Chapter 44
JULY 2014
We slide the burled casket carefully from the dark-blue hearse. The handles feel cool despite the stifling heat scalding eastern Kentucky this July. It is much lighter than I expect and we hoist it hip high as if empty. After three or four awkward steps, our walkings join to an intended cadence, and once so aligned, our pace is slow and purposeful, off the road, onto the grass, and down the hill toward the crossing.
The mourners file behind us as we move slowly toward the burial site on the hill. The sun, which shied all morning behind low clouds, swaddles us now in warm light. At the graveside, dirt from the hole is piled to the side, covered with an Astroturf carpet. Flowers everywhere. We cortege the casket to the grave and set it on the platform. We all gather around the coffin in a semicircle, clasping hands in front and behind for lack of purposeful utility.
“Dear friends,” Pastor Barnes begins. “Let us pray…”
I scan the crowd for familiar faces, recognizing many through the application of years. They are stooped and creased now, some attended by grown children, others on their own.
He is standing by himself, off to the side. The tall man with beamed shoulders and a thick neck. His blond hair is cut short at the front, not quite a crew, and the back tails his shoulders. His dense beard is two shades darker than his hair. With hints of red.
He moves closer to the casket. Despite the beard I recognize him instantly. Recognize the three-piece suit he wore to Pops’ brother’s funeral ten years ago, now tight across him.
I smile and Buzzy Fink smiles back.
In 2002 Billy Boyd’s Monongahela Energy traded the reclaimed plateau that was once Sadler, Cheek, and Indian Head to the commonwealth in exchange for mineral rights on a string of mountains north of Medgar up toward Big Spoon. Within two years a new supermax prison sprouted on the barren site with lights that Christmas-treed the stub of Sadler and washed all the luminance from the stars.
The Company took Floss Mountain first, then Limber, then Kinny and Chute—eight hundred acres clear-cut and ready for blasting, hauling, and filling. The jobs soon followed—dragliners, blasters, haulers, and supervisors—and outrage after that: anger at each new hollow fill, umbrage on every rust-running creek, rage with each new cancer diagnosis.
Paitsel organized protests, wrote letters, made phone calls, and cajoled B-list celebrities, but as always, the money was on the side of the mines. Each year the lines were drawn deeper and to ever more acute angles as cousins stopped speaking, kin became estranged, liquored friends fist-fought over draglines instead of women.
Katherine Marie Sloane was born on December 14, 1979, in the Subic Bay Naval Hospital while her father was on maneuvers in the South China Sea. After the Philippines came a fickle of postings around the world—Pensacola for first and second grade; then four years in San Diego; Dubai for junior high; senior year at the American School in London while her father taught at Greenwich.
She chose the University of Kentucky for their premed program and because she liked the brochure. After that, Emory for medical school.
She first saw him coming from a lecture on Merton. She was on her way to the chem lab with some friends when their sidewalks wove into one. He was by himself and walked as if he didn’t mind being alone.
She chanced upon him again the following week when she was buying new running shoes for the cystic fibrosis 10-K. He was working at Foot Locker on weekends for walking-around money. She asked him the difference between the Advantra and the Road Warrior. He mumbled something about vacuum-molded soles. She could tell he was nervous, could feel his eyes on her as she examined the instep of the Jog Master. She wasn’t surprised when he turned up at the race, and his attempts to keep up with her were valiant.
They went for coffee afterward and she caught him twice looking at her. Watching the tiny hairs that covered her earlobes and the space of skin at the end of her eyebrow. Watching the way the light overhead gave her chestnut hair a reddish tinge when she cocked her head a certain way.
She was a first-year med, she told him. He told her he was getting his masters in fine arts and wanted to write. She wanted to specialize in pediatric surgery, she said.
They talked of their parents. He hadn’t seen his father in five years. Hers was teaching at the Naval Academy in Annapolis before retirement. She told him how it was to never have a home for more than a few years.
They discussed Nietzsche and cognitive dissonance in children. They argued architecture and whether Jan Brady was prettier than Marcia; if Gilligan really wanted to be rescued; if the Grateful Dead were any good.
She rubbed her coffee mug when thinking and tossed her hair to the side when she laughed.
They each told a dirty joke. Neither had any bumper stickers.
He tried to compliment her. She turned red and remarked on the coffee. He liked that she didn’t wear bangle earrings—liked that she wasn’t afraid to wear a cappuccino-froth mustache.
They each recited Shakespeare. She was Lady Macbeth spurring him to murder. He was Henry urging her at Agincourt. She was in love by the end of his mangled St. Crispin’s Day speech.
She told him of her volunteer work at a children’s clinic in town and about the time she berated a man in Safeway for hitting his own boy. They agreed that the animal rights people go overboard. Neither had seen a UFO.
They stayed until five p.m., examining each other’s lives and discovering empathies in their opposite experiences. They parted, promising to meet for Italian the following Friday. She wrote her number on the back of the coffee-shop bill.
They married nineteen months later at the Naval Academy Chapel. His father came but left the reception early; his mother and grandfather danced all night with total abandon. She began her residency at Emory and he took an assistant professorship in the English department. Within a year she was pregnant and the trouble started. A difficult carry became a disastrous birth. Kate’s uterus ruptured and she began hemorrhaging. The doctors saved her with an emergency Cesarean and amid the blood and building expectations came a little girl on air and light named Sarah Ryder Gillooly. My daughter.
Pastor Barnes’ benediction speaks of renewal and a life to celebrate. Mom thanks the assembled for coming and tells a few anecdotes from Pops’ life, then asks everyone back to Chisold Street for food. She jokes that she laid in extra Clinch Mountain sour mash on his specific instructions.
Kate squeezes my hand. “You sure you want to stay up here by yourself tonight? Mom can take Sarah.”
I brush away a gnat cloud and kiss her. “I’m sure. I’ll come by and get some stuff.”
She smiles sadly, touches my cheek, and walks with Mom, Audy Rae, and the rest of them to the waiting cars at the cul-de-sac. I watch as they trace the trail down the hill, across the creek, and through the old field, now fully taken by trees.
It was Audy Rae who found Pops, sitting in the green wicker chair where she left him the evening before. Mom was down in Atlanta at an exhibition of her paintings and Audy Rae agreed to take care of him for the weekend. She knew he had passed as soon as she rounded Watford and saw him in last night’s clothes. He looked asleep, but she knew otherwise. She closed his eyes all the way, brushed his hair with her hand, and went into the kitchen to call Dr. Killen.
After a while I walk down the trail, across the creek, through the young woods to the cabin. Before the baby, Kate and I would sometimes drive up from Atlanta for secret weekends in Jukes Hollow. I’d work on my thesis, she would study for her boards, and we would zip two sleeping bags together and entwine ourselves on the pine floor.
I linger on the cabin porch for a while, recalling those times, then head to Pops’ old truck, still serving faithfully after all these years, and drive toward town to pick up my old camping gear from 22 Chisold. At Route 32, on impulse, I take a left instead of a right and after a few minutes turn into Fink’s Hollow Road. Buzzy and I had not really spoken since I arrived, what with the funeral arrangements
and other death duties. I drive up the hill to the houses, with Giggins Hoo sitting proudly in the middle of it all.
I see someone in the shadows of the porch and walk toward the house. In the darkened corner, sitting on the old La-Z-Boy recliner, is Buzzy’s uncle Elwin, now patriarch of the hollow.
Buzzy’s mother doesn’t see much of Buzzy nowadays. He comes around once a month to take her to lunch at Sizzler, but because she and Crystal don’t get along (fight like rabid cats, actually) they stopped visiting as a family around the time Tanner was born. Now, except for the lunches, it’s only Christmas and the boys’ birthdays.
I walk between Giggins Hoo and Buzzy’s old house, now occupied by strangers, past the barn and up the trail to the tree house. I find the rock that marks the path to the old oak. The course is overgrown and underbrushed, but I can still read a faint gesture of trail and follow it along the shelf. After five minutes I tip the slight crest and the huge tree is before me. Buzzy is by the base, as I expected, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the remains of the tree house. He hears the crackle of leaves and turns around.
Shortly after high school started, Mom and my father separated. With everything she had endured in the preceding years, the divorce came as a relief, in some way providing passage on that cut of her life.
Buzzy and I entered tenth grade in September, him in a wheelchair for first semester. Our Glaston Lake adventure and the attending publicity made us local celebrities, and kids in school competed for our friendship. But we stuck together for the next three years as we grew through adolescence.
Cleo’s senior season was another record breaker, but Isak Fink passed in his sleep shortly after Cleo left the hollow for Notre Dame. Buzzy and I watched his father’s slow slide that second summer, never really talking about it, never really needing to.
With no charges filed, Notre Dame quickly forgot the inconvenient circumstances of Cleo’s involvement in the beating death of Paul Pierce. Second string as a freshman behind Tony Rice, then midway through their march to the national championship, Cleo’s throwing shoulder separated during a dorm roughhouse. Surgery, another separation, and he was back in the bedroom he shared with Buzzy, apprenticing at Wickle’s Hauling.
By our own senior year we had abandoned the tree house for more adult pursuits. We secretly bought his cousin Licky’s Dodge Dart for four hundred dollars saved from chopping firewood and selling it out of Pops’ truck in the suburbs of Lexington. The car was registered to Buzzy and we kept it on an old mining road since he never told his grandfather. We hardly ever drove it, but it made us feel emancipated nonetheless.
At homecoming that year we had full rein of Twyla Buford’s sister’s trailer with Twyla and me in one room and Buzzy and Crystal Smith in the other.
For spring break we told everyone we were going camping up at Glaston and instead drove the secret car all the way to Panama City.
The rest of the spring was parties and the run-up to graduation. The excitement of applying to colleges and the quiet that came over Buzzy when I talked about it. Driving all night after prom to Hilton Head, then laughing as Crystal and Twyla got their prom dresses soaked by a big wave. Graduation in the tent on the football field and the look on Pops’ face as I stood to give the valedictory address.
After another summer chopping wood, I went off to Columbia. Buzzy’s uncle got him a job building wood forms for Clemet Construction in Glassville.
We saw each other whenever I was home from school, but gradually, as we put years and divergent experiences between us, we found less reason to meet. During those few awkward visits we always regressed to retelling that first summer together.
Crystal got pregnant when they were twenty, and Buzzy married her in a courthouse ceremony. He bought a suit for the occasion, honeymooned her on a four-day weekend in Myrtle Beach, then moved into Crystal’s mother’s trailer in downtown Medgar.
Once Tanner was born, they rented their own place at the Dew Meadow Park (next to the new Walmart outside Glassville). Even though it was only a single-wide, Crystal was boastful of the trailer because it had one of those retractable awnings that came only with the top-of-the-line double-wides.
The old oak hasn’t changed at all. The years since my last visit growing on it in indiscernible fractions. The tree house is gone, except for a few pieces of the platform. The ruins look like a hunter’s tree stand, alone in the nest of the big branches. Around the base are a few ebbed fragments of the old house; a fleck of a wall; some shingles half buried under the leaves; the arm of a red rocker over by a stump.
Buzzy’s tie is loosened and his jacket is draped over his arm, a sweat blossom across his back.
“Hey, Indiana,” he says.
“I thought you might be up here,” I say.
He turns back to the tree.
“I tried to climb it but couldn’t get much past two foot. Gettin old an fat, I guess.”
“I’m not even going to try,” I say.
“Sorry I wasn’t able to come to Tingley’s. I been workin a double shift last two weeks. We been so busy we had to turn away some jobs.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
We are silent for a minute, trying to rediscover the easy conversation of our youth.
Finally he says, “I never tole you this before, but I used to wish your grandaddy was my grandaddy, too. That we were brothers.” He pauses, then continues. “I used to wonder what it would be like, havin him to look up to.”
“But you looked up to your grandfather. He was a good man.”
“I looked up to him, all right. I just dint have to be lookin up very far.”
I open my mouth to comment but let the thought fade in me instead.
Buzzy breaks the silence.
“You know, I used to envy you, Kevin. You were my best friend, but, man, I used to envy you.”
“Envy me? I’m the one who envied you. You were the most popular kid in school. I was happy just to get your castoffs.”
“Yeah, an look at us now.” He gazes up into the broad branches of the oak. “You see, I knew that summer, when the Glaston story got out an we had all them reporters callin after us. All them people wantin to know us—bein on TV an in the newspapers an stuff. I knew that my life was never gonna get better than right then. We was fourteen years old an in the fuckin Lexington Herald, for Christsake.”
We are silent again, standing under the arch of the oak, pretending to be fascinated with what is left of the tree house. I finally bring the conversation back to a tested topic.
“Remember when Levona Stiles’ hair caught on fire that time? When she and Petunia came up to the Telling Cave with Tilroy and Skeeter?”
He brightens and laughs. “I swear I thought you were gonna wet yourself when she took off her top.”
He shakes his head and kneels to pick up a quarter-size piece of tree-house wall.
We are awkward again, searching our catalog of experiences for common conversation.
“How’s your baby?” he asks. “Heard you had a girl.”
“Not much of a baby anymore; she’s almost three. How are your boys?”
“Great.”
“What are they, seventeen and twenty?”
“Nineteen an twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two! He’s a grown man. How’s Crystal doing?”
He pauses.
“We’ve separated.”
“Sorry to hear that. When did this happen?”
“Last week,” he says, then hesitates again. “It’s been comin.”
The conversation tails. I look up at the sky and see nothing but blue.
“They say it’s going to be a really hot summer. Probably from all that global warming stuff.”
“I heard that,” he says, then pulls a thread of conversation from the comment. “Do you ever watch the Weather Channel?”
I shake my head.
“Oh man, the Weather Channel is great. I watch it all the time. I love watchin what the weather is like in places
like Africa or China someplace. Drives Crystal nuts.”
“We don’t have cable,” I add, as if some justification is required for my lack of interest in third world weather.
“No cable?”
“I mean, we can get it if we want. But we decided we wouldn’t really use it.”
“What do you do for sports?”
“I don’t have time to watch it anyway. I never knew how hard teachers worked until I became one.”
We are silent until finally he says, “Well, I’m gonna head on back. I’m takin my momma out to lunch. I try to do that once a month.”
“That’s a good thing.”
We walk silently back down the trail to Fink’s Hollow. He smiles at the sight of the old truck and puts his hand on the hood as if to draw out more memories from that magical time in our lives. Finally he sticks out his hand and I take it. “It’s good seein you, Kevin. I jus wish it was for better reasons.”
“Yeah, it was good to see you, too. And thanks for coming out to the hollow. I appreciate it.”
He nods, then says, “Next time you’re in town, give me a call. I’ll be in my new place by then. You can come over or somethin.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” I say. “I’ll definitely do that.”
He turns and walks off toward Giggins Hoo. I follow the road out of the hollow and back to town.
Medgar is alive with activity now, with the mines heaving and the prison nearing capacity. I drive through the west side to Main Street. The place is a puzzle with familiar pieces cut to a new picture, for all the old Main Street stores are gone. Dempsey’s closed in 2001 after a Food Lion opened at the old urinal-mint factory. It is now an antique store. Miss Janey’s shut that same year after Miss Janey suffered a stroke and lost the use of her right arm. It’s a quilt shop.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 37