The children she saw inside have joined a mob of others under Letty’s big mulberry. She laughs at herself, her vision of ghosts. The children’s hands and faces and soles are all inked blue from berries gulped and trampled.
Letty’s yard is a small mowed clearing held in on every side by protective hickory woods. Sugar’s husband, Roscoe, in the company of all the other old men, is standing watch over Letty’s big iron washpot, which is settled like a hen on a white nest of coals. The fire adds more cruel heat to this hot day, quivering in the air around the men’s boot leather and rising up into the arms of trees. Inside the enormous pot, a thousand thumb-sized pieces of what was yesterday a live fat hog swirl upward in the cracking oil. Sugar thinks: One more citizen of Heaven, making his contribution. Roscoe and his friends are studying the heat of the fire and the level of oil in the pot with the attitude men take on occasions like this, feeling the weight of their supervisory powers. Sugar smiles. A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn’t, this world would end at once.
She stands alone under Letty’s bent peach trees, wanting to be outside the crowd for a minute before it draws her back in. What will her cousin Alice make of this place? She can’t imagine. Sugar looks fondly at the dark braids trailing down men’s backs, the women’s shoes lifted high in the uneven grass. Children are everywhere in sight. The ones too small to climb trees run low through the crowd, their smooth, dark heads passing under every hand. Sugar feels rocked in the bosom of family. All these people are related somehow to Roscoe and herself and her children. Probably she could pick out any two people in Cherokee County and track the human path that links their families. In fact, that’s the favorite pastime of every old Cherokee, at gatherings of every kind.
Even though she wasn’t born here, Sugar has been a Hornbuckle long enough to do it as well as anyone: trace down Hornbuckles and Black-feathers, Stones and Soaps and Swakes. She can remember, when she first moved here with her new husband, she felt she’d walked into an endless family reunion.
Her daughters, Quatie and Johnetta, are standing shoulder to shoulder in Letty’s outdoor summer kitchen, Johnetta stirring the bean pot and Quatie working just as hard on some long tale she needs to tell. Quatie’s husband’s mother, Boma Mellowbug, is crossing the yard in a bright blue satin dress and a man’s wool cap. She walks sideways like a crawdad, with her eyes on the sky. In Heaven it’s a good thing to be related to Boma, because she sees things no one else does.
Earlier she saw Boma standing among the men, talking earnestly with Cash. Now she crosses to the grape arbor to talk to three boys and a girl that belonged to Bonnie Fourkiller, a dear friend of Sugar’s now deceased. The girl has an odd haircut but still yet looks like Bonnie. Sugar can’t remember any of these children’s names except, strangely, the first baby boy who died—that was Soldier—and the youngest, Gabriel, who was taken off to Texas somehow, and killed, Sugar thinks, though she can’t recall how. Today she can easily imagine those lost boys turning up here too, grown tall; she sees how their shoulders would fit into place between their brothers’ and sister’s.
The crowd is also missing Cash and Letty’s mother, who died a few years back. She should be here ordering the children out of the pies and the old men away from idleness. In her last years she always organized gospel singing at the hog fries. For her whole life prior to that she went to the Locust Grove stomp dances, and wouldn’t be persuaded to miss them for anything in this world, until her knees got bad; then she converted to Baptist. She said the kneeling and praying was trouble but still grieved her less than stomping. That was her way. So then they had to sing “Amazing Grace” and
“Washed in the Blood” at every big occasion, with the Cherokee words, which were less appalling at least than the English. The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete. It astonishes Sugar that she’s becoming one of these old women herself. She still feels pretty and young.
She jumps slightly, for Boma Mellowbug is standing beside her, reading her mind.
“Are you happy?” Boma asks, looking sideways at Sugar from under her wool cap and veil of white hair.
“I am, Boma. I haven’t been sometimes, but now I am.”
“Well, then, don’t be tormented by the kolon. He’s not always a bad thing.”
Sugar looks up. “That bird?”
“That one flies over when somebody is going to die. You hear him call? He sounds like he’s chewing bones.”