by Ron Rash
Laurel went inside. She took the dough tray off its peg and set it on the cook table. As she opened the meal gum and scooped out flour with the straight cup, Laurel debated whether to tell Hank and Slidell about the man with the flute, decided not to.
Chapter Two
When Laurel awoke on Saturday, she busied herself with the morning chores, cleaning out the ash grate, fetching milk and butter from the springhouse, water from the well. Hank had laid wood and kindling in the firebox last night, so she stuffed a page from last year’s wish book inside and raked a kitchen match across the black iron. The fire caught and Laurel clanged the door shut. The warm smell of coffee filled the room as she fried the eggs and slid them on the plates, took cornbread from the pie safe and placed it on the table by the blackberry jam and butter, milk for the coffee. Last month Hank had wondered aloud if they should buy a shoat to raise for breakfast meat. He’d shown no surprise when Laurel argued against it.
Even before the parakeets had come to the cove, the chore Laurel hated most growing up was feeding the hogs. There had been three in the pen, one a shoat but the others thick and hairy and tall as calves. Each time Laurel fed them, she’d approached with shaking hands, moving quietly so she could pour the slops before the hogs rushed the trough. But they always knew. When she leaned the pail over the top board, the hogs squealed and grunted, clambered into the wooden trough and crashed their swollen bodies against the board slats. The gray wood bowed and the rusty nails creaked and each time Laurel believed the boards and nails would give and the hogs would tear her apart like a poppet doll.
Hank cursed and Laurel knew some button or snap frustrated him, that or a bootlace. Things he wouldn’t let her help him with. He came out wearing the shirt she’d washed yesterday, the left sleeve cut off at the elbow so he’d not have to bother pinning it. She poured the coffee and they sat down to eat. There was a fairness in not telling about the man with the flute, Laurel thought, because Hank kept so much to himself, especially about Carolyn Weatherbee. He was all but betrothed, if not betrothed, but Laurel knew nothing about the wedding plans.
Her daddy’s a superstitious old fool and I got to humor him since he’s already tallied my gone hand against me. That was how Hank explained never asking Laurel along on Sunday mornings when he borrowed Slidell’s horse and wagon and made the three-mile trip to the Weatherbee farm, or how, at the victory jubilees, Hank barely acknowledged Laurel once the Weatherbees arrived. That’ll soon change, she reminded herself. What the old man believed wouldn’t matter once Hank and Carolyn were married and living in the cove.
They didn’t speak until only smears of jam remained on their plates.
“I’ll go feed the colt and calves,” Hank said as he pushed back his chair.
“Slidell helping you today?”
“Probably not. It sounded like he’s got a full portion doing his own chores, especially since we’re off to town come afternoon.”
After Hank left, Laurel washed the cups and dishes and flatware, filled the gray berlin kettle with pole beans and set it on the stove to simmer. She went to the sink, sifted soda powder on her toothbrush and brushed her teeth before she tied her hair back with a crimped hairpin. Dew soaked her bare feet as she walked toward the cornfield. A crow cawed once and lifted from amid the tasseled stalks, passed over the two nailed boards and the tattered remnants of a shirt. She’d need to get another from the bottom drawer, maybe set a straw hat atop the seed-sack face. Might at least keep them from roosting on it, Laurel figured.
The cliff loomed over her and though her eyes were cast downward she felt its presence. Even inside the cabin she could feel it, as though the cliff’s shadow was so dense it soaked through the wood. Nothing but shadow land, her mother had told Laurel, and claimed there wasn’t a gloamier place in the whole Blue Ridge. A cursed place as well, most people in the county believed, cursed long before Laurel’s father bought the land. The Cherokee had stayed away from the cove, and the first white family to settle here had all died of smallpox. There were stories of hunters who’d come into the cove and never been seen again, a place where ghosts and fetches wandered. But Laurel’s parents didn’t know these things the spring her father crossed the state line separating Cocke County and Madison in search of cheap land, found a hundred acres for the price of twenty in Tennessee.
Laurel was eight when her father collapsed in the field. Doctor Carter had told him there was nothing to be done except not exert himself. Then Laurel’s mother had died and after that hardly anyone except Slidell entered the cove. Even Preacher Goins, who’d bibled her mother’s funeral, made sure he left before dark. He hadn’t taken Laurel’s hand or hugged her and Laurel knew the why of that too. At school her classmates echoed what their parents believed—that her father’s heart gave out after rocking Laurel with the birthmark touching his chest, that her mother’s poisoned limb had turned the color of Laurel’s stained skin, that the cove itself had marked Laurel as its own. Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance. That was what Miss Calicut always told the class when a student said an owl’s hoot meant someone would die or killing black snakes could end a drought. But her saying so didn’t do much good, especially when parents complained that Miss Calicut needed to stick to reading and ciphering—things a schoolmarm understood.
Laurel laid the hoe at a row end. Hank was in the high pasture, his back to her as he planted another fence post. I’ll just go as far as the wash pool, she told herself. As she passed the barn, she saw a praying mantis long as a pencil clinging to a board. At the wood’s edge, dark berries sagged the poke stalks and the joe-pye weed was level with her eyes. All sure signs summer would soon be over.
Laurel followed the path through dead chestnuts whose peeling bark revealed wood the color of bone. Cleared four hundred dollars on the deal and we’ll be able to live off the chestnuts alone, her father bragged when he bought the land, but red dots sinister as those on black widows had already appeared on the tree trunks. Then as their first summer here passed, more and more dark patches scoured the once-green ridges. One more calamity, because blue mold had rotted the tobacco and the light-starved orchard had yielded only a sprinkling of shriveled fruit. Her father had sworn a blind man would be more fortunate, because he’d at least not have to watch it happen.
When Laurel got to the outcrop, she sat and listened to sounds usually no more noticeable than her own breath. But she heard them now, water swiveling around rocks, the wind stirring leaves, the farther-off pecking of a yellowhammer. All of these she heard first, because the music was quieter today, a mournful song played softly.
Coincidence and ignorance, Miss Calicut said, but there had been times in the last year, especially after her father died, that Laurel felt she herself might be a ghost. Did a ghost even know it was a ghost? Days would pass and Laurel wouldn’t see a single living soul. She’d left the cove only on the Saturdays she went to town with Slidell or to the monthly victory jubilees. Both places people avoided her, crossing the street, moving to another barn corner. Wasn’t that what a ghost was, a thing cut off from the living? Those nights in the cove Laurel had waked to sounds and silences never noticed when Hank or her father had been around—the emptiness of every other room, the creak of the well’s rope and pulley, the cabin resettling some part of itself—the loneliest sorts of sounds and silences. There had been mornings she’d looked in the mirror and wondered if what she saw wasn’t a reflection but instead a floating weightless thing. After a while she quit changing the month on the Black Draught calendar. If Slidell showed up in his brogans and overalls to help with chores Laurel couldn’t do alone, it was Wednesday. If he wore a white linen shirt and corduroy pants, it was the weekend. Laurel remembered how once she’d leaned close just to see her breath condense on the mirror’s glass.
One night at a victory jubilee Jubel Parton asked her to go outside, winking at his friends as he did so. Reeking of whiskey, he kissed her sloppily o
n the mouth. Doing it because he’s drunk, Laurel had believed, but let him do it anyway, because if his hands and lips could touch her, she was yet flesh and blood. Jubel’s daddy owned Parton’s Outdoor Goods, so the next Saturday when she and Slidell were in Mars Hill, Laurel had walked down an aisle of steel traps and cane poles to the counter. Jubel told another clerk to take the register and led Laurel to the cellar where they lay on burlap feed bags that chafed her arms and legs. She’d have let him have her right then, but after a few minutes he stopped. Need us a rubber so there won’t be no woods colt, Jubel had said, and told her he’d bring one to the next jubilee. Three weeks later Jubel was waiting outside. He’d taken a last swallow from a whiskey bottle and handed it to Ray Janson, who snickered as Jubel took Laurel’s hand, grabbed a horse blanket from a wagon, and walked to the pasture’s edge. There was enough light from the barn mouth to risk being seen and Laurel asked to go into the woods. Better here, Jubel had answered. After they’d finished, Jubel gave her a checkered handkerchief to wash the blood off her legs. It was only when she got up that Laurel saw the others. Jubel walked toward Ray Janson and held out his hand for the wagered gold coin.
As the flute began another song, Laurel thought of how in six months they’d have a horse big enough to haul the wagon. They could start selling milk and eggs, if not in Mars Hill then Marshall, and each year there’d be more livestock. She’d even seen the parakeets last week. A small flock, no more than a half dozen, but they had swooped low enough to show their red and yellow heads before crossing the ridge toward the Ledbetter farm. And this music, another pretty thing that had found its way into the cove. Laurel dipped her hand and felt the shock of cold as she palmed the water and drank. Go on up there or go on home, she told herself, you’ve got too many chores to dawdle. She stepped into the water and followed the flute’s song up the ridge and into the rhododendron.
The stranger was exactly as he’d been yesterday, back against the tree and eyes closed as he balanced the flute. His not moving gave her a chill. Having to eat or drink or stretch your legs was a human thing. Laurel looked around for mushrooms in a fairy ring or some other sign. Expecting the worst of him same as folks do to you, Laurel chided herself. Scabs and scratches proved that the stranger bled. Eating too, for nubbed corncobs lay in the campfire’s ashes. Laurel eased herself onto the ground. The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren’t needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn’t about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been.
The man stopped midsong and peered intently down the ridge, then seemed to relax. He placed the flute in the leather case and sat a few minutes, thinking about something. She couldn’t tell if what he pondered pleased or vexed him, but Laurel suddenly wished she could know. It would be, like the music, something secretly shared. The man stood and stretched, walked up to the ridge crest and gazed toward the Ledbetter farm. Laurel lifted a rhododendron branch to see his campsite better. A tree branch shaped like a club lay beside the leaf pallet. One end wasn’t much thicker than a tobacco stick, but a burl knot on the other bulged big as a yarn ball. He could have seen a copperhead or heard a panther. It could be for nothing more than that, Laurel told herself, but crept farther back into the rhododendron.
The stranger came down the ridge and took an apple from the haversack. Green and hard, but he bit right into it, his mouth pruning with its sourness. Laurel’s stomach grumbled because it was near noon-dinner time for her too, but if she moved he’d hear her. The man finished the apple and threw the core into the woods, picked up the flute. This time the notes were hesitant, more like birdsong. His eyes closed and the notes blended into each other and it wasn’t the song of a warbler or peewee but a thrush, the kind with black spots and a reddish tail. Go, Laurel told herself, before he stops again.
As she walked into the yard, Hank checked the pocket watch he’d brought back from France.
“We need to soon get going or Slidell will leave without us,” Hank said.
Laurel hurriedly fixed their food and left the dishes for later. She and Hank walked toward the notch, passing through more dead chestnuts. The blight that killed them was first found in New York City, Miss Calicut had told them, but there were people who swore that, in these mountains at least, it had started here in the cove. The land began to slant upward and the cliff’s shadow deepened. As the trail thinned, Hank stepped ahead of her. The trail curled around the cliff face and the sky spread out wide and blue as if leveled by a rolling pin.
At the trail notch, an ash tree narrowed the passage. Glass bottles had been knotted to the limb with leather strips, hung close so they could clink against each other, on the wood itself an X painted in red. Pieces of glass, some blue and some clear, cluttered the ground like spills of rock candy.
Put there as a warning. Hank cursed and kicked the glass shards off the path, raised wisps of salt as he did so. His shoulders pulled inward and his hand clenched. When he’d first come back from the war, Hank had torn bottles and cans off the branch, but they always reappeared. He paused and Laurel thought he might strip the tree again. Instead, Hank went on and Laurel followed.
“Hope we didn’t hold you up,” Hank said as they came into the yard.
“Naw,” Slidell said.
He raised himself from the porch steps, picked up his shotgun, and began walking toward the barn. Slidell’s face was chapped and deep furrowed, but he moved with the gait of a man decades younger. Shoulders unhunched, belly taut and hazel eyes clear. Even the white hair was spry, thick and bristly. Hank followed Slidell to the barn to help harness Ginny to the wagon. Laurel waited in the side yard by the bee box. A drowsy hum came from inside the white wood. One day soon Slidell would smoke the bees, take out the super, and pour the honey into quart mason jars. He’d bring Hank and Laurel more than he’d keep for himself. Laurel would hear him coming, the jars clanking inside a tote sack swung over his shoulder.
She joined the men on the buckboard and Slidell gathered the checkreins in his gnarly hands. They bumped down a wide path, passing the small graveyard and the pasture, once a cornfield, where Slidell’s father and brother had been killed by outliers during the Confederate War. Folks will step on my land and not fret a moment that a man and a fourteen-year-old boy was murdered here with less conscience than killing two snakes, Slidell had once told her. This is a place folks ought to be scared of, not some gloamy cove.
Soon the path spread its weedy shoulders and became a dirt wayfare. The land slanted downward and trees thickened. Ginny was old and swaybacked, her gait slow and measured. Slidell gave the checkreins an occasional halfhearted shake, more out of habit than expectation the horse’s pace would quicken.
Hank nodded at the double-barreled shotgun in the wagon bed.
“That boar hog vexing you again?”
“No, but last week he was standing bold as Jehoshaphat at the end of this wayfare. He didn’t look to be trifled with, especially with those tusks jutting off his face like hay hooks.”
“But you haven’t seen him near the notch?” Laurel asked.
“Not yet, but come near harvesttime I figure him to make his way up to my cabbage patch like he done last year, unless that shotgun curbs his appetite once and for all.”
“I hope you kill it,” Laurel said.
“Help me be on the lookout and maybe I’ll satisfy the both of us,” Slidell said. He jostled the checkreins again and turned to Hank. “You buying more wire today?”
“That and staples,” Hank answered. “I might price a pulley for the new well, in case I ever get the damn thing done.”
“I wish I could help you,” Slidell said, “but well digging is a young man’s game, at least far deep as you are now. This war will end soon and there’ll be more young men around. They’ll have been out in the world an
d be less obliged to listen to tall tales and nonsense.”
“Maybe,” Hank said.
They came to the old Marshall toll pike and turned left. Wheel tracks from wagons and automobiles braided the dust and chert. The trees were not as close or numerous. They passed several cabins, then a two-story farmhouse whose tin roof shimmered. More homes appeared and fewer fields and pastures. Laurel could see the college now, first the clock tower and then the brick and wood buildings. The pike crested a last time and they descended, first passing the granite arch and brick drive that led up to the college, then coming into town.
As always, Laurel felt her stomach tense. Since it was Saturday, wagons and horses were tethered to every hitching post, a few automobiles nosed up to the boardwalks as well. The wagon made a halting progress amid farm families and town folk, a few college students. Laurel looked for Marcie Bettingfield’s wagon, hoping to hear how she and her baby were doing. They passed Lusk’s Barbershop and Feith Savings and Loan, across from them what had been a tailor’s shop but now had UNITED STATES RECRUITING OFFICE painted on the window. Chauncey Feith stood outside the doorway in his uniform. Laurel glanced over to see if Hank noticed him, but his eyes were fixed straight ahead, as were hers when they passed Parton’s Outdoor Goods.
Two women in bonnets came out of the post office. One nudged the other at the wagon’s approach. They hurriedly crossed the street, heads turned so the bonnets concealed their faces. Slidell found an empty hitching post in front of the spinning red-and-white pole advertising Lusk’s Barbershop.