A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  His gaze was riveted to the exposed debris, his hands clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that his knuckles were blue-white. He stopped the car on the road’s weedy shoulder, cut the engine, slung his door open, and got out. “No,” I said urgently, holding on to his shirt sleeve. He pulled his arm away and staggered down the rain-drenched slope, shoving broken limbs aside, climbing over tree trunks. He pivoted, his eyes stark and agonized, his fists clenched. “Stay back,” he called. “I don’t want you down in this with me.”

  I struggled past the door he’d left open, holding on to the door frame, flinging a hand back to grab my cane. “I’ve always been part of it. You keep me out now, you’ll keep me out forever. Wait. Someone’s coming. You hear it? A car’s coming.”

  It was Matthew, driving one of the farm trucks. He parked on the shoulder and leaped out, frowning at Roan. “I knew you’d be too damned stubborn to go anywhere safe in the middle of a tornado. I couldn’t find you at Ten Jumps, so I’ve been … What the hell are you doing down there?”

  “Go get him!” I ordered. “Get him out of there!”

  Matthew hesitated, looking from Roan to me in astonishment. “What is it? What’s here?”

  “Me,” Roan said in a gutted tone. “What I was. What I’ll always be to everyone who wants to forget. Everything you don’t understand.”

  Matthew shook his head. “What?” He bent down and picked up something from the weeds, then straightened with a dented, rust-pocked, muddy hubcap in his hands. He turned the piece of debris, frowning, examining it, then dropped it suddenly and stared at Roan. “Whatever this is about, just tell me. It couldn’t be that bad.” He clambered down the slope.

  Roan lurched forward a step. “Both of you—stay up there!”

  Matthew stopped, looking askance at Roan’s furious warning. Then he clamped his mouth shut and went on, swinging at limbs, angrily pushing through the mud-spattered vines. “What are you going to do? Is it like the other day—somebody gets in your face and the best you can do is knock him down? Go ahead. Show me who you really are.”

  Roan snatched him by the shirt and shook him. I screamed, “Roan, don’t!” as Matthew clamped his hands on Roan’s fists. Matthew lost his balance and fell backward into a pile of branches. Roan leaned over him, still dragging on his shirt. Matthew stared up at him, frozen.

  “This is where I grew up,” Roan said to him. “In this garbage hole! This is what I come from! Claire came here for help when we were kids, but instead of helping her, my old man tried to rape her. And when I got here—”

  “Roan,” I called brokenly.

  Roan’s head sank. He took a long breath, then leveled a brutal, unapologetic stare at Matthew. “I killed him.”

  The three of us sat on the soggy mat of weeds in the roadside by the Hollow, me in the middle, Roan staring straight ahead, Matthew with his arms propped on his knees and his head bowed.

  The past had been laid out in Roan’s words and mine. The why, the how, a raw portrait of Roan’s childhood, Big Roan’s unsalvageable violence and cruelty. Listening to Roan tell it all made my skin crawl; the horrors hovering outside an uncurtained window on a dark night had solid form again.

  I tried to make Matthew understand why our family had sent Roan away, as I had finally come to accept it, and why he would have to accept and forgive his own treatment as a child. Imperfect and shamed intentions—a hard lesson in the dignities that hold families together, making them generous and ruthless at the same moment, both sanctuary and fortress.

  Matthew had said nothing, listening in incredulous silence. He seemed dazed.

  Roan and I traded a helpless look. He picked up a tattered stalk of Queen Anne’s lace and smoothed his fingers over the flat disk of tiny white flowers. “I killed him,” he repeated wearily. “My old man. He hurt Claire, and I killed the son of a bitch. And I’d do it again, if I had to. What happened to me after that had as much to do with my lack of faith as the Maloneys’ bad judgment. If I’d stuck it out at the foster home I’d have had a chance to come back here and be part of the family again. I don’t like what was done to me, but people make mistakes. I made one when I didn’t tell you the truth about me and about who you are.”

  I bit my tongue, trying to stay quiet and let them settle this, but wanting to shake Matthew and make him see.

  Roan snapped the flower in his hand, then tossed it away. “Let’s get this straight. Claire and I spent the past twenty years without each other, and I wasn’t with her this spring when she needed me. That’s the price she and I paid. Twenty years without her—that’s the only thing I wish I could change. I’ll never let that happen again. I brought you home. You have a family now. You don’t owe me anything. Now you know the truth about me. I understand what this family means to you. There’s a helluva lot more heritage for you to be proud of as a Maloney than as a Sullivan.”

  Matthew staggered to his feet, moved in front of Roan, then dropped to his heels and met his eyes. They studied each other for a moment in silence. “You’re not a murderer,” Matthew said. It amazed me, how he unraveled the issues down to that single turning point. He jerked his head toward the Hollow. “You don’t belong here. You never did. And you don’t have to deal with it by yourself. You think I’m ashamed of you?” His voice shook. “I’m still a Sullivan, if you’ll still have me. Give me a chance to earn the honor again. Sullivan. I’m proud of that.”

  There were a hundred images of Roan in my mind, pieces of memories—the fierce, accused boy at the carnival; the boy who knocked Neely Tipton down for me; the half-strangled boy carrying my chocolate Easter rabbit away from Steckem Road; the boy who stood atop Dunshinnog with Grandpa and me, listening to an old gospel song on a tin whistle, his eyes glowing. And every time I had surprised him by loving him and fighting for him, everything good he had brought out in me, and everything he had made of himself as a grown man, and for this young man, my nephew, whom he’d cared for and loved and raised as a tribute to what we meant to each other—all of that came together in him now.

  “We’re going to dig this place up,” Roan said. “Clean it out. Get rid of it. If I have to pull every piece of it out with my bare hands. Cut it out and close it up and forget it was ever here.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his hair, struggling in spite of the powerful words. Matthew scooped up the hubcap he’d examined earlier. His face set, he leaped up and tossed the hubcap into the back of the farm truck. “Okay. Let’s get to work then,” he announced. Roan stood quickly and helped me up. I carefully jabbed the tip of my cane into a paper-thin scrap of rusted metal in the weeds, then balanced precariously, lifted the cane, and shook the scrap into the truck’s bed. “One piece at a time, that’s all it takes,” I told Roan.

  He tilted his head back and shut his eyes. There was a long moment when I didn’t know what to expect next. “We’ll clean this place out,” he repeated. “Clean it out”—he opened his eyes, and his voice grew—“haul it out, and fill it in again. And then I’ll never set a foot in this goddamned hole again, and neither will anyone else I love.”

  Matthew draped an arm over his shoulder. Suddenly Roan put one arm around him and the other around me. He pulled us both close, and we pulled him.

  “I need chain saws,” I said when I got to the farm. “Work gloves, bug repellent, and a water cooler.” And then I explained why, with my heart in my throat, and Mama firmly sent old Nat to gather everything. Tweet grabbed a pair of work gloves. “I’m going over there with you,” she said. “Roan needs all of us.”

  I didn’t know what pleased me more—her brusque, clinical attitude as she shoved her hands into the gloves or the purely determined tenderness with which she had already claimed a place in the family.

  “You know, you and Matthew are going to be fine here,” I said.

  “What about you and Roan?”

  I didn’t know, couldn’t judge yet. “Let’s dig up one piece of trouble at a time,” I told her.

  It was hard work
, and slow work, and that was good, sweating out the poison. I moved around the perimeter of the Hollow clumsily, piling branches and small pine logs into heaps with my free hand, hating my cane. Roan and Matthew, sweat pouring down their chests, flung debris to the roadside, and Tweet tossed the pieces into the truck. Hot sun scalded us, and the damp air became a pine-scented sauna. Gnats and fat horseflies and stinging no-see-ums swarmed mercilessly around our faces. A small black snake slithered from a pile of brush. I captured it gently and held it out to Tweet. “Better carry it across the road and put it out of harm’s way,” I said. “There’ll be more where it came from. And watch out for copperheads. They’re not potent enough to kill a person, but if one bites you it won’t be any fun.”

  Tweet accepted the black snake in her hands, hurried across the road and set it down, then trotted back to me, gazing anxiously toward Roan and Matthew. They were mired in a flattened maze of trees. “It’ll take weeks at this rate,” she murmured to me. “This is like four ants trying to move a rain forest.”

  “Faith can move mountains,” Matthew said, grunting as he shoved at the half-fallen pine with the tire hanging from it. “It just can’t push this damned tree over.”

  The tree mocked him by suddenly collapsing, and a thick limb slapped him across the back. He sprawled face-forward into jagged rubble and blackberry briars. Tweet shrieked and started down the bank. Roan dived into the debris. I sighed with relief as he pulled Matthew upright. There were several long red scratches across Matthew’s face, and he hunched over, heaving, the breath knocked out of him.

  Tweet got to him and frantically ran her hands over his back, pulling his sweat-soaked shirt up to his shoulder blades and probing his spine. “I’m okay,” Matthew gasped. “Baby, you’re a vet, not a chiropractor. Stop poking my vertebrae.”

  Tweet’s face convulsed. She swiveled toward Roan, flinging her hands out. “I know he wants to do this with you, and I know you and Claire need to make the effort, but this plan is not going to work! We’re all going to get snakebit or eaten alive by insects or”—she pounded the malevolent fallen pine—“crushed under a tree! You have to accept the fact that this isn’t a job for two men and two women, one of whom is staggering around devotedly on a barely rehabilitated leg!”

  “Wait a minute,” Matthew called. “Listen.”

  One of the farm’s big, one-ton hay trucks lumbered into sight around the curve. Mama, with Amanda in her lap, Grandma Dottie, and Renfrew were packed into the front seat beside Nat, who drove the same way he thought, slowly. Mama climbed down from the high cab and immediately instructed Nat, “Set the sawhorses across this lane of the road.” She brusquely tugged at a yellow straw hat that made her face seem like the center of a large daisy. “Carry them back about where that big elm tree hangs down. We’re going to block off this lane.”

  Grandma Dottie waved her cigarette at Roan from the window of the truck’s cab. “Get my card table, Roan. Put it on the pavement and set up my patio umbrella. And put the lawn chairs under it. I’m not getting out until I have a chair to sit in.” Renfrew went to the back of the huge, wooden-sided truck, snapped the tailgate down, and bellowed, “I cain’t haul none of these ice chests and food boxes out by myself! Roan, get your boy and his wife to stop gawkin’ and come help!”

  Mama, dressed in jeans and a workshirt, clambered through the debris. When she reached Matthew, she carefully sprayed him with insect repellent. She sprayed Roan next, and then me, scowling mildly at my sweaty, sunbaked face. She plopped her hat on my head.

  Amanda, outfitted in pink sunglasses and a baseball cap, and cradling a small cassette boom box in her arms, wandered to the edge of the road and looked around uneasily. “How come Papa isn’t here yet, Uncle Roan?”

  Uncle Roan. Roan’s jaw worked. “I don’t know, hon. We haven’t talked to him.” He looked at Mama, bewildered.

  “I can’t speak for Josh,” Mama said wearily. “But the others are coming.”

  As if on cue, we heard a distant sound of large proportions and a minute later a fat yellow dump truck rolled between the steep, moist overhang of laurel and trees, coming from the direction of town. Behind it came four more dump trucks, and then a tractor pulling a backhoe on a trailer, and another tractor pulling a bulldozer on a trailer, then a stream of cars and pickups.

  The lead truck grumbled to a halt near us, with the others parking on the shoulders on either side behind it, filling the road with the loud purr of heavy horsepower, then the small vehicles maneuvering for parking space.

  Hop and Evan waved at us from the lead dump truck. Brady, Uncle Winston, Uncle Eldon, and several of my cousins climbed out of the others. Their thumbs hooked in the bibs of camouflage overalls, Hop and Evan took one long, unhappy look at the Hollow, then at Roan, Matthew, and me. “Y’all ought not to go huntin’ for bear by yourselves,” Hop said.

  Evan nodded. “Not much of a place for handwork either. Matthew looks like he’s been sawin’ stumps with his nose.”

  Roan inhaled sharply. “I don’t know how to thank—”

  “You’ve got no need to offer any thank-yous,” Uncle Winston said. Uncle Eldon added loudly, “No point in any cussing or discussing. We’re here because we want to be.”

  A line of cars and trucks began to arrive. They came—Maloneys, Delaneys, Kehoes, O’Briens, and Tobblers. Aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws—topping a hundred people by my count—bearing food and witness and quiet dedication. More chain saws and shovels and axes; boxes of food, ice coolers, guitars, lawn chairs, and blankets.

  Daddy climbed out of a car, the hot, damp breeze picking at his thinning hair and plaid shirt. My father seemed to be sunk inside dark determination, the man who had buried the Hollow and sent Roan away unfairly, remembering.

  Roan turned to look at me. “Did you ask them to do this?” he asked hoarsely.

  Crying a little, I shook my head. “Don’t you understand? They’re here for you.”

  The picnic tables were being set up. Music rose from a guitar. This, then, was dinner on the grounds, bringing fellowship to hell’s half-acre in the wilderness.

  Except for Josh, whom no one had heard from yet.

  The Hollow was scalped of trees by late afternoon. Violet and Rebecca goaded me into resting on a blanket with them at the base of the shady hills. The silence that followed hours of roaring chain saws felt heavy and portentous. Neat stacks of pine logs lined the clearing.

  Everyone went silent, watching Roan and me. He walked over and squatted beside me. We gazed at a backhoe, manned by Hop. I put a hand on Roan’s shoulder and gently massaged a steel-spring knot of tension. He fumbled for my hand and gripped it tightly, then tucked it in the crook of his arm. Matthew and Tweet stood nearby. Matthew looked regretful. “Now that push comes to dig,” he said, “this feels pretty gruesome. I’m beginning to wish we could just sing a couple of hallelujahs and go home.”

  Roan said in a low voice, “Until we scrape the rot out of this ground, this place is home.”

  It was tough. My skin crawled every time Hop dug the backhoe’s claw-scoop into the earth. Shadows fell across the Hollow. Everyone gathered in a large semicircle, their faces trapped in the Don’t-look-I-have-to-look expression of spectators at a grisly accident.

  Five feet down, the rusted-out hull of the truck’s roof appeared. Matthew grimaced, Roan raised a hand, and Hop stopped the backhoe. Roan walked over to the hole and stood, looking down.

  No one moved, no one breathed. A minute ticked by and then another one. I began to fear that Roan had lost himself in some time warp. “Help me up,” I told Violet and Rebecca. “Hurry.”

  The backhoe clawed into Big Roan’s truck, muddy and rusted; the cab caved in, the twisted metal charred black in spots, because Daddy had set fire to it and the trailer, before he buried them.

  The backhoe dragged it out of the clinging mud, and it gave off metallic groans that made people edge closer together for comfort. Evan posed the bulldozer behind it. “We’ll shove it
up on one of the trailers,” he called.

  The look in Roan’s eyes tore me apart. He stood there in agony, muddy hands jammed onto his hips, his chest rising and falling roughly beneath his sweat-drenched shirt. I knew he was seeing Big Roan in that truck, seeing himself in that truck.

  I slid my arms around him. “Let it go,” I whispered.

  “I can’t. I can’t stop seeing it.”

  “Wait.” Josh, his expression resigned, stood at the road. We all turned in surprise.

  My brother walked slowly, heavily, through the raw clearing. Matthew watched him with troubled eyes. “Let me help,” Josh said.

  “Papa!” Amanda yelled, darting up the slope to him then halting uncertainly. “I knew you’d come! I told everybody you would! I told Matthew!”

  That broke my brother’s strained expression and curved his face into gratitude. He scooped her into a hug and lifted her off her feet. “What a prize you are,” he said gruffly as she peered at him over her sunglasses, her face flushed and worried, then relaxing into a smile.

  Tweet trotted to the truck’s carcass, peered at it with her small blond head cocked to one side, thumped one warped door that hung by a single hinge, then looked at Roan solemnly. “Looks like a fixer-upper to me.”

  Some in the crowd burst into relieved laughter. Roan and I looked at Josh, who held Amanda tighter. She patted his cheek. We hadn’t brought him a son with no compromises, but we had given him a wholehearted daughter.

  Cans, the battered hulk of a washing machine, rotting tires, mysterious shards of who-knew-what origins—we dug it all up and lugged it away, we scooped it and flung it and dumped it into the big trucks.

  Deeper, deeper. The backhoe was sunk so low in the gouge it had made that we could hand Hop a cup of iced tea without reaching up. Water began to seep among the garbage, big, muddy puddles of it from the narrow creek that used to trickle through the gully at the very bottom of the Hollow.

  The daylight was fading fast. Several dozen camping lanterns glowed with weird, festive charm. “There it is,” Hop yelled as his scoop thudded on a metal wall. The trailer.