I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play And wild and sweet the words repeat Of peace on earth good will to men
Ellen was bringing in a split-oak basket of persimmons. “I ran onto them yesterday, Pa. I don’t know why the possums let them be.”
Anton took one of the soft orange fruit. “Used to be they made ’simmon beer in this county. It wasn’t sharp like city beer, Gar. We used to roast ’simmon seeds too, when coffee was scarce.”
Garland bit into the mellow sweet fruit. “They’re good. The pucker’s gone out.”
“The frost seasons them,” Ellen said.
“I know. Used to hunt them when I was a kid.”
“A ’simmon tree’s got a black heartwood in its center,” Anton said, “with layers of yellow sapwood outside it. It’s the only tree I know like that.”
“Those rings, now,” said Ellen. “You can count the rings to tell the age of a tree.”
“Is that black heartwood in the young tree?” asked Frankie.
“And if there’s a drought,” Ellen went on, “the ring’s scarce to be read, it’s so narrow.”
“I want to know about that heartwood, Pa.”
“Well, you don’t find hit in a sapling, Poppet. It comes of itself as the tree takes on age.”
“I think it’s there in the young tree,” Frankie said.
“How come you to worry on that, Poppet? It’s no consequence.”
“But I want to know.”
“Now there,” said Garland. “It’s getting on bedtime. I can tell Frankie’s sleepy.”
“Ellie never sang a song yet,” said Frankie.
“I’ll sing in the morning. We’re wasting coal oil. Come on.”
The girls climbed from the fire-warmed parlor to the loft where winter rain reeled on the roof. Under dank blankets they were waiting for the warmth of their bodies to overtake them. Anton’s disputing voice came up the stairs, “Why’s she act so? Like a highborn one? What are you doing to her there in that city?” Garland’s voice was heard in murmur. And again Anton’s rude shout, “Be she e’er seeing men?” And in a moment, “Well, that don’t mean a thing. N. J. says all his sister e’er did was set on a fellow’s lap one winter. Said his pa watched them courting by the range and thought no harm. They hardly spoke but only set there hugging. Now before God, she came by a child and his pa had to get them married.”
In the melancholy dark from her bed, over the sound of the sleet whipping the shingles, Ellen whispered, “You like a fellow?”
“No, I’m a poor country girl there. I hear them laugh. I came on my singing teacher snickering with Uncle. It was about me.”
“When do you think you’ll start playing in public like Pa wants?”
“I’m the most alone person. It’s because I’m queer, I think. Maybe Pa made me so. Or else I get it from Ma. The way I talk and act.”
Anton’s voice was audible through the doorway as they came into the hall downstairs, “And then I heard Ma saying, I’d fain have been a lady but I married you, little feist. We dragged her down, Gar. We gommed her desires.”
“Hell, An, you’re drunk. Forget Ma. Like I did long ago. Let’s get back to the subject. As I see it, Frankie’s doing the best she can. She’s not got much gumption and she’s plenty like you when she gets stubborn, but I think she’s beginning to adjust. This is the first vacation she’s had, what with lessons. I hope I can keep her present teacher. Says he’s got his hands full. Costs a mint, you know.”
“Hum. If there’s anything I can do for you.”
“You’re my brother.” Garland’s familiar slap on Anton’s back was carried up the staircase. “Covers a multitude of sins. We’ve got to stick together.”
Ellen thought Frankie was asleep until she heard the voice threading the dark. “Seems I got a black heartwood core same as that ’simmon tree.” The girl’s voice was sated with self-pity. “People can tell it’s there.”
* * * * *
The next day Garland came to the barn where Ellen was cleaning the goats’ stable, heaping the soiled litter outside the shed with a heavy fork. An acrid stench hung in the air and the flock of five moved about her. “Keep you company awhile, hon?”
“If you like.”
“You have quite a bunch of your own here.”
“I set store by them.” She was forking fresh bedding in the pen and the animals crowded in to lie down, nosing and chewing the straw. She fastened the gate and leaned to watch them.
“Long time ago,” Garland was saying, “old man Alden used to keep a pair of nannies in his shack with him. Wonder if he’s still alive.”
“Ne’er heard of him.”
“Lived a few miles up the road. Us boys would sneak over to peek in his windows. Watch him suck the milk from the udders.”
“Is that a fact?”
Garland watched her intently. “You’re wonderful, puss.”
“That’s a silly thing to say.”
“Well, you make me feel like a boy again. I always said it.”
Ellen laughed at him. “Reckon I best get to the kitchen. I’ll race you to see if you’re still a boy.”
“Now there’s a cruel wench.” He trailed after her.
At the steps she waited. As they started up they became aware suddenly of a commotion within the house, of cries and Anton’s growls. Ellen was running up the stairs. “I’m afraid it’s Ma.”
But the shrill cry of Frankie pierced, “I won’t go back. I won’t. I hate you. You can’t make me.”
And a sound was heard so that Ellen turned to Garland. “He’s beating her. He’ll not be gainsaid. What’ll we do?”
“I’ll show you what. He’s always got to lord it over someone.” Garland sharpened his wrath, ran into the hall, flinging open the parlor door.
Anton was red-faced, and Frankie, in a despair of tears, was shaking in a corner of the sofa, her knitted skirt pulled above her knees, her bobbed hair tangled. She hid her face. “I don’t care about nothing. I don’t care.”
Garland caught Anton’s arm and while they shouted, Ellen bade her sister come into the kitchen. Frankie laid her head on the table and wept. Ellen walked about the room at her work, finally coaxing, “Now these fruits have to be cut up for the cake. You always were good at it, Frankie. Here’s the knife and bowl.”
Frankie pushed them from her. “Ellie, I do hate Pa.” She fled up the stairs.
The angered voices in the parlor rose and fell until the milking hour came. Then Anton, black-faced, strode to the barn. Garland watched him from the porch stoop and then followed. “There,” said Ellen to Maria who came in from the bedroom, “things are in a state. Pa ought to let Frankie stay here where she belongs.”
“Don’t beard Mester Gaddy,” Maria advised. “Let him be.”
That night by the fireside it was as if a ghostly thing stood amid them. Ellen sighed. Maria, feeling the trouble, gestured to herself. Garland smoked one cigarette after another. And Frankie was white, holding her head erect. “Reckon I’ll go to bed,” she said at length. “Good night all.”
Anton bent his scorn-washed face over a farm journal. “Well, I see here it tells about them foreigners in the old country using artificial insemination. Now I reckon that’s a sin against a beast. It’s sodomy.” He pulled furiously on his dead pipe.
“Chrissake, An.”
But in the morning Ellen caught sight at the stairhead of Frankie and Anton. The thin words came, “Forgive my willfulness, Pa.” Frankie’s face was hard. She had purchased her peace, before leaving her father again, kneeling in the short skirt she now wore.
* * * * *
On the second Christmas of these three years, Frankie brought her contradictory ways again into focus, so that Anton stalked about in dudgeon, lying in wait for her open rebellion. She would turn him though, in a new cunning way she had learned, “Beg your pardon, Pa.”
The holiday evenings were drawn short and quiet by the hickory and oak-fed fires. After midnight mass, all but Garland ate sparely at the table, disheartened. The sliced meats and cheese, the sweet cakes and peppered blood pudding, were spread forth. “Have some Barrier Cherries, Uncle,” Ellen pressed him. “Frankie and Lily Garrett made them once.” Ellen, who knew her father and sister so well, felt the sadness of it. She knew the man was like a willful child and here was his only beloved set against him.
Frankie went back to Chicago then. Before they drove away in Garland’s Oakland sedan with the high-squared top and the yellow leather seats, Garland announced, “Frankie’s been engaged for her first recital. March the sixteenth, nineteen twenty-nine. Frankie Gaddy enters the lists of the immortals.”
“Shut up, Uncle,” Frankie sighed.
“You greening me, Garland?” Anton was suspicious. “You going to play before those folks?”
“Yes, I am, Pa.”
“Hell, An, she’s booked,” Garland shouted. “In one of my theatres.”
“I vow.”
“My,” Ellen said, “I ne’er thought Frankie’d be so bold.”
* * * * *
And time moved, weaving a tapestry. On radiant summer nights moonlight laved the meadows and frogs dripped shrill tones. Ellen would slip down the stairs to wander where flowering honeysuckle presaged the passing of time. Longings waxed in her. She lay in the honeyed grass and wept easily. The moon shone and she bared her white body, wondered at the restlessness clutching her. She dwelled on the summer she had met Christian Ay, for at that one time the even cord of her life had risen to such a gleaming line that she doubted on it ever after. I’m bound and thralled. The pleasure and the sadness are too close together. She went back to her attic room to wait for dawn.