!Woodsmen
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by Anna @ 2016
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Chapter 1: Land
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After Papaw died, Mamaw settled into her place, 
worked her job, and watched her children make their
way in the world.

On the porch she was stringing beans, a dog asleep,
humming to herself when Carl Vance's Plymouth made
its way up the road. She kept humming. Dust rose.
She set the beans down and waited. Carl closed the
door on the plymouth. Mamaw watched him approach.

When Carl leaned on the railing and put his boot on
the step, Mamaw said, If you gonna spit, spit in the
grass.

Mawana Brock, you ain't prepared to budge, are ye,
he said casually.

You tear up the rest of the ridge, she said, and all
I can do is pray God take your heart and place it
with his. But you won't do that here.

Question is, Carl Vance said, whether you going to
get anything out of it. Ain't no question what will
happen. Carl spit his tobacco juice on Mamaw's step.
One day I'm gonna own your land.

Before we moved to Madison County, when I was a
girl-child who wanted for nothing but a horse, I was
with Mamaw more than mom. Mom drove a school bus,
delivered eggs from my uncle's chickens, cleaned a
man's house twice a week, and cleaned the church
Saturday nights.

Mamaw grew tomatoes, okra, corn, tobacco, asparagus,
mustard greens, blackberries, salad peas, and mint.
When she was my age her family had a horse named 
Nightly because her dam'd foaled her on a nightly
train or something like that.

Mamaw's father was mean because her papaw'd drunk
away what little they had left after the Civil War
when his morphine ran out and his wounds hurt.
Mamaw's mother and her and my great-aunts weren't
allowed to leave the house and garden without his
permission. He kept their clothes locked in a chest
he made from barnboard. The women and girls in the
house could only dress when he chose.

I never wanted a man like the one haunted Mamaw, who
she never got shed of, whose ghost she still tried 
to please eighty years after she escaped and eloped
to marry at fifteen, fifty years after the monster 
died.

I imagined the monster Otis Brock, riding his horse
to her mother's---my meme's---dooryard, taking Meme
to the corn-shucking and conceiving his first child
on her at it, in the back of the barn, quiet while
the people sat productively socializing just the 
other side of the wall.

Virginia, I imagined him saying to her, smooth,
kind, gentle, as he briefly pretended to be, I yearn
after thee. If thou would marry me, it would be no
mistake.

I imagine Meme, having just begun to bind her loins
to catch her blood, looking boldly at him, refusing
to see the hardness in his eye.

I don't know if Otis Brock had a horse. I doubt it,
as broke as legend has it his family was on account 
of his father's iniquities. When I was the age at 
which he conceived on her at the corn-shucking, I
was finding trouble in Madison County, but still if
I was quiet I pined after a horse. Why would a girl
of Meme's time and place sniff after any man who
lacked one?

She looked at her future husband, patterning herself
after her mother, willing herself a women. She used
the formal language too, the language they abandoned
with the game bagged and courtship concluded.

I shan't, Meme said, turned on her heel, and walked
into the cabin. I shan't, she said because she 
wanted to go with him. Her false adulthood was lost
she entered the cabin where her mother was giving
birth and her aunts ran her out.

She walked back of the cabin where the men chewed 
and stoked the fire under the black kettle, attended
by their dogs. Neither would they have Meme in their
company.

She was not a child that day and would not go to the
creek branch with the children, so of course she 
returned to Otis Brock, mounted his horse, rose with
him to the corn-shucking, and conceived her first
child. It miscarried at eight months. Shortly after,
the second was conceived, her clothes locked in the
trunk, servitude begun.

How did he mount Meme when he came in the house
evenings? Did he eat what she cooked him first, hoe-
cakes, soup beans, sometimes fried chicken? Did he
talk to her? He wasn't photographed so I can only
imagine him short, hard piercing-blue eyes, evening
stubble on a sun-weathered face. A stereotype, a 
fantasy like the horse I imagined he had.