Moses Washington’s old Chevy pulls in on the other side of the pump. Behind his truck a thousand dust particles rise up in a small cyclone of sparkling bits. I duck in the front door before Moses climbs out. If he sees the bags in the truck there will be questions. He knows I’m supposed to be at the plant. Sometimes I think he knows everything.
Moses and his wife, Pearlene, have been around me my whole life. Pearlene delivered Carter and me when we came too quickly for Mother to get to the hospital. Some people say Moses has lived in Clayton long enough to have seen Yankee General Edward Ord march his soldiers over Davis Bridge.
The inside of Gerald’s Gas consists of three aisles whose crammed shelves contain every item a person might need. Bread. Extension cords. Tylenol. Fish bait. I grab two six-packs—one RC Cola and one Budweiser. Barbeque pork rinds are a favorite of Tucker’s. Five bags of those go on the counter. MoonPies for me. Beef jerky.
The bells above the door announce an arrival. Moses walks in. There is nowhere to hide. He takes in the large load on the counter.
“Looks like you and the dog are going on a trip. Where you headed?”
“Leaving is all,” I say.
Moses nods, like he understands. This will not be the end of the conversation. Besides serving as town handyman, he’s also the closest thing Clayton has to a Father Confessor. We don’t have a Catholic around here for miles but most folks like to talk. And Moses likes to listen.
Gerald takes his time ringing up my items. I hand over a twenty.
“Well, hell,” Gerald says, spitting a wad of chewing tobacco into an old Maxwell House can. “I’m out of ones, Zeke. Hang on a second while I go grab some out of the safe.”
Moses stands alongside me holding a bottle of chocolate Yoo-hoo and pressing the other hand into his hip, claiming the arthritis is acting up again. The morning gas rush, such as it is, has long passed and we are the only customers.
I keep my eyes focused out the window. Jessie Canthrop pulls into the dairy bar across the street and orders her first ice-cream cone of the day. Most folks put her weight somewhere between three and four hundred pounds. Last year, Jessie’s Girl Scout cookie order alone was enough to send the Clayton troop on an all-expenses-paid trip to Dollywood. Tucker sits in the truck, his eyes tracking me, unsure of how this day is unfolding.
“I don’t think I caught where you were headed,” Moses says in a friendly tone.
When I play deaf he shifts his weight beside me, clearing his throat. “You running away from something?”
Sweat pools in the small of my back, dampening the elastic on my briefs. The idea of leaving had seemed so easy at home—get in the truck and go.
“I’m not running.” This is a lie. I know it and he knows it.
Part of me wants to tell him, to say the words out loud and hear them vibrate off the air. I’m going to kill myself, Moses.
“Pearlene and I been talking about doing the same thing for years. Moving ourselves over to Memphis where we can pass more black folks than white folks in the street.”
Moses and his wife are several shades darker than the darkest white person in town. For a fact, everybody in Clayton knows that at least one person in his family has a little bit of Cherokee or black or both. And everybody, except Moses and Pearlene, pretends like they don’t know.
“We never have left, though. At least not yet. We still got some time, I imagine.”
I stay quiet.
He reaches a big-knuckled, scarred hand in my direction. Pats my shoulder. “Don’t you go and be a chicken shit.”
How does he know?
A smile covers his face but the pressure of his hand increases until I have to try hard not to squirm. “You’ve got two sweet girls,” he says. “They don’t need a daddy leaving town.”
It won’t help to tell him I’m not even sure the girls will miss me.
“I’ve known you your whole life, son, and you’ve had a rough go of it lately. But with those blue eyes like your mother’s, just a matter of time before another good woman lands in your arms, and you got that smart head to figure out what you need to be doing with yourself. You just need a new beginning is all.”
Gerald’s large gut precedes him through the back door. “Damn safe is a bear to open.”
He heaves himself back up onto the stool with the help of a cane and counts out my change.
I turn to Moses to say good-bye. The old man and I stare at each other. The thing about looking at Moses is his whole life story can be glimpsed through his eyes—the warmth in them telegraphs all the love he’s given his wife and surviving child over the years, but also there’s a resigned sadness, evidence of the grief he and Pearlene endured in losing two of their three children, a daughter when she was five years old and a son when he was twenty. Even with all that, suicide has probably never crossed Moses’s mind. He’s strong. No one in this town would argue he’s the better man here.
“You remember what I said?” he asks.
I nod and start the truck up, knowing this will be the last time I see him.
Moses stands in the doorway watching me go, slowly shaking his head like he knows I’m going to be a chicken shit.
I head east on Highway 57. The sky is stripped blue. Tucker hangs his big head out the window, ears flat back in the wind, nose on full alert sniffing the hot air. As the miles increase between Clayton and me, I can feel my shoulders start to let down. No one knows where I am right now. No one would think I should be here.
At Eastview, I turn north toward Jackson. The Johnny Cash eight-track blasts out of the truck’s speakers. I hear the train a comin’ . . . “Folsom Prison Blues” is Tucker’s favorite song. As soon as Johnny says, “I hang my head and cry,” the dog gives me a look that says he’s happy, even though our routine is all off-kilter and he doesn’t know where we’re headed.
Another pickup passes us on the left and the old man driving gives me a thumbs-up—for the song or for the dog or for both. My brother took to wearing all black in the last years of his life. We had a running joke where I would ask, Whose funeral you going to? and he’d shout, Yours! Then he’d tackle me.
The beginning years in the Tyler Road house were good ones. Love had run freely between Jackie and me, babies were being made, and my brother felt safe again. He had a real home with us, not just the shed where he and I lived in the five years between 1960 and when Jackie and I married.
When Honora was born, Jackie and I almost went crazy those first few months. The baby had colic, and every afternoon she’d start crying and keep going until we thought she’d run out of tears. I started working double shifts just to get some peace. One day she cried nonstop from the time I left the house at five thirty that morning until bedtime. Nothing Jackie tried calmed Honora—not even taking her for a ride on pothole-filled Redbud Road, which usually caused her to fall asleep. It’s a miracle we didn’t damage the old Impala’s chassis as many times as we drove it up and down Redbud that year.
By eight thirty that night Jackie had all she could take. She went and put the still-screaming baby in the crib and walked out to our tiny front porch and had herself a good cry. She believed she was a terrible mother. We’d tried for five years to have a baby and now finally here she was and Jackie wanted to give her back.
For most of the day, Carter had stayed in his room or outside, away from the caterwauling. Jackie and I had chosen the house, in part, because of its small third bedroom on the back, perfect for my brother. She didn’t even flinch when I proposed to her and said I wanted her to marry me with all my heart but I also needed her to promise it would always be okay for my brother to live with us. Jackie said she didn’t know how long she’d been out on the porch before she stopped crying enough to notice the baby was quiet.
Noises came from the kitchen. She blew her nose one last time and went inside. In t
he gentle gray of the early night, Jackie watched from the doorway while Carter swayed back and forth making scrambled eggs on the stove with one hand, the tiny infant held over his shoulder with the other.
The baby’s eyes grew heavy and she at last surrendered to sleep. Carter heard Jackie move behind him and motioned for her to sit at the table. The eggs and a piece of unbuttered toast were set before her along with a glass of milk. He left her alone to eat while he took the baby in the living room. When Jackie finished, she found them asleep in the rocking chair. She covered them with an old afghan and watched them from the couch until her own eyes closed.
The way I miss Carter and the way I miss what Jackie and I had are all tangled up. Maybe if it had been one or the other . . . If I could trade my marriage for my brother, maybe that would be enough. But the sum of the two losses together is too much.
Two hours later I’m thirty miles outside of Nashville. Thirty miles from Rosie, the baby sister who had been Carter’s and my constant pestering shadow, following us into snake-filled creeks and happy to play soldiers all day. And while we complained about a girl tagging along, it was mostly for show. Of all the people who will be left behind, she will miss me the most.
I pull over at a Stuckey’s to call, hoping to catch her before she heads out for lunch with an up-and-coming country music singer. Her clients are always up-and-coming. They are almost never anybody I’ve actually heard on the radio. The only female agent at KMG, Rosie started as a secretary fifteen years ago, doing everything anybody ever asked her to do, plus a thousand other things they didn’t. After the boss gave up trying to screw her, he promoted her.
I step into the phone booth, drop a quarter into the slot and push the numbers scrawled in my address book under “Rosie work.” A receptionist answers and puts me through. The noon sun beats down through the booth’s grimy panes of glass. Fags get AIDS is written in blue marker across the black plastic cover of the phone book.
“This is Rosie.”
Her voice echoes out at me like she’s sitting in a cave, which means I’m on the speaker-phone thing, and she sounds so grown-up. I think of Rosie with ponytails and scraped knees. Doesn’t matter that she’s almost forty now.
“Hey, Rosie, it’s your brother.”
“Surprise. Surprise.” I can hear her grinning. “Momma called this morning. Said you looked like you were running away from home. Where are you?”
“I’m about a half hour outside Nashville.”
“Half hour? Half hour! Give a girl some notice. Hang on a second.”
I hear footsteps and murmurings between Rosie and her secretary. “Damn” comes across loud and clear.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’ve got a lunch date with the senior vice president. My boss’s boss. I can’t not go. Stay with me tonight. I’ll take you out to dinner.”
Her words tumble at me, one on top of the other. Always in a hurry this girl is. Maybe because she is the youngest of the five of us or maybe because she was born that way, Rosie is tough. When the girl decides something, whether it’s having fried okra for breakfast or working with famous country music people, get out of her way. Mother thought Rosie was crazy for hauling herself up to Nashville. Kept telling her, Going to get your heart broke, my girl, you are. Mother knew what it was like to want something so bad and end up not getting it.
“Don’t worry,” I say, trying not to sound disappointed. “I’ve got farther down the road to go tonight, so can’t stick around for dinner. Just calling to say hi. You okay?”
“Don’t change the subject. Where are you going? Did you tell the girls you were leaving? Did you tell Jackie?”
Two teenagers in a rusted-out Pontiac pull up next to the truck. They stare at me, then roll their eyes at each other. My own daughters are too young to drive. At least by themselves. Honora turned fifteen this summer. Jackie asked me to teach her to drive, said it could be something my girl and I could do together. Mend some fences that have been all broken down since the divorce. I took Honora out once a week to First Baptist’s parking lot. She didn’t appreciate the truck’s manual transmission. Why can’t you have an automatic like everybody else? The first lesson ended with both of us mad, but by the third one, she got the hang of it. Last week I took her out for a drive on the highway. She shifted all the way into fifth gear. Made her proud. I like going fast, Daddy, she said.
Rosie’s voice calls out to me from the phone. “Did you hear me?”
“I got to go. Somebody’s waiting for the phone.” I pause for a second, torn between telling her everything and worried she might talk me out of it.
“Listen, I love you, okay?” This is a compromise. This is the only thing Rosie needs to know.
She yells at me not to hang up. Tucker waits with his head out the truck window, panting like he’s about to pass out. After I give him some water, we head east again. The Smokies rise up outside the truck’s windows by sunset. The last time I saw the mountains was with Jacklynn on our honeymoon. It was October and wide bands of red, green, and yellow cut across the mountains. Jacklynn was twenty-two and I was twenty-three. Happiness loomed large.
As darkness falls, I stop in Pigeon Forge at a motel done up to look like a real log cabin, though it’s actually logs painted on vinyl siding. The nightly room rate is half my daily take-home, so I go for the weekly rate, figuring I’ll have a kind of a vacation before doing what I’ve come here to do.
The McDonald’s around the corner provides dinner. I eat in front of my room’s TV. Every five minutes the top of the set requires a whack to make the picture come in clear. The static is a friendly background buzz while I try to fall asleep, but the sheets scratch my skin and headlights from cars on the main road keep sweeping through the thin curtains. My daughters wouldn’t mind. They like having at least one light on when they go to bed. When Honora and Louisa were small, Jackie was in charge of baths and teeth and hair brushing. My job was to tuck each daughter in the way she liked it. Lou wanted the covers pulled all the way up to the chin but she always left one leg on top, in case she needed to escape. You never know, Daddy, monsters could come. In the glow of the pink-shaded lamp that sat on the nightstand between their beds, I read to them. The titles changed from Goodnight Moon to Cat in the Hat to Little House on the Prairie. Lights out, I’d say. Just one more, Daddy. Please. Last one, I’d say.
Tucker lies on the floor by the bed, already snoring after finishing off the burger and fries.
The far-off sound of a train’s whistle echoes over the droning of the air conditioner. I close my eyes and listen, hear the whistle get closer and closer until the train must be heading straight for the room. It takes me back to Clayton. To Carter and me waiting every Tuesday night for the five-thirty freight train from Memphis to whistle through town so we could race across the tracks before heading home to dinner.
Five
1948
My mother had no great hopes for my sisters, knew their futures promised little difference from her own, even suspected that their girlhoods might prove the high-water mark of their lives. Not so for her boys. When my brother and I had landed in her arms on a clear October night, she thanked God. Two sons. Two children with chances to get out of Clayton. Go to college. Wrestle from the world everything we might want.
Only two years after our birth, measles swept through Clayton, taking Mother’s dream with it. Vi, Daisy, Carter, and I got it, the rubeola vaccine still nearly two decades away. But only my brother almost died. His fever climbed so high he went into convulsions; then encephalitis swelled his still-forming brain, pushing him into a coma for two weeks. When Carter pulled through, neither our parents nor the doctors worried much about the possibility of permanent brain damage—my parents because they didn’t question the miracle of their son’s survival and the doctors because they had little knowledge about long-term effects.
The first night Mother told me I was different from Carter, she must have been convinced it was the only way to salvage her dream for us, knowing that the greatest chance for its success now rested with me.
The sound of my sisters’ murmurings, soft secrets shared among the three of them, carried out through the open window to the front porch step where Mother and I sat trying to get cool after the day’s heat. She smoked her last Lucky Strike of the day and drank iced tea laced with more sugar than I could stand. Sugar and a fair bit of vodka. The number 36 train barreled through the Clayton crossing, rattling panes of glass in the living-room windows and announcing bedtime. As stars pierced the dark velvet of the Tennessee sky, Mother leaned down to me, her mouth brushing my ear. When she spoke, the noise of the words was no louder than that of a water moccasin gliding past me in Shelby Creek.
“You see those lights up in the sky, Ezekiel? You see the brightest one?” she said. “That, my boy, is you. Don’t let anybody tell you different. You’re one of the chosen ones. God will strengthen you. That’s what your name means.”
This was new information. Up until then, I had known two things about the origin of my name—Mother heard it on one of her favorite radio shows—The Shadow—and somewhere in the middle of the Bible was a section with Ezekiel on it.
I turned to stare up at her. She was the prettiest mother in Clayton; everybody said so. And when she smiled wide, when the smiling reached all the way into the deepest blue of her eyes, I got this feeling like everything was going to be okay.
Tonight she did not smile wide. Instead, her eyes glowed with a far-off light that made me uneasy. I liked the idea of being the brightest star, but what about Carter? Wasn’t he one of the chosen ones, too?
A small amount of tea lingered in Mother’s glass. Her voice grew louder. I sneaked a glance in Carter’s direction to make sure he wasn’t close by, because I sensed that whatever Mother was going to say next, he shouldn’t hear.
The Lost Saints of Tennessee Page 3