by Gina nahai
He smoked half a cigarette, paid without eating, without looking for the girl with the faded face, and got back into the car.
Through Virginia the highway narrowed, and the mountains loomed taller above the land. Adam drove in the dark, alone on the road but for the occasional truck. In his mind he could see the dense green cover of the mountains around him, the soil that was red and gold with strips of glittering black—coal seams, like dark crystal—the narrow, unpaved lanes that stretched from the highway toward the hills, into clearings where a few houses, a church, a cemetery, huddled together, forgotten by the world.
Little Sam may be dead, Adam thought, but his cult would
go on without him, entrenched within the community of believers as the coal seams in the dirt—narrow, deep, so hard it stuck to everything it touched. These same believers would protect Sam’s legacy and perpetuate his beliefs. Like crusaders everywhere, they would be quick to declare martyrs and even quicker to accept converts, and yes, there was no denying the fact that no one, not the nonbelievers who dismissed the snake handlers’ antics as mere deception, or the reporters who stalked them hoping to discover the smoke and mirrors Adam knew were not there, or even the doctors who attended church meetings armed with all the tools modern science had to offer—none of those people had ever managed to explain why the snakes often did not bite the handlers, why the fire that they handled did not burn and the poison they drank did not kill.
He drove all night, west toward Middletown, then south on Highway 11. Past Harrisonburg the mountains rose straight off the side of the road—walls of rock and trees that stretched into the sky and blocked out the moon and the stars. Beyond Chris-tiansburg the highway veered west, and the valley grew deeper and more narrow. He headed toward Cumberland Gap—the narrow passage through the Appalachian Mountains that connected the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Sixteen hundred feet above sea level, this was the bridge across which Daniel Boone had blazed the Wilderness Road two hundred years earlier.
Long ago Adam had memorized, then tried to forget, every inch of this landscape, every color, every lonely, dust-ridden town along the way and yet, the first light of dawn struck him with all the wonder and magic of discovery.
The valley was a carpet of a thousand shades of green—vibrant, deep colors of stunning density and lushness—the earth a stark red, the air bright and glittering with sparkles of light. Where the road widened a bit, Adam could see dilapidated wooden shacks built on a slope with nothing around them but trees. Their porches were jammed with old shoes and discarded stoves, tattered clothes hanging on a line, broken benches and legless chairs. Even though it was morning, there were no people in sight, no children playing on the porches or on the side of the road. Adam realized he had forgotten how underpopulated Appalachian towns were, how, after years of living in crowded cities where every man’s breath rubbed against the back of another’s neck, one could draw comfort from being surrounded only by mountains.
Through the Cumberland Gap he found himself turning north, toward Kentucky. He watched the road widen a bit, the landscape dotted by simple wooden barns painted black, small cemeteries—their gravestones well tended, the graves bearing fresh flowers—bordering the road. Every few miles a church appeared alone against the horizon: simple, one-room structures built entirely of wood with an A-shaped frame and a steeple, with names like highway holiness church of god, and the church of lord jesus with signs following. In between the churches, the highway was dotted with signs posted into the ground: are you ready for the day of reckoning? they asked. Or: come on over and bring the kids, signed, god.
He drove through Harlan, Kentucky, then Pineville—coalmining towns still bearing the marks of a devastation they could not recover from. Being here, Adam thought, it was easy to understand why Appalachia was so different from the rest of America, why little that happened on the outside could really penetrate the lives of the people here: there was a sense of life old but not worn, of nature invigorating its own, stubborn and inflexible, of living things growing but not changing—a world of majestic beauty that remained always the same.
Lynch, Kentucky, was a one-street town built on a mountain slope. The street, unpaved most of the way, was wide enough for one car. The few stores that bordered it were abandoned, their windows broken, their insides piled ceiling-high with giant, monstrous dust balls. Behind them were single-room shacks that had housed coal miners in another day. Now they sat empty, the coal miners gone or dead, the alleys around the houses still strewn with discarded toys and furniture.
Adam drove up to an old bridge made of rope and planks and suspended above a dried creek bed. Beyond it, he knew, in what was once the town of Corbin Glow, was a rusted freight car, derailed and long forgotten, split in half so that the top was open. He did not get out of the car here. He turned around and headed toward Knoxville. Down Highway 63 he stopped only when he saw the old chain-link fence surrounding an abandoned brick structure with darkened windows and kudzu growing all over.
He stepped out of the car and felt the humid air wash over him like sorrow. Squinting through the light, he saw the stone plaque that still hung next to the building’s entrance:
TENNESSEE STATE HOME FOR CHILDREN.
This was it, he thought: home as he knew it.
INSIDE the boardinghouse the heat had become palpable. The atmosphere was thick, like butter—a moist, heavy mixture of cigarette smoke and wood polish and humidity. After Blue left, Adam remained in his chair, stunned by the emotions she had evoked in him and by the memory of her presence. Around him the heat cast shadows on the walls and prompted ghosts to crawl out of their hiding places and walk the house searching for cooler spots—the narrow spaces between the shelves in the pantry, the smooth surfaces of the white satin sheets in the owner’s bed, the bear-claw bathtub in Adam’s bathroom. The owner’s cat strutted across the Persian rug on the drawing room floor and licked the back of a glass dolphin with purple skin.
Past sunset, the Dutch boys changed into white shorts and tennis socks, and filed noisily down the stairs—headed for unknown destinations where they would drink American beer and dwell on Blue’s memory till their senses dulled or the heat subsided. Behind them the owner walked through the house trailed by his Persian cat, and closed all the shutters to keep out the encroaching darkness.
“One must never allow the dusk to set in,” he said as he lit the floor lamp with the painted silk shade above Adam’s chair.
Adam acted as if he had not heard or seen the man. His indifference annoyed the owner, made him more determined to induce a reaction.
In Knoxville the last few days, Adam had put together the pieces of Blue’s story without difficulty or much probing. The facts of the case were easily established and hardly in doubt. Ironically, their very simplicity was what allowed room for speculation.
Born outside the United States, Blue had come to Knoxville in 1951—the fourteen-year-old bride of a professor of extinct languages at the University of Tennessee. Himself of mysterious origin, her husband had first appeared in the city shortly after the second World War. For years he had lived alone in the house in Fort Sanders and attended the First Baptist Church on Main Avenue. Wednesday nights he had gone to the movies at the Bijou Theater, then dined alone at the S & W. He had been polite and civil to his colleagues and neighbors, but he had formed no relationships outside of work, and had never entertained a guest at home. One summer he had taken leave from the university and gone away for many months—to the East, he said, where language had first started. He had come back with a wife.
Thirty-one years her senior, the Professor had applied himself to the task of educating Blue and teaching her the ways of city women. He had taught the girl to speak and read and write English, brought her books by the dozen, bought her clothes at Hess’ department store—the city’s premier shopping spot— but he had not let her out of the house alone and had controlled her every move and every contact. Right then, their mar
riage had seemed bizarre—the first act of a tragedy about to unfold.
Sometime in late 1956 the Professor had taken an interest in the Church of God and Little Sam’s movement. For a while he had attended Holiness services up and down the southern states. Distrusted and shunned at first, because he was an outsider and a foreigner to boot, he had been allowed to stay only when he introduced his young wife to the church: she was so beautiful, no man would willingly have deprived himself of the privilege of setting eyes on her during worship; and she had picked up a snake the very first time she had gone to church and at every meeting that followed. Fearless beyond reason, she had taken on every challenge the believers had presented to her— Fighting snakes no one else dared touch, drinking undiluted poison and setting her body into burning flames, emerging unscathed and ever the stronger for her troubles—a fact no one could deny and that had, right from the start, guaranteed her a place among the members. Long after the Professor had lost interest in Little Sam’s movement, his wife continued to attend services and handle snakes.
Blue’s relationship with the church, however, had always been troubled. Little Sam had welcomed her at first, and for a while he granted her the benefit of his most indulgent attentions. He kept a close eye on her and blessed her in his sermons, and he would have laid hands on her, would have gladly anointed her with blessed oils and a holy touch but for the fact that she fought his advances with as much resolve and fury as she did the snakes. The more Sam tried, the harder she fought back and the stronger she seemed to become, until it was clear that Sam would never be able to tame her. Jilted, he had stepped back, then assessed Blue in a new, more critical light.
“See for yourselves,” he began to tell the believers. “This woman lives in a big house in the city, indulges in luxury and great vanity. In church she never testifies, never faints or talks in tongues. She seems little interested in the sermons, even less interested in letting the Lord into her home and her life. She is, in short, the very image of evil and sinfulness. If the Holiness code is to be believed, if the strength of a man’s faith is what protects him against earthly harm, then this woman should be ravaged by snakebite and vomiting blood and poison by now. She must be blinded by fire, paralyzed by fear, and yet...
“Yet she handles snakes more often and with greater impunity than any Holiness man or woman, and this could only mean one thing, could only point to one direction and it would take a blind man not to see.”
Either the Holiness code was incorrect, Little Sam concluded, or Blue was the devil incarnate.
At EIGHT O’CLOCK the humidity in the air melted into rain and began to fall in slow, heavy drops. Adam went to the window and opened the blinds. Church Avenue was empty. Across the way a light burned in the cluttered front of an antique shop that had been closed since Adam had arrived in town. A black woman in a lavender dress sat behind a desk looking at herself in the small mirror of a silver compact. She had left the door to the shop half ajar, placed the open sign where it would be clearly visible to passersby.
Adam left the window and headed out of the room. A glass of “something easy—like love with a stranger,” sat untouched in the light of the floor lamp.
Outside, the rain sounded like lead dropping against the asphalt on the street. He stood under the marquee and smoked a cigarette. The black woman in the antique shop had stopped painting her face and was having a conversation on the phone. She sat up straight behind her antique desk—a professional saleslady with impeccable manners, at work. All around her bits of junk and old furniture—broken chairs, kitchenware, a naked mannequin, books no one had opened in a hundred years—lay under a heap of dust.
The rain stopped.
Adam walked along Church Avenue toward Walnut Street. The railroad tracks ran parallel to Jackson, crossed Broadway, then veered in the direction of Gay and Locust Streets. The train whistled through town all night, catching him awake and smoking. Three old women wearing the bright orange color of the University of Tennessee and sporting purple-white hair drove past in a Cadillac.
Growing up, Adam had lived less than an hour outside this town, but he had been a world away.
He turned from Market onto Clinch Avenue and into Fort Sanders. From a distance, Blue’s house looked dark, its shutters closed. The front yard was overrun by weeds, giving the impression of a place uninhabited by living beings.
Nine o’clock. Adam waited for the Professor to drive by.
He appeared at exactly ten minutes past nine, in his 1961 blue Chevrolet with white leather seats, its chrome bumpers covered with dust from the road. He had both hands on top of the steering wheel—the ten-minutes-to-two position taught to new drivers—and he leaned toward the windshield as he drove. He was so small, Adam could only see the top half of his face behind the wheel, and he focused on the road with such consternation, it was clear he was afraid of his own driving.
He eased the car up 19th Street, turned right on Clinch Avenue, and stopped in front of his house. He sat in the car for an eternity before stepping out.
He was small and thin, dressed in a gray suit and a fedora. He had the pallor of people who never see sunlight, the hollow expression of one who has resigned himself to great loss. He was unshaved but well groomed, his black shoes shiny in the night. He looked up and down the street. When he saw Adam, he looked as if he had been punched in the chest. Quickly he locked the door to his car and headed up the steps to the house.
Adam smoked his cigarette down to the very end. He thought about Blue moving through the quiet, darkened hallways of that house. He imagined the rooms from inside, the little man in the dark suit standing behind a closed window, staring out of the cracks in the shutters with fear all over his face. He remembered what Blue had said about watching Adam from her bedroom. Strange, he thought, how the Professor seemed to carry the guilt and apprehension that should have been Blue’s— as if he were the concerned parent of a child determined to err; as if he feared a consequence that she, for her part, embraced.
Nine-thirty, and the town was already asleep. Adam turned away from the house and crossed the street. He wanted a drink, the comfort of being surrounded by people and noise. He thought he should go back to the hotel and take his car, drive out to the strip malls outside of town in search of a bar. Something tugged at him. He turned around in the dark.
Blue was standing on the sidewalk above 18th Street, her clothes wet from rain, her feet still bare. From a distance she looked drawn, tired, lost in a way that startled Adam—a woman who has waited too long for a train that never arrives. He realized she must have followed him from the boardinghouse, that she must have watched him as he watched her house and waited for the Professor to arrive.
She had wanted him to come here, he thought, wanted him to find her.
The OWNER was waiting for Adam at the entrance to the boardinghouse. He had changed out of his safari clothes into a light Indian pantsuit with gold and coral embroideries. A shadow in the half darkness, he was sipping a martini when Adam arrived.
“Quite a night for a walk,” he said sarcastically.
Upstairs, the Dutch boys had fallen asleep on their beds with their clothes still on. Adam saw that the door to his own room was open a crack—as if someone had already been there and wanted him to know they had. He went up to the door cautiously—following years of experience living in places where reporters were routinely targeted by government thugs or revolutionary zealots.
Inside, nothing looked out of place. His bed was still unmade as he had left it that morning and his few clothes spilled out of the top of his backpack on the floor, and the ashtray on the night table was still full of butts. But he had the unmistakable feeling that his room had been searched in his absence, that hands had reached under his mattress, through the empty dresser drawers, inside the pockets of his shirts in the backpack. The ceiling fan, which had been off when he left, had been turned on, making a clanking noise with every rotation. He reached for the switch and turned it off.
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br /> “It’s going to be hot,” the owner called from the hallway below.“Better leave the fan on and sleep with your eyes open.”
Adam slammed the door and ignored the advice about the fan. The French doors leading to the balcony of his room were open, but the air did not move at all. He pulled his shirt off and lay faceup on the bed.
Beirut was a thousand years away. He missed its breezy afternoons, the stunning colors of the Mediterranean, the town built on the edge of a cliff. He missed being in a place from which he had no memories—an outsider, interested but uninvolved.
He thought about how odd it was that no one in Knoxville— none of the residents, none of the believers Adam had called on the last few days—had recognized him, how no one even suspected that Adam himself might be from the mountains. Growing up in an orphanage, he had been taught to shed his Appalachian accent, to behave and even to think like city folk. Maybe that’s why, he thought, none of the people he had interviewed and dealt with had looked at him hard enough to recognize his roots.
And he thought how strange that he had glimpsed Blue for such a short while, but that she would manage to cast her colors into Adam’s life forever—like the lavender bleach the Arab women on the streets of Beirut poured into their basins of water before submerging their clothes to wash by hand: one small pinch of color in a vast container of clean water, and it would run streaks of bright, vivid blue through the basin and change the color of everything it touched into a luminous, unforgettable white.
ADAM NEVER TOLD ANYONE ABOUT HIS BEGINNINGS. Partly, he was ashamed. Partly, also, he did not understand it well enough to explain it to others. Appalachia, he would realize in time, had had its own rules—the daily workings of a culture so unfamiliar to and so hidden from the rest of the world, it did not make sense anywhere beyond the mountains. That was Appalachia’s curse, but also its strength: to understand it, you had to get closer, to cross the mountains, linger within the valleys. You had to watch time slow down, let yourself become mesmerized by the colors of the landscape—by the wild, pulsating quiet, the long and narrow roads of an ancient loneliness that no man or machine was able to conquer—until the day you woke up with the color of the rivers in your eyes and the sound of the waterfalls in your ears, and you knew, without having the words to define it, that you had become part of a world where reality had its own meaning.