With a Hammer for My Heart Read online

  With a Hammer for my Heart

  KENTUCKY VOICES

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Wendell Berry Ed McClanahan

  Billy C. Clark Gurney Norman

  James Baker Hall Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

  George Ella Lyon Richard Taylor

  Bobbie Ann Mason Frank X Walker

  Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

  Frank X Walker

  The Cave

  Robert Penn Warren

  Famous People I Have Known

  Ed McClanahan

  Miss America Kissed Caleb

  Billy C. Clark

  Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War

  Richard Taylor

  The Total Light Process: New and Selected Poems

  James Baker Hall

  With a Hammer for My Heart: A Novel

  George Ella Lyon

  THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

  Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Copyright © 1997 by George Ella Lyon

  Published in 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com

  11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lyon, George Ella, 1949–

  With a hammer for my heart : a novel / George Ella Lyon.

  p. cm. — (Kentucky voices)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-9175-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-8131-9175-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Recluses— Fiction. 2. Mountain life—Fiction. 3. Teenage girls—Fiction. 4. Women healers—Fiction. 5. Appalachian Region—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.Y4454W5 2007

  811’. 54—dc22

  2006029969

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of American University Presses

  for Dick Jackson

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people, whose generous support, technical advice, friendship, and/or criticism helped make this book possible—Sandy Ballard, Carol Bastian, Sallie Bingham, Louise Borden, Marie Bradby, Joy Button, Paul Cantrell, Jo Carson, Marguerite Casparian, Jan Cook, Jenny Davis, Priscilla Denby, David Fresh, Martha Gehringer, Vicky Hayes, Mary Hodges, Gladys Hoskins, Robert and Betty Hoskins, Pat Hudson, Karen Jones, Jane Wilson Joyce, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Ann Kilkelly, Leatha Kendrick, Barbara Mabry, Jeff Daniel Marion, Lou Martin, Sue McFarlan, Gurney Norman, Ann and Frank Olson, Karen Orchard, Barbara Presnell, Marilyn Sewell, Anne and Graham Shelby, Lee Smith, Kathleen Sterling, Laura Sutton, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Jane Gentry Vance, Roberta White, and Dana Wildsmith.

  And to Dick Jackson, my editor; Barbara Kouts, my agent; and Steve Lyon, my husband—praise and thanks for believing in this project and working with me to see it through.

  Portions of this novel first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: Ace Magazine (Mamaw, pages 16–18, under the title “Mother Jesus”), The American Voice (Nancy Catherine, pages 133–139, under the title “Snake”), Appalachian Heritage (Lawanda, pages 5–11, under the title “Enterprise” and Garland, pages 23–25, under the title “Alone All One”), and Mossy Creek Reader (Lawanda, pages 5–11, under the title “Enterprise” and, pages 39–43, under the title “Leaving”).

  …

  A summer or so after the end of the Second World War, Londoners noticed strange plants growing in the bomb craters, rare flowers flourishing. Botanists were called in and, through intense study, they made this discovery: though native to London, the plants had not grown there since 1666. The Great Fire had burned them off, buried their seed under ash and rubble. Nearly three hundred years later, the blaze and force of bombs resurrected them.

  Thus, this story.

  An old man lived on a hill in two buses. A bombed-out soldier, a hermit without faith. His family he’d driven off, his town he detested. He spent his time in books, booze, and dirt. And he scared away any stranger who came up his hill. Except Lawanda.

  You never know who’s at the door when you hear foot-steps. You never know what will fall from the sky.

  ONE

  LAWANDA: I’m wanting to go to college. Nobody in my family has ever done it and we sure can’t pay the bills, but I’m still planning to go. Last summer I tried to get a job to save money, but I soon found out there’s not enough work here in Cardin for grown people, much less kids. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so I couldn’t work at a fast-food place. They’re all on the other side of the bypass. So when we got this card in the mail in September about selling magazines, I was all excited. I had done real well selling chocolate bars door-to-door to help the band buy a tuba. Of course, I had special motivation. I wanted to play the tuba. But I felt even more motivated about this, so I mentioned it to my mom. She was not encouraging.

  “Who do you know who has money for magazines or time to turn the pages?” School had just started and she was putting up fall beans.

  “Well, nobody on this road, but girls at school carry Glamour around like the Bible.”

  “And you’re aiming to contribute to that?”

  “Mom, I’m aiming to save some money for college.”

  “I thought you was going to strap yourself to your books and win a big scholarship or something.”

  “I am. I mean, I’m going to try.”

  “And how are you going to do that knocking on doors?”

  “I’ll only do it Saturday mornings, Mom. I can’t study all the time.”

  “There’s your chores, too.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, talk to your dad.”

  I waited till after supper and the news that night. Dad was tired. Skinny as he is, the way he lay on the couch, his clothes could have been on a hanger.

  I sat in the TV chair and told him my plan. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers and sat up.

  “Do you have to furnish money up front?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have to pay them for sample magazines before you can start?”

  “Oh, no, there’s just a folder you show people. They deduct the cost of that from your first pay. ”

  “Then it’s okay by me. Fact is, it’s downright enterprising, Lawanda. But you got to be careful about your territory.”

  “What?”

  “Where you sell. They’s some doors around here you knock on and you’re dead.”

  I heard that, of course, but mostly what I heard was, Whoopee! I can do it! So about two weeks later, after my kit came in, I set out. I had on this denim jumper Mom made for me, the kind they wear now, with the low waist, and a red-striped shirt of my brother Noonie’s, the newest thing he had, and he forgot it when he left for Cincinnati. You couldn’t tell how big it was under the jumper. I thought how in this getup I could be pregnant and no one
would know it. Like Melody Shumate. She got so sick at school, they thought she had food poisoning. What she had was a seven-pound boy.

  Anyway, I also wore red jelly shoes. They’re my sister Dessie’s but she didn’t mind. Or actually, she didn’t know. She was stuck to the TV like a stamp.

  I hate TV, and the first thing I sold that morning was a subscription to TV Guide. Old Mrs. Manning studied the folder and then studied me.

  “You Howard Ingle’s girl?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sure do feature the Smiths.”

  “I do look like Mamaw for a fact,” I told her. “Did you see anything you wanted?”

  “What? Oh, in this thing?” She waved the folder. “Do you have that TV book? Murph watches day and night. We might as well know what’s on.”

  So I made my first sale. She had to count the money out in change from a peanut butter jar.

  I had been to five houses before the Mannings’ and I was getting tired. Also Dessie’s jellies had blistered my little toes. My feet are bigger than hers but it’s been our custom to act like they’re not. With my pocketbook bulging, I sat on a rock and put my arms on my knees and my head on my arms to think. I was out Hallspoint Road. I should have said that.

  I considered the girls at school I might interest in Glamour, Seventeen, or even Cosmopolitan. Boys who might want Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics. I began to imagine everyone I knew with a magazine in their hands and then I tried to get close enough to read the cover. Some wouldn’t hold it. Others threw it at me or struck a match on their heel and set it afire. Mamaw’s magazine flapped its pages and just took off. But one person, an old man, put his hands on the cover and opened it like an accordion. He began to play the most amazing tune. Not beautiful exactly, but knowing everything. I forgot about magazines, listening …

  Suddenly, my arms slid off my knees, my forehead hit my denim lap, and I sat up. Panicked, I felt for my pocket-book and my folder. Whew! They were right by my left foot. I hadn’t been asleep exactly. I don’t know where I’d been. “Absent in your mind,” Mom calls it, and I guess that’s right.

  Once I collected myself, I began to wonder who the old man could be. I only had time to try one more customer and I was sure he was it. I closed my eyes and tried to get the picture back. I couldn’t, but I heard the music all right. Heard the tune anyway. The instrument was more like a harmonica. When I realized this, I listened differently and then it hit me: Mr. Garland! The old man who lives in the buses on the other side of Cade’s Hill from our house. He must sit outside and play some nights or have a powerful radio, because I’ve heard music from up there many a time.

  When I thought of him, it clicked in my mind that Dad wouldn’t want me to go. “He’s not bad,” Dad had said when I’d asked about the man who lived up there. “Not bad, but dangerous.”

  “How?”

  “Just any way he’d take a notion. You steer clear of him.”

  So I had had my warning a long time ago. Trouble was, the music was much fresher. And the image of him playing that magazine. I looked at my watch, one of my favorite possessions, all red and yellow—I ordered it from M & M’s. It was 11:15. I just had time to hike up to the buses, make my sale, and be home by noon. So off I went. My toes didn’t even hurt.

  Mr. Garland’s buses sat just below the ridge of Cade’s Hill, so I came in from the back. Weeds were up above my waist. But when I came around to the front of the buses, the hillside was mowed and there was the most beautiful garden, late corn tasseling and tomatoes red as fire. I was working on courage to climb the metal steps and knock when Mr. Garland stood up between the rows.

  “Well, lookee here,” he said in a hoarse sort of voice. “If it ain’t Miss Riding Hood come to entertain the wolf.”

  “Mr. Garland,” I started, but my voice came out no louder than the insects in the grass. The man coming toward me was huge, with wild gray hair and a beard flowing right down to the hair on his chest. He didn’t wear a shirt, and his arms and shoulders were thick and red. His cutoff khaki pants were torn and he wore no shoes.

  “You catching flies?”

  I snapped my mouth shut, took a deep breath, and started again. “Mr. Garland, I’m selling magazines.”

  “To do what? Send your eighth grade to Frankfort for a look at the floral clock?”

  “I’m in high school, Mr. Garland. I’m just trying to make money for me.”

  I realized I was holding the folder in front of me like a shield, so I let my arm drop.

  He came forward, squinting.

  “Are you a Smith?”

  “Well, not exactly. My mamaw is.”

  “Which one?”

  “My mother’s mother.”

  “I mean, which Smith?”

  “Ada,” I said. “My papaw’s John.”

  “You’re Howard Ingle’s girl!”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t he tell you not to come up here?”

  That got me scared, not so much of Mr. Garland as of what would happen if he told Dad.

  “The truth is, I keep hearing your music at night and I thought you might like a music magazine. My dad says you read.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Books and minds too. Yours is pretty sharp. Come on into First Bus. This sun’s a-killing me.”

  Now I knew I probably shouldn’t go in his bus—Mom had said not even to go in people’s houses—but, well, there I was. It’s just like I’m going to school, I told myself.

  First Bus was a sight.

  “This is my reading bus,” Mr. Garland told me. “And my company bus. Sit down right there.” He gestured to the seat diagonal to the driver’s. I took it and he settled in behind the wheel. I couldn’t help but notice how the wheel caught his flesh right below the nipple.

  “That seat you’re occupying is Curtis Ballard’s,” he told me—Mr. Ballard’s my dad’s boss—“so you should feel right at home. Father Connor likes to sit here.” He pointed at the seat behind his. “I told him it’s because if we sit opposite each other, he thinks it’s a confession booth.”

  A confession bus, I thought.

  All the other seats were piled with books. Rows of books like in a library, rows like in his garden. And the walls, from the windows up across the ceiling, were all covered with maps.

  “Where do you get the books?” I asked.

  “Oh, people give them to the church, or Curtis Ballard brings them up here, or I get them from the library.”

  “You could be a bookmobile,” I told him.

  “Except I don’t roll,” he said. “And I’d likely shoot anyone who took my books.”

  That dried up my talk.

  “But the bulk of my books,” he went on, “come from Cincinnati. They’s a place up there called the Book Hive— big outfit, five stories. I’ve not been there, but Curtis Ballard’s told me—and I order things off of them—get a jumble box. Most of what I get don’t cost over a couple of dollars, some only seventy-five cents. I get a big pile, read them, and then find a seat for each one.”

  “So you mean they’re arranged?”

  He looked at me. “I didn’t think you was stupid,” he said.

  “And I didn’t think you were mean.” I sat up straight and sucked my breath in. I couldn’t believe what I’d said.

  “I don’t know why not. I’m sure enough folks could have told you.” Mr. Garland leaned on the wheel and the horn made a splatty sound, somewhere between a cough and a fart. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Mr. Garland,” I started again, “about these magazines …”

  “It’s Garland,” he said. “No mister to it. First name and last. And I might take a magazine now; you’re not all that stupid. Let me see what you got. ”

  In the end he took two, paid me in raggedy bills he slid from under a seat in Second Bus. As I started down the hill, he hollered, “Do you play guitar?”

  “No,” I called back. “Tuba.”

  “God’s eyeballs!” he yelled. “Don’t
bring it up here!”

  Threshing through the weeds, I debated whether to look at my watch and see just how much trouble I was in. I decided against it. I’d made three sales and I’d met Garland. I’d just let the good times last.

  HOWARD: When I married June, I was dumb as a chair and light-headed as a willow. Any wind could blow, any hands could cart me from place to place. As long as I had June I didn’t care. I figured it would all work out. Well, it has somehow. But we’ve had to saw off some chair legs to burn, some willow branches to mend the house with. Of course, the house gives. A house that gives ain’t always a bad thing.

  I guess the worst time was when I was hauling coal for that little mine at Arjay. They was shut down for safety violations after a roof fall killed Slate Jenkins and his brother. Wasn’t no union there, so we all went home to starve. June and I had all five kids by then—Noonie, Ray, Lawanda, Dessie, and Jeff. Jeff was still little enough to sleep in a drawer. I was pretty scared. I looked at them—at June nursing that baby and her so scrawny, the leaders stood out in her neck; at my pockets, which didn’t even have linings left to turn out. Howard Ingle, I said, what’s going to save you now?

  There wasn’t no mine work, I knew that. I didn’t own my truck, so I couldn’t hire to haul something else. And I couldn’t do much labor on account of my back—got busted up in a wreck when I was eighteen. Oh, I could do factory work, line work, but we didn’t have any of that around here. And I sure didn’t have money to move us somewhere that did.

  Well, I said, other places have trucks and hire drivers. Like what? Grocery stores. I checked all them. They had what they needed. Then there was the folks further up, the ones that made the pop and milk and bread. I went to them too. Nope. They had drivers and backup drivers. What about the bus? I went to the Greyhound and the local line. Did I have experience driving a bus? No, but … No buts about it. They couldn’t afford to train a man and they sure wouldn’t set you in the road thinking you was driving some Ford. Okay, okay. But what?