The Price of Love
Sometimes the real world drives away dreams, and sometimes it brings them into sharper focus. I might have forgotten all about my dream if it wasn’t for seeing so many snakes. Opened the front door one sunny April day and I thought I saw a piece of washer hose just lying on the porch, but as I got closer to pick it up, it turned into a black snake, six foot long if it was an inch. It saw me and started forming a rippling letter S in slow motion before my eyes, slinking toward the edge of the porch, blending in to the dark beneath. All I could think about was how many we’d seen the year before. It was not that I wished it any malice or harm. I just wished it gone.
That was only the beginning. As soon as the ground warmed and trees began to bud out, seemed like snakes crawled out from under every rock outcropping or wild berry bush, especially the first year. It didn’t make any difference that Lux mowed the grass around the yard and kept all the stacks of unused lumber away from our outbuildings. At first Lux didn’t believe me, because I only saw the snakes during the day while he was off at work. But one summer night when the Jeep rolled up into the yard, a copperhead struck at Lux’s work boot as he stepped down. After that, when we’d been out for a trip to town, I didn’t let Ronnie and Lissy out of the Jeep without Lux getting out first and walking a circle around the tires for me and the kids. Lux shook his head and called it the Price of love.
I wouldn’t let the kids play out in the yard without me, since even nonpoisonous black ratters will bite. And they are stealthy, for the most part, though timber rattlers will warn a person. They will rattle to protect themselves. But copperheads will not. Copperheads will strike anything, and to me that feels like spite. Neighbors of Dad’s once had a penned-up 150-pound prize sheepdog with a shaggy coat that got attacked while it slept and died on the way to the vet.
I saw so many copperheads, I began to wonder whether they were real. On the way to feed my little banties, any type of snake could be stretched out along the path in the sun, or under the chicken house trying to figure out how to steal an egg or snatch a baby chick. I never knew when I’d see them, but each time my heart about seized up in my chest.
Hard to say if it was bad spirits, bad luck, or bad planning. The day Lux and his men started digging the postholes for our house, they dug into an old cellar wall from the Smith house site. I learned that there is nothing that snakes like better than a half-buried rock-wall cellar. We did not know it was there, though we had seen some exposed stones, a couple of limestone corners that broke through the ground near the base of our house.
I knew it wasn’t rational, but I began to think that the snakes were those Barker sisters’ fault, that we must have unearthed some Barker family crypt. Other things made me wonder, little things, like if a hen was broody but none of her eggs hatched out, or if the potato vines were fine but the potatoes had black rot, I would remember my witch dream. Maybe it was a sign or a prophecy. Maybe this place was not our place.
I fretted so much over snakes that I wouldn’t wear open-toed shoes. But Lux didn’t fret. He just killed them with whatever was close by: shovel, hoe, or switch. I could never bring myself to kill one, even though on my way to and from anywhere, a snake would stop me dead in my tracks, a two-inch-tall hurdle that was impossible to jump over.
On this matter Mom and I agreed. A mother’s duty was to keep her children away from snakes at all times. Thank God the children didn’t get bit, is all I can say. I saw how bad snakebite could be for full-grown man when a copperhead struck Wade Barker on his pinkie finger. That was the following year, and I’m getting ahead of myself, but Wade told us he was picking up a flat rock on the ground to fill a deep puddle on the road, and a small copperhead had been coiled underneath. At the time, Mom said, “A snake will charm people till they stand stock still, and then strike them down dead.” That was a new one on me. Where in the heck did she get those sayings?
But Wade insisted he got charmed and that’s why he froze and couldn’t take his hand away. Lux said Wade was probably drunk at the time. He always did move slowly, being overweight and because of his bad hip. Wade limped out of the hollow straight to Dad’s, his little finger looking like an angry red egg got stuck onto his dirty scabbed up mitt of a hand. If not for Dad speeding all the way to the emergency room, Wade might’ve died. It is possible that the Lord spared him for a reason. There’s no way to know how to read that kind of sign, though Dad took it upon himself to do the right thing when a man’s life hung in the balance; still, Wade moving back onto the Goshen Road was the beginning of our troubles.
AFTER OCTOBER’S hard frost the snakes disappeared. As November came on, I was grateful for the frozen ground, and the way the tall grass had died down on the paths to the paddock and chicken house. Our first Christmas we were snowed in for a week, and we only saw the sun from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The scant light lingered in sort of amber glow on the ridgetop for a few more hours. Lux hunted, following tracks, brought home turkey and rabbit for supper. The kids and I baked gingerbread cookies and made our own books out of construction paper and crayons. We kept the animals watered and kept the fire burning.
Lux managed to drive out to the mill no matter how deep the snow. It piled up on the roof of the tack shed and capped each rail and fencepost. Icicles hung from Dakota’s shaggy coat and clinked together as he walked. We trudged a path to the outhouse. With each snowfall, even if it was pitch black outside, Lux would throw his work boots on over his long johns and rush out to shovel, so he could turn the Jeep around. Sometimes, when the snow was too deep to drive back in, Lux would stay overnight with Dad and Mom, and Mom would call us about every hour to make sure things were OK up the hollow. It seemed silly, but I looked forward to hearing the phone ring.
With the January thaw, our little family could drive out of the hollow together. Lux would drop us off to visit Mom and Dad or Billie and baby Bertie and then head to work. Mostly Mom kept her critical comments to herself, but every so often she would tell me how she was praying for us, trying to keep us in the sights of the Lord, hoping that He would protect us and save us. “Yes, Mom,” I would say. “Don’t worry yourself sick. We are fine,” I would say, though what I did not say was that it was kind of nice to have a warm house to pass the time in, even if it meant watching reruns of Gunsmoke or Bonanza with Dad. Lux would take us back home on his way up the hollow, but I knew that since no one was home all afternoon to keep the stove going, we’d be coming back to a chilly little cabin.
I think that these were the best times for us. I know that one of those snug and cozy winter nights, I realized I was pregnant again. It came over me, like a spell was cast. A sense of joy and peace, a fullness. But like everything in life, things change, and as the saying goes, you don’t have to go looking for trouble—trouble will find you.
Wade Barker
Whenever there was a story on the news about a forest fire, Dad told us kids about how during a very dry summer back when Dad first got home from the war, Wade Barker set fire to the woods on the Goshen Road just to see what would happen. When he was growing up, Wade was a big skulking boy about ten years younger than Dad. Wade started the fire with leaves and brush on the edge of the road; then all of a sudden, acres of woods were ablaze. Dad said, “Clouds of smoke and heat reached down to within a few acres of his place. If not for the creek that ran along the road, it might have caught the whole valley on fire.” Volunteer fire departments from two townships came with pumpers, and neighbors came with shovels. By the grace of God, they put out the fire and saved the rest of the valley.
Wade denied it to the fire marshal, but later he bragged about it to let everyone know just what kind of dangerous character he could be. The strange thing was, the Barker homeplace wasn’t touched, though fire charred a ring of huge pine trees around their house. Those great, scorched, barren trees still stood after all these years.
That second year, driving in or out of the hollow, I got used to seeing a large black dog limping around, so
skinny I even thought about putting out some dog food. I never saw that dog again after Wade Barker came back in the flesh, a little over eighteen months after we moved in. By then, Billie and Alan Ray’d paid us for the trailer, set it up near the barn on the western edge of Dad’s land with a little picket fence, and settled in. Lux took the money that Alan Ray gave him and traded in the Jeep for a black Ford four-by-four pickup. Then he hired Edgar Sutton, Dad’s friend who drove a dozer for Pennzoil, to widen the road, set culverts, and grade and gravel it. Edgar made the road smoother, and he even cut some ditches alongside the rocky part of the road, so not quite so much water would run down the road and freeze in the winter.
The best thing that Edgar Sutton did was to set a couple of two-foot-tall steel culverts on the steep rise above Barker’s, keeping the water from washing down the road in the wettest part of spring when our little creek spilled over its banks as it worked its way down the hill. The worst thing that Edgar did was improve the whole length of the road enough for Wade Barker to be able to move back up on the Goshen Road. Word gets out, it seems, when someone fixes up a road.
Wade Barker was unmarried, unwashed, slow-moving and even slower-talking, and built like a fifty-five-gallon drum with a head stuffed on and a smudged-up Weirton Steel cap, so dirty I couldn’t tell what color it used to be, atop that ruddy, scrubby head of his. He said he was in the “haulin’ business,” and he left it at that. Within a few weeks he had a group of buddies up there, helping themselves to his beer and any other consumables offered by his relief check. Someone came up with the idea that using Barker’s beat-up old bald-tire flatbed truck they could haul whatever logs he could buy in the area and sell them to A-1.
In a few short weeks, during the rainy, early spring weather, Wade Barker undid most of the good that Edgar Sutton had done with his dozer and grader. Wade began driving in and out of the hollow with that old rear-wheel-drive flatbed truck. Its back tires slipped and ground in the mud, its engine raced and smoked. Then it would stall out, slide backward on the steep road, and start up and begin to try to climb again, breaking down the road surface and churning up more soft mud between Barker’s and Dad’s, especially the spots that Edgar Sutton had recently improved.
Lux began driving his Ford pickup down to the lower creek near Dad’s yard after work, to shovel loads of rocks and creek gravel onto his truck bed. He stood in the creek, pant legs so full of muck that I couldn’t tell where his overalls left off and his work boots began. From that point on, we were always working on that road, Lux mostly, and me, too, when my back wasn’t bad from carrying the children. As the weather got nicer we all went with him. Lissy and Ron’s heads barely reached the top of the tailgate, but they stood on tiptoes with their tennis shoes in the cool creek water and threw stones onto the truck bed to help their dad. Ronnie picked up crawdads from under the stones and threw them in a bucket for me to boil up, too.
Once the truck bed was filled, Lux’d take the kids to town and buy them a soda at Cleve’s. On the return trip, Lux would set the largest stones into the holes on the road and stand in ruts over his ankles, scrape shovelfuls of the creek gravel out of the truck bed, and set it in place with a steel tamping bar. Lux always said that crushed limestone would have been a better way to fill the ruts, but creek gravel was free for the taking.
EVEN THOUGH Wade Barker got over his snakebite, he never again threw a bit of rock onto the Goshen Road. He and his old drinking buddies acted as though they didn’t have to. But sometimes, when Wade was heading in or out of the hollow and Lux was standing in the creek with the kids, I could hear Lux get on Wade, just loud enough for all of them to hear. He’d say, “Throw any rocks on the road today, boys? how ’bout you, Wade?” But Wade’s fat hairy arm would rest on the open window, the brim of his cap would hide his eyes, and he would just drive on by, his truck smoking and chugging, wheels spinning the creek gravel right out of the tire tracks.
Road work took time, but Lux made that part of his daily chores. Evenings, Lux drove home from the sawmill with his truck bed full of rocks from rock slides off the shale cliffs on CR 57. Weekends, we drove to town for groceries with a shovel and a tamping bar sticking out of the bed. Alan Ray told Lux that he worked harder than the state roads crew. But then again, Alan Ray told that old joke about “What’s yellow and blue and sleeps six during the daytime?” and, of course, the answer is “A state roads truck.” Alan Ray used to devil Lux about mud splattered up to the windshield of his truck, and he always made a special point to tell Lux to make sure he took off his boots before he came into their trailer, but teasing never seemed to bother Lux that much.
What dug at Lux was Wade Barker. When Wade moved up, he started clearing, probably to keep back the snakes. Soon Wade and his buddies had taken the junk out of the yard, an old wringer washing machine, torn-up couch springs, car parts, old fencing, crocks, anything they couldn’t burn, and tossed it all into a little ravine on the side of the Goshen Road, just uphill from Wade’s house, right before our parcel of land began. It is possible that Wade also got paid to haul trash and scrap, as more and more junk began to fill up that ravine. Lux watched Wade remove the shingles from the roof of his house, and then add those shingles to the pile.
Whenever he saw Wade, Lux would stop his truck, get out, and tell Wade that all that garbage would slip down the creek one day and clog up the culverts that Edgar had set. In return, Wade said Lux got on his case for no good reason. Wade waved his hands around, said Lux acted like a worried old lady, said that Lux was off his rocker, said that when Lux paid the taxes on his land then Lux could tell him what he could and could not do with it.
The only one who could get anywhere with Wade seemed to be Dad. When Dad talked to Wade, Wade said he had pension money coming, and he was going to really fix the road up. He’d truck in eight tons of limestone at a time, and he’d have Edgar lay a new road over the old one, with larger culverts the whole length, and maybe even build a bridge. “He’s a real concerned citizen,” Dad said after Wade had left, and then he threw his head back and laughed. Mom told us she prayed that the Lord would keep Wade away from us and guide him to move back to wherever he came from. Mom was one of the most welcoming people I knew, but Mom never invited Wade to set foot into her home.
None of us ever suspected how bad it was going to get.
Soon enough, Dad found out that Wade didn’t really have much money coming in, just a very small disability settlement. Lux predicted that Wade and his friends would just drink up whatever money he got. Lux couldn’t stand the way Wade’s friends stared at me if they were out when we drove past. Only Alan Ray got friendly with Wade. No surprises there. Billie told me Wade and his friends had cases of beer and jugs of moonshine in the old root cellar behind his shack.
By the second winter after Wade moved back, our third full year up there, Lux’d had it with Wade Barker. December and January, as the days turned cold and rainy, Wade moved his hauling operation closer to home. He started timbering his own property. He probably needed the extra beer money. All the real timber had been sold off by Wade’s mother and aunt years earlier, so he and his friends cut scrub locust for props for the mines. It was a pretty crummy operation, just Wade and a couple of men and his truck, clear-cutting the hillside above his house and throwing the brush down into the same ravine, on top of all the other junk.
In January the road was frozen, and Wade’s flatbed running up and down wasn’t too bad, but with a wet snow, or a warming thaw, the road surface softened, and Wade’s tires slid, spun, and dug their way up the hill. Wade’s pension came and went, and nary a bit of gravel showed up on the road to fill in the ruts he’d made. February was just overly wet and snowy. The wettest days, Alan Ray could not cut timber, so he would show up with Billie and Bertie, leave them with me and the kids, and take off into the woods and end up down at Wade’s, shooting the bull, having a couple of beers, coming back to our house late in the afternoon to drive Billie home.
Lux worked insi
de in the mill, so he had to show up every day. The rocks that Lux laid into the ruts of the road got churned under the mud by Wade’s truck. Even with a four-wheel drive, it got more and more difficult to get back home unless the road had frozen the night before. Lux bolted a heavy wooden railroad tie to a steel I-beam and tried to level out the road by dragging that beam behind the Bronco, scraping the soft mud off the hump in the middle to fill in the ruts. But it didn’t last. New ruts and puddles appeared, and Lux could not keep up. The rainwater and snowmelt kept running down the tire tracks instead of in the ditches on the side of the road.
Day Full of Holes
Weekdays, about an hour after Lux left for work, I drove the old Bronco out of the hollow to Dad’s bridge so Lissy could meet the school bus for preschool. Since the Bronco had holes in the floorboards and didn’t have any heat, I kept a woolen blanket so Lissy and the boys could bundle up and keep warm. Some mornings Mom would turn on the porch light for me, so that I’d know she was up, in case I wanted to stop by for coffee. Though I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, I rarely stopped. Getting down the road was easy, it was just that I wanted to be sure that the trusty old Bronco could make it back up the hill to get home, since the mud on the road had gotten so deep and slick.
“The hog needs feeding,” I’d say, so I didn’t hurt her feelings, or, “I’m checking on the chicks.” In winter I turned a light on in the henhouse to keep those hens from freezing. Mom used to say I had the only electrified henhouse she ever heard of, but she admitted that I had the first eggs of the season. When the temperature dropped into the teens and the road froze, I knew I’d be able to get back, so I’d stop and visit with Mom for a spell, and her parting words would always be the same. “May God lead you safely back to my door.”
Goshen Road Page 11