Fiction: Two Women

W. Luther Jett

---W. Luther Jett

Sairy Grooms: Where We Come From

When I come kicking and squalling into this world, my mother wished to name me Sarah, after my great-great-grandmother, but Mamma had an impediment, so the clerk at the courthouse wrote down what he thought he heard — “Sairy”. “Sairy Clopper.” Don’t know where that “i” in the middle come from, but I do know where I come from, which is more than my great-great grandparents could say.

I come from Cherrytown, outside Hardyville, and behind the big farm, Halcyon Hills. Yes, sir, Mamma gave birth to me right here in the sitting room of this very house. Oh, we added on to it since then. When I was born, it was just a shotgun cabin with a room up front, kitchen in the rear, and a sleeping loft. Still, we owned it. My father, Lord rest his soul, had the title, free and clear, house and land.

“Clopper” was my maiden name and when I married my Abe, I gave it up for his. Oh, Abe was a striker to look upon, handsome as the dawn. We didn’t have no wedding picture taken, couldn’t afford it then, but I got this one snapshot of my man in his uniform. Private First Class Abe Grooms. Yes, he was over there, in France during the first great war. Quartermaster Corps, minding the horses. Them horses weren’t much use in that war, but the army kept them on anyways. And it was what he was born to do, I believe, care for the horses and other animals.

That was his job on the farm, too, before and after, and how I met him was, I had a mule went lame. I loved that old mule and didn’t want to have to put him down. Everyone said, “Oh, you take him to Abe Grooms, Abe’ll fix him right up.” And he sure did. Fixed that mule right up and me, a gangle-gawky gal, I got fixed right up with him.

We had six children altogether. The middle one died a baby — our little angel, Japeth. Two we had before the war, grown up and gone north — Abner and Cecilia, we call her Cissy. They write me regular, both of them. Doing well. Hortense and Letitia, our last two, they still here with me for the time being. But I lost my Abe right after Letitia was born and that was also right around when I started working for Miz Orah.

I used to mind her two little ones alongside my own, while she were trying to nurse Mister Willard back to health. Oh, I could see they weren't no hope in that, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. I do reckon she might of figured it out on her own.

I s’pose that is why we get on so well together, Miz Orah and me, on account of we both lost our husbands ‘bout the same time and were both left with young children to tend. Sorrow is sorrow, and strife is strife, and don’t matter what color skin you have nor how much money. I believe that is something Miz Orah always understood, even if most of the white folks around her did not — either they never figured it out, or just didn’t care to know.

Now, my Mamma, she made sure I learned my letters, sent me to that school they built for us out Tuscarora way. So I can read my Bible and other such books, sign my name and keep accounts, and I made sure each of my children learned the same and more. That way, we don’t lose one another, the way our old folks would back in the days. 

I used to sit in Miz Orah’s kitchen — they were living on the farm back then, in the old Caretaker’s house — used to sit there with the children round my knee, Junior Will, my Hortense, and the two wees, Miss Gracie and my Missie, Letitia. Reason we called them the two wees, they were both so small, not much talking yet, and when either one cried, the other would just join right in, so they sounded like two little piggies, “Wee, wee, wee!” So we would sit in the kitchen by the old coal stove and I would read to them while in the front parlor Miz Orah took care of her mister. Mister Willard’s brother set up a bed for him in there, so they didn’t have to carry him up and down stairs. Let me tell you, there was no shortage of reading matter. I do not think I ever had to read the same story twice, unless one of the children clamored for it. I never saw such a house for books.

Oh, I miss my Abe so. He been gone twenty years, seem like a day. Nights like this, I sit up sometimes and think I hear his boot-step, old porch-boards creaking, catch a whiff of his durn old pipe tobacco. ‘Tweren’t the influenza took him like it did so many. He went out one night hunting a lost foal got loose out the barnyard, lord bless him. Dark night too, no moon, wind high. Abe must have ventured out onto the the Old Indian Pike looking for that colt, least that’s where they found him come morning. Seem like he was run over or run down or both. Broke him up all kinds of ways, so he was gone by the time they located him. They never did learn who did it. I’d like to think it was some drunk old boy who didn’t even realize he hit anyone or anything. That’s easier to live with than some of the other notions cross my mind sometimes.

Just tore my heart open, to see that handsome man so mangled. Man lived through the war to come home to us in one piece, still didn’t live to see his grandchildren. And we so poor — I didn’t know how we could afford the undertaker, let alone a funeral. That’s when Big Tom Mooney stepped up. “He’s one of my hands,” Mister Tom says, “And he was working for me when it happened.” So he covered the cost of everything — undertaker, coffin, preacher, and burial. Even paid for the headstone. Vermont marble, too. There’s a blank space on that stone for my name when the time comes.

I hear tell of many a mean thing Mister Tom done, and how his kin are all scared faithless to cross him. Much of it true, too. But I am here to ask — a kindness like he done for Abe and me — does that not balance out any of the mean?

They ain’t but one can answer me that riddle, and that one not of this world, but the next.

To this day, I will not walk that main Pike at night. I would sleep in the woods first. And it is why, though it pained me deep, I could not have my baby girls, my Hetty and my Letty, walk that ten miles and back to the high school in Ninevah. See, wintertime they be walking both ways in the dark, and I could not abide it. Ain’t no bus to carry them. So I had to pull them out of school.

Letitia, I know she dream of going to college, but I got to figure out a way she can get her high school degree first. Miz Orah says there’s a test she can take and it's free, so that will be one good step. She got to study for it. Get that done and worry ‘bout the college tuition later, but it is a worry. I don’t think Mister Tom gone to help with that, nor would I even ask. There’s a limit to charity on both sides. I’m already beholden and don’t need to be beholden more.

About Mister Tom, Miz Orah she has a different set of opinions than me. She holds him accountable for the death of her husband. She will not speak of it, nowadays. She holds her tongue. But I heard her, one dark mid-winter night, few weeks after they laid Mister Willard to rest. Oh, it was cold, bitter cold, and we went low on firewood back home in Cherrytown. When Miz Orah found that out, she insisted we stay with her until the cold snap passed.

“You can sleep in our parlor,” she told me. “Why, there’s already a bed there.” That gave me a chill, ‘cause they ain’t no good to come from sleeping in somebody else’s death bed. I’m not superstitious like some, but it did give me an uneasy feeling.

“Miz Orah, we can bed down just as snug out in the kitchen. I’ll lay out a bedroll, some quiltings, and we’ll be just fine. We’ll keep a low fire in the kitchen stove, and that’ll save you burning coal in the front parlor all night.” Miz Orah look like she might know what I was really thinking, but she ain’t say nothing. Or maybe she just thought I was too proud, I can’t say. It’s years past now.

Anyway, we bundled up next to the stove that night, me, Hortense, and little Letitia in my arms. I couldn’t rightly sleep. And s’pose neither could Miz Orah, ‘cause I heard her out there in the front parlor, shuffling and puttering about. Pretty soon, I hear that screen door squeak, and I knew she gone out onto the porch. Full moon that night.

I knew I maybe shouldn’t, but I sat upright then, still holding my baby close, and kind of leaned to peer out. From where I sat, I could see clear through the parlor and past, out the front door. She was out there in just her robe, muttering to herself. 

And then, loud as buckshot, she cried out. “Damn you, Tom Mooney! You killed my Will! You worked him to death!” She were sobbing then. What could I do?

I got up to my feet, moving slow and cautious, not to wake up Hortense. Letitia still sleeping in my arms. I crept out to the doorway. It was such a cold night and the full moon breaking over the fields. Miz Orah sobbing away. Why, she was only a girl in those days, school marm or not, still on the shy side of thirty.

Sorrow is sorrow. I spoke, just loud enough so she could hear. “Miz Orah,” I said. “Miz Orah, you come back inside.” I almost added, “‘fore you catch your death” the way my Mamma might, but I had sense enough to stop myself.

“You come back in here to the kitchen.” She turned to face me, tears half-frozen down her cheeks. “You need to keep your strength up,” I told her. “I’m gone make you up a hot cup of camomile, and you gone drink it, and then you gone get upstairs to bed.” S’pose some folks might think I hadn’t no business scolding and ordering the lady of the household about, but she went meek as a lamb, followed me on in, and set down with me at the kitchen table.

We both had us a cup of camomile, and I do believe it helped her steady herself. Didn’t speak a word further to one another. Didn’t need to. Many’s the times since, we have sat together over a hot cup of this or that, and had no end of things to say. But not that night.

We both lost our husbands while they were working for Mister Tom. Now in neither case do I think it was entirely his fault. ‘Specially not the way we lost my Abe. But Mister Tom, fair or not, he work his people hard.

Never since that night did I ever hear Miz Orah say another cross word directly about Mister Tom. But she holds a coldness toward him. I see how her whole body stiffens when he walks into a room. Now, when she got ready to go back to teaching school, that coldness did not stop her from going to Mister Tom about that acre lot in Hardyville next to old Mister Reece’s cottage. And I believe he must just about given it away to her.

And she had herself a new house built on that lot. So wouldn’t nobody in her family never again have to walk through that parlor where her Will had passed. A body can only hold so much sorrow and then she has to move along.

Is that a dove I hear out there cooing? If I’m not careful, sun’s going to sneak up on my backside. Is Letitia still up, too? We both better get some rest. 

Yes, that is a dove. I never can remember — Is it a mourning dove? Or a morning dove? Can’t it be both?

Orah Wilchester Reece: Necessities

For me, there was only one soul meant to be my partner. Partner — that’s how Will put it, only he’d pronounce it “Pardner”, like the cowboys do. Nobody can take his place, and I never even tried to find another. My mother was the same way after Papa died. Though when that happened, she was older than me, that’s true. 

I have done things on my own which I would surely have done with Will had he lived. But another man might never have given me the same opportunities. Might’ve needed me to stay home and not teach. Stay home and not travel.

I have my children, my Grace and my Junie. There’s love enough there. If I lost either one of them, I know my days would darken immeasurably. 

Would you listen to those frogs and crickets? Don’t know when I’ve heard such  racket — Maybe on the Fourth of July, but that’s man-made noise. There’s a mockingbird out there somewhere. Or is that Junie, whistling?

No, it’s a mockingbird. I heard an owl, too, just now. I know the full moon is past but see how the Old Pike shines! I remember one night like this, before Junie was born. Will and me piled into the Model A and we just drove, drove all the way out to where the Pike met the river ferry, and moonlight danced on the waters. Will kept singing that song the doughboys sang:

There’s a long, long trail a-winding,

Into the land of my dreams …

How’s the rest of it go? “Where the honeysuckle’s twining, and the bright moon beams?” We thought that road might go on forever. We thought that night would never end. We didn’t know how young we really were.

Things you remember sometimes. The way Sequoia trees smell in Yosemite on fog-draped mornings, or a voice in the night. Will’s cough, toward the end — some memories you hold, not as a treasure so much as a necessity, putting things in their proper light. What is beholden, and by whom.

We were small and all together, in the gardener’s cottage at the State Home. Papa, Meemaw, Hannah, Artemis, and me, Orah. I could not have been but seven. Papa still living, with his fine mustache, going out in the morning to see to the crops, coming home at noon, mopping his brow. He never burned, no matter how harsh the sun. We’d stand by the gate sometimes, looking across the fields — oh, there was corn and lettuce, potatoes, squash, and to one side, pole-beans. Blue morning glories round the gate, lilacs at the kitchen door. And far down a dirt lane, the barns, and past those, the hulk of the Main Dormitory.

The patients who were well enough worked the fields that was how it was then. The doctors supposed it kept their minds off their troubles. We never saw the sickest, but the ones who worked the fields would come up to the gate and Meemaw would bring out a galvanized pail of cold water from the ice-house, the dew condensing on the outside of the bucket. The patients would fall in line, each had his own tin cup, tied on a string. They didn’t look at all sick, that’s what I recall, they looked no different from Papa, nor any other man. Maybe a little sadder, maybe a little more weary. They had no families to go home to, only each other.

One of the patients had a crooked mouth, puckered to one side, like he got stuck puzzling out a question. Stuck on a riddle that couldn’t be solved. But whenever he saw my sisters or me, the corners of his mouth would relax a bit and he would wink, that’s all, just wink. And there was another kept a mouth-harp in his overalls, and after he’d taken a long drink of cold water, he’d pull out that mouth-harp and play a little tune while waiting for the others to be done. Always the same tune, all high, lonesome notes. I remember that to this day.

Now, is that tune a treasure or a necessity? We were only three years at the State Home before moving back to the old family farm, between Ninevah and Pinedusky, and then the influenza took Papa. I went off to college, first woman in our family to do so, and met Will, not knowing he’d soon be taken too. Troubles find us, I think, no matter where or how far we travel.

Velma, after losing Will’s brother Frank in that car crash, tried to make a new life for herself and Marny. Trouble followed them, didn’t it? Sad, smart little Marny, unearthly as she seemed, almost a wraith. Now, truly one. Sounds superstitious, and I suppose it is. Here we are in the 20th century, when the idea of family curses ought to be a thing of the past, but I swan, sometimes it seems those Reeces and Mooneys have had a hex put on them. What a silly idea. If that hex has a name to it, it starts with a big “T” and I don’t mean “Trouble”.

When I finished Normal School and came to the Hardyville Academy to teach fifth grade, marriage was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to awaken the genius I thought slept in every child, awaken it and teach it to run wild through those fields of wheat and corn, to swing from maple branches, higher and higher. To reach up and feel the warm glow of unknown stars.

That is still my mission. I have learned, though, that not all genius runs at the same pace. And some prefer to plunge their hands deep into the rich soil rather than reach for heaven.

I met him during the holidays, my very first year in Hardyville. I was boarding with his parents up at the farm, Halcyon Hills, but that isn’t where we met. He had been away out west. When he came home for the holidays, he stayed in Ninevah, so it was not until he turned up at the church social that we met. My Will. Those luminous grey eyes and that shock of hair always falling into them. I wanted to fall into them myself.

We talked a bit and danced a bit, and then we talked some more. I wanted to hear all about the canyon lands where he’d been surveying —seemed like a foreign country to me. I’d seen pictures in the National Geographic — purple canyons, and red mesas that stood like great mittens against the immense canopy of sky.

“The Mittens” — isn’t that what that comic strip character called them, that Krazy Kat? Listening to Willard speak of it all was far better than any old funny paper. Better even than the National Geographic. “The enchanted land,” he called it.

Sounds as if I was enchanted by him, and that did come to happen, but not right away. Not that night. Midway through the evening, Will’s brothers came wildcatting in to spirit him off somewhere. I’d met them both. Mooney was kind, but I didn’t like Frank, not one bit. Loud and reeling, and that was before he took to drink.

But anyway, Willard and I exchanged addresses and we kept up a correspondence after he went back to his surveying expedition. I still have those letters, bound up in a red ribbon. I have the telegram, too, sent by the Chief Surveyor to Will’s Paw and Maw:

WILLARD SICK STOP INFLUENZA STOP 50/50 CHANCE RECOVERY STOP TEMPE HOSPITAL PROVIDING BEST CARE STOP

Oh, my land, we were all so worried — who wouldn’t be? The second wave of the flu epidemic was raging everywhere that winter. Half my students were out at one point, either sick themselves, or staying home to help nurse their siblings. Some had to nurse their parents. There was talk of just closing the schools, though they never did. And old Paw Reece driving all the way into Ninevah — the road was still just dirt back then — just the same, driving every other day to the Western Union office, hoping for news and dreading it all the same time.

As for me, I kept thinking how my own Papa was taken by the same disease just over a year earlier. Was I to lose two dear hearts to that cruel flu? I was in a state, and thankful the school wasn’t shut down as it was the only thing kept me from just crawling under my bed and staying there. Then at last the telegram came, followed by his letter. The telegram was sent to Maw and Paw Reece, but the letter came addressed to me:

Been to H-ll and back. Getting better but too weak to go on surveying. Coming home on the next train. Would you marry me?

Love, your Will

Will hadn’t needed a wife any more than I needed a husband. But we were married at the Tabernacle Church in Hardyville by old Reverend Chert, one bright day in early fall. Neither of us wanted any candles lit and burning in the church. Family superstition. Ten months later our son was born, Willard the Third. “Junie” we would call him, to differentiate, “Junie” for Junior. 

We were living in the caretaker’s house by then, up next to the big farmhouse. That was not necessary, but Big Tom insisted, because Willard was helping manage Halcyon Hills. That was not necessary either, in fact, I had cause to wish he’d never taken it on. I wish we’d moved into town, or better, gone west. My Will might be living still.

But Big Tom Mooney, stubborn as a steam locomotive, insisted he needed all three boys to run the farm. Why all three, I did not understand, since their Paw, Willard Senior the First, managed it all right on his own all those years, with Nell beside him to raise the boys and Bobby. 

I think all the Reeces were afraid of their uncle, Maw Nell’s brother. Scared he might turn them out if they stood up to him. And considering what a cold-minded man Big Tom could be, I can’t say as I blame them. Nevertheless, it wasn’t necessary for Willard to knuckle under. He could have had any job he wanted almost, and if we hit a streak of hard luck, why, my teaching could have supported us until we got back on our feet.

I told Willard all that, right after Big Tom made his proposal. If you want to call it a proposal — sounded more like an ultimatum to me. That night was our first fight, Willard and me. Our only fight. My belly heavy with little Junie and my heart heavy with foreboding. We went round about it, talked it one way and the other and then another way as well.

“We just don’t need Uncle Big’s help,” I kept saying. “He needs you, Willard Reece, more than you will ever need him.”

Willard nodding, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. Always fiddling with that pipe, in spite of his bad lungs. And then he’d come back with another reason he had to take the offer. Came down to this — Paw Reece, we all knew, was too old and stiff, starting to forget things, too. While Mooney and Frank, it was true, couldn’t neither of them manage the farm on his own, and together they were always squabbling. 

I believe it was not fear and not necessity, but kindness made my Willard take a job that would prove the death of him. That is how he saw it, and at the end of our long night of contention, I yielded. And in spite of Big Tom’s meddling ways, the hard labor he put my Willard through, we did have three good years. Junie was our joy and two years later when his little sister came along, she doubled our happiness. Things one recalls — good and bad, sorrow and laughter. Grace taking her first steps out on the front porch, all bundled up against the wind, big old grin on her face. Until she went plop, down on her bottom, and then, oh, what a wail! She wasn’t hurt, she had on so much padding, she just felt humiliated.

And then that terrible winter came, came on early, with our first snows in mid-October and six-foot drifts come Thanksgiving and the chill settling into Will’s lungs, lungs that had never really healed from the influenza. That chill just settled deeper and deeper, and by Christmas, he was bedridden.

Frank came over one day, drunk as a lord, to rig a bed in our parlor that could be folded up in the middle, like the beds in hospitals. How he managed that work, cockle-burred as he was, I do not pretend to know, but he did it and that bed worked just fine, the little use we had of it. I sat by Will while he lay there, propped him up, nursed him, and read to him. We had Sairy to come help with Grace and Junie and cook the meals. I just prayed spring might come as early as winter had, but Will never rose from that bed, and when the robins returned and the little crocuses peeped out from the soil, my Will was already under the ground.

After we buried Will, I took off my widow’s weeds — never could stand to wear black — and I made myself a promise, that once Grace and Junie got old enough to leave with relatives, I would go west on my own, to see those enchanted places, the places my love loved, see them for myself. And I did. Now, that was a necessity.

I suppose I shouldn’t dredge up all these old memories. Not that it does any harm, but I don’t know what good it does, either. Nibbling away at things done and gone like that old hound, Addlepate, gnawing a bone. We cannot change the past, we can only aim to change ourselves.

This whole business with little Marny’s death— the unexpected shock, and then the funeral, and Big Tom, Uncle Big, stepping in as he always must, to orchestrate and compensate. It just opens a box of recollections, some of them good. But, there’s anger lurking in those memories — my anger, anger over good that should never have been taken from us just to suit one man’s stubborn pride.

And none of it necessary, his machinations, his insistence. He had enough cause to be proud without that. But he would not be satisfied.

To tend a garden of flowers. To sit and listen to a sparrow while watching the sunrise. To see the gleam of wonder in a child’s eyes. A long drive in moonlight. The song of the redwoods. To be met with dignity. To be given the freedom to fail. To have room to rejoice and space to grieve. These are all I teach my students to treasure.

These are the necessities.

***

Bio: W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of six poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father, (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Our Situation, (Prolific Press, 2018), Everyone Disappears (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Little Wars (Kelsay Books, 2021), Watchman, What of the Night? (CW Books, 2022), and  The Colour War,  which has just been released by Kelsay Books. His full-length collection, Flying to America was published by Broadstone Press in 2024. His story, “Two Women” is an excerpt from his as-yet-unpublished novel, Uncle Big.

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Setu, March 2025