When Mattie and David Brown set out to farm some hilly wooded acres at the foot of Pine Mountain, they are unmindful of the rumors of haunts and hermits. David's fiddle, Mattie's determination, their three healthy sons make the growing debts unimportant -- until one day David is gone. The neighboring Miller family becomes Mattie's center, but it is the hermit Brustein who changes her life. And a reluctant outsider, Sarah Bakeley, who inherits an empty cabin, will have profound influence on Mattie's granddaughter. This is a story of connections, known and unknown, sought and unsought, that shape a person's life and loves and choices.

Parts of the Whole

By Catharine E. Roth

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Catharine E. Roth
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-7309-5

Chapter One

Mattie

The tavern was crowded, for a Thursday: it had been a wet week, and men were restless. Snow melted to slush in the afternoons, ice formed overnight, with more snow. In the old man's youth the whole of the large stone building had been an inn, but by now, in 1915, the business had dwindled to the one long room, with tables, benches and some chairs, and big fireplace at the end. Cal kept the hearth warm, and there was still food to be had, soups and fresh bread and pies, he made sure his granddaughter Mattie saw to that. But the occasional traveler seeking a bed was sent on to Mrs. Geigley's, where he would wake in the mornings to strong coffee and temperance pamphlets.

"Fish, I tell you! Even the fish!" The old man, seated in a Windsor chair near the fire, pounded his stout hickory cane on the broad planks of the floor. "Every last — hell I mean from whales bigger'n this house to the littlest damn minnie. He got every last one in mind and you think you can sneak around past Him, outa his sight? There ain't nothin' dumber 'n a fish and He can use any one He wants any time He wants, and if He can make a fish swaller Jonah what makes you think He couldn't open up the earth and swaller you?"

Laughter from the round table nearest Cal rose over the general hum of voices.

"Amen, Cal! Tell it, brother!"

"Every time Cal drowns in his cup he starts hollerin' 'bout fishes." Tucker Schultz belched gently and raised his glass mug. "Two more, Mattie."

The cane pounded again, and Cal was on his feet. "I said, gal, you think yer invisible? You think He don't see? Go on ahead, act like you don't hear me, someday too late you'll remember every word, too late though, I say –"

"Here now!" Tucker's brother Warren leaned back his chair and shouted right at Cal's dusty black coat. "Unhand her, Cal. I ain't fixin to fetch my own ale, now."

The girl twisted out of Cal's reach, collected the two tall glasses and moved on, pausing at another table to nod at an order for soup.

"You best go easy, Cal," Tucker said. "That young'un's the only thing between you and ruin."

"Ruin?" the old man stormed. "Ruin? She's ruin, she is. I'll keep her to the path, I will, long as I can raise an arm. But it's a heavy cross for an old man, I tell you."

Warren guffawed. "Not as heavy as buyin' your help, I'll wager."

"Damnation, you think she don't cost me? Who's raised her then, these fifteen years?"

Though her expression didn't change as she set down the drinks and took Tucker's four bits, Mattie was grateful for the men's interference. Both Tucker and Warren had come between her and Cal before, not so her grandfather noticed, but she did. Younger, she used to pretend that Tucker was her father; for all his reputation of fiery temper, he was always gentle toward her. Warren, who was leaner and quieter, actually resembled more her own dark scrawniness, and was in most ways a more appealing parent, but somehow she rather leaned toward Tucker. She knew all the while she was being as dumb as her grandfather said she was, to look in that corner. There was no father, and that was that. And her mother, who'd died ten years ago, was growing dim and soon would not be, either, in spite of Mattie's desperate morning ritual to call up her face.

Warren stood, stretched, and left, standing aside at the door to let three younger men in. They shook a little, dripping, glancing gladly at the fire, their bodies expanding almost visibly in the heat: the Kane brothers, and David Brown, the new fellow, who looked around the room to find Mattie, to smile at her. Mattie scowled down at the empty bowls she was clearing, but knew her grandfather would have seen the blush she could not stop.

The first thunderstorm was early in June, and sudden. Tucker Schultz came into the tavern to wait it out, which wasn't unusual; he was a carpenter and seemed always to be coming into Potter's Corner for something or other. But Forrest Miller came in right behind him, which was unusual. He farmed on a ridge way west of the village, further out than Mattie had ever been. He'd be one day, folks said, the biggest farmer in the county if he didn't lose too much putting everything in fruit trees.

"Got coffee, Mattie?" Tucker called to her, and she nodded and went into the kitchen. When she came out with the mugs, she realized they were talking about David.

"He ain't been here long enough to know it all, I guess," Tucker was saying.

Forrest laughed, a nice sort of rolling laugh. He had six young'uns already, Mattie thought wistfully, and she'd heard his wife Hazel was carrying again, and all those children knew their daddy, and could hear him laugh like that, maybe every day or so. "Maybe he's smart enough not to pay too much attention," he said, and Mattie's thoughts went back to David.

"You don't think that hill's hainted? How come you ain't bought the farm your own self, then? It's practically next door to you."

"The farm I got is making an old man of me, what I want with another?"

Tucker shook his head, his ruddy face looking mournful. "My daddy used to say that was a good farm, once."

"Well then, why shouldn't Brown have it?"

"Say what you want, that mountain's full of some strange goings on. I'm a Christian, and I ain't saying I believe it all. But I ain't saying I know everything, neither."

"There's no sign of ghosts on my place."

"Well sir, that's your place and not that other. The shadow of that mountain don't fall your way."

Mattie had to leave to take bread out of the oven. The kitchen was steamy with heat, and she propped the back door open, stood watching the slanting rain. It was Saturday, and the loaves and biscuits, along with the two kettles of soup, would be crumbs and dirty bowls by midnight. All week she had made strawberry and rhubarb pies. Whole families would stop, sometimes, on their way home from shopping, and Mattie was both eager for the evening and already weary. To make for my own, she thought, and her stomach twisted with yearning just as the heavy cane thumped against her upper arm. She gasped but didn't cry out, a habit learned early to protect her privacy.

"Git on in there!" Cal's whisper was a snarl. "You know I can't carry them mugs no more, didn't you hear me callin'?"

What if David was just fooling – she blinked back the sudden tears and ran past her grandfather into the big room, hurried to the group of men settled along the long table under the windows, then down the stairs to draw two big pitchers from the barrels in the cool cellar. He said he was serious, he had said it twice, he would get that farm and take her away if she wanted. Oh yes, she wanted. But what did he want with her, when he could go anywhere, see anyone? Oh, David. Mattie's knees buckled on the steps but she caught herself in time, her arms aching from the heavy beer, the blow, and the need to reach out to the thick curly black hair and merry, loving eyes.

She hid in the cellar until Cal left, cussing, for church, and then paced in an agony of terror. Perhaps he would turn back, or maybe David would not come. But she waited in the grape arbor only a quarter hour, and he was there, his fiddle riding under the seat of the borrowed buggy, a pretty bay mare in harness. She clambered up quickly, before he could get down to help, and they trotted away from the old inn, to the crossroads and west, to the hills. She had packed a lunch of bread and cheeses and cold beef.

For three miles the road was broad, well traveled, through open farmland or gentle rises and dips; for the next hour, the way was more wooded, steeper, with rutted and rocky stretches. She knew the area only by a kind of osmosis of talk: New Hope Church was up here somewhere, and the Miller farm, and Mertz Hollow, where the bottles of clear liquor came from, and of course Pine Mountain. David turned off the main track, finally, into a lane, and let the mare pick her way carefully, as rocks exposed by years of untended spring wash-outs stood sharp and uneven. The way was cooler, through deep woods on both sides, until a right angle turn opened a view, and she saw the house and caught her breath, clutching unconsciously at David's leg.

He tied the mare to a big shade maple while she leaped out and stood between two tall pines, looking at the front door with its little stoop. He came up behind her and she turned to meet his grin; they ran like children to look in through windows at the bare rooms with falling ceiling and peeling wallpaper. The kitchen was small, with an old wood range still in it; the other main room downstairs was a little larger, with a pretty stone fireplace at the end. They turned away and walked on to the barn.

"It's sound, I been all through it," David said. "Even the roof, save for the one end." They led the mare down to the springhouse, a stone replica of the farmhouse, and let her drink from the overflow while Mattie stood entranced in the doorway, excited by the images of bustle and routine that the place suggested, though no buckets or milk cans or butter churns had survived the long abandonment.

The rails of the narrow pasture between the barn and springhouse would not have kept in a determined beast, but the grass was thick and they decided to trust the hunger of the mare, and left her, and strolled slowly up through the berry-choked yard back to the house. It was tiny, for a stone house, without the additional wings most of the old houses had been given in the past century. David pushed on the front door and swung it open, and when his hand touched hers she took hold, and they went in.

She could easily avoid Cal's temper in the daylight. He would wait till she slept, she knew, and she propped a chair against the door of her bare little room. She was surprised to wake to its rattling, sure she would never sleep after such a day. She sat up, ready to run past him, knowing the chair was light and wouldn't hold, her heart thudding not from fear of Cal but from the rush of memory, the slight, sweet ache in her hips, the feel of David's hand here, and here.

Cal didn't persist, and she slid back down under the light blanket, and woke in the dawn to the door barred from the outside. She backed away from it, mystified, with no knowing of keys. She laughed a little at her grandfather's senile retribution, relieved her body's needs in the old chamberpot, and took the chair by a window to wait. The tavern was closed Mondays, but he'd want her eventually to clean or fetch something. Her window looked away from the village the inn was on the edge of, and there was little to watch. She looked around the room, pretending to decide what to take with her when David got the loan, but there were no decisions to make. Her clothes, even with the heavy wool sweater and winter shawl, would be easy to carry rolled in a blanket. It was beyond possibility, nowhere even in her pretending, that her grandfather would send with her any of the dishes or even one of the chairs. Perhaps the high stool from the kitchen, if she could lay her hands on it.

She came, like David, with no past to pack around. She had made no secret of that, since it was common knowledge, and he had laughed and said it proved they were meant to start one, together. She had nothing even of her mother. When she died one winter, still not naming her child's father, Cal in his rage and grief had burned all her things, telling the six year old Mattie that to forget her mother was her only chance of staying free of her wickedness.

By afternoon hunger and thirst had make Mattie anxious, but there was no use to pound or call. She dozed, sweat. One window didn't open at all, and the other, though she could get it open a foot, opened to hot westerly breezes bringing little relief into the stuffy room. She tried the door as dark came, but the lock was secure, beyond her strength. She contemplated the drop to the ground, briefly. She knelt by the window and called silently for David, knowing it wouldn't work, feeling it couldn't because she couldn't picture him alone, she didn't even know where he slept, how could her thoughts get to him? He slept sometimes in the lumber mill where he worked, doubling as a kind of night watchman, he had told her that but she had no image of it.

No sounds came to her from the house below. She slept only in snatches that night, and by mid-morning, as the room was heating up again, the panic struck her down.

"Pap! Grandpap!" She screamed to him, her throat sore, her head spinning, slapping hard, then feebly, at the door, sobbing.

He waited another hour. When he flung the door open wide, she was crumpled on the floor, and the strap was in his hand.

For two weeks Cal kept her locked in at night, practically tied to his side during the day. On Sunday he literally tied a short rope to her wrist and led her to church, where Mattie burned with a shame and rage new to her. There were sympathetic, disapproving glances, but no one intervened, and she interpreted the disapproval as knowledge, since Cal had wrenched the confession of mortal sin from her. She was afraid of him now, as she had never been all the years when his temper had been merely a part of the texture of her life. And now she knew she must get free of him, knew that he stood between her and life.

"Out!" Cal shuffled with surprising speed to the door, barring entry with his cane. Only Warren Schultz was in the room; he turned in time to see David Brown grin and tip his hat at the old man, and vanish. Cal thumped his cane and limped, muttering, back to his chair by the fireplace, which he stared at as if there were fire there to watch. Mattie stood frozen where she'd been wiping a table until feeling Warren's gaze she found him watching her with the slightest smile on his face. He cut his eyes toward the kitchen, then turned to Cal.

"Cal, you think if the womens get the vote they'll turn you out of business?" he said, and Mattie stood just a minute longer in confusion, then walked with careful slowness to the kitchen.

"Monday," David said, whispering it against her hair as he gathered her in close to his chest, just outside the back door.

"I'll come right this minute."

"No, Monday evening, before dark. This is Friday, give me the weekend, I'm getting a wagon and team and we can move in, proper. The bank's giving me the papers Monday morning."

She pulled her head back to look at him, to make it real, and he kissed her lips, then again harder, with a little moan in the back of his throat.

"Teddy he's been scroungin' for us," he said when he released her. "Found all manner of useful things."

"Don't come til then," she managed to say, though it hurt her throat to do it. "He'll watch me close all Saturday-Sunday, he'll be sloppy about it come Monday."

She rolled some things in the blanket, Monday afternoon, and brought it to the kitchen, where it sat only half-hidden. She glanced at it so often, her body so tense with dread and happiness, she could scarcely believe Cal didn't notice. He dozed in his chair on the broad wooden porch, while she went in and out the back, finishing the washing, the last she would do here. Did David remember to get wash tubs, she wondered, and nearly laughed out loud. She'd wash in the little creek by the spring, if she had to, and feel lucky.

Coming in for his supper of fried meat and potatoes, Cal noticed the blanket.

"I'm just fixin' to air it," Mattie said, "soon's I get the lines empty." She poured him coffee, and picked up the blanket and went out, right under his gaze. Not able to think of any pretext for picking up the stool, she left it behind.

David grabbed the blanket roll and tossed it to land where it would among the clutter of chests and pails and pots in the wagon bed, and lifted Mattie clean off her feet, swinging her around once before steadying her on the wagon step. He sprang up beside her and the team moved almost before he'd gathered the reins.

"Hey then, are you sad?" He leaned forward and peered into her face.

She laughed, shaking her head, wiping at the tears. "Nothin' like sad," she assured him, "nothing like that at all. Just can't hardly believe it, is all."

"It's true, my love, it's true." And he kissed her, right on the open road, in the twilight.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Parts of the Wholeby Catharine E. Roth Copyright © 2010 by Catharine E. Roth. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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