Ring for Grandmother

Chapter One: The Road Up Anvil Ridge

I am setting this down in the winter of 1917, in a rented room over a dry goods store, with a lamp turned low and my daughter asleep on the other side of a curtain. I write it out because I have learned that a thing left unsaid gets bigger in the dark, and because there may come a day when somebody needs to know exactly how it was done and exactly what it cost. I will use plain words. I taught arithmetic and spelling for six years to the children of Cane Ford, and I have no patience for a sentence that hides behind itself.

My name was Etna Cothran before it was Etna Wilkerson. In the spring of 1911 I was twenty-four years old, seven months gone with child, and newly the wife of a man I had known for five months.

I want to be honest about how it happened, because later there were people in the valley who said I was a schemer and people who said I was a fool, and neither of them had the shape of it right.

My father died in the January of 1910 of a thing in his lungs that made him bark like a dog for eleven weeks. He left me his Bible, his razor, and forty-one dollars. I taught the Cane Ford school. In the autumn Thomas Wilkerson came down off the ridge to sell apples out of a wagon, in a year when the valley orchards had gone to blight and there were no apples anywhere between the river and the county line. He had them piled up like red money. He was tall and slow-moving and about thirty-five, with a face that had been out in weather. He asked me, very seriously, whether I would care for an apple, and then he stood there holding it out until I took it, as though he had no other business in the world.

He courted me the way a careful man builds a fence. He came every second Saturday. He never once said a word to me that was clever. He brought butter, a bolt of gray cloth, a tin of real coffee, and once a jar of honey with the comb still floating in it, and he sat on the schoolhouse step while I graded slates and he let the silence be. My father had shouted for a living, more or less. Thomas's quiet felt like a room with the windows open.

In September I let him take me walking up the creek road past dark, and in October I understood what that walk had cost me, and in January we were married in the front room of the Methodist parsonage with two witnesses and no flowers. Belle came down from Tullis Mill to stand with me. My sister Belle is three years older than I am and has the disposition of a hen who has seen a hawk once and never forgotten it. She took my hands afterward and said, "You didn't have to do this."

"The school board will not keep a teacher who is showing," I said. "They told me so in a letter. It was a very polite letter."

"You could come to me."

"You have four children and a husband who counts the eggs."

She didn't argue with that. She said, "Three hundred acres," the way you'd say a number in a sum you didn't trust, and then she kissed me and cried on my collar and went home.

Three hundred acres on Anvil Ridge. Four hours by wagon from Cane Ford in dry weather, and no road at all in wet. That is the first thing you must understand, and everything else follows from it: on Anvil Ridge there was nobody to tell.

We went up in February and the ridge was all bare gray timber and ice in the wheel ruts. In April, when this story properly starts, it had greened over into something almost beautiful, and I was as big as a churn and I had learned the shape of my new life.

The house was two stories of squared logs with a frame addition, whitewashed, roofed in cedar shake, and older than the county. There was a porch across the front with a lightning rod running down the west corner post, which I noticed the first day because it was the only new-looking thing on the place, and I remember thinking that a man who spends money on a lightning rod is a man who intends to keep what he has.

There was a barn, a corncrib, a smokehouse, and a springhouse dug back into the hillside forty yards behind the kitchen, with a stone front and a heavy plank door. The spring came out cold enough to hurt your teeth. Thomas told me it had never gone dry, not in 1881, not in 1901 when the whole ridge went to dust and men were hauling water eleven miles.

Everything on that place was fat. That is the word. The cattle were fat when the neighbors' cattle were racks of bone. The corn came up dark green and stayed dark green. The hens laid through the cold. There were apples when there were no apples. The Wilkersons had money in a bank in the county seat, which no one else on that ridge had, and they lived like people who did not, on beans and cornbread and buttermilk, in a house with no carpet.

And there was Lavina.

My mother-in-law was near sixty then, tall as her son and thin as a hoe handle, with iron-colored hair braided and pinned so tight it pulled at her temples. She had been on that ridge since she was a bride herself. She wore black because her husband had died in 1904, and I believe she would have worn black anyway. She met me at the wagon that first day, looked at my belly and then at my face, in that order, and said, "You'll want to know the rules of the house."

Not hello. Not welcome.

I said, "I expect I will."

"There's three," she said. "There's no mirror in this house and there won't be. You'll not hang one, you'll not carry one in your bag, and if you brought one you'll give it to me now."

I had a little hand glass in my trunk with a mother-of-pearl back. I did not give it to her, that day.

"Second," she said. "The milk pail goes out to the springhouse every night at dusk. Full. Not near dusk. Dusk. It's my job till it's yours."

"For what?"

"For the springhouse," she said, as if that were an answer, and went on. "Third. The north bedroom at the head of the stairs stays shut. It's not your room, it's not Thomas's, it's nobody's. You don't open it, you don't dust it, you don't stand in front of it longer than it takes to walk past."

I looked at Thomas. He was unbuckling the harness with his back to us, and he did not turn around.

"That's a strange sort of rule," I said.

"It's a plain rule," Lavina said. "Plain rules is the easiest kind to keep."

Inside, the house smelled of ash and lye and something faintly sour underneath, like a cellar where milk had been spilled a long time ago. The stairs went up out of the front room, steep, with a landing at the top, and above the stairwell, bolted to the crossbeam, there hung a small iron handbell.

It was black with age, no bigger than a pear. Somebody had run an iron bolt straight through the loop of its handle and into the beam, so that it hung there fixed and could be rung but could never be carried away. There was a groove worn shiny in the beam where the bolt had been worked at, over years, by a hand or hands trying to get it loose.

I stood in that front room with my hat still on and looked up at it, and Tessie came down the stairs.

My husband's sister was sixteen that spring and the palest living person I have ever seen — not sickly exactly, but leached, like linen boiled too many times. She had her mother's height and none of her mother's straightness; she went about with her shoulders rolled forward as though she were always slightly cold. She stopped four steps from the bottom when she saw me looking up at the bell.

"What's it for?" I asked her, and I smiled, because she was young and I had spent six years being pleasant to shy children.

Tessie looked at the bell. Then she looked at me, and something moved behind her face that I did not have a name for until much later. Pity is what it was. Pity, in a sixteen-year-old girl, aimed at a grown woman with a wedding ring on.

"It's for ringing," she said, and went past me out the door.