The fourth night, he became ill, and for two weeks he suffered through a cold that turned into influenza. After a teasing warm spell, the weather came back mortally cold, and he moved out of the mansion into Obie’s little kitchen house. An electric heater and the old wood-burning range together would keep the room at fifty degrees, and he could sleep. But it was a miserable place to stay, its attic full of manic squirrels, its floor a dull smear of ground-in soot and dirt, its walls impregnated with the oily emanations of ten thousand meals.
One day in mid-December there was a knock at the kitchen house door and he found Chance Poxley standing in the tall dead grass, bareheaded, shading his eyes with one hand.
Julian held the door open only a little. “What can I do for you?”
“Can I step in? This wind’s goin’ to freeze me female.”
He backed into the room, and the old man came up the three wooden steps. When his eyes adjusted he looked around. “My God you’re livin’ like a jailbird in here.”
“Next year I’ll arrange to keep the big house warm.”
Mr. Poxley shook his head. “I hear in the old days it took three servants working full-time to keep all the fireplaces going with coal. You can’t even buy coal anymore.”
“Did you come out here to discuss my heating problems?”
Mr. Poxley grimaced. “No.” He handed him a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?”
“You’re two months behind on your payments for your appliances and furniture.”
Julian reddened. He stood staring at the invoice for a long time as the squirrels began chasing each other above their heads. “Are you sure I haven’t paid these?”
“If you can show me the canceled checks, we’ll know, won’t we.”
“I’ll examine my records, and if they indicate that I’ve missed paying you, I’ll make it up.”
Mr. Poxley held out a hand. “I’d appreciate a check right now.”
“But I can’t do that. I might wind up paying you twice.”
The old man lowered his hand and looked over at the smoking stove. “Let me tell you something. People that take over a place like this have a lot of money. They can afford to hire a bunch of contractors to do a proper restoration.”
“My dream is to do just that.”
“At the rate you’re going, it’ll take you a hundred years just to make the place look second-rate. And if you stay out here, this house’ll kill you. If that’s your dream, then it’s a nightmare.”
Julian straightened his back. “It’s my heritage. Are you suggesting I move back to an apartment in Memphis?”
“There’s people that’ll pay a bit of money for this property. With what you sell it for, you could get a tight little house with a shop out back.”
“And you’d get your money for the refrigerator and air conditioner and the other stuff.”
Chance Poxley put out a hand, palm down, and said, in a soft voice, “Look, if you can’t pay me, I’ll have to put a lien on the place. So will the folks down at the lumber yard, who I hear tell have advanced you considerable supplies on credit.”
Julian opened the door and pointed outside. “You’ll get your money.”
The old man rolled his eyes at the little room. “Well, I got to admit I’ve never been throwed out of a worse place than this.” He eased down the steps and stopped to survey the property. “You know,” he said over his shoulder, “I didn’t come here to cause you any trouble. But I got to tell you, when the sheriff found out an owner was on this property, he checked into the tax records and found out you owe on this place back to 1946.” The man’s thin white hair was torn by the wind. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”
Julian waved him away as though he were a stray dog. “Get off my property,” he yelled. “I can buy and sell every damned one of you.” He himself didn’t know where this cutting voice had come from, its load of arrogance perhaps conjured up out of the red dirt around him, the dead fields and parched lumber of his inheritance.
Julian sat down that night to balance his checkbook and found that he’d have to transfer money from his tiny emergency fund at the bank in Memphis to hold off his creditors for a week or so. After that, he was bankrupt.
—
One night of gun-blue sky, the temperature went down to nine degrees. Julian had stuffed the cookstove with scrap wood he’d scavenged, and the stovepipe was glowing red halfway up to the flimsy ceiling. An old Remington manual was set up on the table, and it refused to move when he hit the Tab key, the fresh oil on its parts turned to gum by the cold. At about eleven o’clock, he had to go to the bathroom, so he put on padded slippers and all the clothes in the room and opened the door to the night. The wind was a black punishment, and his bones were rattling by the time he reached the back door of the big house. As soon as he stepped inside, his heart shrank at a splashing sound echoing down the dark hall. His feet began to sting, and when he turned on the hall light he could see water running deep on the floor. He slid over to the foot of the stairs and looked up at a ladder of water coming down, a skin of ice on the edges like a mountain stream. Upstairs, he found that the frozen toilet had shattered and fallen away from the wall, snapping off the feed line at the floor level, and water was jetting up to the ceiling. He had no idea where he could turn the water off. And only one person could tell him.
He sat next to the phone table in the hall and hooked his feet on a chair rung to keep them out of the water, which covered all the floors downstairs and was now pouring through the ceiling above him as well. He pulled out phone bills from the drawer under the phone, studying the columns of calls until he found a number in Georgia. He imagined he had done so much for Obie that the man should at least tell him where a valve was. Looking up, he watched lines of icicles forming where water sluiced through cracks in the plaster.
After many rings, someone in Georgia picked up the phone, and he asked to speak to Obie Parker. “This is his former employer,” he shouted into the receiver. “I need to ask him a question.”
A woman’s reedy voice answered, sounding self-righteous and glad to be so. “Do you have any idea a-tall what time it is?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but this is important.”
“Obadiah is asleep, and a workin’ man needs all the rest he’s due, so I’m not about to roust him out of a warm bed, mister.”
Julian’s voice rose in pitch. “But I’ve got a broken water pipe and—”
“A broke pipe, you say? Mister, there’s people in the world got a whole lot worse than that wrong in their lives. They got the cancer, they got children selling dope, they got trailers blown apart by tornado winds that leaves them standin’ in the yard starin’ up at the stars. But you know what? Ain’t a one of them callin’ me up at twelve-ten at night to whine about no broke water pipe.”
“It’s eleven-ten,” Julian corrected.
“Mister, you caught up in your own little world so much you think the rest of God’s universe is in your time zone. It’s twelve-ten in Georgia.”
A piano-size raft of plaster detatched from the ceiling and fell at his feet, covering him with a surf of freezing water. “Good Lord, lady, I’ve got to talk to your husband.”
“People in hell got to have strawberry shortcake, but they don’t get it.” She hung up.
He lowered the buzzing phone and looked down the long, swamped hall toward the front of the house that was his glory, that told everyone who he was. He knew everything about it, and at the same time, nothing at all. The wind flattened the tall dry grass next to the pillars in a dead shout that told him not a thing that would help. Suddenly he was startled by the jangling phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey. It’s Obie. I heard my wife a-talkin’ to you.”
The voice was like a warm, comforting hand, but Julian could not help shouting, “Where the hell’s the water valve to the house? I’m flooded out here.”
“If you got water on the floors don’t go after that pump
switch in the panel box. It’ll knock you into the next world. Look under the sink and turn that third valve to the right.”
He sloshed through the house and did as he was told, but it was a long time before the system bled down and the water diminished its rattle on the stairs. With a house-shaking crash, the dining room plaster came down all at once. Shivering, he ran back to the phone, wet up to the knees, and climbed onto the chair. “What do I do now, Obie? All the plaster in the place is coming down.”
The voice drifted in from Georgia, sleepy and soft. “You can’t afford no plaster man, that’s for sure.” After a pause he said, “Might be time to sell out.”
“Never,” he yelled into the receiver. “I’ll never leave here in a million years.”
“One time, I said I’d never give up my tattoos.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need your moralizing lesson. I need you to come back and fix things.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but it sounds like things is past fixin’.”
Something crashed down in the kitchen like a truckload of gravel. “What can I do about the plaster?”
“That plaster’s the least of your problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
The light fixture above his head filled with water and popped off in a shower of blue sparks, and he dropped the phone. Blind and trembling in the watery dark, he began to struggle down the hall toward his outbuilding, desperate for the warmth of the red-hot stove. When he opened the back door, he saw the old kitchen was now a windblown fireball of lumber, streamers of flame running toward him through the grass. He lurched outside and began stamping at the brush until he understood that with its brick porch and pillars, the house probably would not catch fire. Through a sidelight at the rear door he watched the flames race in the wind, flowing under his car and fanning out to light the corncrib, the smokehouse, and the big sagging barn, which went up in a howl of crackling boards and dried-out hay. At one point he tried to call the Poxley volunteer fire department, but the creosote pole that supported his phone wire had already gone up like a torch, taking his service away. In ten minutes, the fire circled the house, and he climbed up to the belvedere to track its progress as it burned to the ditches surrounding his tract, taking out the pump house, a tractor shed, and incinerating his Dodge, which burned hot and high, killing most of the foliage of the live oak shading it.
At dawn he could see that but for the roadside oaks, everything was gone, burned off the face of the earth as if by a powerful beam of light, the house standing naked and singed in a field of white ash. He stayed up in the belvedere hoping the new sun would warm him, but daylight brought a shrill wind crying like the voices of all the families, wealthy or destitute, who had lived in his house, who, each in turn, had given it up through death or duress and left it to falter. He stood unshaven and burning with fever, dressed in sopping house slippers and several layers of old robes and cotton jackets, waiting—for what, he wasn’t sure. But after a few minutes he heard a car on the gravel road, looked down through the bubbled glass and saw them. Even from this distance he could see that Mr. Poxley’s mouth had fallen open at the sight of the guttering outbuildings. He and a big deputy stepped out of the police car and walked to the roadside fence. Each man held down his hat with one hand and bore folded papers in the other, liens and tax bills that would take the place away, and Julian felt house and history shrink to nothing under his feet, a void replaced by a vision of himself, dressed in borrowed clothes and defeat, spirited away that very evening on a lurching bus bound for Memphis and sitting next to some untaught, impoverished person, perhaps even another long-suffering and moralizing carpenter.
Attitude Adjustment
Two years had passed since the collision, and now young Father Jim spent a great deal of time lying in a recliner, looking for patterns in the cottage-cheese ceiling. He liked to pretend the flattened globs of Sheetrock mud were ice floes in the Arctic Ocean, and he was in a skiff trying to find a way through them to rescue a stranded person. He could never travel far before his mind just lost track of any direction and wandered back to the starting point at the central light fixture.
The diocese had allotted him this small outdated house on the edge of a North Carolina mountain town, a place with no Catholic church. The bishop told him he was now a pinch hitter, and occasionally he was summoned, as a last resort, to drive to a nearby town and say an early Mass or handle a Bible study session for children. For a long time after the accident, Father Jim felt like a robot he’d seen blown apart in a movie, its many pieces scattered, all still blinking, still functioning, but totally disconnected. Sometimes his nose itched, but he couldn’t think of what part of him was supposed to scratch it. Now and then he would feel a sadness rise above the painful healing that he had to endure, but the sad feeling wouldn’t quite make it across his brain to the part that could really appreciate it. Sometimes he would close his eyes tight and try to remember what had happened—how, in the heavy forest south of Passion Gap, a train had been trumpeting a monstrous chord of warning through the snow, but Father Jim, driving toward his church while creating a new homily in his head, had failed to hear it. He was proud of his sermons and wanted to get this latest one just right. Suddenly, the road twisted over the tracks, but with no crossing arms or blinking lights to warn him, Father Jim never saw the locomotive of a hundred-car coal train that exploded into his vehicle, shoving it a quarter mile east in a veil of flames and coppery sparks. Upon impact, the priest ascended through a million diamonds of windshield and landed in the middle of Highway 16, his skull fractured like a dropped melon, his hands cut through, both legs broken and bleeding. He lay in the snowy road for an hour waiting for the ambulance crew to come up the mountain through the developing blizzard while the engineer and brakeman crouched over his body trying to stop the bleeding with shop rags.
There were precious few Catholic priests in the mountains, so despite Father Jim’s infirmities he was called on to pitch in when a pastor became ill or was called away from his church. He was always the last to be asked, of course, because most of the other priests knew he was forgetful of the most basic things and had developed a horror of giving homilies, a talent he had completely lost after the accident. And then, he was very scary to look at, his forehead and face heavily scarred, one of his eyes fixed and blind; the muscular six-foot-four priest often seemed ready to tumble over because of damage to his feet. He discomfited several adult congregations with his homilies, though when asked to help with children’s church, most of the youngest ones liked him a great deal, perhaps thinking he was a reassigned troll from their books of fairy tales. Or maybe they liked his smile, the only facial expression he could still control.
The one rehab he remembered to do was weight lifting, because every morning he’d bang his ankles on the two-hundred-pound barbell next to his bed. Sometimes he questioned why he had to put up with so much discomfort. Now and then he wondered if God had sent a train to run over him. He’d also considered two or three times why God hadn’t finished the job, but then he’d forget what he’d been wondering and move on. The doctors said his brain function might gradually improve. Physically, he would have to put up with some malformations. Since the many surgeries, he’d lost most of the hair on his misshapen head, and a rail yard of scars ran diagonally down to where his eyebrows once were. He seemed to have misplaced his sense of humor. His sister, in a failed attempt to make him laugh, told him he resembled a space alien in a set of Star Wars action figures.
Early one Saturday, Father Nguyen, up at Bluff Mountain Mission, saw the injured priest’s name on a list of retired or partly abled priests. When his phone rang, Father Jim was in his recliner, trying to make sense of CNN and its runway-model announcers. He looked up in the air for the sound, wondering for a moment what it might be. Then on the fifth ring he remembered and picked up the receiver. After a few seconds, he recalled how to say hello. Father Ngu
yen needed to catch a last-minute flight to attend an aunt’s funeral and asked if he would cover the five o’clock vigil service and hear confessions for half an hour before Mass. Father Jim pressed a button on his answering machine, which began to record the call, and then asked for specific directions. The other priest reminded him that Bluff Mountain was only ten miles away and that he’d driven there several times. It was on the same highway as his little house. Father Jim, who for some reason still had a driver’s license, told him he would be there on time. He wrote himself a note and placed it under a cheap battery-powered travel clock that he set to ring at three p.m. Later that day, it did, and he followed the sound to the note, got dressed, and went out with his vestments over his arm to sit in his vehicle and try to start it. It was ten minutes before he remembered that the car wouldn’t go in gear unless he stepped on the brake. Out on the road, he repeated his destination to himself every minute, and before long he was pulling into St. Timothy’s parking lot. He got out and stared down the highway toward where he’d come from, remembering nothing of the trip.
Once in the little reconciliation room, he sat behind a kneeler that was topped with a privacy screen. There was also a plain chair four feet in front of him for penitents who wanted a face-to-face confession, a rare occurrence. Since his accident, Father Jim was embarrassed to hear confessions and felt sorry for the people telling their sins. At one time he’d taken pride in his ability to lend a compassionate ear, to give advice, but nowadays he felt he was no longer any good as a confessor, because he’d lost the talent for saying the right thing. He still tried, but the connection between a penitent’s guilt and any remedy he might offer would simply not occur to him. His ideas were like boxcars with no couplers, bumping together and drifting apart.
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