Someone Lived There

 

How Many Springs?

How many springs have passed 
since she watched the first green shoots break from the earth,
 the bright blooms unfurl?

The year they raised the little cabin
she planted a handful of the precious bulbs, 
a neighbor's sharing.
Pushing aside the fallen, crisping leaves,
she buried the papery bulbs
in sure and certain hope
of making a home, a family,
of putting her mark on the land.

Here I am and here I mean to stay
each buried bulb declared.

She cut switches of forsythia,
yellow bells, they called them,
from a neighbor’s plantings,
boxwood too, and rooted them all
in the damp earth beside the spring.

In a few years, heavy with her second child,
she set out the little plants they'd made,
all around the cabin.

Her children dug hidey holes
beneath those boxwood,
and brought her fistfuls of the daffodils
that multiplied and spread with every spring.

Like her own family . . .
they moved off, most of them, in later years.

But they still returned,
sometimes with the daffodils
and sometimes for Decoration Day, 
when the piney flowers lifted their blowsy heads.

Long gone, that woman, those children, that cabin;
but the daffodils return each year,
and her mark remains. 

Belvy and Miss Priss

Law, will you look how things has growed up here. It must a dozen years -- maybe more --since I was up this way. Poor old Belvy -- I can see him now, setting in that chair, just watching his place go back to the wild.

He never did no good, after his Violet died. They had such a pretty house -- that's what's left of it up there -- the vines has near taken it.  Such a shame...

He could of stayed there -- but ever since the day he come in from the garden and found Violet on the kitchen floor, dead as a hammer, he said he couldn't bear to be in that house -- that he kept seeing her laying there. So he got him that house trailer and had them to set it there below the old place where he didn't have to see it..

That hole in the door --  he cut that for his cat, Miss Priss. Now she was a pretty thing -- one of them long-haired yaller cats with the greenest eyes you ever did see. She showed up right after Belvy moved into the trailer and, though he'd never been one for cats, he was a fool for Miss Priss -- said she put him in mind of Violet -- she had yaller hair when she was young and green eyes too.  

You'd see him setting there of an evening with that cat on his knee, and him talking to her like she was a person. She had right good sense, for a cat, and I reckon that if it weren't for Miss Priss, Belvy wouldn't have lasted out the year. But he had Miss Priss for company and, by all accounts, he seemed content. 

What? No, they're both long gone -- at least I reckon they both are. Belvy passed away about ten years ago. He had a heart condition, they said, and wasn't no one much surprised.

It was John Lee, his nearest neighbor, found him.  John Lee said he'd been on his way up the road, in a hurry to get home, but Miss Priss was setting on Belvy's porch chair, just yowling like one thing. He thought that was right queer and, not seeing Belvy about, he decided he'd best go see was anything the matter.

John Lee said that cat led him straight to the bedroom where poor old Belvy was laying stiff and cold -- but peaceful-like, John Lee said, as if he'd just slept away . . .

John Lee said the cat just watched, as solemn as a judge, when they come to take old Belvy away. He was aiming to catch her and take her home with him for his little girl but Miss Priss, she slipped off into the woods and wouldn't come, though he called and called.  He found a bag of cat food  and left some out for her, thinking he'd try to catch her another day.

And though he came back the next few days, he never saw her.  The cat food was gone but of course he didn't have no way of knowing if it was her or a rat or a possum that had eaten it. He worried that something might have gotten her -- a coyote or some such.

But she turned up one last time -- at Belvy's burying.  There's a little family graveyard on up the road where Violet had been laid to rest. And when they buried Belvy next to her, I was there. There  wasn't much of a turnout -- but we all of us saw that long-haired yaller cat, setting on Violet's gravestone and watching the whole service.  

When Belvy had been lowered down and the hole had been filled, the cat was still setting there. Preacher called for one last prayer and we all bowed our heads. Just as I was about to close my eyes, I looked at Miss Priss and, you can call me a liar but that cat had bowed her head too.

She was gone when the prayer ended -- Preacher is right long-winded -- and no one ever saw her again. 

Sometimes I wonder about Miss Priss. Sometimes I wonder was she just a cat . . .

The Cutshall Boys and the Florida Grass Widow (part two)

• This continues yesterday's story. It's long -- Birdie can't be rushed... and she even condensed it a bit because of the melting ice cream . . .

 According to Viola, things went along for some little while with the grass widow stopping by now and again of an evening to set on the porch and sing with the Cutshall boys. Didn’t no one think a thing of it but after a time, things begun to change somehow.  

First the boys cut back on the drinking they’d been doing and went to fixing up the place – it had run down terrible in the thirty-some years since their momma had died – they bought curtains for the front room and painted the window frames and they picked up the beer cans and such out of the creek where they’d throwed them. And then they went in to Penland’s and got them some new duds.

Viola said she seen them in there, buying new shirts and overhauls. She said they had even been to the barber, which was a new one for them, being as they had always cut each other’s hair. But here was Walton with his hair slicked down and parted on the left and Dalton just the same but with the part running down the right side. Or maybe it was the other way round. Everwhat, Viola said they made right good-looking men, cleaned up like that.

And first thing you knew, Viola said, it was clear to anyone with an eye to see that the Cutshall boys was sparking that grass widow. You’d see her at the Burger Doodle with Walton or maybe Dalton – did I mention that them two boys was the very spit of one another? Viola says that their momma was the onliest one on earth who could tell one from another and sometimes she warn’t completely sure. Their daddy, he didn’t even try – just called out “You, boy!” when he needed something.

Howsomever, time went on and it was a usual thing to see the Cutshall boys’ old truck riding all over the county with Dalton or Walton, everwhich it was, driving that grass widow and her poodle dog around and t’other boy back home, setting lonely on the porch, drinking beer again and throwing the cans out into the yard.

Viola said that the grass widow told her one day that she was right taken with Walton or maybe it was Dalton – the one who played the fiddle, the grass widow said. Viola said that didn’t clear things up none to her mind for as long as she’d known the Cutshall boys, they’d both played fiddle and banjo – could switch instruments in the middle of a tune without missing a beat and if you had your eyes closed, you’d never know a thing had happened. But Viola didn’t tell the grass widow this, though, looking back, maybe she should have.

Things went on like this for the longest time – and sometimes the brother who was out with the truck didn’t come back till way late at night or even the next morning. “It would have broke their momma’s heart,” said Viola, “that and the drinking that was going on. 
And then that big fight and what came of it . . . .”

When she said that, Viola prissed up her mouth like a hen’s bottom and said she had washed her hands of the Cutshall boys and that such a story weren’t fitten to pass on and that  her husband Henry oughtn’t to tell it neither and him a deacon in the Freewill Baptist church.

But I got Henry aside in the cereal aisle at the grocery store one day, while Viola was picking out a cake mix two aisles over, and I got the rest of the story from him. You see he’d been there at the house when the fight happened.

Seems he’d gone over to ask the Cutshall boys for help putting up his hay the next week (and maybe to have a little sup of their beer, if I know Henry, deacon or not, for Viola’ll not allow it in her house.)  They was the three of them setting there, talking of this and that, said Henry, when here come the grass widow running down the road, still in her nurse outfit, big bosoms bouncing, red top knot all skee-jawed and falling down, and the little white poodle dog just panting to keep up.

”I’m a free woman,” she hollers. “I just got a letter to say that my mean old husband who misused me so has died, and I inherit everything. There’s a house at the beach and enough money for happy ever after.”

She pounds up the porch steps and stands there in front of the Cutshall boys, looking from one to the other. They both of them have their hair slicked straight back and they ain’t no way she can tell which is which.

“Dalton?” she says, kinda puzzled like. (Or it might have been Walton – Henry said he disremembered,)

And the Cutshall boys look at one another and then at her and both of them stands up and says, “I’m Dalton.” (Or Walton.)

The grass widow don’t even blink. “Well,” says she, trying to fix her hair back, “one of you said he wanted to marry me if ever I was a free woman. Said it time and again, oh, if you were just free, and I’m here to tell you that I  am now. Gimme one of those beers and you two figure it out while I catch my breath.”

And she plops herself down and crosses her legs and takes a big old sup of that beer.

Henry said the Cutshall boys was standing there, just glowering at each other like two big bulls and muttering things like I was first and But it was me she-”          

Right there in the cereal aisle, Henry was showing me how they was standing, all puffed up and scowling, but when he started repeating the things they was saying, he broke off right quick.  He said he was forgetting himself, and him a deacon in the Freewill Baptist Church. But I let him know I’d not be content till I heard the rest of the story and he gave it to me, all in a big hurry and with his eyes swiveling around to see was Viola coming.

They went from talking, Henry said, to shoving at one another and from shoving to throwing fists, and all the while the grass widow sat there just watching with a beer in one hand and the little poodle dog on her lap. And next thing Henry knew, the Cutshall boys was out in the yard, wrassling like the fellers on the TV, rolling about and hollering, and raising dust like you never saw.

Then one of them cracks his head against a rock and goes to bleeding like a stuck pig. “Oh, brother,” he hollers, “you’ve killed me.”

And the fight stops and the Cutshall boys is crying like big old babies and hugging and bleeding all over one another and saying sorry and that this is what happens when they let a woman come between them and that they’ll never be parted, not for any woman.

The grass widow pushes the poodle dog off her lap and comes down into the yard.

“Let me look at that cut,” she says, and she squats down and pulls a bandana out of her pocket and wipes the dust and blood away.

“Am I going to die?” asks the one, looking up pitiful at her, and “Have I kilt him?” asks the other, kneeling there with his brother’s head in his arms.

She don’t answer, just tightens her lips and shakes her head. Then she sets back on her heels and looks from one to the other. “Go on and sit up, you on the ground, It’s just a little cut that won’t even need stitches. I’ll have to shave around it some, then a butterfly bandage will fix it fine. But before I do that," she says, "I want to know something. It was both of you all along, wasn’t it? Taking me riding, buying me lunch at the Burger Doodle, feeding me all that sweet talk. Taking turns . . .”

The Cutshall boys hang their heads and don't say nothing.

“So which is which?” she says.

Finally one of them speaks up. “Truth to tell, we don’t rightly know. Mamma thought she did but afore she died, she called us in and said that from the time we was born, she had lost track – we was just too blamed alike.”

The other one puts his arm around his brother. “We always took turns with the names. Depending how we felt of a morning, it’d my turn to be Dalton-”

“Or Walton,” the other chimes in. “It just didn’t ever seem to matter nohow…”

Again, the grass widow don’t even blink. “I’ll take you both,” she says.

“And that’s what she done,” said Henry, pulling him down a box of Grape Nuts.  “She married one of them at the Magistrate’s Office and then all three of them took off for Florida in her new convertible, her driving and Dalton or it could have been Walton, beside her and the other un in the back with the little poodle dog.”

 

We heard wheels squeaking and looked up to see Viola and her buggy coming toward us. Henry waved the Grape Nuts at her and whispered real quick, “We got a letter from the Cutshall boys about a year after that – said they was happy as pigs in slop and didn’t look to be coming back. They sent a check signed by the grass widow -- Darlene M. Cutshall --to pay for having someone to look after their folks’s graves and they had put in a picture of the three of them.

 Such dudes you wouldn't have believed. They was all three in short pants and bright colored shirts and sunglasses.  The grass widow had put on some weight and her hair was cut short and curly. There was three little poodle dogs instead of just the one. And the Cutshall boys – why you couldn't have told them from Florida people.” 

 

The Cutshall Boys and the Florida Grass Widow

Oh, my, would you look at that. Pitiful sight, ain't it? Just pull off the road for a minute, if you don't care . . . Ay, law, I don't know how many years it's been since I come this way. I had heard something of what happened to the Cutshall boys but I never thought to see their place all overtook like this.

Is that an old beer carton there on the porch? Well, I ain't surprised a bit. They say it was the drink that was at the root of the trouble  -- drink and that grass widow from Florida.  

A grass widow? Why, honey, that's a woman who acts like she's a widow though her husband is alive and above the grass. Some is divorced -- they's an awful lot of those around -- and some has just walked away from a marriage without a divorce. I don't know which it was with the Florida woman. 

The way I heard it was the Florida grass widow had her a job with the health department -- she was a nurse of some kind -- and she rented a little house down the road a piece from here.  My friend Viola knew her and said she was a friendly somebody from the first -- set in to going to church and to dinner at the Volunteer Fire Department and getting to know her neighbors all up and down the branch. She was no spring chicken but still a good looking woman up in her forties -- big bosoms and red hair that she wore  in a knot on top of her head.  I saw her once when I was at the dollar store with Viola and it was Viola who told me the whole story.

Now the Cutshall boys was two old bachelors. Walton and Dalton -- they was twins -- had lived right there in that house all the fifty-some years of their lives, farming and taking care of their old daddy till he died, and hadn't neither one of them ever had a thing to do with women. Just warn't interested, some said but others said that neither one would ever try to court a woman if his brother didn't give the go ahead.

But somehow or another, that Florida grass widow got to be friends with the Cutshall boys. Viola said that it all started when the Florida grass widow was out walking her little poodle dog one evening.  She passed by on her way up the road and threw up her hand friendly-like at the Cutshall boys who was setting there on the porch. 

Howdy, hollers Dalton, or it could have been Walton, and before you could say knife, here comes the grass widow, hopping up on the porch with the little dog hopping right behind her.

Walton, or it could have been Dalton, gets up from his chair and tells her to set down and he gets a milk crate for himself.  The Cutshall boys don't hardly know what to say being as they ain't never had a strange woman on their porch, much less one from away, but it don't matter, the grass widow sets in to talking like one thing -- asking all kinds of questions and then she asks do they like to play music.

Well, that was all it took. The boys set in to telling her about how they had once played a set with Bill Monroe when he was in Asheville and how he had asked them to join up with his band but they couldn't an account of having to take care of their old daddy.  Then Dalton, or maybe Walton, goes into the house and comes out with a fiddle and a banjo and the Cutshall boys begin to pick and sing and afore long the grass widow joins in.

Viola said you could hear the music clear up to her house. She said they was singing "Farther Along We'll Know All About It" and that the grass widow's voice was just as sweet-

Oh, my, look at the time! Here I am keeping you from getting home and you with ice cream likely melting all over your groceries.  Let's drive on along and I'll tell you the rest as we go.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Old Barn