Jolene Page 3

  “No, Ma,” Anna agreed.

  Ma turned her attention to the driver. “Thenkee again, Jeb. Safe journeys.”

  Jeb took that as the signal to leave. He slapped the reins against the mule’s back. “Walk on, Daisy,” was all he said, and with a little lurch, the mule put the wagon in motion.

  Anna looked back to wave goodbye, but all she saw was Ma’s back as she went back into the house. She swallowed down tears, and turned her attention to the road in front of her. Bad as she felt, she wasn’t going to cry in front of a stranger.

  Anna had never ridden on a wagon before, and the sensation of sitting on something that was moving was extremely unsettling, and very quickly drove out every other feeling but borderline fear. She clutched both hands on the worn board seat and gritted her teeth. It seemed very high up here, and as the wagon lurched in the ruts of the dirt road, more than a little precarious and not a little scary.

  But by the time they reached the edge of Soddy, where the Company houses ended, and the much more ramshackle shacks of those who had cobbled together their own “houses” out of boards and tarpaper began, the road smoothed out some, and she started to relax. The mule didn’t seem inclined to go any faster than a walk, Jeb didn’t seem inclined to urge her to, and Anna loosened her white-knuckle grip on the seat as her fear ebbed.

  The transition from “Soddy” to “farms outside of Soddy” was abrupt. The shacks ended, the farm fields began, and already there were men and women out in the fields, either doing something with a mule dragging some sort of implement between the rows of growing plants while a man steered the thing, or with a man dragging the implement himself and a boy or a woman guiding it. Plow? Harrow? Hoe? She didn’t know. She didn’t know nothin’ about farming.

  That must be cruel hard, she thought with astonishment, looking at the men dragging a plow their own selves. No wonder Pa was contemptuous of farming. At least he wasn’t being treated like a mere beast. Was he? She realized at that moment she didn’t know much about mining either. For all she knew, his foreman could be driving him as harder or harder than that man pulling that plow. Pa might be contemptuous of farming, but was mining really better?

  But if you farm, at least you ain’t gonna starve . . . and you ain’t allus owing the Company more money than you got.

  Jeb turned the mule onto a new road, going south and east, and soon they were driving along parallel to the Lake. For all that she had lived all her life within shouting distance of the Lake, this was the first time she had ever set eyes on it, and she tried not to gape at the expanse of water. Until now, the most water she had ever seen at one time was when Ma had the extra wood to heat water for everyone to have a bath in the old tin hip-bath—which normally lived next to the rain barrel, with both set to catch extra water so Ma didn’t have to go to the pump as often. Ma kept pieces of old rag stitched together over the tops of both to keep out the critters, the bugs, the leaves, and the soot. There was a pump shared by all the nearby houses where they otherwise had to get their water, which was why it was much more convenient to have the rain-water handy.

  Wonder where Aunt Jinny gets her water? Does she have a crick nearby? Walking all the way to a crick in the winter to get pails of water would be a powerful lot of work. And cold. And she didn’t have shoon, so she’d have to wrap her feet in rags and straw and hope they didn’t freeze going to and fro. She hoped Aunt Jinny wasn’t going to expect her to do it. She wasn’t sure she could haul a half-full pail, much less two full ones.

  Little wisps of fog floated over the surface of the Lake. It wasn’t exactly a Lake, it was more like a very, very wide part of Soddy Crick, because barges came up the Crick all the time, passing through the Crick and on, to take up the coal and coke from the mine at Soddy and the bigger one at Daisy, south of Soddy, and haul it down elsewhere to sell. The view was unexpectedly beautiful, with the sun just coming up and glinting off the ripples, and a passel of ducks floating on the current, and she found her heart going still for a moment at the sight. And suddenly, instead of smelling soot and smoke and someone’s dirty privy, she smelled—

  Green. There was no other way to describe the scent, except as green. And clean water, and a hint of something sweet. Flowers? And she heard birds singing, which she could never do in town. The air felt clean on her face, and despite the morning being cold, the sun felt warmer than it ever did on her own porch.

  She straightened up a little, and took in lungfuls of the lovely clean air, and somehow, didn’t cough.

  And a little spark of hope sprang to life inside her.

  Mebbe this ain’t gonna be bad.

  2

  THE route they followed took several turnings, away from the Lake, across smaller cricks that she didn’t know the names for, but generally going more south than east, and through farm country. By this time, she’d managed to lose her sadness in something like excitement at all the things that were new to her. She’d never seen so much food growing before, and in her mind, she started to question Pa’s contempt for farmers even more. Of the people who were out there, there weren’t more than a couple out of dozens that were pulling a plow themselves. So mebbe the ones that were doing that were just bad farmers. It appeared to her that if you were farming, even if the harvest was poor, well, you didn’t owe nothin’, you just didn’t get much.

  As for mining . . . well. Things had been better before Pa started coughing, but they had never been precisely good in her memory. The miners got paid by the weight of coal they brought out, and paid in Company scrip, which could only be used at the Company store—and how overpriced things were at the store was made evident by the difference between what Ma paid at the general store with the cash money she got from potions, and what she paid at the Company store in scrip. But the Company store did one thing the general store didn’t—it let you take things on account.

  Which is why pert near ev’body allus runs a debt at the Company store . . .

  She shook away these uncomfortable thoughts, and admired the green fields spread out around her, taking long breaths of air that somehow got deeper into her lungs than ever before. She hadn’t coughed once since they left Soddy! Most of the stuff out there in those farm fields she recognized; she knew corn and beans even at a distance, and squash was obvious from the rounds hanging on the vines. But other things were a mystery.

  But all that corn! Even flint-corn was tasty when it was just milky, soft, and done as a roasted ear, and she longed to jump off the box and pick a couple of ears to have at lunch. But—that would be stealing, and that was breaking a Commandment. She couldn’t be tempted to do that, though the boys in Soddy boasted all the time out of the hearing of adults about how they’d sneak out after dark when they was supposed to be in bed and raid cornfields at night, and have themselves illicit corn feasts. A few ears of corn wasn’t worth the amount of praying for forgiveness you’d have to do, after a theft like that. At least, not as far as she was concerned.

  They kept going mostly south and a bit east while the sun kept climbing up into the sky, and Anna watched everything going on around her with complete fascination. These were all things she had heard about, but never seen. The only cows and goats she had ever seen were in pictures; the only geese and ducks were the ones she spotted flying overhead when she was weeding.

  Some few people in Soddy kept chickens, so of course she’d seen those, but her family had never been able to afford to do so.

  So many animals out here! And wild ones! Rabbits froze beside the road as they passed, and squirrels ran across it, and she’d never seen either alive, only skinned and gutted and ready for the pot when Ma could trade potions for them. The same with ’possums; she was not prepared for how ugly and odd they were, and she only knew what they were by the bare tail. They were good in stew; some people said they were greasy, but in winter she positively craved the taste of fat.

  As for the farms themselves, the more
she saw, the more she envied the children out there in the fields, helping their Mas and Pas. Ma scrutinized every weed that got pulled up, on the chance it might be added to the poke salad she kept stewing on the back of the stove, the food of last resort when even the Company store wouldn’t give you a speck of flour on credit. And when Ma was watching, Heaven forbid you sneak so much as a single pea for yourself. As she squinted to see what was going on at them farmhouses, there was at least one girl younger than her, shelling peas on the porch as they passed, and Anna could tell that for every pea that made it into the pan, at least two were going into the little girl’s mouth. The freedom to eat as many peas as you wanted . . . she’d never had that. Every bit of food had to be accounted for and shared, with the lion’s share always going to Pa.

  Every time they crossed a crick, there was at least one boy fishing it, or hunting for crawdads. Every farm, if it didn’t have a cow, at least had a goat, which meant milk and butter and maybe cheese. And all of them had chickens, which meant eggs, and when a hen got too old to lay—stewed chicken! She hadn’t had an egg in—forever. And she’d never tasted chicken. Well, maybe having to pull a plow your own self instead of having a mule or ox to do it was cruel hard . . . but wasn’t it made up for in all the good things you got to eat?

  They passed a tangle of wild blackberry bushes standing between the road and a field of tall, leafy plants she didn’t recognize; she spotted the red and purple berries growing there, and it was all she could do not to beg Jeb to stop—

  But then, he did. “I fancy a bite a’ fruit with lunch,” he said conversationally, as he got down off the bench and tied the mule’s reins to a young tree. “How ’bout y’all?”

  “Yessir!” she said eagerly. “Please, sir!” And he laughed, and pulled an empty basket out from beneath the seat before helping her down.

  “Lessee if we kin fill this quick,” he told her, and set to picking.

  A few berries went into her mouth (to make up for the pain of being stuck by thorns), but most went into the basket. And most of the fruit was fully ripe, so it wasn’t too terribly long before the basket was, in fact, full.

  It occurred to her that Jeb was treating her like a little girl, and not the woman-grown she was by her years. But right now—she didn’t care. Not if being treated like a little chile was going to get her this kind of treat.

  “Mistuh Jebediah?” she asked, because she was dying to know. Was it some kind of green to eat? The leaves were enormous. She could scarcely imagine how someone would cook it—would they eat it raw? “What’s the stuff a-growin’ in the field on t’other side of the blackberries?”

  He laughed and laughed. “That there’s ’baccy, young’un! Ain’t you never seen it afore?”

  “Not a-growin’,” she admitted. The whole way, she’d seen field after field of the stuff, and wondered what it was. She knew enough about farming to know that this, and not corn, was a farmer’s cash crop. He grew corn for his family and his animals, but he grew ’baccy for money.

  “Wall, there ’tis,” he said, and looked at the basket, which was almost overflowing. “Huh. Missy, most young’uns I know’d et more than they picked, but since y’all didn’t, I reckon we got us ’nuff fer dinner an’ supper too. We’ll stop at next crick we cross.”

  He helped Anna back up on the seat, and picked up the reins. Daisy, who had been contentedly munching the weeds growing at the foot of the blackberry bushes around her bit, obediently picked up her head. “Walk on, Daisy,” Jeb ordered, and off they went again.

  But before too long, they came to another small field of corn, with a farmer working in it, and he stopped her with a “whoa-up.” “Howdy, neighbor!” he hailed the stranger. “I got me a hankerin’ fer roastin’ ears. Y’all got any t’trade?”

  The farmer straightened up from his hoeing and moved over to the road, as Anna sat quietly. “Reckon I do. What’s t’trade?”

  Jeb leaned over between his own legs and extracted a bit of metal from beneath the wagon seat, and held it out. “Knife blank. Been worked to a finish, jest needs a handle an’ sharpenin’, an I reckon y’all for the kinda man what knows his way ’round a good knife.”

  The farmer took it from Jeb and examined it critically. “Reckon it’s wuth ’bout two ears,” he said, starting the bargaining, which carried on in a spirited manner until Jeb was the possessor of a full dozen young ears of corn and some termaters for good measure, and the farmer appeared right satisfied with his potential knife.

  “Now, that there’s supper and breakfus’ sorted,” Jeb said as he got Daisy moving again. He looked over at Anna and his old blue eyes twinkled. “Saw y’all a-hankerin’ over thet corn, an’ I’m partial to a roastin’ ear m’self.”

  “Thenkee, sir,” she said quietly, her hands clasped on the edge of the seat. “Where’d y’all get thet there knife?”

  “Make ’em m’self from scrap iron,” Jeb replied. “I ain’t no smith, but m’Pa taught me how, so’s I’d allus hev’ somethin’ t’trade fer. When winter sets in an’ there ain’t so much cartin’ t’be done, I takes my liddle scraps of iron an’ I makes blanks. Man allus has t’hev two strings t’his bow, my Pa useta say, and I gets a better bargain tradin’ than payin’ fer most liddle things.”

  For the first time in a very long time, Anna was actually feeling hungry by the time they crossed another crick, and Jeb declared it was dinnertime. He slipped the mule’s bit this time so she could eat proper, tied her up near enough to the crick so she could drink, and they set up upstream, under the trees, amongst the moss and roots. It was cool and breezy, the moss was soft to sit on, and the crick sounded cheerful. Jeb brought down a tin cup to share, the basket of blackberries, and her little packet of cornbread and a bigger packet folded in a square of cheesecloth. When she opened her packet, he stared at it a minute and frowned, then patted her shoulder. “Y’all put thet away fer now,” he said, and opened his own packet. “I got too much t’et by m’self, reckon y’all kin he’p.” And he handed her a fat half-moon of piecrust stuffed with something.

  Piecrust! They almost never had pie. You needed flour and lard or suet for it; flour was better saved for bread, and lard hard to come by.

  She wrapped her cornbread back up, and held the piecrust-thing he had given her in her lap, staring at it. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Fancy a good Taffy gal not knowin’ a pasty when she sees one!” he scoffed. “Must be ’cause yore Ma niver learnt t’do ’em fer yore Pa. That there’s a pasty. Miners et ’em. Pie crust nice as nice, stuffed with whatever y’all got at hand. Missus Davies, what I stay with in Soddy overnight, makes ’em fer m’trip home. Now—” He ducked his head and clasped his hands and she did the same. “For what we’re about to et, thenkee, Jesus,” he said, then watched her until she took a tentative bite of the thing before he tucked into his own. She nearly dropped it in surprise to taste the meat in among the carrots, turnips, and potatoes, little shreds of meat and enough gravy to hold it all together too. “Now, that crimpy crust ’round the edge, y’ain’t supposed to et that. Y’all throw it down the mine fer the tommyknockers, so they don’t steal yore lunchpail or let the mine roof fall on ya. Now, we ain’t gonna give our’n t’ the tommyknockers, but we’re a-gonna save it anyway, ’cause I got a notion.” He nodded wisely, and said nothing more; after thanking him profusely—and marveling at the idea of being able to throw good food away—Anna was too busy enjoying every bite to talk. And she was stuffed so full that she couldn’t have eaten that outer crimped crust anyway, so she handed it over to him and he folded it with a little bit of his in the cheesecloth. Then, for no reason that she could determine, he stopped and cut a couple of willow rods and threw them in the back of the otherwise empty wagon.

  It wasn’t until they were back on the road that it occurred to her belatedly that he had just probably fed her his supper, and he’d given her that pasty out of pure kindness of heart wh
en he saw how poorly provisioned she was. But she couldn’t un-eat it, so all she could do was be thankful for it, determined to add him to her evening prayers. At least they had roasting ears, her cornbread, and berries, so he wouldn’t go to sleep hungry.

  Finally they moved onto a road running down the middle of a broad spit of tree-covered land with a couple of small houses on it that ended at the Lake. And here the Lake was even broader than it was back at Soddy. Late afternoon sun made everything a mellow gold, the rippling surface of the Lake looked molten, and that green-water smell was back again.

  Dead ahead of them was a dock, and tied up to it was a contraption so perilous-looking that Anna felt a wash of terror at the thought that this thing and it alone was going to take them across the lake to the other side.

  It was a cobbled-together raft-like contrivance roughly big enough to hold a couple of wagons, with nothing more than a couple of ropes serving as railings. It looked as if it was floating barely above the water. There was a sort of shack at one side of it in the middle, and on the opposite side, what looked like a water wheel.

  “That there’s the Igou Ferry,” said Jeb. “Thet’ll get us t’other side, an’ if the current ain’t bad, we kin get fur enough along the road on t’other side that there’s a farmer I know’ll let us use his haybarn fer the night.”

  Anna wasn’t given a chance to comment or object. As she clung to the wagon seat, the mule pulled the wagon aboard the rickety thing, not stopping until her hooves were nearly in the water at the front. Jeb climbed down, took eight wedges of wood from under the seat, and wedged two under each wheel to keep the wagon from rolling either forward or back, then came around to her side and held out his hand to her. “Gotta come down, Annie,” he coaxed. “Y’all bein’ up there so high, least little move y’all make’ll start the whole thing a-rockin, an’ y’all don’ want that.”