Mary at the Old Railroad Trestle

Chapters 20-24

Chapter 20
         I rested on the bed for quite a while, until my eyes began to drift close and sights I did not wish to See commenced to assail me. Oh! Will it never end? I lay there thinking. Feeling rather as a heroine in one of the Gothics Mamma had used to read in my childhood but attempted to secrete from me, I perceived myself as assailed and victimized. Now this new threat: the Visions I Saw were not sufficient, but the Spiritualist minister Jepthah Termather now would surely desire me to attend the séances he would hold for Aunt Grace. And my attendance would not be enough; no, for he would command me to participate, perhaps even act as his medium-or I should say, as his medium on behalf of the Spirits he attempted to summon. I knew he certainly could not overlook his discovery of my “Talent.”
         I rolled to my left side away from the high window, in the wall above me and to the right of my cot, but facing the dimmer sloping wall did not assist me. Each time my eyes drifted shut, I could See, and each time they flew open, shadows moved oddly and uncertainly along the wall I faced. So no matter whether awake nor asleep, eyes open nor eyes closed, at the moment I could find no escape-no escape.
          Sighing, I sat up and reached for my second-best shawl. I tossed that over my head, then paused in the door at the top of the stairs, which served also as the door to my room-for the attic was small and misshapen in this sharecropper’s house, and did not extend the full length of the house as would an attic in a decently-sized house such as Aunt Grace possessed. There was much less room to clean, therefore, and also fewer spots in which to escape to avoid Seeing.
         No one stirred in the front of the house but I could hear Mamma humming to herself in the pantry-her sewing and notions room-and the click of her scissors indicated she was cutting out to a pattern, probably the dress ordered for Miz Wills, for which I had been requested to conduct a second errand into town for the broadcloth bolt. I stepped as quietly as a mouse sneaking past a sleeping cat down the stairs, and had faced the front door, when a knock resounded on it. Before Mamma could put down her scissors and call out, “Who’s there?” I raced silently through the kitchen behind the stairs and through the back door, then across the tiny rear yard into the corn rows. I KNEW who stood at the front door; and I knew also it wasn’t no one I wished to meet! For surely it was old Minister Jepthah Termather, come to sweetly persuade my Mamma to attend Aunt Grace’s doin’s, and more importantly from his view (much more terrifying in mine) to persuad Mamma to allow me to attend as well—though I am sure he did not plan yet to announce that he wished to utilize me as a go-between from the world of the living and the world of the spirits. As I headed down the corn-rows, I suddenly thought that perhaps I should have nipped into the pantry while Mamma was at the door and snatched up the strong box-but there was no going back now without being seen.
Chapter 21
          Racing through the corn-rows in a shawl and long skirts is not exactly an accurate description. Corn hair and tassels caught against my black shawl as if it had been the finest wool instead of dull thick cotton. I frequently stumbled over stones and pebbles that had worked their way up from under the soil during the intermittent spring rains, and I quickly found I had most probably lost my sense of direction. The one wise thing to do was not to leave the row in which I had begun, but to continue walking. Crossing over to another row could easily find me lost. I knew that somewhere straight ahead was the bend of the river which I sought, so I persevered. Eventually, I knew, I would reach the banks of the Tamblen and from there I could just proceed to my destination-if only I had one in mind-which of course I had not. I had scurried from the house just like a field mouse racing from a predatory owl, with no thought in mind except to prevent being trapped in the house with Minister Termather.
         Once some distance from the house, I could begin to hear the burble and shift of the River some ways in front of me and toward my right. I knew now I had guessed arightly, and as I came closer to the as yet unseen banks my anxieties ebbed somewhat and I found myself wondering the identity of the person knocking at our door.
         I had immediately assumed the visitor to be Spiritualist Minister Jepthah Termather, of course. He had been on my mind since I first encountered him in town passing by the General & Dry Goods. Then he quizzed me on the ride back toward Aunt Grace’s, and again on the second encounter as I headed back to the store to collect another bolt of broadcloth for Mamma to sew up for Miz Wills. He had stayed on my mind as I looked into Mamma’s eyes and spotted something slinking alive way down in their deeps that I had never before known. He had lingered on as I tried to rest, if not actually to nap, upstairs in my tiny lopsided attic room. His visage flitted between me and the Visions as I alternately opened and shuttered my eyes. Finally, at the knock on the door as I stood at the bottom of the stairs, I Saw him standing outside just as clearly as if the door had been flung wide open by Mamma (as it undoubtedly was after I raced silently outside) and now, even as I thought it over again with my anxieties somewhat departed and deadened, I STILL Saw him as if standing on the tiny stoop just outside her front door. I STILL Saw him, and so I KNOW it had been he knocking, rapping, tapping, restlessly at our door, Seeking me.

Chapter 22
         My Mamma had never acknowledged that there was anything at all different about me, about my birth, about my childhood. She surely never talked about my Seeing Talent. Neither did Daddy, though I now and then caught him gazing at me oddly with a small frown on his face and a distant light in his eyes. Of course, he often looked at Mamma that way too. He still looks at me like that, even though he’s been gone since 1909. My older brother Billy Raife never seemed to pay too much never mind to whether I was odd and different or not. He just took care of me when wasn’t anybody else available (those times when Mamma was sickly and fragile and maybe Lucie was helping her mamma to do for Aunt Grace and Daddy had to be managing down at the General & Dry Goods, or very occasionally and not at all often still running an occasional long-distance errand for Uncle Colonel Custis which might last two to three days). Billy Raife just went on and cared for me like I was perfectly normal, and I guess on the outside I was (and still am). It were on the inside I think where the differences really showed.
         When I started to attend the one-room schoolhouse at Cameron’s Crossing when I was seven, right away all the other children started to laugh and make fun of me. Not inside the classroom, no; for they knew my daddy was Uncle Colonel Custis Haskell’s kin through Uncle Colonel’s wife Aunt Grace, and by the time I turned seven, well, pretty much all of Cameron’s Crossing was really the property of Uncle Colonel Custis Haskell-one way or another—either through ownership or through his control. All the Mammas and Daddys of all the other children had to trade down at the General & Dry Goods where my Daddy managed, less’n they wanted to drive their wagons all the way down to Canton, and most people did not care to go that far. So they fairly much had to be nice to me on the inside of the school and in the General & Dry Goods, if they should run into me there with Daddy when their folks came in to shop. But on the outside, at recess, or out in the street, now that was different. Sometimes I would even hear rustling in the bushes outside my window at night, and town boys whispering  words like “crazy witch, crazy witch girl,” “daydreamer,” “sees stuff”.  Mamma took me out of the school after Daddy passed in 1909, and I never went back in there again. Not once. Not even for the convocation the Baptist church had that summer to celebrate their new pastor (Brother Lawjohn, when he first came to Cameron’s Crossing, so we finally had a preacher who did not have to pastor at 3 churches but was all our own).
But Mamma—she never never never said nary one word to me about anything being different about me at all. Till Daddy passed on in 1909, she really had not said too much to me at all, more than “Pass the plate, Mary,” and “get ready for school,” and “Stop squirming” when I got too impatient for Brother Terry’s sermon to end. (Preacher Terry had served our little Baptist church right along to 1909, when Brother Lawjohn came in. But Brother Terry also had to serve at White’s Ridge and Morriston as well as at Cameron’s Crossing, so needless to say he was spread kind of thin. He took one church each Sunday of the month to pastor, and each time he came to Cameron’s Crossing our little church rocked and reeled and the rafters creaked with his shouting, while the perspiration plumb poured down his suit right out of his soul. My ears ached after his sermons; seemed like he never would gone to quit. Guess he thought to make up for us only seeing him one Sunday out of every three; guess I was glad that was all we did see of him.

^*^
         I say all this to point out as background, I think, how unlikely it would be that Mamma would ever live in a world of acknowledgment of my differences. I honestly wonder, sometimes-like on this dawning Sunday morning of Mother’s Day, and earlier when I ran through the cornfields from the house to the Tamblen River, seeking asylum and peace and escape- if Mamma would even acknowledge me at all were it not that she needed me as her errand girl to run to the General & Dry Goods for notions and bolts of cloth, or to pick out some foodstuffs now and then. Of course I guess folks would notice when I did not show to sit in the pew next to Mamma at church every Sunday; they surely did in 1907 when I had the pneumonia or something like it—mebbe not quite that because it were pneumonia which took my Daddy in 1909—or mebbe that were just grief. But folks sure mentioned to Mamma in the General & Dry Goods as to how they had not seen me on the previous Sunday; but the following week I was there, just a’coughin’ and sputterin’, but still, dressed up in my Sunday best.
         Like today. Dressed up in my Sunday go-to-meetin’ best. Not gone to be in church. Not gone to be at all—soon.

Chapter 23
         Here is what I really did not know about what was happening behind me, back at Mamma’s front door. I really had been accurate in guessing who stood at the door and knocked; I did not need Miz Pladgett, choirmaster of Cameron’s Crossing First Baptist Congregation and Schoolmistress of Canton, Alabama one-room first grade through twelfth grade before her demise in the flood of June 1908 to appear before me and tell me who had been at the door; but she did appear and she did tell me. That was as I came out of the last of the corn-rows, probably looking a little bit like a stalk of corn myself, with straw all in my hair (which had fallen out of its ribbon and I had lost the ribbon somewhere in my race to the river) and tassels all a-stuck against my shawl, the hem of my skirts muddy and my boots dusty and drab. 
          I did not need a visit from Miz Pladgett (especially not after the visit the night before in all her drowning, dripping, water-sogged glory) but here she came whispering so low my ears could not hear the words but my mind could feel them forming:

“that minister-that Spiritualist man-he’s come for you: but you are ours not his-ours”.

         What a bundle of joy and goodwill Miz Pladgett had determined to be lately, first last night and then now. As if I didn’t know my fate had been assured just by the fact of his showing up in town. I did not know for certain, right then, that I had to act again before I could act to seal my fate. I mean, that I knew I was ended, but not that I would have to end at least one other before myself.

Chapter 24
          When I reached the water Miz Pladgett had already faded away. I had calmed down just a tad bit, so I pulled up my skirt hems and sat down near the bank. From here I could see the far edge of the New River Bridge off to my distant right, the far edge because the curve of the cove kept me from seeing the near side of the bridge.  I knew another half hour of walking would bring me around behind the town and fetch me up at my eventual life’s destination: The Old Railroad Trestle. I knew that was coming, and I knew it would not be long. Yet I also knew that it was not meant for today. I rested my head on my bent knees, folding my arms across my calves. I stayed there awhile, lulled by the burble of the Tamblen, drifting into those daydreams of which I had so often been accused by the kids at the one-room school in town. While I drifted, I do not think I actually Saw anyone at that time. I think my mind had temporarily shut itself down just from the sheer strain of the moment, of what had happened today and what was going to happen—tonight, or tomorrow night, or the next-I knew not when, but I knew it would be soon. And I knew that no matter how I tried to hide out and keep away, that this trouble was bound to find me, find me out and carry me away, just like the bodies of Miz Pladgett and her “fiancé,” Mr. Married Henry Weakes, were carried away on down the Tamblen River, just by this very spot, around from the cove and past here, away from Canton, away from Cameron’s Crossing, away…
but just not ever away from me.