by Ninie Hammon
He opened his eyes, glanced at his watch, and his face sprang to life. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be late for Bobby’s recital, and he’d suffered through months of practice as the boy prepared for it. Bless his heart, Bobby’s stubby little fingers were not designed for piano keys. But he loved music and wanted to play, and that was all that mattered to Warren. And after tonight, surely he’d never have to listen to a hinky-tinky version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” ever again.
Chapter 7
Carter had spent the day in Charleston running errands, then made good time from his apartment to Sadler Hollow late that afternoon. Going east, the city gave up quickly to forested mountains, where he traveled along winding, rutted roads that snaked through narrow valleys with sides so steep they were almost vertical. This was West By-God Virginia.
Foreigners, defined as anybody you didn’t recognize on sight and whose lineage you couldn’t instantly trace back three generations, charged that West Virginia roads went “from nowhere through nowhere to nowhere,” and there was some truth in that. But driving along the winding mountain roads was more than a journey through space. It was a journey through culture, from one civilization to another culture that was at once far simpler and immensely more complex than the previous one.
It was a journey through time, too, back thirty, maybe forty years. Carter always pictured West Virginia as the concentric circles inside a tree trunk or the orbits of the planets around the sun. The closer you got to the center of the mountains, the deepest, most remote areas of Whoopie Country, the further away from the twentieth century you’d traveled. He’d been there a time or two with his circuit-riding preacher father. In those remote hollows, people lived in houses perched on the mountainsides so precariously it looked like the weight of sunlight alone might topple them. They’d peered at him with more distrust, antagonism and suspicion than the folks in Sadler Hollow viewed strangers. But come to think of it, not a whole lot more. In truth, every West Virginia hollow was so isolated it was its own private universe, separated by light years from the hollow only a couple of miles away.
When he pulled up in front of his mother’s house, the sun had gone down behind the mountain on the far side of the hollow, and its shadow had stretched over the top of the little white frame house on the side of Naked Turtle Mountain—so named because there was a huge rock outcrop on the top that looked like a turtle’s shell. The area below—without a shell—was therefore a naked (pronounced nekkid) turtle.
The folks in Sadlerton, which sat on the valley floor, only got four hours of direct sunlight a day, from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. The home where he grew up got a little more because it was high up the mountainside and caught the last of the afternoon rays.
Though Sadler Hollow was in one of the outside rings, maybe Saturn or Jupiter, most houses had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Carter had spent a fortune to have a septic system installed for his mother three years ago and wasn’t surprised to find the little Craddock boys on her porch the next day to try out her indoor privy. Electricity had cost more than plumbing. Gratefully, there was a line in the hollow on the other side of Naked Turtle Mountain, which, as the crow flies, was only a couple of miles away. He’d never have been able to afford any of it—including the electric appliances or the wiring for them—if it hadn’t been for his shine business.
The elementary school he’d attended in Sadlerton had had electricity but no plumbing. It was a one-room structure where maybe a third of the students actually completed the eighth grade and went on to Cochran County High School in Chandler. Most of the girls dropped out and got married, and the boys went to work in the mines. That he and Grayson had graduated from high school and then “got out” was nothing short of miraculous—with all the credit going to James Addington, their bachelor uncle. After he served in World War I, their father, Everett, moved into the West Virginia mountains to become a circuit-riding preacher. Everett’s younger brother was less spiritual and more practical. He set about amassing a fortune, and when the time came, Uncle Jim reached out and snatched his two nephews out of the nineteenth century into educations and a future.
Carter got out of his Camaro, then stood for a moment beside it, looking up the narrow hollow to the top where Northfield Coal’s Impoundment Dam No. 1 rested in the crease between the ridges, shining black where the coal slurry caught a few rays of the sun before it fell below the mountain to the west.
He turned his gaze down the hollow toward the little community of Sadlerton. It was the largest of a half dozen coal-camp communities—the only one with a post office and fire station—strung together like beads spaced out on a string along Naked Turtle Creek, which had been a good-sized stream before the dams at the top of the hollow stopped the flow of its major tributary. When you counted the residents of Akin, Bent Twig, Alice Springs, Barberville, Copperhead and probably ten more communities that didn’t have names, roughly five thousand people lived in Sadler Hollow. Add in Chandler at the far end of the hollow, the county seat of Cochran County, which had actually grown from a coal camp into a real town, and almost seven thousand people lived downstream from Impoundment Dam No. 1.
He looked up at the dam again and then back down the hollow as far as he could see.
“Inspect the ones whose failure could result in loss of life or extensive property damage…”
Well, that phrase certainly described Impoundment Dam No. 1.
People in the hollow had been complaining about it ever since the coal company bulldozed the top of the mountain into the creek eight years ago. The dam was perfectly safe, of course, but these people didn’t trust Northfield Coal and had good reason not to. Added to the disgruntled, laid-off miners, the folks who owned property had innocently sold the company their mineral rights for a paltry sum decades before, assuming there’d one day be a coal mine beneath their land. They never dreamed that the contract they’d signed granted the coal company the right to rip the top off the mountain, taking with it their homes and everything they owned. Put a bee in Sadler Hollow’s bonnet about the dam failing, and it would get ugly quick!
If the people who lived here actually knew what had happened three days ago in a little town on the other side of the planet, Warren would have good reason for concern. But Carter was sure they had no idea. Outsiders simply couldn’t understand how isolated these people were. They didn’t have electricity, let alone television sets piping Walter Cronkite into their living rooms every night to tell them “That’s the way it is.” More important, their universe was Sadler Hollow, and whatever was going on in the rest of the world just flat-out didn’t matter. Carter would nose around anyway, of course. And find out absolutely nothing. He’d have a report crisp and neat on Warren’s desk before the old man got into work on Monday morning.
Carter smiled. Meanwhile, he’d enjoy his three-day weekend with Piper. His mother, too, of course. And Sunshine. Precious Sadie was a little ray of sunshine, so that’s what he called her.
* * *
The only thing Grayson knew for certain was that he had definitely had his bell rung, and his brain was still so scrambled he didn’t know exactly when it had happened. Or how. He could only recall opening his eyes in the medical tent, lying on a cot. Dollar Bill, KFC, Beanie and Bagpipes were talking to the doc at the other end of the tent, but the doc shooed them away. That’d been night before last. He’d dozed off and on all day yesterday—remembered waking up screaming after a dream about…no, it was gone. He’d slept through the night last night but still felt utterly, totally exhausted.
He leaned back and rested his head against a tree beside the medical tent, outside the makeshift shelter he’d built right after first light out of a couple of rubberized ponchos and a piece of vine. He’d hated the smell of disinfectant, the copper stench of blood and the singed-hair stink of burned flesh in the tent, but the doc would only let him leave if he promised to stay near. Still watching his concussion, making sure…what? That he didn’t d
rop over dead from a brain bleed? Grayson figured half the GIs in-country were walking around with concussions. Cracked skulls were about as common here as jungle rot. But he’d done what the doc ordered just to get out of the tent.
It was full morning now. By noon, when a whole fleet of Hueys, medevac choppers, came in full of wounded soldiers, the tent would be buzzing. Nobody would notice one missing chaplain. He’d wait until then to sneak off and look for his squad.
Until then, he was content to sit. He figured if he sat still long enough and concentrated, maybe he could piece together what’d happened that had landed him in the field hospital.
He closed his eyes and tried, went back to the last thing he could remember clearly before waking up here. They’d come into that village by the river, on the back side, at night. The next morning, they were hit by gooks in the jungle beyond the village so he and Haystack had—
Haystack.
The image of him staring sightlessly upward, flies buzzing around the small round hole in his forehead filled Grayson’s whole head. It was as if he were looking at that huge movie screen where he and Piper had seen the Ten Commandments but up so close to the screen that Haystack’s face filled all his vision.
Haystack was dead. Sniper.
Grayson’s memory took another step forward, and a blurry form on the other side of the road resolved into clear focus. Nguyen! She was just standing there, looking at him. Then she began to advance slowly toward him and his squad. After that…
His mind recoiled so violently from the rest of the memory that his head bobbed slightly on his shoulders. Though he didn’t know why, he did know that if he allowed himself to think about the little girl, he’d end up dinki dau. Crazy. Section Eight. No, the memory-movie ended with Haystack. Beyond that point was blackness.
He quickly opened his eyes, suddenly afraid the blackness existed outside his eyelids the same as it did inside. What he saw was boots. Just boots, that’s all. It felt like way too much trouble to lift his head to see the rest of the soldier standing in front of him. Not now. Not with his ears humming, ringing. An explosion, there must have been an explosion so close it’d rung his chime good! He wondered idly if he’d ever hear normally again, if the hum in his ears that sounded like an old refrigerator kicking on in the middle of the night would ever go away.
The soldier in front of him spoke, but Grayson couldn’t hear what he said. He put his finger in his left ear and shook it. Sometimes that helped. Not this time, though. So he held his nose and blew hard. He felt a pop in his right ear, and the muted sounds all around him became clear. He was instantly sorry he’d done it. Muted was better.
What had been mumble was now nearby conversations. He didn’t have to hear the words to know what the conversations were about. Same talk, different day. How bad the food was. How bad the weather was. How bad their feet hurt. Expletives abounded, the f-word, inserted in every sentence and between the syllables of every other word. He could hear men groaning in the medical tent and the distant rumble of thunder, or gunfire.
“You Chaplain Addington?” the soldier standing in front of him asked. Gray heard him clearly that time so the ear-popping maneuver had worked better than he thought. He tried it again.
“Yeah, I’m Addington,” Grayson said. He heard his own voice with relative clarity, so his other ear must be clear now, too. He looked up and saw that the soldier was a chopper jockey, a crewman on an early medevac that’d be taking the worst of the wounded in the tent back to Saigon.
The soldier looked at a clipboard, thumbed the top paper back and ran his finger down the paper beneath. “Addington, yeah, here it is. You’ve got orders to accompany the body of PFC Herbert Thomas Maddox back to Kentucky.” Haystack. “Gather up your gear.”
Grayson sat very still and felt the universe shift beneath him. He’d lost his short-timer’s stick, hadn’t seen it since…with no stick, and absolutely no idea what day it was, Grayson was unable to come up with an exact number. Less than thirty, he was sure. Twenty-two, maybe? Though he couldn’t pin down his actual days left in-country, he did know one thing with absolute certainty: his time wasn’t up.
“You got the wrong guy,” he told the chopper jockey.
“You’re Addington, right? Chaplain Grayson Allen Addington?” The soldier rattled off a serial number. It was the one printed on the silver dog tag that hung around Grayson’s neck.
“Yeah. But I…why would…?”
“Whadda you care? You’re getting out of here. Wish it was me. I still got ninety-eight marks to cut in my stick.”
Grayson’s heart took up the rhythm of a snare drum in his chest.
“You’re serious, aren’t you,” he said to the soldier in wonder.
The soldier nodded but still Grayson couldn’t wrap his mind around the concept. Was it possible? Could he actually be…going home?
* * *
Carter’s long strides carried him up the sidewalk to the front door of the house, which by the standards of Sadler Hollow was a large, well-kept structure. That meant it actually had a yard with a sparse stand of grass that Piper mowed with the push-mower once a week. His mother loved roses and trellises on both sides of the wide porch steps sported climbing rose vines with blossoms that perfumed the warm evening air. There was half a whiskey barrel by the front gate, where blue, yellow and pink pansy faces looked up at the sky.
Ma had planted a vegetable garden along the south side of the house. Five grains to a hill of corn—“one for the woodchuck, one for the crow, one for the weather and two to grow.” The garden had produced okra, too, and tomatoes, squash and crisp black-eyed peas all summer. Pole beans climbed the fence on the back side of the house, above ripe watermelons. The soil on the mountainside wasn’t the best, and there was precious little flat land around the house, but Marian Addington could make a garden grow anywhere.
The house needed painting but was in better shape than most. The fence had been in need of paint for so long that the wood had worn almost bare and the sun had bleached it out a gray so shiny it was silver. But it was in good repair, stretched primly around the yard with the requisite squeaky gate in front with a mailbox on a post next to it. Piper’s old white Rambler station wagon sat in the dirt driveway. Marian had no driver’s license and had never owned a car.
The gate squealed its protest when he opened it, and he took only a couple of steps, then stopped. Someone inside his mother’s house was singing. The voice was as clear as a church bell on a cold winter morning, and he thought instantly of the Vienna Boys’ Choir he’d heard perform once on the Ed Sullivan Show.
He crossed the wood slat porch, opened the unlatched screen door, stuck his head in and called out, “Ding-dong. Avon calling.”
The singing instantly stopped.
“Carter?” Piper called out. She emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. “What are you doing here?”
“Is that any way to greet the man who—at great risk to life and limb, I might add—won for your daughter the one and only Rasmus the Magnificent at the free-throw booth at the county fair?”
He blustered because the sight of Piper always took his breath away. She was wearing jeans and a striped, sleeveless blouse that showed off her graceful, tanned arms. Her long black hair hung in loose curls around her shoulders, and her eyes were so dark you could fall into the depths of them and never come back up. She smiled, drawing her lips back in a heart shape that made his knees weak. She was glad to see him!
“It’s Thursday and not even suppertime yet. Why are you here?”
“I’ve got a more pressing question. Who was that singing?”
As if in answer, a little girl emerged from the hallway leading to his mother’s bedroom. She had Sunshine casually balanced on her hip. Though the toddler was small-boned and delicate, the little girl hauling her couldn’t have been more than nine or ten herself.
“Unka Cardur,” Sadie exclaimed when she saw him. She lifted her little hands shoulder high, palms u
p like a tulip, in a comical gesture of surprise. “You came baaaack.” She did that every time she saw him—even if he’d only gone out to the road to check the mailbox.
The little girl holding Sadie had flaming red hair in long braids and a spray of crimson freckles on her nose. Her eyes were the most amazing shade of green Carter’d ever seen. Well, one of them was. He couldn’t see the other, the one almost closed with a huge, purple shiner. There was also an ugly bruise on her left cheek, and her lip was split where somebody’d obviously popped her in the mouth.
“Shh,” she said with her finger to her split lip. “Don’t want to wake her now she’s finally drifted off.”
A peep would have disturbed the old woman whose pain never let her rest well and whose hearing was so acute she could be jarred from fitful sleep if a cricket tripped and fell in the front yard.
Sadie chimed in, putting her chubby finger under her nose. “Be vewry, vewry quiet,” she whispered, unaware how much she sounded like Elmer Fudd.
Carter was momentarily distracted by “kiiill da waaabbit…kiiill da waaabbit” ringing in his head.
“Marian’s asleep?” Piper was incredulous.
“Just did nod away.”
“But how…?” Piper looked a question at Carter.
“What?” He was totally bewildered.
“Marian hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep without her pain medicine in weeks. I don’t…” Piper’s voice trailed off.
Carter turned and spoke to the little girl.
“Hi there. I’m Carter Addington, Marian’s oldest son. What’s your name?”