by Ron Rash
“Time to go,” Leonard said.
As they drove back Travis read each mailbox, SHELTON appearing with the regularity of a last name in a family cemetery. They passed an old man plowing his field, back and head bent toward the steering wheel. Travis was surprised the man wasn’t in church. Maybe he’d been sick and gotten behind in his farmwork. Travis slowed. The tractor was an old 8N Ford, what farmers called a redbelly because of its colors. He studied the man’s face, trying to find something of himself under the wrinkles.
“Why do you reckon people don’t talk much about what happened up here?” Travis asked.
“The men who shot them were also from this county. Even after the war some folks got killed because of what happened that morning. People believed it was better not to talk about it.”
They passed the white clapboard church. The windows were open and Travis heard a blur of piano, the slow cadence of a familiar hymn. A dim guilt settled over him. No matter how late he’d stayed out Saturday nights, his parents had made him go to church the next morning. I’ll go next Sunday with Lori, he told himself. The road plunged downward. Travis looked in the rearview mirror and watched the steeple disappear into the landscape.
“You’d think they wouldn’t have done such a thing to their own neighbors,” Travis said.
“History argues otherwise. Lots of times people do worse to people they know than to strangers. Hitler and Stalin certainly did.”
“Most of the men in Madison County fought Confederate, I guess,” Travis said.
“No. That’s what a lot of folks think, but it was like most mountain counties, half Confederate, half Union. That caused Jeff Davis a lot of headaches. Bad enough for the South to fight the rest of the United States, then add to that a bunch of homemade Lincolnites. Of course, men like Colonel Allen used the term bushwhackers, which made it easier for something like Shelton Laurel to happen.”
“How is that?”
“Because a bushwhacker’s a criminal, not a soldier.”
The mountains leaned back from the road edge and Travis shifted gears. Sunlight poured through the windshield, but the light seemed softer, less concentrated than in the meadow. The metal detector and shovel shifted in the truck bed, clanged against each other, and resettled. The glasses lay in the glove compartment, wrapped in a handkerchief. They could be worth money because they were old, like the butter churns and kettles tourists bought in Marshall, but Travis knew he wasn’t going to sell them. It wouldn’t be right somehow.
“You got any books about what Hitler and Stalin done?”
“Yes.”
Halfway down the mountain they passed a car parked on the road’s shoulder. A fly fisherman stood midstream, his orange line whipping back and forth before it unfurled a final time, settled on the water soft as a dogwood petal. Travis had never fished that way. Something about it had always seemed too fancy, like wearing a suit to hunt rabbits. He wondered if Lori might like to go fishing with him sometime. He wanted her to see him do something he was really good at, better than Shank or Willard or any of the other guys he knew.
“So what kind of student were you in school?” Leonard asked.
“Not too good.”
“Why not?”
“What they taught didn’t seem important, except for shop class.”
The road veered right, the kind of curve that was so sharp you could almost meet yourself coming the other way. Travis spun the wheel hard, leaning his body the way he imagined Richard Petty or Junior Johnson would coming off a banked turn at Rockingham. He had to swerve to stay on the road as the detector and shovel banged against the sides of the truck. He waited for Leonard to get on him about driving too fast, but he didn’t.
“But you do like to read,” Leonard said.
“Yeah, but just about things I’m interested in.”
“Did you ever take any college prep classes?”
“No. I did pretty good on some tests in eighth grade. The teachers told Daddy and Momma I should do college prep in high school, but Daddy said I didn’t need college to farm tobacco.”
“That happened to me,” Leonard said, “except my parents did what the teachers suggested.”
Travis couldn’t imagine his daddy taking advice about anything, much less on how to raise his own son.
“You glad that happened,” Travis asked, “them putting you in college prep classes?”
Leonard paused.
“It enabled me to get a scholarship to college.”
His question hadn’t really been answered but Travis didn’t press. He held his left hand out the window, turning it like a weathervane as air buffeted his palm. He didn’t need to check his watch to know it was past noon now, could feel the early-afternoon air clabbering up like butter. Tail end of the dog days, the worst time of year to be working in a field. No breeze, everything dry and dusty. Mornings weren’t so bad because the mountains kept the sun at bay awhile, but come midday the sun sizzled directly overhead. The only thing that made it bearable was having someone else out in the fields with you, knowing they were feeling just as frazzled. Travis hoped these last few dog days bristled up good, made the old man so miserable he’d feel like he’d stepped into a whole barrel of yellow jackets.
“You ever thought about getting a GED?” Leonard asked.
Travis glanced over at Leonard, wanting to see how serious he was.
“No. I don’t know much about them. Is it sort of equal to graduating high school?”
“Just as equal,” Leonard said.
“You have to take classes at night?”
“You don’t have to take any classes at all, just pass the test.”
For a few moments they rode in silence. They passed a cow pasture where three dead blacksnakes lay draped on the barbed-wire fence. Some farmers believed killing blacksnakes helped bring rain, but his daddy had always sworn that was nonsense. The snakes’ bellies were the same milky blue as the old medicine bottles Travis’s grandmother used for vases.
“I could find out what you’d need to do,” Leonard said, sounding casual, like he was talking about nothing more than looking up a baseball score.
They were silent until the truck bumped up the drive. Beside the trailer Dena lay on a tattered quilt. Her eyes flickered open for a few moments and then closed. All she wore was the bathing suit’s bottom. A pale stripe like a lash mark crossed the middle of her back.
“You’d figure she’d have enough sense not to do that after getting boiled the way she did,” Travis said.
“You’d think so,” Leonard agreed.
The dogs crawled out from under the trailer, their long red tongues unfurled.
“I’ll get them some water,” Travis said.
“Give those tomato plants a good soaking too.”
“You mind if I go in and get a beer first?” Travis asked. “I’ll pay for it. I’m near about as hot and thirsty as those dogs.”
“There’s a Coke in there you can have,” Leonard said, “but as long as you’re staying here you get no beer or drugs.”
“Why?”
“One less charge that can be leveled against me if I get busted.”
Travis followed Leonard inside. He got the Coke out of the refrigerator and drank it in three gulps, then went and filled the two hubcaps that served as water bowls. The harsh spray drummed against the metal sides, a full ringing sound he liked. A small rainbow wavered above as the dogs lapped the water, so thirsty they didn’t care when spray hit their faces. Travis slowly raised his eyes, let them pass over the parched grass to where Dena sunbathed.
Dena’s eyes remained closed so Travis let his gaze linger until water spilled onto the ground. He unraveled the hose and dragged it over to the tomatoes. Dena got up as he was starting the second row. Travis thought she would cover herself, but she didn’t. She walked toward the trailer, seeming not to notice him.
He had seen women’s breasts in magazines before but these were different. They drooped more and were starkly pal
e compared to the rest of her skin. He felt himself grow hard as he watched Dena disappear into the trailer.
When them nipples get hard you know you got them good and ready to give it all to you. That was what Shank always claimed, and Travis had agreed. But that had just been talk on Travis’s part. The few girls he’d been out with hadn’t let him do more than some kissing. He’d had to make up stuff to tell Shank and the others so they wouldn’t be ribbing him about not having his cherry busted.
It didn’t look like that was going to change anytime soon if Lori had her way. Friday night she’d told him about her sister getting pregnant at seventeen and how she wasn’t going to let that happen to her. Travis hadn’t much liked the way she’d said it, like she was lecturing him, but right afterward she’d let him french kiss her for the first time and he’d forgot all about being lectured and most everything else.
Lori would be out of church by now, probably already home helping her mother fix noon dinner. He wished he was with her, helping look after her brother till the food was ready. Maybe afterward him and Lori going for a walk so they could be alone. He’d go over to the café on Monday during his break. Lori would be busy but he’d at least be around her.
Shank and the other fellows would bull-rag him good if they knew he was getting all moony about Lori. You got it bad as a calf bawling for its momma, he could hear Shank saying, and Travis reckoned he sure enough did to be thinking of her all the time.
May 13, 1861
A.M.
Summoned to Allen residence.
Lawrence Allen, age 28.
Complaint: Losing voice.
Diagnosis: Aphonia.
Treatment: Take gargle of honey, vinegar, alum. Slippery elm
morning and night.
No talking for three days.
Fee: Two dollars. Paid in cash.
Would it be that not just Allen but Zeb Vance and his Raleigh
firebrands would get aphonia to quite their braying about
states rights.
P.M.
Summoned to courthouse.
Julius Candler, age 32.
Complaint: Bleeding from nostrils resulting from fisticuffs.
Diagnosis: Fracture of nose.
Treatment: Set nose.
Fee: None.
Summoned to Main Street.
Elish Tweed, age 12.
Complaint: Gunshot through arm and into ribs.
Diagnosis: Same.
Treatment: Sponged both wounds. Probed arm for torn blood
vessels or broken bone. Removed bullet from rib cage. Shot by
accident.
Fee: None.
Ransom Merrill, age 48.
Two gunshot wounds. Deceased at time of arrival.
Roland Norris, age 22.
Complaint: Knife wound to arm.
Diagnosis: Same. No severed vein or artery.
Treatment: Sponged wound. Sewed up with cotton thread.
Fee: One dollar. Paid with side of ham.
Abney Shelton, age 19.
Complaint: Bleeding lip from fisticuffs.
Diagnosis: Cut requiring suture.
Treatment: Sponged wound. Sewed up with cotton thread.
Fee: One dollar. Three bushels of oats to be delivered.
Final delegate vote: 28 for Secessionists, 144 Unionists. This
folly may yet be prevented.
SIX
“That GED you mentioned a few weeks ago,” Travis said.
“I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt none for you to look into it.”
Leonard’s palms pressed his coffee cup to take in its warmth. Leonard wore a sweatshirt, though he would shed it once sunlight settled on the trailer’s tin. A raven made its harsh call from the woods. They were hardy birds that would winter out in the mountains, and this one sounded invigorated by the cool late-September morning.
He raised his cup and sipped. The boy wouldn’t bring up the GED if he hadn’t been thinking about it a lot the last month, maybe had already mentioned the test to Lori. Still skittish though, not yet committing himself. But Leonard had committed himself, just blurted out the offer of finding out what needed to be done. Leonard had not brought up the matter again, but now Travis had.
“I guess I could go by the vocational school this morning,” Leonard said. “Find out what you’d need to do.”
“Thanks,” Travis said. He looked down at his cereal. “Would you help me study if I was to make a go of it?”
Leonard didn’t answer.
“I reckon that to mean no,” Travis said.
“I guess I can help you some,” Leonard said.
Soon after Travis left for work, Leonard followed Highway 25 down to Marshall as well. The dogwood trees had begun to turn, stipples of russet now under the green canopy. Dogwoods were always the first to acknowledge that widening between sun and earth. In another week the tulip poplars would yellow, followed by the purpling of the sweet gums. Then all green rubbed off the mountains but for the resolute firs and pines on the high ridges, that and the club moss scabbing the understory’s brown skin. The morning shadows transforming as well—deeper, more pronounced. Laying heavier on the ground when cool weather comes, his mother claimed, as though shadows had a corporeal reality.
When he was a child, Leonard’s mother had often sat on the steps of their farmhouse, at times half an hour passing as she stared at the mountains rising beyond their pasture. The prettiness of it takes me away from myself, she’d once explained to him, her voice soft as if sharing a secret. She’d told him that sometimes a Bible or church wasn’t enough. That’s why there’s need for a world in the first place, son, she’d said. In the days right after Emily and Kera had left, Leonard had tried to see the world the way his mother had. He’d drive out to the Calumet River, the one place with enough trees to hide a landscape that looked like it had been leveled by a huge rolling pin. He’d sat on the bank and stared at the cottonwoods and birch, the black alders and witch hazel huddled beneath the bigger trees, the slow brown water, trying to find the same inner peace his mother had years earlier on those farmhouse porch steps.
When he arrived at the vocational center, Leonard almost turned around and drove back to the trailer. He didn’t owe the boy this. He could tell Travis the person in charge of adult education hadn’t been in. Tell the boy if he wanted a GED he could find out about it himself. Minutes passed before Leonard finally walked through the main door.
Even blindfolded he’d have known he was in a high school. Cheap perfume and cologne clogged the air, a smell of linseed oil on the waxed wood floors. The secretary gave him a room number and Leonard walked down the hallway. Students were changing classes, lockers clanging shut amid a muddle of voices. He moved around clots of teenagers, and each time one brushed or bumped against him his stomach tensed as if expecting a blow.
Mrs. Ponder had been his high school’s guidance counselor, but now she was the county’s GED director. She’d helped Leonard apply to colleges the fall of his senior year, but when he said his name she didn’t appear to remember him. He told her why he’d come, mentioned the reading Travis had done during the last month.
“All that’s good,” Mrs. Ponder said. “This test is more about interpreting what’s read than specific subject matter. Of course it will be different with the math. He can probably do the multiplication and division, but he’ll need an understanding of fractions and decimals, a few formulas as well.”
Mrs. Ponder turned to the bookshelves that flanked her desk. One afternoon after school she had helped Leonard fill out forms for Chapel Hill and NC State. She’d been thinner then, her hair longer and unstreaked by gray, only a few years out of college herself. He was one of many male students with a crush on her. They had sat at a table in the library, the applications and transcripts spread before them. Close enough that he could smell the soap on her skin and see the bared rise of her collarbone, the fine blond hairs on her forearm. I’d bet a month’s salary you’ll end up teaching at
some college, she’d told him that afternoon. A bet he should have taken, Leonard now thought as Mrs. Ponder ran her index finger over a row of books.
She lifted a thick paperback titled Essentials of Mathematics from the shelf. “If he can work through all the problems in these first ten chapters, he’ll do fine on the math part.”
Mrs. Ponder handed the book to Leonard.
“Courtesy of the state of North Carolina,” she said.
“How often is the GED given?”
“First Thursday and first Saturday of the month at Asheville-Buncombe Tech. Let me know at least two weeks in advance and I’ll reserve him a place.”
“I’m thinking April. Math’s not my strong suit so I may be learning right along with him.”
“I remember,” Mrs. Ponder said, meeting Leonard’s eyes. “If your math scores had been higher you’d have received scholarships to out-of-state schools as well. Maybe you would have gotten far enough away not to find your way back here. That’s what I hoped for you.”
Mrs. Ponder looked out her window at the mountains as if to emphasize they were still in Madison County and not some bucolic New England college town.
“I’m glad I’m not at the high school anymore,” she said. “There are fewer disappointments here. Be able to read a safety manual. Balance a checkbook. Get a job as a secretary or foreman at a mill. That’s all I have to hope for now, Leonard.”
He wore what he always wore these days—ragged jeans and a tee-shirt, work boots. His hair long, his beard unkempt. Leonard knew what Mrs. Ponder saw before her, heard it in the bitterness of her voice. Whatever she knew or didn’t know of his life since high school, his appearance evidently verified enough.
“Is this for your son?” she asked, and he knew this was a judgment of him as well.