’ve tried to read so much; I think it’s good to be informed about things. I’d like to have an office job myself, someday, if I could make it to a city like Unionville. I’ve thought I might be able to earn a living typing correspondence, or some sort of work like that. I’d like to teach in a school, but I don’t know if I’d be able. At least I’ve read everything I could get my hands on. The lending library comes to town about every two months and I check out the maximum number of books, and my sister, Sibby, lets me check out books on her card since she’s not much for reading. And our teacher Mrs. Spender used to bring her own books to school until they made her stop. I got quite a lot of reading done that way, Walden and Origin of Species and Pilgrim’s Progress and The Inferno.

  I didn’t mention Forever Amber, which was by far the most interesting book I’d ever gleaned from Mrs. Spender’s lending table, because I figured it would be unladylike.

  —Those are good books for beginners, Aaron replied in an airy, knowledgeable way. —I have a lot of books that I left behind in Unionville. You could read some of them if we ever swung back in that direction. Things much more advanced than Pilgrim’s Progress. I could teach you a little about accounting too, enough so you could do the monthly bills and grocery figures. That would leave me time to do the office work and relax after I got home. When you’ve been dealing with figures all day, you don’t want much to do with them in the evenings.

  —I’d imagine not, I agreed, stunned by this sudden turn of conversation. I was thrilled to hear he was thinking of bringing me to Unionville at some point. It seemed that somehow the discussion had turned into what we would be doing in the near future. Did this mean Aaron was thinking seriously about our being together—for life? It seemed soon for that—we hardly knew each other—but I could garner no other meaning from his words. All I could understand from it was that he wanted to marry me.

  —Would you stay in clerking? I asked.

  —Probably for the time being, Aaron said, hitching up his galluses a bi
t. He frowned slightly. —My aim is to have my own business of some sort in two–three years, either a store or a loan office.

  My mouth must have gaped open. I knew Job, of course, who owned his own store, but no one else in my immediate acquaintance had more ambition than to pay the rent on their land or to get the tobacco in before it was ruined by the sun or the rain or hail or insects. Security was only as good as the next crop, which meant every year a family might be on the verge of going hungry.

  —Why, that sounds like a fine plan, I said, smiling at him.

  Aaron reached over and put his hand on my arm. —I’d like for you to be a part of all that, Cora, he said.

  It was silly, but I had an image of me in a pretty gingham dress with a white apron, sitting down to a kitchen table surrounded by three little smiling children, Aaron at the head of the table blessing the steaming hot food. It was probably from one of those Saturday Evening Post covers that I used to look at in Job’s store, but at that moment it was real to me.

  —I’d like to be, I whispered.

  I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. After a moment he said he’d best get going, and I said I’d better, too. My heart sang when Aaron said he’d try to meet me on the road leading up to our pasture one day this coming week. But although I waited for him beyond what was seemly every day after school, he never came. It would be several weeks before I saw him again, and I almost went out of my mind with longing.

  Chapter Five

  Finally school let out for the summer, and all of us from ages eighteen down to five went home to help with the backbreaking work of getting in the tobacco. The children whose families were lucky enough to own a few acres or more of land would help their parents; poorer children like us would hire out to labor in other people’s fields.