by Ron Rash
“You guys hang out at your grandfather’s office much?”
“We work there, cleaning up mainly,” I said.
“I bet there’s plenty of sample packs laying around, something to mellow us out, like some Quaaludes or Valium. Bring some of those and I’ll show you how we party in the Sunshine State.” Ligeia paused and smiled. “Like your little brother saw last week, I can let it all hang out.”
There is no way we’re doing anything like that, I expected Bill to say, but instead he asked Ligeia’s age.
“How old do I look?”
“Eugene’s sixteen,” Bill answered. “I’d guess you’re at least a year older, maybe two.”
“I think I’ll keep you guessing about that and if I have feet or fins,” Ligeia said. “Some mystery always makes a chick more interesting, right?”
“What time will you be here on Sunday?” I asked.
“I’m here when I appear,” Ligeia answered.
She swam into the shadowy water beside the ledge, gave us a wink, and slowly sank. As her head disappeared, the long red hair fanned out on the surface. Then, like a night flower closing, it regathered and was gone.
“Come on,” Bill said, and we walked back to our pool. I reeled in the line to check the bait.
“Sounds like skinny dipping may be involved when they party in Florida,” Bill said.
“Last week, she didn’t know we were here,” I answered. “She’s wearing a bathing suit now that she knows someone else is around.”
“You don’t wear a bathing suit top like that unless you want to be looked at, little brother, though she could be like those summer girls at the pool. They want us to look so they can act stuck up like their parents.”
“I don’t think she’s like them,” I answered. “Her accent is but her words aren’t. They are more like, you know . . .”
“Like a hippie would use,” Bill said.
“She looks like one, the love beads and all.”
“Or pretending to be one, just to act like she’s cooler than us,” Bill said. “There are a couple of guys at Wake Forest who do that. They were jerks before they grew their hair out and they’re still jerks.”
“I don’t think she’s a jerk.”
“No,” Bill said, “but I hope she doesn’t get sick this summer. Can you imagine how the old man would react? Those beads with the peace sign alone would send him into orbit. I’m just glad he’s so pumped up on my becoming a surgeon. Otherwise, he’d say screw the high lottery number, you’re going over there anyway.” Bill paused, his voice mockingly stentorian. “You learn responsibility in war, boy.”
“He’d be glad to send me,” I said, “even if my number was three hundred and sixty-five.”
“Mom wouldn’t let that happen,” Bill said, and paused. “I wouldn’t either.”
A rod dipped and I reeled in a catfish. I picked it up carefully, avoiding the spiny fin that could slice a palm open. I freed the hook and threw the fish back into the pool.
“We’re coming back next week, aren’t we?” I asked.
Bill nodded.
“She’s right,” he said, “some whiskey would be nice.”
“There’s no way Mr. Jenson will sell it to you.”
“I know,” Bill said, “but if her parents are like most of these Florida folks, they have a well-stocked liquor cabinet. I bet she could sneak some out if she tried, at least enough for a couple of drinks, which is all we need anyway. I’m going to go ask her.”
But when we went downstream, Ligeia was gone.
“Let’s wait a few minutes before leaving,” Bill said. “I want to see who picks her up.”
We loaded up the truck, turned it around to face the gravel road.
“Where did she disappear to?” Bill asked after twenty minutes. “This road’s a dead end. There’s nothing after that but forestland.”
“Like I told you last week, she may have come from over the ridge. They could have a place on Chestnut Road.”
“Maybe so,” Bill mused. “When’s the last time you were up there?”
“A couple of years ago.”
“I haven’t been since high school. Back then it was nothing but trailers and farmhouses.”
“You know how those second homes are,” I said. “They can cover a ridge quick as kudzu.”
“Nice simile. Save that for one of your poems,” Bill said, cranking the truck. We bumped up the skid trail onto the gravel. “You know, little brother, being the shy sensitive artist only works on girls if they know you are shy and sensitive. If you just stare at them with your mouth open, they think you’re like Nebo. Comprende?”
“Ligeia’s interested in you, not me.”
“Well, she didn’t seem to be playing favorites, and if you’re her type, then good for you. After all, I’ve got Leslie, though she could just as well be on the moon this summer.”
“What about getting some samples out of Grandfather’s closet?” I asked.
“I’m still thinking about that,” Bill said as we turned onto the four-lane. “It’s not like he’d miss one sample. Those shelves are packed with more meds than the drugstore. And he and Shirley won’t be there on Saturday. But of course Nebo will be and you know how he is. Even if he’s not working he’ll hang around and check up on us.”
“I know,” I agreed.
“But it’s not like he can see through walls, right? As long as he’s outside, there’s no reason to worry.”
But I did worry. Like every child in Sylva, I’d grown up terrified of Nebo. He was over six feet tall, wiry, but with huge hands and a shaved head. He never wore a hat or cap, so in summer his skull reddened as if dipped in boiling water. He had to be, like Grandfather, in his early seventies, but Nebo was strong enough to carry a trash-filled fifty-five-gallon steel barrel to the curbside each Wednesday. But most unsettling was his silence. Nebo had arrived in Sylva a day after Grandfather returned from World War One, and he’d immediately moved into our grandfather’s guesthouse. The timing made many in town assume they’d met during the war, and that Grandfather had perhaps saved his life. There were no visible scars on Nebo but he walked with an odd gait, one leg half a beat behind the other. Some believed his muteness, like his hacking cough, had been caused by mustard gas.
Nebo occasionally worked for others, chopping wood, painting, but only with Grandfather’s permission. As if more golem than handyman, he waited between jobs on the office’s back porch steps, in one hand a long straight razor and in the other a whetstone. You could hear the breathlike rasping and, when he raised the blade to inspect the edge, see the honed steel blaze in the sunlight. His doing so precipitated more than a few children’s nightmares, including some of my own. And no doubt some adult nightmares as well, I suspect now, because Nebo had been present the December day in 1918 when our grandfather confronted the salesman. Many in town believed that later the same evening, the salesman’s final appointment was with Nebo.
“I can buy some beer and wine at that store,” Bill said as we passed a convenience store on the four-lane. “This far out of town Grandfather won’t find out, especially from a guy who hardly speaks English.”
“I think so too,” I agreed, “unless one of Grandfather’s patients is in there at the same time.”
“Yeah, I’d need to be careful about that,” Bill said, but then he slapped an open palm against the dashboard. “Damn it, I’m of age, so even if he does find out . . . But he won’t,” my brother said less harshly, giving me a glance. “So, little brother, are you a Pabst Blue Ribbon guy or into the fancy stuff like Heineken?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Come on, Eugene,” Bill chuckled. “Don’t tell me that you haven’t sneaked a few beers.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Not even one?”
“No.”
“What in the hell do you do all the time?” Bill asked incredulously. “You can’t read and write every minute. You don’t play sports or date or go
to movies. At least I figured you’d drink. Has there ever been a writer who didn’t drink?”
I’VE PASSED OUT in my chair and can’t get to the phone until the sixth ring. It’s not my brother but a telemarketer guaranteeing 25 percent off my car insurance. Not likely, I think. I check the stove’s clock and delete an hour because I don’t switch to daylight savings time. I want five o’clock to stay five o’clock. I dial the number again and get a recording that the office closes between noon and two. I could drive the fifty miles to Asheville, but there’s too much alcohol in me to risk it. So I wait in the front room, the newspaper on the couch, the front page still facedown. The little buffering the whiskey gave me has drained away and I feel the house’s hollowness. People don’t have to be dead to be ghosts, I think as I stare at the mantel. Except for one, the photos are dusty and light faded, but still discernible: Bill and I dressed for Easter. Another of Bill in his high school baseball uniform and, beside it, one of me at my Beta Club induction. To the left, my mother and father on their wedding day. And one more—my daughter Sarah’s photograph, the sole proof in this house that I once had a family. There is no scar above Sarah’s left eye because this is her tenth-grade class picture, taken two months before the accident. No photograph of my grandfather is on the mantel, nor ever has been, one of the rare opportunities my mother had to keep his presence outside our lives.
I will have my say in their upbringing, Grandfather told our mother. He always checked our report cards and when Bill made his one B in high school, the old man declared there’d be no med school unless Bill “did his part.” My two junior-year-end B’s in Chemistry I and French III brought threats that if I didn’t get into Wake Forest, by then his, my father’s, and my brother’s alma mater, he’d not pay for me to go elsewhere. Clothes, length of hair, where we could or could not go, Grandfather made those decisions.
But our mother had a subversive streak. For years she read to us every night, though she sensed early on that Bill, by temperament as much as Grandfather’s influence, had little interest in what existed only in the imagination. She made sure our bedroom bookshelves held as much fiction as nonfiction. Twain and Poe and London, then Hemingway and Steinbeck. She loved nineteenth-century novels, especially Austen and Dickens, but the book she cherished most was Look Homeward, Angel, a novel set just fifty miles from Sylva. I suppose it was selfish on my part encouraging you toward literature, my mother told me her last week alive, but it was as if your grandfather wished to erase any part of me in the both of you. He was a hard, intolerant man, overly pragmatic too, as such men almost always are. I wanted you and your brother to see there could be more within you, much more. And I succeeded, you first but eventually Bill too, though of course Leslie deserves more credit than I do. And yet, my mother said, if you had gone into medicine, your life . . .
My mother had stopped there, the only sounds the beeps and wheezes of machines measuring her ebbing life. When I asked if she wanted me to read more Wolfe or Austen, my mother nodded no and closed her eyes for a few minutes. It had exhausted her, this speaking of matters not spoken of before. A final act of tidying up, much the same as she’d made sure the house was swept and mopped, counters cleared of clutter, before leaving to enter the hospital—that is how I’ve come to view those last days I spent with her. But she knew some things cannot be tidied up.
That’s what novels so often get wrong, knowingly get wrong, my mother had said when she reopened her eyes. You make certain choices and you leave life never knowing if they were right or wrong. When your father died, I didn’t know how to go on. I knew raising Bill and you without him would be harder, but what I couldn’t bear was how much I missed your father. I couldn’t escape that feeling, not even for a few minutes. I loved him that much. At night when you and Bill were in bed, I’d cry myself to sleep. When Bill was at school and you were napping, I’d cry then too. There were mornings my body felt such a gray heaviness, I could barely rise from the bed, and I kept thinking, Tomorrow will be better, but it wasn’t. So one day I told myself that I must act as though your father was never in my life, that I wouldn’t look at pictures of him or read letters he’d written me. I wouldn’t talk about him, and if someone else did, I’d change the subject. I talked about him to you and Bill but never told you of how much I loved him and how much I missed him, or how much of your father I saw in you and Bill. I feared if I spoke of it, especially to you two, I’d never be able to hold the loss in again. I’d lie in bed and never get up. But now I believe perhaps I should have, that the worst thing was not speaking of how much I loved him, because even though your father was no longer alive, you’d know the love that brought you into this world was still alive in me, and so a part of him had not died.
When I’d reminded my mother that she had told me of that love on a rainy day in Asheville, she’d replied, Yes, and maybe too late, and not to Bill, only you. Maybe you were right not to have spoken of it before, I’d said. If you had been overcome by it, unable to leave bed, Bill and I would have been raised by Grandfather. Yes, but we’ll never know, will we? my mother responded, and nodded at the copy of Pride and Prejudice by her bedside. Austen knew these things. She understood why we need art.
Yet my mother was only partly correct about our not knowing. There are some choices you make and you do know, ever afterward, to your last breath—of course, these are only the wrong ones.
“Dr. Matney’s already with his first patient,” the receptionist tells me when I dial Bill’s office at 2:05.
“But you gave him my message?”
“Yes, Mr. Matney, I did.”
“Tell him I need to talk now.”
“He is with a patient, Mr. Matney,” the receptionist says, more brusquely.
“The patient can wait.”
“I will tell him after he’s finished with the patient.”
I hang the phone back on its wall mount. I’m one of the last people in the county without a cell phone or a computer, because I have no need for them. I keep the landline only in hopes of one day picking up the phone and hearing my daughter’s voice.
CHAPTER THREE
When I was three and Bill eight, our father fell from a tree stand while hunting in Tennessee. He died during an emergency operation in the county’s hospital. A botched surgery, Grandfather always claimed, though what, if anything, he based this on I never knew. At the time, we lived in Asheville, where my father was finishing up his residency. Our mother had grown up in Winston-Salem and she may have wished to return there to be near her family, but Grandfather convinced her to stay in Sylva. My mother’s relatives, all textile workers, could provide little of what he offered.
She was the first in her family to get a college degree, and it had not been easy. The lines of A’s on her high school report cards drew the resentment of other mill-village kids. Once she was at Greensboro College, extra jobs paid for what scholarships did not. Her first roommate made snide comments about her closet filled with bare hangers; her second offered hand-me-downs, which my mother said was worse. But in her junior year she met my father at a social, and they married during his first semester of medical school.
Perhaps it was always about loving my father, but how could my mother not have been relieved to know that by marrying a doctor she’d never have to scratch and claw for anything again. There’s nothing ennobling about being poor, she’d once told me. I’ve done what I can to keep you and your brother from learning that firsthand. And then there she was, a widow with two young sons. With an English degree from Greensboro, she could teach, but with Bill and me to raise it would mean teetering bank accounts and past-due bills, what she had known growing up but wanted to spare her children. Is it ungenerous to believe that she accepted her father-in-law’s offer as much for herself as her sons? I don’t think so. Only once, when Bill was thirteen and I eight, did our mother tell us to pack our belongings. We were leaving Sylva to live in Winston-Salem, she’d said. But we didn’t leave.
Grandfather n
ever spoke negatively to Bill and me about our mother’s background. He admired her determination, her “grit” in bettering herself. She knew what she had to do and she’d done it, he told Bill and me. Now, as his son’s widow, she need do nothing more than stay home and raise his two grandsons. Or be allowed to, I later realized, for when Grandfather died during my junior year at Wake Forest, my mother altered her life radically. My grandfather had willed the house to her and enough money to live comfortably, but he was barely in the ground when she began working part-time at the library and then full-time. She soon was dating a retired high school guidance counselor, which made me believe that part of Grandfather’s pact with her included not seeking a second husband.
You make choices in life and you must accept the consequences of those choices. Bill and I had heard Grandfather’s maxim often growing up, occasioned by everything from a toothache to a low grade. War confirmed this view, he said, and told us of a fellow soldier whose falling asleep on guard duty allowed a German to get close enough to toss a grenade in their trench. Three men in the squadron died and Grandfather lost half of two fingers, which, being on his right hand, ensured that he’d forever be a GP. None of the other soldiers spoke to that man in the days afterward, Grandfather claimed, even after he’d begged forgiveness and vowed it would never happen again. Ten days later during a counterattack, mustard gas canisters landed in their unit’s midst. The sleeping guard clamped on his mask, only to find the hose severed. He’d lost his sight and his lungs were cindered. It took a week for him to die. Which was as it should be, our grandfather told us, since it allowed the lesson to be thoroughly learned. Grandfather never said he’d cut the hose, but he did tell us that the other lesson war had taught him was how easy it was to kill a human being.
As I too almost learned.
She will probably walk with a slight limp the rest of her life, but all in all you should consider yourselves lucky. Another half inch and her femoral artery would have been cut. Then nothing could have saved her. We had been outside Sarah’s hospital room, the orthopedic surgeon, Kay, and me. Kay had gasped and raised a hand to her mouth. When I placed a hand lightly, tentatively, on her shoulder, Kay flinched at my touch. I looked into her eyes and what I’d seen there for months—anger, sadness, concern—was gone. She simply looked through me, and into a future where I didn’t exist.