Oral History (9781101565612) by Lee Smith

hammer, sweet-smelling store-bought soap for the baby and Pricey Jane, a string of rosy beads for Pricey Jane. And newspapers, too, a magazine—he liked to watch how she’d look through them, pointing at the pictures, making those soft clucking sounds in her throat and giggling to beat the band. Then she’d make her a flour paste and put them up so careful on the wall, it tickled Almarine how she kept everything just so. Anytime the papers got sooty, why down they’d come, and he’d better have some others there to take their place.
    Now Almarine’s head bobs up and down as the horse picks its way up the rocky trace. Luther’s voice goes along in his mind. Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, I knowed you so well, you lost me my woman and done sent my soul to hell. Almarine grins, dozing.
    She’s never suspecting no rosy beads.
    But he sits up straight as he passes through the stand of pine trees, as he hears his cow for the first time.
    â€œLord God,” Almarine says, kicking hard, urging his horse ahead. When they break out of the pines, galloping now along the short level space at the mouth of the creek, that’s when he sees the buzzards wheeling in their circles overhead, black wings outstretched and never moving, flying circles over his holler. No smoke comes from his chimney. “Lord God,” he says again. But getting up there takes forever—there’s no way to hurry that trail.
    Finally he comes to the cow, lying on her side with her belly distended and her large brown eyes already gone filmy and blank. She’s still breathing, he sees, but that’s all. Sometimes she makes that sound. Duck circles her, barking, the hair on his back standing up.
    Almarine gives a whoop so loud it come back from all three mountains. “Pricey Jane!” he hollers. “Pricey Jane!”
    Insects buzz through the hot yellow day and a black and yellow butterfly settles for a second on the cow’s belly.
    â€œEli!” Almarine hollers, and he hears nothing, and then he’s back up on that horse and gone ahead and finally he hears the baby crying in a way she’s never cried, a thin little wail like a mewling cat.
    â€œPricey Jane!” he yells. The cabin door is still bolted from inside so he kicks it open, his heart banging hard in his chest and all of this happening, it seems to him, in some clear awful light that renders it both real and not real, happening but not to him, not to him and Pricey Jane and their family, and not in Hoot Owl Holler.
    The air in here is foul. She lies on her back on the tick by the fire with one thin arm extended out and dropping beside the bed, her fingers open, her head turned a bit to the side as if in sleep, her body curled on the star-flower quilt. Purple flowers, yellow stars. She must of gotten up, she must of pulled up the quilt, she must of gone and laid back down. He sees the churn where she pulled it out, where she started churning before she lay back down.
    â€œPricey Jane.” Almarine kneels by the bed and pulls her to him, shaking her frail shoulders, but her head rolls over to the side and her mouth drops open and slack. Her breath smells like something dead. But anyway she’s still breathing, and a faint blue pulse in her temple beats on when he smooths back the hair from her wild white face. Dark circles ring her eyes. Finally she opens them. She cannot speak but something seems to show there, for an instant, in her eyes. He thinks she knows him. Almarine lays her back gently and whirls toward the other bed, but Eli lies so still there, and the skin of his cheeks has gone cold. Dory’s crying fills the cabin. The smell is everywhere. Almarine grabs Dory up out of the cradle, wraps her in her quilt like an Indian baby, and holding her tight he runs back out of the cabin. Throwing his packs to the ground he rides one-armed holding Dory, faster than anybody has ever ridden down that trace before, and