Oral History (9781101565612) by Lee Smith Page A

off on the trail toward Hurricane Mountain. He hollers it out to everybody he sees. Dory is crying and crying. Miraculously, the sun shines still; and it’s still summer, it’s still afternoon.
    Later Almarine will not remember how he almost rode his horse to death until bloody-mouthed and foam-flecked it buckled to its knees not thirty feet from where he was headed, Granny Younger’s cabin on Hurricane Mountain. He will not remember how Granny lay in the bed with her face turned toward the wall, or how Rhoda Hibbitts told him to get on back, that Granny was sick and maybe dying, or how Rhoda took a second look at him and jumped up and then Granny Younger looked too and got up out of her sickbed and took off the white socks she had put on for dying, her burial socks, and put on her boots instead, to go back to Hoot Owl Holler with Almarine. He will not remember how Rhoda rang and rang the bell, summoning Bill Horn to take Dory over to Peter Paul Ramey’s cabin for a spell so she can get some titty off Peter Paul’s wife who is nursing a baby herself, or how they sent a Justice boy hell-for-leather toward Black Rock for young Doc Story, or how the Davenports came and strapped a bed-tick onto a little sled and strapped Granny on top of that, hitching up their mule to pull her along, three Davenport men and a bunch of children running behind, and the smoke from Granny’s pipe floating out blue behind them in the hot still air. Rhoda Hibbitts and her daughters came last. They marched along carrying everything they could think of; they looked like they meant to stay.
    Almarine remembered none of that as he rode a Davenport mule ahead of them all, holding fast in his mind’s eye to the scene that lay before him, or behind him, the scene that would never leave him again: the look that came into Pricey Jane’s eyes when she saw who he was, the way her head drooped slack to the side, the feel of his boy’s cold cheek, how the dog barked and how the buzzards, slow and graceful, made those awful circles in the blue sky over his holler.
    He beat them all back by nearly an hour, and nothing had changed. She was still alive.
    The Davenports paused with the sled to let Granny observe the cow.
    Granny’s eyes squinched tight together, her mouth bunched around her pipe.
    â€œDew pizen,” she said. “I knowed as much.”
    Granny closed her eyes and lay back against the bed-tick. “Giddyap,” said the Davenports.
    â€œHow much farther is it?” asked the older Hibbitts girl, Rose, and the younger one said she was so tired she was about to die. All the little Davenport children had stopped following them back at the Hurricane turn-off. “I wisht I’d of gone back too,” the younger one, Louella, said.
    â€œHush your mouth,” said their mother, picking up her skirts as she walked a wide circle around the dying cow, with both of them following behind. Rhoda lowered her head and prayed, approaching Almarine’s cabin. She knew—they all knew—about dew poison, and they all knew it had no cure. Either you lived through it or you died. Rhoda had had an uncle to die of it, over in West Virginia. This was why you had to watch where a milk-cow grazed, keep her out of cow-stomps and shady swamps and ferny places so she wouldn’t get took milk-sick like this one did. Anybody who drank off a milk-sick cow, or ate her butter, would die too.
    Granny had had the Davenports drag the churn out on the porch by the time Rhoda got up to the cabin; Granny was lifting the dasher to see. The milk, silver-black, dripped down from the wooden dasher and would not foam. “Lord sweet Jesus,” Rhoda prayed, but Granny threw the dasher down in the churn and stomped back inside chewing her pipe. “Git me some water and bile it,” she yelled back out to Rhoda, who had to do it herself because her daughters were crying out in the yard. They were not good for a