A Parchment of Leaves Read Free Page B

mean.”
    I had been around horses enough to know what this meant, so when they all collapsed in laughter, I had to join in.
    I couldn’t have cared less if they loved him or if they had all hated him and met him at the bridge with snarls and shotguns. I had decided that I was going to have him.
    Our courting never took us past the mouth of Redbud. Even though Daddy thought a lot of Saul, he wouldn’t allow it. Daddy had said that I was his most precious stone. “I’ll let you trail from my fingers, but not be plucked,” Daddy told me one evening when Saul came calling.
    I didn’t care where we went, as long as he come to see me, but I would have liked to ride off on that fine horse with him a time or two without worrying how far we went. I thought a lot about how it would feel to just slip away, to just wrap my arms around Saul’s waist and take off. We never got to do that, though. We always went down to the confluence of Redbud Creek and the Black Banks River. There was a great big rock there, round as an unbaked biscuit. It had a crooked nose that jutted out over the water. This was our spot.
    Summer was barely gone before he asked me to marry him. I remember the way the air smelled that day—like blackberries ripe and about to bust on the vines. The sky was without one stain of cloud, and there didn’t seem to be a sound besides that of his horse scratching its neck against a scaly-barked hickory and the pretty racket ofthe falls. We sat there where we always did, watching the creek fall into the river. The creek was so fast and loud that you couldn’t do much talking there. This wall of noise gave us the chance to sit there and study each other. I spent hours looking at the veins in his arms, the calluses on his hands. He had taken a job at the sawmill and this had made his arms firm, his hands much bigger. When we wanted to speak, we’d have to either holler or lean over to each other’s ears. It was a good courting place on this account. Any two people can set and jaw all day long, but it takes two people right for each other to set together and just be quiet. And it’s good to have to talk close to somebody’s ear. Sometimes when he did this, his hot breath would send a shudder all through me.
    That day, he run his rough hand down the whole length of my hair and smoothed the ends out onto the rock behind me. I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of him touching me in such a way. I have always believed that somebody touching your head is a sign of love, and his doing so got to me so badly that I felt like crying out. It seemed better to me than if he had leaned me back onto the rock and set into kissing. I knowed exactly how cool my hair was beneath his fingers, how his big palm could have fit my head just like a cap if he had taken the notion to position it in such a way, and I closed my eyes.
    The closer it got to dark, the louder the water seemed to be. The sky was red at the horizon, and the moon drifted like a white melon rind in the purple sky opposite.
    â€œVine?” I heard him yell.
    I turned to face him. “What?”
    â€œWe ought to just get married,” he hollered.
    I nodded. “Well,” I mouthed. I didn’t want to scream out my acceptance, but I sure felt like it. I turned back to the creek and was aware of my shoulders arching up in the smile that just about cut my face in half.
    I STOOD WITHIN the shadows of the porch when Saul took Daddy out in the yard to ask for my hand. I had told Saul that it was customary to ask the mother of a Cherokee girl first, but he felt it would be a betrayal of Daddy if he did not tell him before anyone else. They were friends, after all.
    Daddy leaned against the gate, his face made darker and older by the dying light. I knowed Daddy would say it was all right, but that he’d tell Saul to ask for Mama’s permission. I seen Daddy nod his head and put his finger to the touch-me-not