by Ron Rash
“We were cleaning limbs,” Matt said, “and the saw jumped back and dug into his leg till it got to bone. I made a tourniquet with my belt, but he still almost bled to death.” Matt paused. “Charlton shouldn’t have been running that saw. He’d been drinking.”
Matt held her close a few more moments, then stepped back. He nodded toward the corner where Linda and her mother sat.
“You better say something to your momma and Linda,” Matt said, and released her arms. Jamie let go too. It was only then that she realized the key was still in her closed right hand. She slipped it into her uniform pocket.
Her mother stood when Jamie approached, but Linda stayed on the couch, her head bowed.
“Pray hard, girl,” her mother said as she embraced Jamie. “Your brother is going to need every prayer he can get.”
“You seen him yet, Momma?” she asked. Jamie smelled the Camay lotion her mother rubbed on every night. She breathed deep, let the smell of the lotion replace the smell of blood.
“No, he’s still in surgery, will be for at least another hour.”
Her mother released her and stepped back.
“I can’t stand myself just sitting her,” her mother said, and nodded at Jamie’s father standing beside the door marked SURGERY. “Come on, Luther. I’m going to get us all some doughnuts and coffee and I need you to help carry it.” She turned to Jamie. “You stay here and look after Linda.”
Jamie sat in the place her mother had left. Linda’s head remained bowed, but her eyes were open. Jamie looked up the wall clock. Two-twenty three. The red minute hand went around seven more times before Jamie spoke.
“It’s going to be all right, Linda,” she said. It was the only thing she could think to say.
Linda lifted her head, looked right at Jamie. “You sound pretty sure of that. Maybe if it was your husband getting his leg took off you’d think different.”
Linda wasn’t thirty yet, but Jamie saw something she recognized in every older woman in her family. It was how they looked out at the world, their eyes resigned to bad times and trouble. I don’t ever remember being young, Grandma Alexander had once told her. All I remember is something always needing to be done, whether it was hoeing a field or washing or feeding children or tending cows and chickens.
The elevator door opened and Jamie’s parents stepped out, their hands filled with paper bags.
“You think this couldn’t have happened to Matt,” Linda said, raising her voice enough that Jamie’s parents came no closer. “You think it happened because Charlton had been drinking.”
“I don’t think any such thing,” Jamie said.
Linda looked at her in-laws.
“I got three young ones to feed and buy school clothes for, and a disability check ain’t going to be enough to do that.”
“We’ll do everything we can to help you,” Jamie’s father said, and offered Linda a styrofoam cup of coffee. “Here. This will give you some strength.”
“I don’t need strength,” Linda said, her voice wild and angry. “I need the money Charlton overpaid Matt. Money that should be ours. Money we need worse than they do.”
Linda looked at her father-in-law.
“You know Charlton paid hourly pages to everybody else who worked for him.”
“I earned every cent he paid me,” Matt said. He had left his seat and stepped closer, standing next to Jamie now. “I been there every day and I’ve cut plenty of days dawn to dark. It’s bad what’s happened to Charlton, and I’m sorry it happened. But me and Jamie don’t owe you anything.” Jamie placed her hand on Matt’s arm, but he jerked it away. “I ain’t listening to this anymore.”
“You owe us everything,” Linda shouted as Matt walked toward the elevator. “If Charlton hadn’t taken you on you’d never have been able to make a down-payment on that lake house.” Linda looked at Jamie’s parents now, tears streaming down her face. “A lake house, and the five of us in a beat-up doublewide.”
The surgery room door opened, and a nurse glared at them all briefly before the door closed again.
Jamie’s mother sat down on the couch and pressed Linda’s head to her bosom.
“We’re all going to do everything possible to get you all through this, Linda, and that includes Matt and Jamie.”
Linda sobbed now, her face smeared with mascara. Minutes passed before she lifted her head. She tried to smile as she brushed tears from her cheek and slowly lifted herself from the couch. Jamie’s father gripped Linda’s upper arm when her knees buckled.
“I know I look a sight,” Linda said. “I best go to the bathroom and tidy up so Charlton won’t see me like this.” Linda looked at Jamie. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Jamie’s father walked Linda to the restroom and waited by the door.
“Come here, girl,” her mother said to Jamie.
Jamie did not move. She was afraid, almost as afraid as when she’d seen her father’s face through the windshield.
“I need to call the restaurant, let them know what’s going on.”
“That can wait a few minutes,” her mother said. “We need to talk, and right now.”
Jamie remained where she was.
“I know you’re put out with Linda,” her mother said, “and I don’t blame you. Grieving don’t give her no excuse to talk that way to you and Matt.” She paused, waited for Jamie to meet her eyes. “But you know you got to help them.”
Jamie turned and stared at the wall clock. She thought how only two hours earlier she had been caulking the back room of the lake house.
“Me and your daddy will do what we can, but that won’t be near enough. Your daddy says even if the skidder’s sold it’ll bring no more than two thousand dollars. We’re not talking about just Linda here. We’re talking about your niece and nephews.”
“Why are you saying this to me, Momma?” Jamie said. “Matt’s going to have to find another job now, and there’s no way he’ll make the kind of money Charlton paid him. We need all the money we got just to make the payments on the lake house, much less fix it up. We’ll have tuition to pay as well come spring.”
The elevator door opened. Jamie hoped it was Matt, but a chaplain got off and walked past them toward the intensive care unit.
“You’ve been blessed, Jamie,” her mother said. “Linda’s right. Charlton never let anyone but Matt work percentage. You could give Charlton the difference between what Matt got paid and the six dollars an hour anybody else would have got.”
“But we’d have to sell the lake house,” Jamie said. “How can you ask me and Matt to do that?”
“The same way I’d have asked your brother to quit high school. Only I never had to ask. He knew what had to be done and did it without me saying a word to him. Seventeen years old and he knew what had to be done.” Her mother laid her hand on Jamie’s. “That lake house, you had no right to expect to such a place so young. You know it was a miracle you got it in the first place. You can’t expect miracles in this life, girl.”
The bathroom door opened and Linda came out. She and Jamie’s father walked toward them
“Maybe not, Momma,” Jamie said, her voice low but sharp, “but when they come a person’s got a right to take them.”
“You got to do what’s best for the whole family,” her mother said, speaking quietly as well. “You got to accept that life is full of disappointments. That’s something you learn as you grow older.”
There had been complications during the surgery, and Jamie was unable to see Charlton until after seven-thirty. His eyes opened when she placed her hand on his, but he was too drugged to say anything coherent. Jamie wondered if he even understood what had happened to him.
When Jamie and Matt got back to the lake house it was dark, and by then things had been decided, but not before harsh words had been exchanged.
“Come on,” Matt said, reaching his hand out to hers after they got out of the Escort. “Let’s go down to the lake, baby. I need one good thing to happen in my life to
day.”
“Not tonight,” Jamie said. “I’m going on in.”
She changed into her nightgown. Matt came in soon afterward naked and dripping, work clothes and boots cradled in his arms. Jamie stepped out of the bathroom, a toothbrush in her hand.
“Put those clothes out on the porch,” she said. “I don’t want to smell that blood anymore.”
Jamie was in bed when he came back, and soon Matt cut out the light and joined her. For a minute the only sound was the crickets and tree frogs. The mattress’ worn-out bedsprings creaked as Matt turned to face her.
“I’ll go see Harold Wilkinson in the morning,” Matt said. “He knows I did good work for Charlton. I figure I can get eight dollars an hour to work on his crew, especially since I know how to run a skidder.”
Matt reached out and laid his arm on Jamie’s shoulder.
“Come here,” he said, pulling her closer.
She smelled the thick, fishy odor of the lake, felt the lake’s coldness on his skin.
“They’ll be needing help a long time,” Matt said. “In two, three years at most we’ll have jobs that pay three times what we’re making now. Keeping this house is going to save us a lot of money, money we can help them with later.”
Matt paused.
“You listening to me.”
“Yes,” Jamie said.
“Linda’s parents can help too. I didn’t hear your momma say a word about them helping out.” Matt kissed her softly on the cheek. “They’ll be all right. We’ll all be all right. Go to sleep, babe. You got another long day coming.”
But she did not fall asleep, not for a while, and she woke at first light. She left the bed and went to the bathroom. Jamie turned on the faucet and soaked a washcloth, wrung it out and pressed it to her face. She set it on the basin and looked at the mirror. A crack jagged across the mirror like a lightning bolt. Something else to be replaced, she thought.
CHEMISTRY
The spring my father spent three weeks at Broughton Hospital, he came back to my mother and me pale and disoriented, two pill bottles clutched in his right hand as we made our awkward reunion in the hospital lobby. A portly, gray-haired man wearing a tie and tweed jacket soon joined us. Dr. Morris pronounced my father “greatly improved, well on his way to recovery,” but even in those first few minutes my mother and I were less sure. My father seemed to be in a holding pattern, not the humorous, confident man he had been before his life swerved to some bleak reckoning, but also not the man who’d lain in bed those April mornings when my mother called the high school to arrange a substitute. He now seemed like a shipwreck survivor, treading water but unable to swim.
“All he needs is a hobby,” Doctor Morris said, patting my father’s back as if they were old friends, “to keep his mind off his mind.” The doctor laughed and straightened his tie, added as if an afterthought, “and the medicine, of course.” Dr. Morris patted my father’s back again. “A chemistry teacher knows how important that is.”
My father took half of Dr. Morris’s advice. As soon as we got home, he brought the steel oxygen tank clanging down from the attic and gathered the wet suit, mask and flippers he hadn’t worn since his navy days. He put it all on to check for leaks and rips, his webbed feet flapping as he moved around the living room like some half-evolved creature.
“I’m not sure this was the kind of hobby Dr. Morris had in mind,” my mother said, trying to catch the eyes behind the mask. “It seems dangerous.”
My father did not reply. He was testing the mouthpiece while adjusting the straps that held the air tanks. That done, he made swimming motions with his arms as he raised his knees toward his chest like a drum major.
“I’ve got some repairs to make,” he said, and flapped on out to the garage. While my mother cooked a homecoming supper of pork chops and rice, he prepared himself to enter the deep gloaming of channels and drop offs with thirty minutes of breath strapped to his back.
My father still wore his wet suit and fins when he sat down at the supper table that evening. He ate everything on his plate, which heartened my mother and me, and drank glass after glass of iced tea as if possessed by an unquenchable thirst. But when he lay his napkin on the table, he did not refill his glass with more tea and reach for the pill bottles my mother had placed beside his plate.
“You’ve got to take the medicine,” my mother urged. “It’s going to heal you.”
“Heal me,” my father mused. “You sound like Dr. Morris. He said the same thing right before they did the shock treatments.”
My mother looked at her plate.
“Can’t you see that’s exactly why you need to take the pills? So you won’t ever have to do that again.” She raised her napkin to soak a tear from her cheek, her voice a mere whisper now. “This is not something to be ashamed of, Paul. It’s no different from taking penicillin for an infection.”
But my father was adamant. He pushed the tinted bottles to the center of the table one at a time as if they were chess pieces.
“How can I teach chemistry if I’m so muddled I can’t find the classroom?” he said.
That spring my allegiances were with my mother, who anchored our family in ways I had not appreciated until my father had been hospitalized. The following Monday my father resumed teaching, and I was her confederate at school. Between bells I peeked into a classroom filled with periodic charts, styrofoam carbons, and atoms wired together like fragile solar systems. In March Mr. Keller, the vice-principal, had found my father crouched and sobbing in the chemical storage room, a molecular model of oxygen clutched in his hands, so it was with relief in those last weeks of my junior year that I found my father manning his desk between breaks, braced and ready for the next wave of students.
One morning he was looking up when my halved face appeared at his door. He saluted me sharply.
“Petty Officer Hampton reports no men overboard, sir,” he said to me.
“Well, at least he’s got his sense of humor back,” my mother said when I reported the incident.
In mid-June my father announced at Sunday breakfast he was no longer a Presbyterian. Instead of sitting with us on the polished-oak pews of Cliffside Presbyterian, he would be driving up to Cleveland County’s mountainous northern corner to attend a Pentecostal church.
“It’s something I’ve got to do,” my father said.
My mother laid her napkin on the table, looked at my father as if he’d just informed us he was defecting to Cuba.
“We need to talk, Paul,” she said. “Alone.”
My parents disappeared behind a closed bedroom door. I could hear my father’s voice, moderate and reassuring, or at least attempting to be. My mother’s voice, in contrast, was tense and troubled. They talked an hour, then dressed for church. I was unsure who’d prevailed until my father came out of the bedroom wearing not a suit but a shirt and tie. He cranked our decade-old Ford Fairlane and headed north into the mountains, as he would Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, my mother and I drove our newer Buick LeSabre in the opposite direction, down toward Broad River to Cliffside Presbyterian.
I was not made privy to what kind of understanding, if any, my parents had reached about his change in church affiliation, but it was obvious as well as inevitable that my mother found this religious transmutation troubling. A lifelong Presbyterian, she distrusted religious fervor, especially for a man in such a tenuous mental state, but I suspect she also felt something akin to betrayal—a rejection of much of the life his marriage to her had made possible.
My mother had been baptized in Cliffside’s Presbyterian church, but my father, who’d grown up in the high mountains of Watauga County, had been Pentecostal before their marriage. His conversion signaled a social as well as religious transformation, a sign of upward mobility from hardscrabble Appalachian beginnings, for in this Scots-Irish community where Episcopalians were rare as Eskimos, he worshipped with the Brahmins of the county’s Protestant hierarchy.
&n
bsp; My father had appeared a dutiful convert, teaching Sunday school, helping prepare the men’s breakfasts, even serving a term as an elder, but he’d been a subversive convert as well. On Sunday mornings he entertained me with caustic remarks about the propriety of the services and Presbyterians’ inability to sing anything remotely resembling a “joyful noise.” When the choir rose to sing, my father winked at me, pretended to stuff plugs in his ears. My mother looked straight ahead at such times, trying to ignore my father’s shenanigans, but her lips always tightened.
“That wafer might as well be a burnt marshmallow for all the passion it evokes in that crowd,” my father said one Sunday as we drove home. “If Jesus Christ and his disciples marched in during a service, the ushers would tell them to have a seat, that the congregation would be glad to hear what they had to say as soon as the monthly business meeting was over.”
My mother glared at my father but addressed her words to the backseat where I sat.
“Just because a service is orderly and dignified doesn’t mean it isn’t heartfelt,” she said. “Don’t trust people who make a spectacle of what that believe, Joel. Too often it’s just a show, a way of drawing attention to themselves.”
As we entered summer, our lives took on a guarded normality. My father taught a six-week summer school session. My mother resumed, after a two-month absence, her part-time job as a bookkeeper for my Uncle Brad’s construction firm. I worked for my uncle as well, driving nails and pouring concrete. My uncle also gave us free reign of the lake house he’d bought years earlier when he’d had the time to use it, so on Saturday mornings we drove up Highway Ten to spend the day at South Mountain Reservoir, where cool mountain breezes and teeth-chattering water might revive us after a week of wilting piedmont humidity. No doubt my mother packed up food and swim suits each Saturday in hopes the lake might be beneficial for my father after a week of remedial teaching in an un-airconditioned classroom.