A Parchment of Leaves by Silas House Page B

a war. They whistled and hollered, held their glasses and bottles and jars high in the air.
    My chest heaved. I was so out of breath that I didn’t think I could make it back to my place on Saul’s lap, and I fell right back on a quilt, made damp by dew, breathing hard. When I finally gathered myself back together, I set up, leaning back on my hands, and tried to shake away the feeling. It was just the moonshine, I figured.
    A woman come out of the crowd into the middle of the circle. There were so many people there that I had not noticed her before, but my eyes fell so straight upon her that I felt I was meant to be seeing her. She looked different from the women on God’s Creek, more like my aunts and the women I had knowed growing up. She held herself in a proud way, her legs planted firmly on the ground.
    She was saying something low and breathy to the fiddler, so I knowed she was about to sing for us.
    â€œSing ‘Long Journey Home,’ Serena!” a man called out.
    I had heard tell of her, of course. Her man, Whistle-Dick, worked with Saul, and they lived on the next creek over from us, but she had been gone ever since I had come to God’s Creek. She had been gone way over to Pineville, setting beside her mother’s deathbed. She had been home a week, but I hadn’t even had the time to go down and speak to her, what with the house-raising. “That gal’s a crackerjack,” Saul had said, but I hadn’t thought much about it.
    I spoke her name to myself. She was named just right, as her face was so smooth and clean that it looked as if she had just dashed two handfuls of ice water onto it. Her eyes were wide, so that she seemed to be taking in every single thing with cool concentration. She was a big-boned woman, but in that curvy way that men like. She was solid as a beech tree, with hands that looked as if they knowed how to do things. She held her shoulders square, her chin high.
    Whistle-Dick was drunker than anybody there. Falling-down drunk, and by dark he had passed out right on the porch floor. Now, most women would have either got mad and took off home by theirself or went over there and tried to tend to their man, making sure he wasn’t about to get sick. But Serena just got up to sing.
    Everybody was calling out different songs for her to sing while Aaron tried to tune his banjo.
    She smiled at the crowd and spoke in a strong voice. “You all just hush now,” she said. “I believe I’ll do ‘The Two Sisters.’”
    That was a song about a girl who drowns her own sister out of jealousy. I never had liked that song, since it was one of those that repeated the same verse over and over, but this time it was altogether different. Serena had the clearest and most perfect voice that I had ever heard in my life. She must have had a whippoorwill’s soul because she sung just as pretty and mournful as they did. She closed her eyes and held her face skyward, and a wrinkle come to her brow at some verses, making me believe that she felt every painful word of that song, like somehow she was connected to what happened in it. She sung:
    She pushed her a little further from shore,
Bow down.
    Pushed her a little further from shore,
Bow and bend to me.
    She bent and pushed her out from the shore,
    All for the sake of the hat that she wore.
    I savored her voice the way I had once clenched my mouth tight to lock in the taste of my mama’s coffee. The whole yard was quiet. I closed my eyes and felt the words make goose bumps run up the backs of my arms.
    The miller was hanged for his deadly sin,
Bow down.
    The miller was hanged for his deadly sin,
Bow and bend to me.
    The miller was hanged for his deadly sin,
    The older sister ought to have been.
    I will be true, true to my love;
    Love if my love will be true to me.
    When she was done, she held handfuls of her skirt and walked back to her seat. Everybody was stunned for a minute, I reckon, because