Goshen Road

by Bonnie Proudfoot

  I married the man I wanted to marry. There was just something about Lux, and I knew it from the time we were kids on the ballfield. Nothing held him back, not losing an eye in the accident, not wearing an eyepatch. I longed to be close to him before I even knew what that meant, or what longing was all about. I loved the man he turned into—a hardworking hilljack of a guy, smelling like Copenhagen snuff, chain oil, and wood smoke, skin tasting like salt, long arms as wiry as hackberry limbs, a man just as hardheaded as me. I must have shattered my mother’s dreams, or maybe gave her more things to pray about. Lucky for me, I could tell that Dad was on my side.

  Moving up the Goshen Road was an adventure. It was our adventure. We were overrun with the place, the joys of it, the work of it. If we didn’t try, if we never tried to take that chance, who would we be and what would we know about life, or about ourselves?

  Here’s what I mean when I talk about how it was for me and Lux.

  I remember back before we were married, when Lux and I first started going together. This was maybe a couple of months after his stitches came out, on one of those hot, steamy summer afternoons. He pulled his Jeep up to the house right after he got off work. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said. “We can cool off from this heat. You might want a towel.”

  We rolled up to a pull-off near the dam, where the local kids always liked to swim. It turned out he had something else in mind. He led the way along a footpath through the woods above the dam to a cool, shaded break in the trees, just beside a small waterfall on Buffalo Creek. It was me and him, standing on a rocky ledge, must’ve been ten feet above the creek, looking down onto a flowing rush of cold water, and that rushing water had carved out a deep, wide pool—a perfect, private swimming spot.

  Lux said, “OK. You’re going to see something, and it ain’t going to be pretty.” He stripped off his shirt. Then he stripped off his eyepatch. I did not know what to look at first. His face, chin, and throat and his long arms were tanned dark ruddy brown, but his slim, lean chest was white as a pillowcase, speckled with a few black hairs around the base of his brown neck and under his arms. OK, that did look kind of funny. But his left eye, under the patch—the stitches had closed into scars around the eye, and his eye was sewed halfway shut. Lines of red shot out toward his temple from around his eyelid as if some great wolf had clawed at his face. “It’ll do,” I answered, as I could tell he wanted me to say something, but all the while thinking that it might not be pretty, but it was real, and real was better than pretty.

  “OK, then,” he said, nodding. “You ready?” Then he turned his back, scrambled from branch to branch up a nearby pine tree, reached for a thick braided rope that someone had hung over a branch about twenty feet above us, then worked his way down the rope, arm over arm, toward me, until he stood beside me on the rocky ledge, a foot or two away from the rushing waterfall.

  Then he stripped off his pants, stood in his boxers, and said, “Catch the rope when I swing it back to you, and do what I do.” I watched his arms grip the rope just above a great knot at the base, saw his legs skip backward a few steps, then he launched and swung his body way out, releasing, arcing out into the deep water below the rocks, hitting the water with a splash, coming back to the surface with a big old grin. On its own, the rope came right back to me, exactly where I was standing. I reached out and caught it. I looked at the water below. Then it was up to me, in my shorts and T-shirt. I looked down there at him, paddling backward, making room for me to land in the deepest spot.

  I’d never before clenched anything as hard as I held on to that rope. I hung on as high as I could, my arms trembling with the grip. I stepped backward, still hanging on, then ran forward, pushing out over the rocky ledge, gripping tighter now. I held onto the rope until my body was all the way out over the water and starting to swing back, all of a sudden knowing that I had better let go.

  Then I let the rope go. It was just me, out over flat rocks on the bank of the stream, the feeling of flying, knowing that if I did not get it right, I’d know soon enough, those rocks looked closer than I expected. All the way down, my legs stretched out below me, the rope swung loose above. I forced my legs to swing out, to hit the deepest spot of the swimming hole. The water was warm at first, then cold, cold and deep. I held my breath, hit the cool, sandy bottom with my toes and pushed off. My head rose up out of the water. I opened my eyes and saw Lux paddling over with his broad smile. “Ain’t that something,” he said.

  It was everything. It was the whole world. It was all I ever needed.

  I never wanted to hear that girls did not do these things. I never wanted to sit on the sidelines and watch. How do you know when to let go of the rope? You know that if you hit the rocks, you could break bones. You know that if you hit the muddy spots on the edge, you have to get back up, wash the muck off your legs, and then you will have to climb back up to that ledge and do it again, and do it right this time. Or you can grab the rope, swing out with all your strength, shoot for the sky, and when that thick piece of rope arcs all the way, drop into the deep, and there you go.

  That is the secret that people who sit around and watch others do not know anything about. I know that I have been lucky sometimes, unlucky other times, and the Lord might have had something to do with that, although He works in mysterious ways and His lessons are not always clear. Don’t tell me you love me so much you do not want me to jump. Show me what to do and give me the rope.

  The Goshen Road

  My mother never wanted me and Lux to move up the hollow. The road scared the daylights out of her. My dad might have had something to say about it, but he kept it to himself, as he never wanted to get between me and Lux once we were wed. Lux said it was really the road’s fault that we had to leave our land and our dreams behind and move back down to Dad’s. Though I didn’t agree entirely, I came to see his point.

  That rocky, rutted, backcountry dirt road, the Goshen Road, was twisty, steep, and narrow, with Barker Mountain rising up on the north side of the road, and a dark, deep-set gulley below on the southern side. It was a mile and a half drive uphill to where we would build our cabin, and I knew every inch of the way between Dad’s farmhouse and our property line.

  For the first quarter mile, we had to splash the Jeep through the creek and climb steep jagged layers of shale rock. This was a test on the best of days. The road flattened out, then rose steeply again, then flattened out at Barker’s and finally rose once more, following the Goshen Creek until it arrived at our parcel of land at the head of the hollow, the end of the line. In the winter we could hear layers of ice crunching underneath us from frozen mud in the rutted tire tracks. Through the road, I could feel the living cycle of the earth, freeze and thaw, damp and dry.

  Late winter, coming onto spring, the creek was as high as the wheel wells, the water flooded down the rocks in the daytime, but at night that water froze in sheets. To get out of the hollow, we had to slide the Jeep down those sheets of ice and pray the road was banked correctly. I never mentioned that to my mother, trying to spare her the grief, I suppose, or maybe not wanting to add to her doubt about our choices.

  Some winter days, coming back from town, just before heading back up the hollow, we made a stop at Dad’s to give Lux a chance to set chains on the tires. We could visit for a spell, let Mom spoil the kids with hot cocoa or milk and cookies, then off we went, winding out low gear, grinding through the snow like an army on the move. In a hard rain or a snow-melt, water overflowed the ditches on the uphill side, flooded down the tire ruts into the hardscrabble in torrents, and the cliff face turned into a waterfall. Come summer, the road was drier but narrower, as wide as a tractor path, briars and low tree branches scraped at the doors of the Jeep. One of us had the brilliant thought that we lived on a one-way street just like in town, but the one-way arrow was pointing whichever way we happened to be traveling at the time.

  For three years Lux drove, I held my breath and clutched Lissy, Ronnie, and eventually Little Lux, and thought a
bout how we did it before, so we could do it again. If we’d have broken down or gotten stuck by sliding backward into a snowbank, we would’ve had to hike clear back to the bottom to get Dad or Alan Ray to help winch us out of there. It would not be the end of the world, I told myself. It would all work out, I thought. Get tough, I told myself, get real. People faced a lot harder in days gone by, when this land was first settled using mules and horses. Look life in the face, I thought.

  I thought of this road like I thought about all of life. Running away from a problem does not make it go away; a person is only going to have to face that problem again some time, in some other way. I don’t know why I knew this, I just did.

  NO ONE else lived on the Goshen Road between our land and Dad’s place when we began building, though two families had lived there in recent memory, Barkers and Smiths. Decades earlier, the Smith family farmhouse had stood on what would become our house site. Old-timers said it was as pretty a place as they had ever seen, with a pond full of bass and bluegill, pasture, gardens and fruit trees. Wooded hillsides rose up in a ring around our meadow. Dad said the apple orchard came right from Johnny Appleseed himself.

  The Barkers still held onto a parcel of land halfway between Dad’s and ours. It used to be their family homestead, but all that remained by the time we bought our land was a caved-in tar-paper shack and an outhouse behind it. Sometime after the Second World War, the Smiths sold their ninety-acre farm to the Barker sisters, although they retained access to the Smith family cemetery. The Barker sisters bought the land, then sold the Smith farmhouse right off its stone foundation. The story goes that the buyers set the floor joists of the farmhouse on rails, loaded it onto a flatbed, and hauled it to town. It stands to this day near the post office in Fairchance. After that, the Barker sisters sold off all the prime hardwood timber and locust trees to A-1 lumber. Finally they let the Smith parcel go to the county for back taxes. Then they moved on.

  By the late 1950s all that remained up at the head of the Goshen Road was an overgrown field, a half-caved-in cellar pit made of hand-hewn stones that had been the foundation of the Smith farmhouse, and an old cistern-type well with a rusty pipe that stuck out of the ground. At some point the county abandoned all road maintenance. The Goshen Road became an “orphan road.” Anyone who owned property had a right of way, but it was not worth the cost to the county for upkeep.

  Dad grabbed up the ninety-seven-acre Smith property as soon as he saw the notices in the Telegram. Even though it wasn’t worth much, once it was his he could hold it or sell it, and if he sold it he’d be the one to decide who lived up the road from him and Mom. He was all smiles when Lux asked him to sell it to us on a land contract. Dad said he was so pleased to keep it in the family that he would have given it to us. Lux insisted he pay, and they worked it all out. Dad did not ask for a down payment. Just a smile, a handshake, and a pat on the back, and it was ours.

  FROM THE start, Lux and I used to ride horses up there and scout the property, talking about where to put the chicken house, the corral, the gardens, the tack shed, and, of course, our little cabin that Lux talked nonstop about and would build himself. At those moments, joy flooded through his words into me with an open sense of possibility and wonder. It was like we were the painters and saw this wide arc of fields and wooded hills as our canvas: this field with a barn or a chicken house, that hillside cleared and fenced and turned into pasture, this spring that already flowed with clear water should be fine for Dakota. The orchard was overgrown but still bearing bushels of fruit, and the dark, steep trails led into the lush shade of the deep woods, where turkeys called in the spring. We’d crest the last hill and cross onto our land, and the wide world would open up in shades of green. Our horses trotted through waist-high wild oats and clover, crows called out a welcome. We’d canter into the apple orchard, and I thought that this must really be paradise, this gift—to have a real chance to shape our lives and the lives of our children.

  But it wasn’t until we began to move up there that it struck me how little I knew about how to live way back in the woods. Oh, Mother, dare I say it? You might have been just a little bit correct there. That first year, once Lux drove off to work, I didn’t have any way to get out of that hollow other than hiking out with a child under each arm. Lux eventually bartered his spare western saddle to his uncle Ron for an old four-wheel-drive Bronco with no reverse gear and the hubs permanently locked in. It took guts and sheer will, but I learned to drive that ornery son of a bitch, winding out first gear as I tried to get it up the hill, or riding the brakes all the way down between our place and Dad’s. I was the first female in our family to drive a car, and I wore that like a medal.

  Dad gave me the thumbs-up whenever he saw me, but if Mom was impressed, she did not show it. She always found something else to point out, some other aspect of my life that caused her the heartburn. There were things I knew better than to mention, not to Mom or to Billie, who was known to spread a rumor or two in her time. For instance, though I had kids and critters to watch over, and there was always something to do, I was lonely sometimes up there, with Lux at work all day, and for the most part no visitors. I didn’t mention it because after all what good would it have done to bring up the subject or cause Mom more worry? It’s just that I didn’t quite expect how different things would be, with no vehicles passing by, ever.

  Billie came up, not that she would hoof it, but if Alan Ray was off work and he felt like taking a walk in the woods, he’d drive her up. Mom and Dad’s Lincoln would have bottomed out in the ruts, so they didn’t risk it. Truthfully, there weren’t many folks wanting to risk that road, even in the best weather.

  Once a year a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses made it up, in a spanking new four-wheel-drive Jeep Wagoneer with off-road tires. They must’ve known what they were in store for, going in and out of these hollows. Two families at a time would drive up to our little cabin, the boys dressed in little business suits and the girls in little matching pinafores, like a little flock of chicks circling a mother hen. My front walk was usually so muddy I was embarrassed to have company, but I could hear a vehicle coming, then a second, then slowing down when the road got steep, the rumbling engines getting louder.

  I was actually sort of glad to see them. I’d take their Watchtower magazine and offer them whatever cookies or cake I had baked and some tea or instant coffee; after all, they were doing the Lord’s work. But I wouldn’t ever see things their way, as I tried to tell them, and neither would anyone in my family. While my Lissy and Ronnie had their crayons and toys all over the floor, their quiet little ones stood around in their Sunday best, raised so strict in that Witness faith. It seemed like they would have to break with their own parents if they wanted to play on the floor with dolls or toy trucks. I felt a little sad for the children. Maybe after they drove down out the hollow, those folks felt sorry for me and mine. They look at our practices as sinful, but I believe people ought to worship God in acts and deeds and with a joyful noise. People ought to sing out their love for the Lord, to shout it out, or speak in tongues if the Spirit calls. Some of that comes from how I was raised, but some of it comes from deep within me and was not something I heard in a church pew. I believe in moving if the Holy Spirit calls you to move, and I believe in signs and wonders that come down to us from above. They are there for anyone.

  This Dream of Witches

  I remember when the Lord first sent me a sign that we shouldn’t be moving up on the Goshen Road. It gave me the shivers, like a cold hand gripped me in the belly, like something deep in my gut already knew what my dream was going to tell me. I knew. I had this feeling, like the past and the future are all the same thing, like we sense what will be, what the Lord wants for us, and it’s no different than if it’s already happened.

  On the last three nights of August in 1971, right around the time that Lux hauled the first load of lumber up the hollow to set the corners for our first building, which would soon be a little toolshed for Lux and a li
ttle chicken house for me to keep some laying and brooding hens, I dreamed the same dream.

  The dream was so clear I could watch myself in it. I was standing in our field at sundown. Lux hadn’t mowed yet, so flowering stalks of queen of the meadow and Joe-Pye weed were almost as tall as me. The light- and dark-purple flower clusters swayed slowly back and forth in the breeze like bridesmaids, bowing left to right. In the dream, I couldn’t quite see the sunset from where I stood. The row of round apple trees still heavy with leaves and fruit was between me and the pink-and-orange sky. It was right before it starts getting dark, when the whole sky brightens in the last rays of the sun. The field was almost glowing, the light seemed to settle just above the tree line. Then two wrinkled-up, chubby witches formed themselves from the shadows cast by the trees and slowly circled on their flying broomsticks, around and around in the swirling air.

  I watched, and I saw myself. I stared like a child at a carnival watching a ride spin. The broom riders looked like the Barker sisters, or what I remembered them looking like. They were all in black, as witches are, but with tight black stretchy pants on, and black capes and hats, with stringy black hair, bad skin, and crooked front teeth. As I watched, I wondered how they stayed up on the broomsticks. They were large people, all of the Barkers. I knew better than to laugh at this sight, as something solemn and unnatural seemed about to happen, a ceremony, or a ritual that I was only just getting a glimpse of, but something that had been done many times before. They saw me, too. They saw me watching them, and they sort of flaunted themselves in a trashy way, laughing at me, circling in the shimmering air, and chanting loud enough for me to hear. “Go away, go away, go away. This place is not your place, this here is our place.”

  “Who are you? Who are you?” I asked them, in my dream. But they refused to answer, though they knew I was speaking right to them. Lord God up in Heaven! If that didn’t beat all, I thought to myself. But I remembered something about the Barker sisters just then. Their house had been a little ways down the hollow, not on this exact place at all; still, they just appeared, swirling up out of the field. I watched them circling and taunting until it became too dark, until the very last ray of sunlight turned to a single spot of ruby fire in their midst.