Something Rich and Strange

by Ron Rash

  For a few moments, nobody says anything, because we all know it could have been Kerrie in that Humvee one day earlier. Ellen asks about school. And Kerrie says the head of the education department at N.C. State is matching up the tuition costs with the army’s college fund. They’ve been really helpful, she says. I tell her about the books and Kerrie says to be sure and thank Professor Korovich.

  Maybe it’s because the picture’s a little blurry, but one second I see something in Kerrie’s face that reminds me of when she was a baby, then something else reminds me of her in first grade and after that high school. It’s like the slightest flicker or shift makes one show more than the others. But that’s not it, I realize. All those different faces are inside me, not on the screen, and I can’t help thinking that if I remember every one, enough of Kerrie’s alive inside me to keep safe the part that isn’t.

  We stay on awhile longer, not saying anything important, but what we talk about doesn’t matter as much as seeing Kerrie and hearing her voice, knowing that she’s made it safe through one more day and night. Afterward, we clean up the office, mopping the waiting room last. The bloodstain’s a chore. We get on our hands and knees, rubbing the linoleum so hard it’s like we’re trying to take it off too. We finally get done and Ellen picks up the two twenties and the five on the receptionist’s desk. The money we get from Dr. Blanton goes into an envelope we’re giving Kerrie the day she gets home. It’ll be nearly two thousand dollars, enough to help her some at college. On the way home I turn on the radio. It’s a station Ellen and me like because it plays lots of songs we heard while dating, songs we listened to when we were no older than Kerrie.

  Several stores already have their Christmas decorations up, and they brighten the town as we drive through. As I wait for a light to turn, I think about Ellen being more scared the closer we get to Kerrie coming home. It’s like Kerrie’s been lucky so long that the luck’s due to run out. I can’t help thinking that we can still get a phone call saying Kerrie’s been hurt. Or even worse, a soldier showing up with his cap in his hands.

  The light turns green and I pass the clock tower, behind it Cromer Hall. The office windows are all dark, but there are lights on at the student center. Some students won’t be going home for the holidays, and because of that someone in town has a phone close by, ready if it rings. I think about a young woman who’s hurt and scared making that call, and how someone will be there to listen.

  LAST RITE

  When the sheriff stepped onto her porch, he carried his hat in his hands, so she knew Elijah was dead. The sheriff told how drovers had found her son’s body beside a spring just off the trail between Boone and Mountain City, a bullet hole in the back of his head, his pockets turned inside out. He told her of the charred piece of fatback in the skillet, the warm ashes underneath, the empty haversack with the name Elijah Hampton stitched into it. The drovers had nailed the skillet in a big beech tree as a marker and then buried him beside it.

  “Murdered,” Sarah said, speaking the word the sheriff had avoided. “For a few pieces of silver in his pocket.”

  It wasn’t a question but the sheriff answered as it were.

  “That’s what I reckon.”

  “And you don’t know who done it.”

  “No, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “And I’ll not lie to you. We’ll likely never know.”

  The sheriff held the haversack out to her.

  “Your daughter-in law didn’t want this. She said she couldn’t bear the sight of his blood on it. You may not want it either.”

  Sarah took the haversack and laid it beside the door.

  “So you’ve already been to see Laura,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I thought it best, her being the wife.”

  The sheriff reached into his shirt pocket.

  “Here’s the death certificate. I thought you might want to see it.”

  “Just a minute,” Sarah said.

  She stepped into the front room and took the bible and pen from the mantle. She sat in her porch chair, the bible open on her lap, the piece of paper in her hand.

  “It don’t say where he died,” Sarah said.

  “No, ma’am. That gap where they found him, it’s the back of beyond. Nobody lives down there, ever has far as I know.”

  The sheriff looked down at her, his pale-blue eyes shadowed by the hat he now wore.

  “Mrs. Hampton,” he said, “they don’t even know what state that place is in, much less what county.”

  Sarah closed the bible, the last line unfilled.

  Eight months later the dew darkened the hem of her gingham dress as Sarah walked out of the yard, the cool slickness of the grass brushing her bare feet and ankles. Sarah followed Aho Creek down the mountain to where it entered the middle fork of the New River. She stepped onto the wagon road and followed the river north toward Boone, the sun rising over her right shoulder. Soon the river’s white rush plunged away from the road. Her shoulder began aching, and she shifted the haversack to her other side.

  Sarah stopped at a creek on the outskirts of town. She drank from the creek and unwrapped the sandwich she’d brought with her, but the first mouthful stuck in her throat like sawdust. She tore the bread and ham into pieces and left it for the birds before opening the haversack. Sarah knew she looked a sight but could do nothing about it except take out the lye soap and face cloth and wash the sweat from her face and neck, the dust from her feet and ankles. She took out her shoes and put them on and then walked into Boone, the main street crowded with farmers and their families come to spend Saturday in town. Sarah searched the storefronts until she found the sign that said BENEDICT ASH-SURVEYOR.

  His age surprised her, the smooth brow, the full set of teeth. Like the unweathered sign outside his door, the surveyor’s youth made Sarah wonder how experienced he was. The surveyor must have realized clients would wish him older, for he wore a mangy red beard and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses he did not put on until Sarah appeared at his door. Sarah told him what she wanted and he listened, first with incredulity and then resignation. He’d been in Boone less than a month and needed any client he could get.

  When Sarah finished, the surveyor spread a map across his desk. He took off the glasses and studied the map intently before he spoke.

  “My fee will be six dollars. It’ll be a full day to get there, do the surveying, and get back. I don’t work Sundays, so I’ll go first thing Monday morning.”

  Sarah took a leather purse from the haversack, unsnapped it and removed two silver dollars and four quarters.

  “Here. I’ll pay you the rest when you’re done.” She poured the silver into his hand. “What time do we leave on Monday, Mr. Ash?”

  “We?” he asked.

  Sunday night Sarah had trouble falling asleep. She lay in bed thinking about how Laura had come to church that morning dressed in a blue cotton dress, her dark widow’s weeds now packed away.

  “You’d think she’d have worn them a year,” Anna Miller whispered as they watched Laura enter the church with Clay Triplett.

  “She has to get on with her life,” Sarah replied without conviction.

  She watched Laura lean close to Clay Triplett as the singing began, their hands touching beneath the shared hymnal. Sarah tried to be charitable toward her daughter-in-law, reminding herself that Laura was barely eighteen, that she had been married to Elijah less than a year. The young could believe bad times would be balanced out by good. They could believe the past was something you could box up and forget.

  After the service Sarah asked Laura if she wanted to make the journey with the surveyor and her. Sarah wasn’t sure if it pleased or disappointed her when Laura said yes. Sarah asked to borrow one of the horses, offered to pay.

  “You know I wouldn’t charge you, Mrs. Hampton,” Laura said. “I’ll bring the horse over this afternoon on my way to Boone. I’ll spend the night with my aunt in town.”

  Then Laura had walked over to where Clay Triplett waited in the shade of a
live oak tree. He’d tipped his hat to Sarah, then helped Laura into his wagon to take her home.

  It had been almost suppertime when Laura brought the horse.

  “I reckoned you’d want Sapphire,” Laura said. “Elijah always said she was your favorite.”

  Laura opened her grip and removed a photograph of Elijah taken when he was twelve years old. She handed the photograph to Sarah.

  “I think it best if you keep this now. Something else to remember him by.”

  “Why are you giving me this?” Sarah asked, and Laura blushed.

  “Me and Clay, we’re going to get married.”

  “I figured as much,” Sarah said, her voice colder than she intended.

  “I’d hoped you’d understand, Mrs. Hampton,” Laura said.

  Sarah looked at the photograph, Elijah dressed in his Sunday church clothes though it had been a Saturday morning in a photographer’s studio in Boone. Elijah stared at her from a decade away, his eyes dark and serious.

  “You keep it,” Sarah finally said, handing the photograph back. “I won’t forget what he looked like. You probably will.”

  Laura let the photograph lay on her open palms. She gazed intently, as though seeing something in it she had not noticed before.

  “I loved Elijah,” Laura said, not looking up.

  “I still do,” Sarah had replied.

  Sapphire whinnied out in the barn, the same barn she had been foaled in seven springs ago. Will had died the previous winter, Sarah and Elijah had delivered the colt. Sarah wondered if Sapphire remembered the barn, remembered she had been born there.

  In the darkness Sarah finally fell asleep and dreamed that Elijah was calling her. He was not the man he’d grown up to be. It was a child’s voice Sarah heard in the laurel slick she stumbled and shoved through, branches welting her face and arms and legs as she thrashed deeper into the slick, her legs growing wearier with each blind step, the voice that called her never closer or farther away. Sarah woke with the quilt thrown off the bed, her brow damp as if fevered. She lay in the dark and waited for first light, remembering what was not dream but memory.

  It had been August and Elijah was five. She and Will were hoeing the cornfield by the creek. She left Elijah at the end of a row, the whirligig Will had carved for him clasped in his hand. When she reached the end of the row Elijah was gone. They searched all afternoon, working their way back to the farmhouse and then above the pasture where the woods thickened, the same woods where they had heard a panther that spring. She shouted his name until her throat was raw and her voice no more than a harsh whisper.

  As night came on Will took the horse to get more help. Sarah lit the lantern and followed the creek, calling his name with what voice she had left. A half mile downstream he answered, his trembling voice rising out of a laurel slick that bordered the creek. She pushed and tripped through the laurel, making wrong guesses, losing her sense of direction in the tangle of leaves and branches. She found him lying on a matting of laurel leaves, the whirligig still clutched in his hand. That was just like him, Sarah thought. Even as a child he’d been careful not to lose things. Careful in other ways too, so that even at eight or nine he could be trusted with an axe or rifle.

  Sarah and Laura met the surveyor Monday morning in front of his office. He had not bothered to wear the glasses, but an owlshead pistol bulged from the holster on his hip.

  “That three dollars,” he said to Sarah. “I can take it now and lock it in my office.”

  “I’d just as lief wait till you earned it,” Sarah replied.

  They rode west out of Boone, she on Sapphire, Laura on the gray stallion Will had named Traveler, the surveyor on his roan. The land soon became steeper, rockier. Sarvis and beard-tongue bloomed on the road’s edge while dogwoods brightened the woods. The horses breathed harder as the air thinned. Sarah felt lightheaded, but it was more than the altitude. She had been unable to eat any supper or breakfast.

  They passed Oak Grove and Villas, then turned north, through Silverstone. Sarah wondered what people thought of this strange procession, of the armed young man wearing denim pants and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, the clanking surveying equipment draped on the roan’s flanks like armor, the nineteen-year-old girl dressed in widow’s weeds behind him, and Sarah last, also in black, holding the reins and a family bible, forty-two but already an old woman. Sarah stared down at her hands and noted how coarse and wrinkled they were, how the purple veins stretched across their backs as if worms had burrowed under her skin.

  Outside of Silverstone the wagon road narrowed until it was no longer a road but a trail. The Stone Mountains loomed like thunderheads. The surveyor carefully scanned the woods that pressed close to the trail and the stone outcrops they passed under, his free hand resting on his holster. Sarah felt Sapphire strain as the grade steepened and the thin air grew even thinner. A rattlesnake slithered across the path and she patted the Sapphire’s flank and spoke gently until the animal calmed. Sapphire remembered her, though the horse had been gone from the farm for nineteen months.

  She had given Sapphire and the other two horses to Elijah the last morning he awoke under her roof. Sarah had fixed him breakfast but he was too excited to do anything but push the eggs and grits around his plate. Elijah talked of the house he was building at the foot of Dismal Mountain, the house where he and Laura would spend their first night together under an unshingled roof. Sarah called the horses a wedding gift though to her way of thinking they were already more his than hers. He had been the one who looked after them after Will died. Elijah had been only fourteen, but there had not been a morning or evening he forgot to feed or groom the horses. He’d treated the animals with care, like everything else in his life. Which was why he’d not ridden Sapphire to Mountain City. Elijah feared the mare might break a leg on the rocky backslope of the mountain. Always careful, Sarah thought, but somehow not careful enough with what was most precious of all.

  They traveled another hour before entering the gap, the mountains and woods closing around them, sunlight mere glances in the treetops. No birds sang and no deer or rabbit bolted into the undergrowth at their approach. The trees leaned over the trail as if listening.

  “I didn’t know it to be this far,” the surveyor grumbled. “To be honest, Mrs. Hampton, I don’t believe six dollars is enough.”

  “My son lost his life for less money,” Sarah said.

  They came to the spring first, the bare, packed ground of a campsite beside it. They dismounted and let the horses drink. The skillet rusted on the big beech a few yards down the trail and in the woods behind it they found the swelling in the ground. Like it’s pregnant, Sarah thought. The drovers had done as much as could be expected. A flat creek rock no bigger than her bible leaned at the head of the grave. No markings were on it. A few broomsedge sprigs poked through the brown leaves that covered the grave. Another winter and Sarah knew the rock would fall, the grave settle, and no one would know a man was buried here.

  She wondered if she’d be alive by then. Her stomach had troubled her for months. Ginseng and yellowroot, the draught the doctor had given her, did not help. She had no appetite, and last week she’d coughed up a bright gout of blood.

  The surveyor spoke first. “I’m going to get my equipment and go a ways up that ridge.” He pointed west where a granite-faced mountain cut the sky in half. “It’s too steep for the horses so you all stay here. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour,” he said, and walked away.

  Laura kneeled beside the grave and cleared the leaves from the mound. She took a handkerchief from her dress pocket and unknotted it.

  “I brung some wildflower seeds to put on his grave,” Laura said. “You want to help plant them, Mrs. Hampton?”

  Sarah looked at Laura and realized why Elijah had been so smitten with her. Laura’s eyes were dark as July blackberries, her hair yellow as corn silk. But pretty didn’t last long in these mountains. Too soon, Sarah knew Laura would stand before a looking-glass and find an
old woman staring back .

  “I’ll help,” Sarah said, and kneeled beside her daughter-in-law.

  The ground was loose so the planting didn’t take very long. When they finished, Sarah stood, her hands stained by the dark loamy earth. “I’ll be at the spring with the horses,” Sarah said.

  She was tired from the journey, the night without sleep. She took the blanket off Sapphire and spread it on the ground where Elijah had died. She lay down and closed her eyes, the bible laid beside her.

  She slept and soon Elijah called her again. It was dark and she could see nothing, but he was close this time, just a few yards deeper into the laurel slick. Branches slashed at her face but she kept stumbling forward. She was close now, close enough to reach out her hand and touch his face.

  “Mrs. Hampton.”

  The surveyor stood above her, the equipment burdening his shoulder, his face scratched and sweaty, one of his shirtsleeves torn.

  “Where’s Laura?” he asked.

  “At the grave,” Sarah said. Her right arm stretched out before her, open palm pressed to the rocky dirt. She raised that hand to shield her eyes, for it was now midday and sunlight fell through the trees straight as a waterfall.

  “North Carolina, Watauga County,” the surveyor said as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. “Granite, yellow-jackets, snakes, and briars, that’s all that mountain is. I really think it only fair that you pay me two dollars extra. Why just look at my shirt, Mrs. Hampton.”

  Sarah did not look up. She took the pen and bottle of ink from the haversack and opened the bible. She found Elijah’s name, his dates, and place of birth. Sarah clutched the pen and wrote each letter in slow, even strokes, her hand casting a shadow over the drying ink.