The Cove

by Ron Rash

  Chauncey began to feel the alcohol. Nothing much, just a soft buzzing in the back of his brain. He’d heard moonshine was twice as potent as bourbon, but he’d once drunk half a bottle of L & G and never slurred a word.

  “What do you hear about your nephew?” Chauncey asked. “They still think Paul to be up there awhile?”

  “Three more months,” Boyce said, staring at his glass as he spoke.

  Chauncey took a swallow of his beer and tapped his shot glass against the bar. Meachum came over and refilled it.

  “That’s some fine white liquor you’re pouring,” Chauncey said. “When those doctors in Washington are done, all Paul will need is a couple of glasses of this and he’ll be totally cured.”

  “That’s God’s own truth,” one of the old men said as Chauncey drained his shot glass. “It’ll cure most any ailings a fellow can have.”

  Chauncey swallowed and set the glass down hard again as the alcohol made its slow slide into his stomach.

  “Yes, that’s quality whiskey,” Chauncey said, and winked at Meachum. “Whoever made it knew what he was doing. Right, Boyce?”

  “I’d not know,” Boyce answered.

  “Of course not,” Chauncey said and grinned. “There couldn’t be anybody in these parts running a still. It’s probably something those Canucks brewed.”

  Boyce emptied his shot glass and took a long swallow of beer. Chauncey felt his face starting to tingle. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, more like drizzle on a hot summer day. An amber glow now limned the room. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, let his eyes settle on the sergeant’s stripes. Estep and the other man had been privates, both sent home after six months, but Chauncey had been in the army ten months already and was still in. His eyes drifted from his own face to Estep’s. At a district meeting, Captain Arnold had said there were men so afraid before battle that their nipples gave milk. So cowardly they were trying to turn themselves into women, Captain Arnold claimed. For all Chauncey knew, Estep could have been chicken enough to do that. It wouldn’t surprise him a bit.

  Boyce finished the beer and stepped from the bar.

  “You tell Paul we’ll do something special for him when he gets back home,” Chauncey said.

  Boyce gave the slightest nod and walked out.

  “We will,” Chauncey said, and one of the old men grunted in assent.

  He could leave now too, but Chauncey didn’t feel like leaving anymore, at least not yet. Five months he’d avoided Estep, sometimes crossing the street so as not to pass him. People had noticed. He knew they’d rather believe Chauncey did it out of fear than out of contempt for a man who had to be conscripted to fight, the same as they’d rather believe he had gotten to be a recruiter because his father and Senator Zeller knew each other. Captain Arnold himself had told Chauncey the day of his commission that if Chauncey Feith wasn’t the right man for the job he wouldn’t have appointed him even if his father was Woodrow Wilson.

  Chauncey studied the mirrored face he’d avoided too long, looking at every inch, the ridged scars and even the sunk flesh where Estep’s eye had been. Meachum polished the bar near the old men, rubbing the same spot over and over like it was a magic lamp he hoped to summon a genie from. Probably wishing I’d leave, Chauncey thought, and tapped the glass, not so much for a drink as to make Meachum quit pretending he wasn’t in the room. Meachum brought over the bottle.

  “You sure?” the bartender asked, saying it soft, but not soft enough that the others couldn’t hear.

  The old men gandered his way. Estep looked up as well.

  “I wouldn’t ask for it if I didn’t want it,” Chauncey said. “Pour my damn drink.”

  He lifted the glass and drained it and looked around. The liquor didn’t settle as easy this time.

  “That’s some fierce drinking you’re doing there,” one of the old men said, and raised his empty shot glass. “I’d toast you if I had me some more nectar to sup.”

  “Give him another, Meachum,” Chauncey said, and Meachum poured the man a drink.

  “To you, sir,” the man said, raising the glass, “and all men like you what have worn the uniform.”

  A scoff came from the back of the room. Don’t give him the pleasure of acknowledging it, Chauncey told himself. The old men hadn’t seemed to notice, Meachum either, who was back polishing the bar. But it didn’t matter if they had heard because Chauncey Feith didn’t give a damn what Estep or any of the rest of them thought, and that included Hank Shelton and his smart-ass remark when all Chauncey had done was remind Shelton and the rest of them who the real enemy was. He thought about Estep, who could laze all day in a saloon and no one said a word about it, but if Chauncey left his office fifteen minutes early the same folks went into conniptions.

  The liquor began to sour in his stomach. Rotgut, that’s what some called it, and with good reason. As Chauncey stared in the mirror, he thought how a soldier in Europe could be a fool or a coward for months and act brave one time, maybe for just a few seconds, and everything he’d done wrong was forgotten. Or maybe not even brave for a few seconds. From what Chauncey knew, all Estep had done was stand in a trench, probably cowering there because he was too chickenshit to leave it. The same was true of Hank Shelton. Some folks would think him quite the fellow because he tried to take water to a wounded soldier. They’d forget all about the cove and that witchy sister of his. But Shelton himself admitted he’d thought it was a Tommy since the man called for water in English. He’d probably figured there wasn’t a Hun within miles. Shelton hadn’t gone alone either. Another American soldier went with him and he got the worst of it, shot in the chest and nearly dying. If Hank Shelton had known it was a German sniper, or that one was close by, he’d probably have been afraid to go. Yet they’d both been given purple hearts, like Shelton and Estep had done nothing but be heroes the whole time. And now they got to come back and act like Chauncey Feith wasn’t near the man they were, even mock his first name, too ignorant to know that the name Chauncey meant chancellor, a leader.

  What Chauncey did took courage too. It wasn’t the kind where you had a scar or ribbon you could show off, but instead a day-to-day courage as you stood up for what you believed no matter what. An unsung hero, because you couldn’t go around telling people that any man could hold a rifle and stand in a trench but only a select few could do what a general or commodore or recruiter did. Regular soldiers needed to believe they were the ones who mattered most, and that’s what Chauncey did with every recruit. He made each one feel special and he never forgot for a single moment that a few of them would be special, real heroes like Paul Clayton, who’d wiped out two Hun machine-gun nests and won a Silver Star.

  Another of the old men raised his empty glass.

  “I’d like to toast you as well, sir, except I’ve got nary a drop.”

  Chauncey pushed another silver dollar in Meachum’s direction and the bartender filled the glass.

  “I’m glad to buy any man in this room a drink as long as he’s not a shirker,” Chauncey said loudly.

  “To you and the uniform,” the old drunk slurred.

  “Who are you calling a shirker, Feith?” Estep asked.

  The old men quit talking and Meachum stopped wiping the bar.

  “I said, who you calling a shirker, Feith?”

  He watched in the mirror as Estep pushed back his chair and stood.

  “I’m not talking about you,” Chauncey said.

  “Who are you talking about then,” Estep asked, “besides yourself?”

  Meachum came around the bar and stood in front of Estep.

  “This doesn’t concern you, Meachum,” Estep said.

  “It does if it’s happening here,” Meachum answered.

  For a few moments no one spoke.

  “Yeah, I guess it does, especially since the savings and loan’s got a note on you,” Estep sai
d.

  The veteran turned and shoved through the swinging doors, so late in the day now that no light flashed in from outside. Meachum returned to the bar with the table’s empty glasses. He doused them in a bucket of gray water and wiped each one dry before setting it on a cloth.

  “Estep knew I wasn’t talking about him,” Chauncey said.

  Meachum didn’t turn around. Chauncey picked up his change and turned to leave, but the room tilted and he grabbed the bar edge. Give yourself a minute, he told himself. Chauncey tried to recall why he’d come into the Turkey Trot in the first place and remembered. He thought about how Paul Clayton hadn’t waited to be conscripted but had come into the recruiting office on his eighteenth birthday and volunteered despite his mother and uncles telling him not to. When Paul had finished signing the forms, the first thing he did was salute Chauncey. It had been all he could do not to shed a tear, especially since Paul had been one of the first to join Chauncey’s chapter of the Boys Working Reserve.

  He slowly crossed the floor and passed through the doors. If he went home soused, his father would be displeased and his mother would cry, so Chauncey decided to go to the recruiting office instead. After a few stabs at the key hole, he got inside and turned on the electric light. The black letters on the eye chart bobbed a few moments before resettling in their proper positions. Chauncey sat down at his desk and placed his brow on his forearms as the nausea came again. He tried to be perfectly still, his breaths mere sips of air that went no farther than the top of his lungs. He imagined his insides a froth of foul water that had to be calmed. It helped and he began to feel better.

  He opened the desk’s bottom drawer and took out his speech for the next jubilee. It was a bully speech, one the governor of North Carolina himself would be proud to give. Which was no surprise because Chauncey had always been good with words. At the bank, he’d been able to sit down with men three times his age and convince them that their money was better off in Feith Savings and Loan than hidden in a tin can, or explain why a mortgage was the best way to secure a loan. Chauncey had always found the words to assuage their concerns, just as he did now with parents and wives and sometimes the recruits themselves.

  The tower bell chimed eight times before Chauncey felt sober enough to go home. A headache was forming like a thundercloud, but before it erupted an idea came to him. He’d show Estep and Meachum and every other person in Mars Hill that Sergeant Chauncey Feith could lead by example as well as words. He’d show them he could lead not just a troop of boys but a whole community. When Paul Clayton got out of the hospital, he’d have the best homecoming of any soldier in the whole state.

  Chapter Seven

  Wednesday morning after the men went to the pasture, Laurel stood before the books on the makeshift shelf. She ran her index finger down each one. Keep reading and studying them, Miss Calicut had told her that long-ago September when school started again, that way you can stay caught up until enough parents realize how silly they’re acting. By then your father may be sprier too. Even with all the meanness she had endured from other pupils, Miss Calicut had made school the best place Laurel had ever known. Everywhere in the classroom there was something special—on the back wall a map of the United States and around it pictures of a beach in Florida with white sand and a blue ocean, a field of purple wildflowers in Nebraska, another of buildings in New York so tall they were called skyscrapers, another of an orange canyon in Texas. There’d been a globe in the room and Laurel could spin it and the whole world pass before her, each continent a different color. Miss Calicut had a big table next to her desk too, and on it were boxes with pretty rocks and a glass case with butterflies and moths. Real American and North Carolina flags stood by the doorway and beside them a shelf you could pick a book from to borrow over a weekend. Even now, sixteen years later, Laurel had seen more of the world in that one classroom than anywhere outside it.

  Miss Calicut had been young and pretty and she knew all sorts of interesting things about different places, like what people wore and ate, and if the country had mountains or deserts and what kinds of animals lived there. When Miss Calicut read books aloud like Anne of Green Gables and Great Expectations, she changed her voice for the different people in the book and it seemed you knew those people in the realest sort of way. Miss Calicut was always bringing in a plant or bug and once even a live snake and she’d feature something about it that you didn’t know. Best of all, she made Laurel feel different in a good way, doing small things like hugging her every morning or letting her take the roll or ring the recess bell. One time when a town girl teased about her homespun dress, Miss Calicut told Laurel that the other girl was jealous because her own mother couldn’t sew. Whenever she made the highest test grade or won a spell down, Miss Calicut bragged on her and said Laurel had the smarts to be a tip-top schoolteacher, said it in front of the whole class. On that last day, Miss Calicut had given her the seventh-grade textbooks and a brand-new dictionary. For Laurel Shelton, with great expectations for one of my favorite students, Miss Calicut had written on the dictionary’s first page. She’d hugged Laurel and said that as bad as things were they’d get better. It will be good teacher practice for you, Miss Calicut told her, you’ll be your own pupil. Laurel had studied the books all that fall, working out the ciphering, reading, even making up tests for herself. She’d taught Hank some too, though he soon lost interest. But her father had got more needsome every day and by the new year all the books were skiffed with dust.

  Laurel lifted her finger from the last book, wiped the dust on her dress. She took the apron and pan off their pegs and the sack of green beans from the alcove. Once on the porch, she sat in a chair with the sack beside her and the pan at her feet. Laurel watched the men work as she snapped beans and tossed them in the pan. Walter had done this kind of work before. She heard it in the quick clap of the hammer strikes and the way Hank wasn’t stopping to show him how things were done. Surprising considering his smooth hands, his making a living with the flute.

  As Laurel set another handful of beans in her lap, she thought about Walter not hiding the sixty dollars. Even if it was gold, the chain and medallion wouldn’t up-scale a quarter eagle, and why not hide the flute? A man with lots of swivels to him. He hid one thing but not another, gaumy as any boxcar tramp but with money and silver and gold, couldn’t talk or read or write but played the flute so pretty your heart near busted from the wonder of it, a man who made notice of a single green feather. All Laurel knew certain was that she wanted to know more about him and was glad he hadn’t left.

  He brightens up my life. That’s what Marcie said about Robbie, and that was what Walter did. But brightness never stayed long here. Laurel had learned the true of that as a child. The parakeets had flown over the cove like a dense green cloud, but they’d never paused in their passing, never circled or landed. Instead, the birds went over the cove the same way they would a deep murky pond. But one time it was full noon, the few minutes when enough light sifted in for the parakeets to see the orchard and its shriveled fruit. The flock curved back, low enough that Laurel could hear them calling we we we as they bunched above the orchard and began swirling downward. One by one, the birds sleeved the orchard limbs in green and orange and yellow. Laurel had been in the cornfield with Hank. She should have run into the orchard right then and chased them away, but she’d just stood watching as two dozen birds pecked and hopped and preened among the branches. It was like their bodies had knit together and lifted the whole cove skyward into the sun’s full light.

  When her mother saw the parakeets, she’d run to the cabin. Laurel’s father had hobbled onto the porch shirtless and barefoot, shotgun in hand, swearing he’d not allow what paltry fruit they had to be taken. Her father had moved unsteadily into the pasture, Laurel’s mother beside him with a hay fork. Laurel tried to speak, but no words came. It was Hank who spoke.

  “Just scare them away, Daddy.”

  That was what Laure
l thought would happen, because the shotgun wavered in his thin arms. When it went off, the flock bloomed upward. But one bird had been hit, and though it rose too, it quickly lost what grasp it had on the sky. The parakeet landed in the orchard, the hurt wing dragging on the ground. The other birds at first flew west toward the ridge, then turned as one, made a wide arc, and came back, twice flying over the wounded bird before descending. Her father fired again and this time four parakeets fell from the branches. The unharmed birds did not flee as far this time. The bitter smell of cordite filled the orchard as another shot cracked the air and only five parakeets rose. Her mother walked beneath the limbs, gigging wounded birds with the hay fork. When Laurel had run into the orchard and begged her father not to shoot any more, her mother seized her by the arm and said it had to be done. There’d been one more shot before her mother opened the gate and prodded the hogs toward the orchard. They grunted and squealed with each jab, moving forward, slow and contrary, until they saw. The following winter her father placed the barrel between the largest hog’s eyes and squeezed the shotgun’s trigger. Laurel had refused to eat the sausage and ham, but her mother put the bones in soup, the fatback in beans and cornbread. No matter how little, she could always taste it.

  Laurel lifted another handful of beans into her lap and wondered where Walter had found his green feather. She thought about the medallion and the possibility it was a gift from a sweetheart. Not likely. It didn’t seem a girl’s name or have an etching of a heart on it. Not being able to talk would be a lacking many women couldn’t abide, the same way it’d been with Hank’s hand, but Laurel could abide it. Hank had to set store by how good a worker Walter was, and there’d be plenty to do before cold weather came, especially if Hank wanted to finish the well. She bet he was already wishing Walter would stay, perhaps starting to feel like Walter could become his friend. Laurel let herself fancy Walter staying another week and another week after that. Maybe the cardinal flower’s love potion might really work. If Walter stayed on there might come a time they’d be alone and he’d lean over and buss her on the cheek and after that, as the days went on, the kisses would get longer and she’d start picking the Queen Anne’s lace to make a tonic or even the virgin’s bower to twine in her hair.