A Land More Kind Than Home

by Wiley Cash

  “Does it look like a firefly to you?” I asked Stump, but of course he didn’t say nothing.

  But it was gone off the tree before Christmas even came. I asked Mama about it, but she said she hadn’t seen it. I figured Stump probably took it down and hid it somewhere in our room. He was always hiding things he liked and things that belonged to him. You could open his drawers or look under his pillow and find all kinds of things: rocks, sticks, dried-up flowers, toys he didn’t want getting lost or broken. The only things he didn’t hide were the rocks that were ours together. We sat them on the shelves in our room that Daddy’d made for us. Me and Stump would look at our rocks together and try and find stuff about them in Daddy’s old encyclopedias. I knew Stump wouldn’t ever think about hiding any of those rocks because he knew that we shared them. They were ours together.

  THE HOUSE WAS DARK INSIDE, AND I FELT AROUND ON THE WALL BY the front door until I found the switch and the table lamp beside Daddy’s chair turned on. My grandpa walked right to the refrigerator and opened it and started pushing stuff around like he was looking for something. He looked in the freezer too. Then he closed the freezer door and I watched him go over to the counter and look through the cabinets where Mama kept the food.

  “You want something to eat?” he asked me.

  “I ain’t hungry,” I said. I hadn’t had nothing since dinner, but I knew I couldn’t eat nothing then.

  “Well, you need to eat something,” he said. “I ain’t too much of a hand in the kitchen, but you need to eat something.”

  He walked over to the cabinet where Mama kept all the plates and the cups, and he opened it and ran his hand over the plates and then he felt around behind them. He opened another cabinet and just stood there and stared up into it.

  “Goddamn it,” he whispered. He turned around and looked at me where I stood in the front room just inside the door. “Your daddy smoke in the house?” he asked me.

  “He don’t smoke,” I said.

  My grandpa turned around and looked at the cabinets. Then he opened one he’d already opened and he looked inside it again.

  “Of course he don’t smoke,” he said.

  I had to pee, and I walked through the kitchen and down the hallway to the bathroom. I flipped the light switch, but nothing happened. I flipped it a couple more times, but the light over the sink still wouldn’t come on. It was dark in there, but I still thought about opening the toilet lid and peeing without the lights, but I couldn’t hardly see anything and I was afraid of getting it everywhere. I walked back out into the hallway and opened the back door and looked outside. We had to use the privy out back before Daddy had built us an indoor bathroom, and I saw the outline of it across the dark yard. There wasn’t no way I was opening that old door and going in there at night without a flashlight and with nobody to hold the door open for me so I could see a little bit by the moon. In this kind of dark it probably had snakes and all kinds of things hiding out in there. I didn’t want to ask my grandpa to hold the door open for me because I didn’t want him thinking I was a baby, and I didn’t even know if I could pee with him standing there watching me anyway.

  I closed the back door behind me and stepped to the edge of the porch and pulled my zipper down. Before I started going I turned my head and looked through the door behind me, and I could see all the way down the hall and into the kitchen. My grandpa was still in there looking through the cabinets. He ducked down, and I knew he was looking under the counter. I peed off the porch, and I heard it wetting down the grass. When I was done, I went inside and walked down the hallway back to the kitchen. My grandpa stood outside on the front porch smoking a cigarette. I could smell the smoke where it was coming through the screen. On the kitchen table was a plate with two pieces of white bread with peanut butter spread all over them. My grandpa heard me, and he turned and looked at me through the screen.

  “That’s about all I can do,” he said and nodded his head toward the table. He watched me pull out my chair and sit down. I picked up a piece of bread and took a bite. He’d put that peanut butter on there thick, and the bread stuck to the roof of my mouth and I had a time swallowing it. I stood up from the table and got me a glass from the cabinet and went to the refrigerator for the milk. I sat my glass on the counter and poured the milk until my glass was full, and then I put the milk back in the refrigerator and carried my glass to the table.

  My grandpa flicked his cigarette into the yard and opened the screen door and came inside. He sat down across the table from me. I took another bite of the bread and chewed on it. I could feel him looking at me.

  “What grade you in at school?” he asked me.

  I swallowed the bread and took a drink of milk. “Third,” I said. I looked over at him and saw that he was still staring at me. I looked down at my plate and took another bite of the bread, and then I laid my right hand open on the tabletop and looked at where that little bit of splinter was still stuck down in my palm. With my other hand I picked up my glass of milk and took a good, long drink, and then I sat it down and scratched my palm with my fingernail and looked for the edge of that splinter to see if I could feel it. Just a little bit of it stuck out, but it wasn’t quite enough to get ahold of.

  “What are you doing?” my grandpa asked. I lifted my hand off the table and opened it up like I was waving so he could see it.

  “I got a splinter,” I said.

  “Why ain’t you pulled it out yet?” he asked me.

  “Mama tried,” I said, “but she couldn’t get all of it. She said the rest would work itself out.”

  “Good Lord,” he said. He stood up from the table and walked past me and opened one of the cabinets and took down one of Mama’s shiny metal mixing bowls. He went over to the sink and ran water in the tap, and then he picked up the dish soap and squeezed a little bit into the bowl. It looked like he was fixing to wash a bowl that was already clean.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “A trick,” he said. The water from the tap started to steam, and he held the mixing bowl under the faucet and turned the water down to where it was cooler. Suds started bubbling over the top, and he turned off the water and carried the mixing bowl over to the table. He sat it down in front of me.

  “This is going to be a little bit hot at first,” he said, “but leave your hand in there and let it soak for a few minutes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you want something to get unstuck, then you have to get it slick first,” he said. “That’s why.”

  I got up on my knees in the chair and sat back on my shoes, and when I did I felt something sting me in the butt. I looked behind me at my shoes and then I looked in the chair, but there wasn’t nothing there. I felt around in my back pocket and found that little piece of quartz rock Stump had given me that morning before Mr. Thompson took him inside the church. I sat it on the table beside the mixing bowl.

  “What’s that?” my grandpa asked, but I didn’t feel like telling him about it.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I put my right hand down inside the mixing bowl, and at first the water was almost too hot for me to keep it in there, but I did, and after a few seconds I was used to it. My grandpa sat down at the table in the chair beside mine.

  “How’d you learn how to do this?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “if you work with wood long enough you’ll figure out how to fix a splinter pretty quick.”

  “Are you a carpenter?” I asked him.

  “I ain’t much of anything right now,” he said, “but I’ve been a lot of things. I guess I was one of those at one time.”

  I heard him lean back in his chair, and I could feel him watching me. I put my chin down on the table and looked at the side of the mixing bowl. I could see my fuzzy reflection in it, and just beside it I could see my grandpa’s face. The reflection of that quartz rock sat right in between us.

  “You look just like your daddy,” he said.

  I sat there
with my chin on the table, and I stared at his fuzzy reflection. I thought about how I could tell him the same thing.

  TEN

  I BRUSHED MY TEETH AND WASHED MY FACE IN THE BATHROOM with the lights out and my grandpa went back out on the front porch. I didn’t like getting ready for bed without Stump. I wanted to see him looking into the mirror beside me, and I wanted to see him brushing his teeth too. I could imagine him standing there, and I could almost feel his elbow touch my arm when he reached out and turned the water off in the sink. I was glad the lights were burned out; it made him easier to see.

  But then I thought about him lying on that bed over at Miss Lyle’s house, and then I wondered what Mama and Daddy were doing right then and if they were lying on that bed beside him. I remembered how I saw both of them cry today and just thinking about it made me want to cry too, but I was just too tired to do it.

  I walked into the bedroom and turned on the light and looked around. The bed was made up just like me and Stump had left it before we’d gone to church that morning. I kicked off my shoes and reached into my back pocket and pulled out that piece of quartz rock and held it in my hand. It was warm. The shelves Daddy’d made for our rocks were just about full, but I walked over to them anyway and looked for a good place to put Stump’s quartz. I sat it down beside a piece of fool’s gold that we’d found in the creek, but it didn’t seem right to leave it sitting there with all the rocks we’d found together, especially after I’d told him that I’d hold on to it for him.

  The closet door was open, and when I looked up at the top shelf I saw Stump’s quiet box. I knew there wasn’t no chance of Mama or Daddy catching me if I got it down and dropped Stump’s quartz rock inside. I figured if Stump was watching me from Heaven, then he probably wouldn’t care one bit if I did.

  I looked into the hallway and saw that my grandpa was still out on the porch smoking a cigarette. His back was turned, and he leaned against the railing by the porch like he was waiting for somebody to come driving up to the house. I tiptoed out into the kitchen and picked up one of the chairs at the table and brought it back into our bedroom and sat it in front of the closet. I stood up on top of it and reached up into the closet and took down Stump’s box. I stepped off the chair and sat the box on the bed. Before I opened it I closed the bedroom door and turned out the light. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, but there was plenty of light from the moon coming in the window. My grandpa coughed outside on the porch.

  I lifted the top off the shoe box and saw it was full of folded paper, some rocks, and a couple of sticks, but sitting right on top of all of it was the firefly Christmas ornament that I’d made for Stump. I lifted it out of the shoe box by the paper clip Mama’d wrapped around it to hang it from the Christmas tree, and I wondered what Stump thought about when he looked at the ornament up close; I wondered if he pictured me and him out in the fields chasing fireflies and trying to scoop them up in Mama’s Mason jars, or if he ever opened the quiet box and expected that he might find that firefly glowing. I never knew just what he was thinking, especially when he closed our bedroom door and was all alone with his box, but I hoped that firefly I’d given him made the world quieter for him. I sat the ornament down on the bed and walked over to the shelves and picked up Stump’s quartz rock where I’d left it sitting beside that fool’s gold. I walked back to the box and dropped the rock down inside, and then I picked up the firefly and sat it back inside too. I put the top back on Stump’s quiet box and climbed back up on the chair and put it back on the top shelf where I’d found it. I stared at it for a second, and then I changed my mind. I picked it up again and got down from the chair and slid the quiet box under our bed.

  I opened the bedroom door as quiet as I could, and when I peeked out I saw that my grandpa was still standing on the front porch, but he wasn’t smoking no more. I picked up the chair and carried it back into the kitchen. He must’ve heard me because he turned around and looked at me through the screen door.

  “You ready for bed?” he asked.

  “Almost,” I said.

  I walked back into the bedroom and took off my shirt and my blue jeans and got into bed in my jockeys. The windows were open but it was still warm outside, and I kicked off the quilt and only pulled the sheet over me so I wouldn’t get to sweating during the night. I laid there and stared up at the ceiling and looked at the shadows the moonlight spread out across it. I could hear the crickets chirping outside and some wind chimes tinkling, and way off in the distance I could hear the water running in the creek at the bottom of the hill. Everything was just like it always was except that Stump wasn’t there with me. I rolled over and looked at his side of the bed, and I ran my hand over his pillow. It felt cool against my hand after soaking it in that hot water, and I could feel where my skin had opened up a little after my grandpa used his fingernails to grab hold of that splinter and pull it out.

  I tossed my pillow onto the floor by the bed, and then I slid Stump’s pillow under my head. It felt almost cold against my face, and for a second I thought I could smell Stump’s hair. It smelled like the sheets did when Mama hung them to dry on the line outside when the sun was good and hot. I closed my eyes and ran my hand across Stump’s side of the bed, and I imagined he’d just gotten up to pee, and I laid there and listened for his footsteps in the hall.

  MY EYES WERE HEAVY AND SLEEPY WHEN MY GRANDPA CAME INTO the room. I felt him sit down on the bed, and I could smell the cigarette smoke in his clothes.

  “You asleep, buddy?” he whispered.

  “No,” I said. He was quiet, and I laid there and waited for him to say something else. I liked the way the smoke smelled on him and it made me wish Daddy smoked too.

  “I hate all this happened today,” he said. “I hate that you’re having to go through all this.”

  I opened up my eyes all the way and looked down at the bottom of the bed where he sat. The light was on in the hallway, and I could just barely see his face and the outline of his body.

  “When are my mom and dad coming home?” I asked him.

  “They’ll be home tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe even before you wake up for school. They’ve got to take care of your brother tonight.” He looked like he thought about saying something else, but he didn’t. He probably figured I wouldn’t understand. I could’ve told him that I understood plenty. I could’ve told him that I understood that the ambulance was on its way to Miss Lyle’s house to get Stump and that its siren wasn’t on because they knew he was already dead, and I understood that he was probably at the hospital with Mama and Daddy and a whole bunch of doctors trying to figure out what happened to him. He would’ve known how much I understood if he’d known what me and Joe Bill had seen.

  My grandpa reached out his hand and patted mine through the sheet. “Good night,” he said. He started to stand up.

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked him.

  He stood up straight and looked down at me. “Out on the porch,” he said.

  “I mean, where’ve you been all this time?” I said. “How come me and Stump ain’t never seen you before?” I knew Mama would get mad at me for asking him that, but she wasn’t there so I went ahead and asked him anyway. He sat down real slow and stared at the bedroom door like he was waiting for somebody else to walk through it. He sighed, and I could tell he didn’t want to have to answer a question like that.

  “Well,” he said, “if you’ve really got to know, I’ve been all over the place. I spent a couple years driving a rig up and down the coast, hung drywall for a while, worked in a mill up in PA.”

  “What’s PA?” I asked him.

  “Pennsylvania,” he said.

  “But why have you been gone so long?”

  “I just have,” he said. “I just went away.”

  “Why?”

  He sat there quiet like he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next, and then I saw his head turn like he was looking at me over his shoulder. “Because sometimes we do things we can’t take b
ack, and we need to go away and leave folks alone and let them forget us for a while.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Lots of things,” he said. Then he said, “Do you always ask this many questions?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

  He turned around so he could see me better. “Where I’ve been don’t matter as much as me being here now,” he said.

  I looked away from him toward the window. I thought about how during the daytime I could see my daddy’s tobacco fields all the way up to the road from here. I kept looking at the window, but I knew my grandpa was staring at me.

  “Maybe sometime I’ll take you up to my place,” he said. “Show you where I was raised up. We’ll go up to the old cabin where I was born and where your daddy grew up. Maybe we’ll scout the top field for arrowheads. You think you might want to do that?”

  “Sure,” I said, and then I thought about how much Stump liked to find him some arrowheads too so we could sit them on the shelves with the rocks we’d already found. “I wish my brother could go.”

  “Me too, buddy,” he said. “I hate that he can’t. But you know what you can do?”

  “What?”

  “You can keep his memory,” he said. “That’s the best way to hold on to folks. My mama and daddy have been gone so long that I can’t hardly picture them, and I have to remember my memories and hope they’re true. Maybe I’ll see them again someday and they’ll be just how I remember them; maybe not, but I like to think so.”

  “You mean in Heaven?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In Heaven.”

  I laid there and thought about seeing Stump in Heaven, and then I remembered what Joe Bill had said about Stump not being able to sing or talk or nothing. “Do you think Stump will be able to talk when he gets to Heaven?” I asked him.

  “Of course he will,” he said. “We’ll all be able to talk.” He pulled the sheet up around me. “And we’ll all be able to understand each other.” He stood up again, and then he bent down to the bed and made a show of tucking the sheet tight all around me. He walked over and put his hand on the doorknob and stepped into the hallway.