by Jack Riggs
“Who?” he asks.
“John Boyd. Why would he lie about who owns the land?”
“I don't know that he has, Cassie.”
“Momma said the other night that there was a deed, that my father brought it home to show her.”
“The original?”
“No, a copy, I believe.”
“If it was a copy” the man says, “it would have to have all signatures and the county seal to be valid.” He is impatient with the information now, the clock showing minutes past closing.
“I think it did,” I say looking at Peck, his face doubting the possibility. “I think she said it was signed, maybe it was the original.”
“Cassie, look,” Peck says, “your mother never dealt with any of this stuff. Parker did it all for her and then, I guess John Boyd's been doing it ever since Parker died. I don't see how you're going to get anything more than this.”
“The deacons deeded the land, Peck. I remember that. I remember Momma talking about it after he died.”
“Well they didn't, if John Boyd owned the land. Maybe Parker misunderstood what John Boyd and the deacons did.”
“No,” I say, my voice rising this time. “That can't be true. That's not it at all.”
“All right then,” Peck says. He looks to the clerk, smiles, closes the book in front of me. “I think we've done all we can here, right?”
The man smiles in agreement with Peck. It pisses me off that he would just close the book and try to take over like this. “Find the deed,” the man says. “We reopen for business on Monday, eight A.M. sharp.”
“I will,” I say, pushing the book hard across the table. It slides into the clerks chest, catching him off guard, the shock on his face showing his disapproval. I'm out the door, climbing the stairs two at a time while Peck tries to catch up.
“Hey” he says, “wait up.”
We're outside when I swing around, stopping him with a hand on his chest. People leaving the courthouse are watching us, but I don't care. “If you can't help, don't talk,” I say.
“What did I do?” he asks, arms spread out like he might just try and fly.
“Nothing, Peck. You didn't do a thing.”
“Then why are you all pissed off at me?”
“Because, Peck, you didn't do anything that helped. You made that little shit look like he knew what he was talking about.”
“He did, Cassie. He was right. You have to have a deed.”
“I have a deed,” I say.
“Well, where is it?”
“I don't know,” I scream.
“Then you don't have one, Cassie.”
“Not yet,” I say, and then I stomp back toward the car.
Peck trails behind, yelling at me like it's my fault he's such an asshole. “Okay not yet. But don't get all bent out of shape at me because of this. It's not me who wanted to come up here in the first place.”
I turn and face him again, try to measure my words. “Then next time, don't close the book in my face.”
“The courthouse was closing down,” he says. “You ran out of time.”
“I was inside, Peck. They can't lock the door if I'm still inside.” I'm seething over this when I open the car door, the driver's side car door.
“You driving then, I guess?”
“If you think I can, Peck.”
“Jesus, Cassie.” He tosses the keys into my hands.
We get into the car, both doors slamming shut, rattling windows. There is no more talk as we drive down the hill and onto Main, then back out Highway 107. I want to say I'm sorry, but Peck is looking out the window, his whole body turned away from me.
There are more questions about the deed I want to talk over with him, but he has checked out, given up on me, probably on us by now. I don't blame him. I've given Peck good enough cause to never speak to me again. None of this is easy. I drive on, pushing up the mountain, wondering why it has to be so hard between us, hoping I won't get sick again, hoping I won't have to stop and finally tell Peck that I am pregnant.
BY THE TIME we are back in Cashiers, the wind has cleared the air, and I have turned onto Highway 64, Peck sitting up in his seat now as we climb toward Highlands. It feels like the first time we drove along these very roads trying to decide what we were going to do—two lost teenagers. I don't bring this up. I'm afraid it might confirm the suspicions I know he has about me, so I point out the window to our left, the looming cliffs of Whiteside rising through the trees. “Maybe we should take a hike,” I say. But Peck remains silent. He's hurt by the way I behaved in Sylva. “You feel like a hike?” I ask, a question this time. He looks out at Whiteside flickering at us through leafed branches, his hair mussed up by the flurry of a strong breeze pushing through the car from windows rolled down.
“You're wearing flip- flops,” he says. “You can't hike in flip- flops.”
I run into slow traffic moving along Highway 64, a flatbed truck carrying large earthmoving equipment up toward Highlands. The going is tedious, stopping and starting, a line of cars snaking behind the truck, inching along. “We have to walk the old road, anyway,” I say. “The trail's been gone since they tore up Wildcat Cliffs.”
When I was a child, my father held Easter Sunrise Service on Whiteside. He would invite his congregation to meet on top of the mountain, to hike in from the campground while he took the old Kelsey Trail alone from Highlands. It was his way to get right with God, I think, just like his daily prayers at the base of the mountain.
The Easter that I was nine, he let me go with him, Momma's prodding getting the best of his solemn nature for once. At first, I don't think he minded the idea, but the five- mile trail was cold and icy, extremely long for a young girl. That early April morning, I struggled to keep up, his pace brisk and direct. My father could walk the trail in the dark because he knew it so well. I did not, and when the slope began to rise, when I had to navigate rocks and steep inclines, I slowed him down. He became impatient as if I was somehow interfering with God.
When we passed Highland Falls, I wanted to go down to it, to feel the spray of water dampening the air. The trail led us through primeval forest, trees that seemed to hold up the sky, red maples and tulip, yellow birch. Hemlocks were giants among the rest, so big around that together my father and I could not have held hands and circled the tree with our arms, even if he'd been willing to try. We passed landmarks that my father would call out, not to let me know where we were, but to tell himself how much farther he had to go. The falls, Wildcat Cliffs, Garnet Rock meant nothing to me, but with each point made, he would increase his pace and put more distance between us. The trail ended at an old campground, a quarter mile from the summit. There was light in the sky by the time we arrived.
We joined a small group from the church that had ridden in wagons to the campgrounds. They were ready to hike the final distance, but my father was visibly upset that we were late, that others had gone on ahead and were already on top. When the service was over, he asked Momma to take me down with her; he would walk back to Highlands alone for the car. I took this as a rebuke, that I had somehow failed him at his most important moment, the high mark of the church calendar, the resurrection.
From that moment on, his disapproval extended to every aspect of my life, and I began to feel like a second- class citizen. I remember thinking then how I would hate to be my mother and have to live with this man for the rest of my life.
It was only a few months later in 1946 that logging began around Whiteside and the trail we had followed was gone forever. My father joined with others in trying to stop the destruction of the old- growth forest. The logging broke the quiet, filled the Cul-lasaja River with silt, and browned Mirror Lake for what seemed like forever at the time. It angered him to see God's good earth destroyed, tractor skid trails and logging roads scarring the very land he had walked while carrying on his lifelong conversations with God.
When the logging was exhausted, the giant hemlocks and the backside trail forever gone, my father refuse
d to go to the summit of Whiteside again. Even after a road was cut through to bring tourists to the top, a road that would have made the service more agreeable to his congregation, he never went back. He remained faithful to his walks to the southern base of Whiteside, but once the logging began, he refused to go on top and have to look down at the mutilation that was taking place along the northern slope.
Traffic gets the better of Peck and he agrees to a hike when we see the turnoff to Whiteside Mountain. I park the car in a small lot that is left over from the days of the tourist trade. It is rutted and muddied from the rain. “The road will be better,” I say, looking at my feet, the rubber flip- flops already covered in muck. Peck is in boots. Except when he surfs, he is always in boots. He comes around to my side of the car. Peck Johnson, always the gentleman, lifts me up, carries me to the remnants of the old road, the ground there no better than the parking lot.
“This isn't going to work,” he says.
“Sure it will,” I say. I have him put me down along the edge where wild grass and moss cling to the ground. I am able to walk along this sedge, the north slope drop- off pitching steeply as we ascend. Up here the air is crisp with the wind blowing in against the trees. The smell of fresh earth, the sweetness of Catawba rhododendron and flame azaleas, bush honeysuckle after the rain, is like God's candy to the mountains. It lifts my spirits, even as luck runs out and the mud thickens along the road. When I run out of anything to walk on, lose a flip- flop, I look at Peck nervously, afraid he might end this hike before we get to solid ground. But instead, he picks me up again, surprises me with a back ride as we climb the rest of the road together. The silence between us is still there, though I can feel it loosen as we make the old parking area near the summit. There the earth is drier, with wild grass and shrubbery thick along the bluffs of the northeastern face. The view is toward the headwaters of the Chattooga River watershed and all the land beyond.
Because of the storms, we are alone on Whiteside today, no one else attempting the muddy climb. The wind is fierce, gusts pushing at us as we climb toward the summit past Devil's Courthouse and the old tower overlooking Fool's Rock. We hike the final distance along a narrow pathway, ascending eventually to a slab that is carved with Whiteside's altitude. The roughly etched numbers set the elevation at four thousand nine hundred and thirty feet, “above sea level,” Peck says as he looks down into the cove. From here we are protected against the harshest gusts of wind, the sky above us the deepest blue I have ever seen. Giant puffy clouds push fast across us almost at a height that I think I can touch, if I would just reach out and try. We sit on ancient limestone rock along the Eastern Continental Divide, riding the backbone of the Smoky and Blue Ridge mountain ranges. Whiteside Cove spreads out before us some two thousand feet below.
“I can see Mavis's house from here,” Peck says. In all the years we have been married, he has never been to the summit of White-side until today.
“You can see everything from here,” I tell him. “I can't believe you've never been up here until now.” It feels good to be the one showing something to Peck rather than the other way around. He stands and walks to the edge, a rail preventing him from going too far.
“Parker walked down there, through those fields,” he says.
“Yes he did, every day” I say. I rise and join him at the edge. Below us a hawk rides the air currents like a curving mountain road. It dips and turns, rises and falls until it is near enough that we can see its eyes scanning the clumps of rhododendron clutching the mountain face. I point downward to the fields below. “There's Momma's house, then the fields,” I say. “You see where the line of woods starts?”
Peck nods, points himself. “There?”
“Yes,” I say. “Follow the line of woods to the left and then look out into that field. Can you see it?” Below my finger, the distance through air to earth, I can see a faint vein cutting into the green patch. “I think that's it,” I say.
“What?” he asks.
“I think that's the old trail my father walked to Whiteside.”
Peck's eyes try to focus on what I think is there, but he doesn't see it. You have to grow up in the mountains to understand where and how to look for things. Peck is a low country boy the geography of this place too different from the land of his own life. I can feel his uncertainty, confusion over why he is here, why I'm here in a way that doesn't include him. It's how I felt for fifteen years living in the low country, so I guess now it's his turn. “Do you understand me now?” I ask. But this just confuses him more.
“How is that?” he says.
“You don't like this place any more than I liked Garden City Beach.”
“That's foolish, Cassie.”
“No it's not, Peck. How often have you been here since we got married?”
“You know I can't make every trip,” he says.
“Four times, Peck. You've been here four times. I could understand it when my father was alive, but he's been dead for ten years. Ten, Peck, and you've been back up here only four times.”
“Well, I don't count like that,” he says.
“Maybe you should.”
“Look, you know why I don't come,” he says. “I know how much you want to be up here. I let you come to give you room.”
“Peck, you can't stand this place any more than I can stand the mud in the marsh. What if I said you had to move up here if we were to stay together?”
It takes him a minute to answer this. His eyes focused somewhere off into the empty air. “I'd say tell Kelly first,” he says. “She's the one I'd worry about.”
“No you wouldn't,” I say. “Kelly's young. She wouldn't know the difference in a year or two.”
“Cassie, in a couple of years, she'll be a senior. She'd be devastated to leave her friends and the beach.”
“No, Peck, I think you'd be devastated.” I watch his jaw clinch, his hands tighten on the railing.
“Look,” he says, “I know you need time. I want to give you that. I don't need to be up here because I'm just in the way. I'm in the way right now.” He leaves me then, walking farther up the trail. That's the way it is with Peck. I challenge him and he walks away. I have things to tell him, things he needs to hear, so I follow him until he stops at another overlook. It reaches out to reveal the curvature of the mountain, a rough- hewn semicircle of rock that looks like ancient cathedral walls descending below us.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“Then talk.” Peck sits down on a small outcropping where the sun is warm, the wind quiet. I join him there, letting the silence of this place wash over me as I try to decide what he needs to hear. What I want him to know.
“I don't know what I'm going to do,” I say finally. “I know that doesn't help, but that's as far as I've gotten. I haven't been here long enough to decide anything else.”
“I can understand that,” he says. “I wasn't planning on visiting you.”
“Momma's said I can stay with her as long as I need to. And with all this going on with her land, it seems the right thing to do.”
“Have you thought about Kelly?” he asks. “Have you asked her about any of this?”
“No, and if I did, she'd say she wants to go home. That's obvious.”
“She won't do that again,” he promises. “She'll stay put.”
“She can spend a week here with Momma after camp, and then I'll put her on a bus or something. She can go back to the beach and have her summer like you want her to. Besides, she doesn't need to be in the middle of all of this. I was stupid to do that to her.”
He laughs a little under his breath. “Kelly would hate it up here if you tried to pull her out of school.”
“I know that,” I say. “She's more you than me anymore.”
This brings a smile to his face. “She's hardheaded, if that's what you mean,” Peck says.
We sit in silence once more, high clouds beginning to dull the sun. It feels like rain might be coming in again. “What about Clay?�
�� he asks.
“I don't know about Clay,” I say. “He's in Walhalla.”
“He needs to step up here, don't you think?” Peck says. “Does he know about the baby?” His eyes search mine, waiting. I'm shocked to hear the words come from him, but then after this morning, after what we have just said to each other, why should there be any doubt?
“No,” I say. “I don't think it's his.”
Peck stands up like it's my answer that pushes him off the rock. “Goddamn it,” he says. “Goddammit.”
At first I don't understand, stupid me. Then I realize what has just happened. He didn't know. He was fishing for something. He didn't know I was pregnant, and I just gave it to him, just like that. I'm mad at him for doing this, testing me, playing his little game. I'm mad at myself for not seeing it coming. “That's not fair, Peck,” I say, staying put. “Stop manipulating me like that.”
He turns around at the rail, all of Whiteside Cove below him. “You tell me to stop manipulating you, and here you are saying you don't know whose child you're carrying. One thing we know for certain here is that it might be someone's other than mine. It might be Clay Taylor's.”
I hide my face, start to cry at his words. It's not so much the cruelty of them as it is the truth. “Stop it,” I say. Out before us, clouds build near Chimney Top and Rocky Mountain. “I don't know what to do,” I say. “I don't know what I can do. I didn't come up here because I was pregnant. I came up here to get away, Peck, to see what it might be like to not be Peck Johnson's wife anymore, or Kelly Johnson's mother for that matter. I wanted to just be me again, me, Peck. Fifteen years ago, I put me in a drawer when I packed away all my plans for college and whatever I would have done with that. Well, fifteen years is a long time, and I think I'm due. I didn't want to get pregnant, I just wanted to get away.”
I watch Peck from where I sit, the wind shifting, picking up around us. He turns to face me, his eyes sad this time. His hands rub against his unshaven face, pull through tangled hair while he remains exposed on the edge of the mountain. “Well, what the hell are we going to do then?”