Arise, Arise

The old woman set the coffee pot down carefully on top of the wood stove, where it would keep warm. She dragged the rocking chair closer to the stove and propped one foot up on the fender. She reached for her pipe, knocking it gently against one leg of the rocker. Some ashes spilled to the floor, which she disregarded. With a twisted-up napkin she reamed out the pipe. Then she filled it again, struck a match, lit, and smoked. She rocked back and forth. 


It was a late December day, two days before Christmas. The old woman didn’t have much to look forward to with Christmas. For one thing, her husband was gone so many years ago she hardly remembered him. They had just stopped being able to talk to each other, and one day he said he had it in his mind to be leaving, just like that. She had watched him pack up his few things. “Goodbye,” he said awkwardly.


“Goodbye,” she responded, not awkwardly, but not coldly, either. 


Her sons were just boys then. They all worked as hired hands on a neighboring farm. Sometimes the owner would let them go dove-shooting on his property and they would bring back a clutch of fat birds, which she knew how to cook. The oldest boy was tall and lanky and had red hair and piercing blue eyes that made his hair look even redder. The second boy was shorter of build and darker of complexion and also somewhat stocky and stout. The youngest had a merry and cheerful disposition, and he was neither tall nor short, nor thin nor stout. Everyone loved him. But then, the old woman loved all her sons. 


She had not eaten dove for a long time. When the war broke out in Europe that everyone was calling the Great War, her sons were drafted, one by one. The telegram came within a year, after each one. She had to take the telegram to the Ivernams or to the post office, because she did not know how to read. But when she received the third telegram she didn’t bother taking it anywhere because she already knew what the words said. The words were the bodies of her sons, which had been drained of existence. They stood on the page like crosses on the battlefield where her sons lay. It was only the black words one after another, lined up on the yellow page,  that separated them and kept hidden from her the place where they were still living.  Her three sons had vanished. All that she had were letters, words -- on the yellow faded page of her memory.  


The old woman had reflections such as these to keep her company during the long winter nights. Sometimes she put it to herself one way, now another way, but it was basically that the rows of words blocked her from the place where her sons were living. She kept turning the page over and over. After all, it did not matter which way she looked at it! For she could not read. 


The pipe went out. She knocked it against the fender, reloaded, and lit up again. There was a light burning in the room, but even with it and the glow from the stove she could still see the moonlight. It shone on the sycamores outside, the trees they used to call wood ghosts. She was lucky to have them to look at on moonlit nights like this one. 


Every night it was the same. Sometimes the old woman liked winter and at other times she thought that summer was best. In summer she could sit and rock on the porch, where she had a view of the dirt road in front of her house and of the hills around Blacksburg in the distance. Her former employer once told her that her house was perched on a saddle of land, the eastern Continental Divide. He had told her that when the water runs downhill to the west it runs into the Mississippi, and when it runs downhill east it gets to the Atlantic Ocean. The old woman liked knowing that she lived right in the middle of this division of east and west. It seemed to be right in the middle of the universe. 


In winter, on the other hand, she stayed in front of the stove, smoking and listening to the wind tearing through the corners of southwestern Virginia as if the land were a tablecloth it would like to pick up and hurl into some other dimension. The house would tremble in such a wind and the trees outside would snap and groan. Still, that was winter, and she could look at the wood ghosts. Tonight she decided she liked winter best of all the seasons. 


There were also the stories she reviewed in her mind during the long winter nights. Eliza Ivernam, the daughter of the lady she had worked for over the years, had told her a story shortly after her mother had died.  This had taken place not long after the old woman had received the second telegram. So, death was something on all their minds. 


Eliza had told her that a girl had once gone out to pick some flowers. Along came a man on a horse and said to the girl he knew of a place where there were plenty of more flowers like the ones she was looking for. At first the girl said no, then she said yes. She wanted to take them to her mother, who was feeling sick from the change of life, and the flowers were supposed to have healing powers for the blood. 


The girl rode with the man a long way. In the countryside there were rumors that as far as fifty miles away a horseman and a girl were seen riding together. For of course not much time had passed before the mother grew frantic and started sending out searches everywhere. But nobody could ever find the girl, and nobody seemed to know who the strange horseman could be. People searched the woods and meadows for hoof-prints, and sometimes evidence did turn up, but it was never conclusive. One day many years later a startling thing happened. The body of a young girl was found in a pond, where some dredging was going on because of a railroad right-of-way. But even the mother, who was summoned for the sad duty of identifying the body, was not absolutely certain that the body was that of her daughter. But the strangest thing was this. About two weeks after the girl’s body had been found, a young woman appeared at the mother’s house. She had three young children with her. She said, “See, Mother, I have come back with three of the flowers you wanted!” 


The old woman asked Eliza what happened after that, and Eliza said she had asked the same question. The mother had told her, Eliza said, “I think I was half asleep at the time,” as if in explanation, but more as if in sorrow, or as if she were ashamed. 


The old woman felt her eyes beginning to smart. It always happened every time she thought of the girl coming back with the three children. Besides, she missed Eliza. Some time after her mother died, Eliza had moved away. She would send the old woman presents from time to time, and messages, but still it was not the same as having her nearby. 


The old woman and her late employer, Mrs. Ivernam, had felt a genuine affection for each other.  How one white woman who was well-off could feel concern and compassion for a woman “of the people,” a poor white woman of her own race but who had so little…  Such things have happened, but more in the older days than the present. Nowadays poor and rich are less and less likely to commingle, to know one another, much less to feel mutual affection.  These days rich and poor go their separate ways, and a child is lucky indeed to grow up and experience people from different ranks and walks of life. A well-off person would not want to share anything of himself -- and I am not even talking of money -- because of the power of guilt. Even if his wealth did not make him feel guilty, he would feel (in a complicated back--and-forth maneuver of “false consciousness”) that the poor person would expect him to feel guilt, or at least that the poor person, by experiencing his own poverty in his presence, would somehow be judging him.  


This judging would most probably not even correspond to reality. The rich person would totally misread the silence or subdued nature of the poor person; he would interpret as a judgment what was, in reality, just a “natural silence.” For what is more natural to poverty than silent suffering? What is more natural to mankind than poverty and to suffer in silence? It is the divine in us that allows us to speak, and not the humanly poor.  But the guilt (or if not guilt, then the misinterpretation) of the well-off would lead them to pretend that equality had settled over all the world, a grey monotony, a sameness of experience and expectation. This would not be true, of course, but the fiction would enable the rich person not to be gnawed by guilt and it would relieve the poor person from feeling shame, or at least social inadequacy. Thus both parties to the transaction would be relieved of feeling anything.  Which is why equality is both unnatural and soulless. 


The old woman let such thoughts suggest themselves to her on the borders of her mind.  Such thoughts prowled about here and there, as they did with anyone -- but where did they go, and what did they live on? Thoughts, like anything else, came down to hunger and affection, and the old woman only knew that she missed Mrs. Ivernam acutely.  She did not miss her own sons in the same way, because they were not gone from her in the same way. She would say, therefore, that “Mrs. Ivernam” brought something to her mind in the nature of a thought, but that her sons brought before her the nature of nature, the burden of her heart, the very framework of her memory. The former she could pursue and even indwell; the latter was wrathful; it had picked her up like an old tree and shattered her roots upside down against the ground. She had been cast out! 


Mrs. Ivernam’s final illness and death had happened so suddenly that nobody in the family was prepared for it. But on the night she died the old woman had dreamed about her. It was on the next day that Eliza and her brother, Edward, drove over to tell her the news. They came into the house and the old woman invited them to sit down, and she offered them a glass of water. She knew by the way they looked what had happened. She told them of her dream the night before about their mother. “She was sitting downstairs in the front parlor, you know, where she liked to sit during the day, and looking so pretty, and all dressed up like she was going to a party. And she was looking so well I said to her, ‘Mrs. Ivernam, you don’t have the air of someone in the hospital!   You don’t have the air of it at all! And she looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry of me, Martha, I am doing just fine!’”  Eliza and Edward seemed to understand that the dream was the way the old woman was telling them that she had been close to their mother, and that their mother was not suffering any more.  


The moon had set some time ago. The old woman looked out the window. She could not see the wood ghosts. It was beginning to cloud up outside, she felt, because her bones always told her of the moisture when it was coming. She wouldn’t be surprised if it started to snow late tonight. Sometimes they did have snow on Christmas. 


It was getting late. The old woman knocked out her pipe for the last time and banked the fire. She lifted herself slowly out of the rocking chair and crossed over into the bedroom. She let herself down on the mattress that shivered from side to side on its noisy springs whenever she sat down on it, and began to unroll her woollen stockings. She rolled them up into a ball and put them into her shoes, and then put the shoes under her bed. 


Just before going to sleep it was always the same. First she would picture to herself the way she was when her three sons were around her. She would say each of their names softly, pondering each one, and turning each one over and over in her mind, as if it yielded the presence of the bearer in its turnings. She called for them, she called them to let her enter the land of their forgiveness. For she had never forgotten how she acted on the day she knew, beyond doubt, that all her three sons were dead. 


It was on the day she received the third telegram. The man from the telegraph office stood on the front porch. She opened the door a little way. He handed her the telegram with one hand, and pulled off his cap with the other. His face had a reddish glow to it. He mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and left. She did not thank him for delivering the telegram. Of course he knew what was in it too. 


The washing was in a pile on the floor, all ready to be hung up. With the unopened telegram in her hand she stood in the middle of the room and laid a curse on the pile of clothes she had just washed. She damned the telegram and the bringer of the telegram and the house she stood in and the day it was. She cursed the letters that formed the words and she cursed all words. She hurled her invective upon the ship that had carried her boys to Europe and upon the ship’s captain and upon his instruments of navigation. The ocean upon which that ship had rocked its way to Europe received her malison, as did Europe itself for all its wars, and America for fighting in Europe’s war. She excoriated all wars, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars that permitted wars. She anathematized the wind, the rain, the lightning, the thunder, the dawn, the evening, the morning, and the seasons. And finally, to finish off, the gall and rancor arose in her heart and she included everything within the dominions of her anger which she had omitted from her previous maledictions. So that the whole universe stood to be judged by her. And when she was done the whole universe was judged by her. 


But the call of their names was the call for her to enter into the land of their forgiveness. As long as she could picture their faces, all was well, but if she could not see their faces the light would grow dim and she could not see to guide herself. When this happened she would wake up with a start and have to begin the whole issue all over again. But many times she drifted off to sleep and she would have to wait for the next night. But tonight she could see their faces clearly. There was a flowing, billowing light everywhere. Or was it the cold wind she suddenly felt? 


The front door burst open, and her three sons were standing in the middle of the room, shaking the snow off their boots and mopping their streaming faces and hair. The old woman rushed around the room. She pulled down the old tablecloth that she kept only for company from its place on the shelf. She stirred up the fire and set three chairs by the table. Her boys were still so breathless from their long journey that they could barely talk!  She hurried around the room, she put out bread for them,  she put out the wine that she herself had made from scuppernongs. 


The boys looked first at one another and then at her. The old woman asked them how things were where they had been. They were in such a state of feverish excitement! It reminded the old woman of the time they had once brought back doves for supper, a Christmas supper like this one. Since it was the holiday season, the Ivernams had sent her a bottle of fine whiskey. She poured a little over the doves as they were simmering in the pot. How good they smelled, bubbling and stewing in the liquor! And her boys acted that night the way they were acting now, excited, talkative, in fact talking so much it was impossible to remember all they said. And her boys still slept in the same bed in those days, just as she made up their bed for them this night. That other time she had come in to watch them sleeping. The youngest was about to fall off the bed. She pushed him back up again, closer to his brothers. He mumbled something about having to go. “Not now, not now!” she whispered to him anxiously. And he did not wake up. 

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It seemed to her that she sat a long time by their bed, watching them. She put on her shawl, because the chill of before dawn was beginning to settle in the house. The youngest had been born at about this time, when the first light of the dawn begins to show. How many years ago was that? The old woman lost the sense of herself as being young, then getting older, and finally getting to be as old as she now was. It seemed to her that time came to her from ahead, from up in front of her, not from behind as she had always thought. It came upon her like the hair’s breath of light where the dawn was showing. At first in the dimness she could not see the outlines of things. But then later she could feel the shapes of the things that were coming to meet her life. How was she to meet time in that way? It came to her like an angel, and on his face was the light of sorrowing. The wood ghosts came to meet it, the three white sycamores. Time did not cease coming towards her even past the cockcrow, but the angel and the figures passed through her and were gone. The youngest had spoken that it was time to go. ​

This story was inspired by the Appalachian version of the English ballad, “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” collected by folklorist John Jacob Niles.