Requiem by Fire

by Wayne Caldwell

  Two or three spent match stems littered the ground in front of the pen door. “My Lord,” he muttered. “Was he trying to set these dogs on fire?” Sure enough, the top of the door was freshly singed. “Least it was dampish out here. What kind of man would do that?”

  The dogs were of no help with his question. He decided to stay outside awhile, just in case. He had no relish for what was going on inside anyway.

  In the front room Horace looked around. “Now, then, are there more questions?”

  “Can we talk money?” asked Levi Marion.

  “Only generally, unless everybody agrees to be specific.”

  “We’re all family. How much for our farm?” asked Levi Marion.

  “At straight sale, the commission is prepared to pay”—he shuffled in the left-hand pile—“eleven thousand five hundred dollars. Surveyed at 134.35 acres, more or less.”

  “Dad jim it, my deeds call for a hundred fifty-two. Mr. Wakefield, you did Silas Wright the same way. It’s like our land drawed up.”

  “Mr. Carter, we based this on an accurate, up-to-date survey. May I explain that?”

  Levi Marion waved him off. “Silas told us about the lines and angles. He’s going to get a lawyer to see about that. Now, how much is that an acre?”

  “Eighty-five dollars and sixty cents.”

  “What if we take the other?”

  Horace turned the second document in the right-hand pile toward Levi Marion. “Ten thousand three hundred fifty dollars. Seventy-seven dollars and three cents per acre.”

  “So it’s worth less with us on it.” Reddening, he turned to Valerie. “Makes a man proud, don’t it?”

  “Mr. Carter, that’s a standard real estate calculation. A life interest makes property less valuable to a potential buyer.”

  “Who in the fire else is going to buy it? I thought it was to be the government’s forever.”

  “You are right, of course.”

  Valerie raised her hand. “How do we know this ain’t a land grab? Government puts the land together, then gives it to the Vanderbilts or somebody?”

  “The law says forever, Mrs. Carter.”

  Levi Marion’s face approached the hue of a spring radish. “I can’t get over this. A man works his whole life, and his property ain’t worth hardly nothing, and if he wants to live on it awhile longer, it’s even less.” He stood and grabbed Valerie’s hand. “Honey, let’s go home, before I pop a mainspring.”

  “Levi, what about supper?”

  “We can come back. I just need to get out of here awhile.”

  “Mr. Carter, I’m sorry this upsets you,” said Horace.

  “Mr. Wakefield, it ain’t nothing personal. Me and her got to pray over this. I’d been of a mind to stay. Now I don’t know if we can afford to.”

  Horace offered the papers to Levi Marion. “No offense taken, sir. Keep these copies. I will call on you in a few days.”

  Valerie looked pointedly at her oldest sons, who began putting jackets and caps on siblings. “I thought we were going to have a good time here,” Ruth Elizabeth, six, complained.

  “Hush, Miss Priss,” said Rass. “We’ll come back for supper.”

  On the porch Levi Marion asked Thomas about the dogs. “Let’s just say you folks need to be careful going home,” said Thomas. “That was Willie McPeters them dogs was hollering about.”

  “God, that’s all we need,” said Levi Marion. “Thanks for the warning.”

  Thomas shook hands and went inside, where his mother spoke to Horace. “Mr. Wakefield,” she asked, turning her better ear to him, “best I can tell you’re offering us eighty dollars an acre. What might a farm in, say, Maggie or Dellwood cost?”

  “These values, Mrs. Carter, are based on fair market value. If you find a comparable place, the commission’s offer will certainly pay for it.”

  Manson set his coffee cup on the table. “Mr. Wakefield, do you think there’s land in Haywood for sale that’s half as fine as this?”

  Wakefield shook his head. “You have a point, Mr. Carter. The only properties I know that approach this one are not for sale. But outside Haywood County you could double your acreage. Land is cheap in Clay County, for example.”

  Manson looked to be within a hair of an apoplexy. “Mr. Wakefield, we ain’t worrying over money or property. We’re talking about right and wrong.”

  Aunt Mary opened her mouth to speak, but Manson put up his hand.

  “Mama, let me finish. He says ‘fair market value,’ but there ain’t a thing fair about this.” He pointed a bony finger at Horace. “Take it or leave it ain’t choices, Mr. Wakefield. It’s you all saying what we’re going to do. And all so some dern Florida tourist can sleep in a fancy tent….” He faced the front window, hands clenched behind his back in red and white knots.

  “Mr. Carter, my job is to make this as easy as possible.”

  Manson turned suddenly. “Nothing’s easy about this. My daddy used to say there’s only two things worth fighting over—family and land. Nothing else, God and mammon included. I guarantee you he’s having a conniption over this.” He shook his head at his mother. “And if Mama won’t ask you to leave, I’m going to get out before I do something I might be sorry about.” He left and stomped down the hall. They heard the back door slam, resonating the chimes.

  Aunt Mary, sighing, offered coffee, but there were no takers. “Mr. Wakefield, I apologize for my son’s manners. I can say I don’t much blame him, though. I’d fight it if I was younger.” She examined the backs of her hands. “We’re going to stay, Mr. Wakefield, or at least try. So you better tell about those restrictions.”

  “I can boil that down easily.”

  The clock struck the half hour. Aunt Mary pointed toward the hall. “Mr. Wakefield, did you hear that?”

  “It’s very pleasant, Mrs. Carter.”

  “Clock and creek, Mr. Wakefield, soothing music, clock and creek, the same except you don’t need to wind the creek. Creek’s outside, clock’s inside, that’s all the difference. They’ve been what you might call background music to me and Hiram’s life, our babies and sickness and sorrow, happiness and love. I don’t know if I could stand to leave. These boys have a say, of course, but I want to be buried beside Hiram. When I die, they’ll carry me across the creek and up to the cemetery, then they’ll take this old clock to its next home.”

  Horace hesitated a second. “I’m afraid that will require a Park Service Special Use Permit as well, Mrs. Carter.”

  “To carry out a clock?”

  “To be buried in the cemetery.”

  “A body has to have a government paper to be laid in the ground beside her husband?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Carter.”

  “That settles it, Thomas. I’m not moving any farther from your papa. If I did, they might change their minds and not let you bring me back.” She sat heavily, found a handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes. “Mr. Wakefield, Preacher Smith says the good Lord don’t put anything on a person she can’t bear. I have to trust that’s true. I’m going to lay down awhile. The rest of you hear about those restrictions and visit before supper.”

  As she slowly climbed the creaking stairs, Thomas grabbed Wakefield by the arm and headed toward the front porch. “Let’s make sure Manson’s okay” he said. “Mama’s right, the preacher does say that. But you know something? He don’t own no farm over here.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Lemonade Springs

  Late in 1928 Jim Hawkins was hired as interim warden for the North Carolina side of the coming national park. All Cataloochee was relieved at that news, for Jim was a local boy.

  Everyone knew Mack and Rhoda Hawkins raised decent children despite the fact that every one had started life with colic. Fred, the first, born in 1895, cost his parents nearly six months’ sleep. Troy, born two years later in June, put them through the same ordeal. This time Mack bedded in the barn, where all that might spoil rest were distant baby squalls and nearby livestock farts.

/>   They had a Christmas baby in 1901. “I’ll name her Rhoda,” said Rhoda, hair matted on her forehead after a night’s labor.

  “Now, woman, you’re a little tuckered. Let’s think about that later,” said Mack.

  “If you men can name babies after your own selves, so can I,” Rhoda decreed.

  “Well, then, can I call her Junior?”

  If she had possessed enough strength, she would have thrown the nearest object at him.

  This baby was no less prone to howl bloody murder than her brothers. Mack again slept in the barn, Fred spooning beside him for warmth, glad to be away from sister’s constant caterwauling.

  Rhoda carried her around the house, singing silly songs in a vain attempt to quiet her. “Mama’s little Ro-Ro, gonna get a yo-yo, from an old mean so-and-so, yelling out a ‘yo-ho-ho.’” Mack fondly wished for a bottle of rum. Another went “Keep me up a little later, gonna plant a big toe-mater, name it after my Ro-tater.” Mack started calling the baby Tater Bug, which stuck like rosin. Little Rhoda grew up to hate sobriquet, Christian name, and, half the time, the parents who had afflicted her with both.

  Her little brother, Jim, emerged the morning of the great Baltimore fire, which destroyed seventy blocks of that downtown—February 7, 1904. The baby slept quietly for a month, then burst into a fit of full-blown colic until the first of June. Mack and Rhoda decided to have no more offspring if they could help it.

  Jim the boy became intensely interested in both nature and music. He built cages for all manner of creatures. No good at taming possums or raccoons, he domesticated flying squirrels instead, and kept frogs, snakes, cooters, and, to the horror of both Rhodas, a bat in a box on the back porch.

  Mack put a fiddle in Jim’s hands early, and by age twelve the boy played hundreds of tunes, learned from relatives, church, and Carter Fork’s only battery-powered radio. He particularly loved “Sally Ann,” for which he named his mule, a creature that, unlike most of her kind, willingly slogged through water and mud.

  Jim’s early notoriety stemmed from his being the second person in Cataloochee to see a dead mule. Henry Sutton’s Old Sal had been killed in her stall during the cloudburst of 1916. Jim, after sawing her legs off so they could drag her out of the barn, had helped Henry bury his old friend. Jim got as much mileage from retelling that story as Tom Sawyer got after showing up for his own funeral. People pointed him out to newcomers: “That’s the boy sawed them legs off that dead mule.”

  The little school on Carter Fork stopped instruction after seven grades, so he’d boarded with relatives in Waynesville to finish high school. In 1922 he entered the Normal and Industrial School at Cullowhee. The little school boasted seven buildings, two of which were, respectively, if not mutually respectful, Baptist and Methodist churches. The school teetered on the verge of the twentieth century. When a rich man gave them a field, the chief campus sport became watching the football coach argue with the agriculture professor over whether it would become gridiron or stay sown in crops.

  All subjects interested Jim except an ironclad requirement, English grammar, which he refused to study. But he stayed in the library or under a tree, reading about anything from Einstein to eugenics. On weekends he fiddled at a dance club. Sunday evenings usually found him alone, walking in the woods, homesick. He left in 1924 without a degree, but with a job.

  A forest service recruiter had brought news of an experimental forest near the Vanderbilt estate in Buncombe County. Jim hated pushing a pencil, so he figured he could do a sight worse than work outdoors. His application landed him a job late in 1924. On a sunny December morning he strolled into the parking lot of the new facility, whistling a tune, jacket over his shoulder, looking forward to whatever one did in an experimental forest.

  He knew he was in trouble when he walked inside. “I’m Jim Hawkins,” he said. The room smelled of raw pine and linseed oil. His supervisor, wearing a brass badge engraved with the name Thomas, dangled a Camel from one corner of his mouth and looked the new man over. “Clayton Thomas, son. My friends call me Wolf. You’re a tall drink of water, ain’t you?”

  “I guess so, sir. What do you want me to do?”

  “Get used to this.” Thomas pointed to a desk, upon which a black Remington typewriter sat like an outsize toad. “You type?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Learn. We make lots of reports.”

  After a month Jim wondered if their experiments would ever result in additional tonnage sufficient to provide extra wood to produce an additional quantity of chips with which to manufacture enough paper upon which to create the triplicate reports he typed with two fingers.

  In the summer of 1925 he began boarding with Sid Crook’s family, who lived within a half mile of a Methodist church on a hill above Sardis Road. But Sundays the Crooks loaded the jalopy and drove a mile and a half beyond it to the brick Presbyterian church at Sand Hill.

  “How come you all don’t go to the Methodist church?” asked Jim.

  “You don’t better yourself in a Methodist church,” Sid said.

  The male Presbyterians wore suits and ties, and their women sported fancy dresses and hats with veils. One woman, a banker’s wife, wore a stole year-round. Whether mink, otter, or polecat no one could tell, but she loved to arrive late and sashay down the aisle, critter tail dangling from her shoulder.

  On his first Sunday with Crook, Jim donned his best overalls, a white shirt, and a pair of spiffed square-toed black shoes.

  “Is that really what you plan to wear to church?” asked Sid, straightening his necktie.

  “Sure thing,” said Jim.

  Sid put on a gabardine jacket. “You don’t own a suit?”

  “No, sir.”

  Sid shrugged. “You’ll see your mistake.”

  At the church Jim got down from the truck bed, brushed dust from his clothes, and ran a comb through his hair. Sid took him by the elbow. “Jim, you have to meet some of these people,” he said, and walked to the front of the wooden building.

  A tall seersucker-suited man with a mustache out of fashion since Teddy Roosevelt had died greeted Sid. “Mr. Crook, I believe,” he said. “How are you, sir?”

  They shook hands. “Fine, Mr. Queen. I want you to meet my new boarder, Jim Hawkins. He works with the forest at Bent Creek. Jim, this is Mr. A. R. Queen. He lives in Malvern Hills.”

  Jim put out his hand. “Mr. Queen, a pleasure,” he said, while Queen looked him over.

  “Mr. Hawkins,” Queen said, finally shaking Jim’s hand. “I thought someone told me you were a university man.” He fluffed his brightly patterned silk bow tie, no made-up affair.

  “Well, sir, no. I spent a couple of years at the state Normal.”

  “Is this what a young man wears to church there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My word,” said Queen, nodding to Jim. “That would never do in Chapel Hill. Mr. Crook, you would do well to advise your young man to dress properly,” he said, and lumbered inside.

  “Who does he think he is?” asked Jim.

  Sid, smiling, indicated Jim should lower his voice. “He’s made a very lot of money—in real estate.”

  “Sure didn’t help his manners.”

  Sid put his arm around Jim and walked him out of earshot. “Now, you must take advice if you’re going to better yourself.”

  “I can get along with anybody, Mr. Crook. And I don’t know I need bettering. In fact, I might better haul off to the Methodist church.”

  “Give it a chance, Jim. Here. This is our classroom.”

  The men’s Bible class consisted of fifteen men plus the teacher, a round-faced electrician, who droned on about Matthew’s gospel while nervously glancing outside as if someone were stalking him. Chancing on the story of the demoniac and the pigs, he spoke of demons with animation and familiarity. Jim wondered what in the world he had gotten himself into.

  After Sunday school they walked to the chapel, where Jim determined he in fact wore the only pair of overalls
. He was stubbornly proud of that until a tall, bosomy young woman strolled toward the chapel, flanked by her parents. Eighteen or nineteen, she wore no wedding band, and was, he judged, as pretty as a speckled pup. Only sexier.

  Jim eased in with the Crooks on the right side penultimate pew. The girl sat four rows forward on the left, fanning herself slowly with a landscape-print fan. “Who is she?” he whispered to Sid.

  “Nell Johnson. Her father’s Henry and her mother’s Elizabeth. Henry’s in sales with Sawyer Motors downtown. Elizabeth’s—well, she’s interesting.”

  Nell Johnson covered her short dark hair with a Clara Bow hat showcasing an escaped curl at each cheek. The nape of her neck reminded Jim of his mother’s pale pink Christmas mints. He heard nothing of Dr. Brotherton’s sermon, nor did he speak to Nell afterward, for her parents protected her like linemen do a quarterback.

  Sid lent him twenty dollars for a suit and tie, which he proudly wore to church two weeks later. Jim was tall and angular—nothing much on him was round, at least nothing that showed—and the suit softened him somehow. Nell gave him a coy smile half-hidden behind her fan. The next week her parents were distracted, so he asked if he might visit. Through sheer persistence he was invited to Sunday dinner.

  Elizabeth Johnson had not been born a Queen, but aspired to the Queens’ society, despite being a Crump from South Carolina. When Nell first brought it up, Elizabeth refused to entertain Jim Hawkins. “We don’t know anything about him, do we, dear?” she purred. “He doesn’t appear well-bred. You do remember those horrid overalls?”

  “But, Mother, he’s so dreamy. He reminds me of Dick Tracy in the comics. It’s his jaw.”

  “You shouldn’t read such lowbrow material,” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t like the idea,” said Henry Johnson to his wife later that afternoon. “I know what boys that age think. Used to be one myself.” He rustled the sports section.

  “Now, Henry, Nell’s far too refined to have an affaire de cœur with such a bumpkin. It’s a passing fancy, believe me.”