His father was there, at the mast that centered the shed, around which the horses were knocking and frenzied. The mast had a great length of chain hanging from it, and the leather strops of discipline, too, wrapped about its middle. Carved notches marked the days of the season, from Winter Festival to May Day, the days when Daddy did his penance, the hours of his atonement for a sin long ago forgotten. His father wore no shirt; his chest was covered with kudzu hair that sprawled across his shoulders and connected to his belly like inflamed moss; trousers were caked in filth; boots, too, with blood near the toes for they were tight and he would wear them all during the hurting season.
“You got Naomi upset,” Theron said, not meaning to scold, but it was hard to avoid. Naomi was not yet a year, and needed gentleness; the old horse, her sire, Moses, was used to the season, the frantic pain that Daddy put himself through, but Naomi was barely more than a foal.
His father’s eyes were not even upon him, but gazing through him, beyond him, to some richer meaning, listening to the words, but decoding them. The man’s face was yellow jaundice, and the hunger was showing in the sunken cheeks; the thin blond hair, cut short like a monk’s, Theron thought, was slick and shiny, the sweat, pearls of mania. “That’s not good,” his father said, “you take her out, then, take her out, boy.”
Theron nodded, glad, and ran around the mast to grab Naomi’s bit. He tugged at her, but her eyes were still wild. Theron looked around the shed. “It’s the chain, Daddy,” he said, for he knew that a horse, unless tempered to a rope, would take fright at anything that resembled one; the silver chain swung lightly about the thick wood. On its end was a rusty hook, from one of the oyster trawlers that had dry-docked over in Tangier, and there was blood on it. He registered this for a moment, wondering what his father did with the hook that drew blood from him. It was frightening, sometimes, the hurting season, at least to him; he was sure it frightened Mama, too, for she was moody during those months; Leona, older than Daddy or Mama, didn’t seem to notice or care; and Milla, being so young, accepted it the way Theron had up until he’d become aware that it was only his daddy who did it, that when he went to Tangier, nobody else had a mast or the chain and strops, nobody else had a daddy that slept with the horses from February to May.
The boy brought the horse out of the shed, into the slapping rain; the smell of bleach and soap stronger, and he looked up to see the wash swimming in the wind, but their stays holding tight to the rope; Naomi tugged away from him, but he kept his grip, watching for the horse’s teeth. He spoke to her, calmly, and led her over to the springhouse. It would be small for the horse, but she’d be safe and fairly dry, and the darkness of it would calm her.
He tied her to the upturned patio chair and wiped at her forelock and nose with the red bandanna the girl over at the Festival had given him, smoothing down the horse’s mane and then her withers to settle her.
The horse had the thick hair of the island horses—it was said that they could be traced back to the Spanish ships wrecking off the islands, and his father had told him that the harsh winters in the wild had developed the breed to the point of hardiness and hairiness. Something Theron had learned in school, too, a phrase, “survival of the fittest.” That had been the island horses, for they swam every spring around the time of May Day from Tangier over to Chite Island, which was here. Centuries of horses coming to mate on Chite in the spring, and to swim back in October when winter came too harsh here first.
Chite was a small island, although the river that ran through it connected it through the wetlands to the Carolina Isthmus, so it had not been a real island since sometime long before Theron was born. Old Moses, he had been a Chiter, and his dam, a wild horse that had never been tamed on Tangier, had died and left the one foal, Naomi. The horse had a bad fetlock, the back left, and she raised it a little, so he squatted down beside her and massaged it. The wind through the cracks in the old gray wood bit around his ears, but the whistling sound it made seemed to steady his horse. “Good girl,” he said, and wrapped the bandanna around his neck the way the girl had. It smelled of horse now, and perfume, and fish, as all things on Tangier smelled of fish.
Theron waited out the storm in the springhouse, and when it was over, in just a few minutes, he led the horse out to the rockpile road that spanned the wetlands to the west of the house, and took her at a canter.
The horse slowed toward the middle of the rock pile, for it became less smooth here, and there were small gaps in the rocks. The sky cleared, but the sun was still not up in the middle of it, but back in the west, over Tangier. A red-winged blackbird flew up and out from the mesh of yellow reeds and dive-bombed at Theron’s hair.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Didn’t do nothin’ to you!”
He flapped his hands at the descending bird, and dug his heels into Naomi’s side until she galloped some more. His butt was sore from the pounding, for he didn’t have his seat yet, at least not with Naomi, for she was an erratic bounder, but he rose fell rose fell with her, his leg muscles feeling stronger, and he tried to pretend that he and the horse were one animal, just like his daddy had taught him.
The bird left him alone once he was out of its territory, and he guided Naomi down to some fresh water for a drink. He saw their reflection, the horse’s long neck, its thick shaggy mane hanging down, and then his own face in the cold brown water—the red bandanna tied smartly just under his chin, and some whiskers on his upper lip. He smiled at himself; she had liked him, that older girl in Tangier, the pretty one. She was brown eyed just like everybody else on the islands, and brown hair, and freckles. Her hands were like little brushes on his, for they scratched and tingled and smooth when she had slid them across his palms.
“Look,” she’d said after she’d done it, and he had looked at his hands.
At the palms of his hands. All red, the palms, like they were blushing and warm.
“You got skin like water,” she said. “See-through hands. I can see you through your skin, boy. Boy.” She said “boy” like it was a dare, so he had kissed her behind the booth, where nobody could see them.
He had known what the other boys did, the ones in school, even over in the Isthmus, for they bragged about girls in a way that disturbed him. But he had felt lightning in his body, and her lips felt like fire and sensations had gone through him that words could not even describe, for it was his first kiss ever, and she had seen his excitement when she drew back from him. She had whispered, “I guess you like me.”
Embarrassed, he had dropped a hand in front of him and clasped it with the other, “Huh?”
“It’s nature,” she had said, the teacher of his flesh. He leaned forward and kissed her again, but she pushed him away this time and said, “Nuh-uh.” But it led him, this feeling, just like the boys had told him it would, it led him without a thought in the world to anything else.
The horse leaned down, disturbing the water, and Theron’s reflection whirled and broke in the water. She had liked him, that girl, that day. He had changed since then, he knew it.
He was a man now, even if the others called him boy.
The rockpile road ended at the Isthmus Highway, rising out of reeds and swamps and trees like an altar of the true religion. Theron wasn’t supposed to take Naomi up on it, for even though few cars traveled it until summer, when the summer people from the cities came down, and when Daddy blocked the rockpile road to keep them off his property, the highway could be dangerous, for an occasional truck roared through in nothing flat, and a girl’s mother got hit a long time ago trying to push her daughter out of the way and to safety. But Theron, a man now, and cocky, rode Naomi up the brief, steep hill, batting back the sticks and dead vines that had not yet greened since the winter, and clopped up onto the potholed blacktop. Naomi was faster on the highway, riding down the centerline, for it was completely flat, and where it dipped could be seen, and avoided, for several yards.
As he slowed her down at a bend in the road, there was a car stuck in mud
on the shoulder.
2
Theron was not big on cars, not like the other boys, but this one was pretty and sporty, a two-seater. A man stood beside it, kicking the bumper and cursing to high heaven. He was a lot younger than Daddy, but maybe only Mama’s age. He wore a tan suit, and had rolled his slacks up almost to his knees, which were black with mud. He was soaked head to toe, caught, no doubt, in the storm. His eyeglasses were fogged up.
Theron dismounted, and led Naomi up to the man. “Mister, ‘scuse me, but what kind of car you got?”
The man looked at Theron as if he could not hear. Almost like his father in the shed. Then he said, “Right now it’s the kind that breaks down.”
“Pretty nice. Never seen one like that before,” Theron nodded. “You’re stuck.”
“You must be the local genius,” the man said, and then grinned. “Sorry, but you ever get so pissed off at something you can’t see straight, kid?”
“I guess.”
“So, kid, you live nearby? You got a phone or something?”
“Yeah, only we don’t let strangers use it.”
“Okay. Anybody else around here? A drugstore?”
Theron chuckled, and covered his mouth to keep from making the man feel too bad. “Sorry—sorry— don’t mean to laugh. Don’t mean to. But you’re twenty-five miles from town center.” He pointed toward the direction that the man must’ve already come.
“That piss hole? Christ, kid, that’s a town? I thought it was a mosquito breeding ground. Nothing the other way? You sure?”
Naomi whinnied, and Theron patted her nose. “She’s shy. Just shy of biting, sometimes, I think.” Then he tugged at the bandanna around his neck, self-consciously. There was something about this man he didn’t feel comfortable about. “You’re not from around here.”
The man shook his head. “No, kid, “I’m a damn Yankee. Make that a goddamned Yankee. But don’t hold it against me.” The man said his name was Evan, and he was from Connecticut, and that he wrote magazine articles and was supposed to meet his wife up the shore, but he was doing some kind of article on lost byways of the South.
“You write,” Theron said, smiling, “that’s wild. Wild. Me, I barely read. I watch TV. Anything you write ever get on TV?”
Evan shook his head. “Yeah, I once did write for the TV news. CBS.”
“I watch that. Dan Rather. My daddy thinks he’s from another parish, if you know what I mean, but Daddy thinks anybody on TV is.”
“Well, kid, I don’t know about that, but I know I hated it. I hate this. What a way to make a living, huh?”
Theron shrugged. “Survival of the fittest, I guess.” The wind, which had died, picked up again, rattling the dead reeds, shagging at the budding trees, dispersing the petals of those that had blossomed early. He could smell honeysuckle already, up here on the Isthmus, and it wasn’t even May. The man had a kind look to him, a wrinkled-brow honesty, and Daddy had always told him that when someone needed help, there was only one thing to do. “Look, mister,” Theron said after watching the man pace his car, “if you don’t mind walking down there,” he pointed down the gully, over the wetlands, to the stand of trees that separated Chite from the mainland, “it’s about two miles. I’d let you ride her, but she’s shy. My daddy’s got a phone, only I got to warn you about one thing.”
Evan said, “What’s that, kid?”
“We keep to ourselves most of the time. I go to school up in Isthmus, but we don’t really mix. My baby sister, Milla, she never even seen a mainlander.” The man named Evan seemed to grasp this immediately. “Let’s go.”
Evan got a camera and a tape recorder out of the back of his car and strung both of them around his neck like ties. His shoes were brown and would be uncomfortable for the trip—Theron smiled inside himself when he thought of crossing the land on the other side of the rockpile road, where the mud would surely suck him to his ankles if he wasn’t careful. Evan asked, as they descended from the highway, down to the road between the wetlands, “Are there snakes down here?”
“Too cold still. There’ll be plenty by June. I once saw a man from Tangier bite the head off a cottonmouth. You ever see that? He just chomped, and spit it out like it was tobacco.” Theron rode Naomi, but walked her slow so the man could keep up with them. He wasn’t sure how Daddy or Mama, or even Leona for that matter, would take having a stranger over; Daddy was normally friendly with outlanders, but this was the hurting season, and it might be embarrassing for someone to walk right into the middle of that. Theron assumed that other fathers had their own hurting seasons, although he’d been too awkward to ask any of the boys over in the high school, both because they always seemed smarter than him, and because he was already teased enough as it was for being so different.
The sun was just past noon when they reached sight of the house, and the wind had pretty much died. The sky was white with cloud streaks, and the earth was damp, the moss that hung from the trees sparkled with heaven’s spit, as Mama called rain when she was feeling poetic. Naomi tried to pick up speed, for the shed was close by, but he kept her slow out of courtesy to the stranger. “How you doin’?” he asked Evan.
Evan wagged his head around and said, “Hey, kid, can I get a picture? You and the horse and the house and that thing—what is that? Some kind of bag?” Theron looked in the direction where Evan indicated, as the man unscrewed his camera’s lens cap. Dangling from the willow, with the wash, was the Luck Sack. “It’s for good luck,” Theron said. “It keeps away hurricanes and floods in spring.”
“How’s it work?”
“So far, so good.” He posed for a picture, sitting up proudly on his horse, keeping his chin back so the man could get a clear shot of the red bandanna that girl in Tangier had given him. Theron wished he had a hat—his father had a hat, and now that Theron had crossed the border between boyhood and mandom, he would’ve liked something brown with a broad brim to keep the sun out of his eyes, to make him feel like a horseman.
“So,” Evan said, snapping several pictures, “you have other good luck charms?”
Theron struck pose after pose, attempting a masculine look for this one, a shy look, a rugged, tough pose. “We’re not much into good luck. It’s what we call tradition. Say, how much film you got in there?”
“Lots.” Snap–snap–snap. “What’s in that sack, anyway?”
“One of the cats. We got seven. Kittens on the way,” Theron said. “I love kittens, but cats I ain’t so fond of. You gonna put my pictures in a magazine or something?”
“Maybe,” Evan said, lowering the camera. He let the camera swing around his neck. He reached beneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes. His face glowed with sweat—the two miles had been hard on him, because he was a Yankee. The man seemed to be taking in the house and the river, maybe even the bay if his eyesight was any good with those thick glasses. “Are you people witches or something?”
Theron straightened up and grunted, “Nahsir,” his pride a little hurt by such an assumption, “we’re Baptists.”
“Ronny, honey,” Leona said, her eyes lowering, not even looking at the stranger; she kept the screen door shut, and her massive form blocked the way. “I don’t think you should be bringing people home right now.”
“This’s Evan. He’s a Yankee,” Theron said. “He needs to use the phone.”
Leona looked at Evan’s shoes. Theron saw the squiggle vein come out on her forehead, like when she was tense over cleaning. “Mister, our phone’s out of order.” She said it lightly, delicately, sweetly. Then she looked him in the eye.
Evan blinked. “That’s okay,” he said, patting Theron on the shoulder.
Leona arched her eyebrows and stared at the small tape recorder and camera around his neck. “You a traveling pawnshop, mister?”
“Nah’m,” Theron butted in, “he writes for magazines. He’s a famous writer, Leo, he used to write for Dan Rather.”
“Not really,” Evan said.
“I’m sorry, sir,
but you can’t come in the house. The little girl’s sick, and like I said, the phone’s not working. We had a big storm this morning. Always knocks out the power lines and such.” She kept her hands pressed against the screen door as if the man would suddenly bolt for it. And then, to Theron, “Now, Ronny, why’d you bring this nice man all the way out here when you knew the line was down?”
Theron said, “‘Cause I thought it’d be up by now,” turning to look up at Evan, who kept staring at Leona. “It’s usually up in a hour or two,” and, as if this were a brilliant idea, he clapped his hands. “I know, Evan, you can stay and have some sandwich and pie, and then maybe the phone’ll be up.”
A groan from the shed out back, and Evan and Theron both glanced that way. It was Daddy with his hurting. Leona groaned, as much to cover up the other noise as anything, and she clutched her stomach. “I tell you, mister, what little Milla’s got, we all seem to be coming down with. You’d be wise to get on back up to Isthmus.”
“Some kind of flu,” Evan said.
“That’s right. That one that’s been going around.” She nodded, looking pained.
Evan grinned, as if this were a game. “Had my flu shots, ma’am. And anyway, even if I hadn’t, I’ll survive it.”
Leona lost all semblance of pretend kindness. “Just get off this property right now, and Ronny, you take him back up to the highway.” She stepped back into the gray hallway and shut the big door on both of them.
“She always this sweet?”
Theron shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her today. She’s almost a hundred, but all age done for her is make her ornery.” He went and tied Naomi around the sapling.
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