Northwest Georgia summers were wet with rain and sweat and heavy green leaves on vines that wrapped around anything that stood still too long. The air buzzed, and the ground crawled with little red chiggers that always seemed to find the least convenient places to bite. Chiggers were worth cussing about. But nobody did any cussing around Pastor Campbell’s place.
“Azalee, run this over to Granny. She’s washing today and I told her I’d send some lye soap. She ain’t got none made up.” Christine held out a paper-wrapped chunk of soap to her daughter. “Get on now. And don’t stop down in the holler. You got to get the eggs in soon as you get back.”
Azalee nodded. She tied the soap up in her apron and started down the raw wood steps toward the yard. In the early summer, the rains left pools of mud and wet patches of grass poking through. Azalee’s bare toes squished in the puddles as she picked her way carefully through the rocks and piles of cans. There weren’t any jars in the piles. Jars were precious. Her momma put food up in jars. Putting up food was about the most important thing her momma did.
At the edge of the woods, the daylight faded into green shadows cast by the oaks and pines that grew close together in the steep-sided valley between the farms. Down the middle of the holler, water gathered into a low stream fed by a dribbling spring and frequent summer rains. She always liked to stop and hunt for crawdads or hoppy toads, but today she was supposed to stay on the path that ran through. Today she was supposed to mind her mother and go straight there and come straight back. When she reached the footbridge over the creek, she watched her feet go heel to toe straight across the graying wood, and she felt proud to be old enough to cross the holler alone.
The footpath ran from the creek to her granny’s house. Granny Harris they called her. She wasn’t an old woman in years. Azalee’s mother, her first child, was born when she was only fourteen, but all those years of childbearing and child-raising had aged her body and her mind. She’d born thirteen children; she’d seen seven live. She’d fed those children and kept clothes on their backs by the skin of her gnarled fingers. She spoke little and rarely smiled. Azalee loved her Granny for no good reason, loved everything about her from the black bonnet on her head to the hard-leather, buttoned shoes on her feet. Azalee wanted shoes just like them. She’d never had any but hand-me-downs, and she coveted those shoes that kept her grandmother’s feet out of the rocky mud. She could just about imagine how warm those shoes must feel, soft on the inside like a cow’s jiggly neck.
Straight up the steep side she went, digging her toes into the dirt, grabbing hold of roots to pull herself up until her head popped up over the ridge. She saw the fire lick out around the base of the black, iron pot not far from her face and scooched away to safer ground.
“Hey, Granny, Momma sent you some soap.” She pulled herself upright and wiped her little hands against one another, then on her dress before she untied it to get out the soap. Granny didn’t answer. She yelled, “Granny, soap!”
“I done heard you, girl. Set it down on that stump.” Her grandmother was carrying buckets to the iron wash pot straddled over the fire pit. “Jeff, bring me more buckets. I still ain’t got enough water.”
Jeff was Granny’s youngest son. He looked at Azalee. “You wanna come? Get a bucket.” He grabbed the buckets his mother had dropped then headed out back toward the family well, looking over his shoulder. “You coming? Azalea struggled with the heavy tin pail.
“I’m coming. Wait up.”
“Naw, can’t wait up. You come on.” Jeff grinned, swinging the buckets from his fingers. He liked little Azalee with her curly black hair. She was curious about everything like he was. He always felt like he didn’t quite fit in with his family. He wanted to read. They wanted to work. ‘Course, work had to be done. Work grew the food and made the clothes, but he knew there was more than that worth waking up to every day. There had to be, or he didn’t care whether he woke up or not.
“Come on, baby girl, you almost there.” He stood at the well cranking the handle to draw up the rope that they tied to the bucket handle. Azalee grinned at him, walking with the bucket in front of her, bumping it back against her apron-covered legs. She watched him tie the bucket on, then crank it down until they could hear the pail hit the water. He knew how to move the crank just right to catch the water. Then he’d two-hand it to reverse the crank to bring the bucket back up since it was much heavier than it had been when it went down.
“How come you don’t let the bucket fly down like my brother does?” She stood on one foot balancing with her arms.
“Well, now, he might of been lucky so far, but that’s a good way to lose a bucket in the well. You let that bucket slap the water, and it might jostle the rope loose. I think it’s worth the effort to crank it down, so I don’t lose the bucket. ‘Cause once it’s gone, there ain’t no getting it back unless I tie this rope to you and send you down to get it.” He reached over the well to the rope, still cranking with one hand. The heavy bucket was almost to his reach. “ Sometimes being in a hurry is more trouble than it’s worth.”
Azalee grinned at the thought of going down the well.
“I’ll go down the well! Put me on the rope, I’ll go down!” She hopped in circles, pretending.
“Naw, you know I was just teasing.” His strong, young arms pulled the bucket over the side. He untied the rope from one and moved it to another. “Go tell Granny I got two buckets ready. I’ll bring them in a minute.” He ruffled the top of her head, shaking the shiny curls.
Azalee ran around the house back to the wash pot and watched what her granny was doing. A pile of clothes lay in the mud next to the pot. She watched the woman carve slivers of it into the wash pot using a case knife she’d pulled from her apron pocket. Azalee wondered why the clothes were lying in the mud. Seemed to her like stacking them up on a board or something would have kept them from getting even dirtier. Course, they were slick dirty anyhow, but laying them in the mud didn’t make much sense.
Granny dropped a bundle of clothes into the near-boiling water. She picked up a slim wood board as tall as her and began pumping it up and down into the soapy water. Azalee watched her. She was slip-sliding her feet in the mud near the fire squishing it up between her toes..
“Better stop that, girl, or you gone dig yourself a hole to hell.” Azalee stopped. She’d never heard that word outside of church.
“Didn’t your mama tell you to get straight home?” Granny stopped agitating the water and stared at Azalee. Her bright eyes under the dark brim of her bonnet focused on the little girl.
“Yes, ma'am. Jeff said he’s almost done,” yelling over her shoulder as took off running toward the footpath, dancing through the weeds and the thickets and the rough stones, finding the downhill way and skipping so as not to fall until she reached the floor of the holler. Back in the wet gloom, she slowed. The little creek played over the rocks and leaves tracing through the bottomland. Her daddy always told her to watch for snakes, to listen for their rattles, for the slippery paper sound as they moved through the leaves. The water wasn’t deep enough for moccasins, not right now, but she feared them like they all did. They all feared those the black monsters. She knelt on the footboards that skimmed above the creek and stared into the water, watching for the scuttle of a crawdad. She spread her fingers out over the water and pressed her hand down onto the surface just enough to feel the water move, but not enough for it to break, and she held her breath. The water’s smoothness was tantalizing.
She felt the boards move before she heard the voice, deep and low.
“Girl, what are you doing down here? You by yourself?”
She knew who it was.
“Answer me, girl.”
“I got to go home.” She pulled herself up off the board but she had nowhere to go.
“You ain’t in no hurry though.” The voice hadn’t moved. She saw the boots taking up the whole footbridge; legs perched wide.
“I shouldn’t of stopped. I got to go.” She didn’t want to touch him. But he wouldn’t move. “I got to go home now. Mama’s going to be looking for me.” She wouldn’t look up. She just wouldn’t.
“Naw, she ain’t coming after you. I just come from there. She’s out getting those eggs she told you to get. I said I reckoned I could find you. And here you are, pretty little thing laid out on these boards like you was waiting for me to find you.” He grinned at himself. “Maybe I should lay down here with you. I bet I could teach you some games you ain’t learned yet.”
She knew she didn’t want to play any games with him.
She saw him lean towards her. She could smell the day’s work on his clothes. She jumped into the creek fast, catching the rocks with her toes, pushing against the slime to hold her balance, swinging her arms to catch her fall. She grabbed the brush on the side and scrambled up the hill. Behind her, she heard the man’s dark laugh.
When she reached her house, her mama was coming round the corner with the egg basket.
“Where’ve you been? I told you to get the eggs. Now I had to do it. And you’re covered in mud! You ain’t got nothing else clean to wash day.” Azalee’s mother reached for the thin hickory branch on the porch rail.
“No, Mama. I fell in the creek. I fell in. Mr. Porter wouldn’t move out of the way--”
“Don’t you go blaming this on Mr. Porter. He come to look for you. Get that dress off.” Her mama was ugly with anger. She grabbed the dress by the hem and yanked it over Azalee’s head.
No, Mama, please, no!” Azalee tried to pull away from her mother’s grip, but her arms and head were tangled in the cotton folds of her dress.
“Shut your mouth.” Her mother’s raised the hickory switch above her head. “Stop your fighting. I said go there and git back. And you didn’t mind. I told you what would happened, didn’t I?” Every line was accented with a swish of the thin, supple cane. “You’ll learn to mind if I have to cut it into you. You’ll learn to mind what I tell you.”
Inside the dress, Azalee gasped. The hickory switch sliced like a thin, hot steel blade, stinging and burning too fast to catch up with her breath.
Her mama let go. Azalee fell. “Quit your crying. You ain’t got nothing to cry about. You the one playing while I’m working.” Azalee sucked her breath, sucked in hard to hold it. Mama didn’t like it when she cried; she’d switch her more if she didn’t stop.
“Get up and feed the chickens. Then you pick out that big, black one and bring it here. We’re going to eat it for supper. You can pull the feathers out.”
Azalee smoothed out the muddied skirt of her dress, tears dripping silently down the front. It had been her favorite. Her daddy bought the flour in it especially for her. He let her pick out the bag with little pink flowers down at the store. Now it was spoiled. She knew mud would never boil out. All those pretty pink flowers were hidden under the red clay stain.