Read Online Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill - Free Book Online Page A

lamplight shining through the night.

Signs and Portents

    A unt Malindy was no kin of ours, but all through my childhood she stayed at our house, a free boarder who always sat in our best rocker. She was very old and very fat and always wore her shining fat dress of black sateen; and she ate enormously, never did a lick of work, never even peeled an apple or snapped a bean, and I loved her and lay safe and warm, pillowed against her sateen breasts.
    G.D. always said that she was there because she had no other place to go to; but we never thought why she was so welcome, so well come. We didn't even think to wonder, for she was our Seeress, the Priestess of the Swago. She made the prophecies, the telling of daisies and the writhing of mystic serpents; and she had all the children to rock.
    Aunt Malindy was full of signs and portents. She had her death-bell sign, her howling hound dog, and, from her girlhood, that strange, death-ridden omen which shehad seen one long-ago summer midnight: the great fireball screaming in the sky over Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.
    It's a strange thing about old tales and superstitions: you believe them and you don't. You know that deep down in the depths of them they are as true as the morning, but that all the glittering, eerie surface is as false as false. Nobody comes to visit because you drop a dirty dishrag, but you keep your dishrag clean. And no snake stings a tree to kill the tree, but back in the Garden, his eyes were as green as glass.
    There were so many snake stories that they crawled slowly on the edges of a child's sleep. To begin with, Satan had gone into the Garden in a snakeskin, and now the black snakes sucked the eggs in our chicken house, and it was rumored that they sometimes sucked the cows. The snake stories were most often Aunt Malindy's; but they could be Uncle Dock's or Cousin Rush's or the true one G.D. told. Aunt Malindy told how her sister Mag had been charmed by a beautiful red and blue circled viper whose eyes fixed on her so she couldn't move. At last a dog ran between her and the snake and broke the spell. Aunt Malindy's other sister had been bit by a copperhead in dog days, and every year after that, for fiftyyears, in dog days her sister's leg would swell up and mottle with red, coppery spots.
    Mad black snakes smelled like cucumbers. Hoop snakes with horns in their tails would put the horns in their mouths, roll down the hill, stick their tail-horn into a tree trunk and the tree would die. And there were glass snakes. When you hit them, they flew into a million pieces and then went back together again. One summer Sunday morning, G.D. had come upon a whole nest of copperheads by a shale cliff on the riverbank—a tight, writhing coil, and others crawling around lifting their arrowheads. He cut a strong willow withe and slashed and slashed until he sickened from the venomous smell. Then he walked back up the road to church and brought some of the men to see. When they stretched the dead snakes out on a flat rock, they counted a hundred and twenty-three.

    There were panther stories too, and always, just over the Pinnacle, lay the dark mystique of the wilderness with its feral footpads and yellow-green eyes. There was the panther that had followed Mama's buggy through the pine forest over at Pickens, and the panther that had gone to sleep in the cattle scales. They told that Cousin Joe Buckley kept a pet panther who slept with him every night tame as a cat, until onenight when Joe awoke to teeth pinching his throat.
    Sometimes, at our sugar-makin' campfire, G.D. would tell of the night Grandpa Jonathan-the-Elder fell asleep by his sugar fire and a panther came up and sniffed his face. Grandpa Jonathan lay very still and played dead; and the panther scratched around, covered him up with leaves, and left him cooling there. Grandpa Jonathan jumped up, filled a kettle with firebrands, and started to the Tommy