One Short Fiction

It was about 50 years ago now. I was minding my own business, sitting on the back stoop, eating a bacon and ham sandwich and watching my mother at the wash pot out in the yard. She had it at a boil for the whites and was bent away from the heat, dashing the soapy water with a long paddle, the sweat dripping off her nose. We always washed the whites first, mostly underthings and bed linens, to get the best use out of the water we hauled up from the creek by hand, one bucket at a time. After the whites, we’d wash what we called the goods, clothes for school and church, things mainly for town or for Christmas. We always saved the everydays, clothes for work and play, and then the rags, until last.

We were finished with the whites, and had the washing part done with the goods, when it all started.

“Get up, Frances,” Mommy said, “and help me rinse.”

She began fishing the goods out of the wash pot one at a time for me to put through the mangle wringer before I dropped them into the cold-water rinse tub at my feet, and everything was going fine until her church dress got stuck in the mangle about midway through. I pulled and pulled on the hand crank, and she pushed and pushed on the dress, but nothing moved.

“Damn it! Run tell your Daddy to come get this loose.”

So I ran down the hill and found him setting the spring corn in the big field below the road. He stopped what he was doing and told me, “The wrench for the mangle is hanging on the back wall in the corn crib. Go get it and pry the nut loose yourself.”

Like most corn cribs, ours was a little building bigger than an outhouse, but smaller than a barn, and set away from the house because of the mice it attracted. More of a shed, I guess, but with two-inch gaps between the sideboards to air the corn. Back then, most everybody around here had a corn crib of hewn logs, usually with a flat tin roof and an earthen floor. But ours was different. Bigger and better. Made from milled slats with a raised floor and a framed door and a pitched tar shingle roof. When Daddy first bought the farm, he thought our corn crib was too big and a little ridiculous. But it was full at the time, and there was corn enough to keep the stock fed through that first winter and even sell some in town. So, he came to consider the corn crib to be a good idea. And us kids did too. We liked to play in it in winter. Mound up the cobs as high as we could along the back wall and then climb up and slide down.

I hadn’t been in there since I was little, and when I stepped through the door the familiar smells, and the sight of the sunlight coming through the slats, brought on in me for the first time in my thirteen young years a feeling of nostalgia, a fondness and slight longing for the ways things used to be. I kicked around for black snakes in last year’s dry cobs and then waded to the back wall. I grabbed the wrench and turned to go, but I then stopped. Something caught my eye. It was a blue, pointy looking thing, barely sticking up out of the cobs still mounded up against the wall. It had a gold line painted along the edge I could see and looked to be two feet tall, maybe three. I pushed some of the cobs aside to get a better look and just about fell out when I saw a pale face with a shy smile looking right back at me. I started to run, but took hold of myself, and uncovered a statue of a lady standing in a doorway or maybe the mouth of a cave with a hint of blue sky behind her. She had ivory skin and little gold stars circling around her head. Her arms were down at her sides with her little hands open, palms out. She had on a white scarf and gown under a long blue cape.

I’d not been off the mountain before, but I’d seen this lady at Christmas time and at Vacation Bible School. So I knew who she was.

“Well, shit the bed,” I said out loud. “This be Mother Mary.”

I went to pick her up, to carry her back to the house, but she was heavy, and I don’t know why, but her being heavy like that is what spooked me. I’d been in and out of that corn crib all my life, and now here she was. I jumped back up and headed to Daddy as fast as I could.

“Corn crib,” I said, when I reached him, out of breath. “Blue cape. Little hands …”

“What the hell?” Daddy laughed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Ain’t no hell about it, Daddy. I think Mother Mary is in the corn crib.”

“I got too much to do to put up with one of your stories.”

“But Daddy!”

He gave me a squint eyed look, and then he said, “Alright. Let’s go. But I’ll strap your ass if you’re lying.”

We walked back to the corn crib, and he went in to see for himself. He was in there quite a while and must’ve looked it over pretty good. When he come out, he was silent and seemed a little solemn. He took his hat off and then put it right back on.

“It’s her, ain’t it?” I asked.

“I reckon,” he said.

He stepped back, cupped his hands and called for Mommy.

“Ida! Come look at this!”

“I got a fire under the wash pot!”

“Would you come here, please?”

She came, but she wasn’t happy about it.

“Look at what?” she asked.

“In the corn crib. Just go in and look.”

Mommy winced a little on her bad knee when she took the high step through the door, and she wasn’t in there but a minute before she came back out and walked over to us.

“Where did that come from?’

“I don’t know. Frances found it.”

Through the open door, we could see the corn dust swirling around Mary in the sunbeams coming through the slats behind her. And that got us all spooked, so we took off toward the house post haste.

Nothing more was said until dinner, where it was the only topic discussed.

“Well,” Daddy said, “the folks we bought this place from were Germans. They’re the only Germans I ever saw around here, so I don’t know. Maybe they carried her here from Virginia, where they said they come from, or maybe all the way from Germany.”

“That may be,” Mommy answered, “but why would they go to all that trouble and then just leave her in the corn crib? And why didn’t we see her earlier? We’ve been using that corn crib for years.”

Daddy nodded and didn’t say much else. He figured they must’ve had some reason to leave her there, and to be on the safe side, we left her in there, too.

Back then, there was just the one church in town, so the millenarian types and the more joyful of noise had to get along under one roof. That normally wasn’t a problem, but when Mommy said something about the corn crib at the picnic social that next Sunday, it became one. She had set out her fried chicken and apple brown betty on one of the long tables in the shade. We sat down near the middle, facing the church, with Pastor Shelby and his wife, Carolyn, on our right, and old Mrs. Campbell and her spinster daughter, Abigail, to our left. Our neighbor Jimmy Don Johnson and his family were directly across, and plenty of others in the congregation crowded in to sit or stand within earshot of what was being said, which also happened to put most of them within clear reach of the brown betty.

“Miss Ida,” the pastor said, speaking to Mommy of course, “I don’t know where it would come from, if not from the Germans. They very well could’ve been Palatines, but I never knew them. Of course, I’ll want to come out and look for myself. And how exactly was it found?”

“Frances found it when my church dress got clogged in the mangle.”

“Hmpf,” Mrs. Campbell bit off. “There you go. It’s idolatrous. No matter how it was found. And it come out of nowhere, did it not? It needs to be got rid of.”

“Maybe carried off and broke up?” suggested spinster Abigail.

“Or bind it in white cloth and twine and bury it by the road,” her mother said.

Jimmy Don, the neighbor, laughed, “You saying the Devil jumped up all the way into that corn crib?”

“Well, you never know,” offered someone down by the brown betty.

“Oh, I think I do know,” Jimmy Don said with a grin. “Nothing jumps up from Hell and into a corn crib or anywhere else because a church dress gets clogged in a mangle. That’s superstitious nonsense.”

“Uh, hum,” Pastor Shelby cleared his throat.

“Mrs. Shelby and I will be going to see if the statue is indeed a Palatine representation of Mary, the mother of Jesus. And I have to agree with Jimmy Don that it likely did not appear out of The Abyss, or elsewhere, all of a sudden. Even so I too cannot fathom the mystery of how it was not found sooner. But, and most certainly, however, I mean, I must say, the implications of the fallen angel Beelzebub choosing the form of Mary to be the emissary of his foul intentions on earth would be dire, indeed.”

“The reverent’s right,” Jimmy Don said. “It didn’t just jump up out of nowhere.”

Then, Mommy said, “I still don’t see how we wouldn’t have found her by now. We have lived on that place for almost twenty years, raised all our kids there, only got one left at home, ready to start high school, and we’ve raked out and filled that corn crib every year. It plainly ain’t likely that she showed up out of the blue, but neither is it any more likely that she sit out there for twenty years without being seen.”

“This whole situation,” Daddy said, “is a mystery, as the pastor says. And we’re going to ask Judge Reese to come look the next time he’s riding circuit through here. Maybe between him and the pastor, they’ll see something or know something we don’t.”

“Now hand me that brown betty,” he added, and he scooped the last of it onto his plate.

“We’ve had nothing but good luck since we bought our place, and we sure don’t want to see bad luck coming our way now. So, I don’t know. There’s just no telling.”

After the picnic social, word began to spread around the holler that we found a statue of a blue lady that may or may not be the mother of Jesus in our corn crib. Neighbors started coming to see. The Cantrells. The Dixons and the Lusters. Even families we hardly knew. The pastor came out, and Judge Reese did stop in, and both confirmed it was the Virgin Mary, as the Judge put it.

Meanwhile, wider discussion continued, as it will in the hills, and the Germans theory was ruled out more or less right away. Most everyone agreed that not even a German would do anything as odd as leaving a Virgin Mary in a corn crib. And, anyway, somebody would’ve found the statue sooner than now if they did.

The joyful noise contingent in the congregation came around to abide the idea that maybe she did appear out of the blue. Like a miracle. After all, she was first seen by innocent children. And it was the church dress clogging in the mangle that led to her being found. These facts were not in dispute. Those of the more millenarian persuasion felt those very facts, to the contrary, indicated she must’ve come there by some measure of ill doing. As Mrs. Campbell continued to point out, “it” was, in fact, an idol. That was not in dispute, either. It was not dirty or chipped when it was found. It looked brand new, and it wouldn’t look that way if it’d been out there for years. And there came the sticking point. Everything about it could be argued to be the work of angel or demon alike, including a late breaking and desperate idea that some divided soul had somehow been compelled, whether for good or for ill, to go to Cincinnati after her and then hide her in our corn crib. Opinion was divided and would not be united.

With the discussion at a stalemate, and spring planting coming on, the excitement died down. Mommy’s church dress come out of the mangle just fine. Daddy finished planting, and the corn crop filled in. Jimmy Don’s hayfields grew up, and Daddy and him got the first cut raked and stacked without rain. All summer long, nobody was struck crippled or blind. No sticks rose up from the ground to beat the wicked. Or the weary. Mrs. Campbell and daughter Abigail seemed disappointed that nothing big was going wrong. But Pastor Shelby was affirmed in his learned initial opinion that neither sacred wonder nor calamitous blunder was likely to occur over this anytime soon. My family took comfort in this, and the whole thing more or less blowed over until it come time for the corn to come off the stalk.

Daddy and Jimmy Don always worked the corn harvest together, so Jimmy and his brood followed us home after church one Sunday so the men could talk it out. Mommy and Jimmy’s wife, Adeline, went in to fix lunch. Daddy and Jimmy sat down on the front porch to make arrangements. And I took my place cross-legged on the porch floor with Jimmy’s four stair step boys. The men judged a rough time when the corn would be dry enough to pick and agreed to put off cutting the last of the hay until right after the first frost. Jimmy’s boys kept squirming and fighting, and I finally asked permission for them to go play down at the creek.

“Alright,” Jimmy Don said, “go on but be careful with those church clothes.”

“And you boys stay away from that corn crib,” Daddy added as they run down the hill, and then he stood up and sat right back down.

“Jimmy Don,” he said, “I don’t know what to do about this situation in the corn crib. You and Pastor Shelby both said from the start that it was probably nothing, and Judge Reese agreed. But it still ain’t explained. Ida is still worried about it, and I’m unsettled, too.”

“What does Ida say?”

“Ida says, where did it come from and what does it mean?”

“Well,” I piped up, aiming to protect Mommy’s reputation, “it was her church dress that got stuck in the mangle,” and the men had the nerve to laugh.

“You watch how you talk to Brother Jimmy Don here,” Daddy said, in his best play-scolding way. I hung my head and hid my tickle, trying not to laugh, and it wasn’t but a few minutes later when Mommy called us all in to eat. We had baked chicken stuffed with cornbread, mashed taters, pickled okra, sugar snap peas, spinach, fried green tomatoes, and Mommy’s brown betty, of course. And, well, those sure were some days back then. Days of plenty, that’s for sure.

But anyway, after Jimmy Don and his left, we started talking about the corn crib, and there was nothing to do but walk down there together and look. Daddy and me were dragging our feet, but Mommy surprised us both by going on ahead. She walked right up and opened the door just as smooth as you please.

And nothing was changed. There she stood. Mother Mary. Little hands still open. Little smile still on her face. And I knew I should feel scared, but I didn’t. With Mommy and Daddy there, and I guess it having been a while since I saw her, it didn’t feel the same. Mommy and Daddy turned eyes on one another, and I turned eyes on them. Then we all turned eyes on the one in the crib.

“Look,” Daddy said, with Mommy still holding the door open. “We’ve got to put the corn up somewhere. And it would be silly to burn down this good German built corn crib and build another.”

He turned to Mommy.

“Wouldn’t it?”

“In the light of day, yes,” Mommy said. “But the fact remains that she wasn’t here one day and then she was here the next. Those two things cain’t be true at once.”

“And any idea,” Daddy said, “that some fool went to Cincinnati to get her and then hid her in our corn crib is ridiculous.”

“The matter of the church dress feels silly to me now,” Mommy said in her quiet voice. “But it didn’t feel silly then. And not just to me. It didn’t feel silly to you or to Frances or to at least half the congregation.”

The three of us stood there thinking hard, and after a while, something come to me.

“Maybe that’s it. Everybody in the congregation has been trying to explain it all summer long. Maybe there just ain’t a reasonable explanation to be found.”

“And if there is no reasonable explanation,” Mommy pondered aloud, “then that explains it.”

“What?” Daddy and me asked at the same time.

“I mean there are plenty of things in this world already that can’t be explained. We run up against them all the time, and we don’t stop what we’re doing when we do. We trust in The Almighty that the explanation will come to us farther along. Maybe all this is a test of our faith.”

“Here are the natural facts,” she continued. “The corn is ready to pick. We need a place to put it. We are blessed with this good German built corn crib standing right in front of us. And we’re still tore up over this infernal thing – whatever it is and wherever it come from. But we must remember and be thankful for what we have. Nothing really bad ever happened to us before we found it in this corn crib. Nothing bad has happened since. And all good faith and reason demands that nothing will unless and until the Almighty requires it.”

It was nearing dark, the last pink light in the sky settling onto the corn crib floor.

Mommy shut the door, and we went back up to the house. We sat down for some more brown betty and read to each other from the Books of John and Revelation until time for bed.

All three of us were in a bit of an uproar for the next few days, lost in a feeling of joy filled with wonder. Pastor and Mrs. Shelby come out and prayed with us and then led the whole congregation in a prayer of thanksgiving for our test of faith and for the Almighty’s gift of our understanding. For the sake of the widow Campbell and her daughter, and the unity of the congregation as a whole, the pastor allowed from the pulpit that both sides of divided opinion that summer had been right after all, in so far as the good Lord is known to send the Devil in fey disguise to test all the faithful in trying times.

And after all that, we got back to doing the things we always did. Mommy made me a new dress for my first day in high school and made herself a new church dress cut from the same cloth. Daddy raked the old cobs out of the corn crib, to ready for the harvest, and left Maria, as the Germans apparently called the virgin, where she stood. We picked corn and stacked hay with Jimmy Don, and after trading shares, Daddy filled the corn crib and the barn like he always had. For years after that, Mommy and Daddy covered over that pale face in the corn crib with a new fall harvest and no fuss at all. And that’s how it was, until one year, finally, I believe I was married by then, Mommy went to rake the corn crib, and the Maria was gone. And there never come an explanation for that either. She was just gone. Disappeared. Like a miracle.