Jim watched a good twenty minutes while it found a dinner’s worth of prey, then turned as if to see whether the man were worth further concern. Wings unfolding, it pushed itself forward, like a man might heave himself from a diving board. It unleashed a wad of yellowish waste and flew parallel to the ground until it got a good purchase, lofting toward Nellie Ridge.
Doubling back a quarter mile up the creek, it was as graceful in mid-flight as it was awkward on takeoff. Dark legs tucked and folded, it soared over the house heading downstream. Reminds me of a machine, the way they unfold themselves. Like something you’d need to oil ever now and then. I swear, I hope Papa was right.
He went back to the roof and finished the chimney. The rest of the day he weather-stripped kitchen door and windows, and moved his things into the little room. A cot on the south wall. A stove for heat and cooking, a place to sit, a place to eat, a place to sleep. Outside, food was buried or in springhouse or smokehouse, and inside, canned tomatoes and beans stocked the pantry. He’d get by.
He’d mail order a coal and firewood delivery in the morning. He would have picked it up himself but had no car, and he had not yet built a wagon his horse might pull.
He slept like a man with a clear conscience. After tending to livestock and feeding chickens, he ate breakfast, then headed to the post office. The creek to his left sparkled in the sun like diamond lacework. No heron. He stopped to examine fresh deer prints and wondered if the animals were still nearby. They had come from the ridge to drink but had not returned, at least not there. They might be standing in the bend of the creek, just out of sight, watching him for signs of danger. Probably the doe and fawn Nell had seen.
A hundred yards up the road someone had thrown a soft drink bottle and a paper bag onto the roadside. The shattered bottle’s neck looked sharp enough to hobble horse or human for a long time. The bag held wax paper, pieces of light bread crust, and several hundred red ants, which Jim brushed off his hand. Biting little bastards. He protected his fingers with the bag as he painstakingly put glass shards into his saddlebag.
Wonder why folks think a car window’s something to throw trash out of. I’ve told Evans we need receptacles, but he says there’s no money. They can build that damn road, and a campground. Seems they could afford a couple of trash cans.
At Nellie, Hub Carter’s beat-up Essex was not yet in evidence. It had started life dark brown but was now faded to the color of an elderly camel. Hub’s habit was to leave Waynesville early with mail bound for Cataloochee, spend the day in the post office jawing with whoever might pass through, or napping if no one showed up, then carry outgoing mail to Waynesville. A routine broken only by Sunday.
Jim emptied his saddlebag in the canister on the porch. He looked inside. Empty shelves testified this had once been a thriving store, but Hub carried only bare necessities these days—matches, coffee, shotgun shells. A few camping tools, fishhooks, line, leader.
The mail sorting table was nearly bare. Five years ago Jim would have had to rat through at least a hundred pieces, but this morning there were only three, including one that made him flinch—a letter to him, wrapped in a pink square envelope smelling of Nell’s perfume, a purple three-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner, aligned perfectly with the envelope’s edge.
It was cold in the little building, but it was this find that made him shudder all over. Sniffing the envelope again, he put it into his jacket pocket and walked outside.
On the porch he saw no reason to think anyone but he was in Cataloochee. Sign of neither automobile nor horse save his in any direction. He smelled no wood smoke, and nothing but breeze tickled his ears. “Lonesome Valley” came to mind, which he hummed and sang on his way home. He’d know after reading Nell’s letter whether he’d have to keep walking it by himself.
Stirring up the fire, he sighed, then sat at his hermit’s table. When he slit the envelope and turned it over, two pictures slid out, his children smiling like life was perfectly happy. School pictures, except Little Elizabeth was not yet a pupil. He wondered about that for a minute, then propped the pictures against the base of the lamp. He’d give a hundred dollars to catch them running off the porch, then swing them as he had done so many times.
He took a deep breath and unfolded the letter.
Dear Jim,
I hardly know how to put words on this paper. Or rather I don’t really know what to say that will do either of us any good. I do hope you are well, and taking care of yourself. And I assure you Little Elizabeth and Henry Mack are just fine, growing like weeds. They miss their daddy.
Jim, I had hoped you would follow me, if not for my sake, for theirs. But, sadly, I suppose it was not to be. I had thought you cared enough for me to leave that place where I could never ever be happy.
It hurts that you have chosen not to come. And it hurts even more that I must ask for a divorce, so I can get on with whatever life is left me.
Jim stood and looked out the window. Divorce. The word slapped his mind, same as if she had called him a vile name. Made him out to be sinful. A thousand things flurried in his head, but chief among them were anger and astonishment, so much that at first he didn’t notice the melodrama in her last phrase.
He finished reading the letter at the window.
No, I haven’t found a beau. I want to have nothing to do with men for a while. You have numbed something inside of me. I hear music on the radio but don’t want to dance just yet. Maybe someday. But not yet.
I really have no hard feelings, Jim. At least none to make me want to hurt you, or myself. I trust you have none toward me, either. We can still be friends.
Mother and Father are well. They asked me to tell you to send money for our children’s support, and I think that is reasonable.
I would appreciate hearing from you soon, as this is tiring and vexing to us all. We need to get it behind us.
Jim, I will always remember our first days together, and hold you warmly in my heart, always.
She signed it, simply, Nell.
After rereading it a few times he consigned it to the fireplace and threw another stick of wood atop. “Last heat I’ll get out of her,” he muttered. He put on his jacket and went to the porch.
And wept. For his marriage. For his children. For all Cataloochee. For all good people who found themselves in sorrow. But mostly for his children.
He finally sat on the step and blew his nose. Through red eyes he looked toward the barn and knew she was right, she could never have been happy there. He was a dumb son of a bitch not to have realized that off the bat. The more he thought about it the more he realized that staying in the valley was right for him. If he could see Mack and Little Elizabeth fairly often, it might be all right.
That night he sat at the table with a couple of sheets of notebook paper. He meant to tell her of his feelings, but after several false starts he knew he could no more do that than crochet. He threw the sheets into the cookstove and found a postcard. On its back he wrote:
Dear Nell,
I am fine. I don’t know how to get a divorce, but I’m sure your mother can figure what to tell me to do. If Henry could pay for it, that would be good. I will send money, but I want to see my kids as often as I can. Keep the car. I loved you the best I knew how.
Jim
After he banked the fire for the night, he drank a stout toast to Cataloochee and rolled instantly into a dreamless land.
His luck did not change one way or the other over the winter. He signed separation papers drawn up by Henry Johnson’s attorney. He visited Silas Wright on one pretense or another every couple of weeks. They both needed company, although neither would admit it. Keeping warm occupied much of his time, and he looked forward to spring, when he would plant a garden. The big bed in the main part of the house stayed empty except for a family of field mice, which found it a dandy place to spend the winter.
CHAPTER 34
Directive
Superintendent Evans’s first directive about str
uctures, issued back in 1931, was vague enough for Jim to be a literalist about it. He had been enjoined “to destroy all useless shacks which might serve as fire hazards.” In the first place, burning down a fire hazard was an act fraught with irony. In Jim’s view, there were few “shacks” in Cataloochee, and “useless” was a relative term. A man might be caught in a tempest and find, even in an abandoned hog pen, shelter from the storm.
Evans had, however, been specific about Uncle Andy’s farm. Jim had to admit the place was dilapidated. Jonquils and hyacinths still graced the grounds in spring, just before apple trees rioted full white. But years ago—about the time the big chestnut died—things started downhill. Uncle Andy went to his reward during the bad winter of 1892, and as children moved away and Aunt Charlotte aged, neglect began to strangle the house. Humans had not lived there in a decade or more.
Jim set the can of coal oil on the front porch and sighed. He fingered a box of wooden matches. A house needs to be lived in, same as a person. If the spirit’s gone, the body dies. When a family leaves, a house never feels a hearth fire or hears happy stories or smells beans cooking or sees young’uns learn to walk. That means peeling paint and stove-in steps and leaky roof, and it soon dies. You might say I’m getting ready to cremate a body that’s been dead awhile.
He decided to start with an outbuilding or two. He looked all over for signs of life. The dog they had spooked was long gone, and no sign of her pups remained. A lone brown bat slept in a corner of an eave on the barn shed. Inside was a broom handle. Gosh, Uncle Andy left firewood. But he died sudden, so didn’t get to choose the leaving of it. When I was a young’un, Mama kept a picture of his corpse on the mantel next to a picture of my daddy. He was laid out in the front room, everything a little out of focus except his nose, thin and sharp as a hatchet. Gave me the creeps.
He knocked wasp nests into a basket for fishbait when he might get away to Lake Junaluska. A groundhog had burrowed beneath the back side of the barn, something Uncle Andy never would have put up with. Reckon a little warmth overhead’ll bring him out of there. Wonder what all else lives here. Ground squirrels, birds, snakes, lizards, rats. Ain’t seen a sign of a house cat.
Papa used to tell of mink, otter, and beaver, but they’re long since trapped out. As a young’un I hunted plenty of small animals, but now about all you see is possums and mice. A mole or two. Coons and skunks are uncommon. Ain’t seen a bobcat in years, unless you count that shadow on the trail a couple of weeks ago. Foxes are gone. But look here.
His boot toe scattered a fair quantity of rabbit pellets. Used to call these things smartness pills. Feed them to a kid, he’ll smarten up quick. So rabbits are coming back. Foxes will follow. And big cats. Maybe this place will change for the good, who knows. I know once you light a match, you can’t go back.
He sloshed coal oil on the corncrib and fished a match from his pocket. The little structure roared like a locomotive for a few minutes, giving off an inordinate amount of smoke, fed by corncobs and dusty leaves. Jim looked around for Uncle Andy, halfway expecting the old man to point a bony finger at him and make him stop.
Each successive structure was larger, but practice did not quiet his shaky fingers. As the smokehouse went up, he remembered helping hang meat many a fall. When we finished working up the hogs, Aunt Charlotte put out a feed, and Uncle Andy set the furniture against the walls and broke out a mandolin. I fiddled and we danced till way after midnight. We was having fun. No honky-tonk to it, just something joyful, even worshipful, thanks for another year, thanks for the meat, thanks for a gal to smile at and touch. Sure wish Nell could have seen such as that.
A dance anymore’s just for the hell of it, drinking and carrying on. Not a bit of joy. Like it was a job almost. Times have changed.
After burning this farm, he reported to Evans and hoped to wait a long while before burning others. Horace Wakefield had not yet given up on a museum in the park, and when he heard Jim had destroyed the Andy Carter house, he renewed his campaign. Everyone from Superintendent Evans to Secretary Ickes to President Roosevelt was asked to help preserve something of the mountain way of life. To no avail.
It took the wheels of government a while, but Jim finally received a new directive. Evans was this time specific to a fault. Jim was to supervise burning “all houses, barns, and any and all outbuildings associated with abandoned properties.” Jim was standing in his kitchen with the document but had to sit halfway through the reading of it. He was to begin by meeting a party of CCC enrollees at the Mack Hawkins place on Carter Fork, Cataloochee, North Carolina, on Wednesday, June 20, 1934, at nine in the morning. Evans, moreover, had contracted with a man named Thad Carter to help destroy structures. Evans trusted Jim would give Carter “any help, aid, and assistance” necessary to carry out his orders, and reminded Jim that if he couldn’t fulfill his duties, hundreds of men needed work. And the closing, instead of Evans’s normal “Very truly yours,” read “Cordially.” A handwritten note said he would come “to personally inspect” Thursday.
“That son of a bitch,” Jim muttered. Orders to burn his own homeplace. Tomorrow. And to get along with Thad Carter. “That son of a bitch.”
Jim had last seen Thad Carter in the mid 1920s, loafing at the train depot in Waynesville, swinging a long silver chain attached to pleated trousers, and hinting of easy money up north. Rumor had it that he went to Dearborn, Michigan, to work for Ford, but could not keep a job and spent time in jail for some petty crime or other. In Jim’s opinion the boy had not been worth shooting then, and likely was perfectly worthless now.
Jim had not slept well since Nell had left, nearly a year before. That night he gave up trying at about four and fixed a breakfast he could not eat. He had his mother’s habit of showing up early for anything—church, funeral, doctor’s appointment, wedding. So he rode slowly up Carter Fork a little after eight, nervous, creaky, like a man bound for his own execution.
Hitching his horse, Jim saw a man of middle height with graying, un-parted hair and a pronounced slouch emerge from the front room, lean against the column, and light a cigarette. Eyebrows like gray woolly bears. His crooked, shit-eating grin made Jim want to puke. Prepared as he was to dislike this man, Jim was nevertheless surprised at how intensely and quickly he did so.
“Hot enough for you?” Thad drawled as Jim approached.
“Maybe. You must be Thad Carter.”
He blew smoke in Jim’s direction and held out his hand. “The same. You’re Hawkins. I remember your daddy was bad to lay out of a night.”
“I believe you’re confusing him with some of your people.”
The eyebrows undulated like snakes. “Oh, a little tetchious, are we?”
“Listen, Carter. Ain’t nothing I like about this. Especially you. So let’s get something straight. I’m in charge here. You stink like a brewery. There’ll be no drinking on the job, and if that’s last night I smell, you’re too drunk to work. Show up like that again and you’re gone. Understand?”
Thad lit a fresh cigarette off the old one and grinned. “Yup, Mr. Ranger, sir.”
“Do you have tools?”
“Matches.”
“I brought rakes and shovels to the barn last night. Maybe by the time you get them the CCC will be here. Move it.”
Thad saluted, sloppily, left-handed, and headed to the barn. Jim stared at him and fingered his revolver.
The CCC supervisor left a half dozen enrollees with Jim and headed off toward Rabbit Ridge with nine more for a day of hard labor. Jim’s bunch looked at the same time cocky and relaxed, like they would have a lark this workday. Jim looked them over and figured he could do worse, but not much. The six of them plus Thad promised to be about as intelligent as three normal Haywood County men.
“All right, boys, you’re mine for eight hours,” he said. “Carter yonder and I are to make sure these structures are destroyed today. Nothing left except ashes, and all fire extinguished. Understand?”
Holding rakes and a m
attock, they nodded and shifted from foot to foot. Two carried tow sacks folded over their belts.
“Those sacks for anything in particular?” Jim asked.
“Naw, sir, they was just handy.” This boy was a Yankee of some description.
“Okay. I want every inch of this place searched. Put anything of value in these bags.”
“Is it evidence?” Thad asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Evidence somebody worth a tinker’s damn used to live in this falling-down house.”
Jim wheeled on Thad. “You know good and well I grew up here, and I’ll thank you to keep your damn opinions to yourself.” He looked at the boys and pointed. “I tended cattle and horses, milked and fed and castrated stock here. I shucked corn from that crib and slopped hogs in that sty. Played a lot of music and danced here. Mourned some kinfolks here. So if anybody has any objection to policing this place, let me know and I’ll send you the hell home.” The CCC straightened up considerably.
An hour later they assembled in the yard. Slim pickings. Castoffs like a broken stove lifter and some hairpins, half a pair of ice tongs, a zinc circle with BALL stamped in the middle. Stuff Harrogate had missed.
“Didn’t leave many valuables, did we?” asked Jim.
“Except this, sir.” The one redheaded man handed Jim a penknife.
“Where was this?”
“In the room over the kitchen, shoved under the baseboard.”
Mack had traded for the knife years ago and given it to his wife. It boasted inlaid mother-of-pearl handles, one of which had a silver shield engraved with her initials.
“Momma lost this when I was about eight. She fretted for days. Said she’d give whoever found it a Yankee dime.”
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