I ran down the street. Betty saw me and started waving her arms. “Brenda!” she cried in a voice that sounded like she was sucking up the air. “Oh God, it’s Brenda!”
I looked around. Neighbors were coming out on their porches. Tom and Hassel appeared in the door of the Dew Drop. I ran up the plank porch steps. Betty Lloyd gripped my arm tight enough to punch holes in the flesh.
“What’s wrong with Brenda?” I said.
“She’s shot! Oh God, help my baby!”
She dragged me through the doorway. Brenda was lying all twisted up in the middle of the floor. Her head glistened like someone had spilled red paint on her, and streaks of blood ran down the face of Bob Barker on the television screen. I grabbed hold of the door frame. Betty was on her knees, tugging at Brenda’s shoulders, and then she rocked back on her heels and wailed.
Then I saw Doyle Ray. He was huddled in the corner cradling a rifle to his chest like it was a doll, the barrel pointed toward the ceiling.
“Doyle Ray,” I said.
“Hey, Jackie,” he said. He talked real slow. “Please help her.”
I moved to the telephone and dialed, watching the gun the whole time. Tom and Hassel came through the door and froze.
Then I heard the voice on the phone say, “Fanning Funeral.”
I said, “We need somebody from the funeral home at Number Thirteen. A girl’s been shot and we have to get her to the hospital. We’ll meet you at Winco Bottom.”
Then I stood and held the telephone, suddenly afraid to move. I became aware of Uncle Brigham hollering and cussing from the kitchen.
“Doyle Ray,” said Tom, “put down the gun.”
Doyle Ray’s face was pale and he was shaking. “I got to hold onto something,” he said.
“Put the gun down,” said Tom. “You can hold onto me.”
Doyle Ray laid the gun down. Tom went to him and held him around the shoulders. “Jackie,” Tom said, “call an ambulance. Brenda may not be dead yet.”
Hassel said, “They aint no ambulance so we always call a hearse to carry folks to the hospital. Jackie’s done the right thing. We’ll have to get Brenda to the bottom somehow.”
He felt Brenda’s wrist.
“She’s still yet alive,” he said.
Doyle Ray started to sob.
Hassel went to the kitchen and came back with some towels. He covered Brenda’s head with a towel. When it soaked through with blood he tossed it aside and used another one. He said, “Uncle Brigham’s setting in the kitchen yonder holding his arm. Look’s like it’s broke.”
“Betty, what happened?” Tom said.
She rocked back and forth, holding Brenda’s hand. “Brigham’s been drinking. He started in to beat on Doyle Ray for not doing his homework and we couldn’t get him calmed down. After a while Doyle Ray grabbed the rifle. But he couldn’t just shoot his daddy so he swung the stock at him, hit him in the arm. Only it went off and Brenda—my baby was—”
“Jackie,” said Hassel, “you hold these towels. Press down some but not too hard. Junior has got an old wreck he’s working on up to his house that I think will run. We’ll drive her down the railroad track.”
I felt dizzy but I took a deep breath and held the towel. I turned my head so I couldn’t see the red streaks on the TV and the wall. Tom was watching me. “You all right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re doing fine,” he said. “Damn fine.”
Doyle Ray slumped against Tom. “Are they going to put me in that electric chair?” he said.
“Nobody’s going to put you in any electric chair,” Tom said. “We know it was an accident.”
They loaded Brenda into a beat-up blue Plymouth that Hassel drove between the houses. They had Tom’s coat wrapped around her. Her head was still covered up with redsplotched towels. Then they chugged off down the railroad right-of-way, Hassel up front with Uncle Brigham, who was in a lot of pain, Tom and Betty in the back seat holding Brenda. Doyle Ray came out and sat on the front porch step. He didn’t have a coat on, even though it was cold. Old Sam Chernenko, who had come to see what was going on, stood beside him. Doyle Ray said, “I want Dillon. He’s my kin. I want to talk to Dillon.”
“Dillon’s still at work,” I said.
Doyle Ray buried his face in his arms. I walked away and left him with Sam. My mother would be at Winco bottom soon, waiting to pick me up, so I walked the railroad track. The cold air burned my cheeks where I cried—although I couldn’t recall when that had been—and I held a gloved hand across my face.
I reached the bottom just as the hearse pulled in. My mother was standing beside the old Plymouth. When she saw me, she ran at me and held me tight to her.
“Thank God it wasn’t you,” she whispered in my ear, and I felt ashamed to be so important to anybody. She let me go. “I’m going to ride to the hospital,” she said. “You go on back to Dillon’s and spend the night.”
I went over to the blue Plymouth where Hassel and Tom stood watching the two funeral home men load Brenda into the back of the hearse. My mother climbed in beside her. After they drove away, we got in the Plymouth, all three of us in the front and me in the middle. The heater didn’t work and I was shivering so bad it was hard to breathe. Tom put his arms around me and laid his cheek against the top of my head.
“I should have done something to keep this from happening,” he said. “Those are my afterschool kids. Both of them are my kids.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said.
He rubbed my arm, laced his fingers through mine, and squeezed. Hassel reached over and grabbed Tom’s arm. He drove the rest of the way with one hand and all three of us holding onto each other.
Doyle Ray has been sent to the reform school at Pruntytown for two years. Arthur Lee says it is for his own good. Tom testified in Doyle Ray’s behalf but it didn’t help. The judge, who is a buddy of Arthur Lee’s, said the shooting was an example of Tom’s “disruptive influence on the young people of Number Thirteen.” When he said it, Tom took a step like he would punch the judge, and Hassel grabbed his arm. I had one more reason to hate Arthur Lee.
Brenda was in a coma for two weeks, then she woke up. When I visited her in the hospital, she had stitches puckering her forehead like a black bug stuck on her skin. After six months she came home. Now she is in her wheelchair on the front porch, slumped over like she is made out of rags, sniffing at the summer breeze. She lays her head to one side and stares straight ahead. The pure white lines of the scar mark her like a brand.
I stand in front of her. “Brenda?”
Brenda swallows loudly. “Hi.”
“How you doing?”
“Hi. How—” Her mouth moves in circles like she is swigging mouthwash. “Hi.”
I hear steps behind me, and a clanking sound. Toejam Day is out with his gunnysack collecting pop bottles. He is shirtless in the July heat, wet with perspiration, and his ribs show smooth like his chest has been polished.
“Hey, Toejam.”
Toejam stops.
“Brenda,” Toejam says. “Hey, Brenda.”
“Hi.” Brenda moves her mouth. “Hi.”
Toejam grins and looks at me. “Hey, Jackie, She’s doing good, aint she?”
I can’t stand to be around him right now. I turn and run toward Dillon’s trailer. When I look back Toejam is watching me with his head ducked down like his feelings are hurt.
RACHEL, 1966
I dream I am in the middle of the river again and the ice is coming. I slip from my mule’s back into the cold water. Then Dillon has me around the neck and is hauling me to shore, only I don’t want to go because I am safe in the river. Dillon pulls me onto the bank and I wrestle him but he sits on my chest. He is so heavy I can’t breathe and I try to scream but he only presses harder. He is looking out over the river toward the mountains, and he is smiling.
I sit up in bed and Arthur Lee holds my arms. I gasp for breath and he is saying, “Rachel, Rachel are you all right?” I strain
to see his face but it is too dark. After a while I breathe easier. I lean against him.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me,” he says. “I thought you were having a heart attack.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just heartburn.”
“Heartburn! That’s a damn bad case of it. Maybe you ought to go to a doctor.”
“I’ve been.”
I shut my eyes. The doctor has already explained that I had rheumatic fever without knowing it when I was a child, that the heart muscle has grown weaker. I am taking digitalis, and I have told Jackie and Arthur Lee that I don’t eat fried food because I am on a diet. I won’t tell them any more unless it gets worse. Arthur Lee would only get mad and attack the problem like it is a seam of coal to be dug, would want to call in every specialist, waste his money over something that cannot be made right. Jackie is having a hard enough time with what happened to Brenda. I don’t want her fretting about me. Maybe I won’t get any worse.
Besides, Jackie would tell Dillon. He might come for me again and I am not strong enough for that.
DILLON, 1966
My people were from the Black Mountains in south Wales. Mommy had it from my daddy, who heard it from his daddy and his daddy before him. Daddy told Mommy a little of the Welsh stories he heard growing up, about the good fairies and the bad fairies, only one bunch was so purely good and the other so purely bad that they were both perilous. It was their purity would kill a person.
There are mountains in Wales. I wanted to go there during the war but I never got a long enough leave. I have seen pictures in books at the Justice Public Library. They are like our mountains only bald of trees. You can look at them and tell, even in a picture, that they are not just piles of rock, they are ancient spirits. The old ones believed that way, my people used to say, and so do the Indians in this country. I knew it myself when I worked in the mine. I could hear the mountain above me groan and cry out, mourning its losses, screaming with pain when we cut away its bones. I knew when the roof fell and took a man it was no accident but the mountain lashing out like a wounded animal.
I can hear the mountains talk at night. It is a gift I have from my great-uncle Dillon the hermit. I lie on my bed with the window open and hear the cries coming off Trace. I have seen what they are doing above Lloyd’s Fork. Once when all the television sets in Number Thirteen went blank, Hassel and I drove up to see what had happened to the antenna. “Bears probably knocked it over,” Hassel said. I smiled at his foolishness. We took my truck up the old road past the remains of Winco camp on the mountainside where the black people once lived. Most of the houses were caved in and scraps of curtains hung from the windows, caught on jagged edges of broken glass. They are ghostly dwellings, looking as though you could thrust your arm right through the wood. We drove until the first fall of timber blocked the road. I stopped the truck and said, “I don’t think they’s much doubt what’s happened, do you?”
Hassel looked up the mountain and shook his head, his eyes narrowed against the sun. “Damn it,” he said, “they’re supposed to just be stripping the other end of Lloyd’s Fork. I seen their permit in the newspaper at a Concerned Citizens meeting.”
“Reckon Arthur Lee can’t read a map,” I said.
I let off the emergency brake and started backing down the mountain, pulling on the steering wheel, twisting my head back and forth until my neck ached. I forgot Hassel was there. All I could think was, Goddamn VISTA and his Concerned Citizens, and don’t that name sound like a passel of idiots sitting around with their foreheads puckered up. Goddamn silly boy that thinks he knows more than we do, pissing around with food co-ops, like a few crates of tomatoes and cucumbers will end poverty, while the American Coal Company kills men underground and rips apart these mountains. Every goddamn kid on the hollow mooning after him. Goddamn Jackie mooning after him and won’t give me the time of day.
I like the Robo. Wouldn’t have thought a car wash would be satisfying, but there are a lot of moving parts to keep up and I like working with machinery. A machine is interesting as a puzzle but predictable enough so while you work you can let your mind roll anywhere it wants to. When the wash is running, Sim and I talk, or if I am by myself I will read a book. At the end of the page I look up at the sheets of water and soap, the whirring green brushes, and feel the muscles of my back relax. After a car leaves there is a clean wet smell like a swimming pool.
At four-thirty I walk to the pay phone by the highway and call my trailer. Jackie answers.
“Got much homework this weekend?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
“I aint seen you in a ’coon’s age. Let’s pack a lunch, go up on the mountain like we did when you were a youngun. I got a hankering to see that hermit’s cabin again.”
Maybe it’s cruel because I can guess what we will find and I haven’t warned her. But I want to see for myself and I want her there. I want to see what she will do.
“All right,” she is saying on the phone. “Can Tom come too?”
Goddamn VISTA. But I can’t think of a good reason to say no. So the next day I have to walk the mile of track with him to Winco where my truck is parked. It is October, the leaves are speckled brown like russet apples, and the clear air seems as crackly as the leaves, we make small talk about the weather, about the car wash.
Then I say, “You see a lot of Jackie.”
He smiles and says, “Jackie’s a good kid. I’m glad she can hang out at Number Thirteen.”
He keeps his head down, watching where he is walking, not looking at me.
I say, “I hear tell you’re going to be a Catholic priest.”
“That’s right,” he says. “In a year or so.”
“Here a while and then gone.”
He notices the edge in my voice and glances at me.
“Something wrong with that?” he asks.
“We seen too much of it.”
I have said enough to keep a distance between us, so I walk a while in silence. The railroad has laid new gravel along the track and it grinds beneath our feet.
Then the VISTA says, “I’ve been aware for a while that you don’t care for me. You’re pretty cool whenever we run into each other. Anything you want to talk about?”
Goddamn college kid, trying to use some kind of psychology on me.
I walk a while longer without saying anything, trying to make him uneasy. Then I say, “We take care of our own problems down here. We don’t appreciate the government sending us a bunch of outsiders that come in here like it’s some big adventure, showing off in front of the poor hillbillies, and then taking off when the notion suits them.”
He stops walking. “Maybe I shouldn’t come today,” he says, “if you feel that way.”
“There’s something I want to show you,” I say. “I don’t have to like you to think it’s important for you to see it. Besides, Jackie would be heartbroke if I show up without you.”
He looks at me funny but doesn’t say anything and starts walking again. We reach my truck and ride most of the way to Annadel in silence.
Jackie is waiting on the street below Arthur Lee’s house, beside the boarded-up Roxie Theater. She lights up when she sees us, and I know it’s not because of me. The VISTA gets out of the truck so Jackie can sit between us. She gives me a peck on the cheek and then ignores me, keeps turning her head to look at the VISTA and poking me in the arm with her elbow.
I turn on the radio, Porter Waggoner singing “In the Pines.” Jackie slumps on the seat, says, “You don’t still listen to that hillbilly stuff do you?” Her voice is low and pleading.
I flick the knob off and grip the wheel with both hands, fighting off the impulse to smack her.
“Sorry,” I say, “I forget I’m traveling in sophisticated company.”
“You don’t have to turn it off,” the VISTA says. He sounds uncomfortable.
“No,” Jackie says then, her voice so low I can barely hear her, “you don’t have to turn it off. I didn’t mean anything.”
We pass the Jenkinjones camp houses, the company store, empty since Arthur Lee built a fancy new office out of cinderblock and glass. At the burning slate dump I roll up my window against the acrid smell. The slate has almost reached the far side of the hollow. The VISTA looks out the window.
“What happens if they fill in the whole hollow?” he asks. “Won’t water start to back up there?”
“Behind that pile of bone?” I say. “Sure. No place else for it to go.”
“I ought to look into it,” he says.
“You do that.”
I keep my voice low and even but he glances at me anyway. Jackie squirms and pokes her elbow into my ribs, this time on purpose.
The road is rougher than I remember. The truck rocks back and forth across the ruts, climbs over rocks and roots.
“Bad road,” the VISTA says.
“Looks like it washes out every good rain,” I say. “That’s something new.”
Then we reach a tree fall. There is a clearing to leave the truck.
“Want to walk it?” I ask.
“Why not,” the VISTA says, trying to sound cheerful. He gets out and stands a little ways off.
Jackie sits on the edge of the truck seat like she doesn’t want to get out.
I lean back inside the cab and ask, “Something wrong?”
“It’s all muddy and tree trunks everywhere,” she says. “I’ll get my new tennis shoes dirty.”
I want to grab her wrist and jerk her up straight. “Stay here if you want to, princess. But you aint making a very good impression on your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she whispers,” and you have been embarrassing me all morning. You better stop, Dillon, or I won’t speak to you ever again.”
I slam the truck door and she gets out the other side. I start climbing over the tree trunks and the VISTA is close behind. The ground has been chewed up by heavy machinery. Jackie slips from a trunk and steps in mud up to her ankle. The VISTA pulls her out by the arm but her tennis shoe comes off. “Dillon!” she wails like it is my fault. I ignore her and keep on. We are getting near the turn-off where the narrow track should run straight through the laurel up the mountainside. But when I round the curve of the hill there is no laurel, no mountaintop to climb, no hermit’s cabin, only a highwall, sharp like a knife, and a slice of empty sky.
The Unquiet Earth Page 23