Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  Sam threw his arms around Charlie’s neck, his cheeks puffed with gum, and just held him like that, smelling the morning, Charlie’s soap, the river, his birthday.

  Then Charlie led him to the truck and gave him one more present, his first baseball glove, a Wilson, stiff and taut, a boy’s glove, too big now, something to grow into. Charlie told him they’d put Wesson oil in the glove that night, oil it down, and in time it would grow supple, and grow to fit exactly as his hand grew, smooth and supple as a second skin. Sam was in heaven. He had died and gone to heaven.

  “Now we dig, son,” said Charlie, gently taking the boy’s arms from around his neck. “Get you a shovel out of the truck.” He’d started to talk like a country man, by then.

  Sam helped for half an hour, then wandered by the river with his new glove, tossing a ball and letting it bounce off the tight new surface of the glove that smelled so sweet to him, while Charlie dug the pit for another three hours, until the hole was three feet wide and five feet deep, like a child’s grave.

  Once the pit was dug, they filled it with kindling and logs and set it on fire, the blaze so hot you couldn’t get within five feet of it, so hot that any log thrown on it hissed like a snake, popped like summer fireworks, and then burst into flames immediately. The fire started, fresh wood stacked over Charlie’s head, they went back to the butcher shop to get the pigs, which had been soaking in brine in the meat locker. Charlie knew nothing about what he was doing, not really, but old man Tolley, who had sold him the three week-old piglets, who had been fattening them up for Charlie from the day they were born, had taught him carefully, step by step, about the brining, the pit, the basting with melted butter and cider, how long, how hot, how high. The old man had been doing it since he was a boy, and his father before him, so being taught how to roast a pig by old man Tolley was like being taught how to paint by da Vinci.

  “Are they babies?” asked Sam, staring down at the two grayish pink carcasses floating in tubs.

  “Well, they’re not getting any older, not any more,” said Will, “but that is some of the finest pig you will ever eat in your life.”

  “I wish they weren’t babies.”

  “If you’re going to eat it, son, you ought to know where it comes from. You’re six now. You have to pay attention. It shows respect. Always remember that. You don’t get a full belly out of nowhere.

  “Can’t live on air,” said Charlie.

  “I don’t need food,” said Sam.

  “Everybody needs food.”

  “I don’t. I’ve got Bazooka!” shouted Sam, spilling the pieces out of his pocket onto the floor.

  “Where’d you get that, boy?” asked Will, gathering them up and holding out his hands.

  “The tree. The magic tree.”

  “I did it, Will. I gave them to the boy.”

  “Wish you hadn’t done that, Charlie. Alma won’t like it, you know.”

  “Sam?” Charlie knelt on the floor in front of the boy. “Whenever we pick a piece off the tree, you’ll ask your mother first, right?”

  “Well. Okay.”

  “Just think. That way, it’ll last longer. It’ll last forever, your whole life.”

  “And how long will that be?”

  “At least a hundred years. One hundred and ninety-seven years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “It’s a very very long time.”

  “Do some pigs live that long?”

  “No, Sam. Just boys. Just some boys.”

  “Will you? Will Daddy?”

  “I have every hope.”

  While they talked, the sky outside had turned from white to black, the air had thickened, and there was a sudden crack and a flash and the sky opened up and poured rain, so thick you couldn’t see across the street and Will had to turn on the lights in the shop, at midday, it was that dark.

  It lasted five minutes, and when it was over, it was fifteen degrees cooler, and the sky was the color of a baby’s eyes. A perfect Virginia August day. And a day like that, well, you’d be blessed to see it, just once in your life.

  The storm, in its five minutes, created both destruction and perfection. Limbs and lines were down. Susie Hostetter, the telephone operator, packed up and went home for the day.

  The storm didn’t put out the fire in Charlie’s pit, although there was volcanic steam rising from it by the time he got back there, and the pigs were on the spit by one o’clock, turned by him by hand every fifteen minutes with a makeshift iron crank made by the blacksmith in Lexington. The fat from the slowly turning carcasses dripped into the fire, explosions of flame shooting up around the flesh. Charlie kept buckets of water from the river handy, to splash on the coals, so the skin wouldn’t burn before the meat cooked. He brushed them every twenty minute with a paintbrush dipped in melted fat and cider.

  People started coming in around two. He’d invited more than a hundred, even some of the town’s black people, knowing they wouldn’t come, and they didn’t. They knew, just as they knew that Charlie’s invitation was genuine and heartfelt and gracious, that they wouldn’t be in the right place if they were in that field on that afternoon. The Reverend Lewis Shadwell considered going, even got dressed to go, with a present for Sam wrapped and sitting on his bureau, but he wavered at the last minute, then hung his clothes carefully back in his closet and lay down in his undershirt and took a nap in the fresh afternoon air. By the time he woke up, what happened out by the river had already happened.

  There was a sense of lightness, after the storm, a brightness in the air and in people’s hearts. There was music in the air from a band Charlie had hired all the way from Fincastle, a bluegrass band that played all the songs the people of the town had grown up on but didn’t listen to much anymore, songs like “The Knoxville Girl,” with its sad tale of murder and grieving. “She fell down on her bended knees, for mercy she did cry, ‘Oh, Willie dear, don’t kill me here, I’m unprepared to die.’ ” The singer was an old man. He sang the songs his grandfather had taught him, and played the fiddle without ever changing his expression or looking up, while two other men played banjo and guitar, their faces as flat and sharp as their instruments.

  People heard the songs, the music of the mountains and hollows they came down from, first love and murder and hard dirt and the hard, hard life of sorrow, heard the old man, and heard the flat country voices of their own grandmothers and grandfathers, the songs they had heard on the wide wooden porches of their childhoods.

  And then Sylvan came, Sylvan and Boaty, stepping out of their vulgar fancy car, Sylvan wearing the green dress from the movie. She’d tried to get Claudie to come. She figured Claudie was the only black person brave and careless enough to go, but even Claudie had begged off, saying she couldn’t leave Evelyn Hope alone all afternoon. Instead, Claudie left Evelyn Hope after all and went out and sat on the other side of the river, where they could all see her, making drawings of the goings on, and of Sylvan in particular.

  Sylvan was luminous in the full bloom of her twenty years, as bright and fluid as the air. She greeted Charlie delicately, without either distance or familiarity, and she and Boaty moved into the crowd as though she and Charlie had never lain skin on skin and body to body, in full view of a boy who was not yet six years old.

  There were presents for Sam, of course, everybody had bought some little thing, and he was drunk with the treasure. Whistles and yo-yos, and bullwhips and cap pistols, everybody brought what they thought he would like, because they genuinely liked and admired Will, and particularly Alma. And, too, they hoped their generosity to Sam might bring better grades to their own struggling youngsters, or even a leaner pound of hamburger. Alma wrote down every present in a little ruled book, and wondered how long it would take for Sam to thank everybody personally with a card.

  Charlie saw Claudie across the river, everybody did. He walked down to the edge of the stream and waved and called and motioned for her to come over, but she didn’t even acknowledge his greeting. Sh
e didn’t even look up from her drawing when Sylvan broke away and called her name, twirling in the green dress so it rose up and everybody could see the tartan lining.

  People did not know what to make of that dress. It was so exotic, so far beyond the realm of anything the women themselves could purchase or even sew. It was like looking at some wild African animal, or a penguin from the South Pole. They didn’t see its prettiness, or how it brought the life into Sylvan’s rich body; they looked on it as though she were trying to trick them into taking her for something other than she was, a hillbilly from some desolate valley most of them had never even seen. They were used to her shenanigans, to her putting on airs, but somehow this green dress in this field, in those shoes, on this afternoon, it was just too much.

  Who did she think she was, and who, in fact, was she? And how long would it be before Boaty found out? The easiest way to find out something secret is to ask somebody who doesn’t like whoever the secret is about, and a lot of people didn’t like Sylvan Glass, at least they didn’t like her at that minute. Things would change, though, when what happened happened, when she did what she did, because she did the first part, the brave part, not the miracle, but the first part, the right thing. For a brief time, she would mean a great deal to them, and they would look at her with a kind of graciousness, but only for a short time, only until she did what she did after that.

  And what happened was this: About three o’clock, when Charlie and Will were about to take the pigs off the spit and lay them out to rest on slabs of marble borrowed from Coffey’s place that cut gravestones, Sam saw a piece of gum high up on the tree he just had to have. People weren’t paying attention to him any more, the presents were opened and their stomachs were empty. They were watching the pig on the spit, and listening to the old man sing in a high falsetto, “It was on a moonlight night, stars shining bright, whispers on high, love said good-bye . . .”

  It was a mistake a man who was not a father would make, to hang so much bubblegum so high up on the tree. There were a lot of children there, and the lower branches had been pretty much stripped bare. Talking, hungry, nobody saw Sam crawling out on the limb, over the river, but they heard the sharp shiver and split of the willow branch breaking, dry now in the late summer, and, even if they didn’t see him fall, they saw the splash, and heard the thud as the broken branch hit Sam on the head as he hit the water, and they saw the plume of blood where the boy went down. So quickly such tragedy can happen. While you’re looking away. Just a glance and then something, something wrong out of the corner of your eye. The dog and the car. The blade and your finger. In a breath. A blink.

  They all ran, even though they hadn’t seen the boy fall, only heard the snap of the branch. Some of the women screamed. The music abruptly stopped. Charlie ran, and he could run the fastest, but Sylvan was already there, in the water and gone under, leaving Charlie helpless, darting in the shallows, trying to spot the boy, uselessly calling his name, as everybody was doing. The current here was strong, everybody knew it, and the boy was already moving downstream in the rushing current, banged against rocks, dragged to the bottom.

  No, it was Sylvan who dove in, this twenty-year-old girl in a green silk movie costume with a tartan lining, her body a blade into the water. A quick green slash in the tossing, tumbling blue-green water, and then they both were gone.

  She couldn’t see through the green water, the light hazy, filtered, shadowed by leaf and cloud above. She followed the current, let herself be carried on it, pushing through it, knowing that the boy had been carried the same way. There was only one direction to go, and the river would decide where they would end up. She pulled through the water in front of her, her arms in butterfly sweeps, reaching for the tail of a shirt, a shoe, a hand trailing behind.

  One minute. Two minutes. She darted to the surface for air and plunged back in, to find him right below her, caught on the spring of an old mattress, limp, lifeless. She pulled; he wouldn’t come loose. She pulled again, then turned herself around in the water, and put her foot against the mattress, quick green short snakes slithering out and up around her. Grabbing his shoulders and pushing herself off, freeing him, one sneaker left behind, its laces floating in the water, ghostly streamers.

  The mud was soft at the bank, like the icing on a cake. Her feet couldn’t find purchase. She could not get a foot free, couldn’t get his head above the water. He seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Then Charlie got to them, pulled at her billowing hair, reeled her in, the mud sucking the shoes from her feet, and the boy, the boy in her arms, now in Charlie’s, now lifted up and out and into other hands, Raidy Tate, Charlie Howard, then his father, who laid him on the ground, as Doctor Brush kneeled over him and then they all fell silent while the doctor felt, and listened and turned the boy over and thumped, and back again and pushed, and put his head to the boy’s chest and listened and finally looked up at Will and Alma and almost imperceptibly shook his head. But that said all there was to be said. Dead.

  Alma howled and Will fell to his knees sobbing, his only child, the light of his life, now dead, rough hands pushing the hair back from Sam’s face, as though the sun could warm the boy back to life, and Alma screaming, falling into the arms of keening women, her arms reaching out for the body her legs could not carry her to, fighting for freedom from the women who locked her into her instant, her eternal grief.

  Charlie’s face was wet with tears and sweat. Guilt. This was what had come from his foolish birthday trick for Sam—this tiny body, dead, one shoe off, one sock, dead. Sylvan turned away, grateful for the first time for the arms of her fat husband, his heavy shoulder, so that she did not see what happened next, did not see as Charlie pushed Will back and stood above the boy and then fell to his knees, straddling the small body, picking it up and grasping it to his chest, then gently lowering him again, the imprint of the boy’s wet body dark and damp on his shirt.

  Sylvan didn’t see as Charlie leaned forward and whispered something in the boy’s ear, something that took a while and nobody heard what it was, although people spent a lot of time afterward guessing what it might have been, a prayer, a poem, an apology, a verse from the Bible.

  Sylvan didn’t see as Charlie then put his face to the boy’s and kissed him for a long time. Mouth to mouth, he held his lips against the boy’s for a full thirty seconds, the women howling, Will kneeling, head bowed, his breath heavy and wet against his chest, his streaming eyes closed.

  She didn’t see as the boy’s eyes opened, as water shot from his mouth, but she heard what everybody heard, the boy’s small voice, a mixture of alarm and wonder, as he said the first word of his new life.

  “Beebo?” he said, looking up at Charlie, and then, turning away, “Mama? Mama?” And he was alive again, the pink of his blood pushing the blue from his skin, from the tips of his fingers. He was alive where he had been dead, and the crowd parted as the women released Alma and she rushed forward as Charlie stood and ran into the shadows of the willow, pulling the pieces of bubblegum from the branches and throwing them into the water. The crowd stood silent, the boy alive, the men and women knowing that whatever happened after this, it would forever and always be after what they had witnessed on this day. This thing that nobody knew the name of, but some people thought and were afraid, ever, to say what it was, but would just say, and still do, that they were there, that they saw it, the whisper and the kiss and the coming back to life—and then just pausing in the telling to shake their heads, dumb with the wonder of it.

  Everything in this town, in this county, in history and in the lives of those people who were there and those that weren’t, everything was before that kiss—the music, the Knoxville Girl, the graceful, awkward dancing to the sad laments, the heat of the morning and the thunderclap of noon, the pig burned and forgotten, their hungers that were suddenly gone—these things were before, unremembered, their hearts now full, and everything else was after.

  And after, for a short space of time, whatever happened and wh
erever he went, Charlie Beale walked on water in their eyes, and he could do no wrong.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EVERYBODY, MAN, WOMAN, and child in Brownsburg, loved Charlie Beale. Everyone, except one man. From that minute, Boaty Glass hated him. He had looked the other way when Charlie Beale started buying up land, even swallowed his pride when he heard talk that Charlie had surpassed him in terms of acreage held, and the quality of that acreage. He had even turned a deaf ear to the rumors flying around about what Charlie Beale was doing with his wife, even though he knew in his heart that all rumors are eventually true. He didn’t care much for his wife and her full body and her fancy ways. Didn’t care much at all, as long as she kept on being his wife.

  He had wanted a glorious hood ornament for the car of his life. Sparkling, finely made, isolated and virtuous. He had wanted to be an object of envy. But, most of all, he had wanted to be loved, because, with a magnificent wife, he would be seen as someone who was himself adored. He had put on a wedding ring because then, if he walked the streets of Brownsburg or Timbuktu, any stranger passing could glance at his hand and know that he was loved.

  But the idea that Charlie was now held in such exalted regard, the regard he had longed for since the moment his mother died, scratched at his throat as though he had swallowed barbed wire. When Boaty got riled, he heard a constant, high-pitched whine in his ear, and felt the bitter tides of the bile churning in his stomach. It took Boaty a long time to get mad, but when he did, he stayed mad and waited patiently, hands folded across his expansive stomach, for his revenge.

  Even Sylvan didn’t seem like part of his holdings any more, ever since she pulled that boy from the water. She no longer belonged to him in the way she had. People who normally nodded politely or avoided her altogether, looking on her only as an extension of his property, began to stop her on the street, to pay her compliments on those foolish getups, those things she dreamed up with that crazy woman. They treated her as though she were some kind of a great lady, instead of the back-hollow trash she was born and would always be.