Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

“Save that poor beast the trouble, you old sot,” I told him. “Ain’t no reason for you to go no farther.”

I heard him pull on those reins, and that mule came to a dead stop right there in the snow. I kept on walking.

“Shit,” I heard him say.

JULIE AND BEN NAMED THAT LITTLE BOY CHRISTOPHER, BUT ONLY Julie and the folks at church ever called him that. Ben always called him “Stump,” and so did just about everybody else who knew him. Julie hated that nickname like it was poisonous, and she always called him Christopher. I never once heard her call him anything else.

But she did tell me that he’d been given that nickname one afternoon when a man from the state had come out to the house to chart Ben’s burley. This wasn’t too long after they’d moved off the mountain to Mr. Gant’s house down in the holler and Ben had took to growing tobacco. I reckon he ended up a right good farmer and a downright state swindler after he got to learning that with a big smile and a few extra dollars them agents wouldn’t give him any problems about his overage. But Lord knows that wasn’t always so when he first started out.

Julie’s story went that this agent had had him the pleasure of jerking up several rows of that burley while Ben just stood there and watched, and now the dusty roots of those plants peeked out from the tailgate of his state truck. He stood by the back fender and charted Ben’s patches on his clipboard, and then he just crossed his arms and waited while Ben looked that chart over and read all that paperwork just as slow and careful as he could.

Now, Julie was a beautiful girl, just a fair little thing with her white skin and that blond hair-the kind of girl that’s got her admirers and probably don’t even know it for all her sweetness. Maybe she caught this man’s eye and made him turn his attention from where Ben was looking over the paperwork to where Julie’d bent to her knees in the flower bed to get at the clumps of weeds and bullgrass by the porch. Or maybe that man noticed the little boy that stood right there beside her in the flower bed with just the tips of his little fingers dusting her shoulder like it was something that needed cleaning. I don’t know what got him looking, but I figure he looked long enough to see that the boy’s deep blue eyes were fixed on the field he and Ben had just risen from on their way back up to the house.

“Hey, fella,” that man said like he expected the little boy’s head to turn toward him or his eyes to light on him where he stood by the truck. Of course Christopher didn’t move. “Hey, little man,” that agent said even louder. Now, I’ve seen some folks get flat-out embarrassed when little ones don’t pay them no mind. It ain’t a strange thing to feel that way, and I reckon this man wasn’t no different.

“That’s a quiet boy,” that agent said to Ben. Julie said she stopped pulling up the weeds and turned her head to see Ben and the agent standing in the driveway behind her. The setting sun was just beyond them, and she could only see their outlines against all that light. The man turned toward her. She could barely make out his face in the glare. “You got yourself a soft-spoken boy there,” he told her. “A deep thinker. Any little boy who can stand like a stump in a cleared field is a deep thinker.”

He laughed to himself like he was hoping that Ben and Julie would laugh with him, but Ben had finished reading and signing all that paperwork and he just handed over the clipboard and the pen to the agent.

“He’s a mute,” Ben said. “He hasn’t said a word a day in his life.”

The agent put the clipboard under his arm and dropped the pen into his breast pocket. “Now, I didn’t mean to say-” he began.

“What-all burley you took from me better get gone,” Ben said. “I don’t want to hear nothing about it taking root somewhere up the road.” He stood there and looked at the agent, and then he walked past him and crossed the yard toward the barn.

The man looked to Julie where she was still hunkered down in the flower bed. She took her bandana from the pocket of her dress and wiped the sweat off her forehead. I reckon she probably even smiled at him in an unassuming way that made him even sorrier for saying such a thing about her son.

“I swear I didn’t mean nothing by it,” the man said. He looked from Julie to the little boy whose eyes had been fixed on the field, but he saw that Christopher’s gaze had turned and set itself on the path his father had cut across the yard toward the shadow of the barn.

That child was touched, and I just don’t know what else you could call it. He never cried once as a baby, and by the time he was three years old those two kids knew he wasn’t ever going to speak. He’d hum sometimes or maybe even grunt when he wanted something, but that was about it. He was quiet, all right, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t peaceful. He could spend all day sitting still on the porch steps with just his eyes creeping around the yard to take measure of the things resting just out of line with your own gaze: the tree line, the ridge, an earthworm inching itself along through the dirt. I used to sit with him when he was just a little bitty thing, and sometimes I got to believing that I could feel his eyes on me. When I did, I’d whip my head around right quick to try and catch him staring, but I never could. I’d find him instead just sitting there with his eyes locked on a black spread of birds moving in silhouette against a bright sky or else watching the edge of the breeze rustle the dried leaves on the oaks crowding the ridge behind their little house.

It wouldn’t have really mattered one bit if Doc Winthrop had made it up to Ben and Julie’s house on time because there wasn’t no amount of doctoring by a drunk old country doctor or root working by a half-froze old woman that would’ve helped that boy a bit. I knew that much the very minute I laid eyes on him the very night he was born. But I can tell you that Ben refusing to even think about listening to me set me off, and I thought about it my whole walk down the mountain in that driving snow. You show me a woman who calls herself a Christian up in these parts, and I’ll show you a woman who knows how to heal. It ain’t un-Christian to make do when you’re poor, I can promise you that. You just show me a Christian woman up here, and I’ll show you a woman who knows what to pick and where to find it. If you don’t know how to heal yourself, then you don’t know how to live when times are hard. My great-aunt taught me that the best way she knew how, and never once had anybody told me they weren’t going to do what was best for them. Not until Ben did that very thing the night his boy was born.

You can find just about everything you’ll ever need out there in those woods if you’re willing to look hard enough, and if you’re poor, you’ll look right hard. Wild ginger calms the whooping cough and it’s jewelweed for the poison ivy, and if you’re going courting you’d best bring your bergamot for your breath and some strong, fine-looking teeth. And me, I find a good pokeweed liniment staves off the rheumatism during a chilly, rainy fall.

Now, I can’t say that boiling a tea or praying or healing would have helped that boy none, but I can tell you it wouldn’t have hurt him a lick to try, especially if you knew what you were doing and how to do it. But I can tell you there’s stuff out there that’ll kill you just as quick as you can eat it, and you’ve got to know what to look out for.

When I was a little girl, my great-aunt told me a story about a band of Confederate outliers who took to starving in the mountains north of Madison. Most of my people were Union, and couldn’t none of them have cared less about the war until it crept like a black cloud over the rim of the eastern hills. When it found them, they grew bitter quick at being forced to fight a war that wasn’t their own.