Ellen, who found tears started easily now, who was wary of her sudden sieges of self-pity, was running from the room. Again she dipped the pen.
Mr. Christian Ay,
There is a need for me to speak with you. I wish you were still hired to Brinker. I fear you have forgot me and this is but a striving after wind. Could you make a way to write or send word?
Ellen Gaddy Millville, Ktcky.
This she addressed, Mr. Christian Ay, Care of Ay’s Store, Louisville, Ktcky.
She mused, near suffocating in the loneliness. Had she led him on as Christian had declared? Had she sinned? Her brows contracted and she searched again the halls of memory for meanings. Surely she had known to fear that which befell. Here in the countryside tales were constantly bruited and old songs sung of fallen virgins and light young men. The Bible related dire warnings and horrid punishments meted out to defiled maids. She had led him to their sin then. But that wasn’t so. I didn’t knowing lead him on. I wasn’t a wanton. There came to her mind the woodchucks Anton trapped. A shotgun often didn’t penetrate the small thick skulls so steel traps were set in their underground paths. If a creature blundered and felt the sudden grip, it would strive with its greatest strength. And if it could not tear free, it backed into its den, pulling the trap after. There it gnawed its own leg above the metal jaws. It destroyed a part of its flesh, knowing it was a way.
When the next morning was just made, two scalded hog carcasses were hanging from the sourwood scaffold. The blood had been caught in a bowl and taken to the kitchen for boiling and seasoning. The great white wrinkled heads were on the porch in a red-daubed washtub. “If there was a ooman with child about,” Sam grunted as they were hoisting the scraped bodies by gambrel sticks thrust through the hamstrings, “we’d have to take care to cover this mess. Butchering blood on the earth marks a child.”
“I don’t have those worries any more.” Anton tossed the liver and kidneys and sweetbreads in the pan Ellen brought out to them.
The fire was dying under the iron cauldron. Soon hams were piled in a heap along with the sagging shoulders and sides on a lye-scrubbed plank. The sausage-making began. Sam was scraping the inverted intestines preliminary to stuffing them. He stopped to hone his knife on a whetstone he carried in his pocket, spat on it for lubrication. “My old ooman came back last night. First thing Eadie did was boil up hot mustard water and set her feet in it. She chewed up a sourwood twig to make her a snuff brush. Give me a dipping, Samuel, she says, I’m tuckered.” He sat back thoughtful. “For Gawd, my house was a lonely place against that old hen’s return.”
Anton sliced chunks of meat savagely, the razor-sharp knife whipping close to his finger tips. He held his silence, fed the pork into the grinder.
In the kitchen the women were preparing in their fashion for the celebration ahead. Anton had given Ellen coins with which to buy sugar when she did her trading, and for spices and raisins to put in the holiday cakes. In this season when his brother came for the annual visit, Anton would have no stinting. “Girl,” he said to her, “my ma used to make a pale holytide cake. There were whites of eggs beat in bowls and it was thick with nuts and sugared fruits. Not black like those strong sorghum ones you-all make. Hum.” He nodded, complacent.
Ellen was assenting, eager. “I’ll ask Mrs. Love. Could be she’s learned the rule of such a cake, Pa.”
“And when you’re trading, go down of an evening when priest is holding hours for confession. Your uncle be due on Saturday, and I’ll have you all at the communion rail when he’s here, proper pious.”
Before walking the muddy road to Millville in the cloudy darkened late afternoon, Ellen went to her room. She was binding her waist tight with a length of cloth. “I can’t see nothing yet, but Stacey Love might.”
In the confessional box, she whispered to the young priest. “Bless me, Father Tompert. I confess to God and you that I’ve sinned. My last confession was Easter.” She despaired. It’s all made up of falseness. I’ve no right to be here.
“Confess your sins since then, child.”
“I took God’s name in vain. One time I did truly hate my pa.”
“Have you had any impure thoughts, my child?”
“No.”
“If you have any of these kind of thoughts you must do your best to banish them. Are you truly sorry for your sins?”
“I am, Father.”
She went to kneel in a pew, forbearing to recite the penance prayers the priest had assigned to her. Instead she asked the Virgin to have pity, to understand why she was mute to Father Tompert for the sake of Anton’s pride. She was thus driven, with a measure of courage, to rejecting the rituals bestowed on her since a cross was hung about her throat as a baby, since she first held the beads and lisped the Credo. And praying to Mary, Ellen emerged with her as a personal god. She grasped the blue-gowned symbol in her need as if it were flesh and blood and could wield an influence on her fate. She denied the immense father figure of God without debating it.
* * * * *
In coming days she would meet the mail carrier in his Model T, take back her second letter and place it with the other in the trunk. She at last put aside the hope of finding Christian Ay.
By Friday, cakes and tarts, breads, cheeses and dried fruit pies were overflowing from the pantry shelves. Hams and sidemeat were curing in the smokehouse, sausages strung lavish from the shed eaves. There were crocks of fried meat packed in white fat, as well as headcheese, liverwurst, and tins of fresh lard. In the hot kitchen, Maria was baking breads and biscuits in the newly-blacked range, vaguely wakened in the prospect of a visitor. She spoke to Ellen, “Get wax candles when you go by Love’s next time, girl. The tallow ones ain’t suited for Mester Garland Gaddy.”
Frankie was at the long table, a basket of butternuts and walnuts on the floor by her. She was cracking them on a sadiron with a blow of an old hammer head. She looked up, “You’re right peaked, Ellie. Are you ailing?”
“I’ll hunt out some of that bloodroot tonic,” Maria said, “if you got the complaint. It’ll make new blood.”
“I’d as lief you’d sing again,” Frankie was saying. “And you used to cut up so. Seems you’ve given it up.”
Ellen, startled, burned her hand on the iron pan she was taking from the oven. She shook her wrist to ease the seep of pain.
“Go smear yellow soap on it,” her mother said, “it’ll draw out the heat.”
Ellen rubbed on the soap, blinking her eyes. She sang to hide the tears and to hold her tongue from blurting her trouble.
If I had known before I courted That love had been so hard to win I’d have locked my heart with the keys of golden And pinned it down with a silver pin
“That’s too lamenting, Ellie. Sing that one Penny used to. About that Minnie.”
Hush little Minnie and don’t say a word Papa’s going to buy me a mocking bird It can whistle and it can sing It can do most anything
They were making ready for the guest coming. Calico was hung across one end of the downstairs bedroom to form a separate chamber in which Garland would sleep. A chair was placed by the bed and a stone-topped table. In its base was a chamber pot, and on top a crockery pitcher with pink roses glazed on its surface set in a matching basin. A cake of store soap lay in a dish, a towel folded beside it. They ripped the bed tick open, removed the old stuffing, and filled it with soft wheat straw. The one feather pallet was aired and placed on the mattress, and over all they spread muslin sheets and their best quilts.
That night Ellen was in a chair in the warm parlor, her back aching from the long hours, a piece of mending in her hand. Dark had come on, the lamp was throwing feeble quivering shadows. Anton was holding the Bible and his lips moved. He raised his eyes, studied the image of Joseph alone on the table. He spoke, abrupt, “Where’s the Virgin Mary that stood there with Joseph? She be broke, I vow.”
Ellen looked up in alarm. “I took her to the loft-room, Pa. What with holytide, I thought it would please you if I prayed to her, pious-like.”
“Well, I allow you can keep her for a spell. But she’ll not be broke, girl.”
“No, Pa. I’ll take care.” She arose. “Reckon I’ll go to bed. Coming, Frankie?”
He stopped them. “I’ll say the prayer to Michael once for this family. Get down, you-all.”
On their knees the women were waiting, their shadows cast like gentle giants on the wall. The man knelt by the lamp and his specter engulfed theirs. “Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our safeguard against the snares of the devil. Thou, Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits that wander through the world seeking the ruination of souls.”
The temperature dropped in the night. As they were beginning the morning chores, whitefrost covered the land. The remote stars were cold and challenging. Ellen shivered, feeling her frailty. “What does it matter? One soul like me. I’m but a grain in a field of wheat. Who’s to heed if I be lone or have a sin to burn me?”