“I hope he’s wrong.”
“Me too,” I said.
Later that night, I called Sam and Heather. I needed to hear their voices even if it was for just five minutes. They told me they would come at the end of the summer to visit. They promised. They asked how I had been, and Sam, trying to take on Everett’s role, asked how the house was, if it needed anything. In some ways, it’s quite sweet how they try to take on our old roles and in others I can’t stand it, but I was lonely and I needed my family. Heather told us about a new patient, a child actor she said we would know if she could tell us her name, who had been coming to her for a month for counseling. We listened to the more interesting details and tried to guess at who it was, but she wouldn’t give a name. Then, feigning sleepiness, I told the children I had to go. Hearing their voices had made me lonelier, and when I got off the phone, I thought I would just go right up to bed. I began flipping off lamps and light switches when the moon came out from behind a cloud and its white light fell on the road, on the patch. I opened the door.
The wind was in the leaves and I smelled rain coming, but the light was on the road. I walked behind the house to the shed and pulled out an old pickaxe of Everett’s and carried it out to the road. The wood on the handle was worn smooth. I took a mighty swing and jabbed into the patched surface. The axe bounced right back, not even nicking the asphalt and nearly toppling me, but I steadied myself and I took another swing. Then another. I tried to hit the same mark to soften the spot. The wind blew hard and the moonlight left and I struck the road again and again, trying to keep up a rhythm, but I couldn’t. Breathless, I dropped the axe and sat down on the curb. Blisters had already formed on my hands, and I rubbed them. The asphalt had what looked like only a scratch on its surface. I was never going to break it.
THE END OF summer arrived and with it Sam and Heather. I spent a week getting the house all straight for them and going to the grocery for their favorite foods. It took my mind off the awful events of the spring, the image of that poor woman. The two of them home were something like a storm, and the house, for a few days, was alive like it used to be with their energy and talk, meals around the dining room table, and the steady hum of a television or stereo in the background. Heather and I cleaned out the attic, and Sam took care of my landscaping, asking how the pickaxe had become so bent and nicked, and when we went to church everyone told them how happy I must be to have them home.
I was happy to see them. We sat down in a pew in the balcony, and I took note of the cracks in the eggshell-colored plaster. It is a good old church, comforting, and I felt safe between my children, the first time I had ever had such a feeling—that of the protected rather than the protector. The preacher gave his sermon about how Jesus said He would never leave us, that He would never desert us, and I thought about how Everett and I shouldn’t have waited so long to have them because the truth of life is I will desert them. Everett already has. Life is an odd miracle to me. It is so simple and true—the movement of breath into a body and its exhalation—and then, like those breaths, it is fleeting, but with such hard parting.
I’d been looking out the window every day for a couple that might have resembled Everett and me to show up and stare at the road, but no one came. It was as if that woman, that girl, had no people. The preacher read from the book of John, quoting Jesus, and I took up Sam’s and Heather’s hands and gave each one a good squeeze, which they returned. They were leaving in the morning, and I would count down the days until their next visit. I thought I might cry if I focused on it too much, so I picked up a hymnal and thumbed through its pages.
After lunch, I went up to the office and turned on the computer, and I started looking up sinkholes on the internet. There was our town. There was the news article from the paper and one on CNN. An “unknown motorist” each one labeled the woman. She couldn’t have always been unknown I thought. Not someone who screamed for the life inside her all the way to the end.
The children were in their rooms, readying suitcases for an early morning drive to the airport. They refused to let me follow behind in the car and watch them off, and it was as if I had already begun to allow the knot of loss and leaving to form below my sternum. I wanted them both to stay, and yet I knew I could never ask them such a thing—a life here is not what we ever wished for them. Just then Heather’s voice called to me and I rose.
She was standing in the hall, holding my golden scarf.
“Mom, this is gorgeous.”
“Your father bought it for me when we went to New York.”
“Why didn’t you ever wear it?”
“I did there. It never seemed to fit in here, and I could never find the right occasion for it.”
“It’s lovely,” she said, thumbing the fabric. “What is it?” Sam said.
“A scarf,” she said, holding it out to him. “She’s never worn it.”
“I did once,” I interrupted.
“You’ve kept it in the attic all these years?” Sam said.
I nodded. “Take it,” I said to Heather. “Your dad would be happy you have it, and I will be too.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“You’re going to get it one day,” I said. “You’re both are going to get everything that’s left, so you might as well take it now while I can see you enjoy it.”
“Mom, that’s so morbid.” She turned to her brother who turned back to me, but I only shrugged my shoulders.
“But it’s true. Take it. I want you to. Here.” I took the garment in my hands and placed it around her neck and knotted it for her. “You look beautiful. Doesn’t she?” Sam nodded. I stood behind her and faced her toward the mirror, and then there was Sam looking too. The three of us alone in the hallway. Heather turned and kissed my cheek, and the fabric brushed my neck.
“Mom?” Sam said. “Do you know those people?”
Through the transom window above the front door we saw a man and woman standing in the road.
“They’ve been out there for fifteen minutes,” he said. They haven’t said a word to each other.”
I put my hand up to my heart. There was a genuine ache and pain, and I stood between Sam and Heather and I knew.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Who is it?” Heather said.
“The parents,” I said. “They’ve come to see her.” I noticed a bouquet of wilting flowers in the man’s hand. They had on church clothes.
“You want us to go out there with you?” Sam asked.
“No, you two just get your things together. I’ll be back in a minute.” I opened the door and the rush of a breeze entered. The couple lifted their heads, and I walked down the steps to the sidewalk. The man put his arm over the woman’s shoulder and she clasped it.
I was aware of Sam and Heather standing in the doorway, so I turned to them and waved for them to close the door, and they obliged. Then I stepped off the sidewalk and called to the couple.
SILER, KENTUCKY, 1970
NO ONE WAS surprised when news spread that Cheeks Mahan killed Riley Lawson. After all, people knew the story. Riley had married the Mahan girl, Della, when she was nineteen and almost immediately began pounding on her. When she came home to visit her family for Sunday dinners after church, she wore the bruises of her young love under her eyes and on the slim part of her wrists. When she was a girl, no one had ever seen a child with such life in her, never understood where she got that energy and bounce to her walk, the shine in her hair. When they looked at her parents—Cheeks who was an old man before he turned forty, his back gimped up from working in the mines in his twenties, his hearing gone from running dozers in his thirties, and her mother, Marlene, with a frame as fragile as a bird’s but a mouth that cut wounds deeper than the valley they lived in—it was hard for anyone to see much hope or happiness that might lie in between the walls of their home.
But legend and rumor can only explain so much, and what happened, of course, changed them all, and maybe none more than the bo
y, Duke, who handed his father the 12-gauge shotgun that pumped the slugs in Riley’s body and who still, sometimes in the night, hears the shot.
The marks of Della’s beatings had bothered them all, but not as much as they did Cheeks. He had always believed the girl’s spirit was like a thing of defiance that could burn like a strong fire even after a bucket of water has been poured over the flames’ tips. It was what, he thought, gave her her beauty. And though Marlene saw it too, she had envied and resented it, and in some small place inside her had been happy when Della decided on that son of a bitch Riley Lawson three years before.
All that changed when Della finally moved home, leaving Riley for good they thought, near the end of June, just when the wet heat of summer was really starting to build in the valleys and hang in the treetops of the mountains. But every week on Friday, after Riley had been paid and run out to his cousin Pete’s place, the bootlegger, for a half case, he came calling on Della, and she would meet him halfway, talking in the yard.
Cheeks had warned Riley not to come around and told Della she needed to leave him be, but neither listened, and on one muggy night, with the last remnants of firecrackers and Roman candles shooting off somewhere in the distance, Riley drove into their yard, the tires of his beat-up Dart skidding brown streaks into the grass. This was not the night Cheeks took the boy’s life, but they all thought it would be, and when Della got up from the couch and ran to the door, Cheeks pushed her aside and told her to stay still. Riley cut the headlights off and stomped his boots into the earth, hollering her name, asking her to come outside.
She watched from the window, and Duke stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at the dark figure in the yard. Riley’s steps were unsure, and Duke watched his father turn the doorknob and step out onto the porch with his shotgun down by his side. “Don’t move,” he said to them both as he crossed the doorway.
The heat entered through the open door and hit their faces like a wet towel. Riley stopped his shouting when he saw Cheeks. He took on a calm look and narrowed his eyes toward the shotgun. He called out for him to shoot. “I don’t want to live without her. Shoot me, old man. Right here,” he said, pointing at his heart. “Blow me away.”
At that, both men stepped forward, Cheeks from out of the doorway, the lights of the living room glowing behind him, and Riley stumbling, tripping on a rock and falling to his knees.
Cheeks put the shotgun back down to his side then, and Riley lowered his head, letting his chin bob against his sternum.
“I love her,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”
Della broke for the porch. She stood in the damp night, locked in place, her eyes shifting back and forth to the two men she loved more than any others in the world.
“Go on,” Cheeks said. “Put him in his car and get back in the house.”
She ran into the yard where Riley was kneeling and pulled him up, supporting nearly every ounce of his body on her shoulders, and dragged him to the car.
“Baby,” he said to her when he was sitting upright. His blue eyes were swimming in the moonlight, and his black bangs were stamped to his forehead with sweat. “Come home,” he said. “Come back to me.” Even with the alcohol in him, he meant it. He knew there was no other woman he wanted in his life.
Della wanted him then too. She wanted to frame his face with her hands the way she had on their wedding night when they’d driven down to Eagle Falls and sat on the rocks watching the water crash, the mist swirling in her hair. She could feel her back lean forward, the muscles in her jaw tense as she readied to kiss him when Duke came from behind her and said, “Daddy says to get back inside. Let him sleep it off.”
The moment was lost. She pulled back and followed her little brother into the house.
“You ought to know better,” Cheeks said when they came inside. Marlene was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“Please, Daddy. Not now,” Della said.
“After all you’ve been through with him,” he said. “You’d think—” but he didn’t finish the sentence. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at her, the scruff of his beard shadowy on his face.
“You can’t go back to him, Della,” their mother said, breaking the silence in the room.
These warnings didn’t matter. Three days after Cheeks raised his rifle at Riley for the first time Della snuck off in the middle of the day to see him. Duke was in the mountains, scouting deer for the fall, and saw the blue Mustang—a present from Riley to Della on the night he proposed—cutting swatches through the thicket of trees.
He was halfway up the hillside and knew there was nowhere else for Della to go that day. He watched the car hug the curved yellow lines in the road and listened to the deep grumble of the 351 engine rise through the air. He pictured Della behind the wheel, her hair flying all around her face, the dark brown of it contrasted against the white upholstery.
Duke thought he was starting to understand what it meant to be a man and felt as if he was coming into his own manhood more and more with his new growth-spurted and filled-out frame. And because of this, though she was ten years older than him, Duke saw how easy it was for a man to love his sister and her beauty, to want to follow her. He’d been too young when Della first met Riley Lawson to remember much, just eight, but he’d always been wary of him. Everyone knew the stories about the Lawsons. There was Butch, the oldest, who’d been kicked out of the navy (after earning two Purple Hearts) when he’d hit his commanding officer and hung him over the edge of the ship by his ankles, screaming at him until a half-dozen seamen grabbed hold of both men. Loyal, the middle boy, stole hubcaps and sold dope over in Fordyce, and once when he’d been at the Trademart Shopping Center, two boys came out and jumped him with a baseball bat, only to have Loyal somehow take the bat away from them and beat them both black and blue, busting their car windows and then slitting their tires.
By those standards, perhaps, Riley Lawson wasn’t as tough as his brothers, nobody could say for sure. The legend of their stories had outgrown the substance of each man long before Della had met and married Riley. She had ignored those stories, passed them off as mere gossip, and fell in love. The night Riley proposed to Della he’d won the Mustang in a poker game over in Rockholds. Right after he picked the keys off the table, the story went, the man he’d won it from had come at Riley, chips flying off the table in a rain shower of red, blue, and white plastic discs.
Some said the man should’ve known better. Riley wasn’t just thick-chested. He was quick; his fists could fly like hummingbird wings. He beat the man’s face in until it looked like somebody took a mallet to a steak. The whole left side of the man’s body seemed to drag the ground, and when Riley was done, they said, he pulled a pistol from under his denim coat, held it over top of the man, and pressed it into his broken and crooked nose, bending it straight.
“You’re lucky I didn’t use this,” he said and spat.
But Della didn’t know this. She’d only known half the truth; that he’d won it at a card game. She was too sick with love and happiness, with that incredible energy of hers packed with goodwill to believe such things really happened—even in this sort of rough country and life. She accepted the car with glee and drove Riley and herself all the way over to Middlesboro that night, winding through the mountains so fast on some of the turns that Riley thought for sure they’d head right into the bank, and they found a spot near the Cumberland Gap, inside the national park, and made love under the stars with the lights of the car cut off but the radio playing Joplin, the Dead, and then the Lovin’ Spoonful over their naked bodies.
Della couldn’t see a time when her love for Riley would fade. And after they were married, she never thought for a moment that her love would not calm him on those nights he came home from playing cards or running through the hills with his friends and he’d get that angry, sick look in his eyes like a lost dog that’s been attacked. Nobody knew it, but Della believed in her own spirit as much as everyone who saw
it. She felt she could will herself through the worst moments with an intensity of focus that had been the trait of her people, that was carried in both her mother and father and passed on to Duke as well. She was singular in her ability to love Riley through to the end.
As Duke saw the Mustang blow through the turns, the old fear he carried as a younger boy brewed in his belly. He felt the acids there churn his throat raw. He wondered if this might be the time when Riley, the man whose family history had been littered with rumors, would reveal himself in some awful way and finally break his sister’s spirit.
THE ENTIRE FAMILY carried the same fear as Duke, and when she returned home that night, it was as if each of them felt a chip of themselves had been taken through the countryside to Riley’s during the day. They sat at the dinner table, and Marlene leered at her daughter with a look so disgusted and filled with loathing that Duke looked down at the floor and Cheeks finally said, “She’s a grown woman, Marlene. She can do what she likes.”
Marlene slammed down a bowl of mashed potatoes on the table. Cheeks held up his hand before she could speak and said, “There’s nothing left to say.”
More than the others, Marlene took Della’s running off as an act of personal rejection. It was a commentary and a punishment, she felt, for all the terrible thoughts she had of her daughter over the years. She’d always known the girl was ageless. Her skin was smooth like soapstone and she wouldn’t begin to wrinkle until well into her fifties. But the envy she’d always carried for Della had relented the first time the girl came home with bruises under her eyes and a cut in her lip. She’d undressed her that night, just like when she was a baby, pulling back the covers on the bed in Della’s old room and helping her in. She wet a rag and brought cotton balls dipped in alcohol and cleaned Della’s face and iced her bruises. And when she came home the last time, her eye swollen shut, red patches of Riley’s skin under her nails, Marlene stayed by her daughter until the sun cracked through the curtains, and she realized she had fallen asleep in the slat-back chair with her head resting on Della’s stomach, the slow movements of the girl’s breathing having lulled her.
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