The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

by Christopher Scotton

  At the left of the entrance was the old wooden shed, walls leaning slightly south the way flowers tilt toward the sun, the door hanging from a hinge. Inside were a few dented miners’ hats, blackened coveralls with Monongahela Mining Company stitched across the chest. A workbench with a row of open glass containers, the dried residue of long-evaporated solvents mucking the bottoms. Under the bench was a nearly full old metal can, its faded Kerosene label brushed with rust.

  As soon as I saw it, the walls of the shed fell to an infinite horizon and my heart began to push out against my breastbone, as if it was a wrongly accused convict pounding out his innocence on a cell wall. When I picked it up, my feet and the ground under them faded out like a lost television signal blurring to snow. My hands were dead stones, as some other person, some other entity, took control of my limbs and pushed me outside myself to watch the can’s contents splash on the old wood wall and watch the way the wood pulled the kerosene into it as dry ground drinks in water.

  On the empty, he threw the can into the door and took five steps back and pulled a Redhill match pack from his pocket, struck one, and lifted it to flick into the kerosene puddle at the corner. A hand reached from behind him and grabbed his wrist hard. I spun. It was Buzzy Fink.

  He blew out the match.

  “So you come to my mountains jus to burn em down.”

  “No, I’m just, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “I’m… never mind.” I pulled my wrist free and turned back toward town.

  “Hey,” he said after a few moments.

  I stopped. Turned. “What?”

  “I want to show you somethin.” The tone in his voice told me it wasn’t a request.

  “What?”

  “Somethin you need to see.”

  “What is it?”

  He walked past me and onto the trail back to the tree house. “You comin?”

  I hurried after him, nearly tripping on a jut of granite in the trail.

  “Where’ve you been the last few days, anyway?”

  “Watchin you set fires.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Somebody hadta keep it from spreadin.”

  “They were little fires.” Regretted it as soon as the words passed my lips.

  He stopped and half turned to me. “You done now?”

  I nodded slowly, unconvinced. He went back to the trail and continued on.

  At the tree house he scurried apelike up the trunk. I followed slowly to the first limb, remembering the secret handgrabs and footholds, then pulled myself up to the platform. Buzzy had hands on hips, looking out to the mountains that surrounded town.

  “See all these.” He swept his arm from left to right across the expanse of hills. “I got my own names for em.” He motioned to the rightmost mountain. “This first mountain here, grown-ups call Stanley; but I call it Hawk Wing cause I found a baby hawk there that couldn’t fly. Took it home to raise it, then brought him back. He still lives up there.

  “Next to it is Skull Mountain. I call it that cause me an Cleo found the skull of a cougar or maybe even a sabre-tooth tiger or some other prehistoric thing. Got it hangin on my bedroom wall. Next to it is Buck Head on accounta I got my first deer there. Big-ass twelve-point buck.” His hands bragged the rack width. “Me an Cleo was up the stand an the buck was off on a hill bout a hundert yards away. Cle’s an expert shot an coulda dropped the buck in a heartbeat, but he let me take it with his rifle cause he’s got a scope on it. He’s like that, you know, always wants me to be the best at stuff. So I get the buck in the crosshairs an blam—sucker goes down.

  “The one next to that is Round Rock. Nothing cool happened there but on the other side it’s got these perfectly round rocks size a tractor tires. Over here are Big Tiny an Little Tiny. I call em that on accounta theys the smallest. Next to it is Luck, which has a bunch of old mines cut out of it. I call it Old Cheesey like that cheese with them holes in it. The next two I call Winkin an Blinkin. No real reason; I jus like the bedtime story my momma used to tell me.” He stood shoulder width wide, surveying the range with satisfaction, as if he’d spent the morning molding them all from clay.

  “That last one there, the one with the knob on top, that’s called Knob Mountain.” It was at the end of the eastern line of hills that encircled the town, in opposition to the flat-topped rubble of the excavated mountains. Its majestic reach and perfect shape made the scarred landscape of those dead peaks even more jarring.

  “What’s its real name?”

  “Knob Mountain.”

  I nodded. “Good name for it.”

  “It’s where the Tellin Cave is,” he added.

  “What’s that?”

  “Best cave in the county. Goes on for miles, they say; even gotta river underneath. I’ve never gone down that far, but Cleo did. Him an Jimmy Pike got all the way down to the river.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said, anxious to explore a potentially dangerous cave.

  “Naw, I been there lots a times.”

  “Come on, man. Let’s do something cool.”

  He sat down in the rocker and lit a cigarette, regarding the ring of hills the way a curator appraises his finest art.

  “Look, I want to explore something,” I said. “I’m gonna go myself.”

  “You can’t go yourself.”

  “Why not, too dangerous?”

  “Against the rules.”

  “Whose rules?”

  “The Tellin Cave rules, you dumbass. It’s why they call it the Tellin Cave in the first place.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause everyone who goes in has to tell a secret bout themselves.”

  I laughed for the first time in months. “What? Who says?”

  He frowned. “It ain’t nothin to joke bout. You don’t tell the Tellin Cave a secret, it’ll kill you.”

  “How can a cave kill you?”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. He looked at me like I really was dumb. “Cave can kill you lots a ways. Leighton Buzzard was the first. My grandaddy was with him when it happened. They was up the cave with some friends. This was a long time ago, before my granma an all. They were tellin stories around a fire, an Bicky Wilson, she says to everybody, ‘The spirit a the cave wants to know our secrets, we all gots to give it one.’ So they went round the fire each givin a secret, an when they get to Leighton he says he ain’t gonna tell no secret an that starts a big ruction an he leaves in a huff. Next week he drowns up Glaston Lake. That’s how the whole thing started.”

  I shook my head. “Could’ve been a coincidence.”

  “Well, later that year, they was back up the cave, an another one, Rebah Deal, says she ain’t tellin nuthin. Then when they went explorin, she gets lost an they never find her. Was like the cave jus swallowed her right up. They say at night, on the anniversary, you can hear her ghost callin from the belly a the cave. I been up twice then but I ain’t heard it.”

  “When’s the anniversary?”

  “Four weeks. July twenty-third. Once Rebah disappeared the legend a the Tellin Cave stuck. You may not believe, but it’s a parcel a bad luck to be hangin over your head. I wouldn’t test it.”

  I was determined to see the Telling Cave. “I’m going anyway. If the cave kills me, it’ll be your fault and I’ll come back to haunt you.”

  “It ain’t nothin to joke about, I’m tellin you. I’ll take you up there but not if you’re gonna laugh at the power. The cave might get mad an kill me too, jus outta spite.”

  “I won’t joke, I promise,” I said, tightening my lips around a grin.

  He went into the tree house, came out with a flashlight and knapsack, and was halfway down the tree before I could blink. I managed to slide down behind him without incident.

  Suddenly an object whooshed by our heads and stuck into the oak with a loud thwack. We both whirled to the sound. A twelve-inch metal arrow quivered in the bark.

  “What the fuck you faggots doin up here? This is our pla
ce.”

  A large, thick-gutted, zit-stippled teenager with greasy black hair and bad teeth climbed up the rise toward us. Dangling at his right side was a crossbow pistol, drawstring loosed from the shot at our heads. Behind him was a much smaller boy, about the same age, maybe sixteen, but half his mass. The thin boy had enormous buckteeth, thick eyebrows, and bushy brown hair. It all made him seem like he had been raised by impoverished beavers.

  “I said, what the fuck you pussies doin in our place?”

  “Your place?” Buzzy said calmly. I could tell he was seething inside, but good sense told him to hold his temper in the face of an older, armed teenager. “I thought your place was up Six Holler.”

  “It’s all our place, fuckwad,” said beaver boy.

  “Well, I’m jus showin Kevin here the mountains, him bein from outta town.”

  They puff-chested over to us.

  “Skeeter, gwon get that arrow out the tree.” Skeeter went and put a shoulder into Buzzy as he passed. Buzzy braced and the boy bounced off him like a bird hitting a brick wall. He raised his fist, but Buzzy didn’t flinch. “Jus get the fuckin arrow, Skeeter,” the boy said. Skeeter went to the tree and pulled the bolt out of the bark.

  “Where’d you get that crossbow, Tilroy?” Buzzy asked. “That’s badass.” He knew flattery would ease the situation.

  “My uncle give it to me for my birthday. Sucker is deadly.” He brought it up to show us. The handle was burled wood and lacquer, the bolt guide and bow were gunmetal gray, the bowstring a hundred fibers tightly woven into a single high-tensile filament. “Already got a possum an a coon,” he said proudly.

  Buzzy whistled. “That is seriously cool.” Tilroy was lost for the moment, just gazing at his new weapon.

  Skeeter looked up at the tree house. “Where’s the ladder at?”

  Buzzy started moving away. “We gotta get on home. Chores an stuff.” He walked past me, grabbed my shirtsleeve, and pulled. I followed.

  “Fuckwad. Where’s the ladder at?”

  “I ain’t seen no ladder. It’s Cleo’s tree house. He don’t let no one up there.”

  At the mention of Buzzy’s brother, Tilroy and Skeeter went silent, looking up at the nested structure. While they whispered and pointed up, we walked down the trail.

  “Hey, faggots!”

  I stopped and turned. Tilroy lowered the crossbow to me.

  “Jus keep walkin,” Buzzy hissed.

  Tilroy and Skeeter laughed. I turned to catch up. Once down the slope I grabbed Buzzy. “Let’s get out of here.” I started to run.

  He shook me off. “I ain’t runnin from that asswipe.” Buzzy’s forehead was hunkered, lips pushed out in a scowl. “I swear, I hate that mutherfucker.”

  “Is he a big bully in school?”

  “He’s the one who gets bullied cause he’s so fat. Seniors mostly. Then he goes an takes it out on the freshmen. I seen him do some crazy shit in the parkin lot. Doesn’t mess with me, though. He knows Cleo would kick his ass.”

  By the time we got to the trail fork, afternoon was closing out. We said our good-byes and agreed to meet up again the next day, maybe for a trip to the Telling Cave. I made my way down the mountain, over the train tracks, and up Green Street to Main.

  Chapter 4

  THE AERODYNAMICS OF FLYROCK

  Arthur Bradley Peebles was born to Missiwatchiwie County on January 3, 1919, in sideways snow and wind that flailed Jukes Hollow for three days, cresting and spilling frozen waves against the southern edge of the timber cabin his father, Oriel Peebles, had built ten years before. The Peebles clan had been scraping a life from the dirt and rock and walled sunlight of the hollow for sixty-five years by the time Arthur was born. The Peebleses were broadaxed and sure. Drum chested and stubborn, with thick hands cut for hard work; laughter like the crack of bowling ball on pin.

  Jeb and Hershel, two years apart, followed their father into the mines at fifteen. Arthur Bradley, however, was a thinker and a questioner and a reader. His mother, who could read and write better than most of the county, taught him his letters from the book of Genesis, spelling out words on a pine board with elderberry chalk. Within eight months, Arthur was into Exodus, reading aloud to his mother, following her ponylike as she labored to run the house in Jukes Hollow.

  At eight, Arthur was walking five miles every other Tuesday to Mrs. Robert J. Taylor’s in Glassville to borrow a book from her considerable collection of eighty-five volumes. He was Robinson Crusoe sneaking through the jungle, scouting for ambush. He was Gulliver negotiating the fleshy landscapes of the Brobdingnags. He was Ahab, substituting green moss boulders for the white whale and losing his leg a thousand times. For Arthur, the words gathered in waterfall thoughts that spilled off the page into the pools of imagination collecting in his head.

  Oriel was concerned about his idleness and Jeb thought he was weak and yellow. He entered the University of Kentucky to study philosophy the year his father was killed by a fertilizer bomb in the back of the union offices in downtown Medgar. The murder in 1936 touched off the bloodiest union uprising in the region, the Sadler Mountain Wars, which lasted nine months, until federal marshals took control of the town and the mines, gradually restoring the peace.

  (Oriel’s funeral service was a caution. The union wanted a full casket despite the fact that the only piece of Oriel available for burial was his left hand. His wife, a clear thinker even in grief, thought it a shameful waste of timber and opted for a foot-square polished wood box with a gold handle on top. It made for a sight as half of Missi County followed the family up the hollow from the church, a single pallbearer in the lead carrying the gilded box as if they were burying the most popular hamster in the county.)

  After the Sadler Mountain Wars, Hershel returned to the mines and Jeb bought a farm on the other side of Cheek Mountain. Arthur went back to school on tuition earned selling shoes door-to-door in Lexington for the Emory Grove Shoe Company. It was on his third call of the morning that he met Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe.

  “Hello, my name is Arthur Bradley Peebles representing the Emory Grove Shoe Company; we make the most comfortable shoes in the entire South,” he announced. “So comfortable, in fact, that if you ever get a blister or a bunion as a result of our shoes, we will gladly give you double your money back. You see, each shoe is custom-made to the exact measurement of your foot so our shoes feel as comfortable as your stocking feet.”

  The woman at the door, granite faced, severe dress, and graying hair screwed to a bun, looked him over dismissively. “Young man, we don’t need new shoes,” she said, beginning to close the door.

  Then footsteps down the stairs and a voice in the hall. “Just a minute, Gertrude. I would like to hear more about the gentleman’s shoes.”

  Gertrude glared at Arthur and wordlessly ushered him into the sitting room—red velvet and mahogany, tasseled and warm.

  Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe swept into the room on air and light that dissolved Arthur’s practiced speech into fragments.

  “Um, I sell shoes, and uh, they are very much like your stocking feet, these shoes… because they are comfortable and… uh… if you get bunions we will gladly give your money back because we make the most comfortable shoes in the entire South… uh, miss.”

  “Is that a fact, then—the most comfortable shoes in the entire South?” She gave him a half smile.

  Arthur brightened, remembering his lines now. “Absolutely, Miss…?”

  “Winthorpe, Sarah Winthorpe.”

  She extended her soft, exceptional hand, and its warmth made Arthur want to run. Her long chestnut hair played against her neck and shoulders, taking the tired sunlight from the front window and turning it electric. He forgot his speech again. Gertrude stood in the doorway, arms across her chest, eyes folded in a shriveling stare.

  If proper Emory Grove Shoe Company procedure had been followed, Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe’s shoes would have been delivered via post within three weeks; however, Arthur felt that special handling
was required in this particular case and delivered them himself. Special handling was also required for the next four pairs of size-seven shoes he delivered to the Winthorpe residence.

  Arthur’s sales for the following six months fell precipitously; however, the waves that spiked through him every time he saw Sarah did not. They married on June 18, 1940, to the shattering disappointment of Mr. Winthorpe, who believed “if Jesus Christ himself came from Missiwatchiwie County he wouldn’t be good enough for my Sarah.” (The fact that Jesus was Jewish would have eliminated him from contention in Mr. Winthorpe’s mind long before county of origin was ever discussed.)

  After a weekend at Glaston Lake, they moved into Arthur’s one-room apartment above Stack’s Butchery half a block from campus. Arthur went back to his school and his shoes; Sarah went back to her particular state of effortless grace.

  He spent six more months at the University of Kentucky, then started as assistant professor of philosophy at Maryville College in Tennessee, when the war broke. He joined the navy and soon was oiling the Bofors antiaircraft guns of port broadside turret number two on the carrier USS Enterprise in the Pacific.

  It would begin with the low, airy rumble of distant engines, the frantic scouring of the horizon, then contact. The kamikaze always arrived in proud formation and, as if from the hand of some phantom conductor, broke off expertly in threes and fours. Fascinating and terrible. Once kamikaze entered the kill zone, the gunners had exactly seventeen seconds to down the plane.

  The May morning in 1945 burned clear, as the sun flushed from a following sea. Arthur was hitting baseballs to the Enterprise’s star shortstop when the alarm started slow and shrill against the nearing drone of the kamikaze.

  The attackers swarmed like sweat bees. Eight to a ship. Three on the middle portside. Two high, one low. Guns screaming. Seventeen seconds. First kill immediately. Swinging right, middle portside number one down, fourteen seconds, second kill. Twelve seconds left.

  The third bomber flew true off the churning water. Arthur turned the guns, firing immediately. Tracers spinning soundlessly past. Closer. Nine seconds. Arthur spraying the air with shot, each one missing the plane. Five seconds. The face of the pilot coming into focus now. Three seconds. His plane parting the chaff like a car through morning mist. Closer. Two seconds. Salt and sweat in Arthur’s eyes. As the plane flew under his sight line in the last half second before it slammed into the hull, the pilot looked up at him. Their eyes locked in a terrible instant. The pilot was smiling.