assisted Viola into the wagon, and we waved as the couple rode off.
Aunt Rachel left the following week. Her original intention had been to remain for most of the summer, attend the wedding, and then go home. But after her stay at the sanitarium, she resolved that it was time for her to return to Roanoke.
After she departed, the house seemed empty. Mr. Chappels returned from Richmond and continued to court my mother. In the meanwhile, Uncle Everett came by periodically to check on the farm and us.
With the coming of April, plowing and seedtime resumed, and great activity broke out across the land. Since I was not in school, and wouldn’t be enrolled until the fall, I had a child’s run of the fields and barnyards, allowed to participate in whatever caught my fancy, or my mother and grandmother consented to let me do. I got to ride on the backs of the big draft horses, cling to the drag when it came time to break up the plowed clods, take the horses down to the creek for water, and, once their harnesses were removed, feed them huge ears of hard yellow corn, or a half-pail of oats each. I also enjoyed gathering eggs, feeding the chickens, slopping the hogs, and playing with the tenant farmer’s children, whenever they didn’t have chores of their own.
Two of the children were close to my age, a five-year old boy named Russell, and his four-year old sister, Cruella. They hailed from sturdy mountain stock, to say the least. Russell was a tough little kid and always wanted to fight. We frequently wrestled each other and would hit each other hard on the arms. His sister liked to play with dogs, especially when the dogs were in heat. This was all new to me, and even I came away shocked one afternoon when I stumbled upon Russell and Cruella having sex with a dog. Russell was holding it by its hindquarters, while Cruella had taken off her panties and the dog was humping her back. My curiosity overrode any sense of buggery or morbid wrong. Later, the three of us played “doctor-nurse,” Russell and I practicing on Cruella what the dog had more successfully performed. That continued for most of the summer until Pearl caught us doing it in the apple house and threatened to tell my mother. “You leave those thrash alone!” she reprimanded. “Good Lord, boy! Your mother would skin you alive!” I doubted that, but I had no desire to anger or hurt my mother. I avoided the two children, but occasionally I would play “husband-wife” with Cruella in the barn. She would pull down her panties and I would slip out my “winky,” as my grandmother called it, and press it against Cruella’s tight, little crevice. It was only in my teen years that I realized what we were supposed to have been doing. But by then Cruella and her family had moved on.
Summer ushered in many exciting activities. Earl, Pearl’s father and one of the older farmhands, hitched up the wagon one noon and took me with him into the Knobs to cut a load of firewood for the kitchen’s cookstove. We stopped near the top of the ridge, overlooking Uncle Jim’s farm, before turning off into an old growth of hickories and oaks. Earl carried a long, wobbling steel saw over his shoulder and cut up a number of logs from fallen trees. He watched me carefully, but allowed me to assist with the sawing. Since I was a tall, stout boy, I was able to pull the saw in unison with him, but he had to do the heavier, muscular work and load the logs onto the wagon. Later, he split them into stovewood-size pieces and let me whack away with a hatchet to create kindling. He oversaw everything I did and taught me how to swing the hatchet with clean smooth strokes, creating slender sticks that would ignite quickly. He rarely called me “Tommy.” Instead, he addressed me as “Son.” I thought that strange at the time, but his calling me “Son” made me feel special. He had lost his only son in a mowing accident. Pearl would often retell how “his horse done reared up when he come upon this rattlesnake, and Felston fell right off, face fo-m’st in the blades. It ripped him up like a hog.” It was Earl who let me sit on the drag, ride the horses down to the creek for water, and perform other chores within my range. He never once raised his voice in anger, swore, or grew impatient over anything around me. He sometimes ate with us in the kitchen, since his wife, or Pearl’s mother, was dead, but he always walked back to his cabin at night. Two brothers and their wives and children lived there, as well. It was his brothers who did the larger portion of the plowing, planting, harvesting, suckering of tobacco, hay bailing, thrashing of the wheat, cutting and shocking the corn, and, at Thanksgiving time, slaughtering the hogs. The latter, however, constituted a colossal undertaking, requiring every farmhand’s effort for an entire week. Not even the women were exempt. They worked harder than the men, cutting off the fat for lard and grinding up scraps for sausage, which they peppered and stored in long, greasy, cloth sacks.
During berry picking time, we descended on the hills like locusts. First, came the strawberries and later blackberries, mulberries, and cherries. Like primitive food-gatherers from some wandering ice-age tribe, my mother, Pearl and I joined the women and other children on the farm in these group forays. We scoured the hills and hedgerows, fields and byways, picking and filling our baskets with nature’s delectable bounty. Uncle Everett came for us to pick strawberries on his farm, where we gathered the sweetest berries of all. Later, at home, my grandmother oversaw the converting of our juice-stained pails of berries into pint and quart jars of luscious preserves.
This latter bout with nature led to a discourse on Providence and the goodness of the Creator, in which my grandmother insisted Mr. Chappels participate. His presence, that particular evening, rested solely on the basis of his love for my mother. But seeing he had stayed for dinner, there was no escaping her theological confrontation.
“Now don’t you find that convincing?” she began. “That the grandeur and opulence of nature, the very abundance and extravagance of creation, should reflect something of the grandeur and goodness of its Designer? Isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” he moaned, not wishing to contest her.
“What is your own theory? You must have one. Please share it. We’re all family now, or soon will be,” she smiled. Then she folded her hands in that aristocratic style she must have acquired at the Martha Washington Seminary for Girls. She waited patiently for him to commence.
“Mama, the poor man and I have a ton of things to discuss and plan. Can’t we do this later?”
“Oh, Shaula! Later never comes, my dear. Occasions like this are gifts of the season. Tomorrow will sweep them all away and introduce an order of fresh new duties.”
“You do have a point, Miz. Edmonds. But I see it all as nature’s boundless way of hurling thousands of seeds and berries to the winds of chance, knowing that only a few will ever survive the harsh conditions of reality. She’s a profligate spender, if you ask me. Whether God exists or not, or guides the process or not, or foreordained its mechanics, I fear to say. Our beliefs should match the facts, and not the facts our beliefs. That’s what every successful banker knows, and God pity the ones who don’t.”
“Oh, so definitive! Do tell! We mustn’t misguide Tommy. Not a sparrow falls, but that our heavenly Father knows it. I might be old fashioned, and out of my league when it comes to banking, but I can never doubt His guiding hand.”
A silence ensued. Her brow lifted and sagged and her face grew taut. Her wrinkles swelled into grooves. Then she smiled. “We need you, Mr. Chappels. Yes, dear man! And God knows it. Don’t disdain an old woman’s belief in the mercy of Providence. I know it when I see it.”
“And coffee cups, too, Grandmother!” I piped up. “Remember, you saw him first in the coffee cup.”
Pearl and my mother hooted with laughter. Mr. Chappels blushed with mirth. My grandmother’s face turned ashen.
“Oh, goodness!” she feigned. Her cheeks burned red, even under her rouge.
“So much for dissembling, Mama,” my mother said.
“‘Opulence,’ ‘dissembling,’ ‘Providence’!” repeated Mr. Chappels. Does anybody ever explain these words for
