by Louis Bayard
I fried up the last of the eggs, and then I rolled the kids out of bed. They each dragged a blanket to the table. Earle just stared at his plate.
“So help me,” I said, “you make me throw that out, I’m gonna kill you.”
“What’d you pack for lunch?” he asked.
“Apple butter sandwiches.” And when he give me that scowl, I said, “Excuse me, Daddy Warbucks. Filet mignon’ll be here tomorrow. You don’t like my lunches, why don’t you trade ’em?”
“He already does,” said Janey.
It was a hair past seven when I shooed them out of the house. There was a hard wind coming down the mountain, right in their faces. They stood rocking in it.
“Listen now. Not a word. It’s a day like any other.”
“Then why aren’t you open yet?” Earle asked.
“’Cause I got business in town, and that’s the last nosy-ass question you get.”
I give them each a light little kick in the butt. It’s what I do every morning, and when they were littler, that kick would send him laughing up the hill—halfway to school. Today, they was like a pair of jennies in harness. I watched them just to the point where they disappeared around the bend, and then I called after them.
“Watch out for cars!”
It’s a queer town, Walnut Ridge. Some half a century back, the citizens got a little cash in their pockets and a couple stars in their eyes and figured they was going to be the next big deal in Warren County—bigger than Front Royal, even. So they went and built themselves a main street. ’Course they couldn’t run it but the two blocks before it reached the nearest cliff, but they was so keen on their prospects they decided to call it First Street. As in first of many to come.
Well, fate had other plans for Walnut Ridge, and it turned into one of those places that just straggles along. Most of the townsfolk just bled back into the mountains till about ten years ago, when they was coaxed back down with the promise of digging soapstone. Company made a bunch of ugly houses for ’em—raw clapboard with tin roofs, each looking like the next. But the Depression took care of the soapstone company, and today the quarry’s closed, and folks are back to straggling.
Carpentry, masonry, Civilian Conservation Corps, whatever’ll answer. There’s some work to be had building Skyline Drive, and there’s talk of a rayon plant in a couple years, but that’s talk.
First Street, though, is still there in all its glory. Walkways on both sides. A five-and-tencent store. A drugstore. A Primitive Baptist church. There’s an empty tobacco warehouse that some rich old lady was trying to turn into a temple for the arts, but that never took, and right there at the end of the street, before it drops off the cliff, is a white farmhouse with green shutters.
It’s an old house, built before the War Between the States, and it don’t look like it’s been painted since. The planters are rotting in the window boxes, and the grass in the front yard is losing ground to the weeds, but it’s mostly clean and well tended, and it has the best view of the valley. I used to think if a pot of gold was to drop from the sky (it wouldn’t have to be a big pot), maybe this was the house I’d want for myself.
Only I would’ve had to live there all alone. Wake up that way, go to bed that way. And before I moved in, I’d have had to get rid of the birdbath ’cause if a bird can’t find itself some water, it’s got no business being a bird. But the part that really would’ve had to go was the tiny slat bench in the front yard under the elm tree.
It wasn’t the bench I minded, it was the two white plaster kids sitting on it. From a distance, they looked close enough to the real thing to make you wonder who’d been keeping ’em out of the sun. It was only closer you saw the lie of it, and that was when the heebie-jeebies kicked in. ’Cause it was like some terrible enchantment held them on that bench.
So the stone children, they would’ve had to go.
To speak true, I hadn’t come down yet on the door knocker. It was a little fancy for my tastes, but I liked the way it rested in your hand, and on that particular morning, I made sure to hold it a space before I let it drop.
The door swung open, and there was Mina Gallagher, looking like she was already bracing for me. Thin and pinched, with a mouth always folding in and brown eyes always pushing out. Her fingers ran to the collar of her dress.
“Morning,” she said.
“Is Mr. Gallagher there?”
“It’s not even eight.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She give me a good look-over.
“Chester,” she said. He didn’t answer. “Chester!”
“Yes?”
“Visitor.” She looked at me a spell longer. “Won’t you come inside?”
Chester was already jogging down the staircase in an old wool bathrobe. I could see patches of electrical tape on the soles of his slippers.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“I was just going to ask Melia if she cared for some coffee.”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, then,” said Mina Gallagher, “I’ll leave you to it.”
She followed the straightest line to the kitchen.
“This is a surprise,” said Chester.
“Reckon so.”
He looked down at his hand, found a lit pipe in it. “Do you mind if I…”
“Nope.”
He took a drag. Jammed his free hand into the pocket of his robe.
“Here you are,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Like you said you’d be.”
After a day’s practice, I weren’t no better at telling the news. All I could do was stand there like a fool on the cracked parquet tile.
“She’s gone,” he said.
He sat on the bottommost stair. “Sorry. I should have … do you want any—”
“Coffee? Your wife already asked.”
“She did, didn’t she?”
He stared for a while at his pipe, not really seeing it.
“When did it happen?” he asked.
“Night before last.”
“Ah. Okay. So you—I mean, I’m guessing there’ll be a funeral.”
“Already done. No offense, Chester, it was a private affair. Family only.”
“Of course.”
I give his knee a little nudge with mine. He slid over on the stair till there was room for the two of us.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“Well. You being her lawyer and all.”
His mouth turned up at the corners.
“Last time I saw her, she fired me.”
“She weren’t in her right head.”
“Oh, I think she was. It was me who wasn’t.” He stared at his pipe. “The will. You’ll want to see the will.”
“Seen it.”
“Well, you know how it goes then. The—the service station, that’s held in trust with the bank. Me being the trustee. Till such time as you gain your maturity.”
“Yep.”
“Of course, there are sundry possessions. The pie safe. The ring. There’s a—there’s a wedding dress, I think.”
He took off his glasses. Pressed a thumb against each eye. “Sorry, Melia.”
“It’s okay. I got a day’s start on you.”
He put his glasses back on. “The first time I ever saw your mama, she was in these bib overalls. Covered head-to-I-don’t-know-what, jamming her face in some carburetor. I wasn’t even sure she was a woman till she says ’Scuse me in that—that voice of hers. She comes back, oh, twenty-four seconds later, and there wasn’t a speck on her. She looked like Venus in her half shell.”
“It was a gift,” I said.
“And I’m standing there, all at sea, and she says—you know what she says?”
I knew, but I let him go.
“She says, ‘You any good at this lawyering business?’ And I say, ‘Well, if I’m not, we’ll find something else.’”
His chuckle come out like a sigh.
“Melia,” he said.
“I want you to know there wasn’t—”
“I know.”
“I mean, I’m a married—”
“Chester, I know. She knew, too.”
“That she did.”
“So you’re in the clear.”
“Is that what I am?”
From the kitchen came the sound of something having its life cleaned out of it. A counter, probably.
“Listen,” I said. “I gotta get back. There’s one thing I need to ask you.”
“Certainly.”
“Did you ever ask Mama who was going to look after us? Once she was gone?”
“Did I ask? Only about a million times. I said, ‘This isn’t just you, Brenda, you’ve got to think about your kids. They’re going to need a guardian.’ And you know what she said?”
“‘Keep your pants on. I’ll figure it out.’”
“Exactly.”
“Only she didn’t.”
He looked at me.
“You mustn’t think badly of her, Melia. I just think it came on faster than she was expecting. Folks like her—so alive—I think it’s hard for them to think the living can end.”
It was so quiet in that damned house. Nothing to listen to but the ticking of the grandfather clock and the squeak of Mina Gallagher’s dishrags.
“I can’t lose Janey and Earle,” I said.
“You won’t.”
“Oh? You gonna tell me Virginia law says something different than I think it says? Last I heard, orphaned kids become wards of the state. Did I get that wrong?”
His eyes went sidling off.
“Chester, I can live on the bum if I have to. I can dig ditches, I can lay trestles, but I won’t see those kids turned over to some thin-lipped Christians with birch rods. I won’t.”
“Y’all must have kin,” he said weakly.
“Mama’s people are all gone.”
“Janey and Earle? They’ve got a father somewhere.”
“If you call the Moundsville prison somewhere, then yes, they do.”
Through the cloud of pipe smoke, he squinted at me. “What about you, Melia? Someone had to be the father of you, right?”
“You tell me who,” I said, “and we’ll both know.”
Your daddy. He’s …
Chester tapped the stem of his pipe against his chest. “What if someone were to adopt you? All three of you.”
I folded my arms across my chest, give him a hard stare.
“And just who’s gonna do that?”
There come another squeak from the kitchen.
“Jesus, Chester. You know folks in this town ain’t got the time of day for us. You really see any of ’em fighting over who gets to keep us?”
“Then what do you want me to do, Melia? I mean, I could try to roust up some money.”
“You ain’t got much more than us, Chester.”
“Then what?”
“Don’t do nothing, don’t say nothing. Not till I got everything worked out.”
And when his face started to trouble, I said, “Chester, this is probably the easiest thing anyone’ll ask you to do all day.”
“You’re asking me to help perpetrate a fraud.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I mean, as a friend of the family, it’s one thing. As a lawyer—as a bank director—I’m sworn on oath to—”
He stopped. Rocked his face back toward the ceiling. “Jesus, will you listen to me? No wonder she fired me.”
“All I need’s a few days,” I said.
“One condition,” he said.
“What?”
“Hire me back.”
“Don’t be dumb. I can’t do no hiring.”
“Sure you can. Just repeat after me. I, Melia Hoyle. Well, go on.”
“I, Melia Hoyle…”
“Hereby name Chester Gallagher…”
“Hereby name Chester Gallagher…”
“To be my attorney.”
“To be my attorney.”
“I will pay him what you would pay a dog.”
“I will…” I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. “We can’t even pay a dog,” I said. “But you’re welcome to our scraps.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He put out his hand, and we shook on it.
“Well,” he said. “Being that I am now bound by attorney-client privilege, I cannot possibly divulge any information without your express consent. So help me God and the state of Virginia.”
Just the barest trace of a smile on him, and then it was gone.
“Doesn’t seem right,” he said. “Girl like you taking on all this.”
“I ain’t no girl, Chester. Oh, and hey, there’s one other thing. I need you to get us a death certificate.”
“Out of thin air, you mean.”
I shrugged. “It’s what I hire you for, ain’t it?”
Chapter
THREE
It was near eight in the morning by the time I got back to the station. Just in time for the trucks to start piling off Highway 55. Regular as the sun, these fellers. All through the night, they ride the mountains, living on tobacco and coffee and maybe chasing it with a little whiskey. Then they crowd in a few hours past dawn. Eyes sagging, faces mashed in. Legs dragging after. The only dream they got left is to make Pittsburgh or Philly or Baltimore before the light goes. So you give ’em a little coffee, and they flop in one of the Adirondack chairs under the general-store awning, doze for a bit. Then they spring up, good as new.
But even as they tear east, they remember those ten minutes they spent at Brenda’s Oasis. All those whiskery men with their big sunburned arms—I couldn’t tell ’em apart at first, but then I started remembering things about them. Dutch was the one singed off his eyebrows when his rig caught fire near Altoona. Elmer lost half his ear in a bar fight in Kansas City. Glenmont had the anaconda tattoo on his neck. Joe Bob was the feller with the moon face who set in his truck and sobbed on the steering wheel. (His wife left him for an encyclopedia salesman from Wheeling.)
Then there was the fearsomest one of all. Six foot four, three hundred pounds. Big ol’ white scar down the left side of his face. Arms the size of my body, feet like manhole covers, black hair running from his neck to the tips of his fingers. A mouthful of rotten teeth. He came barreling down the hill one morning—all the way from Oak Ridge without a rest—and, before he even stopped his rig, he leaned out the window and roared (at nobody to speak of), “Fix the goddamn rattle!”
Then he staggered off to grab a coffee and take a piss, and when he came back, I was slamming down the hood.
“The choke in your carburetor is stuck,” I said.
“So unstick it.”
“I did.”
He glared at me. Then he jumped in the cab, turned on the engine, and set there, listening.
“What’s your name?”
“Melia.”
“Where’d you learn about engines?”
“My mama. She’s in the back if you want me to—”
“I don’t wanna. You’re the one who works on this truck from here on in. Got it?”
As he was pulling away, he leaned out his window one more time and said, “Name’s Warner.”
Now, I’d never call Warner my angel, but when some trucker’s telling me to run get my daddy, Warner’s been known to grab the guy by the nap of his shirt—one hand is all it takes—and hoist him straight to the sky. And when that poor sap is seven feet off the ground, Warner says, in the sweetest voice he’s got, “You let this little lady do what she needs to do, all right?”
Mama used to worry I didn’t have me enough friends, but I always told her I had the morning shift.
And they were there that morning in late March, when I most needed them. Merle. Trevor. Joe Bob. Oh, they knew Mama hadn’t been round for a coon’s age, but they never asked me what was going on. They just asked me to fill their tank or check their oil or figure out where that trail of black smoke was coming from.
The ho
urs rolled by, and then it was cold, hard noon. Everyone gone. A good three or four hours before the late-afternoon shift would start pouring in from the east. I used to welcome the peace, but today, Mama was swirling round in my brain. Her duck boots. The little mole just under her lip. That smell of hers, like blackberries.
If you’d have held a gun to my head, I’d have said what I missed most was Mama’s laugh. Which was crazy ’cause it was the most embarrassing laugh a mother could have. It was a whole crazy parade—snorts, grunts, screeches. It could go on for minutes, and every soul from a mile round would be staring, wondering how a body could make such sounds.
I set behind the counter, chewing on beef jerky, sipping ginger beer, flipping through Photoplays. Somewhere toward three in the afternoon, I heard a squeal. A truck was rolling past me—a flatbed, loaded with coal—making that hard right on Totten. Its rear tires slipped a little on the gravel, the truck give a shudder, the back gate popped open, and a man come rolling out.
He landed hard, in a puff of dust, and started rolling toward me, but me, I was running the other way—chasing that truck down the hill.
“Hey, wait!” I called. “Hey, mister! You left something!”
But the truck kept going. And such was my state of mind that, by the time I give up the chase, I plumb forgot about the feller who’d fallen out. It wasn’t till I got back to the station that I found a heap of mud and hair, a cotton shirt, and a pair of torn-up trousers planted squarely in the path to pump number two.
With a growl of frustration, I jogged over to him. Somewhere in the tangle, I found a mouth. I put my ear to it and waited till a little tickle of air straggled out.
Alive. Which didn’t make him any less of a pain in my ass. Or any easier to drag. Every pound of his was pulling against every one of mine. I stood up to catch my breath. Just as I was reaching down again, another pair of hands come out of nowhere.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“Just trying to help, Melia.”
“I got it.”
To speak true, I was glad for the help. But once we’d curled the fella round the pump, I looked up and saw a Dudley I never seen before. Some kinda bullshit aviator’s hat on his head. Shiny leather shoes. More leather on his shins. Fancy balloon pants—I don’t know what you call ’em—the kind rich people ride horses in. And a jacket, military-like, cut to the waist.