by Ninie Hammon
Piper abruptly pulled back with a little cry and shoved him away.
“What?” Grayson asked.
She reached over and flipped on the little bedside table lamp.
“Turn around so I can see your back.”
He obeyed and faced the wall.
She touched his back lightly.
“What is that?”
There was revulsion in her voice.
“What is what?”
“That thing in the middle of your back.”
He reached around and tried to feel it, but whatever she was talking about was squarely between his shoulder blades, and he couldn’t contort either arm sufficiently to reach the spot.
“Look in the mirror in the bathroom…and do…something. Get it off.”
Grayson padded out into the hallway in his underwear and down to the bathroom. The lone, dim bulb cast a bilious glow on the interior of the small room. He turned his back to the vanity mirror over the sink, then craned his head around and tried to see what—
It was a leech. That’s what he’d felt, what’d been itching on the plane and the bus. But how in the world had it stayed stuck on him for so long? It only took a few hours, not even a whole day, for a leech to get full and drop off. This one was huge, a bulbous purple splotch beside his backbone. He looked around for something to use to get it off. Seeing no likely candidate, he went into the kitchen and pulled open a couple of drawers until he found what he was looking for. Carrying the butcher knife back to the bathroom, he again turned his back to the sink and mirror and stabbed the creature with the knife. When black blood squirted out of it onto the mirror, the sink and the floor, he jumped back, tripped over Sadie’s potty chair sitting beside the toilet and landed with a clatter and thump in a heap on the floor.
Sadie began to wail.
Grayson sighed, got to his feet and turned his back to the mirror again. The creature didn’t wiggle and squirm. It hung limp, dead, which perhaps explained why it hadn’t fallen off. Something had killed it and it…Grayson let the thought go and carefully began to scrape the knife across his back to peel the dead leech away. He knew he was asking for an infection, but he’d deal with that in the morning when he could see. Right now, he only wanted it gone!
He flicked the dead leech into the toilet and flushed it, tried to dab his bleeding back with toilet paper but couldn’t reach the wound and felt blood trickling down into his underwear. Because of the blood thinner leeches injected into a bite, it was sometimes difficult to stop the bleeding. He used more toilet paper to clean up the mess in the bathroom as the wound continued to send a sticky stream of warm ooze down his spine. Exhaustion was making him dizzy, and he didn’t do a very good clean-up job before he stepped out into the hallway. Piper had taken Sadie into their bedroom and was pacing back and forth with the child in her arms, patting her back and whispering soothing sounds.
He pointed to the parlor and mouthed: “I’ll crash on the couch.”
Grayson hoped she’d tell him not to, that she wanted him in bed with her where he belonged. But she didn’t, only blew him a kiss and went back to comforting Sadie.
He closed the door quietly behind him—not that the closing door would awaken anybody the wailing child hadn’t already roused—went to the kitchen and tossed the knife in the sink, then stood for a moment, looking out the window. The moon was bright. Though not yet quite full, it silvered the trees in an otherworldly sparkle. He held his breath, listened, wanted to hear the melody of nighttime, the rub-bub, rub-bub of tree frogs and the creaking of crickets. Nothing. Either the frogs and crickets were on strike, or the thunder in his ears had won the battle of the bands.
He went back into the parlor, then thought about his bleeding back and fetched a towel from the bathroom to lie on. He stretched out on the couch—lumpy, with a sagging place on one end and a big protruding bump on the other. He made a note to be grateful for small favors. The roaring of his damaged hearing helped mute the sound of Sadie’s wailing. Grayson had time to think about the black soldier on the MSTS flight who’d described in detail what he planned to do with his woman and considered that sleeping on the couch wasn’t how he’d planned his first night home after spending a year on the other side of the planet. Then he closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.
* * *
Carter had to pull over before he reached the highway because his hands were shaking so violently that he couldn’t keep the car on the road.
He killed the engine and lights and sat in the darkness, silence roaring in his ears. Then he let out a yell, a cry of anger and pain and frustration, a sound almost more feral than human and pounded his fists on the steering wheel so hard some rational part of his brain wondered how he’d drive the car if he broke it.
He stopped pounding and sat quietly. The breeze off the creek carried the night smells of mud, wet leaves and dead crawdads. He could hear frogs and crickets and could barely catch the rushing water sound. Since the construction of the dam, Turtle Creek only carried the water from small mountain streams and Butler Creek, which ran south along the bottom side of Chicken Gizzard Mountain and emptied into the dry creek bed a quarter of a mile below his mother’s house. Even after a heavy rain, Turtle Creek was seldom more than five or six inches deep now.
But you could drown in less than six inches of water.
There’s the sound of the creek and Becky splashing in it along with the whump, whump, whump Grayson makes as he slaps the broom against the rugs hung over the tree limb.
Becky sees Carter and starts to speak.
“Shhh,” he whispers, shakes his head and puts his finger to his lips.
She puts her pudgy finger to her own lips and stands with the water running over her bare feet watching him.
Grayson’s cowboy boots are sitting on the creek bank where he set them after he waded into the water with Becky. Carter edges down into the creek and starts toward them.
Carter shook his head so violently he had the sensation of flinging the memory out of his mind. Not now! Not tonight!
But the other thoughts that flooded into his mind to take the place of the Worst Memory of His Life, as he’d come to call it over the years, were very little better.
Grayson! How could he…? He wasn’t due home for two more months!
But he was here now. And he wasn’t going back!
When they’d heard about the massacre at Fire Base Eagle’s Nest, Carter had actually hoped his brother had been one of the casualties. He hated himself for wanting it, but that would handed him his every desire in life on a silver platter.
And now…
Carter needed more time. It was working. He was winning her. He was slow, patient, kind—everything he wanted to be to her for the rest of his life. And tonight she’d kissed him! Okay, he’d kissed her. But she’d let him; she leaned into it.
And then…
He slammed both fists down on the steering wheel again and heard a sound that might have been something cracking. He leaned back in the seat, ran both hands through his short hair and groaned. Images flooded into his mind, unbidden of Piper welcoming her husband home from the war—into her heart. And her bed!
No! He would not give up. He’d already lost her once. It had ripped his heart right out of his chest when Piper broke up with him. At the time, he was certain it was temporary, that he’d win her back. Then, after her brother Riley’s thug friends put him in the hospital, he understood she’d been avoiding him to protect him. He went off to Duke, certain that as soon as she was out of high school she would…but the day after she graduated, she eloped with Grayson!
At least he seldom saw her after that. The couple moved to Louisville for Grayson to go to seminary, and Ma rode a bus to visit them on holidays. Carter didn’t accompany her.
He’d had lots of other women then. Managed to wall all thoughts of his lost love out of his heart and mind.
But everything changed when they called up Grayson’s National Guard unit, and Piper moved b
ack to the hollow to care for Ma. Carter put on a full-court press then, was with her every chance he got—under the guise of visiting his mother, of course. And he should have had sixty more days. Carter was absolutely certain that by the end of October, Piper would…
He let out a sigh that actually trembled slightly on the end, and for the first time in five years wished he had a cigarette. He seldom thought of smoking after he quit, but when Piper’s precious little brother lit one the other night, Carter had felt the familiar yearning.
Zeke. He made a humph sound in his through. Somebody ought to—
And then it came to him. A plan. Not in pieces, vague, with bits to figure out and work out. It came to him whole, like it’d been designed by somebody else and mailed to him. Or like he’d been working on it himself for months. A plan that would solve both of his problems with one decisive act.
He started the car, gave it the gas and fishtailed in the dirt of the road. When he turned left on the highway leading into Sadlerton instead of right toward Charleston, he peeled out and left rubber on the asphalt.
Jesse McCullough lived down in the valley by the creek and the railroad track, not up on the side of the mountain like the Addingtons. That was because Reverend Everett Addington had built his family a house on his own little piece of land and most of the houses in Sadlerton were what was left of the company town, the coal camp that had belonged to Northfield Coal Company.
Carter remembered when he was in the third grade, Northfield had painted all the company houses in Sadler Hollow a sickly yellow color nobody liked. A week later, in American history class, they’d been studying how settlers had come to America to find land of their own and freedom to choose how they lived. His best friend, who lived in one of those yellow houses, had raised his hand and asked, “Why ain’t West Virginia in that America?”
Now, of course, most of the houses were sagging wrecks that showed no sign of any color whatsoever, only the ash gray of unpainted boards. Over time, layoffs, mine closings, mechanization and strip mining had decimated the workforce who lived here. All up and down Sadler Hollow were former coal-camp houses with yards where barefoot kids in tattered clothes played in the dirt and where men with hollow faces and hopeless eyes sat on porches looking out at nothing, men who hadn’t had steady employment since the mines started closing in 1956.
On the way to Jesse McCullough’s house, Carter passed the homes of three other cousins—well, one was a second cousin. The whole hollow was full of McCulloughs.
He also passed Bennett’s Five and Dime where he’d stood on the slat porch in 1960 as a junior at Duke and shook hands with John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had spent six weeks in West Virginia that year campaigning for the primary. As a wealthy Yankee Catholic, he’d had to demonstrate he could carry a blue-collar, Protestant state. Six weeks in West Virginia was the equivalent of spending a year in a state as big as California, and Kennedy had gone everywhere, to schools, farms, coal camps, even went down into a coal mine and talked to miners. He’d won the primary handily, but more important he’d won the heart of West Virginians forever. When he came back as president in 1963 to celebrate the state’s centennial, he’d stood in the pouring rain in Charleston and said, “The sun doesn’t always shine in West Virginia, but the people always do.” No state was more heartbroken at his passing than West Virginia.
The almost-full moon shone a silver light that erased some of the ugliness of the house until Carter’s headlights illuminated the dark porch where Jesse and his two oldest boys sat on the steps. Jesse had a beer in his hand, and Carter was certain he’d already had more than a couple of others.
“Come on up and set a spell,” Jesse called out as Carter got out of the car. “What brings you down here to mingle with the poor folks?”
Carter was used to the jab. He’d heard it his whole life. He was a McCullough, all right, but he was also the son of the Rev. Everett Carter Addington, the circuit-riding preacher who’d come here from Richmond, married the beautiful Marian McCullough and then earned his place in the community by a lifetime of selfless devotion. Though Carter and Grayson lived the same lives of poverty and deprivation as everyone else in the hollow, being Addingtons meant they got out.
Carter now lived with a foot in two totally disparate worlds. Charleston boasted one of the highest per capita incomes in the East—in large part due to the wealthy coal operators, who’d raped the land in the mountains and lived like kings in the untouched beauty of the city on the Kanawha River. Unfortunately, mere proximity to that wealth was not sufficient to produce it, and Carter was making his fortune using the skills of the forebearers on his mother’s side of the family, who for generations had manufactured the best moonshine for a hundred miles in any direction.
Jesse turned to Buster, the older of the two boys and said, “Go get your cousin Carter a beer.”
Carter held up his hand. “Thanks, but I can’t. Got to drive back to Charleston tonight.”
“And you can’t drink one beer and still keep the car ’tween the fence posts. You gone soft, Carter. City livin’s made you a pansy.”
The two boys laughed at that.
Carter stepped up on the bottom step of the porch.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“G’on in the house, you two,” Jesse said to the boys. “’Fore you do, bring me ’nuther Iron City.”
The screen door banged shut behind them.
“You come all the way to the holler just to talk?” Jesse asked. “Couldn’t wait till I called?”
“I was already here, seeing to Ma.”
“Seein’ to Piper, don’t you mean?”
The boy came out on the porch and handed his father a beer, then went back inside. Jesse tilted his head back and chugged the final few gulps of his last, crumpled the can and tossed it at a barrel on the weedy yard by the porch. He missed and it clunked into the side of the barrel and clinked to the ground atop the pile of other misses. Jesse picked up a can opener, poked two quick holes in the top of the fresh can and held it out to Carter, who shook his head.
“Grayson’s home.”
That was a conversation stopper.
“No lie? When’d he get here?”
“Tonight.”
“Oh…and you’s up there with Piper. Didn’t catch you doin’ nuthin’—”
“You want to watch that mouth, Jesse,” Carter growled, “or you’re going to find it on the other side of your face.”
“I’s only cuttin’ up with you, Carter. Jeeze.”
“You’re not drunk are you?”
“No, I’m—”
Carter snatched the beer from Jesse’s hand, turned it up and began pouring it on the ground.
“What the—?” Jesse reached out to grab it, but Carter glared at him and he slumped back on the porch in a pout.
“You ready to listen to me now?”
“I’s ready ’fore you poured out my beer. Beers cost money you know.”
Carter pulled his billfold from his pocket, yanked out a couple of bills and tossed them at Jesse.
“Here, buy yourself a case after you hear me out. But this is important and I want you sober, and listening.”
“You sure got your panties in a wad tonight, Carter. Yeah, I’m listenin’.”
It didn’t even take five minutes for Carter to outline his plan. It was simple and brilliant. With any luck, it’d solve both their problems with a minimum of effort—effort Jesse was more than happy to expend—and neither of them would suffer the consequences of their actions. It was perfect. Even Jesse thought so, and there were sharper knives in the drawer than old’ Jess.
“When you want me to do it?” Jesse asked. If he’d been a coon dog, his tail would have been wagging eagerly.
“Obviously, the sooner the better, but I’ve got to work out my end of it. When I know, I’ll call and leave a message for you at Duffy’s, only the number of the date. You remember to bring me some red mud.”
“I’ll put some in a mas
on jar and screw on the lid, keep it nice and soft and spreadable.” Jesse’s lips stretched in a grin that revealed missing teeth. “Your little brother might a’been lucky ’nuff to make it home when most of them Kentucky boys ended up facedown in a rice paddy, but his luck’s ’bout to run out.”
Chapter 16
Piper didn’t like the way Grayson treated Maggie. Didn’t, in fact, even like the way he looked at her. There was a wariness in…no, it was more than wariness. It was hostility. He was belligerent to the child, and he had absolutely no reason to be.
It’s not supposed to be like this.
Not after all the waiting and worrying. Every night for months, she’d fantasized about Gray coming home, but then she’d stopped. Partially because it hurt too bad to reach over and find his side of the bed cold, the pillow puffed where no head had dented it. And after she’d returned from Hawaii, she didn’t imagine his return because she didn’t know what to picture anymore.
She hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t been ready and suddenly here he was. And it wasn’t—
“I tried, but I messed it up.” Maggie had come up silently beside her. “My fingers won’t…do that.”
Piper stood at the front porch railing, dressed in cutoff jeans and a pale yellow shirt as a cool morning breeze gently blew ebony curls back from her face. She was gazing out over the valley where the sun had begun to burn the mist off the small streams that slipped down the mountainsides and eventually emptied into Turtle Creek as it sliced through the middle of the hollow.