To be fair, I hope heaven ain’t like some say, where all a man would do is sing praises around the throne. First place, I can’t sing. Second, that would be about as captivating as watching a bunch of snails hightail it to town.
Folks say you’ll meet all them that’s gone before. Now, it’ll be fine to see Rhetta, and I’d love a reunion with our boys that died, but her old man and I got along about like hard-shells and Catholics, and I think we’d both just as soon heaven not be a dern family reunion.
Saint Paul says we’ll be changed, in the twinkling of an eye, so maybe we’ll look like stars, or comets, or vapors or something. It’d have to be like that to get me to want to spend eternity with her father. She’d of course never imagine him in hell, where I wished him many a time.
Don’t much believe in hell. There’s enough on earth without having to suffer for eternity. But sometimes I’m hopeful there is one, where they put really mean folks, so not to worry the rest of us. Of course, that assumes I get to heaven. If at the gates there’s poison oak, I’m a goner.
Silt-laden eddies coiled downstream from his right foot. Silas had stopped sweating. Stowing his handkerchief, he wiped his feet with his socks, picked up his boots, and headed for the shed. A bird cooed once long, three times short. “Damn, look at them clouds, and streaks going to the sun. Ain’t seen that in a while. And I believe I heard a rain crow.” After hanging the reaphook on the back wall, he shuffled through the yard to the back porch.
He sat in a cane-bottom chair and lit his pipe. “Reckon I’ll rest awhile,” he said, closed his eyes, and kept smoking.
Bud Harrogate had been putting a new handle on a corn sheller. He came out of the barn and squinted toward the heavens. He had shed his plaid flannel shirt, tying its sleeves around his waist, shirttail flapping in a sudden breeze. His torso was fish-belly white, his body tan only at neck and hands. Ambling to the far side of the porch, he stopped, a line of sweat dripping through dark chest hair. He grinned. “Silas, you got a snake on the porch,” he said, as flatly as if he’d observed a pea pod.
Silas grabbed his pipe and looked around. “Where?”
Harrogate pointed to a dark, slowly moving foot-and-a-half long S. “Want me to kill it?”
“Naw, that’s just a baby blacksnake. He’ll fatten up on mice and such. I’d take it kindly if he wouldn’t climb my leg, though.”
When Harrogate came closer, the reptile edged under the porch. “You’d sung a different tune if his daddy’d showed up.”
“I’ve known them big’uns to be mean,” Silas admitted. “One about chased me out of the cornfield one time. But, hell, dry weather puts a kink in my tail, too. Even snakes need water.”
Distant thunder split the afternoon silence. Silas’s bluetick beelined under the porch. Harrogate nodded. “It’s God’s judgment.”
“What do you mean, Bud? That sound?”
“No, that’s a blessing. I mean the drought. It’s God punishing the federal government.”
Silas cut his eye toward Harrogate and relit his pipe.
“You been slipping off to Holiness meetings?”
“Silas, you know better’n that. Long as church don’t bother me, I’ll leave it be, and we’ll both be happy. What I’m talking about is I remember my grandmother’s opinion of Yankees. She was one of the few in our neck of Tennessee who came out for secession. Said the weather borne her out.”
Silas knocked out his pipe on the porch rail. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“Granny said it was plain as the nose on her face, and that was saying something. Her nose looked like somebody’d hit her in the face with an anvil when she was a baby. Anyway, she’d noticed when the Yankees held sway it didn’t rain, cows didn’t give milk, crops failed. But when the Rebs had the upper hand, it rained, we had food. God’s judgment, she called it.”
“So this park business is the same thing?”
“I’d take it so.”
Silas looked to the woods across the field. “Bud, we might have us a storm. Thunder’s getting closer. Wind’s from the southwest.” He scratched the back of his shoulder. “More I think about it, you might be right about that judgment business.” The men stood and eyeballed the sky. Lightning snicked atop Mount Sterling—wind swirled dust devils in the yard.
“That flash was a mile off,” Harrogate said.
“Coming this way.”
Drops pocked the yard, creating marble-size craters.
“Must be ten degrees cooler,” said Harrogate.
“We might take to killing hogs.”
Harrogate sniggered. “It’ll be a while before that, Silas. Here it comes.”
At the first close lightning Silas moved to the opposite end of the porch. Thunder was almost instantaneous, rattling windows and causing the hound under the porch to moan. “I bet Roscoe’s shit hisself,” yelled Silas, but wind blew his words far from Harrogate. Silas watched yard dust turn to mud and skitter before windblown sheets of water. Confused songbirds flew in search of shelter. Wasps dodged under the eaves and settled like boats to a marina.
With the next crash of thunder rain began in earnest. Little red clay yard freshets became branches that made creeks, which combined in a general river after a minute or two. Silas didn’t know which was worse, drought or storm, famine or feast. Harrogate did not flinch as lightning and thunder seemed simultaneous. The storm paused for a second, as if taking a short breath. Then hail the size of spring peas bounced like marbles in the yard. The men watched in fascination, as though they had never seen a thunderstorm.
Over on Carter Fork, Willie McPeters was passed out beneath a huge hemlock when the storm hit. He had neither money nor much desire to earn any, but knew the stills thereabout and lurked in the woods until the lookout fell asleep or was caught short, or some errand called him home. Then McPeters stole what he could carry.
The afternoon found him facedown on prickly needles, small ants wandering into his ears. He had pissed his overalls sometime around dawn, and yellow jackets and butterflies alike had found his front tempting fare. The first riffs of thunder did not faze him, and the coming wind bothered only a wisp of hair on the back of his head. A solitary crow jeered from the top of the hemlock.
He likely would not have started awake even at the onset of rain, but an ant mining in his nose did the job. He sneezed, and the force of it nearly made him retch. Digging brought a fair-size black ant entangled in a wad of dried snot. He ate it slowly, looking over the ground beneath him as if he had no idea who or where he was.
He stared at the broken jar beside him with no recognition. He picked up a shard, sniffed it, licked it carefully, then threw it as far as a sitting toss would carry. Closer thunder made him look to the top of the tree and decide perhaps he needed to move with the crow, which headed for whatever shelter a bird could find.
Standing made him woozy, but he stepped into the path and looked up the hill and down, turning finally downhill and stumbling from the hemlock. A crash of thunder frightened him into a run, and he made it past the second bend in the trail before he tripped on a tree root and flipped ass over kettle. He hit on his belly with a Whuf! and for about ten seconds could not inhale. When simultaneous lightning and thunderclap restored his breathing, he crawled to his knees.
Rain began to pock the dry trail as he stood and looked up the mountain. Again he saw lightning and heard thunder at the same time, and began to run back downhill.
It was pouring by the time he tumbled onto his porch like some windblown weed. Sheets of wind-borne water washed that side of the house. When hail came, he went to the yard and held out his hands like he could prevent such phenomena. Wet to the bone to begin with, he shivered, and came into the porch’s shelter when his scalp began to bleed.
He went inside, shuffling from room to room like he was looking for some solution to this storm. He finally stopped in what had been the kitchen when there had been enough people there to prepare and eat a meal. In a cabinet all
he found were mouse turds and dead spiders. He remembered a bucket of springwater on the back porch.
He took up the dipper and was about to have a long drink when lightning hit the top of a dead chestnut uphill of the house. He dropped the gourd and opened his mouth in a silent Oh, shit as the tree split at the top. Electricity traveled its length and plowed a beeline to his house. Every hair on McPeters’s body stood as stiff as a porcupine quill as something traveled under or through or over the house. The smell of scorched hair blended with the crash of the chestnut top as it hit the room that used to be his father’s.
McPeters rubbed his bleeding head, which had considerably less hair than a minute before. He went inside and stared, transfixed at flame in his own house. The fire caught quickly, but with it came heavy rain through the opening in the roof. Soon McPeters, coughing, rubbing his crotch, and dancing like a kid needing to piss, found it too smoky to stay inside. He grabbed his rifle from over the back door. On the porch he looked around the corner at the fire, which put out as much smoke as a Shay locomotive heading upgrade.
Within fifteen minutes the fire seemed dead. His father’s bedroom was full of chestnut timber, broken joists, and mangled tin. He tried, but the tree would not move, jammed somehow into the corner where a chiffarobe used to sit. The bed had not held a mattress in years. If anyone had been lying there, he would have been impaled by a limb.
The outside wall consisted of snaggled studs over which two layers of wallboard had been nailed. The insulation was a layer of newspapers, which had disappeared in the fire along with most of the wallboard. McPeters could have thrown a cat through the wall, had he had one willing to be caught. The only unscathed piece of furniture was the washstand in the opposite corner—washstand in name only, having never held a basin or pitcher. Old Rafe used to keep a pistol and a box of shells in the drawer, but McPeters found only a mouse nest and half a black walnut hull.
When the rain slacked, he went to the yard and decided moving the tree was not something he needed to do that day. Smoke had ceased to rise from that end of the house, and the sky showed no sign of clearing. Thunder rolled in the distance as if warning folks not to follow.
He felt oddly calm. Something about flames in his own house subdued him. He needed a drink. He had a headache. His eyes were scratchy. Having neither drink nor aspirin, he decided to finish sleeping off his hangover. He lay in his bed, rifle beside him like a child’s stuffed toy.
He woke about suppertime to the stench of burning house. He kept his eyes closed for a minute, listening to fire crackle. When something fell and shook the bed, he opened them and saw a wall of smoke. He grabbed the rifle, rolled out of bed onto the floor, and wormed his way outside.
By dark there was nothing left of the ramshackle house. It had caught from an unnoticed smoldering coal, and finally collapsed onto itself, cracking and roaring like giant popcorn bursting, before the fire petered out in waning shades of orange and red.
McPeters shrugged. He still had a barn.
• • •
The storm passed over Jim Hawkins’s place quickly and did little damage. He was in the yard, offering thanks for the rain, when he saw smoke from Carter Fork. He saddled his horse and headed that way, hoping this was not a lightning-set fire he’d take days to put out, or a fire at his homeplace. He crossed where Carter Fork entered Cataloochee Creek and headed up the little road beside the branch. A mile up the road he saw that the smoke likely came from either his homeplace or the McPeters compound. He spurred the horse as his heart raced. Halfway up the hill he stopped to rest, since he could see it was McPeters, not Hawkins, whose patrimony was ablaze. He looked to the left up a trail where he knew there to be two graves. Who was buried there no one absolutely knew, except they were Confederate deserters killed by Kirk’s Yankee raiders at the end of the war—or Confederate outliers killed by Teague’s home guard—or Union soldiers killed by God knew who. At least, Jim thought, it had something to do with the end of that awful war and could have been some of his ancestors.
When he got to the McPeters place, it was too far gone for him to do anything but sit his horse and watch the pile smolder. No sign of Willie. He tied the horse and poked around. He yelled “McPeters,” but no one answered. “Wonder where he is,” Jim muttered. “Dare I hope he was home and couldn’t get out?” He decided that was an un-Christian thought, then reflected he nonetheless hoped it to be true. He did not see McPeters, who scuttled silently up the ridge behind, occasionally pausing to sight the rifle at Jim’s back and make a little firing noise with dry lips.
CHAPTER 25
Bucket of Balls
In the late spring of 1932 Mary Carter and her sons decided they’d had enough of park regulations and bought a small farm with a fair-size house and large barn close to Zeb and Mattie. Mary hadn’t moved in decades, and dreaded it like the plague.
As a girl she had picked up stakes she didn’t remember how many times. Her father had been a good man, but that had been the trouble. He’d give a man not only his cloak and coat but the rent money if the man had a sad enough story. Before they settled in Suttontown, she had lived in any number of little Tennessee settlements, Ellejoy and Prospect, Chilhowee and Nails Creek, Sandsuck and Big Pine. One particularly penurious year, the household knew the rent was due by a certain sheepish rake to her father’s gait when he walked down the lane. Women and children started packing, dogs ceased to bark and ran to their kennels, while chickens lay down and crossed their legs to be yanked up into coops. Moving required cooperation.
They didn’t own much back then—but it all seemed heavy. They carried a cookstove from place to place, and Mary would cringe every time she looked at the mass of iron and steel—a white porcelain scratched and scarred Knox Mealmaster with water jacket and warmers. Her father made a dolly from a knocked-down packing crate and four crazy wooden wheels to move it from house to wagon, but when they pushed it on rough ground, the range slid onto whoever pulled in front, so they made kindling out of the dolly and wheels alike.
They always packed the stove first, its weight over the front axle. Behind it came whatever furniture they happened to own, which varied from move to move. Kitchen table, bottom to the range, legs disassembled and stowed next to the side panels. If they had a mirror, it came next, padded with a ratty quilt, against the tabletop. Dresser base backed to the mirror. Bed rails slid underneath to the front of the wagon. Beds next, headboards, footboards, and mattresses, along with anything else flat, secured by hemp rope. They crammed baskets of potatoes and onions, chicken coops, canine enclosures, crates of blankets and quilts and clothing, jars of preserves and pickles, crocks, and tools against the furniture so it would not move. Last came chairs, facing backward, some with splint bottoms, others upholstered and patched, still more seatless, backless, or both, destined for kindling wood or repair.
They left Grindstone one afternoon just a step before the landlord. They didn’t even remove the warmers from the cookstove—in fact, a few coals remained, so the stovepipe pointing at Mary’s grandmother’s head smoked like a cannon barrel. When the mules pulled, the load made an ominous, shifty racket, but her father did not stop to rearrange. They careered down the mountain, and amidst a left-hand curve the right-hand forward wheel ran over a fair-size rock. The next thing Mary knew, the cookstove headed warmers first toward the stakes, which cracked upon impact. She jumped off the back ahead of a crate of poultry. The wagon turned over and the cookstove landed upside down on the roadside, along with the flutter and chaos of chickens and turkeys, her father having decided to diversify. They did without warmers that winter.
Hiram Carter had begun life as poor as Job’s turkey, but ended up owning at least one of everything. His wife, Mary, was also acquisitive, and when he died, even though their closets bulged, she could not bear to throw or give away even a necktie. Manson and Thomas inherited their father’s penchant for hoarding against a rainy day, and had broadened it to include such items as a canoe, for which Thomas ha
d traded a horse collar, two pocketknives, and a dollar. No matter that Cataloochee Creek was too skinny to navigate, no pond graced the valley, or that the vessel leaked. Just as Thomas could not pass up a bargain, his brother saw no sense in buying one can of coffee when he had room for three, and was delighted that the empties made convenient containers for rusty nuts, stripped-thread bolts, and bent nails.
So Aunt Mary and her sons fretted about moving. It was one thing to accumulate a life’s worth of truck when you knew the life would be lived in one place. But to move it all? And when?
Hiram—or at least Mary’s remembrance of him—had some advice. “I’d move before bad hot weather,” he told her. “It makes you crazy.”
“How in the world will we manage all this?”
“Put one foot in front of the other and don’t think, just do. It’ll go by before you know it.”
“Can’t we leave some of this?”
“Like what?”
“That rusted plow yonder.”
“Honey, my brother John made that. You can’t get shed of something like that.”
“The boys never use it. They bought a new one five or six years ago.”
“It’s still a good plow.”
“There’s that basketful of rusted pipes in the shed.”
“Honey, grandmother Carter made that basket. As for them fittings, sure to goodness when you throw them away, you’ll need them the next day. Besides, if they have another big war, they’ll be good for scrap.”
“Hiram, I declare. I can’t talk you out of nothing.”
“Now, sweetheart, next thing you know you’ll want to ditch your clock.”
“Hiram Carter, you made that for me. I’d sooner leave myself behind.”
“Glad to hear that. Now, Mary, if you want to get shed of something, what about that string you’ve been saving? It’s the size of a medicine ball. Or all them empty jars?”
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