Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels)

by Alex Bledsoe

  “And you wrote that song you sang?”

  “Yeah.” If he noticed the slight hesitation before she answered, he didn’t mention it.

  “What was it called?”

  “Er … ‘Lament for the Storm.’ Silly, I know.”

  “So why are you doing this instead of playing music full-time?”

  “Under the circumstances, you should be grateful that I am. Besides, all anybody really wants to hear is what’s on the radio, and I don’t have any interest in playing that.”

  “So you know a lot of the songs from around here?” he asked before he’d even consciously formed the question.

  “Some,” she said. “Why?”

  “Well … I’m looking for one.”

  “Which one?”

  “Don’t know. Someone told me about it. Said, ‘If you sing it, it’ll heal your broken heart, and the heart of anyone who hears it,’ and ‘It would be on a hill, carved in stone.’”

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Pretty much.” He found himself holding his breath, awaiting her reply.

  “Never heard of anything like that,” she said. The thread pulled tight, and he heard it snap. “There. Good as new in a few days. Go see your regular doctor to get these out.”

  He tenderly felt around the cut. As she’d said, pine needles protruded from his scalp like an acupuncture treatment. “It still hurts.”

  “It’d hurt worse without ’em.” She wrapped the towel around the bloody tools. “You’ll probably have a black eye, too. Now, let’s walk around a little, make sure you didn’t do anything more serious.”

  She helped him to his feet and led him through an adjoining door into the garage, past the fire truck. They went into the backyard, which bordered an overgrown field slanting down toward the valley. Beyond that, the ever-present Smoky Mountains formed cool blue and gray curves. The view, like all those in Needsville, would’ve been breathtaking if the sun hadn’t added to his headache. The light seemed extra bright, the way it did after a summer thunderstorm.

  Bliss stood in front of him to again check his pupils. “Don’t squint.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  He managed to open his eyes enough for her, and she nodded approvingly. “I think you’ll live.”

  “Will I be able to play the piano?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, I always wanted to do that.” As his eyes adjusted, Rob noticed something in the field. “What’re those?” he said, pointing at a spot where some white stonelike objects rose above the tall grass.

  “What?”

  “Those. Those things sticking up there.”

  “Some old family cemetery. They’re all over the place around here. This is the second-oldest town in Tennessee, you know.” Her blasé demeanor masked her frustration and confusion. What the hell are you? she wanted to scream. How can you see that graveyard when there’s not an ounce of the true anywhere in you?

  Impulsively, Rob walked into the field toward the cemetery. “Hey, where are you going?” Bliss asked, following him. “Maybe you should go back and sit down for a while.”

  “A minute ago, you said I needed to walk around.”

  Before she could think of a reply, they’d reached the spot. A waist-high, rusted iron fence surrounded the tiny graveyard. Inside it, the ground was mostly bare, as though grass did not grow there very well. Four headstones and a smattering of foot markers delineated the burial plots, all adorned with the surname SWETT.

  “So how come the Swetts bury their kin all the way out here behind the fire station?” Rob asked.

  “They used to have a house here, but the family’s gone now. The last one sold it to the city for a dollar to use as the first fire station, in fact. Until it burned down.”

  “The fire station burned down? That’s ironic.”

  She nodded. “I was in high school when it happened. One of the firemen fell asleep on the toilet with a lit cigarette. He got out, but the old building went up like rice paper.”

  Rob opened the gate with difficulty; the hinges were rusty and stiff, and the tilted ground had caused them to seize up at an angle. The grass stopped growing in a straight line exactly beneath the edge of the gate; he wondered if the ground had been treated with something.

  “That’s not very polite,” Bliss said. “You don’t know these people.”

  “‘I beg the pardon of the dead, should I tread upon their head,’” Rob said with mock solemnity. It was part of a poem he and his friends used to chant when they’d play hide-and-seek in the church graveyard. In his peripheral vision, he saw Bliss make another hand gesture, similar to the one he saw back in town. “Hey, you just did it again.”

  “Did what?”

  “That hand thing. Like you did to Queen Kong that made her stop dead.”

  “I was shooing a bee.” Another insect, small and fluttery, popped up around her face, and she made roughly the same move again to chase it away. “See?”

  He knelt before the tallest tombstone. It read THOMAS SWETT, 1824–1901. The letters were cut so deeply, the normal weathering had not yet obscured them. Beneath the name was an inscription:

  THROUGH HIS WINGS THE BREEZE SHARP RINGING,

  WILD HIS DYING DIRGE WAS SINGING,

  WHILE HIS SOUL TO EARTH WAS SPRINGING,

  BODY LIFELESS FOR THE FLIES.

  Rob ran his fingertips over the chiseled letters. On a hill, the man had said.… “That’s not from the Bible, is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” Oh, hell, she thought. He had to notice that.

  He moved to the next marker, whose name was illegible, although the words BELOVED DAUGHTER and the dates 1832–1837 indicated it was a child. Beneath that was another inscription.

  “Am I reading this right?” he asked. “‘Buried in a keg’?”

  “Yeah. It means she died at sea, and her body was kept preserved in alcohol until they could bring her home. She was literally buried in a keg of rum.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “No, it was more common than you’d think.”

  “Why didn’t they just bury them at sea?”

  “Because for some people, the sea’s not home. Don’t you want to be buried somewhere near home?”

  He recalled Anna’s funeral, in the graveyard of the church they’d both grown up attending, and where they planned to be married. “Never thought about it,” he lied.

  The name and date on the next stone, FERLIN EDWARD SWETT, 1802–1855, were legible, but lichen covered part of the inscription beneath it. He was about to move on, when he noticed the word “feeble.” That seemed such an odd word for an epitaph that he knelt and picked enough of the green cover away to make out the phrase:

  HE FADED INTO DARKNESS, SIGHING

  THOUGH HE CALLED, NO ONE REPLYING;

  ONE LAST FEEBLE EFFORT TRYING,

  FAINT HE SUNK NO MORE TO RISE.

  “What does that mean?” Rob asked.

  “Who knows? Probably some old Victorian poem or something. I’m not a tombstone-ologist.” She knew she sounded tense, but Rob was too engrossed to notice. He looked back and forth between the two headstones.

  Long forgotten, the man had said. Carved in stone.

  “You know … these inscriptions could almost be two verses of the same song. Except the more recent one would be the first verse, since it talks about what happens at the point of dying, and the older one is what happens afterwards. What do you think?”

  Nervous perspiration trickled between her shoulder blades, and it took real effort to sound casual. “Hm. Well, as fascinating as this is, you seem to be recovering nicely, and I need to take you back to town so I can get on to work.”

  “Yeah.” He stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Thanks, by the way. For helping out back in town, and for the stitch job.”

  She nodded. “Glad to do it.”

  He took out his phone and began taking pictures of the inscriptions.

  “What are you d
oing?” she almost shouted.

  “Just taking pictures. That way I can play around with the words later.”

  “You’d steal someone’s epitaph and turn it into a song?” She couldn’t keep the fear from her voice, but luckily it came out as outrage.

  He looked at her oddly. She seemed offended all out of proportion. “Wow. I’m sorry, are these some of your people?”

  “No,” Bliss said. “It just seems … rude.”

  “What I really hope to do is find the poem these came from.”

  “Oh.” She fought to appear calm. “That’s sensible, then. Come on, let’s get you back to the Catamount Corner.”

  He started to protest, but suddenly his head swirled and he truly just wanted to lie down back in his room. He followed her back to the station, where she finally gave him some aspirin.

  They were about to drive away when she abruptly stopped the truck at the end of the driveway. She searched his eyes for any gleam of the true, no matter how small, but found none. “You’re really not from around here, are you? I mean, no family from here, no history, nothing.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  She shook her head. “You sure look like you’ve got a good bit of Tufa in you. Hell, you and I could be brother and sister.”

  “That’s a weird thing to say.”

  “No, I’m serious. You don’t have any family ties to this area?”

  “Not a one. It’s just a coincidence.”

  They rode in silence back into town, and she dropped him off in front of the Catamount Corner. He carried his guitar through the empty lobby to his room, where he fell facedown on the bed. But he couldn’t sleep; the words from the two grave markers kept running through his mind, finding their own meter and melody.

  He knew from experience that there was no fighting the muse when she struck. He pulled up the pictures on his phone, quickly transcribed the words to a piece of motel stationery, and began quietly noodling on his guitar, trying out the stanza in different ways, breaking it at different points. It worked best as a simple 4/4 rhythm, a basic chord progression, simplest thing in the world.…

  “Soul to earth” was a weird metaphor, he realized. Souls normally sprang to heaven, not earth. And yet it couldn’t be a euphemism for decay, because the next line explicitly covered that. He knew of no branch of Christianity that allowed the soul to return to the earth; so what religion had these people practiced?

  And “through his wings”; what could that mean? Wings were reserved for angels, yet the subject of the verse was clearly not yet dead.

  His cell phone rang and he jumped. He set the guitar aside and answered it. “Hello?”

  “Hey, tough guy,” Doyle said, amused. “I hear you had a donnybrook on Main Street this morning.”

  “Yeah, with some Neanderthal hill woman named Tiffany.”

  “She’s a monster, all right. So did she beat you up too much to come over for that dinner tonight?”

  “Not at all. I don’t know how much fun I’ll be, but I could sure use some home cooking.”

  After Doyle gave him directions and hung up, Rob got online and tried a search for the poem or song that had inspired the epitaph. He got no results that fit. This thrilled him even more, for it meant he might be on the track of the secret, magical song that had brought him here. And they were right where the man had said they’d be: on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone.

  10

  The Collins’s trailer home looked isolated and vulnerable in the twilight. The trees around it were thick, old, and more densely packed than the rest of the forest. A creek ran along one edge of the lot, crossed by a small decorative bridge.

  Rob parked next to Doyle’s truck beneath a solitary old oak that shaded most of the front yard. One branch had grown so long and heavy that halfway along its length, a makeshift metal brace supported its weight. The yard was neat and boasted no half-assembled cars or sleepy dogs, something Rob realized he’d expected to find.

  Berklee greeted him at the door. She wore khaki shorts despite the chill and a criminally tight white T-shirt, and looked absolutely stunning. She held a beer, and the slight red flush to her cheeks said it wasn’t her first of the day. She stepped aside to let him enter and said, “Hi, glad you could make it. See you found us okay.”

  Rob tapped the brim of his Royals cap. “Sorry for wearing a hat indoors. I know better, but I’ve got fresh stitches and Vaseline in my hair, and I just didn’t think I could stand shampoo on it just yet.”

  “You’re not the first person Tiffany Gwinn’s made get stitches,” Berklee said sympathetically. “Seems like every town’s got someone like her, doesn’t it?”

  Berklee took his jacket and hung it on the rack by the door. The trailer’s living room was furnished in matching couch and recliner, while the little dining area had new-looking table and chairs. Everything was neat and organized, in contrast to the cliché image of trailer people. Rob took a seat on one of the barstools in front of the counter that divided the kitchen and living room.

  Doyle came down the hall in jeans and a dark sweater. “Well, look who took on the Queen Bitch of the Mountains and lived to tell about it. Quite a shiner you’ve got going there.”

  Rob touched the skin around his left eye. It felt tender and hot. “Apparently, I don’t have to tell about it, everyone already knows.”

  “Someone usually gets their head busted when the Gwinns come to town. You ever hear of Great Kate Gwinn?”

  “No.”

  “Back about seventy years ago, she was the biggest moonshiner around Needsville, in every sense. They say she weighed seven hundred pounds, but I figure there’s a thirty percent exaggeration factor in that. She lived up at the Gwinn house, but she was too big to get out the door, so nobody ever arrested her. The local cops told the feds, ‘She’s catchable, but not fetchable.’”

  “Wow. If she was around now, she’d have her own reality show. What happened to her?”

  “When she died, they just put sides and a top on her bed and knocked down a wall to get her out. Took a dozen men and two mules to drag her the ten yards down the hill to the family plot. People all switched to white lightning for a month in her honor.”

  “Switched from what?” Rob asked.

  “Moonshine.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “White lightning’s brewed during the day, moonshine’s brewed at night.”

  Berklee dropped her empty beer into the garbage with a loud clank. “I hear Bliss—” She said the name with disdain. “—bailed you out.”

  Rob nodded. “Ran off the monster, then stitched me up. Probably saved my life. Definitely saved my ass.”

  Berklee folded her arms. “That’s Bliss, all right. The answer to every man’s prayers.”

  Doyle kissed her on the cheek. “I keep telling you, honey, green ain’t your color.”

  “Hmph.” Berklee shrugged off the kiss and opened the fridge for another beer.

  To Rob, Doyle said, “Bliss knows a lot of different things.”

  “No kidding. All she had to do to run off that psycho bitch was this.” He made an approximation of her hand gesture.

  Berklee, just closing the refrigerator, gasped and made a motion with her left hand in response. She caught herself about halfway through, and tried to turn the movement into an innocuous tapping on the counter. But Rob caught it.

  “What was that?”

  “What?” Berklee asked innocently.

  “What you just did.” He imitated it as accurately as he could.

  Berklee glanced at Doyle, who shrugged.

  “Oh, it was nothing, you just startled me,” she said dismissively. “It’s stuff we used to do when we were kids.”

  “Like what?” Rob pressed.

  “Just … stuff,” she said desperately, unable to come up with anything else. “Excuse me, fellas, I have to pee.” She practically shoved Doyle aside to run down the hall.

  Rob looked at Doyle. “So are you going to t
ell me?”

  “Son, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Women around here are crazy on a good day. They all get these superstitions from their mommas when they’re young, and they never quite shake ’em.”

  “And you’re not superstitious?”

  “Not a bit,” he deadpanned, then knocked on the wooden table.

  When Berklee returned from the bathroom, Rob did not bring up Bliss or the hand gestures again. They sat around the kitchen and drank beer until Berklee produced the casserole from the oven.

  “So you both lived here all your lives?” Rob asked as they ate.

  They nodded. Doyle said, “I reckon it’s true, you can take the boy out of the mountains, but not the other way around.”

  “And now he’s got his own business,” Berklee said.

  “Yeah, long as you quit running off my help.”

  Berklee blushed and smiled, and Doyle laughed. Rob said, “What am I missing here?”

  “I came by to bring Doyle his lunch one day, and he was up under a car working on it,” Berklee explained. “I was feeling kinda silly, so since his legs were sticking out, I bent down and unzipped his pants on my way into his office.”

  “Where she found me sitting at my desk,” Doyle added.

  “Seems he’d hired this Barnes boy without mentioning it to me,” Berklee said, “and now the poor kid came staggering in, bleeding from where he’d smacked his head when he jumped ’cause somebody opened his fly.”

  They shared more stories as the empty beer cans piled up. Later, Doyle lit a fire in a pit in the backyard, and they sat under the stars, surrounded by the sounds of the mountain night.

  At last, after a long period of silence except for the fire’s crackling, Rob turned to Doyle. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Doyle said guiltily. “Knew you looked familiar, so I looked you up online.”

  Berklee looked from Rob to her husband. “Who is he? Is he famous?”

  “I guess,” Rob said. He gazed into the fire. “I was a contestant on that TV show, So You Think You Can Sing? I made it all the way to the finals. Me and two other idiots. The producers were going to fly my girlfriend Anna in for the show, to surprise me.”