I would leave Arkansas, never to return, but there is something I must do here first. I must remember. I must recall everything Honeyboy said, if I’m to complete what I must.
I thought “Stagger Lee” was my goal, those infernal verses, but I was mistaken. I will hear “Crowned in Scarlet” in full.
I look in the mirror and see a changed man. Blood-colored eyelids and a shaggy, haggard face. My belly is gone and I find I have no appetite or thirst for liquor anymore.
The world of flesh falls away, after all. It’s but a wincing prick, so very small. Who said that? William Bless?
I will rest now. For tomorrow I will go west to the White River and find someone who can take me to Idyll’s End.
28
Harlan Parker: Dethero and the Bargeman
We are come to Idyll’s End. I now put down this testament to our journey here before I enter the stone garden. The girl and her father watch me expectantly, trying to hide their interest. They will not have to wait much longer.
I have found the grave.
The man was named Mike Dethero and I came across him in a town in the Ozarks called Guion. He was wolfish, with long yellowed teeth and a five o’clock shadow at nine in the morning, and looked as if, given half a chance, he might run about on all fours when no one was watching. But at each town I came to, he was the only man who had ever heard of Cidersend.
“Mah wife, god rest, was from around there, weren’t she, Mollie?” he said to his daughter, a plain-faced girl in braids. It was evening and they both sat on the porch of their small cabin in front of a field of corn. It had rained in the night but now the sun was out full, the bugs whirring in the tall grass, and the whole earth steamed. Dethero and his daughter looked not affected at all by the heat.
“Up where all them apple orchards are, off Hell Creek.”
“Hell Creek?” I asked, slightly bemused at the name.
“Yep, comes pouring cold out of a cave somewhere in the holler. Cold as hell. Cidersend ain’t much farther beyond that.”
“Can you take me there?” I asked. “I’m trying to track down the origin of some folk songs—and all signs point to that town.”
Dethero looked dubious. “Harvest coming on and I’ll need to be here with the boys.”
“I can offer you money,” I said.
The man brightened. “What’re we talkin’ about here?”
“I can give you fifty dollars. Surely that’s enough for a couple of days.”
“Might take more than a couple of days, you hear?”
“Fifty is all I can afford,” I said. It was true. After my motel stay in Blytheville, I was down to seventy-five dollars, though there should be money waiting for me at the Blytheville Trust if Spivacke came through. “I could get you twenty more, possibly, afterward, if you have some patience.”
“Naw,” he said. “Ain’t no easy way up to Hell Creek except by boat on the White, and what? You said you got to take equipment up there?”
“That’s right.”
“That means a mule, and gear, up into the holler? Seventy-five and no less, and you pay for the boat.”
“How about a hundred? Fifty up front, and the rest on return when I can get it from the bank?”
Dethero thought for a long while. He a bad king, Stackerlee. “Michael!” he yelled. “You and your brothers can mind the farm for a few days while I’m off on an errand?”
A young, strapping teen came onto the porch from somewhere within the cabin. Most mountain folk I had known ogled every stranger with some intensity, but the Dethero clan seemed strangely unfazed by my appearance.
“Sure, Pa. Goin’ somewhere’s with this man here?”
“Up to where yer momma’s from,” he said.
The boy whistled and shook his head. “Ain’t no accounting some folks,” the boy said.
Dethero laughed. “Sure as hell ain’t,” he responded, as if I weren’t there. He turned back to me. “You’ll leave that motorcar over there with my boys as collateral, while we’re upriver.” He stood. “Let me pack a bag. Mollie, you fancy a trip?”
Mollie hopped up, bright and smiling, and said, “Sure I do, Pa. Sure,” and ran inside the cabin.
In a short time, they both reappeared with loose bags hung over their shoulders. Dethero carried a lever-actioned rifle. At my request, he lent me a shovel for the journey. His sons appeared and from an outlying barn brought forth a sturdy mule and coaxed it onto the flatbed of an older Ford truck—where it hawed and then promptly sat down, having performed the maneuver before, obviously—and we all drove to the river ferry, a diesel barge run by a man who stank of catfish and cigarette smoke and who agreed to take us across the river and as far upstream as he could, on his boat, the Sleepy John, for five dollars. My wallet had become remarkably flat. Within an hour, the mule, Dethero, Mollie, and the SoundScriber and its batteries and related accouterments—and of course me—were slowly motoring up the White River. It was cooler here, and Mollie lay on her stomach near the prow of the barge with her hands in the flow. They’s a black wall he can’t figure; they’s a black wall he can’t break. They’s somethin’ movin’ beyond he can’t see in the shadows, Satan’s wake.
I remarked on the temperature change and Dethero shrugged. “Spring fed, mister. Comes out of the ground barkin’ cold.” He moved to the railing. “Look over there.”
I followed him and looked where he pointed. The river was remarkably clear.
“See?” I followed the line of his finger. “See ’em move? Trout. They’re good eatin’, if you don’t mind all them bones.” He grinned, showing some gaps in his yellow teeth. “Brought some onions, a tin of lard, and my small skillet for us, if you’re of a mind.”
In all honesty, I don’t think I’d had thought of food, or alcohol, since Cummins State Farm. “That sounds just fine, Mister Dethero. Just fine,” I lied, and turned back to the river to watch the current flow and the steaming land pass.
29
Harlan Parker: Up White River, Up Hell Creek
We watched the land, the shore moving by in a stately and graceful slide. The mountains grew larger—soft, ancient mountains sanded by the rasp of wind and atmosphere passing roughly over the face of the earth for eons, wreathed in old-growth forest with very little evidence of habitation of man. Few lines of blue smoke from cabin fires unspooled toward heaven. A startled congregation of deer dashed into the brush. A line of turkey glided across the river, wind loud over their coarse wings. Dethero laughed at my surprise that turkeys could fly, at least for short distances. A bear looked for all the world like a large dog, lurking on the shore. Rabbits, doves, quail. Turtles, snakes. The air swarmed with mayflies and mosquitoes and dragonflies. Animated particles strewn in the refulgent light of afternoon, gleaming on rock smoothed by centuries of river flow the king gots his kingdom, he goes through every bit, from the fountains of the palace to the edges of the pit the sweet scents of honeysuckle and hay mixed with diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke. It was evening by the time the barge began shuddering and the bargeman brought us to the far shore, many miles upstream from where we began. We disembarked and, since night was drawing on, made camp at the shore of the river, on the rocky bed. Mollie gathered firewood and Dethero arranged for the Sleepy John to return here in three days’ time to recover us, though the bargeman decided not to leave that evening for fear of running aground and remained with us there until first light. I used the gas-operated genny to charge the Edison batteries and the captain was kind enough to allow me to let it remain on the boat until he was to reclaim us—I was there to collect only one song and a single charge should be ample for that.
I shared some of the tinned food I had, and we had a meal by the fire Mollie built and slept on the barge’s deck, beneath the stars.
In the morning, I double-checked the fastenings on the wooden lid protecting the tone and cutting arms of the SoundScriber, and then Dethero deftly balanced and attached the device and its batteries and acetates and relat
ed gear on the mule, which hawed and grumbled but soon grew accustomed to the load. It was packed ingeniously, I must admit, and I found myself considering the luck I had running across Dethero, who, in addition to knowing the location of Cidersend—the village and not its graveyard—also had the rough-hewn skills and knowledgeable hands to bring me there.
We set out, following the river up and up, on game trails and old camp roads cut lifetimes before by settlers and the Quapaw Indians before them, before Hernando de Soto came and western man, with blood and whiskey and gunpowder and steel, to take away the land and claim ownership. I leaned heavily on the shovel as though it were an oversized walking stick. I was tired from my sickness, yes, from the constant hooch and cigarettes these many years; from the war; from the weariness of living orphaned so young by murder; from the heat. From loneliness. I could not keep up with Dethero and his daughter, and lagged behind, much to his dismay and irritation.
The mule—named Bess after Mollie’s least-favorite aunt—hawed and complained when it grew tired and insisted on rest, and there was no amount of coercion or cajoling that would get it to move when it was of a mind for a break. I found my disposition often matched the beast of burden’s exactly, and Bess would begin her lamentations the moment I felt I could go no farther without rest.
By the end of the first afternoon, as the shadows grew long, we made an early camp on the White River’s banks and Mollie retreated into the old growth with a slingshot to hunt squirrels while I stripped nude and fell into the river to wash the sweat and lingering stink of sickness from me. The water felt luxuriously icy. The moss-slick stones shifted under my feet, treacherous. The current took me for a bit, drawing me under. I dreamed then, waking, of my mother and the man Insull, his hands on her shoulders, at her throat. I was for a moment three people: a man lost in a river; my mother, being drowned; a man—that man—holding her beneath the surface. A silly song from when I was a child came to me, as the White River washed me downstream.
I am you and you are me,
Though we always disagree.
You are I and I am three.
Alarmed, I thrashed in the frigid water, flailing for shore. I pulled myself onto the bank downriver and had to march back to the camp as naked as when I came into the world, moisture drying on my skin. As I walked back, in the shadows of the trees, I heard a rustling and stopped, not knowing whether to cover my prick and balls with my hands for propriety’s sake or raise my hands into fists to defend myself.
“Mollie?” I called. “Is that you?”
The rustling sounded again and from the underbrush, a single black figure emerged, spread its wings, and landed on a small tree near the riverbank. A raven, black as coal, blade-beaked. A small green snake twisted and writhed in its obsidian rostrum.
The bird considered me for a moment, then swallowed the serpent in a single large gulp. It cocked its head, blinked its shiny black eyes, and then cried, launching itself into the air, leaving me puzzled as to what its cry sounded like—flee? Flee?
At the camp, I dressed and threw myself down on the ground in an exhausted stupor until Dethero awoke me in the dark. “Got some squirrel and trout left, fried up nice with some onions. Come to the fire if you want some, mister,” he said, and moved away. But inside me, I could find no hunger, nor thirst. I joined him anyway and when he placed the cooling skillet in front of me, I went through the mechanical motions of ingestion: Picking morsels, lifting to my mouth, the tentative feel of lip and tongue, mastication. Swallow. I could not say now what I ate or how it tasted. There were many bones. When Dethero brought forth a flask with shine, and I drank, it did not burn and I could not say if I became drunk. Everything is veiled. Everything is old and worn away. I felt ancient in my bones and flesh.
“Should come to Cidersend in the afternoon,” Dethero said. “Ain’t but a mile to the mouth of Hell Creek, where it empties into the White. Then a hike up the holler, till we pass what folks in these parts call ‘Needle’s Eye.’”
“And then,” I said.
“And then you’ll be able to do whatever you came to do. We’ll get to Cidersend, and the old black orchards there.”
“Black?”
“Some disease got into the trees there, black spots on the apples. They were supposed to burn the orchards to keep the disease from spreading, but it’s said they couldn’t bring themselves to. It was a garden once, and beautiful.” He sighed and stirred the fire with a stick. “So they left it all and moved on to Mountain View. Down to Guion. Over to Batesville. Calico Rock. All over the place. It was just a few families at a farmstead, after all.”
“The Hines family?”
“Yep, them Hines. Showboats, one and all. And the Loves. The Saylors. Evensons and Briers. All gone.” He looked lost, the yellow light of the fire shifting in his eyes. “My Olive was a Saylor. I miss her dear.” Mollie reached out a hand and grasped his and squeezed. Such a simple gesture, and immediately I felt an interloper at a family moment. “You ain’t looking so well, mister. You might want to rest.”
I fell back into a restless sleep, with dreams of Insull and my mother. Château-Thierry and the Somme, the chatter of gunfire and burning horses. West Africa and Austria and French New Guinea, new spices and cinnamon and scented oils upon the air. All my experience collapsing on itself, my own personal acetate caught in an endless loop.
—he ask, “what behind this wall here? ain’t I king of hell?” and the devils all around him answer, “you is, but well well well . . .” and stack don’t like they answer, so he shoots them as they plea. he a bad man, stackolee—
I recall the morning. The light rising in the east, sky lightening over the rim of earth. The White River moving with only a whisper of falling glass, of gurgling, of the endless churn of water, blue-white until it reaches the Arkansas River, where the mud seeps in.
We rose. Dethero was not much for talking and he did not restoke the fire. I took up my satchel—containing only a few things, this field journal being one of them—and we began the hike.
Finally we came to the black orchard, where the trees still grew. Hell Creek was left behind. The orchard trees twisted in misery, blackened and discolored with the disease that choked the life from their roots and darkened their leaves but could not kill them. A smell rose from the ground, thick and sweet and cloying, and with each step the dark, mulched earth released fruiting spores, rising upward. Black, molded husks of farmhouses, barns, outbuildings—a grain dryer, a ramshackle silo, tin sides gone to rust and ruin and standing like lost sentinels at the edges of the trees.
“This is where she was from, Mollie,” Dethero said. “It was falling down before she left and came to us.”
Mollie walked with a tight expression on her young face. Distaste and some dread, I think.
“There’s the stone garden, Mister Parker,” Mollie said, gesturing to the west.
The apple trees, for all their spots and litterfall, stood in military rows, dashing away. As I walked among them, at times they would fall in diagonals to my eyeline, so that at any forward step, the world would take on the illusion of divine order, as if everything had shifted and arranged itself exactly so, specifically for my arrival. Then with the next step, it would disarrange itself. Tension and release. Crescendo to diminuendo.
The columns of trees stopped before me and there was a cast-iron gate beyond, crowded with growth, saplings and young trees mostly, springing among the graves. Wrought in simple ironwork were the names of the families to each side on the supports and an arch over the entrance to the graveyard reading idyll’s end.
Cidersend. Idyll’s End.
I walked among the graves in the slanting late-afternoon sunshine, a million particles strewn on beams of light, across the dappled and overgrown brushwood. If it had ever been a well-tended cemetery, that had been years—decades—before. Now the forest had reclaimed the land, and only the lichen and moss-covered gravestones and the iron gate were any reminder that this was a place where a town
ship had buried its dead.
william ogden love, aged sixty-three years. i raise him up on angel wings and bring him unto me. james and lorena evenson—in death, bound in love. sully saylor, a good father and husband.
The names began to deteriorate, becoming illegible without some closer examination. I ignored them.
There was the figure I had come for. Fifteen feet tall, beautifully hewn from granite, the cloaked angel stood on a pedestal, its wings furled but heavy behind it and its face hidden within the shroud of a cloak. It was carved with such delicacy the softness of the fabric seemed real. In one hand the angel held a sword with lichen for blood spatter down the blade, and the other hand pointed at the earth before it with one bony index finger. There was a sorrow hanging around it, something about the shoulders, the cant of head.
“So what now, mister?” Mollie asked.
“I wait until after midnight, and ask the questions I need to ask,” I said.
“Ask who?” Dethero said. “Midnight in the graveyard? I don’t want no part of this, mister.” The man began shaking his head. “Me and Mollie will just wait out in the orchard for you.”
“I’ve paid you good money. I require you to bring the SoundScriber here, help me to set it up, and then you may do whatever you wish.”
Dethero looked from me to his daughter. She shrugged. She seemed unfazed by it all—me, Idyll’s End, the ruins of her mother’s hamlet—all of it was just another bit of information, it seemed, she would file away.
I sat before the angel, looking up at her, and withdrew from my bag the bottle of wine, the wedge of cheese, and the loaf of bread I had purchased in Blytheville. Both the cheese and the bread had suffered during the journey and were misshapen lumps, with spots of blue-green mold blooming on them, but I ate most of them anyway. My spectral distance from food and taste was gone and I could taste the totality of the food. Each bite of bread held the grit and dirt of the wheat that grew it, the salt of the sweat of the baker, the imperceptible exhalations of every man, woman, and child who came near it. The cheese held the lowing of the heifer that gave the milk, the bacteria that spoiled the milk in a contained burn. The decay of all things. The taste of the mold curled and blossomed upon my tongue. The devil crept in.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 29