She was very cautious with it at first, afraid of it, uncertain of what it might do, but wicked as the charm undoubtedly was it had given back her lost youth, and brought her a strange satisfaction and happiness. Her flesh got back all its old smoothness, her body its old supple grace. She could laugh and sing while she worked. All her weariness left her, all her sadness and bitterness were gone, sorrow was far behind her.
Men are all alike when spring comes and the sunshine works its charm on them, whether they are people or beasts or bugs or fowls. The men grasshoppers fight to the death for a green six-legged lady, the men fish kill each other for the sake of a cold-blooded scaly length of meat, the cocks use spurs and beaks and claws to possess hens that are nothing but a bundle of warm cackling feathers. Human men are worse; they will risk Hell itself for a woman, not only in the spring when all things mate, but all through the year. They risk death to drink without being thirsty, and deal death to eat when they are not driven by real hunger.
Her charm did nothing but draw the men she liked to her, and hold them as long as she wanted them, no more than that.
Her mind was full of two things, and both of them were important: she wanted Andrew to make the crutches for Keepsie and she wanted to know the new way to birth children. The morning was long. She would finish her work, go to see Andrew, then come home by Heaven’s Gate Church where the midwife school was held.
Instead of going straight down the road, she took a path through the woods. Everything seemed silent and still, but little by little many sounds fell on her ears. Water trickled, leaves rustled, birds chirruped over their nest-building. A lizard slipped under a root to hide, a snake writhed swiftly across her path, then out of sight.
The forest was the oldest thing on the plantation except the earth itself. The trees were mighty and tall, and the long gray moss almost hid the new leaf buds which pushed the old leaves off. Poplars flamed with new yellow leaves and green flower petals. Scarlet bells were falling off the supple Jack vines which had climbed high to get clear of the dark damp shade. Jessamine vines covered naked bushes and treetops under masses of yellow mist and the shadowy undergrowth was splotched with redbud and dogwood and crimson buckeye blooms. Nothing changed here. The same old banks of shiny-leaved laurel sloped down to patches of blue and white violets and beds of white lilies. Birds sang everywhere, and the tall pines sighed as they dropped brown needles over their feet.
When a flock of mosquitoes hummed in front of Mary’s eyes, she brushed them away with a smile and told them to go suck some juice out of the tender leaves and let her blood alone. In the distance a wild turkey hen was yelping, boldly calling for a mate. All the gobblers went off by themselves in the winter, leaving their women alone, but the first spring yelp sent them flying to begin their courting in earnest. Gobblers that had been good friends all winter would fall out and fight, the strongest ones taking the hens from the others. That same hen’s calling would start trouble.
Turkeys have strange ways, but perhaps no stranger than people. Men are the queerest of all God’s creatures. Poor fools, not one of them worth a headache, or a teardrop, and yet, worthless as they are, by means of them her own life had become full and her heart had grown warm and glad again.
She was even with July at last, no matter where he was, or what he was doing. Her heart clutched a little when she thought of him, but a woman’s heart is a foolish thing.
She stepped carefully across a narrow log that bridged the sluice between the road and the blacksmith shop, a small, black, dilapidated house whose sloping, broken roof let the evil-smelling smoke inside trickle through. A wild plum thicket that straggled up close to one corner made a bold white splash of fragrant blooms right in the face of the smoky shop-door. A crape-myrtle’s new leaves were scarlet and tender. Squirrels played in a tall hickory whose bright yellow tassels made a thin screen above the old shop’s ugliness, and whenever a sudden light stir of wind freed some of the pretty bits they flitted airily down. Poor things. Their time was out.
Andrew, the blacksmith, was smoking, and his pipe smelled pleasant beside the stench of the coal which floated out through the door.
Mary tapped on the outside and called timidly, “Good mawnin, Cun [Cousin] Andrew.”
“Who dat?” came a quick answer, followed by a surprised and polite, “Why, how you do, Si May-e?”
Mary saw how his black eyes deepened as they fell on her with a hard fixed gaze trying to make out why she had come.
His grimy woolen shirt was open across his broad breast, and his sleeves were rolled up high, showing his powerful, brawny arms. But he looked weary. His face was lined, his lips droopy, and the hand that held his pipe was a bit unsteady. He looked different from himself, somehow.
“How you do today?” he asked her coldly, his eyes still taking account of her.
She met his question boldly and with a smile.
“Fine, Cun Andrew, fine. Same like a lamb a-jumpin.”
More than once those same keen searching eyes had embarrassed her miserably and shamed her until she could not hold up
