by Billy Coffey
“I’m fine,” A Bull say. “Just cold.”
“Well now, that’s good,” Do-tee say, “because we gone head out if you’re up to traveling. Woman’s gone take us in her truck if we can get it started.”
“Take us where?”
“Where you always wanted to go.”
“My daddy?”
Do-tee nods. “Yes. We’re going to your daddy, Abel. You just breathe easy. It’s all about over now.”
A Bull smiles. It’s a bright smile, light comes from it.
“Come on, Dumb Willie,” Do-tee say. “Give me a hand getting everything ready.”
It’s only when they get down the ladder that Do-tee say otherwise. It’s a fear on her face as she says the words, and Dumb Willie thinks the woeman hears them too:
“We have to hurry. He’s not much time left.”
-8-
“You sure you’re okay now, Abel?” Dorothy asks. “You ain’t just wanting me to know you’re brave, are you?”
That makes the fourth time that question has been asked—You sure you’re okay?—since leaving the farm, if Abel’s count is right. He’s sure it is. Twice now by Dorothy, each time spoken in a loud voice so as to be heard over the wind. Twice more by Dumb Willie, though he can only turn and mouth the question through the back glass. That makes four times Abel has nodded in return. He knows another will do little good. At this point, the only answer either of them will accept is No, actually I’m not okay and I’m pretty sure I’m bound for glory, so why don’t y’all go on and bury me so I don’t have to answer anymore.
But Abel would never utter such a thing, regardless of his aggravation. It isn’t mistrust that keeps Dorothy and Dumb Willie asking. It’s worry, and worry is a kind of love.
He nods again—number five.
They travel in the woman’s truck, an old and rusting Ford built in some long-ago before Abel was even born. He and Dorothy ride in the bed in back. Dumb Willie sits up front. He is bent low in the seat so that only the very top of his head can be seen. Sometimes he’ll inch up higher, his attention drawn by concern for Abel or a bird he spots out the window, at which point Abel will watch as either Dorothy raps on the glass or the woman pushes her hand on Dumb Willie’s head, sinking it back. Keeping him hid.
Abel doesn’t think there’s much chance of anybody spotting Dumb Willie way out here. They left the farm at what must be close to an hour ago, and still they move over narrow dirt roads that look to have received no traffic in a long while.
There’s no way of telling how far they’ve come. An hour’s drive could put them seventy miles or so closer to Fairhope and Abel’s daddy were it driven on the highway. But this is no highway. And that woman, she’s just creeping along. Abel doesn’t know if she’s doing that to keep the truck from jostling over the potholes and fallen limbs, or if she’s simply scared of being so far from home. It’s likely both.
“Because I already know,” Dorothy says. “I already know you’re brave.”
He feels his cheeks blush (a welcome sense, given the shivers) and can’t help but lower his eyes. Abel has been called many things by many people, but never that. And never by someone so pretty.
“I ain’t brave,” Abel says.
His eyes come up to find Dorothy leaning against the far bedrail. Her hat is in her lap, leaving the wind to play at what part of her hair has freed itself from her ponytail. She’s smiling as much as she can—everywhere but her eyes. Her gaze is full, taking in Abel with such completeness that he feels naked. Worry clouds those eyes, and concern. Concern means love too. But there is also something else hidden in Dorothy’s stare, a thing like wonderment that frightens Abel as much as it comforts. It’s like he’s sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead.
“You are,” Dorothy says. “You’re the bravest I ever known, Abel, and with a stout heart. So you can tell me how you feel.”
“I’m still cold some. That’s all. I promise. Must have just been a bug. Lots of germs at that woman’s farm, I bet.”
Which must be true—anybody whose toilet is a pail has to have germs. Abel looks through the window to find the old woman’s eyes searching the rearview. Dumb Willie has snuck back down into his seat. He may be sleeping.
Then again, Abel doesn’t know of any germ that could leave him feeling as he did this morning. Not just the chills, which still linger, but that strange sensation that his skin was being stretched too tight, that his insides were trying to get out. That feeling lingers a little too, along with the quiet fear that something is happening to him. Something Dorothy either doesn’t know or won’t tell. Just now, Abel is leaning toward the idea it’s that Dorothy won’t tell. She still has that mix of worry and concern on her face, all under a smile that would normally weaken Abel’s knees. That wonder. But it wouldn’t take much for that wonder to melt to fear, and that is a look Abel well knows. That is the very appearance he himself has carried through much of his life, whether when his momma takes the phone off the hook when the bill collectors set to calling, or when he hears another snap of another bone, or when he used to see Chris Jones come sauntering down the school hallway. It isn’t just fear, but fear made bigger by a dread that things can’t be changed anymore, only faced.
That’s what Dorothy looks like.
He leans forward. “Can I ask you something?”
“You sure can.”
“Are you scared?”
The question looks to shake her. Dorothy keeps her smile, but now it looks frozen rather than a thing she truly feels. She pushes the free part of her hair out of the wind, revealing a perfect ear.
“I guess I am,” she says, “a little.”
“You ain’t gotta be scared, Dorothy. Not with me here and Dumb Willie. We’ll take care a you. We’re almost to Fairhope now, and I bet once I find my daddy and tell him everything that’s gone on, he’ll want to come back and love my momma again. I bet he’ll watch over you too. It’s all what Reverend Johnny said.” He shrugs now, though that may be the chill that settles in him rather than a resignation to how things are. “It’s meant.”
“Didn’t think you held to things being meant.”
“This one is,” he says.
“There are times, Abel, I wish I had your faith.”
“I ain’t got none a that.”
“You’re wrong there,” Dorothy says. “I think you got more of that than most. You just needed an adventure to find it.” That smile softens to something mostly real.
“How about I read a letter? I got one left.”
She tilts her face to the sun, shakes her head. “Let that letter be. We’re making our own way now. All you want to hear from your daddy can be got when you see him.”
“How far to Fairhope?”
“A ways yet, but not far. That woman’ll have to stay on the smaller roads so Dumb Willie can be kept safe.”
“You talked to her last night, then?” Abel asks.
“I did.” Dorothy runs a hand down her leg, looking for something it can do. Now it rises up and settles for twisting her ponytail. “She doesn’t care for me much. That’s okay, and I won’t judge her for it. But it yielded fruit nonetheless. I won’t say the two of us are at peace, and yet here she is, helping us on. It was a good thing you did, saying I should speak with her.” She stretches out a long leg and nudges Abel’s shoe with hers. “You’re a wise man.”
“I am,” Abel says, and blushes again. Being wise is almost as good as being brave.
Dorothy nudges him again, chuckling at his answer. Her face grows still. “How about I ask you something now?”
“Sure.”
She draws her legs in and leans forward into the middle of the truck’s bed. In a moment of panic and ecstasy, Abel knows what it is Dorothy is about to ask. She’s about to ask if he can kiss her. Dorothy’s going to ask it and then Abel will, and what he’ll say next is that they can’t ever be apart from now on because kissing means love in ways that worry and concern will never.
&nb
sp; He leans in as well, curling his lips like he’s about to blow on a candle. Turning his eyes to the window rather than closing them, because he wants Dumb Willie to share in this moment as well, if only so Abel won’t later be accused of lying. Dumb Willie isn’t looking, though. Neither is Dorothy puckering. Her head is down instead, her finger drawing in a layer of dust and dirt that hasn’t been taken by the wind.
“What you doin’?” he asks.
“I need to show you something.”
Abel leans his head down, thinking that if he can’t steal a kiss he can at least steal a whiff of Dorothy’s hair, and sees what she’s drawn. Two circles connected by a line, with a larger circle between them.
“That a hobo sign?”
“No, that’s a map.” She points to the first small circle. “This is where we are.” Now to the third. “That’s Fairhope.”
“What’s the one in the middle?”
She points to it. “Raleigh.”
“Why’d you draw Raleigh? That’s a big city, Dorothy. I don’t think we should be going to any big cities. Greenville turned out bad, and that was only a town.”
“I’d say you’re right.” She straightens her back, leaving the marks to glimmer in the passing sun. The woman’s truck buckles and slows before turning onto what Abel guesses is their first paved road of many more ahead. “But then I went to talk to her last night. I almost didn’t. I knew she was going out to say good night to those graves, and I couldn’t follow her. Not right off. So I stood by the garden trying to find my strength, and then I got an idea.”
“What idea?”
“You remember what I told you about that farm? How it was a hidden place?”
Abel nods.
“And I said there were other places hidden too. That’s when I got the idea. Because I know of one, Abel. Or I’ve heard of it at least. It’s just stories told, and stories might be truth and they might not, but there’s a man who’d know for sure either way. And that man is in Raleigh.”
“We don’t need another special place,” Abel says. “We’re going on to Fairhope.”
“You forget something, Abel. This preacher you met. He promised you treasure, right?”
“My letters,” Abel says.
“And reward.”
“My daddy.”
Dorothy nods. “But what’s in the middle?”
The word is through Abel’s lips in a whisper as another chill rushes over him.
Dorothy repeats it: “Healing.”
“You said I couldn’t get no healing. You told me Reverend Johnny was wrong.”
“I know I did,” says Dorothy. “But I don’t accept that no more, Abel. If there’s a chance you can get healed, that’s a chance I think we have to take. Especially now. That woman driving up there, she ain’t a woman no more. I don’t know if she’s even much of a person. That’s not her fault as I see it, it’s all what happened to her. All she loved got taken away, and now she’s just sad and hollowed out. I can’t bear it. And there’s nothing I can do to make things right for her again. I can’t bear that either. But I can make things right for you, or at least try. If those stories are true. I think it’s time we find out if they are, before we get to your daddy. All that’s left is to carry things through. I aim to do that, great as that cost may be to me. But it may cost you too. That’s the choice you have to make.”
“What cost?”
“Him,” Dorothy says, looking at the window. “Because you’re right, we got no sense going to a big city like Raleigh with Dumb Willie being looked for. Maybe things have died down some since we left Greenville. Maybe news hasn’t gotten this far south about what he did. But maybe not. It’s a chance we take, either way.”
Abel follows Dorothy’s gaze through the glass. Dumb Willie’s head is slumped against the woman’s shoulder now. She’s trying to push him away and drive at the same time.
“This hidden place,” he asks, “it’s in Raleigh?”
“Don’t nobody know where it is, or at least nobody but one. Arthur. He keeps the secret, like his daddy did and his daddy’s daddy, all the way back since”—she shrugs—“forever, almost. It’s his people’s secret.”
“What people?”
“The Cherokee.”
Abel feels his mouth slide open. Indians? Trains, magic, running from folk out to murder them, a crazy woman, and now Indians. Sick or not, these last days have been the greatest of his life.
“Was a time when all this land was theirs,” Dorothy says. “This hidden place too. So I bet if those stories are right, that hidden place must be close. In the mountains, maybe. Back where we came from. Place no one is.”
“We can’t go back,” Abel says. “We’re so close, Dorothy, and I want to go home. I miss my momma.”
“I know,” she says, taking his hand. “I know that, Abel. But you’re not well.”
“I’m better now, I promise.”
“Not for long. Don’t ask me how I know it or what’s wrong with you. Just believe me. Please, believe me. The miles have worn you in ways you can’t know, but I can see those ways. So can Dumb Willie. It’s a spring, this hidden place. And in it’s the clearest, bluest water you ever saw. Special water, Abel. Just like you.” She leans in again, as though to share a secret. “A place of magic. And if someone finds that spring and gets in it, he’ll be restored.”
Restored. The word shines a light in Abel’s mind. “So if I get in that water, I’ll be healed?”
Dorothy says nothing right away and smoothes over the circles in the dust instead. “Heal you in the way you most need, yes. Shoot, they say that water’ll even bring a man back from the dead.”
“Do you think it’s real?”
“Stories say. Arthur will know. And if it is real, he can take us there. Most would call it legend and nothing else, but it sounds no more false to me than a preacher being overcome to give you prophecy.” Dorothy shakes her head. “I don’t know if that spring is there or not, but I know it can be. It can be because there really is magic, Abel. This world’s covered in it, but folk can’t see. Or they don’t want to, because then they’d know there’s things bigger than themselves. We just need a little bit of that magic. A small portion will be enough to see us through.”
“This Arthur man,” Abel says. “Is he special?”
“He is. Arthur knows me true.”
“What happens if Dumb Willie gets caught?”
She dips her head. “He may go Westbound.”
They are hard words. Abel cannot bear the sound of them.
“Everything I believe tells me we’ve made it all this way for a reason,” Dorothy tells him. “We’ve been led this far, though I don’t know by what hand.”
“Maybe it’s God’s,” Abel says. Not his version of God, which is still somewhat fuzzy in Abel’s mind, and definitely not his momma’s. But Reverend Johnny’s God maybe, or the Preacher Keen’s. To Abel, their God sounds like One who would take folk on an adventure so long as they stepped off their front porches.
“God’s abandoned us, Abel. He turned away the moment I pulled you up on that train, because it wasn’t meant.”
“But then we never would’ve met. And you wouldn’t’ve seen that woman again to try to make peace. And I’d maybe never get to see my daddy.”
“Yes, which means we have to go on. Only way we can now is if you get restored, Abel. The story says the spring can only work once. A single time for a single person, and then those waters turn to mud forever.”
“What if we get my daddy first,” Abel says, “and then find Arthur?”
She says it again: “There’s no time left.”
“I don’t want nothing bad to happen to Dumb Willie.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“And I don’t want nothing to happen to you either, Dorothy.”
“My judgment’s coming, but it won’t be now. This is the thing you’ve always wanted, Abel Shifflett. Longer even than wanting your d
addy. And I can’t bear to see pain anymore. Not yours, not anybody’s. There was a time I could look out on this world like it was all just pictures. I roamed and wandered and went where I was called. I saw more faces than you can count. That’s all folk was to me. Faces. I’ve learned from you they’re more. So much more. And because of that, I want to give you more than your life back. I want it to be a grand life. A joyful life. Being a family, having your daddy there and your momma too, having you well. That’s a grand life. But only if the spring is true, and only if we find it in time.”
Abel looks through the window. The woman searches in the rearview. He sees Dumb Willie’s head and Dumb Willie’s eyes, Dumb Willie’s lips mouthing, You oh. Kay? And Abel is, really. He has his friends with him and they’re on an adventure and he’s okay. They’re going to Fairhope to find his daddy, and when they get there Abel is going to tell him how dire things are and how his daddy needs to come back, how they all need to be a family, and that Dumb Willie is in trouble but Abel can tell everybody the truth of what happened with Chris.
And yet Abel also knows Dorothy is right. It’s a grand life that Abel should want, not just a good one. And as long as he must carry around all these brittle bones inside him, it will not be grand. He wants his daddy to see him whole, not broken.
“Do you know what house this Arthur lives at?” he asks.
Dorothy smiles. “No. But I know where he works.”
PART VII
RALEIGH
-1-
Dumb Willie cannot recall a day when he’s spoken so little as this one. That woeman, she don’t talk. He guesses that’s because she’s had nobody to talk to for a long while. All that woeman’s got is her woecow and that pig, and those two holes covered up in back of the garden. The woeman might talk to them, Dumb Willie thinks, but he guesses don’t none of them talk back to her. It takes two people to talk, like he does with A Bull and Do-tee.
Still, Dumb Willie is used to talking. Much of the morning has been spent with him saying whatever is upon his mind, the birds and the trees and how the clouds look like traynes but there’s no rails. That woeman never did answer back. Once Dumb Willie thought maybe she . . . (it was a word, he couldn’t remember it, but it sounded like death, like Do-tee was and like A Bull) . . . couldn’t hear, and that’s why she never talked. He tried yelling in her ear—“You. Hear me?”—and got a hand pushed against his head, so Dumb Willie knew she wasn’t that word that meant not hearing.