The first time I had the dream, I was spooked. After the second night, I know I called out in my sleep, “Who are you? Who are you?” Then Lux woke next to me and held me, shaking, to his chest. I was ready to tell Lux that we should reconsider, maybe hold off on starting our little chicken house, but something kept me back from telling the dream to him. I pondered on telling Mom, but I could already guess her response. This was just one more thing that I wanted to puzzle out for myself. I thought about it all day, turning it back and forth in my brain.
After the third night of the same dream, I got to thinking I was just replaying some fearful childhood nursery rhyme in my head, a tale Mom might have told me about witches in the woods. I told myself that we should take ahold of our destiny as a family, and that living people are way more powerful than ghosts and dreams. Just maybe it was up to us to show those Barkers that they could not keep what they never had. So I kept my mouth shut and tried to push that dream into the background, under the surface of my mind. But it smoldered on, a little flame that wouldn’t quite snuff out.
The Barkers of Barker Mountain
Over the years the Barkers were a subject of conversation in the family. Until I was about five or six they still lived up the Goshen Road, and the sisters and Wade would drive out of the hollow in a rusted-out, faded, two-tone gold-and-cream Ford Fairlane sedan. Dad would go to the window and watch to see if they could make it safely across the creek and up to the blacktop. Mom would say, “There go the big, bad Barkers.” I did not ever ask why she said that, but it seemed like there was just an unfriendly air about them.
The Barker sisters were born and raised on the Goshen Road. They never married, they lived in the small tar-paper-covered cabin, halfway up the hollow between our place and Dad’s. Which one had that boy, Wade Barker, I can’t recall. The two sisters and Wade stayed on the Goshen Road until their old shack of a house began to fall apart. That was the last anyone saw of them, until about five years later. Wade came back for about a year, a grown man, living in that cabin off some kind of disability from a steelyard accident and the money the sisters had made by selling the Smith house and all the hardwood timber. He moved away again when I was about eight or nine, which was about the same time Dad picked up the Smith property at that county tax sale.
Wade’s cabin, what was left of it, set against the back of their narrow field, just before the last steep rise of the road that led to our property line. Some of the roof, most of the walls, and a caved-in front porch still stood, and behind it a little shed and outhouse, but parts of the roof had slumped down flat on top of the ceiling. Window glass, handrails, a wringer-washer, and an old dog box were strewn out front; half-buried pieces of crocks, slop buckets, rusty cast-iron skillets, tree limbs, and scrap lumber lay in the yard. Once, riding past on horseback, Lux and I looked through the busted-out windows of the house to where cobwebbed bed frames and a dresser were piled in one corner that seemed to keep dry. Lux said we ought to check to see if anything looked useful, but I wouldn’t have us touch any of that Barker stuff. I’ve heard folks out this way scout these old places to see what they could use or trade. Lux saw the waste of it. Tools and crocks should be used, he would say, but I felt that every old farm tool carries a story, that we should allow the rightful owners to reclaim what is theirs. Abandoned places are common in these woods, but they are a piece of somebody’s life and family story, beauty and sorrow mixed together.
They say bad things happen in threes, and I put the three dreams mostly out of my head, hoping that the past would eventually bury the past. We had one sign of good luck in an odd way; we got lots of help building our house that fall. The A-1 mill had temporarily shut down while the miners in the central part of the state were on strike. Lux was home, and Alan Ray and some loggers came around every day. By the end of a month they had the first part of our cabin built. It bothered me that the spot Lux chose for our house site was square in the middle of that field where I’d seen those witches circle, but Lux wanted to center the house over the old well to keep our water pipes from freezing.
When is the time right to listen to these hints and signs? Where are the ones who say they’ve been here before, who tell us the meaning of these things, the dreams and intuitions that come seeping into our brains from who knows where? And if they flat out spoke to us, would we listen?
House and Home
Though it seemed like it took forever to get our whole house built, it suited us in the way it went together. We planned that we would build it in two parts, the first part, a two-story section, with a little front porch, a kitchen, mudroom, and living room downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. We bought a Warm Morning wood stove and ran the stovepipe up through the second floor for extra heat. As a gift, Dad had the electric company set poles and run power. Mom insisted we have a phone, and we agreed it was a good idea. Me and Lux had a laugh about that, as we knew that most of the phone calls would be from her. We bought an old wagon wheel at a junk store, and Lux wired that for a living room ceiling light.
Everything that we needed seemed to come to us at the right time, like there was bounty in every direction, although we knew that our final house would never be the kind of place that my well-meaning mother had envisioned for me to live in. We used green milled poplar from A-1 for the framing and beams and more poplar planks for a board-and-batten-style siding, and set the whole house up on used telephone poles that Dad got us from Pennzoil. We knew we would be adding on to the back, so we left that unfinished, and just stapled up tar paper. That was sort of an eyesore, especially as we walked out to the outhouse, but so what? It was our eyesore, perfect in its own way because it was waterproof, snug, and held out a promise for the future.
For the first two weeks in September, after the corners were staked out and the house was square, all the men did was dig postholes. Every few feet another post was set into the ground. Then they built from the floor up, first a platform four feet high in the air, like a landing pad for aliens stuck out in a field, then they raised the walls and built trusses, then a scaffold to start nailing on the roof.
In October, after the tin roofing was nailed down and the windows set, Lux and me, Lissy and little Ronnie moved our furniture from the trailer to our home-in-progress. It sunk in that we actually had a place of our own when Mom and Dad and Billie and Alan Ray came up, and all of us sat around our living room one Sunday afternoon in late October, warm and cozy from the woodstove, and listened to Curt Gowdy call the game as the Pirates beat the Orioles and won the 1971 World Series. Dad bet Lux that Clemente would be the MVP, Lux said it would be the pitcher, Steve Blass. I recall that Lux took Dad’s Lincoln to the carwash the next day.
I watched to see what Mom thought as she looked around our cabin. I could tell she was starting to set aside some of her misgivings, although she could not resist a suggestion. She went right to the top. After the World Series, as soon as she returned home, she called up to the house and made me hand the phone over to Lux. I watched while Lux nodded his head and said, “Yes, ma’am. I will, ma’am. Don’t worry.” The next thing I knew, he built a little gate that circled the wood stove to protect Lissy and Ronnie from accidentally bumping into the hot cast iron of the woodstove. Things like that went a long way to show Mom that my choice in a mate was not entirely wrongheaded.
THE SECOND part of our cabin, which took more than a year to get started on, would eventually have the indoor bathroom, a pantry and laundry room, and upstairs our bedroom, with a view of the sunset looking out over the orchard. Lux surprised me when he announced that he had plans to put a commode in the downstairs bathroom. Mom never did like using the outhouse, and neither did Billie, and they were thrilled to hear it. As Dad said, “Indoor plumbing beats the heck out of three rooms and a path.” I swore I would never take a flush toilet for granted again. Only Lux said he would miss the privacy and the view from the little outhouse window, the span of blue sky and wooded ridgetop.
As we were building our
home, Lux was still off work, and though there wasn’t much money coming in, we had lots to do and the time to do it. Is that some kind of rule of nature? The more money, the less time, and the more time, the less money? I have never known the luxury of too much time and too much money, but I guess I had something to be thankful for, since real trouble starts when a person has neither. I could help when the little ones napped, each task a chance to gain skills, learn what to do and what not to do.
Together Lux and I set posts for Dakota’s paddock, built a shed for tack, and suddenly there was a fenced horse yard alongside the winding creek. Lux developed a spring, and we found an old claw-foot bathtub, which looked silly but held running water all the year round for Dakota. For a while Alan Ray and Billie kept Chance there, too.
We did not always have time or money, but we did have friends and family. Lux would head down to the house some Saturday afternoons and fetch the folks, and he and Dad hung drywall in the bedrooms while Mom and I cooked, fixing whatever the men shot along with whatever came out of the garden: squirrel, grouse, venison, rabbit, wild turkey, collards, turnips, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, new potatoes, corn, and beans, canning the leftovers for the winter. We sat on the porch after supper watching families of does and fawns browse the edges of the orchard in the front yard at sunset. Lux used to say if he was patient, he could feed his family year-round from his front door and no game warden would be the wiser.
On rainy days I stapled up insulation inside and hung shelves in the kitchen for plates, pots, and pans. We had a stack of planed poplar boards from the mill, each with their own pattern of sapwood and heartwood that ranged from light tan to yellow to brownish green. Weekends on the way to town for groceries, we hit the garage sales. Lux would not borrow tools from anyone, even Dad, and he scouted for anything he could put to use, from a shovel or a mattock to old chisels and files. I learned to use an axe, a sander, a staple gun, a drill, a tape measure, and a level. I could countersink the head of a screw and putty over the hole. The chainsaw never bothered me, but my hands shook whenever I tried to use a circular saw. I left that for Lux. Our first Christmas, we asked Mom and Dad for Sears Craftsman hammers.
When Alan Ray was off on a rainy day, or if his crew quit early, he’d drive Billie up. Alan Ray would head into the woods, look for ginseng to sell in season, set out some rabbit boxes, and check for turkey or deer sign. He didn’t have to look too hard. Some mornings the toms came right into my yard and fanned and strutted for my penned-up turkey hens. By then Lux and his crew were back to work. Billie and I had the house to ourselves to work and gossip about the outside world. With the kids’ help, we painted the bedroom walls, then Billie sketched out a red pickup truck on Ronnie’s wall and giant purple flowers for Lissy. Sun-soaked afternoons, while Alan Ray was in the woods, Billie and I took the kids for walks to the henhouse to collect eggs, or we played in the sandbox Lux had set up for Ronnie. He had all his Tonka trucks laid out like a miniature road crew on mountains of sand. Ronnie could say “dig and dump” perfectly, but when he tried to say “dump truck” it came out like “dumbfuck.” Alan Ray made Ronnie say “dump truck” over and over, wherever we were, and everyone howled except for Mom. Her face blanched white and she shook her head.
Ronnie would make such a mess out of himself, I’d have to draw and heat water and set him into the washtub as soon as he was done playing. At that time we were still using a hand pump for water. We had to save up to buy an electric water pump and water heater, and we had yet to run the water lines. But the place kept warm as winter came on. Even Billie said so, and though she was warmer from being pregnant, she was so thin that she usually was chilled. When it was too wet to be outdoors, Billie set up her portable record player on the kitchen table, and the four of us, Billie, me, Ronnie, and Lissy, pretended we were on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. We awarded prizes like homemade pickles to the best dancer, the kids outdoing each other, inventing new dances. Lissy practiced cartwheels; Ronnie hopped in circles until he would fall over face down on the rug. We sang along to “Maggie May” and “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.”
Eventually Alan Ray wore out his welcome. I still can’t figure out whether I did something to put the wrong idea into his head, like maybe I laughed once too often at his pitiful dirty jokes. Late fall, one afternoon while the kids were in the house with Billie and I was out splitting firewood to fill the wood box, Alan Ray walked out of the woods, came up behind me and locked his long arms around my arms, and said, “Girl, ain’t no one ever taught you the right way to swing an axe?”
I pushed my way clear of his arms, shoved him back with my free hand, and cast a glimpse back toward the house. Neither the kids or Billie could see him or me, as I was behind a corner of the tack shed, but I looked at him square on, saying, “What in the world are you up to, Alan Ray?” He kind of stumbled backward, and I realized that he was flat-out shinnied up, that he’d been hitting a flask that he kept in a back pocket of his jeans. He sort of smiled at me, licked his lips, and blew me a kiss. “Didn’t mean nothing, don’t you know.”
I turned around. It might just be that he was trying to be helpful, but I wasn’t so sure about that. Just to show him I knew what I was doing with the axe, I took it up, and swung it as hard as I could into the chopping block, where it lodged itself solidly.
Next thing I knew, he stood right in front of me. “Up to some mischief, I guess,” he said, looking at me. He was bare chested; he’d stripped off his T-shirt and army vest. Sex was written all over his face. He walked back a few steps, motioning to me to come back behind the shed with him. “You know you been wanting it,” he said. “I just know you been waiting on the right time and place.”
“You better keep your hands to yourself, Alan Ray, or Lux is going to come beat the tar out of you, and it won’t be pretty. Where in the world did you get the idea that I was that kind of girl?” I asked him, scowling at him as seriously as I could manage.
“All girls are that kind of girl, right time, right place, right man,” he said back to me. He rubbed at the bulge in his pants. I tried not to look, stared back up, straight into his bloodshot eyes, trying to shoot him a glare that would settle him down. He was not taking the hint. He held out his hand to try to get me to take hold of it, so he could pull me closer. “C’mon Dessie, you ’n’ me, come on. A little bit of fun. No one has to know. I ain’t had none for weeks now. Billie ain’t interested since she’s expecting. All she does is push me away.”
I walked back to where Billie could see me from the house, just in case she happened to be standing near a window. I wished Lux would come blasting up the hollow, surprise us, home from work early. But the road looked about the same, just a slip of gravel cutting between the apple trees and heading west, downhill. I thought about what to say next. “Alan Ray, don’t come ’round here, acting like that. You ain’t my type of man, and you never will be,” I said.
“Oh, I get it. Ain’t you just like your mom?” he said. “I get it. Go ahead, be a bitch, why don’t you? You been fucking with me, leading me on all this while. Well y’ain’t any better than anyone else round here, you know.”
“That’s a load of hogwash and you know it,” I said back to him, wondering if I did something wrong, and when I did it, but thinking it could be a trap, too. Like my mom? That gave me pause, but only for a second. “You got the wrong idea,” I said. “Or else you don’t know nothing at all about me.”
I turned my back to him, pulled the chopping block forward, so if he wanted to talk to me he’d have to stand out in the open. Then I took up the axe by the handle and yanked on it, hoping to hell that it would come free of the block. It did. I set a wide, round piece of poplar firewood on the block, thinking all the while, Alan Ray, you are a real snake in the grass, aren’t you now? My jaw clenched and my hands shook. I raised the heavy axe and split that round chunk of poplar clean in half, one swing. With each log I set on the chopping block, I took aim for the block below the log, not the log itself
, raised the axe again, and watched that blade slice through the poplar like I’d been doing it all my life. Then I set it all into the wheelbarrow. When I looked up, Alan Ray was gone.
I checked to see if he was hanging around, but he had gone to the house and rounded up Billie. All I could see was the tailgate of his red pickup headed down the road. The sun was low in the sky. The cool air helped me breathe, to look at each piece of wood, and think only about the spot on the top of the log where the axe would fall, the spot on the bottom of the log where the axe would wind up as the wood split apart. I could inhale, pick up a log, set it on the block. I could breathe out as the heavy head of the axe fell.
I tried to figure out whether or not I should tell Billie or Lux, Mom or Dad, or keep it to myself. Lux would be ticked off, so ticked off there would be no telling what he’d do or say. I thought about the kids, about how quiet they got when he flew off the handle. Mom would blame the Devil himself for putting wicked impulses into the human heart. Dad, well, much as I wished someone would punch Alan Ray in the nose, I was too old to run to Daddy. But mostly I thought about my sister, wondering if she knew the true nature of the man whose baby she was carrying. Even worse, I wondered if Billie might think I played up to Alan Ray, and that, as he claimed, I’d led him on. It was too much weight to put onto all of their shoulders. I filled the wheelbarrow with as much split firewood as I could, and I headed for the house.
I kept these thoughts to myself, but I saw less of my sweet, beautiful sister that autumn. Alan Ray said he was too busy to make time to drive her up. The kids asked for Auntie Billie, wanted her to bring up her records, sit cross-legged on the floor, and cut out paper dolls, but I told them Uncle Alan Ray was busy and Auntie Billie’s legs hurt too much to hoof it, and I helped them find other games to play. I missed her too, like there was a little less sunshine in our day. There are lessons to be learned here, I thought, lessons about what to say and when to say it. Not every problem has an easy solution. For better or for worse, as winter came on, I kept it all under my hat.
Goshen Road Page 10