by Lydia Peelle
None of us can claim to belong here. The Musician and I came to Nashville in the seventies, him for the drugs and the music, me just for the drugs. We got to be friends, or at least were always showing up at the same parties. He was young and knew the good-looking girls. I was forty years old, just getting started on the heavy stuff. When the scene vibed out in the eighties, we both decided to move to Brown’s Ridge. Way out to the country, we thought back then. Dave’s from California or Nevada or somewhere, no one really knows. I always thought Lacy was born here, but it turns out she moved up with her momma from South Carolina when she was a few years old. Preacher Jubal Cain is from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Joe Guy’s daddy, when he bought the farm, moved down from Paradise Ridge, a good twenty miles to the north. Frank and Jesse James came from Missouri via Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Brown, before he was pierced through the heart with an arrow, was a Yankee from Philadelphia, forging his way south to find a better life for his family. The only person I know who is actually from Brown’s Ridge is Joe Guy Jr., born the year we moved here, in the upstairs bedroom of his daddy’s big white house, but he cut out of here two years ago, and no one’s heard from him since.
The metal detector that the Musician bought is cheap and unreliable. There is no depth setting and for the first few days he wastes hours digging up beer cans and pop tabs that lie just beneath the leaf litter. Every morning he knocks on my door and me and Greenup Bird go with him up the ridge. Dave comes, too, and we all help dig. The Musician points to a spot and I go at it with a short-handled spade while Greenup goes at it with his claws and teeth, dirt spraying out behind him through his back legs. Since the stroke, my left arm shakes so badly that it’s difficult to control any tool. I get tired easily and have to sit down. Greenup is named for the victim of the first peacetime bank robbery in this country, which went down in Liberty, Missouri, in 1866. I live by the creek in a house that J. D. Howard, a local grain dealer known to be a gambler, built in 1875. The house has fifteen-foot-high ceilings and a fireplace in every room. Across the Pike is the field where J. D. Howard kept his horse, an exceptionally fine animal for a man of his humble profession. On weekdays developers trawl through Brown’s Ridge in their Hummers, wider than one lane of the road. They pull over to ask directions, looking down at us through mirrored sunglasses, and we point them the wrong way. I found Greenup Bird on the Pike two years ago, half-starved and half-dead, a cross between a God-knows-what and a Lord-have-mercy. He’s got one blue eye and one black and a coat that feels like a wire brush. As the Musician says, he is one plug-ugly dog. We make a good pair, him and me.
The Musician once played bass for a famous band. He’s been all over the world and he’s got luggage stuffed in every closet in the cabin. He’s got stories, whether you choose to believe them or not. He’s played to a crowd of twenty thousand in Berlin, slept with a one-armed Haitian girl in the back of a Spanish club. The Musician’s given name is Randy Spaulding, but when he started touring he had it legally changed to Lex Spark. He’s got good days and bad days, and when I go to see him I usually know which one it is before I’m halfway up his mud-rutted drive. On bad days he stays inside the dark musty cabin, tending to his regret like it’s a pot on the stove. On good days he is electric with plans, plans you wouldn’t think he had in him, like searching for Frank James’s treasure. He built the cabin himself, with lumber he talked various people into giving him. Three years ago, it was the Musician who broke into my house, dragged me out of a puddle of piss and shit, and drove me to the hospital, where after three days in a coma they told me I was a very lucky man. He hasn’t been able to get session work in Nashville in years. An upright bass leans against his kitchen counter like a woman trying to catch a bartender’s eye. He won’t touch it. I imagine he doesn’t play music anymore for the same reason I don’t do drugs anymore: you can only push up to the edge so many times before you realize the one thing on the other side is your own mortality, with no one waiting there to keep your grave clean.
It’s impossible to prove, but most people would agree that it was Jesse James, alias J. D. Howard, who shot Greenup Bird at that bank in Missouri, committing one of the first crimes of a lifetime of infamy. It was ten years before he moved to Brown’s Ridge and changed his name, built his high-ceilinged house, and tried to live the life of an honest man. Frank James, when he arrived soon after with his wife and young son, took the name of B. J. Woodson and rented a farm along the creek. Joe Guy’s thousand-acre farm, the biggest tract in the entire county, was sold quietly this summer, in the middle of June. When the work crews started rolling in, Preacher Jubal Cain watched the surveyor’s tape go up and said, Whosever will, let him come. A time of prosperity is here. We dig deep holes along the ridgeline, some because of a sign from the metal detector, some because Dave rolls his eyes back in his head and points, some for no reason at all. As we dig we call out to each other through the trees: You got anything? Nothing, man. You? Nothing.
My mind, before I ruined it, was a beautiful thing. As an old man I can say this without vanity or pride. The brilliance was like the light of late day over Joe Guy’s back field, but now the light is gone. What’s left are the scraps, held together with wire and string. Nothing has grown back in the ruts of the drugs. I used to be an inventor. I’ve sold dozens of patents for things you use every day. I like to think I have made life easier for people, better. Some nights I think I can feel Jesse’s bootsteps if I lean off my mattress and press my fingers to the floor, but it is only the rumble of the trucks coming down the Pike. Living in a place like this, you would think it would be easy to start believing in ghosts. But I am haunted by something more real than ghosts. Behind the Minute Mart, on a scrubby lot where the gas trucks turn around, two perfect rows of daffodils come up year after year, just wide enough to line the drive of a farmhouse of which there is no longer a trace. Whoever planted those daffodils, a woman, I picture, in a homemade dress, did it decades ago, without any thought of me. The Musician drives me into town to cash my Social Security checks and buy new boots, and I hold my left arm down with my right to keep it from jerking out and hitting the gear shift. Every once in a while, I’ll speak a whole sentence backwards, and the woman at the bank will smile at me with false patience, like I’m a little boy. We used to go to the honky-tonks on Saturday nights to tell stories about the old days and complain about the music, but we don’t go out at night anymore, because the headlights on the Musician’s truck quit. He’s working part-time laying tile. Days are rough for a self-employed tradesman, what with all the cheap labor the contractors can scare up. The Musician looks down at his boots, the steel toes showing through big holes in the worn-out leather. He sighs and says, It’s a tough row to hoe.
Dave won’t touch the metal detector. He thinks it is a blasphemy. He says that God will disconnect his line to Jesse if he gets too greedy. If you ask, you shall receive, he tells us, and many days when we go out digging he stays behind at the cabin, leaning back on the porch steps with a joint. Jesse might want to get in touch with me, he says. You two go on ahead. When we come back in the afternoon he is curled up snoring in a patch of sun. We’ve happened on a cobalt blue medicine bottle, which the Musician is certain we can sell at an antique shop in town. We’ve found a lug nut, an old snarl of baling wire, eighteen broken Coke bottles, a hornet’s nest, a hollow tree that the Musician climbed inside of and looked all the way up to the sky. We found an old shoe, a ladder, a cracker tin, but still no treasure. Jesse’s not sure yet if he really wants you to find it, Dave says when we wake him. Well, tell Jesse to make up his mind, the Musician says. We haven’t got much time. At dusk I walk Greenup Bird through the hay fields of Joe Guy’s farm, letting him scare up rabbits and bark at the deer. I find a dead raccoon hanging from its neck in the crook of a beech tree. I wonder how many more times we’ll walk through the field: five more mornings, ten. I tell the raccoon, You’re lucky to get out now. I rub out surveying marks spray-painted on the grass with my heel.
One morning in mid-September we think we’ve hit the jackpot. After a clear sign from Jesse, Dave starts in on a level stretch of the hillside, alongside the grade of an old logging road. A foot and a half down his shovel strikes metal, and we all rush over to him, Greenup panting, slapping our legs with his tail. With his hands in the air the Musician circumscribes the size of Confederate bills, bars of solid gold. The shovel twangs encouragingly. But what we dig up turns out to be a sheet of rusted tin hinged to a spiraled copper pipe from an old still. The Musician slumps his shoulders for a moment, then gets back to work. He’s tall and lanky and loose the way a bass player should be. He eats and eats but stays skinny as a whip. He feeds me and Dave in the cabin most nights, frying hamburgers when he’s got work, boiling potatoes when he doesn’t. Dave chucks the pipe downhill. In the twenties, the ridge had more bootleggers than any other place in the county: so wild and steep, yet so close to town. They kept little fox dens at the foot of trees where they sometimes spent the night. They pinned pictures of Clara Bow to the sycamores and ate the lunches their wives packed them in tin pails, throwing the chicken bones over their shoulders. The ones without women sometimes moved out here for good, squatting on unclaimed land in tar paper shacks. In the deepest hollers we find the last of these places, abandoned by the gangs of teenage boys who once used them as clubhouses. Behind their graffiti and karate posters, the walls are insulated with layers of newspaper from the 1950s. We peel them off and read the ads for land auctions and farm liquidations, and I think about how this cashing in on the country is not any kind of new thing.
In 1969 Brown’s Ridge damn near went. Joe Guy’s father saw the development going on in the rest of the county and made up his mind to sell. He found someone in Clarksville who would buy his herd of Holsteins, mapped out roads, and even had sewer lines put into the front field. The caps are still out there; sometimes I trip over them when Greenup and I walk at sunset, or Joe Guy’s mower catches a blade and from my bedroom I hear the scrape of metal against metal. In the spring of that year, Joe Guy’s father stood at the edge of the field with a notary public, a man from a development company, and blueprints for two-and three-bedroom brick ranch houses spread out on the hood of his Cadillac. He was all set to sign the final papers when he had a heart attack and dropped right where he stood, into the ditch on the side of the road. The pen fell out of his hand. The man from the development company said it was as if he had been struck by lightning. Almost like an act of God, he would tell people for the rest of his life . The farm and all the land, as drawn up in the will, went to the sole heir, Joe Guy, and Joe refused to sell. He bought the cows back from the man in Clarksville and put them right back out in the pasture, kept on farming for the next thirty years. But now Joe is older than his father was when he dropped into the weeds that day, and he’s got visions of Florida dancing in his eyes, clean fingernails, sleeping late.
Some days, if either of us has some money, the Musician and I get lunch down at the Meat ‘n’ Three. Lacy pours our coffee and sings along to the country video station on the TV. She holds her check pad up to her mouth and whispers not to order the fish. The cat done licked it, she says. The Musician eats fried chicken with okra, cottage cheese, pinto beans. I eat cornbread and a biscuit and take my rainbow of pills. Lacy is young enough to be the Musician’s daughter, my granddaughter. She wears a wide black belt low on her hips, jeans, bright blue eye shadow. She’s got the body of a 1950s movie star. The Musician watches her carefully as she moves around the room. Most days, she’ll sit down with us while we eat, stealing a French fry or a potato chip from the Musician’s plate, snapping her fluorescent gum. But these days the place is packed with developers up from Nashville, spreading out topo maps on the tables and picking the pork out of their turnip greens. Joe Guy comes in with a pretty lady in panty hose and a suit. They sit at the counter and go over a brochure of computer-generated images of big brick houses. We’re going to call it Apple Orchard Acres, she tells him, and he rubs his hands together and nods. Lacy brings his sweet tea and asks if he’s heard from Joe Jr. He only smiles and winks at her. His brand-new F-350 is parked outside the restaurant, the engine ticking. Wouldn’t you do it, too? the Musician asks, when he sees me looking. Wouldn’t you do the same, for a couple million dollars? What would I do with two million dollars? Buy back the land. Save it for the coyote, the heron, the possum, the bobcat, the kestrel, the broad-winged hawk.
Since my stroke, this is what I have come to know: The path to enlightenment is free of all desire. The doctors say it is something to do with a drop in my testosterone levels, but I feel it is something greater. I look at the world with a new, pure love. The graders rumble down the Pike and pull into Joe Guy’s front fields, laying down the roads. There are three phases of development planned, 188 houses total, with talk of a golf course. The smaller farmers in town, when they hear about it, start to reassess their mortgages, talk to their wives. Dave doesn’t want me and the Musician to get left behind at the Second Coming. He prays for us to find Jesus. But I don’t need to. I’ve found love without him, I say. I look for other answers, other explanations. I read whatever I can get my hands on. Every mammal on earth, I’ve read, from mouse to man to mammoth, goes through roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. When I tell this to Dave, he says, If that’s not proof of God, then I sure as hell don’t know what is.
We dig up a mule shoe, six square-headed nails, a milking pail, a barrette. We find an old Maytag washer, rusted parts all tumbled down the hillside like spilled guts. I have a certain respect for folks who chucked their garbage out their back door. When I was lying unconscious in the hospital, the Musician came into my house and cleaned out as much junk as he could, the boxes of old syringes, the rank buckets of piss. When I relearned how to talk, the first thing I said was, Thank you. Jesse James and a member of his posse, a man named Bill Ryan, alias Tom Hill, drank beer and ate tinned oysters at the saloon that once stood on the site of the Minute Mart, which keeps its security lights on all day and all night, too. We stop to buy Cokes and cellophane-wrapped miniature chess pies, which keep us going until midnight. The kids who hang out there whisper when we come in. I hear them say , There goes one crazy motherfucker, and it’s hard to tell whether they’re talking about Dave with his apocalypse eyes, the Musician with his filthy jeans and busted boots, or me with my shaking hands, my slurred speech.
People driving down the Pike stop in front of my house to take pictures of the historical marker, and they cross the yard to look at the well, which Jesse James supposedly dug. I watch and wonder what they would say if they could see inside. Stacks of magazines from the eighties, old food, stuff even the Musician was too scared to touch when he cleaned the place out, a smell of piss hanging on the shades, which I keep drawn tight. Members of the Nashville ladies’ garden club come and tend the outside of the house, watering the rosebushes, trimming back the boxwood. Greenup Bird puts his paws on the windowsill and barks his head off at them. But I don’t mind all the people. I remind myself that, though I’ve almost paid off the mortgage, this house doesn’t really belong to me. I am no more than a squatter, only passing through. A few years ago, the ladies put a pine log wishing well on top of Jesse James’s deep dank well, a hanging basket full of fake flowers, like something out of a miniature golf course. Dave gets some work somewhere south of the city and leaves, promising the Musician that he’ll give us a call on his cell if he hears from Jesse. The Musician comes down the road and knocks on the door, looking for clues. Frank’s house burned in 1909, but the Musician reasons that maybe he left something at Jesse’s place, a hint, a tiny bag of gold. Think we could get down that well? he asks. He eyes the living room fireplace suspiciously and runs his finger along the mortar. Do you really think we’ll find it? I ask him. He straightens up, pushes his hand through his wild long hair. He looks more serious than I’ve seen him in years. For future generations. We need to find it, he says. What the hell are you talking about? He looks at me. I’m go
ing to be a father, he says, grinning like a sphinx. I’m forty-nine years old. I’ve never even dreamed of this.
At the start of October, Dave returns, unannounced, to sleep on the Musician’s floor. In the middle of the night he gets word from Jesse that he hasn’t been remembering correctly. Frank didn’t put it up on the ridge, Dave reports to us. He buried it in one of the fields near his house. The farm that Frank rented was sprawling, hundreds of acres along the creek. It took him days to plow, even with a team of good mules, even with a half-dozen hired hands. We abandon the ridgeline and come down into the valley. We start out from east to west with no regard for fences, property lines, NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING signs. We dig wherever Dave or the metal detector tells us to: In farmers’ fields, in people’s backyards. We dig up shale and limestone filled with crinoid fragments and brachiopods, the fossilized skeletons of creatures who inhabited Brown’s Ridge 500 million years ago, when we all would have been standing at the bottom of a shallow salty sea. We scare up a half-clothed teenage couple who spook out of the paw-paw like deer. I find an arrowhead, perfectly fluted. When the white man first came, the Indians would lure him into the woods by imitating animal sounds: at night, a fox or an owl; during the day, a squirrel, horse bells. Kaspar Brown was stalking what he believed to be a rutting buck the day that he was ambushed on the steepest part of the ridge.
Joe Guy stands in the gold light of his back field in late October, shading his eyes with one hand. The cows, some of them descendants of his father’s herd, the ones he bought back in 1969, have all been trucked to Alabama. A bobcat that he has watched all its life will spend a few weeks cowering under the construction foreman’s trailer until it streaks out of the pasture and into the hills. The sadness I feel when I see the backhoes moving in is much bigger than me. It seems to shadow the land with heavy wings. At the Meat ‘n’ Three, Lacy leans over the toilet in the back and throws up before her breakfast shift, holding her hair at the nape of her neck. Joe Guy comes in for one last breakfast, trying to fill a creeping emptiness. At least the house will stay in the family, he mutters, hunched at the counter over his coffee and eggs. Joe Jr.’s coming back for it, you know. When Lacy hears this she pauses, her heart pounding and full of new hope, stooped over the bleach bucket with a dripping rag.