Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

from This Day and Time

32 LISTEN HERE THIS DAY AND TIME (1930) from Chapter Three k she lay beside Enoch [Ivy's son] on the pallet, huddled close to him for warmth, Ivy tried to stop thinking, but the old question was again hammering in her brain: "Why did Jim leave me? Oh, Lord God, why did he do me that-a-way?" Her childhood came back to her, the cabin, far from any others, in Rocky Hollow where she had been born, the seventh of twelve-born when laurel was in flower, so that her mother had named her for the rosy cloud of bloom she had looked out on through the little window beside her bed; for the "ivy" that came each May to lighten the deep shadows of Rocky Hollow -ivy, the first thing her mother's tired eyes had rested upon after the granny-woman had lifted her head from lower down the bed. "Hit's a gal, Mis' Buckles, another fine little gall" Ivy's thoughts dwelt softly on her mother, a kindly, dragged-out woman, often sick, but always struggling for a semblance ofdecency and order in the swarming cabin. Her mother would plant a few flower seeds every spring, zinnias or marigolds, touch-me-nots, and bleeding-hearts. "Seems like," she could hear her mother saying, "flowers keeps a body from bein' so lonesome ." Ivy could see her mother squatting beside the branch that tumbled down past the cabin, straightening her back from time to time, trying to get enough clean clothes together so that some of the children could go to Sunday -school two or three times at least in the course of the year. Ivy remembered the daily squabbles; remembered a brother killed by a falling tree; a little sister burned to death, little Dee, left alone in the cabin and trying to start a fire as she had seen the older ones do, by pouring oil on the green wood. She could still hear the screams of little Dee, a sheet of flame, running frantically towards the field where the rest ofthem were dropping corn. She could see herself on one of the steep slopes that wedged in Rocky Hollow, grubbing sprouts on a piece of "new ground"; she could see a stranger passing up the hollow and all ofthem stopping, her father and mother too, resting on their hoes or mattocks, staring after the stranger to whom her father had called down a low half-hostile "Howdy." Ivy could scarcely remember a time when she had not handled a hoe. There were moments of delight Ivy remembered of her childhood; the time she had uncovered the pheasant's nest in the leaves; the little terrapin she had made a pet of; the Indian arrow-heads she had turned up with her ANNE W. ARMSTRONG 33 hoe; times she had played house under a great sycamore that overspread the log spring-house, with acorn-cups for dishes, with tufts of moss, bits of broken crockery. Her childhood, when she thought of it, did not seem to her to have been an unhappy one. Her father, if high-tempered, had not been brutal , or only occasionally, when he was drunk and might beat her mother or kick one of the boys. There had been the fun of going up on the mountain every summer for huckleberries-the whole troop of them, and other families too-the fun of going down the river each spring to the sugar-orchard, sleeping in the sheds left there from year to year among the sugar-maples. Then her mother had died, leaving her, the oldest girl at home, to mother the family till her father had married again, within the year. Then, in the spring that followed, back at the sugar-orchard, all of them helping make sugar and syrup again, and people coming to trade with her father for the thin sappy syrup, carrying it away in the buckets they had brought. And then one day, as she had been carrying a bucket of sap to the fire, a young man standing in her path, teasingly, as if to block the way; a tall, straight, very clean young man, with very short hair, in soldier clothes, and the young man laughing: "Don't be scared! You've growed a right smart since the time I saw you last, at the burying-ground, when they put your Grandpap Buckles away. Well, you ain't gettin' any worse-Iookin', I...