Goshen Road

by Bonnie Proudfoot

  The road is mostly rock now, and it is steep, and it is pitch-black. Her feet make crunching noises. The woods make familiar noises. Hoot owls call, “Hoo-hoo-hooo, hoot-hoooo.” Crickets sing, “I know too, I know too, I know too, I know too.” Lissy’s pounding heart races inside her chest, but her body is only inching. So slowly through the dark space; her legs tremble onward.

  The closer she gets to her house, the less it seems she moves. Some lights are on around back. Glenn would be out in the garage. Jeanie would be alone upstairs in her room. It’s time to put her to bed. A deer could browse around, could take her young daughter and go graze someplace new. She is not a deer. She has a family, a house, a new job at the Whispering Pines, a car loan, and a shameful busted-out car window. She can’t move, can’t even speak. Each leg feels so heavy that it barely moves at all. They don’t even bend; they just barely sway. Her shoulders stiffen. She takes a deep breath. She is almost there, almost back home.

  Then Lissy knows how to be. She is young, and she is still strong. She can stand tall. She can become a tree—a tree. Trees must bend, yes, but not break. She will be strong. Be still. Be silent. She will shelter her daughter under her boughs. She will stand unmoved and hold her head high. She will shake off his sharp words like leaves in the wind. I am a tree.

  She is not a deer. She stands at the front door of her silent dark house. She raises her arms high above her head, presses the steeple of her fingertips hard against each other, and closes the massive wooden doors of each chamber of her pounding heart. Lissy takes some long, steady breaths, and soon she is able to breathe so calmly, so steadily, it is as if she isn’t even breathing at all.

  THIRTEEN

  THE WHITE SHAWL (1992)

  ON THE DAY OF MY DAD’S FUNERAL, MY MOTHER Dessie wore her white shawl. Great-Great-Grandma Elisabeth made it by hand, her mother’s grandmother, handed down from Ireland. It was a beautiful shawl, long white tassels hanging down, tightly woven in fine silken thread. If you look closely, you can see that the weave makes a pattern of little squares where the fine threads cross each other. Mom kept it in a soft cloth pouch on the top shelf of the closet. I used to beg to wear it when I was little. I wondered what kind of message she was trying to send, a white shawl wrapped over the shoulders of her plain black dress. Mom shook her head from side to side, crossed the edges of the shawl around her shoulders and arms, and said, “Lissy, honey, I haven’t even got a black shawl, and besides, they can say what they will, but I just can’t bring myself to sit there like an old crow in the front row of the First Apostolic in solid black.”

  The morticians from Jarvis Brothers did their best. Dad had a split coffin, so no one could see what those logs that slid off that flatbed truck did to his body. I was glad his face was spared. No one understood me or paid me any mind when I said this, but I wished I could have seen him, his body, what he really looked like, before they put him in that poplar box. I don’t know why, but something made me want proof, to see what actually happened to him, maybe to say my good-byes to the real him before the funeral home got to work.

  After I saw Dad laid out in front of the altar at the church, the whole accident was almost too hard to believe. But it was him all right, his gold wedding band that never left his finger, his fingernails impossible to get completely clean, hands crossed over his heart, clean blue-jean shirt with the pearl buttons, bristly black curly beard, jet black hair gone to gray at the temples. No eyepatch, though, just both his closed eyes, the left eye bearing the traces of scars that no mortician’s box of makeup or even a magic wand could ever erase. There were Dad’s crow’s-feet around his eyes, and Dad’s grooves along his brow. That part felt like they got it right. But Daddy’s lips looked too puffy and were too pink, that part was off, wrong, someone else’s mouth found its way onto Dad’s somber countenance. Glenn couldn’t see it, but my brothers and I noticed that right away.

  Aunt Billie took one look at Dad and burst out blubbering into Mom’s shoulder, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her sleeve. Ronnie wouldn’t come up to look at him, and neither would Alan Ray. They settled into the family pew with their caps pulled down low on their heads. Reverend Shorter told Mom that he thought they made it look like Lux Cranfield was asleep with the angels, but who ever knows about that? I know he is supposed to say those sort of things, but maybe it is the other way around, maybe the angels come to earth and sleep with us? Mom answered Reverend back, that she thought Dad might’ve had one or more guardian angels looking out for him all these years, for him to make it on this earth this long. I’ve wondered about that, too. Maybe we walk with them always, during these few short days we are given, though we do not know how to listen for signs of their counsel. Where are they then, when we need them? I wish I knew. A person’s mind can go to those sort of places, sitting in church waiting for her father’s funeral to be over. All I can say is Daddy looked almost calm, the strain of his worries gone. For once his soul at peace, outwardly at least.

  I had an ankle-length black dress, borrowed from Glenn’s mother, high-necked and stiff, the way you’re supposed to feel at your own father’s funeral. At the end of the service, Uncle Alan Ray took his A-1 cap off for the first time since I can remember. Funny that his red hair is almost all white, and he’s getting bald and heavyset now too. He and his boys didn’t wear anything black, though, and neither did Glenn, nor did my brothers. To me, that felt wrong, disrespectful almost, to Dad. Even back here where no one is watching, I believe that these old ways have meaning. Mother said it was fine, though. She said Daddy don’t care what his boys wear, it don’t trouble him now, not a bit.

  The First Apostolic wasn’t even half-filled, though people had filtered in. Some folks knew Dad from the firehall, some old-timers knew Alan Ray and my Granddad Bertram from the AmVets, some men from A-1 Lumber, Dad’s age, Glenn’s age, and a few of their wives. Glenn’s mother and father sent flowers. None of Dad’s people were there; most of the Cranfields haven’t come around Mom and Dad since their wedding. As Dad used to tell it, his dad Everett never wanted Daddy to marry Mom, and most of his people took up for him. The morning of Mom and Dad’s wedding, Everett drove up to the churchyard with a shotgun and fired off a couple shells to get everyone’s attention, and then declared to all that there would be no wedding on that day. Dad and Dad’s Uncle Ron stood guard, like human shields in front of Mom and Granny Rose. Granddad Bertram tore out of the church, right up to Everett, and told him that if he did not want to stay and celebrate this union, his presence was not required. Dad said that Granddad reached out his hand to take the gun, but Everett told him to go to hell and watch his back, that he’d be coming for him before the day was out, and then he left out of the churchyard. All through the ceremony, Granddad Bertram and Dad’s Uncle Ron guarded the front door of the First Apostolic in case Everett thought about coming back around.

  Dad said that he and Mom didn’t even stay for the reception. Mom tossed the bouquet behind her as she ran past the choir room. They slid out of the back of the church after their vows, hopped into Dad’s Jeep, and took off down the main road with a gang of lumberjacks in pickup trucks running defense like the famous Steel Curtain. After the wedding was over, the sheriff found Grandad Everett and locked him up for thirty days.

  We kids never met the man, although once at the gas station Dad turned the pickup around and told us his old man was at the pump, and that we would stop for gas later. Then, at one point, we heard the mortgage and loan took over Grandad’s property and boarded up the house, and word was that he was headed to Florida. Dad used to say that being raised up by a father like that was the best thing that happened to him and the worst thing that happened to him. Now it is too late to ask what he meant. I know he had a special fondness for his uncle Ron. A couple of times we met him and his boys before they sold their farm and moved south. Not many Cranfields live hereabouts anymore. Dad had that one cousin in Shinnston, his uncle Ron’s granddaughter Clairey, who called him on the phone for Chr
istmas, but she never came to visit while he was alive, so it didn’t surprise us that she didn’t come to see him be put to rest.

  MY DAUGHTER Jeanie cried herself back to sleep the morning she heard about her Papaw Lux. She favors Dad, too, with her black curly hair and big dark eyes. She’s so tall these days. And she was good for the whole service in the church, sitting on my lap, eyes brimming with tears, a little black purse stuffed with tissues. She went up to see her Papaw in his box and put her first-grade school picture in there to keep him company, then she came back and buried her little face in my chest. Mom said the last thing he said to her was that she should be careful when she went out to feed the dogs, since it was slick out there. Then he walked out the door in the pitch-black of the morning on his way to work.

  Next to Mom sat Ron, skin as pale as a sheet of paper, looking down at the tips of his shoes like Dad used to do in church. We’re just a year apart, and I know him well enough to read his thoughts from the look in his eyes. I know he’s worried about having to look after Mom. “For God’s sake, Ron,” I told him, “Daddy’s not even cold yet. Don’t you think Mom could use a little looking after now?” He works on the pipelines and never comes home. Half the time we don’t know where he stays or what he gets himself into.

  At church, all three of my brothers acted like they were in jail or the school detention room: Ron, Little Lux, who had a week’s furlough from Parris Island, and Tommy, who’s just sixteen but as tall as the rest of them. He’s going to start pitching for Varsity this spring, and Dad was so proud, that was all he talked about. They fidgeted and whispered to Billie’s boys through the entire funeral service. I thought Mom might say a few words, but she kept her eyes closed, her hands folded in her lap, and her head bowed down. When Reverend Shorter was through and everyone stood to leave, my brothers just sat there in the pew together. You’d think they were old enough to know better. Mom had to tell them to get downstairs to help Uncle Alan Ray get Dad’s coffin out to the truck in the rain.

  No one from the First Apostolic could understand this, but we declined to put Dad to rest in the churchyard, though Granddad Bertram and Grandma Rose are buried there. Daddy had always said he wanted to be buried up on the Goshen Road. There’s a small country cemetery above the old orchard, mostly for Smiths who used to own land on the ridgetop. Dad said he’d promised Grandad Bertram he’d never sell that land, and now it’ll be forever his, I guess. “Your dad never was one to stay in town any longer than he had to, so I reckon we should grant this one small wish of his,” Mom said to us right off. “Just so long as there ain’t any Barkers buried up there,” Mom said. “Your Daddy couldn’t abide waiting for Kingdom Come next to any Barkers.”

  I STAYED back with Mom while she thanked the folks who came to the church service. Ron, Little Lux, and Tommy got Dad’s coffin onto Uncle Alan’s pickup, and then they came and got us. I looked around, half hoping I’d see a line of cars, like when the mayor died, a hearse, little flags on each car, but that vision vanished when I set foot outdoors and only saw the Reverend’s Ranger pickup and vehicles we came to the church in, not another car or truck, not even the men from A-1. Folks said their good-byes, promised they would stop by the house to look in on Mom, and then left to go on with their lives. Ron drove with my brothers in Dad’s Ford F150, Alan Ray took his pickup, and his boys had their Chevy Luv, and Aunt Billie came with Jeanie and me in the old farm Bronco. Glenn went off to work. “It would pain me too much to see Lux Cranfield laid in the ground,” Glenn said, which surprised me, but there was no way to know if he really meant it.

  THE COLDEST rain started coming down, harder and faster as we headed up the Goshen Road. That hollow was muddy as ever, but no one much has driven up there lately, except for Dad, or Alan Ray and the boys when they’re coon hunting, so the ruts were not too deep. I led the way in Dad’s trusty maroon-and-white farm Bronco with the lugs turned in for four-wheel drive, with Billie holding Jeanie in the back and Mom beside me. Mom turned up the heat full blast as soon as we got out of town. She kept saying how cold she was.

  It was one of those rainy spring days, just slightly warmer than a couple of days ago when Dad died. If it hadn’t been so cold and icy, the log truck mightn’t’ve slid like that, the logs tumbling out. Dad was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He always said that when his number’s up, it’s up, and he hoped it’d come fast when it came. Glenn says the same damn thing. I sat in the church and prayed to our dear Lord that Daddy didn’t even know what hit him.

  “I’ve been up this road one too many times. Too many times,” Mom said, shaking her weary gray head from the passenger seat. “Look at this place.”

  I looked around to see what she was talking about. The road itself was soaken wet, slick and muddy, but just firm enough for the Bronco’s tires to still have traction. Below, out the window, past my mother’s pale, drawn face, across the narrow valley, the grass was starting to green up. At the wood’s edge was a row of sarvisberry trees without leaves, the first pale flowers sprayed out along the black branches. Out the driver’s window, on my left, on the sharp edge of the shale cliff face, winter was not ready to give way. Water dripped from every hanging dagger of an icicle, every icy crack between every layer of rock, filling the ditch and running over into the tire tracks, and icicles hung white as bones against the shadows. The bones and the branches, I thought, remembering long walks along the creek in the early spring, the collection of small animal skulls I started as a girl. The signs of creatures that did not make it through this hard winter, right before the full green blast of spring hides all the evidence.

  The scrawny wild blueberry bushes were stunted and leafless, scruffy red stems so thin I could hardly see them against the wet shale. We four kids followed Dad up this road for years, me and Ronnie in the lead, the little ones behind us, and we pulled the blueberries and blackberries from the stalks as they hung off the bank of the road. Dad and Alan Ray set out rabbit boxes and worked on their tree stands. The ground underfoot felt different every day, depending on the weather, the time of day, the season of the year. That might have been yesterday, but it’s really going on ten years ago. I don’t know what it is about seeing the bare thorny whips of multiflora rose overtaking a pasture that used to be all timothy grass that can make a person so sad.

  I sighed. “Oh, Mama,” I said. “I’m so sorry about Daddy. He was a good man. He didn’t deserve to go like this.”

  She looked at me. Her hair had almost completely gone to gray. She began wearing it shoulder-length and wavy lately, like some old mother of the hills. Now the color was gone from her round cheeks. She was trying so hard not to cry that she had to bite her bottom lip. We passed the shambles of the old Barker place and started to climb the steep rise to their old house site.

  “Your Daddy wasn’t a real good man. Some days he was a good man, but some days he could be a real son of a bitch,” she said, almost whispered. Oh Lord, I thought. Not now, Mom, I thought again. Aunt Billie and Jeanie were in the backseat. I doubt they heard us, between the noise of the wipers, the splash of rain against the fenders and on the roof of the Bronco, the rattle of the muffler, and the grinding of the engine.

  “Oh, Mama,” I said. “He loved us the best he could.”

  I stopped talking. I could see how upset she was. Her lips quivered, tears rolled down her cheek, and her whole face seemed like it was going to come undone. In the passenger seat her left hand came out from under her white shawl and covered her mouth. I don’t believe she’s ever taken off that gold wedding band from the day he gave it to her. She hiccupped a few times and caught her breath.

  I stopped the Bronco to wait at the top of the rise near their old house site. The land leveled out to a narrow stretch of field edged by clumps of willows and sumac above the creek. In the center of the field where they once used to live were the only remains of the foundation stones from the old Smith house. A line of jonquils poked out of the ground, ragged and yellow. Why do country people have r
agged jonquils, while in town all they have are perfect, tidy daffodils? I wanted to talk to my mother, to tell her something. Daddy was no son of a bitch. I knew something about being married to a son of a bitch. There are men out there that can take you away from life itself, Mother.

  While we parked there, Alan Ray drove past, slowly, his truck in low gear. Dad’s casket box was mostly under the camper top of his truck, and the rest on the tailgate, strapped on and covered in a blue tarp. Mom’s eyes were brimming over. She took her hands away from her mouth. “Alan Ray’s a son of a bitch, too,” she said a little bit louder.

  “Mom, don’t get Billie started,” I said.

  Why was she comparing her life with Aunt Billie’s, I wondered. Uncle Alan Ray hadn’t worked steady in five years now. He started drinking soon after Granddad Price died; he’d go off to work and end up in the bar. His back hurt too much to cut any more timber, he said. Now he got a disability check once a month, handed it over to Billie, but seemed like he didn’t care where he slept or who brought him home. My dad worked until the day he died.

  Aunt Billie’s two boys came up behind us in their Chevy Luv pickup. The engine ran so rough I could hear the motor stop and then start itself back up again. In their headlights the rain looked like little silver straight pins. Cousin Bertie waved us on from the driver’s seat, and then he and AJ shrugged their hands as if to ask what we were waiting for. I put the Bronco in gear and drove with my lights on, slowly up the dirt lane toward the graveyard.

  Mom went on, like she did not care who heard this. “Your dad punched the hell out of me when we were first married. Ronnie got it, too. You didn’t get it the way Ron got it. Neither did the other boys. You remember his temper.”