Goshen Road

by Bonnie Proudfoot

  EACH TIME Lux and I passed Barker’s on our way back from town, Lux used to say he was going to have to “get serious with old Wade.” I never had the guts to ask him what he meant by that, too afraid that he’d do something that would get him thrown in jail, and if that was the case, it would leave me with three kids, up a hollow and on my own. I knew that no one would help us keep the road up. We were too far away from town for zoning laws, and it was not a county school bus route. It was us, and it was Wade Barker, and there was axle-deep mud churning away under our tires, potholes getting deeper and wider each day as we drove in and out.

  When it rains in West Virginia, folks have been known to leave the “s” out of “West.” On one of those rain-soaked gray afternoons in late winter, on our way home, Lux drove slowly up the hollow, splashing through the water-filled puddles and potholes. Three-quarters of the way up to our house, he eased the truck to the side of the road in front of Wade’s yard, and stopped when he saw the lights were on and Wade was outside. It was still getting dark pretty early, and Alan Ray, who was drinking a beer on Wade’s porch, later said he could see Lux’s headlights over each rise in the road, just the two foggy beams streaming out of the darkness, heading up the hollow, way before he heard the slow grind of the engine or the splash of Lux’s tires slipping in the muddy ruts, but by the slow way Lux was driving, he could tell something was up.

  From the driver’s seat, Lux looked over at Wade’s shack, which was half covered in billows of smoke from the woodstove and foggy rain.

  Lux turned to me, pulled his cap down on his head, slid his work gloves on, and said, “Might be three, four guys on the porch, might be more. How many do you see?” I wasn’t sure how he could tell that. I rolled down the window, blinked back the rain in my eyes, and craned my neck to see Wade’s porch. I could not see anything but shadowy forms. Lux stepped out of the Ford, pulled up the collar on his coat, and through the beam of the headlights I only made out his hands in his pockets and his cheekbones. His jaw was set, steam seemed to rise off the brim of his cap. The rain had been pouring down for the third day in a row, and the patches of snow and reddish-brown mud were so slick that Lux’s work boots kept getting stuck as he walked up to Wade’s porch.

  Alan Ray stepped half off the porch and held out his hand to Lux, but Lux walked right over to Wade. I could hear Lux, shouting to be heard above the clatter of the rain on Wade’s steel roof, say, “How much will you take for your truck, Barker?”

  Wade started mumbling, shuffling his weight back and forth, looking at Alan Ray and at his group of drinking buddies. “I don’t really know, mister,” said Wade. Wade seemed a bit surprised, but he never was too quick to reply to any question.

  “Well, then,” Lux said. “By God, I’ll give you five hundred bucks and my old Bronco to quit your logging, park that truck of yours, and, tell you what, you say the word, and I’ll also give you five thousand to sell me this here piece of land.” As I heard this, I wondered how Lux thought he’d make that kind of money, with us still needing a hot water heater and the house still needing flooring in some places. I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind. What was I thinking? We did not need the flooring as much as we needed the road.

  “Five thousand?” Wade said. He took that old cap off and he scratched at the top of his stubby hairline. “You got five thousand?”

  “I can pay it on time, a thousand a year for five years.” Lux looked around at the men on the porch. One of them began to laugh. Lux took a step forward, closer to the porch.

  Alan Ray spoke up. “You boys don’t think Lux’s good for the money?” That shut them up.

  Wade stood there with the rain hammering against the metal roof of the porch, the steamy rotten smell of wet wood smoking out of his chimney. Finally he shook his head. “Look here, mister,” he told Lux, “you drive up and down this road every day, same as me. Your pretty little blonde-headed wife drives up and down this road, same as me. You don’t get out and say ‘Hey.’ She don’t get out and say ‘Hey.’” Wade looked over at his friends as if to say those same men have sat there for years now, and they’ll swear to it. “I’m an old man. I may not live five years. But I’m a Barker, I am. This here’s Barker Mountain. I’m a Barker.”

  Lux pulled his A-1 hat down on his head and turned back to the truck. “You simple son of a bitch,” I heard him say, over and over again, more to himself. “Where are you going to be when you can’t drive that piece of shit flatbed truck of yours in or out the hollow, Mr. Barker of Barker Mountain? You ever think about that?” He didn’t look at me. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. Wade and the rest of them on the porch started laughing, repeating Lux’s words. “Ain’t you the simple son of a bitch,” they called back at Lux, laughing.

  Lux climbed back up into the truck, and the engine raced as he hit the gas. I turned around and looked out the window, and saw Wade Barker stumble back to the porch with the men. But Alan Ray held his beer and stood in the rain in the road, like he didn’t have the heart to return to Wade’s porch while we could see still him.

  Lux didn’t say anything else. He just revved up the Ford and gunned it. He started up the hill as fast as he could, spinning mud out behind his tires and sliding back and forth, in and out of the ruts that were already on the road. I held onto all three of the children, the baby in my lap, the other two by whatever parts of them I could grab. To me, from the passenger seat, it almost seemed like Lux’s pickup wasn’t going to make it up that slick hillside, like the Ford might slide sideways into the ditch. For a brief moment, I worried that Lux would have to get all those drunks to push him out if we got stuck. But one of the tires finally grabbed on to something solid, and we got going. Then the noise of the swollen creek rushing through the culverts and the splatter of the rain drowned out all the other sounds, and we made it back onto our little turnaround spot in front of our house.

  I don’t know whether it was the sound of the rain, the noise of the creek, or a message, but that night I had one of those witchy dreams again. I dreamed the whole house was bewitched, that it was spinning in circles, like the ground beneath was a whirlpool. I was alone in bed and holding onto both sides of the mattress and trying to figure out what had caused this great spinning. In my dream I looked out the window, and all I could see was black, and then I knew. It was like we were shrunk down, wee little, and house and all, we were inside a great iron cauldron. And the spinning was us, being stirred faster and faster by the giant hands of the sisters. I could hear them laugh, I could hear the rush of the wind, I could hear their smoldering fire as it hissed and popped.

  The next morning as the fog broke I could see that it was just barely raining. Lux had left already, and I set some wood into the stove. I could hear a different noise in the yard, and without even thinking about it I knew the narrow Goshen Creek had come up out of its banks in the night. In the icy mist and haze of the morning, I opened the door of our house and saw a different world, a view unlike any I had seen before. The creek had flowed up high enough to surge halfway up our yard, a roaring wake of water, rushing close to the house, almost to our outhouse behind the back steps. It rose halfway up the planks of the chicken house, and all my little setting hens had drowned. The poor girls wouldn’t leave their nest boxes. They were so tame they used to eat crumbs out of Lissy’s hands.

  Lux went out at six as usual, but after he got to the end of our property the road was completely washed away. Each piece of Wade Barker’s discarded junk had come sliding down the hill with the rising of the creek. The sheet metal and garbage wound up clogging the large culvert pipes that Edgar Sutton had put in. Once those culverts got crammed full of junk, the water from the creek bed rushed over the top of the culvert pipes, then onto the road, and then up, onto the field beside the house. By morning the creek had cut a new creek bed, through the center of what used to be the road between our place and Barker’s, but was now rushing water with chunks of rocks and garbage in its wake. If Lux hadn’t stop
ped the truck at the end of our property, above the flooding creek, he would have totaled the truck.

  The strange thing about this was how, after washing out that section of road, the creek rushed back into its proper bed. All the damage happened on the hillside above Barker’s house. His yard and his homeplace weren’t touched.

  Alan Ray must have been watching for Lux to come out of the hollow. When Lux didn’t come, Alan Ray drove up the road to see if he could help. Wade and his drinking buddies were not stirring yet, he said, but when he passed Barker’s place and started toward ours, there wasn’t enough dry ground for him to drive on. Alan Ray parked his Blazer at Barker’s and hoofed it through the woods up to our house.

  I went to the door when I heard Alan Ray knocking. “Bring a couple of blankets, a couple of shovels, a bottle of whiskey, and meet me at the property line between your place and Barker’s,” he said.

  I settled the two older kids in front of some early morning cartoons, told them to stay in the house, bundled Little Lux into a woolen blanket, and followed Alan Ray’s instructions. When I got the Bronco to the brink of our land, I saw Lux, no shirt, no eyepatch, up to his thighs in the freezing churning water, pulling any piece of garbage or scrap metal he could grab hold of out from those two steel culverts so that the water would run through the culverts again and stop gouging out what was left of the road.

  “Stay back, Des, keep away from the water,” Lux called out to me. I could see him fighting for footing, bracing himself against the edge of a thick piece of cable and some old tires that stuck up out of the water. Alan Ray had stripped his shirt off and jumped in to help. I kept having visions of one of them getting washed into one of those culverts and hemmed in between the junk, winding up under water.

  “Do you want a rope?” I called down at them, thinking that maybe if they tied ropes around their waists, it would keep them from getting swept into the deeper water.

  “Nah,” said Lux. “Just keep them kids away from this mess. Stay back, Des, I mean it.”

  I stood back, watching for what seemed like hours, there, on the uphill bank, that day at the edge of our field. I could hardly believe my eyes. A raging river had appeared where once there was a little stream. By midmorning the water had begun to recede, and I brought the kids down with me and told them to stay in the Bronco. For once, they listened. I drove that Bronco back and forth to the house and the toolshed for anything that seemed useful: hammers, picks, shovels, axes, hoes, mattocks, pry bars. By lunchtime it had just about stopped raining, and I allowed them to stand behind me and watch. It must have had a strange effect on Lissy. In one hand, she held up a large green umbrella, and her other hand clutched Ronnie’s little hand so tightly, it looked like she was scared he would race down to the water and get swept away. The water was so loud I realized I was shouting to her, just to tell her she could put down the umbrella.

  Lux worked like I have never before seen a man work, in silence, as if speaking would just cost more energy. I expected him to be furious, that his rage would push me and the kids back up the hill and into the house. I thought I needed to be watchful, wary, to keep from getting him more riled up. But the time for rage was over. Instead, he had a steady, grim expression, as if he had seen this all play out in his mind and had almost expected it to happen. With each piece of roofing, with each busted two-by-four studded with nails, and each hubcap and car axle he dug out and threw downhill for Alan Ray, he did not crack a smile. He was all business, all arms, all legs, all of his body and all of his brain.

  Alan Ray stood on the bank, taking whatever piece of garbage Lux tossed at him and piling it in the bed of his pickup. He’d reach his long arms down, pull Lux out of the water, blue and shivering, and wrap him up in a woolen blanket. Forgiveness flooded over me for Alan Ray in a way that I never would have expected. Lux needed Alan Ray at that moment, and like a friend was supposed to do, Alan Ray came through.

  Dad had called some friends from Pennzoil, who brought picks and mattocks and chopped away at the rocks and trash and brush from both ends of the culvert pipes. Billie and Mom finally got a ride up from one of Dad’s crew, and they stood on one side of the creek as I stood on the other. We just stood and shivered, watched each other, and tried to shout back and forth. At one point I saw Mom sink down onto the passenger seat of the Blazer and weep, but I could not get any closer to console her.

  Finally, when Lux had cleared enough of the garbage out of the culvert, and most of the creek water flowed back through the culvert pipe instead of flowing down the road, we could see what the floodwaters had wrought. What once was a graded road full of packed limestone, clay, and creek gravel was now a grooved-out gulley. Small ridges of shale, boulders like stepping-stones, deep gouges of clay and mud, water-filled sinkholes, but not a bit of roadbed remained.

  Some of those sinkholes stretched six feet long. Alan Ray said there was one you could’ve parked a whole VW Beetle in. It took two days more, but Dad, Lux, and the crew from Pennzoil filled in all the holes on the road. Edgar Sutton brought his dump truck, rounded up the roofing, old motors, and the rest of Barker’s junk to take to the county dump. Then they busted rocks off the cliffs and picked up boulders from the edge of the creek and cracked them with picks until they filled the gaps in the road. Wade and his friends never showed their faces once.

  Finally, Alan Ray was able to drive the A-1 company four-by-four across the new stretch of road. When he reached the top of the two culverts, he stopped. Lux got out and shoveled the last few heavy slate rocks out of the truck bed into a low spot on the surface of the new stretch of road. Then Lux stomped them in with his soaking wet work boots and a tamping bar. It was starting to snow big wet flakes, but by then the creek was down to its usual flow in its old banks. Lux climbed in and Alan Ray drove the quarter mile up to our house. Billie and me carried the kids and followed behind, only stopping at the chicken house to throw out a couple of handfuls of corn for the remaining few banty hens, who must have perched on the top of the henhouse to ride out the flood.

  And Yet

  After that, every morning when I brought the kids down for school, I didn’t care so much about going back. Once Mom asked me, “Shouldn’t you be getting back up there now?,” but I couldn’t answer. I guess I really couldn’t think of a good reason. And I could barely bring myself to pass that Barker house. Soon Billie started coming over to Mom’s, and we drank instant coffee and watched the game shows and soaps. By the time the little ones woke up from their naps it was time to meet the bigger ones off the bus again.

  Sometimes Lux would get home from work early, and then we’d all stay for supper before we headed up the hollow. Dad would come home and kick us out. He said he wanted to have his house back to himself, but the kids liked having their cousin Bertie to play with. We just carried on like one big family.

  One warm Saturday in late spring, well after the road had dried out, Dad and Mom and Billie and Alan all drove up the hollow together to our place. Dad would never drive his Lincoln up there, of course, so he and Mom rode up with Alan Ray. When they got here Mom had a camera. She took pictures of the gardens, the toolshed, the chicken house, and of all of us in front of the cabin. Then, while us women and the kids watched, Lux, Alan Ray, and Dad pried the roof and siding off our tack shed, so they could move it back down the hollow to rebuild it up against the hillside, where we’d once lived in our trailer, next to Mom and Dad’s. Dad found us another trailer and we set that up, just about in the same place our first one had been, and we moved in during the summer, making short trips up the hollow while the road was dry, gradually taking apart our cabin, stacking the wood in piles, and thinking about how we could reuse it all on projects down at Dad’s place.

  Wade stayed on until the next winter, when the road got bad again, so bad he could not drive himself in and out. Then he blew the engine out of his flatbed. He hoofed it out of the hollow, one of his friends gave him a ride to town, and he never came back to live there again.

/>   The next spring, as Lux walked up to the head of the hollow to have a look around, he told me how he found Wade’s rusty flatbed truck sitting in the middle of his front yard, with spiderwebs on the door handles and grass growing out from under the tires. When he got up to our old place, Lux said, all he could see was a single line of daffodils that I’d set out where the front porch used to be, and strange-looking telephone poles sticking up out of the ground. In the cool of the late afternoon, Lux piled up all the scrap lumber left from the house and the outbuildings in the center of our field, right about where our house was, perhaps around the spot that used to be our living room. Then he poured gasoline on the pile, stepped back, took a match to a piece of rolled-up newspaper, and tossed it into the center of the lumber. With his back to the east, with the apple trees between the sky and him, he sat down and watched the pile burn until the sun went down.

  Mom, if you are listening, if there is anything I can say to you to show you why this was all worth the effort, there are some lessons here, I know, but they escape me now. I look back, I recall the patterns of life at the head of the hollow, pathways we created through the fields to the chicken house, the outhouse, the barn and orchard. I remember the way that we marked the seasons by the cries of each different bird, by the shifting colors of the deep woods surrounding us, by the evening constellations above. For now, I can only say I understand what you wanted and how your love must have burned inside you, a mix of worry and grief. For I too am a mother, I have my beautiful children. They too will strive, I know, and they too will fall.