I love to work—any kind of work will glorify His name—and they tried me in the kitchen first. I had to do with cups and saucers, jelly and all that. It was a fast place and a fine one, getting dinners ready to carry to the sick. Pretty soon, though, they believed I was getting a little too interested in it—they would put me in the laundry. Well, it was down in the basement. People were flying backward and forward pushing those carts and laughing and I began to lose track of what my part was. I was almost lost down there before I could find somebody to tell I wasn’t working. The next I remember, they tried me out on mopping. I caught on to that without a bit of trouble. I had my own mop and bucket and started out after breakfast every morning. The colored stripes on the floor took me around to halls you wouldn’t of thought would be there. But pretty soon my tracks got to overlapping. What happened was wherever I mopped people were calling, trying to find some help—the ones that couldn’t get up. If I put my mop down and traveled to see what it was a person wanted, the nurses believed I had quit. I wouldn’t do that for anything in the world, so to keep them from thinking I was I mopped on up to whoever wanted to see me and this veered my tracks around. Mopping has to be straight, the nurses said, from one place to the next one.
I knew what they meant all right, but I couldn’t stop answering up. Sometimes a gentleman wouldn’t want anything more than his teeth that would be in a jar of water too far for him to reach at, but other times a person was trying to get word to a daughter in California and I’d have to remember her name by heart and then the street she stayed on so I could write a letter. By this time I would forget who wanted her, people were all along the halls, but when the answer came back the hospital people would know. They were wise in all ways. They hid their stamps and envelopes because they came so high and I had to wait until they left their desks to even get mine. But then the letter couldn’t get mailed unless I put it right back in front of them. They began telling me to stay in one place and quit doing different things. If I didn’t stay out of their way, they said, they were going to move me in with a lady from Collinsville. Nobody could stay with that lady because she was trying to talk on a hill. I told them I wouldn’t mind, I needed some company myself and we could stay together. Well, they gave me a brand-new number and took me down to the end of a locked-up place that was just one room but it had two separate beds. Sure enough, there was a lady in there that was talking a mile a minute. I hadn’t heard about the hill, the nurse told her, and so she was putting me back here to listen. She had to be tied down because she ran away (the lady, I mean), and I could change her diaper and do other things for her to save them that much time. They locked us both up then, and I begged the lady’s pardon till I could slow her some. I hadn’t ever been to Collinsville, I told her, and she’d need to start all over, the part she was telling now I couldn’t understand.
She was a pretty-looking lady, old but without hardly any wrinkles. Her eyes stuck out like a deer. When I got her soothed down enough to where I could understand her, she said her name was Miss Bertha. God had given her a hill and if I would let her tell me about it she might be able to figure from my ideas what He wanted her to do. Up to now nobody had the time, and she just had to tell it to her own self over and over. I began to rub her feet—they were dry and hard like Mama’s—and I was happy because she liked me to be there. I might not be able to answer her exactly what God wanted but I would surely try. My grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Stoner, was sanctified in Grace and Grace acts a lot like manna, you can’t tell a thing about it.
To begin with, the lady said, it was the highest hill in all the country around it. You could see for miles in every direction if enemies ever came. No tree was able to stand the blusters that hill went through. Wild flowers frizzled up in summer, dry and all colors of red, but nothing else would grow.
Their chimney was to the north, and a good white man had built it. He didn’t go around building chimneys like this every day, the white man said, and it wasn’t known even yet what the bricks cost or the mortar that went with the mud. He swayed it to the south to make jealous hearts rejoice that the wind was winning. Rain never melted its chinks, and strong smoke came out of its top and ran around the hill.
All this, the lady said, was what her papa wanted. He was old and ready for death, but he had worked to leave her with the hill and the hill with a house and the house with a chimney that couldn’t be gotten for gold. After I am gone, her papa said, don’t leave this hill except to walk to the churchhouse. Don’t believe what any man says. You can work the mule and grow all you need down in the flat below. Corn for the mule and everything else for yourself. And he consecrated the hill, including the flat itself and taking in the chickens. Their chickens were big and black when it was cloudy, and green when the sun was shining.
After her papa died, the neighbors wanted to help her. One had a child that would keep her from being lonesome. Another told her about a job in Collinsville minding a wheelchair lady. But she didn’t want somebody else’s child or the job in Collinsville either. The mule and the chickens were company. She put the mule’s corn on the back gallery so it had to come up the two steps and stand under the roof to eat. The chickens were welcome, too, and she moved their laying boxes along the side of the porch. They dragged their wings at first, but a little feed and they were looking out of the house like they had always lived there.
People talked on her wood. Every nice day, she tied her head in a white rag so the hunters wouldn’t shoot her and slipped back to the forest to gather. There couldn’t a wind pass but branches were falling down. She picked up what was light enough to carry and piled the rest for the ax. By the end of her first winter alone, the yard was full of stacks.
It was only common sense she had to go to the crossroads. No wrong could come of this. She bought coal oil at the store and coffee and some kind of strong sweetening. While she was there she heard the talk of the loggers. These men stopped at the store for their tobacco and motor oil and sometimes drank a Coke. One of them offered to carry her wheat shorts home. By this time she had pigs and she had planted wheat in the flat, but it hadn’t had time to head. She thanked him and told him no. The mule and the sled could drag it.
The lady’s father had lived until she was past thirty and she was going on forty. She sang at the churchhouse and gave the Communion dollar:
Jesus, kneel beside me
In the closing light
Jesus, hold me steady
Through the dark of night.
On the hill the nights were quiet and peaceful. The mule and the chickens crowded in under the roof on the gallery just before the moon rose. The chimney sent up its smoke. Strings of okra hung from nails in the ceiling, waiting to make soup. She could have pork or the sweet meat of chicken on the back of the fire whenever she wanted them. Her creatures lived and died only at her wishes. But she was beginning to think of more. She asked herself a question. Was there such a thing as a child conceived without sin? She had never yet seen a man’s flesh except for faces and hands. Ageable ladies had taken over the dressing of her father for his coffin.
So far God had been nothing but good, and how did she dare to cross Him? The hens laid like clockwork. She sold the eggs for a nickel a dozen more than she sold them for last year. Still she was not content when she opened the door at night and saw the mule standing asleep against the same old stars. Sometimes she would slip outside in the dark and smell the woodsmoke and watch the cool sparks come sailing out of the chimney.
One night in the fall she had the feeling she wanted to go sit in the dark again. The hens rustled on their roosts as she passed them, and for some reason she went back in the house and got the old pistol. She did not stop in the back but went on around to the front, where she could see the lights of Collinsville. Woodsmoke made a haze around the hill. She traipsed around the yard a good while before she saw the truck. It was parked on the road below. Maybe it was broken down, but she had heard no engine trying to roar again. Dogs had been barking earlier from the F.H.A. houses built on past the hill. She walked down to the truck and looked in its window in the scanty light. A man was sitting behind the wheel, sound asleep. She could hear his breathing. He had parked there waiting for something and had fallen to sleep. It was the same man that offered to carry her hog food.
For night after night thereafter, the truck parked on the road. Days were getting short and the sun was down before five. At last the logger got out of the truck and slowly climbed the hill. He held his hat across his breast to show respect. He had a gray-brown face with features that matched each other perfectly, especially the lips, which fitted together to give a look of peace. He was younger than he had looked when she spoke to him at the crossroads.
She did not know whether to let him in, but he kept up his respect. It was a nice evening, he said, and he admired her stacks of wood. He could bring her some green sticks that would hold the fire all night when it got a little colder, pieces he only threw away from his loading of the pulp. She let him come in and sit down in front of the fireplace. He put his arms together and bowed his head a little. He guessed she was wondering why he was out in the night like this, he said, but he had a tricky wife. She hadn’t seemed that way when he married her, but now he was sure she was. There was no rest for him at home, so he rested where he could.
She brought him some cold milk and the last of the day’s cornbread with a little syrup. He ate steadily until he had finished every bite. Yes indeed, he said. Then he licked the plate to save her the stickiness of it and stood up on his feet. Without saying any other word or taking off his coat, he lay down on the feather bed and went to sleep.
After the first fear, she could see there was no more harm in a man sleeping under her roof than there was harm in the mule or the chickens. All of God’s creatures needed rest away from a tricky world. When the first rooster crowed, he started up like he had forgotten where he was, and as soon as he found his hat he eased himself out the door.
The logger came every night after that all through the rest of the winter. Sometimes they talked and sometimes he slept. It gave her a holy feeling—like a mother—when he slept. He was only half her age, and she remembered some words from the Bible: You know not the day or either the hour of My return. Why had he come to her?
There were times when he noticed the weather with her and talked on planting the garden. She asked him questions just to see him ponder. He put blue lotion on the mule’s sore and cured it overnight. He sharpened the plow so it needed only half her strength to hold it in the row. He started his power saw and cut down the terrible thorn tree that was edging into the flat.
Then he bought some banty chickens to give her chickens new blood. That was all right—he didn’t know they were blessed. The black and the green would have circles of yellow now. That was the only difference. But he put himself higher. She had not known he had worm poison for the pigs until she found the sack, thrown up under the house. Oak ashes in the pigs’ slop would do away with the worms. She could stop him from using poison, but worms made her think of sin. What would do away with sin? Oh yes, for all of her papa’s warnings and all the trips to the churchhouse, she knew that she had sinned. Bird wings were beating in the bottom of her stomach. The logger had shown her, little by little, all that a man can do.
It was a peaceful time when she had the hill to herself. She remembered the good peace now. No matter that the logger ate up more in a night than she could raise in a week—what mattered was the sin. If she could get rid of him, with him would go the sin. She would have a child of her own along with everything else. There would be nothing left for her to need, nothing in the world. During the days, she tried to think of ways of telling him that would not hurt his feelings. A good name is rather to be cherished than a crown full of jewels. If you have a lawful wife, how do you know she is tricky? Judge not, that ye be not judged. During the long hours she talked aloud to the mule. It will be only us, the way it used to be. Us and the innocent child.
If he wouldn’t go any other way, she knew how to dress his bed, but she hated to fool with voodoo—it would put an end to his pleasure no matter who he lay with. No, she would pray against the sin and leave it up to God. Whenever the thought struck her, she stopped her work and went into the house with its old musty boards that held the scent of the rain and the smoke and the dust between the cracks. She knelt by the very bed that she had thought of dressing. After she prayed, she wondered about a sign. God must be glad that at least she repented. But everything was the same. The sun continued in the catawampous way it was shining. The chickens pecked and made their usual noises under the skirts of the house. She ran to the flat, and the pods on the field peas were fuller and fatter looking. So creation was running along. She could not be sure the logger would ever leave.
She washed his work clothes and hung them on the fence. When they were hot and dry, she would fold them up and put them on the dresser where he liked them. The pin tray with its painted Cupid, the rusted horseshoe, and her father’s old gold watch she pushed to the back so he wouldn’t brush them off. She was getting ready for him. If he wasn’t coming, that in itself was the sign. But it wasn’t evening yet. She fed everything on the hill and the chickens flew up on their boxes. They had to turn this way and that to get their perches right. A big moon came up before the sun had set. It gave the hill two lights. On such a sight she closed the house early and looked out the mended windows. Every hour he didn’t come might mean he wasn’t coming.
It was two days in their entirety before anyone stopped at the hill. She stayed inside and kept away from sight. People had seen the truck so long in the cut below her house—if the logger had gotten in trouble the law might think of her and want her to pay some money. When somebody came at last, it was a girl child with some nickels tied in a rag. She wanted to get fresh yard eggs. While they were undoing the rag, the child told the news. The gentleman with the timber truck that used to ride our road. His wife had had to kill him for never coming home the day he got his paycheck.
One of the hens had been laying eggs with a double yolk, huge and a golden brown. She put the smaller eggs back and gave the child these—more for her hungry family. So while she was looking out the window, hoping he wouldn’t come, the logger had died his death. He with his pretty lips and limbs like tree trunks. His evil had caught up with him.
After the girl left, she sat in the rocker and rocked and held her beating stomach. Already the logger was a part of the past, with the told-of man that built the chimney and Papa himself, under his plastic lilies. All that was here was the hill and the house and the consecrated things. The child to come would know only His rules, laid down by Moses and Jesus. It would never see any sight but the house and the flat and the same blue smoke, running around the hill. Nobody would have a right to lay hands on it, drag it to town like you see all the time and ruin it on bubble gum.
Rub ahead, little sister, Miss Bertha told me. You have not heard it all yet. These feet have traveled a long ways for Christ.
By the time winter came, people smiled and waved when they saw her. When will it be, Miss Bertha? Let us know if you need us. She waved back but she wouldn’t need them. You see I had the Lord.
By January the sour grass that nothing wanted to eat was turning the ground to green. Burr clover popped up in the flat between the turnips and mustard. The last Friday before March, the school bus ran at its regular time, but it stopped in front of the hill where the log truck used to park. An old woman got off and struggled up the washes between the road and the house. First thing she got in the door the midwife opened up her purse to give the quinine and calomel, then began to curse. The smell of her hair was rank, like the matted kinks of gray had never been washed and combed. She chewed and spat and let the medicine work. It wasn’t long before flesh that had held together for forty years began the cracking open. Her own cries and even her hallelujahs were covered over in curses. So the new soul was born, as slippery as a fish. She wrapped the baby in a clean towel and ordered the midwife out of the house with five dollars extra. It was one-time money and the rascal had taken no food. She lay alone with the baby now until the room got cold. Then she stood up and tried her legs to throw a stick on the first. They were as thin and strong as ever, and there was not too much of blood. She sat in the rocker and laughed and hugged the gift of God. The quiet and the newborn soul soon made her ashamed to be there. This is the hill, she said, but it is yours, not mine.
She leafed through the pages of Job looking for a name. For the ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat was what made her believe she would find one. She would not worry me with all she had thrown away. In the end, Job was finished and still she had found no name. In the end, she called it Queenie.
The hill, up to now, had never had a fence. The mule knew better than to get down in the road where there was nothing to eat but gravel. The hens kept close, not being able to guess when their little corn was going to land in front of them with the quickest getting the most. The pigs multiplied in the dark of the old privy and were knocking it down racing and banging against it. Everyone knew that a hog had nine devils and devils have to be dealt with. All of this called for a fence. She waited for a nice warm day and wrapped Queenie in a quilt and set out to walk to the dump. Rich people sent their trucks there, she had heard, and threw off whatever their houses were full of. As she got near the burning piles, she was half afraid of the wild dogs that ran back and forth, but she reached down and picked up a stick and most of them cut and ran. The dump offered such sights—cake boxes with colored blossoms on them, a broken merry-go-round. Beer cans were everywhere, their labels old and battered. Machines sat up or lay on their backs, still a pure white. She heard grunting from a pile of smoking leaves and there was a starving sow followed by a dozen pigs. The quilt was more than enough to cover the little baby. The sow stood up to her stick and nuzzled its pigs back, but she never went anywhere without a pocketful of corn, and she threw some as far as she could to get the sow aside. Then she leaned over and snatched up two of the pigs, wrapping them in the tail of the quilt that Queenie wasn’t using. There was no wire she could see worth dragging. She got out of the sow’s earshot and hurried back to the hill. In the papers on her shelf were letters from the bank telling how much Papa’s savings had grown since the letter the year before. She would use some of this to buy the wire and the posts and stay away from the dump. She would trade the two little pigs, once she got them strong, for a pair of geese for the hill. With the fence to keep them in they would make good watchdogs and would raise young of their own in a dustbed under the house.
By the time Queenie began to walk, people were beginning to stop. Some wanted to buy greens and some wanted to talk and just be nice, but a few of them asked for money. Especially Josephine, the mother of a bad set of children who were among the F.H.A.ers. She was harmless herself, toothless and skin and bones, but one of her boys was in jail. She had seen this same boy, Sam, throw a potato-chip sack out of the school-bus window right into her patch of greens. So now he was in jail and his mother needed fifty dollars to help her get him out. All she would do would be to stick him in front of TV again and bring him food on a dish. She shamed Josephine for coming to a poor woman’s house who didn’t even have electric lights, to try to beg for bail. Had Sam ever stopped when he saw her hoeing or slopping her pigs in the rain? No, he went grinning by in his new boots or riding the public bus.
Through the baby’s second winter the flat grew vegetables like it never had before. The dark days from Christmas on were filled with sales of turnips. Unless it was raining, she took Queenie down to the flat to pick. The mustards she sold for a nickel a bunch, pinching the leaves from the root. There would be more back tomorrow without a sign of the sun. People asked to buy meat. To go with our greens, Miss Bertha. Sell us a piece of fatback. And she and Queenie would struggle up the hill against the sliding mud and dig down in the tub of salted lard where she kept her pieces of pork. Queenie began to talk. What beese they wanting, Mama? Something to season their greens with. Something to taste like something instead of the stuff in the store. She did not know what to charge. Just give me whatever you want to when you keep in mind the hog feed. The quarters and dollars mounted up and she shot another hog and melted a block of salt to make the hard fat safe.
Her milk was running dry—it had lasted a miraculous time—and she needed a cow for the hill. She heard of an old milk cow that had suffered from pinkeye till her eyes went completely out and now they would sell her cheap. The white man who sold her the cow gave her a rope free, and as soon as she saw the animal was gentle she put Queenie on her back and reached now and then for snatches of honeysuckle to keep the cow well pleased. By the time they got to the hill, though, it was some past feeding time and all the chickens and pigs were worked up into a state. When they saw her coming with the strange blind cow and Queenie, they set up such a racket she had to scald a few to rule their humor down.
As the child grew, she loved to help with the work of the hill and she could even milk the cow. She watched each creature to see that it behaved and went about its duty. A hen didn’t cackle but once before Queenie found its egg. At four she was learning to read the Alamanac and the Bible. She helped to pick the beans and dry them on the cistern. She loved to go back to the forest of the big plantation to get together wood. It was on one of these trips that they learned a wonderful thing. Their cow had come in heat. Why else would the plantation bulls be screeching along the fence line that was closest to the hill and the blind cow answering back? On their way home with the wood nothing needed to be said, but she bent over and read the numbers on the brass lock that held the plantation gate. If she could buy a key with a matching number at a hardware store in Collinsville and then in the night get the blind cow through, from a cheap and blind mother would come the blood of the big plantation’s stock. It was too good to be true.
In the midst of the hardware store with the television playing and clerks stirring around, she spoke aloud to Queenie. It is so hard to live, she said. Just to get by. There was a little gray-haired clerk who thought she was speaking to her. Would she need a hasp with the lock? She bought the whole thing—the duplicate of the lock on the plantation gate with its four brass numbers, two shining keys, and also the useless hasp. She took off her shoe to pay.
The calf, when it came, was a beautiful black bull like the one on the big plantation. In two years, if they wanted to wait that long, it could breed the blind cow back. Meantime the cow gave so much milk that the hill was overflowing. Even the pigs got gorged out and had to lie on their sides to get their breath and sleep. It was against the law to sell milk—the same as meat—but people knew it was clean. They brought Clorox bottles to be filled, and one old soul came to buy milk in a teakettle. She sold it cheap because the money was so great she was afraid to go to the bank. For the first time, she thought of buying something. The mail rider had brought a picture catalogue of white coats, in all lengths and prices. She would get one for Queenie, one with the finest fur. She made out the order and went to the post office to get a money certificate so the envelope with its twenty dollars wouldn’t be opened and stolen. When the coat came in a box, it was wrapped in white tissue paper and never in the house on the hill had there been such a beautiful sight. They hung it in the middle of the room and its whiteness was the first thing they saw when they opened their eyes in the morning.
The fall was coming when Queenie could go to school. She had already learned to read and write, to add and take away. She drew pictures of the hill and all her faithful animals. A few children tried to come to the hill and get her to play with them, but her mother told her no, it would end in envy or robbery. The child loved company, and her greatest pleasure was when someone stopped at the hill. She talked while they paid their money and her mother got together the order. Then she looked out the window while they went away to their houses. But she would have plenty of company in school. The bus ran at seven-thirty and didn’t get home till four. Not until school started, Miss Bertha told me, did she have time to sit and think. Her child was brave and strong—the brightest in her grade. The hill was flourishing and making a fine living. Still, as the days went by she found herself sitting in the chair where her father had sat in the days he was growing old. She wasn’t tired as long as Queenie was there with her talk and her laughing, but the days of late fall were dark, with more than the usual rain, and she found her heart pounding from fear waiting for the red blinkers of the school bus with its news that the child was safe.
The first real storm came in late November, and the cow was back in heat. While Queenie slept, she lay awake and listened to the wind and the screams of the mighty bulls. If she could have a heifer this time—the blind cow—then they would have a bloodline. To get started was the thing. It rained and stopped raining, and she built up the fire with pine sticks fat with yellow rosin. She didn’t want to stay up, the wind was starting fresh, but the blind cow fretted to have its hollowness filled. She got up finally and put on an old army coat. The rope was hanging on a peg beside the door.
She was afraid to take time enough to stay with the cow, once she got it inside the gate. There was no telling where it might wander though, with the bulls confusing it. She could hear a whole herd of them coming toward her, their hoofs making that special noise on the ground, which was halfway freezing. She never let go of the rope and the first bull that reached her mounted and began its fight to release the foamy life.
With all her strength, she pulled the cow away and toward the gate even before the bull had dropped back to the ground. Flurries of frozen rain blew in her face, but she found the icy lock in the dark again, and once she had the cow dragged through she snapped it back forever. It was the last time she would have to borrow life. When she turned in the direction of the hill, she saw a strange thing ahead of her. It was a little streak of blue sticking straight up in the air. It was fire, blue fire, and it was outside the house. She ran with the cow, let go of the rope, fell, and was on her feet again before she knew she had fallen. There was not a sound in the night but the shrieks of the bulls behind them. By the time she reached the hill the blue was gone and nothing was left to give any light but the reddish glow of the chimney.
People said at the funeral that it was the fault of the new white coat. The picture catalogue had called it leather, but it was something else, something that beckoned fire. Queenie had waked, and when she found she was alone she had dressed and gone out in the rain to find her mother. She passed too close to the chimney. That was what people said. She must of passed too close. A child doesn’t know those things. She thought you were at the privy and she wanted to follow behind you. In everything you did, she wanted to follow behind you.
There was a little time at the hospital before the coming of death. The pastor was there and Sam’s mother, but she wouldn’t let them in. Once Queenie got the shots, she talked again on the hill. We will pick pecans up, Mama. You’re going to get some goats. We have ten sows and you needn’t to worry whenever they have their babies. I will stay home from school and be sure not a one gets mashed. At the end she thought the hill was covered with snow and company was at the door.
Now as soon as I could, Miss Bertha said, I must get a knife and cut the straps that held her. She had to get back to the hill. Queenie was safe in heaven, but Papa had left her the hill and all of the things that were on it for her to strictly attend to. She went clear back to the question she asked when I first got put in here with her—what did I think God wanted?
It was hard to know any answer. She had waited so long to hear. I petted her feet and thought about what she had told me. I would be proud to untie the knots, I said, and never mind the knife, her faith was all He wanted.
“The Hill” from The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner by Berry Morgan. Copyright © 1974 by Berry Morgan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
