Prologue
“But Poppa!”
“Don’t but Poppa me girl. There’s no other way.”
“But …”
“Coralie!”
Taking my courage in hand I said, “Poppa, you’ve always said the reason why you and Mawmaw lived here, even though you were getting older, was to escape the cities and the mess you predicted they would inevitably turn into when … not if, but when … something bad happened. Well, something bad did happen, several somethings bad, and the cities did need escaping from. You said that’s why you could come and get me when Daddy and … and the rest of them died. You said that’s why you could keep me when Robbie came home again, only it was in a body bag to be buried at the national cemetery. You said that living here with you and Mawmaw would keep me safe, and I wouldn’t have to live the way other girls were – and are – being forced to live to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. Now you’re telling me … you’re telling me I’m going to have to do it anyway … and on your say so.”
His eyebrows came down and so did the corners of his mouth. “That’s pretty close to sass Coralie Dunlop.”
“I’m not sassing Poppa. I’m trying to understand why you’re doing this!”
“Because every other plan I’ve made has come to nothing, that’s why. All I’m left with is seeing that something less than nothing comes to you, or stopping something worse. I don’t want to see something worse happen to you Baby Girl, so that only leaves something less … less than I’d hope to be able to.” I was about to open my mouth when he said, “I’m sick Coralie. I’ve fought it off as long as I can. Good food. Good air. Natural remedies to replace what I can’t get from the doctors. But that’s only gotten me so far. I’m at the end of my rope and Sweetheart as much as I want to, there’s no more rope to make a knot with and hang onto.”
I’d suspected he was sick again, but I hadn’t let myself think about it being as bad as he’d described. “Are … are you sure? Have you been to the doctor?”
“I’ve outlived that quack’s prediction by two years Baby Girl. But at some point, all of us must face death. Mine is just … mine is just coming faster than I was prepared for it to. Your grandmother tried to explain this part to me when she herself took sick but …” He stopped and looked off into the late afternoon sun and I could see the wetness in his eyes that he had never let fall, at least not where he thought I could see it. In a hoarse voice he said, “Baby Girl, I’d do a lot to spare you this, but it appears that life isn’t going to grant me that wish. So, I’ve done the best I could. Levi Tanner has two young children at home. You know his wife died last year and that sister of hers that was supposed to … to help him out has run off like a huzzy with a man that was working on the road crew reopening the passes. He needs someone, and he swears up and down that he’ll be kind and … and give you time to finish doing the growing you need to before you become a wife in fact and not just name.”
“Wife?!”
“Coralie, don’t use that tone … with me or with Levi. It ain’t what you would call helpful and I shouldn’t have to explain why even if you are a little young for your age.”
My age? Still just shy of sixteen and he, my beloved and trusted grandfather, was talking about marrying me off to a man twice my age, with two young kids … and a dead wife other women at the market whisper that he nearly went crazy from when she died during a miscarriage. I did what Mawmaw had taught me last year when she was going through her last six months on this earth; I simply accepted what I couldn’t change … and in the meantime tried to figure out what I could change.
I took a deep breath and said, “Poppa … what about Josiah? He’s been coming around to help you and while he is kin to me, he isn’t close kin and only by marriage since he is Mawmaw’s grandson by her first husband. Since he isn’t any blood to me no one could say anything about it.”
“Darlin’ don’t you think that would have been my first choice? But it turns out that little XXXX has only been coming around ‘cause he is getting the house and land and wanted to take stock of what that would bring him.”
Ignoring the shock of my Poppa using a curse word in my presence, and not even saying excuse his French or anything like that, I stuttered, “Getting the …? Uh …”
“Nothing I can do about it and that’s why I have been in such a rush to find another solution.”
“It wasn’t … me he was sorta coming to see?” I asked, feeling foolish and vain even as the words left my mouth.
It must have showed because Poppa gave me a one-armed hug and said, “Did the boy … break your heart?”
“No,” I denied even though I had been developing a little bit of a crush on him and feeling the blush blooming on my face because of it. “But I don’t see why he wouldn’t see me as an option. I know more than him how to take care of this house and while he might know how to take care of the woodlot and run the saw mill, he knows doodly squat about gardens and cooking and the rest of what is needed. We could … be partners. Or I could be his housekeeper. Since he doesn’t want me, he could maybe find a local girl and I could … have a place to stay until … until …”
Poppa snorted which told me somehow, some way he’d lost respect for Josiah which in all honesty had me questioning my solution just as quickly as it had entered my head.
“Foolish boy has him a gal already. Well, a woman I reckon you’d call her as she’s got ten years on him easy. In my day we’d a called her a cougar and good name for Mizz Bella Stacker and that’s a fact. Yeller hair that ain’t natural and all teased out around her head is just the beginning of it.”
“You’ve met her?” I asked, never having heard the name come up in my hearing, not even the surname of Stacker.
“Yesterdee. When you run to the market with that acorn meal you finished for Clarice Henderson.”
Clarice Henderson was the doctor’s landlady and he’d agreed to take the acorn meal in payment to finish off Poppa’s debt and the man had told me to take the meal directly to Mrs. Henderson rather than leave it in his saddlebags and maybe sour before he could get it to her.
Poppa continued by saying, “I’m glad you weren’t here to see it. Mizz Cougar looked around this place like she already owned it and everything on it. Kept showing me the papers they’d brought from the lawyers showing that I only had a life estate on the land, that it had really belonged to your Mawmaw and with me dead it will go back to her line and Josiah is the first in line on that side. Buncha damn vultures. Didn’t mention you at all. When I tried to bring it up the woman … less said about what her solution was the better. And no Miss Nosey, it didn’t have nothing to do with you being a Housekeeper but something a lot less respectable at a bar owned by her brother way out in Little Rock and that’s the last discussion of that.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” I knew something else was coming when he made a face. “And here’s the next bit and … I don’t need hysterics Coralie. Things are bad enough as it is and I’m man enough to admit this and feel bad about it. Levi is going to be here tomorrow midmorning and you’re leaving with him. We’re going to spend the rest of the day packing up your things … and things that I mean to be yours … so that yeller haired hag doesn’t get everything she expects to. And that includes all that stuff out in the shed that belonged to your daddy and momma and Mawmaw’s jewelry I bought her in better times.”
A little shocked I whispered, “But if Josiah gets what was Mawmaw’s …”
“He gets this land and house and that’s about all he is getting as far as it goes. The contents of the house and outbuildings is mine to do with what I will or can. Can’t do much about the sawmill, it is considered a structure on the property, but I’ll be damned if I don’t gift out what isn’t legally bound over to the land. Now we’ve got work ahead of us and I mean to do what I can before I give you to Levi to take care of. You start in your room. I already put a duffle bag on your bed. Go on now.”
In the kind of shock I hadn’t ever expected to feel again, the kind you feel as the rug gets pulled out from under you, but I did as Poppa had asked me to. What a day and night that was. After I packed my clothes, Poppa brought me a rolling suitcase he said held all the family pictures and important papers from my parents and that side of the family, including Robbie’s military records and how I might access certain benefits should they ever be available to me. That under no circumstances was I to ever lose that suitcase or let anyone, even Levi, take it from me. It was a while before I understood what he meant and by then … by then I was in too deep and my world so upside down that what was in that suitcase couldn’t do me a whole lot of good.
From there we went on to go through the stuff that had been my family’s from before. I looked at some of it and it was like I didn’t remember it, or if I did, that I had no connection to it. I was eleven when I’d come to live with Poppa and Mawmaw. Barely that. And folks had told me I was in shock for almost three months before I stopped acting like a marionette that had my strings in knots. I remember more about the night our house was attacked than I do about the four months that came after it. They said I had been in the house for almost a month … with my dead family … before Robbie discovered me when he’d come home for the last time after finishing basic training. He was the one that called Poppa and made arrangements for him to come get me. The rest … just isn’t part of any memories that I have, and nothing I’m interested in digging out if they are in there some place. I felt more attached to Poppa and this house than I did to all the memories that came before but the doctor that had come before the one that Poppa told him he was sick had diagnosed me with a type of PTSD and something called Declaritive Memory Dysfunction and had wanted me to be remanded to the State Mental Hospital … or a payment for him to keep his silence on the fact they had a potentially distraught and dangerous child living with them. Mawmaw had run him off the property with a shotgun full of birdshot and reported him to the local sheriff and that’s why the area got a new doctor.
Poppa approved Mawmaw’s choice of action and when I was well enough, he explained that just because I might be a little damaged, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t make something of my life. He also told me about his childhood … being born to a fifteen-year-old mother that had gotten knocked up because she didn’t think it could happen to her. He’d been in and out of foster care for a few years before she married a man that became a father to him and finally took the right kind of interest in him and made sure he stopped getting pulled pillar to post. That hadn’t meant his life had been easy, but he’d been getting along well enough, growing into his potential (if not his full potential), getting married, having kids and such. Then my dad’s biological mother had died, and life seemed to just suck all the give-a-damn out of him for a while.
Poppa said he hadn’t known how to do much of anything when he and Mawmaw had met. He was in a funk and not sure how to climb out of it. My dad’s mother, who took care of the house and everything related to it, had died in a work-related accident when Dad was a little boy. His sisters and brother were young too, but old enough that they were already working on leaving home … or in one brother’s case had already left home. Dad had been a “whoops” (ten years younger than his next sibling up) but apparently God has a plan as Mawmaw was fond of saying because it was Dad that Mawmaw fell in love with before she had Poppa. Dad was so little that Poppa had to take him in the truck as he’d made out of town deliveries and Mawmaw was working at the convenience store where Poppa always stopped for diesel.
Mawmaw had needed a child in her life to give her purpose, or so she said, and Dad reciprocated. The problem was that Mawmaw lived “in the backside of nowhere” and Poppa wasn’t sure at first if he could stand it as back then he was strictly a city fella, driving trucks and delivering anything he could find to run from point a to point b that earned him a paycheck. Soon enough they married anyway and Poppa’s life changed more than he expected it to.
Work was hard to come by in the small mountain town and Poppa’s pride almost ended their marriage before the county stamp was even dry on the license. But then again work was hard to come by in the cities too so what Poppa did was stick it out and he learned to buy and sell things at a seasonal flea market and online and after that they might not have been rich but Poppa’s pride was saved and they actually did at least as well as their neighbors … in other words the bills got paid and food made it to the table and there was a little left over to put in the bank for a rainy day. He also learned to work the wood equipment that had been Mawmaw’s father in law’s way back in the day. Mawmaw said that he got better at it than her father-in-law had been, certainly better than her next to worthless first husband had been.
One of the things that Poppa was good at making were wooden chests … and coffins when necessary, though he tended to give as many of those away as he sold. But back to the wooden chests. He’d been digging out the cedar that road crews from the New New Deal – what people around here called the NND – had been clearing out. All they did was push it in a pile and burn it off when they could get enough of the volunteer firefighters to stand around so it wouldn’t get out of hand. Poppa said it was a sinful waste and would go pull that wood out when no one was looking, not that anyone really cared. He’d bring it back to the saw mill, cut it and put it in the wood kiln for drying, and then he’d make crates and chests out of it to take the place of cardboard boxes when they’d gotten so hard to come by if they weren’t being taxed by the environment Nazis. He could make furniture too, but mostly he just liked to make boxes; boxes, crates, chests, and coffins. Those were his specialties. And he had a lot of them stacked up in the barn.
Well all my belongings, and the other stuff he gave me, got put in those cedar boxes and chests. He even stored a bunch of linens Mawmaw had bought at estate sales and yard sales when times were better in one of his better coffins. They’re so nice and pretty you could probably put one in a living room as a display table and no one would know unless they looked real close and used their imagination.
In another coffin he put all of my mother’s books (mostly about crafts and stuff) and Mawmaw’s books (that were about just about everything) as well as my schoolbooks. “Coralie, you might not be able to go to school anymore – I couldn’t get Levi to go that far as he already has a bit of a problem with your age – but you can still learn. Your Mawmaw never graduated high school as she dropped out when she got pregnant with her oldest boy, but she was still one of the smartest people I ever met in this life. She taught herself all sorts of things, even things you wouldn’t think a woman would need or want to know. More than that, she taught me plenty; especially the ways of the people that have lived here for generations. Mostly she taught me to keep on living on those days I was ready to hang it up. You can do the same for Levi. If he’ll let you. If he won’t … you’ll still have it for yourself and maybe one day it’ll all come in handy.”
Looking back I can see that he was trying to tell me to be realistic, but also to leave myself open to … possibilities I guess you could call them. It was also that night that I found out that Poppa could make something else too. Wagon boxes. I knew he had been working on some big project but I hadn’t gotten curious about it because I had been too busy gleaning the last of the apples and pears out of the trees, getting the cabbages canned into slaw since Poppa didn’t care for sauerkraut, dealing with the green tomatoes that would never make in time to avoid the first frost, juicing all the muscadines that I’d been able to save back from taking to market to pay the tax man, and figuring out what to do with all of the squash and pumpkins that had surprised us with a bumper crop. And doing it all for the first time without Mawmaw there beside me. I’d also been culling the chickens and goats and preserving the meat at Poppa’s insistence though it escaped me why at the time. All that bounty went into that wagon box hidden inside other wooden crates and chests and then were covered with the boxes and crates that held my belongings.
I was distraught and a bit strung out the next morning but Poppa told me, “Hold it together Coralie. This is no more what I want than it is what you want … but there’s no more time to find something better. I can feel my life is measured in days now. I been passing blood and last night it come in clots.”
“What?! We gotta get the doctor!”
“Coralie!” he growled using a tone I’d never heard directed at me. When I turned and looked at him he had the grace to look ashamed and said more kindly. “Baby Girl, it is my time and though it pains me to admit it, and admit to the failures I know I’m leaving behind, I am ready to go. I’m tired. Tired of being sick, tired of the pain in my guts, tired of the disappointment in most people on this planet, and tired of missing my wife … both of ‘em who I hope are in Heaven waiting on me like the preacher keeps going on about. We might not be husband and wife the way we were here on earth, but I’m told it will be some pleasant thing that is better, where we all get along and can live as we should have from the get go if Adam and Eve hadn’t mucked it up for the rest of humanity. Now I want you to go clean up and get dressed in that dress that was your mother’s. And do your hair in something beside those braids. I don’t want people to think of you as a little girl, but as a grown … or near grown … woman that has all the rights that come with that state. Now get. I’ll call you when Levi gets here with his team and a Justice of the Peace.”
I won’t bore you with what transpired, just to say that the marriage was legal as the age of consent in Arkansas had been reduced to fourteen the previous year, but only with a parent or guardian’s consent. As I was less than a month off of my sixteenth birthday I almost didn’t need that. The only thing the Justice and his witnesses wanted to make sure of was that I wasn’t being forced or under undue distress. It almost felt like a lie to say I wasn’t, but I knew it is what Poppa thought needed to happen and I suppose, given that his prediction of only having days left had indeed proved out to be true, it was just in time too.
I rode off with Levi Tanner who’d brought his team of farm horses to pull the wagon. My last look back to waive to Poppa before turning out of the old drive onto the county road that led to Levi’s place was the last time I saw Poppa. Josiah and the old “Yeller Haired Hag” put him in the ground so fast there wasn’t even time for a memorial or nothing. Our small community was shocked at their failure to show what was considered by most to be a basic courtesy to the dead … a memorial everyone could attend and remember the good things about a person before slapping the cemetery sod over their body … and that was only the first of many small things that turned folks against them. But I had no time to be gleeful about the hole they’d dug for themselves, no pun intended. And no inclination no matter what some thought. I was too busy dealing with the hand that I’d been dealt.
“But Poppa!”
“Don’t but Poppa me girl. There’s no other way.”
“But …”
“Coralie!”
Taking my courage in hand I said, “Poppa, you’ve always said the reason why you and Mawmaw lived here, even though you were getting older, was to escape the cities and the mess you predicted they would inevitably turn into when … not if, but when … something bad happened. Well, something bad did happen, several somethings bad, and the cities did need escaping from. You said that’s why you could come and get me when Daddy and … and the rest of them died. You said that’s why you could keep me when Robbie came home again, only it was in a body bag to be buried at the national cemetery. You said that living here with you and Mawmaw would keep me safe, and I wouldn’t have to live the way other girls were – and are – being forced to live to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. Now you’re telling me … you’re telling me I’m going to have to do it anyway … and on your say so.”
His eyebrows came down and so did the corners of his mouth. “That’s pretty close to sass Coralie Dunlop.”
“I’m not sassing Poppa. I’m trying to understand why you’re doing this!”
“Because every other plan I’ve made has come to nothing, that’s why. All I’m left with is seeing that something less than nothing comes to you, or stopping something worse. I don’t want to see something worse happen to you Baby Girl, so that only leaves something less … less than I’d hope to be able to.” I was about to open my mouth when he said, “I’m sick Coralie. I’ve fought it off as long as I can. Good food. Good air. Natural remedies to replace what I can’t get from the doctors. But that’s only gotten me so far. I’m at the end of my rope and Sweetheart as much as I want to, there’s no more rope to make a knot with and hang onto.”
I’d suspected he was sick again, but I hadn’t let myself think about it being as bad as he’d described. “Are … are you sure? Have you been to the doctor?”
“I’ve outlived that quack’s prediction by two years Baby Girl. But at some point, all of us must face death. Mine is just … mine is just coming faster than I was prepared for it to. Your grandmother tried to explain this part to me when she herself took sick but …” He stopped and looked off into the late afternoon sun and I could see the wetness in his eyes that he had never let fall, at least not where he thought I could see it. In a hoarse voice he said, “Baby Girl, I’d do a lot to spare you this, but it appears that life isn’t going to grant me that wish. So, I’ve done the best I could. Levi Tanner has two young children at home. You know his wife died last year and that sister of hers that was supposed to … to help him out has run off like a huzzy with a man that was working on the road crew reopening the passes. He needs someone, and he swears up and down that he’ll be kind and … and give you time to finish doing the growing you need to before you become a wife in fact and not just name.”
“Wife?!”
“Coralie, don’t use that tone … with me or with Levi. It ain’t what you would call helpful and I shouldn’t have to explain why even if you are a little young for your age.”
My age? Still just shy of sixteen and he, my beloved and trusted grandfather, was talking about marrying me off to a man twice my age, with two young kids … and a dead wife other women at the market whisper that he nearly went crazy from when she died during a miscarriage. I did what Mawmaw had taught me last year when she was going through her last six months on this earth; I simply accepted what I couldn’t change … and in the meantime tried to figure out what I could change.
I took a deep breath and said, “Poppa … what about Josiah? He’s been coming around to help you and while he is kin to me, he isn’t close kin and only by marriage since he is Mawmaw’s grandson by her first husband. Since he isn’t any blood to me no one could say anything about it.”
“Darlin’ don’t you think that would have been my first choice? But it turns out that little XXXX has only been coming around ‘cause he is getting the house and land and wanted to take stock of what that would bring him.”
Ignoring the shock of my Poppa using a curse word in my presence, and not even saying excuse his French or anything like that, I stuttered, “Getting the …? Uh …”
“Nothing I can do about it and that’s why I have been in such a rush to find another solution.”
“It wasn’t … me he was sorta coming to see?” I asked, feeling foolish and vain even as the words left my mouth.
It must have showed because Poppa gave me a one-armed hug and said, “Did the boy … break your heart?”
“No,” I denied even though I had been developing a little bit of a crush on him and feeling the blush blooming on my face because of it. “But I don’t see why he wouldn’t see me as an option. I know more than him how to take care of this house and while he might know how to take care of the woodlot and run the saw mill, he knows doodly squat about gardens and cooking and the rest of what is needed. We could … be partners. Or I could be his housekeeper. Since he doesn’t want me, he could maybe find a local girl and I could … have a place to stay until … until …”
Poppa snorted which told me somehow, some way he’d lost respect for Josiah which in all honesty had me questioning my solution just as quickly as it had entered my head.
“Foolish boy has him a gal already. Well, a woman I reckon you’d call her as she’s got ten years on him easy. In my day we’d a called her a cougar and good name for Mizz Bella Stacker and that’s a fact. Yeller hair that ain’t natural and all teased out around her head is just the beginning of it.”
“You’ve met her?” I asked, never having heard the name come up in my hearing, not even the surname of Stacker.
“Yesterdee. When you run to the market with that acorn meal you finished for Clarice Henderson.”
Clarice Henderson was the doctor’s landlady and he’d agreed to take the acorn meal in payment to finish off Poppa’s debt and the man had told me to take the meal directly to Mrs. Henderson rather than leave it in his saddlebags and maybe sour before he could get it to her.
Poppa continued by saying, “I’m glad you weren’t here to see it. Mizz Cougar looked around this place like she already owned it and everything on it. Kept showing me the papers they’d brought from the lawyers showing that I only had a life estate on the land, that it had really belonged to your Mawmaw and with me dead it will go back to her line and Josiah is the first in line on that side. Buncha damn vultures. Didn’t mention you at all. When I tried to bring it up the woman … less said about what her solution was the better. And no Miss Nosey, it didn’t have nothing to do with you being a Housekeeper but something a lot less respectable at a bar owned by her brother way out in Little Rock and that’s the last discussion of that.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” I knew something else was coming when he made a face. “And here’s the next bit and … I don’t need hysterics Coralie. Things are bad enough as it is and I’m man enough to admit this and feel bad about it. Levi is going to be here tomorrow midmorning and you’re leaving with him. We’re going to spend the rest of the day packing up your things … and things that I mean to be yours … so that yeller haired hag doesn’t get everything she expects to. And that includes all that stuff out in the shed that belonged to your daddy and momma and Mawmaw’s jewelry I bought her in better times.”
A little shocked I whispered, “But if Josiah gets what was Mawmaw’s …”
“He gets this land and house and that’s about all he is getting as far as it goes. The contents of the house and outbuildings is mine to do with what I will or can. Can’t do much about the sawmill, it is considered a structure on the property, but I’ll be damned if I don’t gift out what isn’t legally bound over to the land. Now we’ve got work ahead of us and I mean to do what I can before I give you to Levi to take care of. You start in your room. I already put a duffle bag on your bed. Go on now.”
In the kind of shock I hadn’t ever expected to feel again, the kind you feel as the rug gets pulled out from under you, but I did as Poppa had asked me to. What a day and night that was. After I packed my clothes, Poppa brought me a rolling suitcase he said held all the family pictures and important papers from my parents and that side of the family, including Robbie’s military records and how I might access certain benefits should they ever be available to me. That under no circumstances was I to ever lose that suitcase or let anyone, even Levi, take it from me. It was a while before I understood what he meant and by then … by then I was in too deep and my world so upside down that what was in that suitcase couldn’t do me a whole lot of good.
From there we went on to go through the stuff that had been my family’s from before. I looked at some of it and it was like I didn’t remember it, or if I did, that I had no connection to it. I was eleven when I’d come to live with Poppa and Mawmaw. Barely that. And folks had told me I was in shock for almost three months before I stopped acting like a marionette that had my strings in knots. I remember more about the night our house was attacked than I do about the four months that came after it. They said I had been in the house for almost a month … with my dead family … before Robbie discovered me when he’d come home for the last time after finishing basic training. He was the one that called Poppa and made arrangements for him to come get me. The rest … just isn’t part of any memories that I have, and nothing I’m interested in digging out if they are in there some place. I felt more attached to Poppa and this house than I did to all the memories that came before but the doctor that had come before the one that Poppa told him he was sick had diagnosed me with a type of PTSD and something called Declaritive Memory Dysfunction and had wanted me to be remanded to the State Mental Hospital … or a payment for him to keep his silence on the fact they had a potentially distraught and dangerous child living with them. Mawmaw had run him off the property with a shotgun full of birdshot and reported him to the local sheriff and that’s why the area got a new doctor.
Poppa approved Mawmaw’s choice of action and when I was well enough, he explained that just because I might be a little damaged, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t make something of my life. He also told me about his childhood … being born to a fifteen-year-old mother that had gotten knocked up because she didn’t think it could happen to her. He’d been in and out of foster care for a few years before she married a man that became a father to him and finally took the right kind of interest in him and made sure he stopped getting pulled pillar to post. That hadn’t meant his life had been easy, but he’d been getting along well enough, growing into his potential (if not his full potential), getting married, having kids and such. Then my dad’s biological mother had died, and life seemed to just suck all the give-a-damn out of him for a while.
Poppa said he hadn’t known how to do much of anything when he and Mawmaw had met. He was in a funk and not sure how to climb out of it. My dad’s mother, who took care of the house and everything related to it, had died in a work-related accident when Dad was a little boy. His sisters and brother were young too, but old enough that they were already working on leaving home … or in one brother’s case had already left home. Dad had been a “whoops” (ten years younger than his next sibling up) but apparently God has a plan as Mawmaw was fond of saying because it was Dad that Mawmaw fell in love with before she had Poppa. Dad was so little that Poppa had to take him in the truck as he’d made out of town deliveries and Mawmaw was working at the convenience store where Poppa always stopped for diesel.
Mawmaw had needed a child in her life to give her purpose, or so she said, and Dad reciprocated. The problem was that Mawmaw lived “in the backside of nowhere” and Poppa wasn’t sure at first if he could stand it as back then he was strictly a city fella, driving trucks and delivering anything he could find to run from point a to point b that earned him a paycheck. Soon enough they married anyway and Poppa’s life changed more than he expected it to.
Work was hard to come by in the small mountain town and Poppa’s pride almost ended their marriage before the county stamp was even dry on the license. But then again work was hard to come by in the cities too so what Poppa did was stick it out and he learned to buy and sell things at a seasonal flea market and online and after that they might not have been rich but Poppa’s pride was saved and they actually did at least as well as their neighbors … in other words the bills got paid and food made it to the table and there was a little left over to put in the bank for a rainy day. He also learned to work the wood equipment that had been Mawmaw’s father in law’s way back in the day. Mawmaw said that he got better at it than her father-in-law had been, certainly better than her next to worthless first husband had been.
One of the things that Poppa was good at making were wooden chests … and coffins when necessary, though he tended to give as many of those away as he sold. But back to the wooden chests. He’d been digging out the cedar that road crews from the New New Deal – what people around here called the NND – had been clearing out. All they did was push it in a pile and burn it off when they could get enough of the volunteer firefighters to stand around so it wouldn’t get out of hand. Poppa said it was a sinful waste and would go pull that wood out when no one was looking, not that anyone really cared. He’d bring it back to the saw mill, cut it and put it in the wood kiln for drying, and then he’d make crates and chests out of it to take the place of cardboard boxes when they’d gotten so hard to come by if they weren’t being taxed by the environment Nazis. He could make furniture too, but mostly he just liked to make boxes; boxes, crates, chests, and coffins. Those were his specialties. And he had a lot of them stacked up in the barn.
Well all my belongings, and the other stuff he gave me, got put in those cedar boxes and chests. He even stored a bunch of linens Mawmaw had bought at estate sales and yard sales when times were better in one of his better coffins. They’re so nice and pretty you could probably put one in a living room as a display table and no one would know unless they looked real close and used their imagination.
In another coffin he put all of my mother’s books (mostly about crafts and stuff) and Mawmaw’s books (that were about just about everything) as well as my schoolbooks. “Coralie, you might not be able to go to school anymore – I couldn’t get Levi to go that far as he already has a bit of a problem with your age – but you can still learn. Your Mawmaw never graduated high school as she dropped out when she got pregnant with her oldest boy, but she was still one of the smartest people I ever met in this life. She taught herself all sorts of things, even things you wouldn’t think a woman would need or want to know. More than that, she taught me plenty; especially the ways of the people that have lived here for generations. Mostly she taught me to keep on living on those days I was ready to hang it up. You can do the same for Levi. If he’ll let you. If he won’t … you’ll still have it for yourself and maybe one day it’ll all come in handy.”
Looking back I can see that he was trying to tell me to be realistic, but also to leave myself open to … possibilities I guess you could call them. It was also that night that I found out that Poppa could make something else too. Wagon boxes. I knew he had been working on some big project but I hadn’t gotten curious about it because I had been too busy gleaning the last of the apples and pears out of the trees, getting the cabbages canned into slaw since Poppa didn’t care for sauerkraut, dealing with the green tomatoes that would never make in time to avoid the first frost, juicing all the muscadines that I’d been able to save back from taking to market to pay the tax man, and figuring out what to do with all of the squash and pumpkins that had surprised us with a bumper crop. And doing it all for the first time without Mawmaw there beside me. I’d also been culling the chickens and goats and preserving the meat at Poppa’s insistence though it escaped me why at the time. All that bounty went into that wagon box hidden inside other wooden crates and chests and then were covered with the boxes and crates that held my belongings.
I was distraught and a bit strung out the next morning but Poppa told me, “Hold it together Coralie. This is no more what I want than it is what you want … but there’s no more time to find something better. I can feel my life is measured in days now. I been passing blood and last night it come in clots.”
“What?! We gotta get the doctor!”
“Coralie!” he growled using a tone I’d never heard directed at me. When I turned and looked at him he had the grace to look ashamed and said more kindly. “Baby Girl, it is my time and though it pains me to admit it, and admit to the failures I know I’m leaving behind, I am ready to go. I’m tired. Tired of being sick, tired of the pain in my guts, tired of the disappointment in most people on this planet, and tired of missing my wife … both of ‘em who I hope are in Heaven waiting on me like the preacher keeps going on about. We might not be husband and wife the way we were here on earth, but I’m told it will be some pleasant thing that is better, where we all get along and can live as we should have from the get go if Adam and Eve hadn’t mucked it up for the rest of humanity. Now I want you to go clean up and get dressed in that dress that was your mother’s. And do your hair in something beside those braids. I don’t want people to think of you as a little girl, but as a grown … or near grown … woman that has all the rights that come with that state. Now get. I’ll call you when Levi gets here with his team and a Justice of the Peace.”
I won’t bore you with what transpired, just to say that the marriage was legal as the age of consent in Arkansas had been reduced to fourteen the previous year, but only with a parent or guardian’s consent. As I was less than a month off of my sixteenth birthday I almost didn’t need that. The only thing the Justice and his witnesses wanted to make sure of was that I wasn’t being forced or under undue distress. It almost felt like a lie to say I wasn’t, but I knew it is what Poppa thought needed to happen and I suppose, given that his prediction of only having days left had indeed proved out to be true, it was just in time too.
I rode off with Levi Tanner who’d brought his team of farm horses to pull the wagon. My last look back to waive to Poppa before turning out of the old drive onto the county road that led to Levi’s place was the last time I saw Poppa. Josiah and the old “Yeller Haired Hag” put him in the ground so fast there wasn’t even time for a memorial or nothing. Our small community was shocked at their failure to show what was considered by most to be a basic courtesy to the dead … a memorial everyone could attend and remember the good things about a person before slapping the cemetery sod over their body … and that was only the first of many small things that turned folks against them. But I had no time to be gleeful about the hole they’d dug for themselves, no pun intended. And no inclination no matter what some thought. I was too busy dealing with the hand that I’d been dealt.
