Something Rich and Strange

by Ron Rash

  The next day he saw an old man alone in his field. I’ve not come to rob or harm you, Benjamin said as he approached. The farmer looked doubtful until Benjamin flattened the back of Emma’s letter on a well guard, took a pencil from the haversack and asked the way to Knoxville. So you had plenty enough of that tussling, the farmer asked afterward. Benjamin answered that he had. Even with that busted head you got more sense than them still at it, the farmer said, and told Benjamin to wait a minute, came back from his root cellar with salt meat and potatoes. The old man would not have it otherwise, so Benjamin had stuffed the victuals in the haversack and gone on.

  He traveled for two weeks, first north to Nashville and then following the Cumberland Turnpike east. Several times he’d hidden as Union and Confederate soldiers passed, once a whole regiment. Another time, at night, the clatter of cavalry. He’d been spotted only once. Two soldiers on horseback fired their muskets but did not leave the pike to pursue him.

  One night a few miles from Knoxville, Benjamin felt Emma’s presence. Despite the afternoon heat, he’d made good time, so near dusk bedded in a meadow. When he awoke, a wet moon had peeled away the ground dark and replaced it with a silvery sheen. No breeze rustled or night bird called. No sound of water, or distant train. A stiller moment he had never known. Benjamin stepped onto the road and whispered her name. Though Emma did not answer, he knew she was very near. Then she wasn’t, and he felt a distance between them that was more than the miles yet to walk. The next morning Benjamin believed all of it, the silver light, her presence, part of a dream, until he saw his fresh boot prints in the dust.

  He followed a drover’s trace into the mountains and the air quickly cooled. It was as dangerous a place as he had been. Not just soldiers traversed here but also outliers who, with no cause other than profit, took no prisoners. But the few people he met, including a pair of drovers, passed with eyes lowered. They feature me the dangerous one, Benjamin told himself. As he went higher into the mountains, dogwoods that in the lowlands had shed their white yet clutched flowers, as if time was spooling backward. The fancy pleased him.

  The land leveled and somewhere unmarked he passed from Tennessee into North Carolina. Not just Carolina but Watauga County, he reminded himself. Emma was probably in the field hoeing or planting. He imagined her looking up as she wiped her brow or rubbed dirt from her hands—gazing toward the gap at this very moment, already sensing his return. Sounds eight months unheard—the chatter of boomers, a raven’s caw—he heard now. Yellow ladyslippers Emma used for tonics flowered on the trace edge. A chestnut three men couldn’t link arms around curved the path. Everything heard and everything seen was a piece of himself restored. He thought of the soldier in the peach tree. It had been as if the man was trying to climb out of hell itself. And now I have, Benjamin thought. A whole mountain range stood between him and the horror and meanness.

  Late the next afternoon he spotted a church spire, soon after the backs of store fronts. Boone, the county seat where he’d been conscripted. He could be easily recognized here, so waited in the woods as the last farm wagons left town, shopkeepers locked or barred their doors. Night settled in and with it a breeze that smelled of coming rain. Only now, for the first time since he’d left them in the orchard, Benjamin pondered Dobbins and Wray. They too had been conscripted farm boys, Kentucky born. The three of them had been of like nature, quiet men who didn’t dice or drink. At night they kept their own campfire, where they spoke of their farms in such detail that the three homesteads merged into one shared memory. There were friendly disputes over the merits of brightleaf versus burley tobacco, the best way to cure a ham. On the night before the battle, they spoke quietly of crops being tended by wife and kin. I’d nary have figured to miss staring at a mule’s ass dawn to dusk, Wray said, but I surely do.

  They knew from the massing of troops this was to be a battle, not a skirmish. That last morning their regiment had passed a Dunker church, beyond it a plowed field tended only by scarecrows. The braggarts and raw cobs spoke little now as the battle’s racket encircled them like a noose. Officers rode back and forth on skittish horses. Those who’d gone before them littered the ground, so many Benjamin wondered if a single man yet survived. Soon they smelled gunpowder, watched its smoke drift toward them. More bodies appeared. Dobbins picked up a dirt clod, squeezed it. Habit, Benjamin thought, as Dobbins let the grains sift through his fingers. Good soil, Wray had asked. Not the best, Dobbins had answered, but I reckon it to cover our bodies well enough.

  The courthouse clock chimed nine, and he stepped from the woods. As he walked a deserted side street, Benjamin thought of the peach seeds he might have placed in his haversack. He’d eaten the fruit once here in Boone, sold off a wagon up from South Carolina, the peach purpled just past ripeness, fuzzy and soft in the hand. It had been like eating pulpy honey. Better not to have brought them, he decided, for if they did grow, they might barb his memory come spring.

  Once he was outside of Boone, a soft rain began to fall. Benjamin lay down in a laurel slick beside Middlefork Creek, the stream he would follow eight miles until it led him into the pasture below the cabin. Tired as he was, he could not sleep, and would have gone on had the moon and stars offered the way. The laurel leaves caught the rain, let it pool into thick drops that soaked his clothes. For the first time since leaving the battle, Benjamin wished for his field coat. A bone-deep cold entered his body. He clasped his arms over his chest, tucked his knees close. After a while his feet grew numb. Teeth clicked like struck marbles. Just the wet and cold, he told himself, but thought of last winter in camp. Putrid fever had caused the same symptoms. Eight men had died. Those not yet afflicted had filled their mouths with garlic and pinches of gunpowder. A sergeant marked red crosses on dead men’s haversacks. Some had believed that, like consumption, the contagion could drowse in a body for weeks, maybe months, waiting for rain or cold to awaken it.

  The rain had thinned to mist by first light. Benjamin did not eat, simply got to his feet and started walking. Fog narrowed the world as he followed Middlefork Creek up the mountain. The few farmhouses loomed briefly out of the white, sank back. A dog barked once and he heard an axe cleaving wood, but that was all. Soon the fog thinned, just wisps sliding over low ground.

  Until the war, there’d not been a night he and Emma were more than a furlong apart. Trips to Boone or visits to kin might last all day, but come eventide the families returned. From age twelve until they’d married, Benjamin listened for the Watsons’ wagon to clatter past. Once it did, he’d watch from a porch or window as the lantern floated from barn to cabin, disappearing when the Watson’s front door closed. In those few moments of darkness, Benjamin teased himself into believing Emma and her family had vanished forever. He would hold his breath, feel his heart gallop until, slowly, light began to glow inside the cabin, sifting through chinks, the one glass window. As it did, he felt a happiness almost painful.

  As he approached Jacob Story’s farm, Benjamin saw that the corn stood dark and high. No hard frost or gullywasher had come. The signs held true, not only for the corn but also the beans and tobacco. Smoke rose from Jacob’s chimney. Noon-dinner time already, he thought. Benjamin followed the trailway through a stand of silver birch, straddled a split-rail fence, placed one foot on his land and then the other. He had hoped Emma would be in the cabin. That way he could step onto the porch, open the door, and stroll in no different than he would coming from field or barn. Benjamin wanted their separation to seem that way, to never speak of the war or their months apart. He wanted it to become nothing more than a few dark moments, like a lantern carried through a cabin’s low door.

  Emma was not inside, though, but kneeling on the creek bank, next to the cattle guard where the water quickened. He could not see her face because she was looking down, her left arm and hand in the water. She was wearing her Sunday dress, the dress she’d worn on their wedding day. When Benjamin called her name, she did not look up. He walked faster, shouted her name. Emm
a’s eyes remained on the water and now he saw that her right hand hovered above the creek like a dragonfly. The fingers and palm descended and touched the surface, then lifted, did the same thing again and then again.

  He crossed into the cornfield, not stumbling over hoe furrows because there were none. Then he was on the bank opposite Emma, the creek so narrow that he could almost jump it. Emma, he said, almost a whisper. She lifted her head but offered no smile or words or tears. She looked past him, as if he wasn’t even there.

  Benjamin tried to remember the streams he’d crossed, which ones flowed fast and which ones did not. He had stepped over the creek near the peach orchard, after that crossed smidgen branches and wide rivers, sloshing through some, walking bridges over others. But what of today, recalling last night’s shivering cold. He’d not eaten or drunk, and from Boone to here not once crossed the creek. He looked past Emma, searching for a mound of dirt, a wooden cross or flat stone. He looked for his own grave.

  His gaze moved across pasture and wood, corn crib and barn, seeing no sign of such until his eyes settled on the cabin. A red cross was painted on the door. For a few moments, his eyes remained there. Then he looked at Emma. Her head was down and her hand touched the water, this time entered the creek’s flow a moment. When she withdrew the hand, something about her had lightened, wisped away like dandelion seeds. Emma, he said. She raised her hand and pointed to Benjamin’s and then to the water. He lowered his hand into the current and she did the same. The water pressed against his palm. Just for a moment, Benjamin felt another hand touch his. When he looked up, Emma was gone.

  Since her grave wasn’t on the farm, it would be behind the church. Benjamin could walk the two miles, but that would delay his going back west into Tennessee. He turned and began the trek back to Boone. In a week he would be on the Cumberland Turnpike.

  He’d walk the Pike in daylight and soon enough men wearing butternut or men wearing blue would meet him. Whichever side appeared first Benjamin would join. A month or two might pass but there’d be another battle. The armies would finish their business with him. He would hold out his hand again and this time Emma would take it.

  OUTLAWS

  When I was sixteen, my summer job was robbing trains. I’d mask my lower face with a black bandana, then, six-shooter in hand, board the train with two older bandits and demand “loot.” Fourteen times a day I’d get shot by Sheriff Masterson, stagger off the metal steps, and fall into the drainage ditch beside the tracks. Afterwards, we’d wait thirty minutes for the next train, which was the same train, to come hooting up the tracks. Years later I would publish a short story about that summer, and one of my fellow bandits would read it. But that was later.

  My aunt, who worked as a cashier at Frontier Village, had gotten me the job. Despite my being sixteen, she’d cajoled Mr. Watkins, who preferred college students, into hiring me. He can play Billy the Kid, she’d told him. Anyway, with a mask on who can tell how old he is? So it was that on a Saturday morning in June I changed into my all-black outlaw duds in the Stagecoach Saloon’s basement. The Levis and cowboy shirt hung loose on my hips and shoulders, and I had to gouge another notch in my gun belt. My hat sank so low my neck looked like a pale stalk on a black mushroom. I found one a smaller size in the gift shop. The boots were my own.

  My fellow outlaws, both from Charlotte, were Matt, a junior pre-med major at UNC-A, and Jason, who’d just graduated from there. His major was theatre arts, which should have been a tipoff for his performance on the last day we worked together. After stashing our clothes in the lockers, we walked over to the depot where Donald, a paunchy, silver-haired man who claimed he’d been John Wayne’s stunt double in Rio Bravo, went over the whats and whens a last time. He sent us on our way with advice gleaned from eight summers’ experience: there will always be smart alecs onboard and any acknowledgment just egged them on, and be prepared for anything—kids jabbing at your eyes with gift shop spears, teenagers kicking your shins, adults setting you on fire with cigarettes. They even do that to me, Donald said, and I’m the guy wearing the white hat.

  So nine to five, five days a week with Mondays and Tuesdays off, the three of us waited for the train whistle to signal it was time for our hold-up. We had no horses, so ran out of the woods firing pistols at the sky until the locomotive and its three passenger cars halted. We entered separate compartments and Sheriff Masterson took us on one at a time. Clutching our gut-shot bellies, we’d stagger to the metal steps, roll into the ditch, and lie there until the train crossed the trestle and curved back toward the depot.

  Getting shot and dying was the easy part. By July, all of us had plenty of wounds besides scrapes and bruises from falling. We’d been burned, poked, tripped, and pierced by weaponry that ranged from knitting needles to sling-shot marbles. After each failed robbery, we’d retreat to a hideout with its cache of extra blanks and pistols, three lawn chairs, toilet paper, and a Styrofoam cooler filled with sandwiches and soft drinks. Stretched out above it all, a green camouflage tarp kept everything, most of all us, dry when it rained. Our contributions to the hideout were some paperbacks and Jason’s transistor radio, which was always tuned to the college station.

  One morning in mid-July Jason nodded toward the radio.

  “You don’t even know what they’re saying, do you kid?” Jason asked as he rolled a joint.

  “Everybody look what’s going down,” I said, after a few moments.

  “But what’s it about?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “It’s about not wanting to get your ass shot off in Vietnam,” Jason said.

  Matt looked up from a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land.

  “I didn’t hear anything about Vietnam.”

  “When you graduate and your deferment’s up you’ll hear it,” Jason said, “especially when they send you one of these.”

  He took a letter from his pocket and gave it to Matt.

  “You gonna to try to get out of going?” Matt asked as he handed it back.

  “I have gotten out, for four years, but yeah, I plan on keeping an ocean between me and that war.” Jason grimaced. “I never got picked for anything good in my life, varsity baseball, homecoming king, class president. Hell, I didn’t even get picked for glee club, but I fucking get picked for this.”

  “So what will you do?” Matt asked.

  “I’ll convince them I’m nuts. Acting’s what I’m trained for, man. I’ll speak in tongues while I do handstands if I have to. Maybe shit my britches right before I go in. I’ve heard that works. They’ll 4F me in a heartbeat.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Matt said. “The army’s on to that dirty diaper scam. A buddy of mine tried it. He walked in with shit gluing his pants to his bare ass. The army doc told him not to worry, that he’d probably shit himself even worse when the VC started shooting at him.”

  “I’ll come up with something else then,” Jason said. “Like I said, I’m an actor.”

  “Oh yeah,” Matt said. “Sure you will.”

  “So you don’t think I can pull it off?”

  “Well, it’s not like you’ve been giving Academy Award performances this summer,” Matt said. “The kid here does a better death scene than you do.”

  “Maybe I’m saving up for a more challenging audience than those dipshits on the train,” Jason said.

  “You better be saving up for a bus ticket to Toronto,” Matt said.

  Jason lit the joint and inhaled deeply, offered it to me as he always did before passing it to Matt.

  “Bob Dylan’s right, kid,” Jason said. “Don’t trust anybody over thirty about anything, but especially Vietnam. There’s nothing good about being over there.”

  “I heard they got great dope,” Matt said as he passed back the joint.

  “Yeah, it’s called morphine,” Jason answered. “Medics give it to you while they’re trying to stitch you back together.”

  “Some cool animals, too,” Matt deadpanned. “Cobr
as and pythons. Leeches, tigers, and bears, oh my.”

  “Fuck you,” Jason said.

  “Just trying a little levity,” Matt said.

  “We’ll see how funny you think it is when you get your letter.”

  “If I get in med school they can’t touch my ass.”

  “If,” Jason said. “From what you said about your GPA that’s a big if.”

  “I’ve got a year to pull it up,” Matt said.

  Jason turned to me.

  “Growing up around here, you probably believe all that shit about the evil commies, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What about your parents?”

  “My cousin’s over there and Daddy says he ought not be, him or any other American.”

  “Might be some hope for you hicks after all,” Jason said, and held out what was left of the joint to me. “Don’t you want to try it just once?”

  I shook my head and he threw the remnants down, ground them into the dirt with his boot toe. The train whistle blew.

  “Time to get shot,” Matt grinned. “In honor of that letter, the kid and I will let you lead us into battle.”

  “Keep joking about it, asshole,” Jason said. “They may get you yet. But me, I’ll figure a way out. You’ll see.”

  Frontier Village didn’t shut down until after Labor Day, but Matt and I went back to school the last Monday in August. After that Jason would work solo. All through August, Jason talked about ways of getting a deferment, but it wasn’t until our last weekend together that he’d figured out what to do.