by Ron Rash
“Can I have your phone number?”
She blushed slightly but kept her eyes steady on his.
“We don’t have a phone.”
“Can I call you at work?”
“Yes,” Lori said, and took a blue pen from her apron. She looked for a piece of paper but there was only the ivory colored hospital chart.
“Write it on my hand,” Travis said.
He laid his open palm on the aluminum rail. Lori’s left hand gripped his wrist, the firmness surprising him. The pen tickled as she wrote the numbers.
“Don’t forget and wash it off,” she said, a playfulness in her voice he hadn’t heard before.
“I’ll not do that,” Travis said, making a fist as though afraid the numbers might slip away.
When the nurse came in later he asked her to write the number on a card and put it in his billfold. That night as he drifted toward sleep he remembered Lori’s fingers and thumb as they enclosed his wrist, how good that felt. Travis wondered if her fingers had measured how much her touch speeded up his heart.
July 14, 1857
A.M.
Nail Hinson, age 6.
Complaint: Copperhead bite.
Diagnosis: Non-envenomed snakebite. Corn snake? No fang
marks or noxious swelling.
Treatment: Moistened tobacco applied to soothe pain.
Fee: One dollar. To be paid with two peck of apples at harvest.
Georgina Singleton, age 10.
Return in regard to July 11 complaint of puniness and diagnosis
of whipworms.
Treatment: Two drams tobacco seed, whiskey, turpentine at
bedtime for three nights.
Wool rag soaked in heated turpentine on stomach each morning.
Response: Voided fifty-seven worms. Continue treatment two
more nights.
Fee: None.
Levi Peek, age 35.
Complaint: Vomiting blood.
Diagnosis: Hematemesis.
Treatment: Alum and yellow root tonic before meals. No
drinking of any spirits for month.
Fee: One dollar. Paid with four pecks of chestnuts.
P.M.
James Shelton, age 28.
Return in regard to broken leg set on June 20.
Wear splint ten more days.
Fee: No charge.
Ten P.M.
Summoned to Winchester Farm.
Ellie Winchester, age 19.
Complaint: Remittent fever three days. Abdominal pain.
Shivering. Fifth day after childbirth.
Diagnosis: Puerperal fever due to rupture and infection of
fundus uteri. Lochia excessive.
Treatment: Camphor. Boneset tea but patient too distressed to
drink. Cold poultices to forehead. Sent husband to office to
fetch Meigs’s Treatise on Obstetrics.
Twelve A.M.
Fever unabated. Galloping pulse. Violent shivering. Patient
cannot bear touch of poultices on abdomen. Infection ravenous
with resultant purulent uterine fluid. Meigs’s consultation of
no profit. Two drams of laudanum. Dose of Dover’s Powder.
Husband told patient In Articule Mortis.
One A.M.
Fever unabated. Galloping pulse. Two drams of laudanum.
One Twenty A.M.
Patient deceased. Husband inconsolable, as would any man
brought to such a pass. More distressing the cries of the infant,
despite the wet nurse’s attempt to suckle, as though the infant
fathomed its loss.
Fee: None.
FOUR
Leonard woke slowly, a dull pain pressing like thumbs against the back of his eyes. Dena lay beside him. The covers were off and he could see the pink splotches where her skin had peeled. He’d told her to wear sunscreen, not to stay out so long. She might just as well have lain down in a skillet.
Still asleep, Dena raised an arm across her face as if fending off a blow. He saw again the pink centipede-shaped welt. She had never told him what caused that scar, just as she’d never explained her missing front teeth. But she’d told him enough about her life for him to know neither had been an accident. The arm fell to her side as she shifted onto her back. She’d wanted to make love the previous night, and an alcohol-induced ardor had made him receptive. But her skin felt like that of a shedding reptile. Her bridge soaked in a water glass by the bed, and when she’d pressed her lips to his, her mouth caved in like a sinkhole, sucking him into its dark void. He’d had to imagine another woman. Another room, another bed. Kera had once told him that during the Renaissance sex was believed to be a little death. It seemed so to him now, but in a way nothing like the swooning ecstasy depicted in sixteenth-century poetry.
When he’d dropped Dena off in Marshall that morning thirteen months ago, Leonard thought he’d gotten rid of her, but two days later she’d been on the trailer steps, everything she possessed inside a battered suitcase and dark-green trash bag. Just like that, expecting to be taken in simply because she was there.
And now the boy reappearing eight days ago. Other people living in the country had abandoned cats and dogs show up at their doors. Leonard had women and children. Even when he put them out, they kept coming back. He’d asked Dena once why she’d believed he would let her stay. Because you don’t like being alone, she’d said. You wish you did, but you don’t.
Leonard stared at the ceiling a few more moments and then got up. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a V-neck tee-shirt once white but now soiled to the gray of used dishwater. The five-and ten-dollar bills from yesterday’s sales lay on top of the chest of drawers, and he stuffed them in his front pocket. He searched in the closet for the book Travis had asked about and found it. Before going into the kitchen to make coffee he took down the 1859 ledger. Leonard read the December 21 entry, then put the ledger back on the closet shelf and went into the front room.
The boy slept on the couch, shirtless but still in his jeans, a ragged quilt draped over his waist and chest. A wind-up alarm clock ticked below him on the floor, its hands on eight and five. Travis had brought time into the trailer with him, not just the clock but a wristwatch as well. In the corner two cardboard boxes overspilled with the rest of his belongings. Leonard had told him he could stay a week, long enough to find another place. Or get homesick and go home, as Leonard had believed would happen. Now that week had passed and apparently Travis had no more intention of leaving than Dena.
The boy shuddered, pulled his knees close to his chest. Even in sleep trying to protect himself, just as Dena had. Leonard wondered if what the boy dreamed was more memory than illusion. Travis had had a lot of the starch taken out of him since the first time Leonard met him. The Toomeys were responsible for that.
The smell of coffee soon filled the trailer. Its dense rich odor always reminded Leonard of the time he’d needed a clock and a watch. The dogs rustled under the trailer, making their first whines for food. Purebred Plott hounds, bear dogs worth a thousand dollars easy, the man who’d settled a two-hundred-dollar drug debt with them claimed. They were pups then and Leonard had planned to place a For Sale ad in the Marshall paper, but he’d never gotten around to it.
He poured a cup of coffee and went outside to feed the Plotts and hide the money. When he’d done these things he sat on the steps as morning made its slow lean into the valley—sunlight grabbing hold of the treetops and sliding down the sycamore and birch trunks, which threw the light back, almost a reflection. Then the sun eased into the pasture, a slow unfurling that lit up dew beads on the grass and the spiderwebs. A pair of goldfinches flashed across the meadow like yellow sparks flung out from the morning’s bright becoming.
I got nowhere else to go, Travis had said when Leonard stood on these same steps and tried to turn the boy away. Travis had taken a wad of five-and one-dollar bills from his front pocket and offered them to Leonard. I ain’t asking to st
ay free. I got my job back at the store, so I can pay you twenty a week, he had said, a last flicker of pride in his voice. Leonard had stuffed the bills in his pocket, then stepped aside so Travis could come into the trailer. For all Leonard knew the boy had been driving around the county for hours, searching for a place of refuge. Having damn little luck finding one if he’d had to settle for a rusting hulk of tin inhabited by a bootlegger and drug peddler. Luck. Not a word Leonard had heard much growing up, because the word implied chance, randomness. Never a sparrow falls from the sky but God knows it, Preacher Rankin had said Sunday mornings as he waved a Bible before them as if fanning a fire. Nor a drop of rain nor even the wind stirring the most slightsome leaf.
They got to you early with all that otherworldly mumbo jumbo and you just can’t shed it, Kera once told him. She’d blamed his Pentecostal upbringing, but Leonard suspected such beliefs came as much from the mountains themselves, their brooding presence and unyielding shadows. Shades, his Grandfather Shuler had always called ghosts, as if created by the mountains’ light-starved ridges and coves.
His family’s far pasture had bordered church property, and one of Leonard’s earliest chores was walking the pasture after a storm to gather up wreaths, styrofoam crosses, whatever else belonged on the barbed wire’s other side. He was taught to place the grave ornaments back into the cemetery with respect, not thrown or kicked but ever so carefully set down. Because it mattered, not just to those above the ground but those in it. Leonard remembered his hand crossing that boundary between living and dead, easing through the barbed wire the grave litter he’d gathered, one wreath or cross at a time, laying each gently on the plush green grass, and how he’d feared something on the other side might grip his wrist, announce its presence.
But nothing ever had. The dead in the cemetery had stayed dead. But now Travis Shelton had suddenly reappeared on his doorstep, expecting to be sheltered, protected. It was as if, three decades later, Leonard’s hand had slipped through the cemetery’s barbed wire and felt something brush against his skin.
Travis’s alarm still hadn’t gone off, so in a few minutes Leonard went inside, stood close to where the boy slept. Travis was trying to grow a mustache, but the fine blond hairs on his upper lip reminded Leonard of wisps on a baby’s head. The bruise on the boy’s left cheek was a mere dull-yellow tinge now, nothing like last week when purple stained his face like a birthmark. That first night he’d shown up, Travis had told Leonard about his father slapping him. The boy also volunteered what had really happened to his foot. Probably nothing more than an attempt to gain sympathy, Leonard suspected. No good could come from the boy being here, especially if Carlton Toomey found out, which was why Leonard had driven to the Toomeys’ farmhouse last night to get his monthly quota of pills early.
He spoke the boy’s name, and Travis’s eyes opened.
“Your alarm didn’t go off,” Leonard said.
“Ain’t it Sunday?”
“I guess so,” Leonard said, though he wasn’t sure since no calendar hung on the trailer wall.
Travis raised to a sitting position and brushed the long blond hair from his gray eyes. The boy’s face was all jut and angle, as though the features had been outlined but not yet filled in. A lanky build but strength in the shoulders and arms, the muscles wiry and tough like wisteria vines. He’d probably grow another inch or two in height, Leonard figured, maybe reach six feet.
If he lived that long. After their first encounter, Leonard had written Travis off as just another smirking loud-mouthed punk, no different from the majority of adolescents he had dealings with. Casualties of his own prideful recklessness, they ran vehicles into trees and bridge abutments, crippled themselves in rock quarries, got knifed or shot in roadhouse parking lots. Easy enough to argue that Leonard performed a public service by selling them alcohol and drugs, merely speeding up the process of natural selection.
But Travis had shown him something besides arrogance and recklessness. The boy wanted to know things. His first night in the trailer Travis had asked for the book with the Shelton Laurel chapter. Leonard hadn’t felt like searching through the boxes filling the bedroom closet, so the boy had pulled a thick tome about Gettysburg off the shelves instead. Travis had finished that volume last night and asked again about the other book.
“The book with the Shelton Laurel chapter, that’s it on the coffee table,” Leonard said.
Travis sat on the couch and opened the big brown hardback to the chapter Leonard had marked. Thirty minutes passed before he looked up for anything other than a word to be defined.
“So they just shot them like dogs,” the boy said.
“The lucky ones. The rest got bayoneted.”
“Why’d they kill a twelve-year-old?”
“Because a nit makes a louse, or so one of the soldiers stated.” Leonard paused. “You know that saying?”
“I heard my daddy use it,” Travis said, “but I never knew exactly what it meant.”
“A nit is a louse’s immature offspring. The soldier was saying kill the offspring before they get big enough to kill you.”
“Sounds like you know more about it than is in this book,” Travis said. He closed the book slowly, carefully, respecting not just the physical book but its contents, Leonard believed. “They just left them in that ditch to rot?”
“Yes,” Leonard said. “It was their own kin who buried them the next day.”
The boy slipped on his shirt and stood up, left leg bearing most of the weight. He ate a bowl of cereal while Leonard drank a second cup of coffee. Travis ate quickly, his head down, free arm cradling the bowl.
“I want to go see where it happened, where they buried them afterward,” Travis said when he’d finished. “I want to go this morning.”
Leonard heard Dena walk up the hall to the bathroom, the warped linoleum crackling beneath her as if she traversed a pond’s thawing ice. He believed that one day the whole floor would give way and the trailer fold in on itself like a squeezed accordion. But the rent was cheap, eighty dollars a month, the landlord nothing more than an address in central Florida. In a few moments pipes whistled and the shower came on.
“It’s hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for,” Leonard said.
“But you know where it is?”
“Yes.”
Travis got up and rooted around in the boxes that served as his chest of drawers. He came back with a pen and a spiral-bound notebook, laid them on the table between him and Leonard.
“Then draw me a map,” Travis said.
“Even with a map you still might not find the grave site.”
“Draw it and I’ll figure out where it is,” Travis said, pushing the notebook and pen closer to Leonard.
Leonard took a long swallow and felt the last of the coffee warm his throat. The boy was impatient. Leonard saw it in his hurry to grow up, in the way he drove, even the way he ate breakfast, as if expecting the bowl to be snatched away at any moment. Impulsive as well, and that combination had nearly gotten him killed by Carlton Toomey.
“I’ll go with you,” Leonard said. “Just give me a few minutes to shower and dress.”
“Can we take that metal detector?”
“Not much use to. The fellow I got it from said he’d swept that site pretty good.”
“I’d still like to try.”
“Then stick it in the truck and get a shovel as well,” Leonard said, and went to the bathroom Dena had just vacated. The mirror was clouded with condensation, water on the floor because once again she hadn’t pulled the curtain into the tub. Speeding up the rot in the flooring, not giving a damn if the floor gave way beneath her. Leonard rubbed the mirror’s center with his hand, the image of himself clear for a moment, then slowly fading as if receding farther into the mirror, the mirror soon cloudy as before. He remembered the day his Grandfather Candler had died. His grandmother had stopped the mantel clock’s ticking, its hands suspended at eleven and five, the time of her husband’s de
ath. Every mirror in the farmhouse was covered as well, because mirrors were portals through which the new dead could return to the place they’d once lived. Kera was right. They had gotten to him early.
December 21, 1859
A.M.
Sophie Holifield, age 79.
Complaint: Aches and swollen joints.
Diagnosis: Rheumatism.
Treatment: Poultice of warmed ginseng applied to bothersome
joints. Three teaspoons of clover honey every night. One-hour
soak in baths at Hot Springs soon as weather permits.
Fee: One dollar and a quarter. Paid with peach pie.
Naomi Lewis, age 22.
Complaint: Sore eyes.
Diagnosis: Optical inflammation due to handling mistletoe.
Treatment: Wash made of infusion of goldenseal root in cold
water. Use twice daily.
Fee: One dollar and a quarter. Paid with cash.
Note: Consulted Barton’s Collections Towards a Media Medica.
Try to obtain cayenne powder next trip to Asheville.
P.M.
Summoned to Shelton Farm.
David Shelton, age eight.
Symptoms: Fever and chills. Galloping pulse. Strawberry
tongue. Rash on neck and tongue. Agitated speech.
Imaginings.
Diagnosis: Scarlet fever.
Treatment: Sponged with water and vinegar. Two spoons of
laudanum. Had patient drink cold well water. Moved bed
farther from hearth.
Nine P.M.
Galloping pulse. Fever high. Patient agitated, talking his
imaginings. Prepared family for possible dismal reckoning.
Prayers. Mother in much consternation. Continued sponging
but little effect. Boneset tea alternated with cold water.
Ten P.M.
Packed snow on patient’s forehead and chest.
Twelve A.M.
Pulse fuller but fever still high. Two spoons of laudanum.
Continue to pack snow on chest and forehead.
Three A.M.