Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  But then the Swedish boys arrived. They came to work in the lumber business that was growing outside Torchlight, taking the place of King Coal now that all the buried wealth their land could cough up was gone. They were the grandchildren of settlers who’d come to live and farm in the West—Church of the Brethren, someone said—but any religious zeal seemed to have worn its way out of the family by the time the two brothers, Paul and John Gustafson, and their cousin, the blond and blue-eyed Nicklaus Jansen, landed in Torchlight. They could work like mules, everyone said, and they were willing enough to do it, but they liked their whiskey, and the brothers, at least, knew they could have their pick of the local girls and did so on a regular basis. Nick was the quiet one, and surprisingly polite, though he could outdrink them all. And they all loved music and loved to dance. Nick could play the guitar like it was a fiddle or a banjo, and at dances that summer his presence added new life to the old songs.

  Vista was seventeen when the Swedish boys arrived in Torchlight, and by the time she was eighteen, much to the amazement of everyone in and around Torchlight, she was pregnant with Nicklaus Jansen’s child. To their amazement and, it must be said, their delight; what they felt was a mix of satisfaction over the comeuppance that they thought the quiet—and, they assumed, uppity—girl deserved and relief at knowing that this somber girl had found some pleasure at last.

  He was a beautiful young man, too beautiful, she’d think later, blaming herself for succumbing to that beauty. He kept his blond hair longer than most men, and it curled like a baby’s at his ears and the top of his neck. He was tall and strong but also thin and straight-backed; there was nothing thick or brutish about him. When Vista first saw him, walking toward Cecil Baker’s barn at dusk on a summer night with his polished guitar in his hands, she felt something she hadn’t quite known she could feel. Other boys, the local handsome ones, always called to mind her reckless mother somehow. But when she watched Nicklaus Jansen, his soft hands and the way he looked down at the ground rather than meet most people’s eyes—like a shy little schoolboy, she thought, or like her—she banished any thoughts of her mother. And then he started to play.

  He went off in a corner of the barn by himself, and Vista placed herself where she could see but not be seen, and when he started to strum chords and hum along—it was “All the Pretty Little Horses”—in a high, breathy voice, Vista had to hold on to the beam by her head to keep her balance.

  Eventually his cousins came to pull him away to join the others—Cecil on fiddle and his boy Ray picking his clangy old banjo—and together they played fast and loud for the rest of the night. Vista joined the dancing then, but the whole time what she was hearing in her head was a sweet little lullaby in a schoolboy’s voice, and every time she got near the musicians, she’d sneak a glance his way. But he was always looking down or over at his fellow players, watching what they did or watching his own beautiful fingers when he’d play the melody and the other two would pick and bow in the background and look at him, like everyone did, with admiration.

  That was how it went at every barn dance at Cecil Baker’s—and they had them regularly that summer, now that the Swedish boys were there. Nicklaus Jansen and his cousins would arrive at sunset, wearing clean shirts and their work boots; Paul and John would make straight for the whiskey at the back of the barn, and Nicklaus would head for a corner to warm up on his guitar. And each night Vista would find her place in the shadows to watch and listen.

  One night, a month or so after the Swedish boys had arrived in Torchlight, something made her pull her face out of the darkness and into the light, right where Nicklaus Jansen could see her if he happened to look up. After he’d strummed through a chorus of a song she didn’t recognize, he did. He looked right at her and smiled, and he said, “I wondered if you were ever gonna come out of that corner.” And that night he put down his guitar and danced for the first time, and for the last half-dozen dances of the night, his one and only partner was Vista Combs.

  A funny thing about the Combses was the way they kept on having just one baby before disaster struck. At least that was how it had been since Morris and Ivy Combs, Mamaw’s daddy and mama, had left their baby Marthie with a cousin, gone to scout a piece of land to the south that Morris had heard about the summer before, and died in a flood.

  “No use tryin’ to leave,” Mamaw Marthie had come to say after losing her parents and then her daughter in the space of half her life. Of course, it could be argued that she’d lost her husband for just the opposite reason: because he’d stayed and worked in the mines like every other man he and Marthie knew. But still, Mamaw Marthie maintained, leaving that peaceful holler in a bend of the mountains never left a body better off, as far as she could see. And Vista held on to that notion, at least for a time.

  It might have been that being raised in a cabin with fifteen other children, treated like one of the family, it was true, but still short, like everyone was, on food and clothing and warmth, had taught Marthie another lesson. Because besides not making any plans to leave, she’d never cared to marry again and start another family. In the one picture she had of Papaw, the stern-faced portrait from their wedding day, Mamaw Marthie, a strong, tall woman with a long face that always looked tired and sad to Vista, towered over her husband, a wiry man with a hint of mischief at the corners of his mouth. He’d played the fiddle, Mamaw Marthie told Vista, and courted her with songs and foolish riddles that made her laugh despite herself.

  And, well, yes, of course she’d loved him, she’d say when Vista pestered her, just as she’d loved her impetuous, colt-like daughter (“her daddy through and through,” Marthie would say at these times). But love meant loss—you couldn’t have one without the other, Mamaw Marthie said, and that was every bit as true in Memphis or New Orleans or some new factory town in Indiana or Ohio as it was in a Kentucky holler. And so for her, by the age of forty, when her joints began to ache at the first sign of cold and the climb over Harmony Ridge left her weak and winded, one lone granddaughter, it seemed, was enough.

  In the flush of those early days with Nicklaus Jansen, Vista was convinced she’d be the first to make a change. They’d have lots of babies, that much she knew. They’d fix up Mamaw’s cabin and add on rooms, and their babies would play outside in the sunshine in the green valleys, and they’d learn their letters and read all the books Miss Drury had left. And their father would teach them to play guitar, and she would teach them to sing, and they’d be noisy and happy, all of them, outside dancing in the wind that blew off the ridge above the cabin. There would always be sun poking through. The hills would always be green and rich with summer, the redbud poking up out of the mist in the morning, music and love in all their golden heads.

  Who could feel otherwise with a soft and golden lover like Nicklaus Jansen? He was as gentle as early morning, and the first time he kissed her and held her, she wondered how she ever could have felt, about love, the way her mama had made her feel—dirty, mistrustful, afraid. His soft curls felt like goose down against her cheek, and he told her—and she could tell he meant it—that she was the first: that he’d never met another girl as sweet and pure as she.

  When they learned she was pregnant, they arranged a quiet wedding in the Red Lick Church. His cousins stood up with him, Mamaw Marthie with her; it was early autumn, and Vista wove wild asters through her dark curls. Nicklaus smiled at her when the preacher pronounced them man and wife, but his eyes looked glassy, she thought. Later, back at the cabin in their wedding bed, he closed his eyes, which still looked glassy and faraway; it seemed like he was trying to place himself somewhere else. And then—on her wedding night, of all times—it felt, for a moment, more like she’d always been afraid it would feel. A little shameful, connected with animals. But while he slept she shook that idea out of her head and watched him—his full, curving lips, his ruddy cheek, blond curls tossed around the pillow and over his forehead, and she wondered how she ever could have doubted the pure rightness of loving him.
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  Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, she pulled the crushed asters from between her curls and brushed her hair, then burrowed deep under the newly ticked comforter that had been Mamaw Marthie’s wedding gift to them, wrapping herself around her warm, sleeping husband. When she woke several hours later, she was alone.

  She walked into the kitchen to find Mamaw Marthie pulling a pan of biscuits from the stove, no sign of her new husband anywhere. Mamaw looked at her with a question in her eyes, then busied herself with turning the biscuits out to cool. Vista said nothing on her way to the door. Outside, the sunlight was brilliant white, stinging her eyes; the only thing out there were two noisy crows, pecking uselessly at the dead grass.

  Not knowing what to do with herself, Vista walked out to the end of the lane, where it met up with the road into Torchlight. She even climbed over some of the trails up the ridge behind the cabin in the hope that Nicklaus Jansen might have fancied an early-morning ramble through the woods on the day after his wedding. She saw no sign of him, though, and she returned to the cabin breathless and hungry, baffled by his absence and growing more concerned.

  She sat down to eat one of Mamaw Marthie’s biscuits with fresh clover honey, a gift from a neighbor up the holler who kept bees. When Mamaw asked, perfectly innocently, where her husband was, Vista snapped, “I don’t know—I reckon he’ll be back soon” and left the table to busy herself with straightening up their room.

  That was when she found his note. She had carefully folded the blue organdy dress that she’d sewn herself for her wedding, noting with a wave of fear that wherever Nick had gone, he’d taken the small bag of clothing that he’d brought to the cabin the day before. Maybe, she told herself, he’d simply gone into town to return the suit he’d rented for the wedding, and he was simply wearing the other clothes he’d brought.

  With that thought, she turned to make the bed, overwhelmed as she did so by the urge to crawl under the covers and go back to sleep, hoping that when she woke again she’d discover that it had simply been a bad dream. There her sleeping husband would be, curled like a baby under her outstretched arm, his sweet breath tickling her neck.

  When she shook the comforter and started to climb underneath it, though, a small piece of white paper floated slowly to the floor. As it floated, Vista’s stomach tightened; somehow she knew, before she looked, what that piece of paper was going to say.

  “I am sorry, but I believe it was a mistake for us to be married. Please try to forget about me.” And it was signed, simply, “Nick.”

  For a long time, Vista held the note in her hands, staring at it blankly, uncomprehendingly. When she finally forced herself to take in the words, she began tearing furiously at the page, ripping it into tiny pieces that, later in the day, she would throw into the fire. At that moment, though, she gripped the pieces in her fist and shoved them under her pillow. As she did, she buried her face there and let the tears come.

  Once again it was just she and her mamaw, but wasn’t that all she’d ever really expected? The golden ones left that dark valley, that much had become clear. Some lived on in golden sunlight, in yellow kitchens with clear glass windows letting in all that light. Some, set on getting too much too fast, turned darker and sharper around the edges, rough and never quite clean. And then they died. All winter long, Vista held on to the life inside her, determined that this one would be one of the golden ones, one who got out, who stayed gold.

  It was a harsh winter, unusually cold for eastern Kentucky, and clumps of gray ice had lodged themselves permanently in the cabin’s various cracks and crevices by the end of January, when Vista’s pregnancy had begun to show. Every few days she made the walk into town; she had begun to read again, since twice a week there was now a mobile library in Torchlight—an old Ford truck with crates of books in the back that parked outside the post office at eleven o’clock. It never stayed long; it didn’t need to, since Vista and old Aunt Pearlie Dawson and the pale and silent Shade Nixon were the only ones who ever came.

  Aunt Dawson smoked a pipe while she waited. One of the children of the cousins who had taken Mamaw Marthie in as a baby, she had never married; she’d gone off to work in a factory somewhere up North for a time, but when the coal took her papa, this time in one of the worst accidents in the history of the local mine, she’d come back to help raise the children that were younger than she.

  “Mornin’, Dawson.” Vista would nod to her, trying to decide whether she looked like she’d been up all night and whether her breath smelled of spirits. She lived now in a room atop the Torchlight General Store, where, people said, she drank whiskey and read books all night.

  “Mornin’, Vista,” she would answer. “Feelin’ any better these days?”

  “A heap better, yes, ma’am,” Vista would say. She’d been sick as a dog not long after Nicklaus had left, and Mamaw had discussed her morning sickness with various women in the holler, trying to recall some of the remedies they’d all tried in their day. What with the single-baby habits of the Combses, some of that lore had gotten lost; after consulting Aunt Dawson and others, though, she’d settled on wormwood tea and saltine crackers.

  The other reader, Shade Nixon, had been another student of Miss Drury’s, a year or two younger than Vista, pale and sickly and spurned by his brother and two sisters and the other children who walked in with them each day from above Harmony Creek, at the north end of the hollow. She hadn’t had to help him with his letters, as he had already known how to read—had, in fact, been reading the family Bible and anything else he could get his hands on since his mother had taught him at the age of four. When she had died, when Shade was six or seven, he’d joined the other children at Miss Drury’s school. Miss Drury had made such a fuss over him and the way he could already read anything put in front of him. But none of that seemed to matter to Shade. Nothing appeared to reach him at all, in fact.

  Since Miss Drury had left, Vista hadn’t seen much of him. He was never at services at the Red Lick Church—not that Vista was a regular attender, but when she did show up, for Christmas or Easter, say, Shade’s father and three or four of his brothers and sisters might be there, but Shade would never come along. He worked for the timber company, doing the books, and he seemed to be as scorned and isolated as ever. Whenever the truck was running late and she, Shade, and Aunt Dawson stood inside the post office door to wait, Vista sometimes tried to strike up a conversation with him. But he would never meet her eye.

  One morning, as she took her books to the driver to have them listed in the record book, she stepped back to let Shade go ahead of her, claiming she’d forgotten one other book she wanted. But really she wanted a chance to see what he was taking out. That morning it was Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and something by a woman whose name she didn’t recognize, but he had several other items as well—small brown envelopes with labels on the outside.

  “Shade, what are those other things you’ve got there?” she asked, and before he could answer, the driver piped in with “Well, don’t you know you can get music recordings here now, too?”

  “Well, no, I don’t,” Vista snapped back to the know-it-all college-boy driver, whom she’d never liked. And because she knew it would be a good way to get at a good Christian Berea boy’s heart, she added, “Where do you suppose somebody like me’s gonna go to play herself any records?”

  Shade Nixon just cleared his throat and signed his name in the record book. As he turned to leave, though, he tipped his hat to Vista. “If you need a Victrola,” he said, “I could give you mine. I’ve been meanin’ to buy a new one next time I get in to Pikeville.” And then he hurried on up the road toward the timber company’s temporary office next to the feed store.

  A week later, he was there with it: a big old box of a thing with a horn-shaped piece that screwed onto the side. “I reckon I can carry it on out to your place after work,” he said, and this time it was Vista who couldn’t think of what to say. So Shade went on, “Be sure to check out something
to play on this thing, now,” and he carried it back to his office.

  She was nervous and flustered then, afraid to ask the know-it-all college boy about the records he had that day. But then she heard Aunt Dawson, suddenly there behind her back. “Go on, now, girl, don’t be ‘fraid of that boy,” she said, and as she said it, Vista felt her baby give her a good, swift kick at the right side of her belly. She laughed then, grabbing hold of old Aunt Dawson’s arm.

  She picked out one record that morning—songs by the Carter Family, including some she recognized from dances and camp meetings: “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “River Jordan,” “Cannon Ball.” She was afraid to take more than one record, and in truth she didn’t recognize any of the other names on the labels.

  Shade showed up just a few minutes after four that day, and he showed Vista and Mamaw Marthie how to wind up the Victrola and put the needle down easy, right at the first groove on the shiny black disc. Vista thought she saw him frown just a little bit when he looked at the record she’d brought home.

  “You only wanted one?” he asked her, and she nodded, embarrassed to admit it was the only one she’d recognized. They gave him a good hot meal for his efforts, and though he didn’t have much to say, he did look up from the floor from time to time.

  After Shade left, she and Mamaw Marthie played the thing over and over. Mamaw stared endlessly at the spinning record, but Vista found that it made her dizzy to do so, and she stared out at the snow while Mother Maybelle sang. Finally, after they’d played the record perhaps a dozen times and the sun had started to drop behind the western ridge, Mamaw stood to clear the dishes from the table while Vista dozed in her chair beside the stove. The record’s spinning was slowing gradually, and the needle purred along its edge, making rhythmic popping noises that sounded a little like music, too.