Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  For each of them, it was even more of a second chance than had been their rescue from the fire. They felt both terror and relief, twin and oppositional currents within them as they were pulled by an unseen force through an unseen medium of shuddering resistance, advancing into the darkness.

  They each knew that they were on the bridge once again, though they didn't know for how long; and each was stripped barer than they ever had been before of the thing they desired most, control. Never had any of them possessed less of it than on that rainy, creek-swollen night, and they sat quiet and shivering in the waterspouting car as they were pulled into the darkness, with the odor of whiskey still present in the car and on Floyd's body, despite the muddy flushing.

  Finally they reached the other shore, with the current no longer vibrating against the car—a quietness around them now, as if they had been delivered into a new world, and dripping, as if from a second birth—and the old man called to the mule to cease his efforts and directed the animal to back up a step, so that the knot could be unhitched. He helped the Browns out of the car, a conveyance with which the old man was so unfamiliar that at first he could not determine how to open the door. And then, rolling up the cable as he walked back toward the mule, the old man ushered them up the bluff, toward his cabin on the hill.

  As they drew even with the mule, which was just standing there, quivering slightly, as if in either the ending or perhaps beginning of ecstasy—the mule trembling and appearing somehow to radiate a state of grace, having accommodated the one thing in the world it was made and meant to do—they stopped and petted it briefly before leaving it to its isolate bliss. Then they continued on up the slippery hill, with the rain falling as hard as it had all night, and with the water that flowed over the bridge still surging, a few inches deeper now.

  When they reached the cabin, Floyd went into the barn with the old man to have a drink—the man said not to worry about the mule, that he would come home on his own and would not even need drying off but would lie down in the straw if he got cold—and while the men drank and visited, Birdie took the children into the cabin, where she rekindled the ashes in the fireplace, beside which the children huddled, steaming.

  They stayed the night there, Floyd drinking again. The next afternoon the old man led the mule back across with the same cable, and though the bridge was still submerged, Floyd navigated the bridge successfully this time. The old man came back and rowed Birdie and the children across in a rowboat—they refused to ride in the car—with each child clutching a length of driftwood to cling to and float should the current capsize them. The old man was a powerful and experienced rower, however, and they reached the other side without incident, while Floyd sat on the slick bank with his brown bottle in hand and called out advice and encouragement.

  There were no borders that could not be crossed, then, and no crossings that would ever be easy. They had learned already everything they would need to know for their journey.

  THE FOREST

  THE LITTLE SAWMILL was perched at the edge of the dark woods, resting atop the rich soil, with the workers gnawing their way slowly into the old forest. Some years the workers would bring the logs in to the mill, and other years—depending on transportation logistics and contracts—the mill would pack up and move a little farther into the woods. There were still panthers in the swamps and bears in the mountains, or what passed for mountains in those old worn-down hills.

  This was another of the paths of their childhood, the physical and sensual sounds and odors of the mill, with the blades whirring on and off throughout the day—the high whine of the spinning, waiting blade powering down to a deep groan as the blade accepted the timber, the blades sending out a different pitch for rough cut, planing, or finishing, and likewise a different tone based on size, density, even species of timber and time of year, and whether the tree grew on a north slope or a south slope.

  Different smells, too, wafted through their lives in ribbons of scent—the green odor of the living wood and the drier one of dead wood, the latter a scent like that of a campfire; the smell of the diesel engines as well as those of the mules and horses that sometimes skidded the logs out of the swamp when gasoline was scarce or could not be squandered; the scent and creaking sound of the leather harnesses and other tack of the mules and horses; the stale alcohol-sweat and the tobacco of the laborers, all of them missing fingers, even hands and arms, sometimes from the blade but more often from the logs themselves, thousand-pound rolling pins cascading off the truck, crushing and pinching anything in their way.

  And where the workers had not lost some of the various parts of themselves—where there was still a full complement of teeth and fingers and thumbs, hands, feet, arms, and legs—there were internal injuries: broken bones, alcoholism, rage, and the mute desperation of a poverty unknown by several previous generations.

  There were outright deaths, too, accidents sometimes of fatigue—falling off a truck, walking under a falling tree, or any of a hundred other unspectacular possibilities. The mill lost a few workers each year in that manner, like the trees themselves, so that between the dying and the injured, there was always a setback, and always some sort of ongoing or attempted recovery.

  Even to those who had never been in a war, it must have seemed that this was what it would be like: that the forest was the enemy and that the workers' task was to try to gain a little stronger foothold and advance into the enemy's territory a bit farther each day.

  Only a hundred and fifty years separated these new workers and their families from the straight bloodlines of Oglethorpe's ruffians, the prisoners who had been turned loose into the lawless woods—a hundred and fifty years being an utterly insignificant amount of time for such bloodlines to be filtered out of those workers, washed clean by time and the influence of the forest and its ravines and ridges, the tempering that must always be negotiated between any landscape and any species, any newcomer to the world.

  The children knew no other world. The forest—both the injured forest as well as the uninjured—combined with the children's spirits like the gold light that came down through the dense canopy of broad leaves in the morning: each pattern of leaf, each lobe and serration, already accommodated to the specificity of its time and place.

  In that forest, the shady dapple of the leaves moderated the temperature of the soil and gave nutrition to the legions of meek insects, the lives of which also helped enrich and process the soil, and each morning in the spring and summer, the forest would begin to hiss with chlorophyllitic excess—a tremendous, thunderous, silent power, a silent energy shimmering above the leaves with such verve that it was almost audible.

  The green light bathed the children, infiltrated their lungs, shimmered its golden way up into their minds. They could have stayed there forever—as had the generations before them—but the force that had come into them desired otherwise.

  THE SINGERS

  THEIR PARENTS' MILL could in no way afford a kiln. The trees were milled green, the lumber then stacked to dry. The green wood was still heavy and dense. Often it was wood that had been hauled out of the forest only a day or two earlier, and might still be coated with mud and grit from the sledge. Such timber wore down the blades quickly, and the knots where newly severed branches had once grown also chipped the blades. When the blade hit such nicks, it sent out a single squawl of protest. There was no rhythm to these outbursts, but the sound punctuated the days, as did the accompanying lull of the engines when the operator had to idle down, pull the log back, and make another, more cautious approach.

  And in that quieter powering-down, that readjustment, the Browns felt a relief and release from the all-day roar and whine. When the mill was running, though, a tension permeated, and shook every atom in the air in the clearing around the sawmill, and in the bones of all who could hear. The vibrations traveled back into the forest itself.

  Always, after such a setback, the engines ran harder and harder, powering up to make it all the way through the
cut—slabs of lumber peeling away like long curls and shavings of butter—until some new resistance was struck yet again and the peace of near silence returned.

  The workers, leaning in close to the saws and the engines, benumbed by years of their labor and going quickly deaf, had become inured to any such momentary releases. Many of them had become lithified to the world, with only the perspiration that sprang from them beneath the bright sun, and the occasional blood that leapt from them when injured, indicating they were still creatures of this world and not some strange half-machine beings themselves.

  But the children, with their souls and spirits yet so soft-formed, were still deeply alert to the tension of the engines and sawblades. The loud ching! of the blade getting jammed, followed by the groan of the engines shutting down and the quiet cursing of the operator, would have been a part of not just their auditory lives from the beginning, but the pattern and pulse of their every breath, whether they knew it or not: the incessant low-level anxiety of waiting for the sound of disaster, or failure.

  The children and some of the adults crept through the days finely tuned to sound; and when the pressure of the revving-up of the engines was released, the children would have been able to hear once again the shrilling of the seven-year locusts, a sound coming from the forest, as if the forest were healing itself.

  Once daily the sawmill operators would shut down for lunch in the rising heat of the day. The engines would fall silent and songbirds back at the shadowy edge of the forest would resume their calls. The locusts would be sawing, but that was a lulling sound.

  The workers' meals, while much of the rest of the country was starving, were fit for kings and princes: cold biscuits with blackberry jam and honey, thick sandwiches stuffed with salt-cured ham, fresh tomatoes, or fried chicken, or a sandwich made with leftover venison.

  The men visited among themselves, talking quietly about weather or hunting, or about the wood they were milling, or about the machines to which they were hostage—the machines the men served and serviced; machines that, if they stopped running, took away the workers' pay and dictated, with their sputtering valve-worn unpredictability, whether the men's families would have money for the most basic of items: flour, salt, sugar, shoes.

  Few of the workers owned any machines themselves, but rode horses or walked. Too many of them spent their money on whiskey, purchasing it from neighbors or buying the supplies and making it themselves. They were as dependent on it as they were on one another, and the machines, and they sat there at the edge of shade, in the clearing where they were gnawing deeper and deeper into the forest, and stopped and caught their breath, even as the rest of the country floundered in the Great Depression, threatening to sink back down into the gruesome poverty of a hand-to-mouth existence in which starvation was still an ever-present reality, as it had been ten thousand years before.

  And resting there—stalled there—the men had no real idea that for the first time they had much in common with other lives beyond their small hollow: that people on the other side of the great forest, whom they would never see—urban people whose lives were surely more complicated than their own, and who also surely possessed and moved through the world with some sort of laminar grace unbeknownst to the hill people—were now in the kind of dire economic straits that the hill people had known all their lives.

  As the meniscus of the forest separating the two grew thinner, and the desperations on either side of the forest more similar, it would have seemed that both sides might somehow have sensed they were becoming more similar, shaped and molded toward a sameness of circumstance if not spirit.

  But that was not yet the case. The men sipped their cooling coffee from battered steel thermoses and waited for their sweat to cool. They talked either reverently or scornfully about their machines, and when they were ready for the second part of their day, they disassembled the sawblades from their axles, and while the engines cooled further, some of the men would set about sharpening the circular blades of their saws, rasping with a motion so practiced that it was possible to tell who the saw sharpeners were by their musculature alone: a certain slope of shoulder, a particular thickness of forearms gotten from days and then years of grinding steel against steel.

  The saw sharpeners would place the blade flat on a spindle and file outward, honing the steel to address every point on the blade. They could tell roughly from their long experience when the critical edge was regained—the sharpness that would make their work go a little easier in the second half of the day.

  They could feel the softening, the sudden slipperiness, as the last of the resistance was worn away and the edge was gained. They could hear it, too—anyone could notice it—and when this happened, the saw sharpeners would straighten up from their work as if rising from a trance. They would give the blade just a few more light touches, as if to be sure that the edge was real, and then they would brush and blow the steel filings from the blade and knock the magnetized crumbs of iron from their files, and press a thumb or finger lightly to the sawblade to confirm with touch that which their ears, as well as the sudden slackness and ease in the muscles of their arms and backs and shoulders, had already told them.

  That was pretty much the spot where sharpeners at other mills stopped and put the blade back onto the planer and the men would start the engines back up. And for the next few hours, the newly sharpened blades would address the green wood with greater ease. It was good enough for most, and because most of the lumber being milled was rough-cut anyway, the extra edge did not much matter.

  Floyd, however, had a special way of sharpening his blades. He insisted that each blade be fully tempered, or retempered, in the middle of each day. It was important, he said, that the blade be able to fully control the wood. It saved money, too. The edge of a tempered saw not only held longer but cut sharper, resulting in less engine wear, as well as a higher quality of lumber.

  The secret to his lumber's quality lay in his children's ability to discern pitch. At the end of almost every lunch break, the Brown children would be summoned to the saw-sharpening table, where the newly honed blade would be placed on an axle with a motor and then spun rapidly, as if being made ready for a cut.

  There was a certain sound, a ringing, that a fully tempered saw made when it had achieved that absolute perfect edge. It was a sound that the men could sometimes hear, but other times, for whatever reasons, was indiscernible to them. The sound they listened for—the perfect blade—held an eerie resonance, the faint sirenlike echo of a high harmonic that was little different from the tempered harmony the Browns were already learning to achieve with their voices.

  Their individual voices were becoming ever more exceptional. Something inexplicable was happening to them. Anyone could see it, could hear it, and with them still just children. People talked about them when they sang in church choirs, or at weekly social gatherings on the weekends, and relatives' birthday parties. The Browns listened to the Grand Ole Opry on their family's radio, as did everyone they knew. If a family did not own a radio, that family would travel on Friday and Saturday nights to the home of a neighbor who did.

  All throughout the dark woods at night, the scattered and farflung impoverished hamlets would be stitched together in one fabric, the community of sound, as they sat and listened to the weekly radio shows.

  Even as young children, the Browns could imitate with perfect pitch any of the performers they heard on the radio. They were eager to please; the oldest, Maxine, was particularly desperate to please. Floyd was hardest on her, the one most like himself. He tried to manage her like his mill, or any of the other things in his life he could not control. In his mind, anything she did could always be better. Day after day, he transferred his dissatisfactions with himself onto her.

  The men would strive to hear what the children were hearing. They would watch the children to see if it could be discerned at what point the children heard what it was they were listening for.

  There was no mistaking when the Brown
s heard it, even if the men, with their hearing battered by the years of saw-roar, could not. The children, though they would already have been listening intently, would become even more stilled. Whereas in the beginning each of them had been listening to the sawblade as an individual, there was some unnameable point where they were suddenly listening to it as one, the three of them focused on something no one could see, and which few, if any, could hear, though which many of the men could now sense.

  They might as well have been striving to hear a deity. The way the deity seemed not to be there—in a room, in a building, in a grove of woods—and then the way it was there; not instantaneously, but completely.

  There in the clearing, when they heard the higher harmony, the secret pitch and pulse of the round blade having achieved its perfect temper, the children's faces would soften; as if, even though they were children, they had nonetheless been carrying around burdens and tensions, had already absorbed them from the lives of those who surrounded them.

  Some days it might be Jim Ed who first heard the sawblade's release, and other days, Bonnie or Maxine would hear it before the others. But always, once the ringing started, it would be only a second or two before they all three heard it, so that they each became entranced simultaneously.

  Sometimes the children would not hear the sound. Despite the best and most practiced efforts of the saw sharpener, the tempered pitch would not yet be achieved, and the round table's motor would have to be shut off, and the files brought back out, and the blade addressed yet again. And here, too, the children were useful, for they could indicate to the saw sharpener an approximation of how far off-temper the sound had been.