Will was the youngest of three boys, Pa being the oldest. (The Macurdies had always been cursed with what folks around there considered small families; I’d find out more about that later.) I was a little kid five years old when he married Varia. Will was about twenty-five at the time. Even then, I wondered why such a pretty girl would marry someone strange as Will. Some months later she got with child, and when she was supposedly about five months along, Will took her into town. She’d take the train to Evansville, she said, to get cared for and midwifed by her gramma on her mama’s side. Some folks thought that was an insult to the Macurdy clan, and to Doc Simmons, and it seemed awful soon, only five months along. But Will was content, so no one in the family said anything. Us Macurdies have always been easy going; let folks pretty much be what they are. And Varia’d said the women in her family had a lot of trouble carrying to full term and birthing, so she wanted to be with her own gramma.
She was back about six weeks later, her belly down to normal, which on her was flat. And didn’t have any baby with her. No one was surprised at that, of course; she hadn’t carried it long enough. Miscarried, she told Mamma, like she’d been afraid she might. No one troubled her to tell more; didn’t want to grieve her.
Melissy Turnbuck told Julie she wondered if the baby hadn’t been the victim of an orangewood knitting needle. Julie slapped her face for that; I saw her do it. The only one more surprised than me was Melissy. Years later, Julie told me that Varia having an abortion at five, six months wouldn’t make sense anyway. Julie worked for Doc Simmons then, and explained that five months is too far along for that.
Afterward, Varia got with child about every other year—pretty remarkable in our family—and always went off to her gramma, and never came home with anything more than her suitcase. After about the third time, we came to expect it, but she and Will kept trying.
By then we’d come to know that she was strange in other ways than her miscarriages, her tilty green eyes, and laughing at odd times. Because us kids were growing up, and Will didn’t look all that young anymore—but Varia didn’t look any different. In fact, when I was twenty-five, she still looked twenty, though she had to be around forty by then, at least.
That’s the year a big old white oak barber-chaired on Will—split up from the stump, kicked loose about ten feet up, and fell on him. White oak’s treacherous that way; the main reason folks log it is, it’s the only tree that’s much good for wet cooperage, so it’s worth a lot. The one that got him had a butt better’n three feet across. He’d chained it and all before he ever picked up the ax, and tightened the chain with wedges, but the grab hook broke off! Ed Lewis, on the other end of the saw, said all he could see of Will was his left boot and right arm; the rest of him was under that big oak butt, squashed flat as pie crust. It shook Ed so bad, he quit logging; got a job at Singleton’s, delivering coal and hogged stovewood. After they got the tree off Will, Byron Haskell, the undertaker, said he never before saw anything looked like that, and hoped never to again. The casket was kept closed, of course.
Pa said one thing about it was, Will died too quick to suffer.
Ma commented on how brave Varia was, what a strong front she put up, though she did look a little pale and drawn for a while. Afterward a couple of fellas around there tried paying court to her. Pretty as she was, the prettiest woman in Washington County, you might have thought there’d be more, quite a few more, but there was only the two. Unless you count old Lennox Campbell drooling on his vest. Could be they were scared off by how young she looked for her age, plus when it came to giving birth, she seemed sterile as a freemartin.