by Ron Rash
Dedication
For George Singleton
Epigraph
And after that the punishment began.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Three Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Ron Rash
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown and bringing to light another layer of dark earth. Decades pass. She is patient, shelled inside the blue tarp. Each spring the water laps closer, paling roots, loosening stones, scuffing and smoothing. She is waiting and one day a bit of blue appears in the bank and then more blue. The rain pauses and the sun appears but she is ready now and the bank trembles a moment and heaves and the strands of tarp unfurl and she spills into the stream and is free. Bits of bone gather in an eddy, form a brief necklace. The current moves on toward the sea.
CHAPTER ONE
From the beginning, Ligeia’s ability to appear or disappear seemed magical. The first time, forty-six years ago, was at Panther Creek the summer before my junior year in high school. On Sundays after church and a lunch at our grandfather’s house, my older brother, Bill, and I changed into T-shirts and cutoff jeans, tossed our fishing gear into the ’62 Ford pickup Grandfather had bought us, and headed west out of Sylva. We’d cross the interstate, turn onto national forestland, and drive a mile down the gravel road bordering Panther Creek, rods and reels rattling in the truck bed as Bill veered onto an old logging trail. Soon tree limbs and saplings raked the hood and windshield. Then there was no longer a road, only a gap in the trees through which Bill wove until skidding to a stop.
Only two miles away, the Tuckaseegee River held larger trout and deeper swimming holes, but the trout and pools here were enough for us. Best of all, we had this section of stream to ourselves and wanted to keep it that way, which was why Bill parked where the truck could not be seen from the road. We made our way through a thicket of mountain laurel whose branches sometimes whipped back, marking us with welts and scratches. At the stream, we baited our hooks and cast upstream where the current slowed, forming a wide, deep pool. Bill and I set the rods on rocks, stripped to our cutoff jeans, and swam in the pool’s tailwaters. When a rod tip trembled, one of us got out to reel in what tugged the line. Often it was a knottyhead or catfish, but if a trout we gilled it onto our metal stringer. Grandfather enjoyed eating fresh trout and demanded we bring some back. Our mother rolled the fish in cornmeal and fried them for “the old man,” as Bill and I sometimes called him, though never to his face.
After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter’s level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I’d dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might create literature, I’d write a mediocre poem about those mornings in church and afterward the “baptism of nature.”
We’d caught five trout before Bill lifted the fish from the water, signaling it was time to go. Through a gap in the canopy, the declining sun brightened the stringer’s silver sheen, flared the red slashes on each trout’s flanks. A sloshing chandelier was how I described it to my mother that evening. Bill opened the Ka-Bar pocketknife that had once belonged to our father and locked the blade. Good practice, he said, given that after his upcoming year at Wake Forest he’d be heading to Bowman Gray, not to be a GP like our grandfather but a surgeon.
I was lifting a beach towel from the sand when I saw her.
“Someone’s downstream,” I said, “in the pool where the creek bends.”
“A fisherman?” Bill asked, and set down the trout he was gutting. The knife remained in his hand as he took a few steps downstream. “I don’t see anyone.”
“A girl,” I said. “She was in the pool, watching us, and then she dove underwater.”
“A girl?” Bill asked. “A child or ‘girl’ like somebody our age?”
“Our age.”
“In a swimsuit?”
“I don’t think she was wearing anything,” I answered.
“Nothing, even on her bottom half?”
“Nothing on the part I could see.”
“Was anyone with her?”
“I don’t think so.”
Bill set the knife on the sand.
“Well, let’s go look.”
But the pool lay empty, unrippled. No footprints indented the sand.
“You haven’t been sneaking into Grandfather’s office closet, have you, little brother?” Bill asked.
“She could have gotten out on the other side,” I said. On the far bank, surrounded by rhododendron, a granite slab long and wide as a shed door leaned into the stream. I pointed at a damp shadow. “It looks like water dripped on that rock.”
“A muskrat or otter could do that,” Bill said.
He walked downstream, saw nothing, and went through the woods far enough to scan the gravel road.
“I don’t see a vehicle,” Bill said when he came back. “So where did she come from, Eugene? Is she a mermaid who swam up from the Atlantic?”
“Someone might have dropped her off, or she could have come over the ridge. There are houses there.”
“Houses, not a nudist colony.” Bill laid a hand on my shoulder, firm enough that I couldn’t shrug it off. “We’ve got to get you a real girl so you won’t be dreaming one up.”
“Okay, forget it. I was wrong,” I said, tired of the teasing but also wondering if maybe I had imagined her.
BUT I HADN’T, and now, all of these years later, Ligeia has, once again, suddenly appeared, though this time not at Panther Creek but on the front page of our county newspaper, and looking no older than she did in 1969. A mermaid who hadn’t returned to the ocean after all, which is why I’ve broken my rule about drinking before five P.M. It is morning but an empty pint of Jack Daniel’s lies on the coffee table beside last night’s wine bottle. An hour ago I’d read the headline “Remains Identified as Jane Mosely,” refolded the newspaper, and set it facedown on the couch. Now I hope the whiskey buffers me enough to read the whole article. I crawled into that whiskey bottle and stayed there. Years ago, I’d heard those words on a Friday evening in the Sylva Methodist Church basement. I’d never thought of whiskey that way before, but it is what you seek—to be suspended in that amber glow. Seek but not always achieve, because this morning I can’t find my way to that place.
Bill’s office opens at nine. When the stove clock’s minute hand reaches its apex, I dial. The receptionist tells me my brother is in surgery.
“When will he get out?” I ask.
“It’s an emergency operation, Mr. Matney, so I can’t be sure.”
“Have him call me as soon as he returns.”
“I will make a note
of it,” the receptionist says.
“Does he have a cell phone or pager?”
“Your brother doesn’t answer calls during surgery, Mr. Matney.”
“You can at least leave him a message to call me, or give me the number and let me do it myself.”
For a few moments the line is silent.
“I will text him,” she huffs.
Someone at the hospital might know when Bill would finish, but I’d not be told over the phone. I’m not hungry, but eating gives me something to do while waiting, so I force down a bowl of cereal. Besides, alcohol and an empty stomach are never good. Never.
CHAPTER TWO
That summer Bill and I worked in our grandfather’s office weekdays from ten thirty to six, nine to noon Saturdays. We ran errands or answered the phone if Shirley, who served as both nurse and receptionist, was busy or at lunch, which left plenty of time to read books brought from home or the magazines scattered around the reception room. On call, our grandfather said, which also meant under his control. When Grandfather and Shirley left at five, Bill and I swept and mopped the floors, cleaned bathrooms and emptied wastebaskets, disinfected the counters and examination tables. The only strenuous work occurred on Saturdays when we waxed and buffed the floors. Since the office was closed, we had the place mostly to ourselves. Holding tight to the buffer as it skittered across the floor was like controlling a lawn mower on ice. Bill and I took fifteen-minute shifts, my arms gelid by the time it was done. Afterward, we’d rest briefly in the waiting room with the air conditioning blasting, then lock the door and enter the midday heat.
During the school year, Nebo, our grandfather’s mute handyman, did the office cleaning, but come summer he did yard work, as well as fixing leaky faucets, nailing down loose boards, painting, and whatever else Grandfather ordered him to do. On Saturdays while Bill and I worked inside, Nebo cut the office yard with an old side-wheel mower our grandfather refused to replace. Two or three times each Saturday, the mower blades paused and Nebo came inside for a drink of water but also to inspect our work, always pointing out any spot missed.
The salaries we received equaled that of more taxing jobs, such as working on a city grounds crew or at the local sawmill. Grandfather’s hiring Bill and me seemed further assurance of what he’d told our mother when the hunting accident left her a widow—that she and Bill and I would be taken care of. Grandfather owned the house we lived in and let us stay there rent free, all taxes and utilities paid. Our college would be paid for, braces and clothes, whatever other needs. As for the summer jobs, Grandfather could have given us the money outright, but as he told us, it was his duty to instill in us a sense of discipline and responsibility. The jobs fulfilled another purpose though—to keep Bill focused on becoming a surgeon. The office’s medical environment helped with that, but the work also kept Bill close to Sylva and away from Virginia, where his girlfriend, Leslie, was home from Wake Forest for the summer.
That Bill would become a surgeon had been decreed when he was still in elementary school. “Look at how he trims the fat off that roast,” Grandfather told our mother. “A natural-born surgeon and destined to be one of the best, just as I and his father would have been. And you, Eugene,” my grandfather added, smiling as he turned to me, “you’re not even using the correct hand. I don’t know of a single left-handed surgeon. Southpaws see things differently, which isn’t what you want from someone wielding a scalpel. It would not matter so much as a GP, but your mother insists on directing you toward more artistic pursuits.” For one of the few times I ever witnessed, our mother openly disagreed with her father-in-law. “No,” she’d replied quietly, “I merely wish my sons to follow their own interests.”
Grandfather’s attempts to shape our futures had started even earlier. The first Christmas present I remember was a black plastic doctor’s bag filled with a toy stethoscope and thermometer, a rubber hammer to test reflexes, and plastic scalpels much like picnic knives. There were children’s books about medicine, plastic human models with organs and veins. Early on, Grandfather took Bill to the office and on house calls for patients too elderly to leave home. Bill later claimed there wasn’t ever a time that he hadn’t thought of becoming a surgeon. But how could it have been otherwise?
Our grandfather continued to encourage me to think about a medical career, but only halfheartedly. I occasionally went to his office and on patient visits. If he showed Bill something under his microscope or explained a diagnosis, he might include me, perhaps thinking I might yet become one of the elect. Or perhaps it was a way to diminish my mother’s influence. But once Bill declared premed at Wake Forest, my grandfather never mentioned medicine to me again.
AFTER BILL’S TEASING about mermaids, the following Sunday I’d decided to stay home and read.
“Bring your book and come with me, Eugene,” he insisted. “I’ll lay off the mermaid crap and buy us some Pepsis to drink. All you’ll have to do is swim and read. I’ll tend the fishing lines.”
“All right,” I finally said.
When we arrived, I laid my towel on the sand and was about to open my paperback when Bill spoke.
“So she is real.”
Downstream, the girl I’d seen last week waded in the pool’s shallows, though this time she wore a green two-piece bathing suit. If she’d seen us, she wasn’t acting like it.
“Do you recognize her?” Bill asked.
“No.”
“She fills out that bathing suit nicely, don’t you think?” Bill said. “Maybe we should go introduce ourselves.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. Maybe she wants to be by herself.”
“Well, if she does, so be it, but it won’t hurt to find out,” Bill said, and as always, he led and I followed.
She saw us coming and plunged into the deeper water.
“Hey,” Bill shouted. “We just wanted to introduce ourselves.”
We’d run her off again, I figured, but when we got to the pool, she was on the stream’s opposite side. Her arms lay languidly on the rock shelf, head and shoulders out of the water, the green bikini top just under the surface. Her long red hair set off her aqua eyes and unblemished complexion. Close up, she looked younger, closer to my age than Bill’s. Bright beads circled her neck. Love beads, I knew they were called. Affixed to the beads was a penny-size peace symbol. She raised a hand and tucked her dripping hair behind her ears, exposing a pale crescent of breast. I looked away, feeling my face flush.
“What do you guys want?” she asked.
Her accent was that of the Floridians whose second homes dotted the nearby ridges.
“Just to say hello. I’m Bill and this is my brother, Eugene.”
She sank lower in the water, up to the necklace, all the while her eyes on us.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Bill asked.
“No, but I can tell you are,” she said, nodding at our cutoff jeans. “Did those used to be overalls?”
“We’re not hicks,” Bill said, his face reddening. “I’m a senior at Wake Forest and we live in Sylva, not out here. Our grandfather, he’s a doctor.”
“Hey, don’t get so uptight. I was just joking,” she said, then added in the same cool tone. “This grandfather of yours, is his office in Sylva?”
“Yes.”
“I can dig that,” she said.
“So where are you from?” Bill asked.
“Florida, Daytona Beach.”
“Are you here on vacation?”
“Only if you call being bored out of my damn mind for a whole summer a vacation.”
“So your family has a second home up here?” Bill asked, and when she didn’t answer, “How’d you get to the stream? I mean, did someone drop you off?”
“Can your brother talk?” she asked.
“Yes,” Bill said, turning to me.
“What’s your name?” I stammered.
“Ligeia.”
“That’s a nice name,” I said. “I’ve never known a
nyone called that before.”
“That’s the kind of name I wanted,” she said, “not some moldy old name like Jane.”
“Eugene saw you last week,” Bill said, and grinned. “He thought you might be a mermaid.”
“I did not,” I said, my face flushing yet again.
“Maybe I am one,” Ligeia said, looking only at me. “You haven’t checked out my bottom half yet, right?”
“I didn’t mean to do that,” I mumbled, “to see you, I mean.”
For a few moments no one spoke. Ligeia closed her eyes and eased under the water and then came back up. She ran a flat palm over her brow and opened her eyes wide, as if surprised that we were still there.
“If you want, you can come up to where we are,” Bill said. “It’s a bigger pool.”
“We’ve got some cold Pepsis,” I added.
“Drinking Pepsis,” Ligeia asked, “is that what you call a happening around here?”
“A happening?” I asked.
“A party, a good time,” Ligeia said, and looked at Bill. “You’re old enough to buy alcohol legal like, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t got anything stronger than Pepsi?”
“No,” Bill answered. “I mean, not with us.”
“Then I’ll hang out here.”
“Next time we could,” Bill said. “I’ll buy some beer.”
“I hate the taste of beer,” Ligeia said. “What about some whiskey, or pot?”
“If I was at school I could get whiskey,” Bill said, “but around here . . .”
“But there’s an ABC store in town?”
“Yeah, but buying some there wouldn’t be a good idea,” Bill answered, leaving it at that.
“Can you at least score a bottle of Strawberry Hill?” Ligeia asked. “It’s like drinking Kool-Aid but I can get it down.”
“I can get that,” Bill said.
Ligeia gazed past us a few moments, then looked down and touched the beads with her index finger, tracing them back and forth along the front of her neck. She resettled her forearms on the rock and looked at us.