As night fell, they watched a display of fireworks color the sky, and then the group climbed in the Hudson and headed out of town. They had just passed the courthouse when Lou asked Cotton about the mayor’s speech and his muted reaction to it.
“Well, I’ve seen this town go boom and bust before,” he said. “And it usually happens when the politicians and the business types are cheering the loudest. So I just don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different this time, but I just don’t know.”
Lou was left to ponder this while the cheers of the fine celebration receded and then those sounds were gone entirely, replaced with wind whistling through rock and tree, as they headed back up the mountain.
There had not been much rain, but Louisa wasn’t worried yet, though she prayed every night for the skies to open up and bellow hard and long. They were weeding the cornfield, and it was a hot day and the flies and gnats were particularly bothersome. Lou scraped at the dirt, something just not seeming right. “We already planted the seeds. Can’t they grow by themselves?”
“Lot of things go wrong in farming and one or two most always do,” Louisa answered. “And the work don’t never stop, Lou. Just the way it is here.”
Lou swung the hoe over her shoulder. “All I can say is, this corn better taste good.”
“This here’s field corn,” Louisa told her. “For the animals.”
Lou almost dropped her hoe. “We’re doing all this work to feed the animals?”
“They work hard for us, we got to do the same for them. They got to eat too.”
“Yeah, Lou,” said Oz as he attacked the weeds with vigorous strokes. “How can hogs get fat if they don’t eat? Tell me that.”
They worked the hills of corn, side by side under the fierce sun, which was so close it almost seemed to Lou that she could reach up and pocket it. The katydids and crickets scraped tunes at them from all corners. Lou stopped hoeing and watched Cotton drive up to the house and get out.
“Cotton coming every day and reading to Mom is making Oz believe that she’s going to get better,” said Lou to Louisa, taking care that her brother did not hear her.
Louisa wielded the hoe blade with the energy of a young person and the skill of an old. “You right, it’s so terrible bad having Cotton helping your momma.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I like Cotton.”
Louisa stopped and leaned on her hoe. “You should, because Cotton Longfellow’s a good man, none better. He’s helped me through many a hard time since he come here. Not just with his lawyering, but with his strong back. When Eugene hurt his leg bad, he was here ever day for a month doing field work when he could’ve been in Dickens making himself good money. He’s helping your ma ’cause he wants her to get better. He wants her to be able to hold you and Oz agin.”
Lou said nothing to this, but was having trouble getting the hoeing down, chopping instead of slicing. Louisa took a minute to show her again, and Lou picked up the proper technique quickly.
They worked for a while longer in silence, until Louisa straightened up and rubbed at her back. “Body’s telling me to slow down a bit. But my body wants to eat come winter.”
Lou stared out at the countryside. The sky looked painted in oils today, and the trees seemed to fill every spare inch with alluring green.
“How come Dad never came back?” Lou asked quietly.
Louisa followed Lou’s gaze. “No law say a person got to come back to his home,” she said.
“But he wrote about it in all his books. I know he loved it here.”
Louisa stared at the girl and then said, “Let’s go get us a cool drink.” She told Oz to rest some, and they would bring him back some water. He immediately dropped his hoe, picked up some rocks, and started heaving and whooping at each toss, in a manner it seemed only little boys could successfully accomplish. He had taken to placing a tin can on top of a fence post and then throwing rocks at it until he knocked it off. He had become so good that one hard toss would now send the can flying.
They left him to his fun and went to the springhouse, which clung to one side of a steep slope below the house and was shaded by leaning oak and ash trees and a wall of giant rhododendrons. Next to this shack was a split poplar stump, the tip of a large honeycomb protruding from it, a swell of bees above that.
They took metal cups from nails on the wall and dipped them in the water, and then sat outside and drank. Louisa picked up the green leaves of a mountain spurge growing next to the springhouse, which revealed beautiful purple blossoms completely hidden underneath. “One of God’s little secrets,” she explained. Lou sat there, cup cradled between her dimpled knees, watching and listening to her great-grandmother in the pleasant shade as Louisa pointed out other things of interest. “Right there’s an oriole. Don’t see them much no more. Don’t know why not.” She pointed to another bird on a maple branch. “That’s a chuck’s-will-widder. Don’t ask me how the durn thing got its name, ’cause I don’t know.” Finally, her face and tone grew serious.
“Your daddy’s momma was never happy here. She from down the Shenandoah Valley. My son Jake met her at a cakewalk she come up for. They got married, way too fast, put up a little cabin near here. But I know she was all set for the city, though. The Valley was backward for her. Lord, these mountains must’ve seemed like the birth of the world to the poor girl. But she had your daddy, and for the next few years we had us the worst drought I ever seen. The less rain there was, the harder we worked. My boy soon lost his stake, and they moved in with us. Still no rain. Went through our animals. Went through durn near everything we had.” Louisa clenched her hands and then released them. “But we still got by. And then the rains come and we fine after that. But when your daddy was seven, his momma had had enough of this life and she left. She ain’t never bothered to learn the farm, and even the way round a frying pan, so’s she weren’t much help to Jake a’tall.”
“But didn’t Jake want to go with her?”
“Oh, I ’xpect he did, for she was a real purty little thing, and a young man is a young man. They ain’t ’xactly made’a wood. But she didn’t want him along, if you unnerstand me right, him being from the mountains and all. And she didn’t want her own child neither.” Louisa shook her head at this painful remembrance.
“Course, Jake never got over that. Then his daddy died soon after, which didn’t help matters none for any of us.” Louisa smiled. “But your father were the shiny star in our days. Even with that, though, we watched a man we loved die a little more each day, and there weren’t nothing we could do. Two days after your daddy was ten years old, Jake died. Some say heart attack. I say heartbreak. And then it was just me and your daddy up here. We had us good times, Lou, lot of love twixt us. But your daddy suffered a lotta pain too.” She stopped and took a drink of the cool water. “But I still wonder why he never come back not once.”
“Do I remind you of him?” Lou asked quietly.
Louisa smiled. “Same fire, same bullheadedness. Big heart too. Like how you are with your brother. Your daddy always made me laugh twice a day. When I got up and right afore I went to bed. He say he want me begin and end my day with a smile.”
“I wish Mom had let us write you. She said she would one day, but it never happened.”
“Like to knock me over with a stick when the first letter come. I wrote her back some, but my eyes ain’t that good no more. And paper and stamp scarce.”
Lou looked very uncomfortable. “Mom asked Dad to move back to Virginia.”
Louisa looked surprised. “And what’d your daddy say?”
Lou could not tell her the truth. “I don’t know.”
“Oh” was all Louisa offered in response.
Lou found herself growing upset with her father, something she could never remember doing before.
“I can’t believe he just left you here by yourself.”
“I made him go. Mountain no place for somebody like him. Got to share that boy with the world. And your daddy wrote to me
all these years. And he give me money he ain’t got. He done right by me. Don’t you never think badly of him for that.”
“But didn’t it hurt, that he never came back?”
Louisa put an arm around the girl. “He did come back. I got me the three people he loved most in the whole world.”
It had been a hard trek along a narrow trail that often petered out to harsh tangles, forcing Lou to dismount and walk the mare. It was a nice ride, though, for the birds were in full warbling splendor, and flowering horsemint poked up from piles of slate. She had passed secret coves overhung with willow and corralled by rock. Many of the coves were graced with cups of frothing springwater. There were neglected fields of long-vanished homesteads, the broomsedge flourishing there around the rock bones of chimneys without houses.
Finally, following the directions Louisa had given her, Lou found herself at the small house in the clearing. She looked over the property. It appeared likely that in another couple of years this homestead would also surrender to the wild that pressed against it on all sides. Trees stretched over the roof that had almost as many holes as shingles. Window glass was missing at various spots; a sapling was growing up through an opening in the front porch, and wild sumac clung to the splintered porch rails. The front door was hanging by a single nail; in fact it had been tied back so that the door always stood open. A horseshoe was nailed over the doorway, for luck, Lou assumed, and the place looked like it could use some. The surrounding fields, too, were all overgrown. And yet the dirt yard was neatly swept, there was no trash about, and a bed of peonies sat next to the house, with a lilac behind that, and a large snow-ball bush flourished by a small hand-crank well. A rosebush ran up a trellis on one side of the house. Lou had heard that roses thrived on neglect. If true, this was the most ignored rosebush Lou had ever seen, since it was bent over with the weight of its deep red blooms. Jeb came around the corner and barked at rider and horse. When Diamond came out of the house, he stopped dead and looked around, seemingly for a place to hide quick, but coming up empty.
“What you doing here?” he finally said.
Lou slid off the horse and knelt to play with Jeb. “Just came to pay a visit. Where are your folks?”
“Pa working. Ma went down to McKenzie’s.”
“Tell ’em I said hello.”
Diamond thrust his hands in his pockets, bent one bare toe over the other. “Look, I got things to do.”
“Like what?” asked Lou, rising.
“Like fishing. I got to go fishing.”
“Well, I’ll go with you.”
He cocked his head at her. “You know how to fish?”
“They have lots of fishing holes in Brooklyn.”
They stood on a makeshift pier built from a few planks of rough-hewn oak not even nailed together but merely wedged into the rocks that stuck out from the bank of the wide stream. Diamond strung the line with a squirmy pink worm while Lou looked on in disgust. A tomboy was a tomboy, but apparently a worm was a worm. He handed the extra pole to her.
“G’on cast your line out there.”
Lou took the pole and hesitated.
“You want hep?”
“I can do it.”
“See this here’s a southern pole, and I ’xpect you prob’ly used to them newfangled northern poles.”
“You’re right, that’s all I use. Northern pole.”
To his credit, Diamond never cracked a smile, but just took the pole, showed her how to hold it, and then threw a near perfect cast.
Lou watched his technique carefully, took a couple of practice tosses, and then sailed a pretty cast herself.
“Why, that was ’bout good as any I throwed,” Diamond said with all due southern modesty.
“Give me a couple more minutes and I’ll do better than you,” she said slyly.
“You still got to catch the fish,” Diamond gamely replied.
A half hour later Diamond had hooked his third smallmouth and worked it to shore with steady motions. Lou looked at him, properly in awe of his obvious skill, but her competitive streak ran long, and she redoubled her efforts to trump her fish-mate.
Finally, without warning, her line went tight and she was pulled toward the water. With a whiplike effort, she reared the pole back, and a thick catfish came halfway out of the stream.
“Holy Lord,” said Diamond as he saw this creature rise and then fall back into the water. “Biggest catfish I ever seed.” He reached for the pole.
Lou cried out, “I got it, Diamond.” He stepped back and watched girl and fish fighting it out on roughly equal terms. Lou appeared to be winning at first, the line going taut and then slacking, while Diamond called out words of advice and encouragement. Lou slipped and slid all over the unsteady pier, once more almost going in the water, before Diamond yanked on her overalls and pulled her back.
Finally, though, Lou grew weary and gasped out, “I need some help here, Diamond.”
With both pulling on pole and line, the fish quickly was dragged to shore. Diamond reached down, hauled it out of the water, and dropped it on the boards, where it flopped from side to side. Fat and thick, it would be good eating, he said. Lou squatted down and looked proudly at her conquest, aided though it had been. Right as she peered really closely, the fish shimmied once more, then jumped in the air, and spat water, the hook working free from its mouth at the same time. Lou screamed and jumped back, knocked into Diamond, and they both went tumbling into the water. They came up sputtering and watched as the catfish flopped itself over to the edge of the pier, fell in the water, and was gone in a blink. Diamond and Lou looked at each other for a tortured moment and then commenced a titanic splashing battle. Their peals of laughter could probably be heard on the next mountain.
Lou sat in front of the fireplace while Diamond built up the flames so they could dry off. He went and got an old blanket that smelled to Lou of either Jeb, mildew, or both, but she told Diamond thank you as he put it around her shoulders. The inside of Diamond’s house surprised her because it was neat and clean, though the pieces of furniture were few and obviously handmade. On the wall was an old photo of Diamond and a man Lou assumed was his father. There were no photos Lou could see of his mother. While the fire picked up, Jeb lay down next to her and started attending to some fleas in his fur.
Diamond expertly scaled the bass, ran a hickory stick through each, mouth to tail, and cooked them over the fire. Next he cut up an apple and rubbed the juice into the meat. Diamond showed Lou how to feel the rib cage of the fish and pry thick white meat from tiny bones. They ate with their fingers, and it was good. “Your dad was real nice-looking,” Lou said, pointing to the picture.
Diamond looked over at the photo. “Yep, he was.” He caught a breath and glared at Lou.
“Louisa told me,” she said.
Diamond rose and poked the fire with a crooked stick. “Ain’t right playing no tricks on me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me on your own?”
“Why should I?”
“Because we’re friends.”
This took the sting out of Diamond and he sat back down.
“You miss your mom?” Lou asked.
“Naw, how could I? Never knowed the woman.” He ran his hand along the crumpling brick, mud, and horsehair of the fireplace, and his features grew troubled. “See, she died when I’s born.”
David Baldacci Page 19