Dessie set the toddler down near the storm door where he could watch the children outside as she headed for the kitchen. She covered the two golden sweet potato pies and set them up on top of the refrigerator. The kitchen was a mess. Bowls and plates were stacked everywhere, but Billie and Lissy would help clean up. She scraped everything that was half-eaten onto a single plate. Then, she looked at all those cartons of food, still taking up useful floor space in the pantry behind the kitchen.
Dessie rummaged through the pots and pans in the pantry and found the largest cast-aluminum canner, the one Rose had given her when she and Lux were first married. She picked a carving knife out of the sink and sawed open each cardboard box of commodity food. Into the canner she poured out all that was left of the government rice and covered it with the white powdered potato flakes and floury biscuit mix. She blinked the dust out of her eyes, brushed her hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, and then added the leftovers from the table. Then, she balanced little Tommy on her hip, took hold of the pot by the handle, and together they headed outside into the chilly dusk air, down the lane, across the field, and toward her mom and dad’s farmhouse. It felt good to get outside, get a chance to feel the cool breeze on her face. What was she thinking when she took all that crap? she wondered.
“What do you think, Tommy?” she said to the toddler. “Let’s go see Bonnie and Clyde.” There, behind the farmhouse, was a path she’d walked hundreds of times as a girl with leftovers from dinner. Leaves crunched under her feet, and though the air was cool, she could smell the warm muck of the mud and pigshit as she got closer to the pen. Just like the good old days, she thought, the sow nosing out the boar, the silky dust spilling out of the full canner, landing in the mud and on the wiry coats of the two hogs that jostled back and forth, happy for the attention, and shoving each other to be first in line.
NINE
SUNDAY RUN (1982)
THE LAST HILL ON TOP OF PECKINPAW RIDGE BEFORE Fairchance was a dump. It wasn’t a privately owned, charge-if-the-owner’s-around dump like the one before Sheep Run on Northfork. It was a wide spot about one hundred yards off the road, at the top of a steep, barely paved county road with no houses in sight, where folks pulled off, checked downhill to the north and downhill to the south for the game warden or county sheriff, and their household and yard trash was out of their truck beds, into the wide gully, and out of sight.
On a crisp, bright Sunday morning in August, Lux pulled up to Peckinpaw Ridge in his black Ford pickup, got out, and spit into the mud. He aimed carefully to miss his boots. He was in his midthirties, tall, wiry, a pale-skinned man whose wavy black hair was flecked with gray. His thick black beard almost hid the collar of his flannel shirt.
Three boys, ages five, ten, and fourteen, slid out of the passenger door and jumped to the ground. “Tommy, don’t you climb on that trash there,” he told his youngest son, and then to the oldest, he said, “Well, git, Ron, quit your poking. Take that stuff and heave it.” He pointed from the used siding and roofing and household trash in the bed of the truck to the vast cluttered gully below the road.
The dead one lay between a pile of old clothes and rusted car parts as if it was just another home appliance that quit working. Its skin was the color of two-year-old Copenhagen cans, and its hair was gritty with thick clotted axle grease.
“Hey, Daddy, lookit me,” said black-haired Little Lux as he drew a bead with his pellet gun on a large brown wood rat that was scurrying along the edge of a grimy washing machine without a motor. “Here, take that, sucker.” Keh-pop, keh-pop, keh-pew said the gun, and the rat hit the ground with a dull thud, shook itself, and ran into the tailpipe of a rusted muffler. Tommy and Little Lux took off after it, Little Lux with his gun, Tommy waving a long stick and shouting. High in the trees, crows cawed, always a bunch of raucous hecklers.
The dead one had pools of tawny silt under its arms and soft green moss between its legs. Long-legged red spiders hid under rust flakes between its fingers, and slender inky-cap toadstools colonized its groin.
Lux looked at Ron, who was hauling the last of the dead batteries out of the truck bed. “You got those?” Ron, who never said much to his dad, nodded. “Uh huh.” “Come on, boys,” Lux yelled, “you get up outta there. Time to get your sister and Ma up at the church.” Sunday was the best morning to make a trash run. The law was in church too, he figured, or tired out from chasing down drunks on Route 20 the night before. Then he scowled and added, “If we leave them there too long, them old biddies will start in a gossiping, and I’ll never be able to get her home.” He did not want to spend any longer than he had to in his hot pickup, waiting for the First Apostolic to dismiss. Ron scowled too, under the brim of his cap, at this jab at his mother, but kept his mouth shut and headed for the truck.
Lux scanned over the bank, past the trash, trying to see whether the creek bed was dry. The boys were banging on a pile of rusty sheet metal, trying to get the rat to emerge. He climbed into the cab and hollered out the window, “Tommy, you get up outta there or I’ll wallop you. Daddy’s got his belt on, you know I will use it if I have to. Look out for snakes there, Little Lux. Ron, you done yet?”
The dead one lay face downward. Its eyes were like coal and its teeth were like amber. Small opalescent snails tunneled into its hair, red-spotted newts found its mouth. Fine golden strands of mycelia made a forest for nematodes; blind naked baby mice sought out its ears.
“Hey, Dad, looky here, an ol’ scooter. Can I have it?” shouted Tommy, the youngest and the one who paid the least mind to his dad’s threats. He pointed into a pile of old clothes and broken chairs, not twenty feet off the road. “Yeah, sure” said Lux, “Ronald, fetch it up on the truck here, and watch you don’t scratch the tailgate.” Lux squinted down over the hill. “Will you look at that? It probably just needs a little paint.”
“Hey,” said Little Lux, running over to the truck. “I found it first.”
“Never did,” said Tommy. “It’s mine.”
Ron walked over toward the pile of rubble, curious about what kind of shape the scooter would be in, but stepping slowly because he knew that copperheads and rat snakes nested nearby. Whew, but something smelled bad. He was just about to reach down and grab the rusted chrome handle of the scooter when he saw it. He turned and scrambled up the hill, his eyes wide and his face white.
Some of the dead one swelled and sweated, pungent and overripe in the summer heat. Some of it shriveled and dried like a desiccated lily. Reptiles and small rodents swarmed to it like bees to the fresh-cut stump of a sugar maple.
“Whatsa matter, Ron? A-scared of snakes?” Little Lux asked. Ron shook his head and ran up to his father.
“Ron ain’t a-scared of no snakes,” said Tommy. “You remember the time he found us a big old black snake under the woodpile?”
Little Lux looked strangely at his brother. “Hush you, hit ain’t no snake down there.”
The boys turned and squinted from the scooter to Ron, and then to big Lux. Ron was watching quietly and nodding at his father. His thin face was the color of chalk, his eyelids blinked rapidly in the glare of the sun. He slid into the passenger seat and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes.
Lux called Little Lux and Tommy into the empty bed of his pickup truck. He told them to forget about that scooter, that it was all rusty and banged up, and next payday he’d take them into town and buy them one to share if their ma could part with some of the bread-and-butter money. Ron added that there was some old rotten skunk down there; a coon hound must have crippled it and left it to crawl off and die. “Phew, but it was rank,” he said as they scrambled into the truck for the drive back to town. Little Lux and Tommy shouted from the truck bed that a new scooter would to be way better than an old one, that they could hardly wait to tell their cousins that they were getting a new scooter.
Ron sat in the passenger seat with his window rolled down and listened to his young brothers shout back and forth to each other.
“Pa?�
� Ron said, his voice trailed off.
“Let me tell you something my pa used to tell me,” Lux said, rolling the truck out of the short pull-off, making sure the road was empty on both sides of the hill before he eased onto the blacktop. “Don’t go looking for trouble, son, and tread careful when trouble finds you.”
Ron was not exactly sure what his dad meant, but he set those words into the category things my pa repeats every so often, that his pa used to repeat to him. In general, that meant that it was best to keep his mouth shut. He sat beside his father, watching the twitch of his father’s right eye, the left one hidden behind the eyepatch as always, the hollow of his father’s cheekbone above the wiry dark hairs of his beard. Ron wondered how long it would be before he was allowed to take the truck on these back roads, and he wondered if his dad would let him try target practice with his high-powered deer rifle instead of the Winchester, and he wondered, for a brief minute, just why that person would have climbed up in among all that junk to hide, and just how long it took before that person died.
The dead one blew gas out of orifices. The dead one sent up smoke bombs of putrefaction. Dogs came and rolled in it, bringing home corpse news to their owners. The dead one was king over the pollinators and the foragers, it judged the implements, and it absolved the mufflers and the siding. The dead one was covered with leaves in the fall and snow in the winter. And come next spring, on top of Peckinpaw Ridge, the barbed hawthorn bush blazed brighter and redder, and the mountain dogwood cloaked the shambling hillside in ivory, each dark black branch decked out like a new bride, each separate flower, so pale and delicate, four white petals ticked with blood.
TEN
GARY BREWSTER (1984)
IT IS GETTING ON TOWARD THE END OF AUGUST AND school is coming up fast. Stand up straight, Ron. Pick your head up, Ron. Here it all goes and goes and goes again. The leaves on the trees all have that washed-out late summer color, not really turning, not really sharp. Under the cover of the night, under the slim stifling moon, nothing moves except the endless crunch of crickets’ legs, scraping their rough bodies back and forth. The noise makes me think of chewing, forever chewing and sawing.
We picked your uncle’s peaches in the drizzle. When your uncle was off at work we fought over the pizza rolls—you wanted the cheese inside to run out sloppy all over the cookie sheets until it fried crisp in the oven. We fed each other warm bacon with our fingers dripping grease. You threw me over. What are you so afraid of?
Under the slim stifling moon somewhere, Gary Brewster, you fearing, fearful, afraid of nothing, you left; you threw me over, until I dig into my cold chest, until my bare hands catch the crumbs of downy corners in the empty pockets of my jeans.
In late June when the flush of green life turned me, you came here, Gary Brewster. I met you at your grandfather’s sawmill, the last cask worried by redheaded woodpeckers, the dry slabs stacked in shapeless vast walls, we sat in the shadows under long steel rails. The giant saw blades are black from lack of use. For forty years they shone and spun their way through oak and chestnut, splitting off slabs, flinging chips, screaming. You came here and split me apart, Gary Brewster.
UNDER THE night summer sky, at the rushing stream, we jump from rock to rock with dim flashlights you got from the glovebox of your uncle’s Blazer. You are shouting above the flood. The creek is high. There is a racket of water, I remember. We pull our shirts off; we roll up our pants and throw ’em onto the far shore. I almost slip on the rocks. I hear a shout and turn around and you are gone, the shapeless water glinting in the lingering light. And they say it’s always lighter around moving water. The darker shore patches of shadows overlapping and where are you, Gary Brewster? Are you somewhere on the shore or did you just step off one of those rocks into the creek like the way they say that little Clemons girl died; the flood rose up of a sudden and grabbed her from her yard. They didn’t yet find her body. It gave me a case of shudders—
then you grab me from behind and call me a whore and in an instant I feel like one, too, though I had never had it before, and I start to split apart from how big you are. And how it feels, so good in me, until all of a sudden I hear a scream and it is me and I am in pain and don’t even know my own voice or my own hurt.
And afterwards we stand on the bank of the stream and soak up water with our T-shirts and wash ourselves until the goddamn mosquitoes drive us back to our own houses.
NEXT DAY in the fresh morning light I come looking for you. You are sopping up the yolks of eggs with Bisquick fritters; Yerks lets you eat breakfast with your grandpappy’s Farm Boss cap on. It is pulled low on your head. You look like a criminal. You look like an angel. “Pull up a squat, Ron,” your uncle Yerks says, and I shake my head.
“No thanks,” I say, not because I don’t want to, but because I hurt still, too sore to sit down, and flushed, not from the walk over the hill. “I come to see if Gary Brewster wants to make some money,” I say. “Pappy’s busy and he needs someone to drive his truck to the Ford garage and wait for it to be fixed and bring it back.”
“Hungry?” you ask me. You sure are. Just watching your lips took me back to the night and I shake my head to clear my eyes. You take that as a “No,” just as I was about to reach for a fritter, so I hold my hand.
“Gary can’t come” is all your uncle says, so I say, “Well I’m still on my driving permit and Pap is offering to pay five dollars, and I thought I’d split it with him for the company.”
“Noope,” Yerks says, shaking his big jowly head back and forth. “He’s a-goin’ to help me get that sawmill off the ground, that’s why I took him on for the summer. The flywheel’s seized up and them tracks is all pitted. Come back when you can and I’ll put you to work too, Ron.”
You nod your head, not looking like you care one way or another about nothing.
ALL SUMMER long you kill snakes in those woodpiles, and I haul rotten planks out of the mill and burn them. Every night after work in the smoldering burnlight when we open sandwiches together you tell me the killing stories over and over. Long fat slow-moving black snakes sunning like a piece of rubber tubing on the top of gray boards you chop into chunks with a hoe; garter snakes under rocks, slim and stripy, you outrun and stomp in your steel-toe shitkickers; and at the bottom of the woodpile, poison copperheads flecked in gold with heads as wide as a fists you take a thick hickory switch to, then you beat them into the ground, their lifeless bodies twiching until dark.
“WHY DON’T ya work at a real sawmill?” my pap asks me, must have been the end of July, a Saturday, him being home and all. “I’ll take you to A-1 with me. Why’re you always up there hanging around with those Brewsters? They ain’t nothing but a bunch of drunks and buggerboys.”
“They ain’t neither,” I answer. “B’sides, Yerks pays me good enough money.” I hang my head so low he can’t get past the brim of my hat to fix my eyes.
“Oh yeah, what’s good money?” my pap says. But I gulp down my Kool-Aid and head outside quick like I am going somewhere.
“Will you eat something, Ron?” Mama calls from the kitchen. “I’ll fix a fried cheese sandwich. Y’ain’t eating like you should, Ronnie.”
But I pretend like I don’t hear, and I take off for the woods, though I really don’t know where I am going. I am hoping to head up onto the trails, I guess. I am hoping that you would be on the old logging trail at the top of the hill, scouting out some cherry for Yerks to cut, since wild cherry means big money, I head for the path at the edge of Pap’s cornfield. I want to get right out of that house. I don’t care where, I think. I just want to go.
Over the hilltop, behind the last stand of spruce trees and crab apples the land flattens out for a bit, and once some old deer hunters set up a shanty. Now the roof is overrun with vines, and a poplar tree is growing out where a window used to be. Scattered in the scrubby brush are tin cans the color of clay, the glinting litter of broken window glass, busted quart jars, even some good enamel pans hardly even cracked; there are
smooth spots in the grass where the deer bed down and fat does and bucks leave deep two-toe tracks.
My pap once said it’s an old snake pit, but I didn’t see any old snakes. Just two rusty flathead shovels leaning against the door, propping it shut, four plank steps rickety and curled, and then I am inside, in the cool sooty dark, a big hole in the floor, a set of metal shelves and a busted-out window where the metal sink was, the countertop made of pine planks, a bunch of steel butter knives fanned out and a hole in one of them planks—maybe a hand pump for water had set there. No chair to sit down in, so I sit down on a solid spot on the floor and I think about you, Gary Brewster. Again.
And I want you to find me here, I want you to come walking in that door, your milk-white face and your long skinny arms and gold curls on your shoulders, and I am as hard as I ever could be. And I hold myself and think I am a cornholing buggerboy and I am bad, I need a whipping and I am hot for Gary Brewster, and maybe all the world knows it. And why don’t you come on up here, now, Gary Brewster? Soon it will be fall, and then time for you to go. And I rock myself in my own empty arms.
AND ONE night, behind Yerk’s sawmill in the dark, you say, “Hear that, Ron?”
“What’s that?” I say, thinking you hear some old snake in the piles of dry slabs, or a she rat making a nest.
“The trees, up high on the ridge, blowing back and forth like that,” you say. “It sounds just like the ocean, like they’re waves, saying, ‘Wish, wish.’“
I listen and it is true. I wonder why I never heard it before. I mean I heard those trees, but not in that way, ever. And the wind picks up and the trees begin to creak like the legs of old tables and chairs when you sit down to dinner. And I wonder what the other seasons would bring, what Gary Brewster would call the wind in the winter.
You pull a coal from the fire to light a cigarette you stole from Yerks. Your fingers glow red in the light and you cough. “One, two more days and I’m going back to North Carolina.”
Goshen Road Page 17