DEDICATION
For Bob and Auden, forever my green lights.
EPIGRAPH
The light seems somehow brighter brought to rest . . .
shimmering at my fingertips, so close
I have to reach for it, the twice-bent gleam that passes in the swirl
my reaching makes.
“The Light at Hinkson Creek” by Bob Watts
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
The house he’s building is done mostly. All that’s missing now is the prettying, stain on the sprawling deck, final finishing inside. At least that’s what they say. This house has been the talk around our small town. Not much happens here but the same, same: a thirteen-year-old girl waiting for the baby her mother’s sorry boyfriend gave her; the husband we wanted to believe was one of the good ones found out to be the worst kind of cheater with a whole other family two towns over. The same stupid surprises, the usual sadnesses. But this thing is strange. The boy we all saw grow up came back to us slim and hungry-gaunt like a coal miner. With money. JJ Ferguson made it. The poor child who lived with his grandmother, dead for years now, the ordinary boy we all fed when he wouldn’t leave at dinnertime, looking like he was waiting for somebody to ask him to play. We had no idea.
JJ was the newest resident on Brushy Mountain Road. The car they say is his was parked on the long driveway most mornings until evening while JJ worked alongside the Mexican men he hired. Every town has a section where the people are rich and their lives so far from yours you almost expect them to speak another tongue. Brushy Mountain Road is that place for us. You can’t help but get quiet driving on that road, like even your noisy breathing might disturb the beauty or rupture the holy calm that order and clean create. When we were young we used to love to see the houses, all lit up with their curtains and blinds open, glowing yellow like sails of ships in the black faraway on the ocean. If we went slow enough we could see the brilliant colors of their decorated rooms, their floor-to-ceiling bookcases and fine furniture, the floral designs with wallpaper you couldn’t get at the regular hardware store festooning the entryways. We might even get a glimpse of one of them sipping from a mug or snuggled into a chair staring out into the darkness. Though we knew they lived among us, bought white bread and radial tires like the rest of us, we loved the proof of them. I see him. I see him with my own eyes. We breathed in the houses, dreamed about the ones that would have been ours if our lives had run in different directions, if we’d had different faces, if we’d made all the right choices.
When they were young Sylvia and her husband, Don, would drive the road that curled like a potato peel all the way up to the almost top to experience some of what those people had. Don pretended he didn’t want to do it, who gives a shit how them people live, he’d say, but he was as interested as Sylvia. He was careful not to be staring if a body stood in the yard or looked out at him from the window. You can’t let people know what you dream—especially if you can’t get it. You knowing that they know opens a wound in you, an embarrassing naked space that you can’t let just anybody witness. If the rich see a woman looking, fine. A woman can want. But nobody alive could claim to have seen longing on Don’s face. You got to be immune, Mr. Antibiotic or else you hurt all the time.
Why they looked at those places, neither of them could exactly say, since when they came down from the mountain to their own dark little house that they’d fought hard to have and harder to keep, their space felt smaller, meeker, and as tear-filled as a broken promise. Habit is one explanation. Sundays, when they were apt to get lazy and the last thing you need is boredom, a slowed mind, the leisure to think about the man you love-hate, the face that won’t stop looking tired no matter how much you sleep, that thing you do, whatever it is—the driving, the crying, the sinning—calls to you, begs to you to keep getting it done, keep at it, don’t think, keep at it.
But habit is only part of it. The sting of not having or not having enough bores a pain black hole that sucks all the other of life’s injuries into one sharp stinging gap that you don’t need a scientist to remind you may be bottomless. Returning to their house means returning from those mountain drives to their sagging furniture that was old when they got it twenty years before and to a yard that looked even smaller than they remembered. That beautiful house is just a street away, but as out of reach as the moon. But that house-pain is just one lack, and everybody knows one pain is far better than a hundred. That is the mercy. That is the relief—the ache of one singular pain. It was hard not to believe that we, the black people in town in dog trots and shotgun houses at the bottom of the mountain, houses stuck in the sides of hills scattered like chicken feed, weren’t the ugly children. What a relief that in our hearts we knew that no coloreds, no Negroes, no blacks, were welcome, even if they could afford to buy there. At least we didn’t have to believe that we’d done everything wrong and were not the ones that God had chosen.
So much has changed since we were just starting out. The furniture plants that built the town are all but empty. The jobs on the line turning yellow pinewood into the tables and beds for the world are mostly gone. Without the factories there is little work to do. What a difference a few years can make. The jobs that everybody knew as the last resort or the safety net are the jobs nobody can get anymore. Used to be at 3:30 P.M. the roads from Bernhardt, Hammary, Broyhill, and Bassett were hot with cars, bumper to bumper, the convenience stores full of mostly men, but women too with cold ones (Coke or stronger) in one hand, Nabs or Little Debbie cakes in the other for the ride home. These days, go anywhere you please at 3:30 with no trouble. Here’s a math problem for you. How many casinos does it take to make a town? Are you calculating? Got it? No, sorry that’s a trick question. No number of casinos make a town. But if you want a stopover, a place to throw your balled-up trash out the window as you float by in your car, you just need one good casino. Don’t get me wrong, we love a casino and wish for one like the last vial of antidote. We believe despite all experience to the contrary in easy money and our own fortunes changing in an instant like the magician’s card from the sleeve. If one quarter came miraculously from behind the ear, we would milk that ear for days for the rent money. We believe. We hope for the town to morph into an all-resort slick tourist trap, looking like no real person ha
d ever lived here. We are full of the fevered hope of the newly come to Jesus. We can reinvent. We can survive. At least some of us think so. What choice do we have?
Still the rich have moved from the center of town and the near hills to other places in the county. Their homes are estates where their windows look onto the rolling acres of kings. The houses, the once mansions in town that they and their kind left behind, belong to the flippers to turn into cramped and oddly configured apartments or raze altogether. The message was clear as day, the richest person doesn’t live in our midst anymore and what the rich had now, we couldn’t ever see it for ourselves, couldn’t even pass by it and let the images settle in our dreams. Even so, even though we know all that, Brushy Mountain Road loomed in our thinking, in our childhood imaginings. You think you forget those dreams? You get old, but the dreams remain, spry and vigorous. Swat them and they come back like gnats, like plague. You can’t kill them. They can’t die.
The first thing JJ did on that mountain was cut out a whole new road up to his house. Heavy machines of industry, Kubotas and Deeres, used to make the path dotted the hills for weeks, like kids’ toys abandoned in the weeds. Men in town speculated about the tons of gravel and the weight of red clay they had to shift from one place to another to level the hills. The women didn’t care about the road. They knew from their own yards how difficult it was to make a way to get from there to here. They’d dug their own paths, moved their own dirt and rocks in the stubborn Carolina soil. What excited the women was the river rock foundation, the big beautiful windows, the walls rising up like raptured dead.
Most days, JJ would be up there himself, walking around the site, talking to the Mexican men or working hard himself judging by the reports of his sweat-soaked clothes, his close-cropped hair grayed with sawdust. Living in a small town means knowing the news, the broad strokes as well as the lurid minutiae of your neighbor’s life. Your dirty kitchen, cancer treatments, drugged-out child all on the sandwich board of your back, swirled around the body with a stink you could not outrun. JJ was from another small town and did not have nearby family. Few people knew JJ to give out too many details. We are not surprised. We knew too little about him when he lived in Pinewood as a young man. But soon he would show his face. When that house was done, Sylvia knew JJ would be knocking at her door. Years ago that boy had spent too much time in her kitchen, on her back porch and staring at her beautiful child Ava. That JJ had loved Ava was obvious. That Sylvia loved JJ too, like a son, like Devon, her own son, was just as clear. Her son was Devon pronounced like Levon from the Elton John song, though Sylvia was embarrassed to admit that fact to anybody. Devon was her firstborn baby, the baby she wasn’t supposed to have. She never had any romance about being a mother and knew that having a baby was easy if your body was willing. Girls, hardly older than the ones Sylvia passed at the school bus stop at the end of the road every morning, became mothers. But Sylvia’s body had been unwilling until Devon came. She was almost thirty, old in those days and sure that her baby days were long past. It wasn’t that Sylvia loved Devon any more than her daughter, Ava, but Devon was the child that changed her status, the child that made her look at the ordinary world as a big and dangerous paradise. JJ was so like her Devon: both calm boys, funny children with soft voices, with the same warm puddled eyes like they’d been caught crying and they were trying to recover.
Almost a generation had passed, a long time any way you look at it, but Sylvia knew that the feelings were just there under the pancake makeup of the surface. JJ felt them too, how could he not? He had left them, but he was back. That counted. Of course it counted.
They used to say if you love something set it free. Don’t you believe it! Love means never letting anything go, never seeing it stride on long confident legs away from you. You think love leaves? You think you are ever free? Then you are a child or a fool. Flee in the dark, spend a lifetime away, never say its name, never say its name, but one day, or if you are very unlucky, every day, it will whisper yours. And, you know you want to hear your name. Say it, love. Please say it.
2
“I’ve called you,” Marcus said.
“What’s that noise? Is that the boy yelling?”
“Tay Dula. Getting loud. The fat heads will stop it.”
Sylvia had rarely heard any sound in the background when Marcus called. She could almost forget he was in the county lockup.
“I told you about him, Sylvia. He’s like that this time of day.” The brokenhearted sound of the moaning boy scared Sylvia, gave her a sick feeling like she’d uncovered a snake in her yard. She would be trying to forget the sound for days to come.
“Are you okay?” Sylvia said.
“You’ve been somewhere. Why didn’t you answer? I started to think you were gone.”
“Marcus.” Sylvia fought to keep the scolding tone from her voice, but she was way past believing it cute to have a man questioning her comings and goings. “I’ve been sick.”
“What’s wrong? Sylvia? You okay?”
“Not sick. I shouldn’t have said that. Tired. I’m not sleeping.”
“Did Devon get there yet?”
“No not yet. I told you I have a lot to do. I work and I’ve got bills. I’ve not even been here.” Sylvia searched her mind for what else ate up the hours of her day but nothing materialized. The truth was she had been trying to stay away from her daughter’s house and spend some time in her own apartment for a change. “I have a lot of things to do and that’s all there is to it. You need to worry about yourself and don’t be thinking about Devon.” Sylvia sighed. He’s just a scared boy. He’s just a scared boy, she reminded herself. “I’m here now, honey. I’m not avoiding you. I’m here now.”
“I was worried.” Marcus attempted a laugh and sounded younger than the twenty-five-year-old man he was, a boy to Sylvia. Marcus had called her from jail. Not jail; Andy Griffith and Barney Fife run a jail; Marcus was in prison, for months now. Sylvia always accepted the phone charges.
“Just tired, Marcus,” Sylvia said
“I thought you must be busy with Devon.”
“I can come to see you Sunday. I’ll bring you something. What can I bring you?
“No, no don’t do that,” Marcus said. He had always refused her visits, for months now, but Sylvia thought she heard a small hesitation in his voice this time. Please don’t say yes, she thought. Please. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she was glad he’d said no. The truth was that prison scared the hell out of her. It was her good luck that she’d not been inside a prison for nearly thirty years since she’d gone to see a son of a friend. That was enough to hold her for a lifetime. Many times Sylvia thought that the people sitting around waiting for the zombies to attack ought to visit a jail sometime. That’s an apocalypse nobody knew what to do with.
“I’m a good sleeper. I can sleep standing up most of the time,” Sylvia snorted. “But these days I’ve been walking the floor. It’ll pass.”
“Have a drink before bed. You’ve got vodka don’t you? When I first got here I didn’t sleep for weeks. They keep you up. For real. Anything to make you crazy.”
Sylvia hadn’t meant to talk about her sleeplessness, her daily problems that couldn’t sound like anything but petty and small ones in comparison. “Forget about all that. You’ll make it,” Sylvia said, momentarily unsure if the conversation had led them into a slick-sided hole. All that was left was to struggle back out. “You’ve got to work on yourself. You hear me? This is the time to improve. Fight the shame, okay? What did I tell you about that? Worse has happened to people. Worse has happened to me,” Sylvia said.
“Not to me.” Marcus cleared his throat. “This is it.”
“Well, it’s done now.” Sylvia resisted the impulse to sigh. “What are you going to do about it but live through it?”
“You cut to it, don’t you?”
“I’ll bring you a hamburger on Sunday. I can cook, but probably not this week.”
“They rob yo
u here. You have to buy the stuff they’ve got. Three dollars for cheese crackers.”
Sylvia heard loud voices again and what sounded like the muffled-from-the-bottom-of-a-box sound of Marcus’s hand over the receiver. She imagined the life going on around going on around Marcus. He stood in a hallway of a dorm, the common phone large and heavy like a dumbbell in his hand. Marcus leaned against the wall as the other young men (they are white with deep parted hair) lined up behind him in their shorts and baggy underwear waiting their turn to talk to folks back home. Sylvia knew better. But in her fantasy, the whole enterprise of the prison industrial complex was no more sinister than a boy’s summer camp circa 1968. “I’m just glad I got you. You don’t know how glad.”
“I’ll bring you some books then. What do you read?”
“I thought I lost you, Sylvia. You don’t know how glad.”
“Pay attention, Marcus. You need to read something. Focus your mind. I can bring you books.”
“No books. I can’t concentrate for long.”
“You can change. Keep your mind sharp. Believe in that, Marcus. Life is sad, but there’s some good moments and you have to live for those. That’s all we got.” Sylvia couldn’t remember the last time she waited for a good moment instead of holding on through the bad ones for the next wave of bad to shock her into a different kind of sadness. “You know what, Marcus? I changed my mind. There’s nothing wrong with shame. Most people could use more of it. Shame can make you better. Yes, it can.” Sylvia wondered at the statement even as she said it. In her experience nobody got better from shame, only more afraid. Fear moved underground is the most dangerous feeling in the world.
“I’m okay. I feel better. I’ll get used to being a monkey in a fucking cage,” Marcus whispered.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m sorry, sorry.” Marcus’s sigh sounded to Sylvia like a shudder. “There’s guys in here that sold a little dope, stupid asses like me.”
“I’m not trying to hear that, Marcus.”
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