Grandma took one look around, and told Aunt Annie not to worry herself another minute—she’d set things right in no time. She banished the chamber pot to a far corner of the porch, then opened up every window, letting sunlight flood in and the fresh breath of the mountain blow through. She put a pan of water and spices on the stove, and soon the aroma of cinnamon and cloves and vanilla wafted through the rooms, mingling with the piney scent of the woods.
“Leave that pan on the stove, and I expect it would freshen up the house every time the fire’s lit,” Grandma said. She was at her best when she was telling other people what to do. Somehow they’d end up thinking it was their own idea and weren’t they just smart as a whip to have thought of it.
After Aunt Annie washed Uncle Teel head to toe, she rubbed Jergen’s lotion over his bony frame and put him in a clean suit of long underwear. She and Grandma helped him into a chair on the sunny side of the porch, putting a pillow behind his head and tucking his favorite crazy quilt around him.
A crazy quilt was made from leftover fabric scraps of different sizes and shapes and colors put together in a patchwork design. Grandma had one at home that her mother, Sarah Jane Adkins, had made—every piece embellished with embroidered flowers and initials and names of family members. Grandma said it looked like her mother had used up every stitch she knew and then made up a bunch more. She told me that quilt would be mine one day since I admired it.
There was nothing much in the house to eat, so Grandma put a big pot of the pinto beans she’d brought from home on the fire, seasoning them with wild ramps and a chunk of salt pork and adding a handful of mustard greens from the garden. When the beans were done, she took a cup of the savory broth out to the porch where Uncle Teel was resting.
Five inches past six feet tall, his rawboned frame had muscled over from working outdoors as a lumberman from the time he was an overgrown thirteen-year-old. His hands, knobbed at the knuckles and wrists from hard work, were still big and rough as bark, but the rest of him had shriveled down so only the essence remained. Grandma made dandelion tea for him, stirring in a spoonful of molasses to fortify his blood.
Comforted, Uncle Teel napped in the warmth of the sun. When the lavender dusk darkened into purple, Aunt Annie and Grandma came out and sat with Uncle Teel, now awake. They promised him he could stay on the porch as long as he wanted the next day. Finally, he let them help him to his bed. I heard Grandma praying to God to give His child Teel the peace that passeth all understanding.
“Amen,” Aunt Annie said.
9
Mistook for a Haint
I woke up to Grandma clattering around the kitchen, then her footsteps headed toward the bedroom Vonnie and I shared.
“You two get your britches on and let’s get moving; the day’s wasting away.”
Together the three of us walked to where Pinch Gut creek rushed down the mountain, dropping into cascades every time it came to a place it was too hurried to find a way around. The creek water, filtered through the ancient mountain, was used for everything. Vonnie and I helped fill buckets and carry them back to the fire site, holding the heavy load between us.
Grandma emptied the cotton from the blue-and-white striped mattress tickings and washed them in a kettle of water heated in the back yard, feeding the fire with the old batting and deadwood pine. We threw the pinecones on the fire, watching the flames crackle and snap from orange to blue to green. We wrung the ticks out, Vonnie twisting the sturdy mattress covers in one direction and me in the other, then spreading them over a zigzag wood fence that divided the yard from the rise of the mountain.
There wasn’t enough new cotton batting at hand, so while the sun dried the mattress and pillow coverings, we gathered pine needles from the forest floor to fill the pillows, first holding them over the fire to smoke out any bugs. New batting would replace the pine the next time anybody went to the general store in town.
Because we helped some and didn’t aggravate her too much with our usual squabbling, Grandma agreed to let us sleep on a pallet of quilts on one of the picnic tables overlooking the valley, pillows of smoky pine scenting our dreams.
Vonnie elbowed me in the side to wake me up, at the same time shushing me to be quiet. She pointed to the path near the outhouse. Headless in the dark, the long white garb floated silently up the path. Too scared to breathe, we huddled deeper under the quilt. Somebody’s dog started howling down in the flats. Hairs on my arms prickled up. The ghostly figure approached slowly, leaning hard on a walking stick, then fell to the ground and began moaning and calling out, but we couldn’t make out the words.
While the ghost was down, we ran inside to get Grandma. She grabbed her robe and the iron poker leaning against the fireplace, waking Aunt Annie on the way out. Aunt Annie lit a pine-knot torch from the damped-down embers in the fireplace and came running after Grandma.
The man or ghost, whatever it was, collapsed in a heap on the path.
“Land’s sakes, that’s Teel!” Grandma said, as Aunt Annie rushed past her.
Aunt Annie fell to her knees next to Uncle Teel, holding her ear against his chest to see if
