Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing

by Lydia Peelle

  B. J. Woodson and J. D. Howard used to ride their horses down the Pike and across the river on Saturdays, taking the Hyde’s River Ferry and kicking up dust. Just across the Cumberland, in a floodplain at the bend of the river, was the racetrack where they used to spend their hours, Frank always anxious to get back to the farm, Jesse always convincing him to stay longer. The flat alluvial deposits of the land, the silt and fine-grained sand, made it an ideal place to run horses. Seventy years later, it made it the obvious spot to build the Cumberland County airport, and when they built the run-ways they dug up hundreds of horseshoes and coins. When the airport moved out to the interstate in the eighties, the floodplain became the MetroCenter Mall: a movie theater, vast parking lots, elaborate fountains. Since it went bankrupt a few years ago it’s been all but abandoned, save for one former shoe store at the back, facing the river, that has been converted to the State Democratic Headquarters: Some interns and a couple of laptops, without even a prayer. You can see it from the top of the ridge, this white elephant, and if you know how to look you can see the palimpsest of the land clearly, the story written on top of story written on top of rubble and bone.

  Sometimes I don’t know where Dave gets it from. He takes things he hears here and there and cobbles them all together into one unified theory of Armageddon. He pushes his greasy black hair from his face, rolls a joint, takes Isaiah from his pocket. The earth is utterly broken down, he reads . The earth is moved exceedingly. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled. It shall reel to and fro like a drunkard. If this is true, we ask him, why is he bothering to dig for buried treasure? If we strike it rich, he says, I can buy my girl a Greyhound ticket out from Cali. Get a fuck before the end of the world. The Musician rolls his eyes behind Dave’s back. We have spent long hours debating the existence of this girl. If you spend enough time with Dave, it is hard to keep track of what is true. I do know this: I haven’t believed in God since the 1960s. These days I’m not sure what I believe in at all, save the law of the conservation of matter, which means everything is made of what came before: the shrapnel of the big bang runs through my veins, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the cells of the bones and shit of every man, woman, or cockroach that walked this earth before me.

  Years ago we held huge parties up at the Musician’s cabin. We’d roast a pig, plug in the amps, invite loads of music industry people who would drive up from the city, get trashed out of their skulls, and wake up in the morning next to a stranger on the cabin floor. Back then there was no Minute Mart, and people brought beer and liquor in huge metal coolers, not to mention sheets of acid, coke, all the heroin you could ask for. The Musician slept with second-rate country singers and girls just off the bus from Huntsville or Tuscaloosa who were headed for Music Row. I would lock myself in the bathroom with a producer or two and try to slip free of my mind. When my veins started to fall apart, I shot up between my toes. After the stroke, I realized that the world is much bigger than I’d ever before imagined, and that it will close up seamlessly on my absence, like water over a sinking stone. This is the most important thing I know. Walking with Greenup Bird one morning along the creek, I saw him shove his nose into a tangle of thorns. He pulled it out, looked up at me with a startled face, then opened his mouth, and a tiny sparrow flew out from between his teeth and disappeared into the trees.

  November comes, and the woods get gray. The leaves crumple into fists. On his good days, the Musician is talking in ten-year plans, stocks, mutual funds. When we find the treasure, he says, first thing I’m doing is getting a mutual fund. On his bad days, he leaves the metal detector hanging on a hook near the door and drinks himself to sleep in the cabin. Dave’s friend’s cousin gave him a quart jar of peach-flavored moonshine, and he passed it on to the Musician. Dave quit drinking when he found religion, and he knows I won’t touch the stuff now. The Musician will do anything that’s handed to him. The moonshine is colored with Kool-Aid and he wakes up on his couch with pink drool stains like fangs at the corners of his mouth. Late one night, Joe Guy Jr. comes back to Brown’s Ridge. He drives down the Pike in a new Ford truck, just like his father’s, and brings a tape measure to plan how he will furnish the big house, which is already in a choppy sea of broken ground. Lacy wakes up when she hears the distant sound of the truck’s big engine and knows, deep in her blood, that it is him. The Musician, when he hears about Joe Jr.’s return the next morning at the Minute Mart, doesn’t yet have any reason to think twice about it.

  Frank James loved Brown’s Ridge, because he could do an honest day’s work here. He could spend ten hours behind the plow and have nothing to hide when he fell exhausted into bed next to his wife. He stopped cussing and joined the church. He befriended the Nashville policemen. Frank was always the level-headed one, Dave says. Jesse tells me that all those years on the road, his brother was really just along for the ride. Just before he leaves for Florida, we run into Joe Guy at the Minute Mart, buying bread and milk. I seen you boys out there in the field, he says, not unkindly. What are y’all doing out there? The Musician looks down at the toe of his boot. Not your worry now, is it? he snaps, taking a swig from a forty in a brown paper sack. Joe nods. It is not his fault, not really. He’s just a tired old man. I think I know how he feels.

  Joe Guy isn’t long gone by the time phase one of Apple Orchard Acres is up. One day it’s just a handful of foundations and the next the first families are moving in from the city, bringing boxes of appliances and purebred dogs. The yards are still open sores of fill dirt and truck ruts. The new families plant spindly dogwood trees next to the broad stumps of the hackberries and tie them to stakes with string. They install aboveground pools along the creek line and put out poison meat for the coyotes. I lock up Greenup Bird at home and go out with a garbage bag to collect as much of it as I can, then burn it in the woodstove. The streets of the development are named after apples, part of the orchard theme. Gala Court, Macintosh Way, Granny Smith Drive. I didn’t know that Joe Guy ever had apple trees here, the Musician says. He didn’t. He had Holsteins, and before that it was a tobacco field, and before that, who knows, a Shawnee hunting camp, a battleground in some long forgotten war. Well, what do names mean, anyway? the Musician asks. Quite a lot, I think. They used to tell a story. Fred Profitt built a road up his holler in 1957 and we still call it Fred Profitt Road. When the city came around to put up street signs, Jim Harnell named the road up to his place Schlitz Lane. Hyde’s Ferry Road dead-ends at the river, and most people don’t think to wonder why, now that the boat and landing are gone. Last year I gave Lacy a dog I found on the Pike, a big scary boxer that she feels safer coming home to. She gave me directions to her house so I could drop him off, up on Bear Hollow Road, where in 1873 a man named Zeb Mansker shot and killed a black bear, then covered its hide in salt and left it in his pasture for his cows to lick and rasp clean of flesh. It’s the third house on the left, she told me. If you don’t count the trailers.

  No one in Brown’s Ridge, as far as I know, remembers the girl for whom Katy Creek is named, but I like to think of her, a plain, dark-eyed girl with a temper, and secrets. Downstream, where the water widens before emptying into the big brown Cumberland, there’s a one-lane bridge over a stretch that’s deep enough to swim in. In the summer the kids jump off the bridge, hollering and whistling. They all know it’s okay to jump off the west side of the bridge, but not the east. Rumor has it there’s a Pinto rusting underwater just to the east, and you could slice your foot off, or impale yourself, or worse. It’s wisdom that’s been passed down through years among the kids: Not there, they tell the younger ones . There’s a Pinto down there, not there. That’s where the Pinto is, the Pinto, the Pinto. The kids at this point probably have no idea that a Pinto’s a kind of car, but then again, the kid who drove it off the bridge twenty-five years ago probably had no idea that a pinto’s a kind of horse.

  In December two things happen: Brown’s Ridge Baptist paves a brand-new parking area, and Lacy’s baby starts to show.
Every Sunday, more and more people file through the doors of the church in search of salvation. Preacher Jubal rubs his hands together and says, You are all welcome, then looks around and pauses, troubled, struck by the fact that he’s never seen a black face in the congregation before. After the service he walks to the Meat ‘n’ Three and orders coffee and a slice of pecan pie. Why don’t I see a nice girl like you in church? he asks Lacy. Then to no one in particular, She’ll make a good mother. Even to a bastard child. Joe Guy Jr. eats supper there every night. He eats with his eyes on Lacy, measuring her the way he is measuring the new furniture he will buy for his father’s house. She hums and checks to see if the soup in the Crock Pot is hot with her thumb. When she was sixteen, Joe Jr. took Lacy up to one of the shacks on the ridge side and laid her down on the yellowed newspaper and broken glass. In that moment on the ridge, Lacy gritted her teeth and saw clearly what her life was meant to be. Joe Jr. will live in his father’s old house, strange among the new brick mansions, and drive every day to Nashville to his job at a used car lot. For the past two years, in the dark of her bedroom at night, Lacy has silently moved her lips and wished for his return, the closest she has ever come to praying.

  Dave reads from Isaiah as we hike past the new houses, heading to the edge of the creek. The streams shall be turned into pitch, and the dust into brimstone, and the land shall become burning pitch. For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance. The Musician turns around and says, Oh, shut up. I’ve got more important things to worry about. When we pass, the dogs in the new yards throw themselves against the ends of their chains. The houses are enormous, windows piled on windows, pink brick. Every single family that has moved into Apple Orchard Acres has been black, a fact that neither Joe Guy nor any of the developers could have predicted. Haven’t those people been fighting all these years to get out of the country? Jubal Cain asked the crowd at the Meat ‘n’ Three. Why do they want to come back? The Musician can’t get any work laying tile, even in the new houses. The detail work has all been subcontracted out to Mexicans who come up from Nolensville Pike in the backs of crowded pickups. Look right here, Dave says, jabbing at the pages of Isaiah. Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vine-keepers. It’s all in here, he says. He shakes the Musician’s arm . Are you sure you should take that all so literally? the Musician asks him. He’s been talking about playing music again, going back out on the road, calling some old friends. Anything to make a little money. He hasn’t had work for weeks and we are all living on dried beans and peanut butter. But no new band is going to hire a fifty-year-old bass player, even if he has played with Clint Black and George Strait.

  The black families keep coming, moving out from Jefferson Street and Charlotte Avenue. They want a half-acre yard, a three-car garage, no more screaming neighbors. The first night they spend in their new houses, the smell of fresh paint curling their noses, they hold each other and vow to lose twenty pounds, to argue less. Preacher Jubal sits in the Meat ‘n’ Three and says to the four or five white men eating there, Now wait a minute, brothers, is this how we want our town to grow? Lacy gets so big that she can’t bend over to wipe the tables, so she leans over and wipes them behind her back. She sits down with us, blows her bangs up from her forehead. You boys been up to much? she asks. In her face it’s plain that she’s quit expecting anything from the Musician. Not much, he says, eyes on her belly, grinning. When he finds the treasure, he’s going to come for her at work and take her in his arms, tell her he can give her and the baby anything they need. Until then, he’s not letting on to anything. He wants it to be a surprise. While we drink coffee, the Musician leafs through a Pennysaver, and among the ads for grave plots and truck caps he finds one for a new metal detector, STATE OF THE ART, LCD DISPLAY, $500, OBO. No, I say. Yes! he says, slapping his hand down on the table. Surveyors’ stakes go up in the field across from my house. We find orange tape around the hackberry trees, which can mean only one thing. Good God, the Musician says. It’s all going. He takes off his hat and rakes back his hair. They’re coming out here for the same reason we did, aren’t they? I nod my head yes. For peace.

  Dave disappears for three days, then comes up to the cabin to tell us we are close. He had a dream that told him so. It’s right under our noses, he says. All day long, the Musician has been calling friends looking for loans, and he’s flat out on the couch, exhausted, his eyes bloodshot and glazed. Really? he says halfheartedly, but still feels moved to sit up and crack a beer. Greenup Bird lies in the corner with his head on his paws and follows us with his eyes. My girl’s comin’ out, Dave says. I talked to her last night. She says the end may come sooner than we think. He puffs a joint, examines the glowing tip, hands it to the Musician. I think it’s gonna come on real slow, he says. Then hit like an atom bomb. He smacks his hands together. Lacy parks behind the Minute Mart with Joe Jr., who is making wild promises with his hand between her legs. But he’s not yours, Lacy tells him, for the hundredth time, but he doesn’t care. He looks into her tired eyes and feels not love, but a flutter of anticipation, which for him is close enough to it.

  Jesse James liked it well enough here, but he was always anxious to get back to traveling. Frank loved this place, and would have stayed forever. He loved the life of B. J. Woodson, simple, honest, repetitious . I don’t know how he did it, settled down like that after a life on the road, the Musician says . I could never do that. Frank and Jesse and their band, all living in the area under assumed names, met at twilight at the saloon, drinking beer and watching the hills light up with the setting sun. All through the spring, without anyone knowing it, Lacy and the Musician were walking up into the back pastures of Joe Guy’s farm, making love on a blanket and afterwards picking seed ticks off one another, laughing. He told her stories of his travels, meeting Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia, and she listened with her afternoon eyes half-closed and probably wished she knew him back in the day, when he was twenty years younger. On the coldest day of January, the Musician drives past the Meat ‘n’ Three and sees the big Ford parked outside. He slows and sees the two of them through the steamed plate glass door, Joe Jr. leaning across a table, Lacy’s chair pushed back to make room for her enormous belly. Without thinking he cuts the engine and pulls over to watch them, panic knocking around in his chest, his fingernails gouging deep crescents in the steering wheel.

  The next morning I look out my window and the stakes in the field across the Pike are gone, vanished, and the field looks exactly as it did before, exactly as it has for the past few hundred years, the sparrows rising and falling over it like breaths, the trees’ shadows spreading out around its edges. Greenup Bird and I take a slow walk around the perimeter and hear deer footsteps in the water of the creek. For an hour or so, I think that it may be spared. Then in the late morning I hear a thunderous thud and I look out the window to see an army of earthmovers. The house shakes. Greenup howls and scratches his nails along the wood floors. My coffee shudders in its mug. I take a deep breath and try to be fluid, like the creek. In the evening the Musician comes down, knocks on the door all wild-eyed. Time’s up, he says. We got to get in there before they do. We strap on headlamps and start to dig, not waiting for Dave to show up. We go haphazardly, without even the metal detector, the Musician throwing shovelfuls of soil over his shoulder like a madman. As we dig, Lacy is sitting with Joe Jr. on the wide bench seat of his Ford, eating a bucket of fried chicken. The grease makes the baby turn somersaults. Feel, she says to Joe Jr. and puts his hand on her belly. He looks into her eyes and says, We’ll name him Joe Guy the Third.

  All through the cold night the Musician digs. He is now only casting about, digging a foot here, a few inches there, trying to sniff it out. Greenup Bird whines and follows him, nosing at each hole when he leaves it. Dig, Greenup, dig! he shouts. Greenup whines and scrapes at the holes with his claws, tags jingling. I huddle in my jacket and doze on and off. When I wake I know where they are by the white clouds of their breat
h. The Musician digs until morning, leaving craters behind him, cursing Frank and Jesse James. He drops to his knees alongside Greenup and digs with his hands, his fingernails bloody. Still he finds nothing. His son or daughter, like all babies in the womb, turns its head away from the light when Lacy sits down in the weak January sun to smoke her first cigarette of the day. A possum hit on the side of Brown’s Ridge Pike slowly decays, picked at by crows and ants, until it is just a spine like a zipper, nothing more. Dave’s girlfriend calls to tell him it’s too late, she’s not coming, not unless he comes up with the money. The Musician goes to the Meat ‘n’ Three before they open for breakfast and kneels in front of Lacy, begging her to wait. Trust me, he says. I will give you and this baby everything you need.

  We keep digging. There is nothing else for us to do. The houses will go up fast, concrete foundations that are bound to shift in this floodplain soil, some drywall and some fake brick siding, and just like it happened at Joe Guy’s, in a month there will be a row of houses where there were none before, lined up along the Pike like pigs at a trough. The creek will continue to flood every spring, and people will wake up to find their backyards full of crawdads and catfish. There will be streetlights, turning lanes, stoplights. In time people will want a Chili’s. They will want a Sonic, a Jack in the Box, an Auto Zone, a Piggly Wiggly, a Ruby Tuesday’s. A McDonald’s will go up at the crossroads, and the Meat ‘n’ Three will close. A bobcat’s den will be bulldozed away for a store that sells hair extensions and curling irons. The coyotes will root through Dumpsters for a few years before they are run off to the north, howling as they go. Lo, Dave says, clutching the book of Isaiah . There will be burning instead of beauty. Ruby Tuesday, the Musician says, resting on his shovel for a moment, the haze in his mind parting. Isn’t that a song?