The Lost Saints of Tennessee

by Amy Franklin-Willis

  She does not meet my eyes as she speaks, glancing down at the scuffed running shoes on her feet instead. My stomach cramps as I swallow the bitter liquid. The girl lingers for a moment, as if she wants to make sure I drink it all.

  “So, he’s going to be okay?” I ask.

  Her eyelids flutter down again. “Dr. Hickman is a good vet. He stabilized Tucker’s breathing, but now we’re working to get the drug out of him. Tucker’s tough, but this is hard stuff, you know? Nobody likes to throw up. I better get back in there.”

  Her small form disappears down the hallway, slipping behind the door where my dog is puking his guts out. She’s right. Tucker hates to throw up. He once ate the better part of two dozen raw chocolate chip cookies, stole them right off the baking sheets before Jackie put them in the oven. As it all reappeared over my one good pair of pants, he stared up at me between heaves with a scowl that said it was my fault.

  The coffee cup warms my hands, cold despite the humid warmth of the clinic. The words almost escaped my lips while Gina stood there. I did it to the dog. I fed him the drugs. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. But if I say that, they will take the dog away from me. And either way this goes, if he dies or if he lives, Tucker is coming with me.

  A hand presses gently on my arm. “Zeke?”

  I wake with a start and glance at the clock. One thirty. Gina stands next to the chair.

  “Something happened a few minutes ago. Dr. Hickman wanted me to come out and give you an update.”

  She wraps her arms around her chest before continuing. A loud buzzing sound in my ears threatens to drown out what comes next. I hold my breath.

  “Tucker lost consciousness around one fifteen. He’s on the artificial respirator right now to regulate his breathing.”

  “Jesus.”

  The one-eyed cat hops into my lap, preening and rubbing against my chest. The warmth is comforting but I swat it away.

  “Come on, Jack.” Gina scoops the cat into her arms. “I’ll keep you posted, okay? It’s going to be a long morning. Do you want to go back home and I’ll call you?”

  “No.” I am not leaving without the dog.

  “Maybe you’d like to borrow the phone over there.” She points to the desk. “To call someone?”

  Gina thinks Tucker is as good as dead and wants to have backup in case I lose it. My mind gears up, sorting through people to call. The only person I can imagine sitting through this with me is Rosie. Rosie. Nashville is three and a half hours from Pigeon Forge.

  Eight

  1985

  A little after 5 am Rosie bursts through the door of the Smoky Mountain Emergency Pet Hospital dressed in plaid pajama pants stuffed into purple cowboy boots. She wears sunglasses despite the lack of sun outside.

  “Jesus Christ, this place is hard to find.” She pushes the glasses on top of her head and wraps me in the scents of Virginia Slims and perfume that smells like freshly cut grass. “What’s going on, Zeke?”

  She pulls back and grips my shoulders. “How’s the dog?”

  A sense of relief floods through me, warming the muscles cramped from hours spent in the metal chair. I am not alone. The whole ugly story wants to spill out. But I won’t let it. Not yet.

  “He’s unconscious. They’ve got him on an artificial respirator.”

  Rosie’s eyes, the same topaz color as Carter’s and our father’s, widen. “Well, shit.”

  I turn my head away for a moment, trying to keep it together.

  The closing of a door in the back echoes out to the waiting area. Dr. Hickman walks down the hallway toward us. His green scrubs shirt is splattered with stains—a multicolored collage of yellow, black, and dark red. Rosie reaches for my hand, squeezing it hard.

  “Tucker woke up. About five minutes ago.” The vet wears a bemused expression. “Surprised the hell out of me.”

  The earth tilts and I fall, caught by the same chair I sat in expecting news of Tucker’s death. Questions float in my mind but I can’t form them out loud.

  “Will he be okay?” Rosie asks.

  “I don’t see anything at the moment that makes me worry. But we need to keep him here today for observation.” He runs a hand down his face, trying to wipe the exhaustion off of it. “You’re one lucky owner. I didn’t have a lot of faith the dog was going to pull through.”

  “I didn’t think either of us was going to make it through,” I say. My whole body aches, the nerve endings tingling and raw. Rosie’s hand makes small comforting circles on my back.

  My words of thanks to the vet sound hopelessly insufficient.

  “Thank me after you see the bill. Gina will be out with it in a minute.” Dr. Hickman’s expression softens. “Tucker’s a good dog. Keep that codeine locked up, okay?”

  Rosie’s questioning gaze burns down on me.

  “Not now, okay, Rosie? Right now I need to see Tucker and then I really need to sleep.”

  My sister inherited our mother’s laser look—the one where she could narrow her eyes at you and cut through every­thing. I keep my gaze steady on the floor.

  “I need some sleep, too,” she says finally. “See the dog and then let’s get out of here.”

  Gina emerges from the back and walks behind the counter, punching numbers into a calculator. Punching a lot of numbers into the calculator.

  “It all comes to $2,750.”

  Tired as my brain is, it quickly figures the one credit card in my wallet cannot take a hit as big as that.

  “We take Visa,” Gina says, trying to be helpful.

  I slowly remove the wallet from my back pocket and go through the motions of looking through it. Before I’m done, Rosie slides her own Visa card onto the counter.

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “It’s done.” She waves a hand to dismiss it. “Your little unapproved Smoky Mountain getaway has cost you your job back home, so pay me back when you get another one. It’s a good thing I like that dog.” She nudges me with her elbow. “Go see Tucker.”

  The dog lies stretched out on a stainless-steel table, not moving, looking dead. Bits of black are stuck in the soft fur of his muzzle. The charcoal. When I place my head near his, it is wonderfully warm. Alive. My boy made it through. We take in a couple of big breaths together. Inhale. Exhale. That’s all it is. Inhale, exhale. We’re still here together. The crater in my chest contracts, gratitude filling the hole part way.

  The dog’s eyes open. He tries to get up, ready to leave this strange place with its bad smells and horrible medicine.

  “Take it easy, buddy,” I say, patting him back down. “The vet says you need to stay here a little bit longer, okay? You’re going to be all right, though. Everything’s turned out fine.”

  • • •

  Rosie and I grab breakfast at the Pigeon Forge Diner next to the motel. After we both eat large helpings of bacon and biscuits and gravy, she nails me.

  “You going to tell me what the codeine was about, Zeke?”

  The restaurant bustles with the early morning crowd. The thunk of ceramic coffee mugs hitting Formica tabletops. The scrape of spatulas against the grill as the cook manages a batch of hash browns. Truckers in baseball caps pulled low over their eyes curl over their cups, loading up on caffeine before heading out on the road. Our waitress returns to the table asking if we need anything else.

  “You want some more coffee, Rosie?” I say, welcoming the distraction.

  “Honey,” she says to the waitress, “I don’t need anything else right now except for my brother to answer the question I asked him.”

  “Afraid I can’t help you with that,” the waitress says with a half smile, placing the check on the table.

  Rosie sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. Her focus is legendary in our family. When she was nine, she
spent six months selling boxes of Mrs. Leland’s Golden Butter Bits candy door-to-door just to get the “500 boxes prize”—a transistor radio that broke a week after she got it. She has been known to wait weeks, sometimes years, to reach a goal when properly motivated. Her slow rise at KMG is a case in point. Getting to the bottom of big brother’s latest disaster will be one of those goals.

  A mother with two young daughters sits at the booth opposite ours. She looks in her twenties, nearing thirty. The girls could be six and four. The smallest one starts to whine for milk and the mother meets my eyes, shrugging, before signaling to the waitress. For a year in each of Honora’s and Louisa’s lives Jackie and I decided eating out was too much trouble. After a few meals where everything on their plates ended up on restaurant floors, we said we’d wait until they had reasonable table manners.

  Those problems seemed so easy. Kid can’t behave at a restaurant? Don’t eat out. Kid not ready to sit on a potty? Keep her in diapers another six months. Now the complexities of keeping them safe, of keeping them whole, overwhelm me. Mommy’s divorcing Daddy. Daddy’s sad all the time.

  There are two choices. Door number one: Spill the whole thing to my sister. Door number two: Sell her the same story I told the vet’s office. Maybe I should be honest. Tell her suicide is not for sissies. The scale of this latest failure reinforces my belief that there is nothing I can’t screw up. My brother used to be confused by the word sissies. He didn’t understand how it could be hurled at you as an insult and also be the name of three people he loved most in the world.

  When I look back at what our family had—what worked versus what didn’t—it was an unspoken belief that each of us was valuable. That each kid had something to offer. Not in the “you will be president” kind of way, though maybe Mother did mean it like that for me, but mostly in a basic, human way. You are loved. You are valued. This was an elemental truth of our childhood. When Mother fractured that truth in the fall of 1960, all but throwing Carter away, it splintered through the family—traveling from Carter, to me, to our father, and our sisters.

  “Zeke?” Rosie claps her hands in front of my face, causing me to blink. “It’s Saturday, okay? I can sit here all damn day. I’ve got no other place to be. So you can talk to me now or you can talk to me after lunch or dinner. But you’re not leaving until you say something.”

  I take a sip of lukewarm coffee. “Thanks for coming.”

  “You’re welcome. Get on with it.”

  “Remember when I got hurt at work last year?” Door number two it will be.

  She nods.

  “Boss moved me from doing trim work to installing the Formica floors and I slipped. Banged the hell out of my shoulder.” This part was all true. “The doctor prescribed codeine for the pain. The shoulder got better but it’s still not quite right. So I take a painkiller now and again. I brought them on this trip and did a dumb thing.”

  She grabs a piece of bacon off her plate and munches, looking skeptical.

  “Last night I came here for dinner and left the pills out on the nightstand with the top off. You know Tucker. The dog eats cow shit, for God’s sake. I came back and found him lying on the floor with the chewed-up bottle next to him, all of the pills gone.”

  My sister sifts through the words, calculating their accuracy. “That’s a good story,” she says.

  “What? You don’t believe me?” I work on sounding outraged. “I don’t need you to believe me, Rosie. Okay? What? You think I tried to do something else with the codeine? Like what? Go ahead. Say it.”

  A few heads turn in the direction of our table. I feel bad for the mom and two kids who don’t need to hear this.

  Rosie leans over the table, voice low. “You want to know what I think? I think you came here to kill yourself. I think you called me to say good-bye. I think you took those pills yourself and maybe gave some to Tucker so he wouldn’t be left without you, too.”

  I laugh, throwing my hands up. “Then why I am here? Shouldn’t I be dead?” I yell now, pointing at my chest. “I. Am. Here.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know, Zeke. Christ. Will you calm the hell down? What’s the matter with you?”

  “You’re calling me a liar, Rosie. And suggesting I tried to kill my own dog. Anything else?”

  I throw money on the table and stomp out of the restaurant. Not bad acting. Hill Street Blues here I come.

  “Zeke, wait!” My sister hurries to cover the ground between the front door and the truck. I forget she hasn’t slept much in the past twenty-four hours, either.

  The morning clouds drift past, carried by a light wind. Saturday. The dog and I have made it to another Saturday. For some reason the thought makes me smile.

  “Tell me one thing, okay?” She puts a hand on my arm. “What are you doing here? Why did you leave Clayton?”

  “That’s two things.”

  Her hand drops. “This isn’t fucking funny.”

  “You want to know why I came to beautiful Pigeon Forge?”

  She nods.

  Simple question. I stall and put my hands in the back pockets of my jeans, thinking of how to answer. My right hand hits the hard edge of something in the pocket. I pull it out. It’s the postcard from the fudge shop.

  I hold it out to her. “This is why I came here.”

  Rosie takes the card and stares at it. “That’s a picture of a farm in the Smoky Mountains. You came here to buy a farm?”

  “I didn’t come to Pigeon Forge to stay here. I’m on my way to somewhere else.”

  “Really?” She is far from convinced.

  “To Virginia. I’m going back to Lacey Farms. To see Cousin Georgia and Osborne. They sent me a letter a while ago and said they could use some help.”

  Might as well make it sound good.

  She hands the postcard back. “Why didn’t you tell anybody that?”

  I duck my head and try to look sheepish. “I should have. But I needed to get away from Clayton and think it through, you know? Clean mountain air and chocolate fudge never hurt anybody, right?”

  “I guess.” A look of confusion still clouds her face. Against her intuition, she is inclined to believe me.

  “I don’t know about you but I’ve got to get some sleep. There are two beds in the motel room if you want to take a break.”

  We leave the truck in the diner’s parking lot and walk over to the Logland Inn. Rosie collapses on the first bed she sees and falls asleep with her boots still on. She’s too tired to notice the stack of good-bye notes next to the phone, and I quietly pick them up and stash them in the bottom of the duffel bag, planning to throw them away somewhere down the road. In the bathroom I open the remaining pill bottles and watch their contents spiral down the drain. Today I see another possibility. Though it would be less risky if the Laceys had actually sent me a letter asking for help with the farm.

  After a shower, I lie on the bed and let my eyes close at last.

  Nine

  1955

  By second grade, the Clayton School got a new teacher straight from the teacher’s college and she took a liking to Carter. Miss Weaver stayed after school three days a week to help him learn his letters until, by the end of fifth grade, he could read. Not long books at first. Just the Dick and Jane readers. He still liked me reading to him best. But he learned to write, too. Proved that Memphis doctor about as wrong as he could be. Things went along fine for a while until our oldest sister Violet came home late one night with some news. Some bad news.

  Three weeks later, on the night before Violet’s wedding, Mother spoke to Carter and me about it. It seemed odd to have Violet getting married. She was only four years older than Carter and me. We were all still kids.

  “Your sister’s going to make you children uncles before you’re thirteen,” she said, shaking her head and making a clucking noise with he
r tongue against her teeth, a noise she made only when one of us did something dumb. Violet was a year older than Mother was when she got pregnant with Vi. There was no comfort in knowing that history was repeating itself.

  I kept quiet until she left the room. Then I told Carter being an uncle could be fun.

  “If the baby’s a boy, Carter, we could teach him to play basketball and stuff.”

  “What about a girl?”

  “Forget it. What are we going to teach a girl?”

  The wedding day brought cold January rain. All of us kids got dressed up—shoe shines, baths the night before, new clothes. I’d been trying to explain to Carter why Violet was getting married. He and I were sitting in the rough old oak pews waiting for Vi to come down the aisle on Daddy’s arm when he leaned over to me. My brother looked good that day with his hair slicked back and a blue tie on.

  “Vi’s not going to be living with us anymore, is she?”

  “That’s right. She’s going to live in a small house up the road from us. With Louis.”

  “And she’s going to be a momma?”

  “Around summertime.”

  He nodded and then folded his hands in his lap, waiting for it all to begin.

  After the ceremony, there was punch and wedding cake in the church hall. Daddy stood up and said how proud he was of Louis and Violet. Mother shot him a look like she was going to pitch a fit, but Daddy kept going.

  “The Cooper family welcomes the Rydell family. Violet is our eldest child and I think it’s always hardest to say the first good-bye to one of your children. But her mother and I—”

  He stopped and smiled at Mother, who smiled back, even though it was a no-teeth-showing kind of smile.

  “Lillian and I are happy to see the joining of our families.”

  Violet looked pale, the whiteness of her dress reflected in her face. Mother had given her no rest about wearing white, said the dress should be red, but Daddy came to her rescue and Vi got white.

  I watched her say hello to all the guests, shaking hands and hugging. She seemed happy enough. Worn out but happy.