by Kirby Gann
She had not been farther than Montreux and Cincinnati except for one foiled family trip to D.C. in October 1967—the city writhing, its avenues clogged with protesters intending to levitate the Pentagon. Her father gave up on finding a hotel and in a rage swung the station wagon around on the beltway, crossing the grass divide as if it were county fairgrounds. They camped in freezing cold in the Shenandoah and shivered miserably as Ernst proclaimed his new conviction that, after the mess of the capital and the mindless inferno engulfing it, he no longer saw sense in ever leaving home.
Bethel Skaggs lifted into Lyda’s view as the worldly traveler who enjoyed the outright disapproval of her father. He had been everywhere, seen the globe, Bethel said, drinking from a pewter flask in dry Pirtle, twenty-five years old and talking up a teenage girl at a dance in a high school gym. Stationed for a year in Berlin during the missile crisis—he said—and got out the second they let him; raised blue-eye huskies in Nebraska until wolves cleared out his stock; painted barns in Georgia, and then took a chance on his fiddle skills, which allowed him to see every inch of this country to help him decide where he didn’t want to be. Her father suspected a man couldn’t play fiddle worth a damn without deceit and immoral leanings in him and that was enough to confirm Bethel as a person of interest for her.
She was sick of sweeping that kitchen floor twice a day and she was ready for a new pair of shoes. And the only thing anyone could agree on about Bethel Skaggs was that he certainly took the strain off a girl’s eyes.
He never did tell her why he came to Pirtle County or Lake Holloway; he had no people there. His littered the mountains in the eastern towns of Tomahawk, Inez, Watergap—places he swore he would never step foot in again. He had a solid job at the fertilizer plant and so she got the new shoes and moved into the small house in the woods behind the lake—where first thing she did on entering was stamp her heels on the kitchen’s linoleum floor tiles—and before their first anniversary Fleece slid screaming into his part of the world. And for two or three months Lyda thought her life exhausting but happy. And then Bethel announced he was leaving. Service rung up, he said, mentioning he still had commitments to the Army Reserves for the first time. In days he was gone, and no one except himself ever learned where he got up to; she knew only the man never served in Vietnam. She checked with the Army herself out of curiosity years after any of this mattered. Her father believed Bethel wanted away from a wife and squalling baby, damned if it be boy or no, and who could blame a man for that, I raised her myself (she could recall Ernst speaking this to young Cole, eyes dancing beneath white brows long enough to braid). Bethel disappeared and sent no word, not a phone call or note, for well over five years. The next time he rounded the lake and walked back up the hill, he found little Cole Prather.
Lyda wished she had a picture of Bethel’s face the day he found her holding the toddler—stricken, she said; sincere confusion scattering his eyes. As though he could not understand how his son had not grown a tat since he left. Then Fleece ran in through the back door (Fleece ran everywhere then, never walked, his feet scamper-wild from the day he discovered them) and the argument began. She thought, He thinks it’s no different than if he stepped out moments ago, like my life could be stuffed in a footlocker for him to pull out whenever he wants.
She dared her husband to explain her wrong. Five years without word—it wasn’t like she moved to Whore Holler after he left (though she could have, she reminded him, for all he left her with; no one who knew her story would have blamed her). Lyda had been a teenage mother trying to do right, one who went to church on Sundays like any girl trying to do right would. Despite the nature of her effort she still met Mack Prather there, at First Pirtle Baptist. Now he was a man everybody liked, once they noticed him; quiet at first, he didn’t jump into conversation but stood ready with a grin and some funny comment to prove he had been listening close. He was not rascal-handsome like Bethel but he wasn’t ugly, either, though his thin hair, a dun brown like crispy leaves, was already moving to a combover at twenty-four. His eyes were nothing to cry over and his jaw was soft, but he did like to talk once he felt comfortable, and more importantly he liked to listen to Lyda talk. They first started talking and listening to one another at an after-service brunch, he made her laugh on a day she was feeling blue, they were looking over the table spread with bacon and eggs and Mack said from just behind her shoulder, Well I see the chicken made a contribution, but it looks like the pig gave us his full commitment. Then he tumbled her coffee while reaching for cream.
Bethel had been gone two years by then and she was lonely. She wasn’t looking to park her shoes under anyone’s bed; she was trying to be good. Sex had got her into this tough spot and she wanted a future with fewer spots as tough as this. But it helped to have a man around the house whether one lay with him or not. Mack could frame a door; he connected PVC pipe from the house to the county water system instead of the lake’s, which did not use filters and made the sink smell dingy. He played ball with Fleece as well, setting him up with the basketball goal where the hill flattened out near the road until some laker boys stole it away or threw it into the lake, they never knew which.
Mack called himself a developer but that was only ambition talking. Truth was he did construction, a carpenter willing to take on more than he could handle, certain he stood only a loan or two away from drastic and enviable success. Sometimes he helped Lyda by picking up Fleece from her parents’ house before she finished her shift at the clinic. Sometimes he picked her up, too. Her mother Eudora was a practical woman and did not blame her girl when she finally landed in bed with Mack after so long with a wandered-away husband—no, Eudora got upset only when Lyda got knocked up again so quickly. Eudora did not take gossip unless it covered somebody else’s family, and Lyda getting pregnant with her husband gone gave everyone at First Pirtle Baptist much to chew on happy. Her own mama asking if she didn’t know how to keep from getting pregnant! Lyda told her it was a little late to discuss it now.
Mack, sweet, welcomed the news. He told her: We roll with what comes. They did not talk about what they might do if Bethel returned. Lyda tried hard to believe he was gone forever. As her belly grew she admonished herself to stop looking out the front of the house for any unwanted sign of him. Superstitiously she wondered if by ceasing to keep an eye out she was somehow encouraging Bethel to show up. Mack told her she was too young for such old-woman silliness; maybe she lied about her age? She slapped his shoulder. They never had one sign of his coming back, no hint of any homecoming until Bethel was already home.
He arrived to find Lyda as he had left her: alone, carrying a toddler at her shoulder. The front door stood open to invite the breeze. She had finished setting the washed breakfast dishes on the dry rack. Bethel walked in without a hello standing in the doorway as he waited for her to notice him. When she did, his eyes were on the baby—and then Fleece ran in through the back door, calling her to come see a kill he’d made with his bare hand. He stilled at the sight of Bethel, too. Didn’t know who the man could be.
Bethel, Lyda said.
Well Lyda Skaggs, Bethel said. He tossed his small bindle bag and cardboard suitcase onto the couch.
He said he could not accept such outright betrayal. He had come all this way, he said, through near-starvation and miles on his feet, only to find himself obliged to kill the bastard who give her that baby? Lyda assured him he didn’t have to kill anyone, Mack was already dead. I’ll kill his brother then, Bethel said. But the hard smile on his creased face suggested maybe he wouldn’t if she told him he did not have to.
With Cole on the way Mack had redoubled his efforts to realize his ambitions and gone in with his younger brother Ronnie on a rental property in downtown Montreux, a shotgun that required renovations before listing. They ripped out soiled carpets and refinished the floors, only to have a rainstorm reveal the roof needed repair. Ronnie held the ladder while Mack climbed with a bucket of tar pitch and neither noticed the worn linin
g on the wire connecting the house to powerlines overhead. A small misstep with the bucket, and the ladder shifted; Ronnie flew back against the house next door where the wind blew out of him. By the time he recovered and reached to where Mack had fallen, his brother’s skin looked like an overripe plum.
The insurance went to his brother. Ronnie did not particularly care for Lyda; he had no trouble (he made clear) telling her as much, but he promised to do right by his brother’s child. And eventually he did; he did try. Years later when a twelve-going-on-thirteen James Cole got himself arrested (chasing after Fleece in his way), Ronnie discovered Lyda harrowing deep into her own pitched spiral, and his own wife agreed they were honor-bound to get young impressionable Cole off the lake. Lyda thought they did try to do right; they all did. But they succeeded only in making the boy a stranger to both houses.
Morning blues the cheap thin valance in Cole’s bedroom window. By habit he stays still as long as he can, refusing even the smallest move despite knowing he’s not asleep anymore. It’s dawn early, he can tell by the modesty in the twitters and calls of the birds outside, like they’re struggling to wake up after a rough night. Cole remains in the cool cotton safety of the bed, eyes and ears open in a room still cloudy from his cloudy dreams. Over long minutes he watches the outlines of his few pieces of furniture begin to form in the steepening light—a dresser with one drawer missing, a footlocker stood on end—bringing with their growing shadows a strange dread. Sleep: so far and hard to come from, a good place.
He listens to the house. Lyda’s one to always have her ear to the rails; she knows what train is coming in and whether it’s on time.
He listens to the house, his ear exploring the short hallway past Lyda’s room and into the kitchen (the refrigerator humming), through the kitchen and into the living room. There the TV sits silent. He backtracks to her bedroom and listens for any sound in the sheets, a rustle, snore, or sigh, or even the murmured complaint he often catches through the wall separating their heads, Lyda ready to set straight some imagined or remembered companion even in her dreams. Nothing there.
On his feet then for a sweatshirt from the drawer, he peeks out the window. She still drives the old Country Sedan, proudly displaying its historic plates even as rust claims the fenders, duct-taped cardboard replaces one rear window, and the suspension angles high on one side. She doesn’t have money for a newer car and insists she doesn’t need one, the Country starts every time she turns the key and she hardly drives anywhere anyways. The Country sits parked behind his truck in the driveway. He sock-foots through the house and does not see her as he rinses his mouth in the bathroom sink—not bothering to brush his teeth, he’ll be gulping gas-mart coffee and cake in a few minutes—and runs icy tap water over his hands and through his short hair and into his eyes.
On the concrete porch with boots in hand Cole’s spacey fatigue carries him through morning ritual. It’s Saturday, he has horses to feed and turn out at the Spackler farm, and then he’ll work a handful of hours in the city with Uncle Ron-Ron’s crew. He sets to lacing the leather boots, malleable cowhide and once his father’s, boots Fleece wore briefly before bequeathing them to Cole once box-toes came into fashion and his brother splurged on a beautiful black pair from Johnston & Murphy. Cole resoled his father’s boots with tire-tread rubber and by now the leather has conformed to his feet, sinking outward for the bulge of his ankle bones and following the outward spread to his calves, not quite erasing the material’s memory of his father’s form, undecided between the two. There are moments when he believes he cannot love anything as much as these boots—moments such as this one, alone, on the front porch of his mother’s house, starting another day.
It is winter-morning cold but not so cold he needs to complain about it.
He feels her standing behind him; she must have slunk into his wake when he wasn’t paying attention. He feels her staring into the back of his head, into his shoulders tight beneath the hooded gray sweatshirt still smelling of the dryer sheet, a scent he likes.
He double-knots the laces of his left boot and asks what’s on her mind.
“You know my burden, pup,” she says, her voice worn. She clears her throat. “Your big brother. You and your big brother.” Her tone implies exasperation and lassitude, as though she could have launched into a list of numerous instances in which Fleece and Cole have disappointed her, perhaps even hurt her deeply, but there are so many known between the three of them already she saw no point in listing them yet again.
“What about us?”
“You only come back for yourself? I mean who’s looking out for who here?” The wire mesh of the screen door sings a faint song against her scratching nails. “I raised you boys better than to have to wonder. Blood is blood. You got to have each other’s back.”
“I never had to have Fleece’s back. He didn’t need me to. I was just a kid.”
“You would have if he asked. How I raised you both.”
Cole ties the right boot in the same double-knot; he needs to get on the road. He plants both feet square together and looks over them, at how small they seem compared to the rest of his body. Just like his father, Lyda used to say.
“Not sure how you’d say you raised us, Ma.”
He sits facing away from the house, appearing to anyone who happened to notice as a strange young man debating aloud to himself. The hinges on the screen squeal and as the door smacks back into its frame his mother’s bare foot taps his hip for Cole to scoot over, the dark burgundy polish on her big toe chipped white along the inside edge. He makes room.
“Now I tried my best, hon. You’ll see, you ever get a child in this world. Only so much you can do, they end up how they end up anyways.”
It’s not a conversation he wants to have—or, it’s a conversation he would like to have some other time, the opportunity for such conversations being a great reason for his return to the lake—but not now, not with the fatigue of four hours of sleep, no soda in his belly, a day of work he dislikes ahead of him. Cole stands and jangles his keys from a pocket and looks down at his mother on the step, her choppy, saloned hair exposing a little gray at the roots.
“Guess I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Tell me you got your brother’s back.”
“Is he asking?”
“He’s not here to ask. I am. I’m your mother and I am asking you. Make it right.”
“Jesus, make what right?”
Lyda doesn’t answer. She reaches forward, plucks dry petals from the hydrangea and grinds them into confetti falling brightly from her fingers.
“Make what right, Lyda? Tell me, ’cause I don’t know.”
“That man don’t own us. He might act like he does but he owes me, he owes me and he knows it.”
Cole watches the show and refuses to be pulled in. His mother grinds her teeth and wires of muscle braid and weave along her jaw; she clamps shut her eyes, snaps them open, says in a rawboned, hard pioneer-type voice: “I don’t get out like I used to but I still hear what goes on out there—”
“Maybe I should be asking you the questions. You know something I don’t, tell me. All I know’s Fleece aint around. That’s no different from life as I know it. What do you want me to do?”
“You shouldn’t need me to tell you. You’re all grown up. You’ll do right.”
She makes a display of relenting. She repeats to the grass edging the walk that she thought she raised her boys to know better. She pulls more dry petals from the hydrangea, grinding them in her fingers and catching the crumbs in her palm and staring at the pile as though a fortune could be divined there.
“That boy just is as he does,” Cole says, and mother and son share nostalgic smiles at the line, a family saying coined by Lyda one night telling police at the door how sorry she was for what Fleece had done, twelve years old, brought home for egging the cop’s car miles away. I’m trying to raise him officer but the boy just is as he does, she had said.
“You see you
r brother you tell him I want to talk to him. He don’t just take off on me like that.”
From over one shoulder he tells her he will though he doesn’t expect gossip from Spackler’s horses, and this gets a laugh from Lyda. Sometimes—when he was much younger and when his mother had more energy and clarity—they used to take long walks through the woods, not quite losing themselves in its hidden cavities and hollows, occasionally happening upon a secluded sward of grass that appeared to have no reason to be empty of trees. They would circle Lake Holloway and his mother might step out of her shoes and roll up her cuffs to tramp into the sheltered corners overgrown with rushes and shush the croaking psalms chanted by frogs, where she might laugh like a woman without a care, striking out at the water’s surface with an elegantly curved foot, the ruby polish fresh on her nails. Once she had been a woman renowned for dancing on rooftops. So Cole had heard.
He leaves her sitting on the two short steps to the little house, where dark green moss sprouts beneath curling shingles and the brick needs tuck-pointing in many places. She looks frail, barefoot in Fleece’s old high-school football jersey and baggy flannel pajama pants, a figure he feels sorry for as much as she enrages him—even, he would admit, disgusts him at times and on a variety of levels along some murky inner scale. He backs out the narrow gravel drive. His compassion turns to mild surprise as he sees too the figure of a man in the doorway behind her, Lyda half-turned and smiling as she mouths words, her posture suddenly charged, different, astounding Cole with her ability to still be charming and flirtatious as required.
After the horses he hits Montreux. The city isn’t forty minutes away, and even though the counties are connected by interstate, rail, and road, the drive from Lake Holloway feels like a passage from one distinct time to another. Passing through the lake again his small truck thumps over a road that’s more pothole than pavement, passing swampy lawns, rust-streaked muscle cars on concrete blocks, an engine block that has dangled from its tree chain at least three weeks, houses walled in tar paper and concrete and asphalt shingles. A mile along 29 and a strip of shops appears on the right. He never has been able to figure the original purpose of the place, a series of small one-story structures connected in a line, each slightly taller than the next until the corner building, which is two stories. Like a square-moduled retractable telescope fully extended. The two-story used to be a garage and motor oil still stains the lot about it; now a man called Boonie Ed keeps a handful of jalopies there for sale. The other storefronts are inhabited on and off—nail salons and short-loan offices—but otherwise house “For Lease” signs with the name and phone number of the father of a kid Cole knew in grade school. A miscellany of shotgun churches with diverse long names bursts from the woody roadsides at uneven intervals. Then he hits the modern era of gas marts and fast-food hovels with NOW FRYING neon signs, and a small strip of upscale boutiques along Main Street in Renfro, where the rails still divide the road.