by Chris Fabry
His voice has always been a cross between my father’s and a bear’s. He has a deep, resonant quality with an edge of authority, and I imagine tawny young men with shaved heads following him into the mouth of hell itself if he beckoned. Though I had tried to smooth out my upper-Southern accent, pronouncing i’s like “eye” instead of “ah,” he had done nothing to lose his. He always said the way he talked was fine and people up north sound “uppity,” and people down south sound like they talked around marbles.
“You reddy?” he said.
I sat up and snapped my eyes open. I didn’t recognize anyone in the station, and when I looked at the clock, I realized why. It had been three hours since I’d returned from reporting to the parole officer.
“Got the car double-parked. Come on before I get a ticket.”
I grabbed my Clarkston-issued overnight bag and followed.
Carson had that same familiar gait, like a farmer carrying a little too much on one shoulder, both feet striking the heel and going all the way to the toe. His arms dangled, and he moved with confidence. “You bring me anything? License plate or something?”
“That’s funny.”
“I’s just asking.”
“I brought you a present for every time you’ve visited in the last year.”
“This is it here,” he said as we reached the car. He opened the trunk, but I threw my bag in the backseat.
It had been years since I’d ridden in a car. The leather seats smelled new, and it felt good to stretch out. I’d seen this car in commercials, as sleek as a race car but a bit more practical. The front panel looked like a cockpit for a jumbo jet, and his audio player was placed in the radio compartment.
“This thing looks like it could cook your breakfast for you,” I said.
“Lots of things have changed since you went away. We have running water now. Can you imagine that?”
I smiled. “And you don’t have stripes on your shoulders. What happened?”
“My feet. The army nearly ran me to death, and my arches fell flatter than Susie Wilcox’s chest.”
Susie was one of Carson’s old flames. After they broke up, she was a target for criticism.
“How is Susie?” I said.
“She married some old boy out on Barker’s Ridge. Probably met him at the dog track on one of the days she wasn’t running. Heard tell she had a bunch of kids and got big.”
“How big?” I said, biting at his joke.
“Not sure, but they say she’s supersize now. I swear, Will, that girl was so bucktoothed she could eat a cantaloupe through a picket fence. Every time I kissed her, it felt like I was getting a tonsillectomy.”
One thing that did not come easy to Carson was the subtle put-down. I knew as long as we kept the conversation “out there,” among people of the community or in Congress or the military, we were all right. But there was always the point when we ran out of other people to talk about and he turned his salvos to our family.
“I need a drink,” I said, my throat parched like fire. “Not a drink drink, just something wet.”
He turned into a gas station near Cabell Huntington Hospital and filled up while I went in and bought a bottle of Mountain Dew. I had exactly $34 in cash and a check for the money I’d made working at the Clarkston heavy machine refurbishing plant. I had made about a dollar a day, but some of that was taken back because of fees. It was enough to get me started with a few months’ rent in some other town, away from the memories and the stares and the talk behind my back.
“Is Mama planning on me living with her for a while?” I said as we pulled away. “I assume she could use the help around the house.”
“You sure you want to take that on?” Carson shook his head. “Jenna has a hard time going near the place. Says it clogs her sinuses. She thinks there’re dust mites in that house older than we are.”
“She’s probably right.”
“Jenna offered to go over and do Mama’s hair for her since she doesn’t get out much. Told her she’d do the biggest dust mite’s hair for free.”
As I discovered, Jenna worked at Eula Johnson’s salon, the only one in town, if you didn’t count the barbershop where all the men got their hair trimmed if their wives didn’t do it for them.
“How is Jenna?” I said.
“Tolerable.” He merged onto the interstate, ascending the ramp and reaching the speed limit quickly—something I could never do in the car I drove here as a teenager. “We’ve had our share of problems, but . . .”
“But what?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. That’s all.”
“Anybody that would stay with you for this long deserves a combat medal.”
“You got that right.”
I looked for familiar sights along the road. When you’ve been away from home, especially in forced exile, you lose the signposts of place. It only took a few—one advertising the news team at Channel 3, another showcasing the shops at a new mall in the area. I saw the holy grails on the hillside—a Sam’s Club, the sacred shrine of life in the hills. My theory has always been that West Virginians like Wal-Mart because it returns them to their roots. Our grandparents and great-grandparents planned their trips to town, riding on wagons pulled by horses, then bought their supplies for the month. Wal-Mart is just another general store where you buy in bulk and prepare for the apocalypse.
Carson punched a couple of buttons, and classic rock filtered through the speakers. Grand Funk Railroad, the Who, Styx, and Kansas. The songs took me back to days running the interstate, living life as fast as I could, as if it might end the next day. I’d learned that speed and a little bad judgment can change life in drastic ways.
Carson turned the volume down on “Sweet Home Alabama.” “Looks like you stayed in pretty good shape inside. Little on the puny side, but Mama’s cooking will fatten you up.”
“Didn’t have much else to do except stay literate.”
“You make it out of there okay? You know, you didn’t get hurt or anything, did you?”
I had prepared myself for three questions. This was number one. He wanted to know if anyone had gotten to me, if I’d been violated by some inmate. “I did okay.”
“It’s harder when you go in young, I guess,” he said.
We passed a splattered opossum with its unmistakable long tail and sharp nose amid the viscera, blood, and intestines. On the hill above stood a white church, as familiar as Wal-Mart. The opossum almost looked like a sacrifice.
Two songs later Carson dropped the second question wrapped in a tone of concern. “You’ve got an uphill battle coming back here. I don’t know why you changed your mind about heading up to Morgantown, but people have been talking ever since they ran that newspaper story a couple of weeks ago. Mama can’t even set foot in Foodland. I have to drive her down to the Kroger in Barboursville because she thinks nobody will recognize her. Still, she wears sunglasses and a scarf.”
“I’m going to play it low-key,” I said evenly. “I promise not to put a sign around my neck that says, ‘I’m Will Hatfield. Hate me.’”
“You don’t have to wear a sign. Your face is enough to bring down the judgment of God for the people around here. I get enough of it at the office.”
“What do they say?”
“You hear it on the grapevine. Passed along at church picnics and bars and the produce section at Big Bear. How you really didn’t pay the price. That what you did deserved a lot worse than just being locked up a few years.”
I had prepared for this, but the words stung even worse coming from my brother. Not that I expected understanding and compassion.
“They’re saying that they’re gonna get justice their own way. That’s what bothers me the most. And Jenna . . .”
“What about her?”
“You know how it can be at a beauty salon. Those people talk it up like it was the second coming of Lucifer himself, you moving back here.”
“How would they know I’m coming back?”
Cars
on shook his head and waved off the question. “She comes home crying sometimes. Those people have judged us, tried us, and hung us a thousand times.”
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About me serving my time? Do you think I paid the price?”
“Aw, I’m not getting into it. That’s between you and the law. From that perspective, you’ve fulfilled every requirement they made. What you have to live with inside is another thing. I expect that’ll stick with you a long time. Longer than those people want to know.”
“Why did you come back?” I said. “You could have lived just about anywhere.”
Carson turned off the music and we rode in silence. The verdant hills rolled past like postcards of our youth, and it seemed he was loading his cannon and aiming at something. When he had the target in sight, he began.
“This place is in my soul, deep down to the bone.” He cursed. “It’s like some people look at Jerusalem or Mecca or one of those Middle Eastern countries where they make their women cover their faces with towels or veils or whatever. That’s what this is—a hillbilly holy place. Doesn’t matter how far I traveled, Europe or Africa or South America or Asia—what a hole that place was—I always knew I’d come back here, being close to Mama and Daddy and the family. The whole screwed-up, dysfunctional family.”
I had never seen Carson so impassioned, unless it concerned sports or his beer brewing. He was an amateur brewer and had mixed his hops and barley in our garage when he was eighteen. How he kept it a secret from my mother is one of the mysteries yet to be unraveled. He didn’t keep it a secret from our father because he and Dad had taste tests and even entered competitions until Carson went to college.
“I’ve never tasted a tomato better than one grown in Uncle Luther’s garden,” Carson continued. “I’ve never seen a hillside you can put seed into year after year and watch it grow the sweetest corn, the greenest, most delicious beans this side of heaven. I’ve been to Paris—what an awful, rat-infested slum that place is. They took us to Versailles and let us walk around in gardens with every imaginable flower in the world, and I tell you it doesn’t hold a candle to those three weeks in fall when the leaves burst into a rainbow along the hills around here. It’s like living at the end of the yellow brick road.”
We passed another exit and a blighted strip of homes. “Bet Versailles didn’t have as many trailers. Or liquor stores.”
“This place owns me lock, stock, and barrel, Will. And I own it—we’ve got a big piece of it coming to us, you know. The roots go deeper than any ocean on the planet. I don’t want to live in any city you could name. I don’t want to live down south, where the bugs are bigger than our dogs or cats. I don’t want to live out west, where the earthquakes and mudslides bring houses down or the Midwest, where tornadoes chase you into hiding. Name me one place on God’s green earth that’s better than right here and I’ll kiss your rear at midfield at the next Super Bowl.”
“Only if I get to sing the national anthem too,” I said.
The closer we came to the Milton exit, the tighter my shoulders became, a slow-moving ache that coursed through my body. I sensed a shortness of breath, as if I were climbing into the thin air of an unwelcome mountain.
“That’s the way I feel about this place,” Carson said. “But no matter how much I love it, if I had your history and if the people there would rather see me dead—”
“You think that’s what they want?”
“Some of them, sure.”
I wanted to say I’d fallen in love with an Appalachian girl and that truth pushed me forward. I wanted to tell him I was a soldier on a mission, a ranger dropped behind enemy lines whose only weapon was my love for Karin and that I would leave no comrade behind. He would understand that word picture. Instead, I sat, silently listening to the unnerving quiet of his car. We had to yell at each other to be heard in every vehicle I could remember from my childhood, but this was pure silence.
“After Dad died,” Carson said, “I thought a lot about you. How close you two were. I think he always felt bad about your foot, that he had caused it.”
“Wasn’t him. It was my cold thumbs.” I asked what the funeral service was like.
“Terrible. It’s hard enough to take it in yourself, but to hear Mama wail like that and have to be carried out to the hearse, I almost wished I was with you that day.”
“I could have used the company.”
“You hear about Elvis?”
Arron Spurlock was someone I’d tried to stay in contact with while I was in Clarkston. He was a year older but had been held back in the third grade. We were instant friends. I’d tried to help him with his homework, and he’d tried to get us kicked out of school.
One hot Fourth of July when it hadn’t rained for weeks, Arron lugged a five-gallon bucket full of fireworks to a field near our house. It was mostly cherry bombs and firecrackers and a few bottle rockets. He challenged a group of us to help him light the whole batch at one time, but none of us would bite. Elvis cursed us, and because of his father, he had a pretty good repertoire. He crumpled up some newspaper, set it on fire, and walked over to the bucket while we watched from the hillside.
“That boy’s gonna blow himself up,” Carson said.
He wasn’t far off. The explosion knocked Elvis back, and everybody laughed but me. The fire in the field spread quickly. By the time I got to him, his clothes were ablaze. I dragged him to the creek, coughing and sputtering through the smoke and heat. I can still hear his screams. Carson ran and called the fire department. I thought Elvis was dead because he was just lying in the trickle of water, smoldering. You could smell his burned skin from the field, and the firemen made us go home so they could care for him.
Elvis carried the scars of that day on his body. It took months for him to walk again, but he did. And every time he came around the corner of the road, walking to our house for a pickup game of football or baseball or just to have a watermelon seed–spitting competition, he’d be singing “Hound Dog” or “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Heartbreak Hotel.” You could hear his voice ring off the mountains, a bit off-key, but still alive.
“He’s not in trouble again, is he?” I said.
“No, he just disappeared. They put out a missing person’s report on him, but there’s been no word. I’m figuring somebody gave him a recording contract.”
Carson told me where Elvis had been working and about his exploits. A DUI two years ago and a breaking and entering at his former boss’s house. (Elvis claimed the man hadn’t paid him his wages when he quit, so he broke in and took a few items for fair compensation. After Elvis returned the items and fixed the broken window, the man decided not to press charges.)
I was enjoying the conversation because it didn’t focus on me. “Any idea where he might have gone?”
Carson shook his head. “Every time I saw him at the gas station he’d ask about you and when you were getting out. Said he couldn’t wait to go fishing or hunting with you. You hear anything from him?”
“He came up a couple of times, but I don’t think he liked being inside Clarkston. Reminded him too much of what could happen.”
“It’s a big mystery around town. The Exxon station had a devil of a time finding somebody to replace him. Say what you want about his character but he was a wonder with a wrench and a socket set.” Carson exited the interstate where I remembered gas stations and the Mountaineer Opry House. There was now an adult bookstore and more gas stations.
My head ached as the light faded to the west. “Before we go home, could you run me by the cemetery?”
Carson looked at his watch and gave me a furtive glance. “Sure thing.”
It wasn’t until we were on a two-lane country road that ran deep into my history that Carson asked the third question. He mentioned Karin as “that girl you liked.”
But before he could continue, I held up a hand and let him know this was the only No Trespassing sign I had erected. The hunting i
n the rest of the forest of my history was open, but this section was posted. “I don’t want to talk about her, okay?”
His face softened, as if some measure of understanding had invaded his heart. “You’re not holding on to that, are you? Tell me you’re not coming back for her.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Will, she’s—”
“I know everything you know and more,” I said, the emotion welling up and overtaking the tightness. “I know, okay?”
Like a persistent lineman, he wouldn’t give up. “I’m just trying to keep you from more heartache. That girl—”
I whirled in the seat and grabbed his right arm in a death grip.
Carson overcompensated and jerked the wheel left, weaving into the next lane. A horn honked and rose in volume as we locked eyes. He finally swerved back, regaining control and narrowly missing a pickup that ran off the road and threw gravel and dust into the air.
“Are you crazy?” he shouted. “You almost got us killed.”
I stared, jaw clenched. “I’m asking one thing. You don’t have to like it that I’m here. You don’t have to pretend you’re glad to see me or make your wife keep quiet about me, which I know she won’t do. But you will not talk about Karin. It’s a closed subject. You understand?”
“It’s your life. You want to throw it away, go ahead. You seem to have done a pretty good job of that, little brother.”
A graveyard, particularly one in a small town, provides more than a plot of ground to place remains. It endows a history to its residents, a memorial of the past and their place in it. Years ago people came to graveyards to remember, to honor. Graveyards are not as popular today. Perhaps we’re too busy to remember or the exercise is too painful. Perhaps it’s simply not convenient for our fast-paced society. But I suspect most people don’t care as much. We have chosen to shun the pain of the past and ignore the dead, as if they can’t see what we’re doing with our lives and their legacy.