Tammy out of Time Read online

  There was another thing to puzzle over as she sat rocking lightly in Grandma’s chair. A watch like that had to be wound up every so often. Must be he had come to now and then, lying atop the log. That was how he had had sense to know he must tie himself on so’s he wouldn’t fall off. She dozed a little, thinking about it.

  Along past the middle of the night, his breathing woke her. She leaned forward, looking, seeing that his face had changed. It was more alive, with fever color in his cheeks. As she watched there was a faint small quiver of his eyelids, like the wind’s first finger on the water. Then slowly his eyes opened, fever-bright black eyes that fastened on the lantern that was swaying a little as always with the movement of the water. The light seemed to put a spell on him and he could not come out of it, not any more than summer bugs could escape. She did not dare move or speak lest something snap, something delicate beyond all knowing.

  His stillness and his fixity were thin and breakable, like Grandma’s best little glass bowl the old woman gave her long ago because the young ones would just smash it and it was a rare one. His silence had an otherworldness in it, holy-seeming as the sound of the glass bowl when you struck it with a spoon. It must be that his spirit had been so far gone out into unmarked time everlasting that he had to draw it back with care and tenderness lest it snap away and be gone forever into the kind of time that made eternity. He would be lost-feeling, and afeard of that vastness, having the habit of small ticking time. Oh, it was better not to be accustomed to clocks, better to know only the dawn’s blending with the sunrise and the day’s slow sinking into dark! Then one might pass smoothly into the largeness of eternity.

  At last his eyes moved to the window. It made her afeard to see them fixed on the deep darkness there, afeard lest he go forth into it and be lost to her forever. For he was something of her own, that she could not bear to lose. He seemed to her a thing she had made herself, one she had borned, warming him out of the river’s cold and putting life into him.

  Then, almost without moving, his eyes seemed to focus on the curtains, and the green-painted shelf with her glass jars of black-berry juice, her jellies—crab apple, dewberry and muscadine. It gave her pride that he should see first the things, she had made, that he should have nice things to see with his first look.

  After that his eyes came straight down to hers and they had a question in them, a concern. What could she say to make him sure that he was safe? She leaned forward, holding his eyes with her own. Her hands tightened on the arms of the chair, her breath came faster. What words were richest in comfort? Bible words, surely, and out of the Bible, they came to her. “Let not your heart be troubled,” she said, smiling a little because the words had come to her.

  They satisfied him. He closed his eyes and went back into his sleep.

  3.

  TAMMY came out on deck and smelled the early morning with surprise. It struck her sharp and pure as the redbird’s whistle from the bluff. Five days and nights she had been busy fending off a dying the hoot owl had said was due; she’d wrestled with the fever and delirium as Jacob wrestled with the angel. She’d had no time to stop and look around and see there was anything outside, beyond what the shanty-boat walls contained. She had not even thought of doing the exercises she had promised Grandma to do, so she wouldn’t get the lung fever like her mammy did. She started in on them now—rising on her toes, lifting her hands till they met overhead, pointing to the pale-blue sky, then bringing them down slowly, letting out the long breath. Ten times, breathing deep of the morning air, filling herself with refreshment while the first sun shone on the far green willows and spread itself on the water, driving back the dappled shadow of the bluff.

  Spring had come while she was not noticing—and the floater was going to get well. Grandpa said it was sure, now. He hadn’t died of the pneumony as Grandpa said he might. God had taken care of that, maybe because she had prayed so hard and fast, or maybe God would have done it anyway—it was hard to know for sure about God. Of course it might have been the onion poultices. She had cooked up meal and onions and filled two flour sacks with hot mush, changing them turn about on his chest so he had one hot all the time, night and day. That was what broke the fever.

  He had come to himself after that and said his name—Peter Brent, mostly called Pete, he said. He lived over in the next county and nobody would be missing him. That was all he’d said, even when able to say more, except for no, thank you and yes, please. He was a mannerly man, but one not given to speech.

  Tammy finished her exercises and went round to the shore side to see what Grandpa was doing. She stopped by the window shelf and pinched off yellow leaves from the geraniums while she studied about Grandpa. He sat on a box, working with his jugs. “You going jugging, Grandpa?”

  “No, I got other things on my mind. Been held back too long, what with nursing the living and hauling in the dead. Not that I’m grudging of either—the two dead ones brought me good reward money, and the live one—he may be bread cast on the waters, for all we know.”

  “The airplane was what cast him on the waters,” Tammy said. “But I reckon it can work one way as well as the other, if the Lord takes the notion.” She watched Grandpa as she spoke. He was not baiting the hooks. He was untying the lines from the jug handles and he was putting the jugs in a gunny sack as he freed them. “You going to the swamp?”

  “Yes.” He put a finish to the word so no other could follow. He lifted the last jug into the sack and began tying up its mouth with a piece of string.

  “Grandpa?”

  “What you want, child?”

  Tammy stood motionless, looking down at the jug sack. “I know what-for you’re going to the swamp. Grandpa—it ain’t right. Long time ago I seen the men come and take a man off to jail and I sure would hate to see them come get you like that. We do all right without your making more money. I mean—” she shook back her hair and spoke out with boldness now—“I mean, hell’s bells, Grandpa, we’ve always been decent, law-abiding folks and——”

  Grandpa rose up so quick that, considering he had the rheumatism, it was downright scary. One eyebrow went up and the other down. “That’s enough, young one. Of course we’re decent folks. Ain’t none better—independent and God-fearing. But about this corn-liquor business—it’s against the law in the state of Mississippi, I grant you that. But row across the river and the law don’t say a word. Now if the running of a river is all the difference between what they call right and what they call wrong, then I say it’s purely a man-made notion and a lot of tomfoolery. I got a good setup for making liquor on this side the river and I got the freedom to make it here—I don’t care what the law says. Now. You got that straight in your head?

  “Yes, Grandpa. Only just the same, wouldn’t you go to jail if they caught you?”

  “I don’t aim to get caught. Besides, better men than me have gone to jail account of a moral principle and don’t you forget it.” He started dragging his sack along the deck.

  Tammy wasn’t ready to give up yet. “We got plenty of money just the way we are. What-for you have to be making money?” He lowered the sack over the side into the skiff before he answered. Then he turned his deep-blue eyes on her with a sadness in them. “Honey, I got to get you some schooling.”

  “B-but—you didn’t talk like that when the preacher come telling you—you said different to him.”

  “I told him a lot of things, because I’m not going to have anybody come here telling me my business. He’s a mealymouth fellow I got no use for. But that ain’t saying he ain’t right about some things. Tell the truth, honey, the years kind of slipped up on me since your Grandma died. I kept on thinking you was just a mite of a thing I could take my time about schooling. But the preacher made me see. I got to hustle.”

  Tammy stared at him, wide-eyed. “You think I need to get more learning than I’ve got?”

  Grandpa pushed back his hat and scratched his head. “Time was when all a girl needed to know was how to cook
and sew and mind a baby and hold her tongue. Nowadays everything’s different. Take preaching. Things have come to such a pass that it ain’t enough for a man to know his Bible and feel the call. He’s got to know the isms and ologies before he can preach the gospel. Honey, I got to send you to school somehow, and fix it so you can make out when you ain’t got your old grandpa round to pester you.”

  “Oh, Grandpa, don’t say that!” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. Then she drew back and looked into his round ruddy face, loving it, even to the prickly gray whiskers and the deep-cut lines around his eyes and the tobacco stain on his lip. The ache of her loving sharpened with the thought of a time to come when he wouldn’t be here and she would have to make out without him. Then the making-out, the unknown ahead, the mystery and magic, dulled the ache and blurred its edges. “I ain’t saying I wouldn’t like to be going somewheres and learning something new, because I sure would.” She let go her hold of him and stepped back. “So that’s why you’re going to the swamp.”

  “That’s why. And I better be getting along.”

  Tammy stood watching while he got down into the skiff and paddled away. “God, don’t let the revenuers or the sheriff or any-body get him! He ain’t doing it for himself. It’s for me. Amen.”

  When she came back to the kitchen door, she stopped short there with a little cry. Pete had put on his pants and his shirt that she had washed and ironed and readied against the day of his recovery. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over with his head in his hands and his black hair hanging down over his fingers. When he heard her, he let his hands drop, then he let himself drop sideways, back on the pillows. He got one leg up on the bed but he seemed to have no power in the other. Tammy took hold and lifted for him.

  “Not as strong—as I thought.” He had to catch his breath between the words.

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” Tammy scolded, marking the drops of sweat on his upper lip. “I reckon you need some spirits to stay you.”

  He drank the corn liquor at a gulp. “I was trying to look around. To see where I am.”

  “Nothing to see. Just my room there, no bigger than a minute. Out here’s the bluff, and through the door you can see what it’s like yonder—just the river and way off, the Louisiana shore. Sometimes maybe a barge goes by, maybe a dredger. Fish in the river, buzzards in the sky, squirrels and varmints in the swamp. Not a human critter anywheres. It’s a kind of lonesome spot, I reckon, that you floated down to.”

  “I’m damn lucky I floated at all. And lucky to fall into such hands. I’ve been a great deal of trouble to you, I know.”

  Tammy, sitting on the edge of Grandma’s chair, shook her head. “No. It pleasured us no end, to have a live body to tend.”

  He studied her a long moment with a lightening of his face as if something pleased him. Then he said, “I don’t even know your grandfather’s name.”

  Tammy leaned back, rocking gently to and fro, hoping he would note the luxury of such a chair. “Well,” she said, “there are some that call him Brother Dinwoodie because he used to be a preacher off and on, when he got the call. But mostly he goes by the name of Old Deadwood, account of his getting bodies out of the big whirlpool. He ain’t ashamed of that name; he says deadwood keeps a sight of fires going, and it’s what they trim out to make room for the young, and it’s a good thing.”

  “What is it he calls you—Tammy?”

  “Yes. My baptized name is Tambrey. My full name is Tambrey Tyree.”

  He repeated it slowly, making it sound better than it ever had before. “It’s a new one to me—Tambrey.”

  “It came out of the book.”

  “What book?”

  “I’ll show you.” She jumped up so fast the chair went on rocking high and fast till she came back from her room with the book in her hand. “Here. It’s got Grandma’s name—Ellen that the Ellen B. is named for—and Mamma’s name that was Susannah, and mine—all named out of it.” She gave him the book with pride.

  It was an elegant book with stiff covers, with the shapes of flowers pressed into the cover, and there was still some gold left in the lettering. It looked tiny in Pete’s long, bony hands. He read the words on the front of it—“Ladies’ Names and their Significance together with their Floral Emblems.”

  “The colored pictures show the floral emblems. Not all, just seven. My name is on page twenty-two.” She rocked back and forth, waiting while he read the first page where it said it was printed in Philadelphia in 1858. My, but it was nice, having some-body to look at things! When he turned the pages as if seeking her page, she bounded out of the chair to come and stand by the head of the bed and look with him. “There—see it?”

  “Tambrey or Ambrey,” he read. “Significance—immortal. Floral emblem—amaranth.”

  “I been wondering all my life what a amaranth was. Did you ever see one?”

  “Some of them. It’s the name of a species, a whole family of plants.”

  “Plants come in families?”

  “Yes. Prince’s-feathers belong to the amaranth family.”

  “Prince’s-feathers—it has a noble sound.”

  He looked up at her then and smiled. The smile lighted up his face and gave it a kind of sweetness she didn’t know could come into so grave a face. “It grows with little care, survives heat and drought alike. You must have seen it—stiff, bright red and ruffly. Nearly every little cabin in the country has some growing in the front yard.”

  Tammy turned from him and stood by the chair, not looking at him, feeling all at once her lack, her limitation. It rose up like a wall between them. “I...I haven’t seen the country—not since I was big enough to remember.” A sadness came over her, beyond comprehension, as if something not yet here had gathered dark around her. “I been living on the river. All my remembering days.”

  “On the river. Always.” He rested the book on his chest, his fingers keeping the place.

  Tammy sat down, taking comfort in his way of speaking, as if he accepted her life, though with wonder. He was looking past her to the river framed in the open door.

  “It’s not like the ocean. The land holds it, and yet it goes on its way, in peace, bound and yet free. It would be good to live on the river.” His dark eyes came back to her, and then they went over the room and back to her as if he were searching out her life.

  “I’ll tell you how it was,” Tammy said. “My mamma died when I was a little baby. It was in the hard times and my pappy went away West, looking for work. He hitched a ride on a truck that turned over and kilt him in the state of Colorado. His name was Luther Tyree. I like to say it, because it’s all I have. Then Grandma raised me, till she died. That’s every bit of my life.” She leaned back in the chair, looking out the sink window to the pale green of the hackberry tree on the bluff. “I mean, that’s all the outside of my life. I reckon it would take a million years of telling to tell the inside of anybody’s life.”

  “Yes,” Pete said, and she felt his eyes upon her. “Yes, it would.”

  “I been wondering a heap about you, Pete—where you come from, what-all you been doing all your life and how-come you said there wouldn’t be anybody missing you. Haven’t you got any folks?” She leaned toward him, elbows on knees.

  “Yes, I have. Only they aren’t looking for me back from my trip West for another week or so. My father teaches at Longhaven College, and there’s my mother—she’s busy running things generally. Then there’s Aunt Renie. She lives at the plantation, where I’ve been staying since I got out of the service. She paints. Maybe she’s a little queer. Only I’m used to her, so I don’t mind.”

  “But you—what about you?”

  “Me?” Pete waited, as if he wasn’t so sure about himself. “I’m twenty-four. I just grew up. Like everybody else around me, I went to college and went into the service. Then I got out. I went home and then to Aunt Renie’s. It doesn’t sound like much—I’m still on terminal leave, and trying to decide what I’m going
to do.”

  The book slipped out of his fingers. He clasped his hands under his head and stared up at the lantern that rocked gently as always with the movement of the water. “I went looking for something that wasn’t there. Perhaps it isn’t anywhere—a kind of certainty, peace. I had it in the middle of war and I lost it in the middle of peace.”

  “Sounds like a muddle to me,” Tammy said, shaking her head. “Did you have a fight with somebody and have to dear out or was it just the peace-of-God peace you were looking for?”

  Pete laughed and came out of his mulling spell. “You do say the damnedest things. How old are you, Tammy?”

  Tammy bent and picked up the book that had slipped to the floor as he moved. He had given her a look into the inside of his life, and it was a muddle, no matter if he did laugh at her for saying so. It was a muddle and a mystery, closed off from her knowing. Did anyone ever come to know another clean through? Would loving the other open the door a little crack? It might. She didn’t know about that.