_________
I’ve never seen it myself, though. At seventeen, I went north to Wellesley, where once they’d got an earful of my accent, they were thunderstruck I could read and write my whole name. I went back south, back home, only twice during college, and then only to bury my parents, their dying of natural causes within a year of each other. And I’ve never yet been back inside the place where Jimbo’s daddy made his son so ashamed, and helped send us all down the road that dead-ended with me standing there, watching it all, doing nothing, and Bo’s body caught fire like a torch, lit by the good of his heart.
My father did live long enough to see Emerson go to Dartmouth, but not long enough to see him become a professor of seventeenth-century English literature and live in Seattle—his specialty being John Donne. That much I might’ve predicted. But I’m still walking around shocked about this: The very month after our father died, Em joined a church—though at least only an Episcopal church, so it could’ve been worse. He tries to explain it to me: It’s some kind of breath to him, some kind of pulse to his life that—I’ll be straight up—I just don’t understand. And some days—only off days, mind you, or down days—days like today maybe, I’d like to. At least understand. But I will say this: Every time I hear Emerson talk, hush-breathed, using words like mercy and holy, I picture what Jimbo would do. I see him throwing back his head in a hearty laugh at our Emerson kneeling so earnestly on a prayer bench. And I imagine Jimbo would squeeze right in beside him.
To no one’s surprise but his daddy’s, L. J. never took over Waymon’s Feed and Seed. When Uncle Waymon suffered a stroke, his second son, Matt made a real enterprise of the old place, even took Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers as a sideline. Bought Emerson’s old truck, too, with the company name Bo painted there on the door. I have to give Matt credit for keeping the name.
The Big Dog herself, overindulged to the end, breathed her last from the shade of an old dogwood tree while she was supervising our spreading cedar mulch just a week before Emerson left for Dartmouth. She was buried, by request of Mollybird Pittman, beneath a particularly large, particularly red hybrid tea rose. Em never even tried to argue that Big Dog needed to be in our yard—maybe he knew, even then, we wouldn’t be back, him and me. Not anytime soon anyhow. And in the hole with Emerson’s best friend—outside of Bo—we placed an unopened box of barbecue scraps and a full can of Dr Pepper, memorial gifts from Hyme Steinberger and daughters.
L. J. went with the Peace Corps to Togo—or was it Tonga? He eventually became a lawyer in Birmingham and busies himself with pro bono civil rights cases. Pro bono to the extent, he admitted to me when I asked, that he does very little for pay. And his wardrobe looks like it, I assured him last time business brought him to Boston. So he calls when he’s in town, and he pounds out the occasional terse, meant-to-be-friendly e-mail. My aunt’s Christmas letters hint that she still grieves her son’s lack of graciousness and tact, his never, she implies, having made too much of himself.
Me, I moved down the Mass Pike from Wellesley to Boston. And after years of playacting big-city sophistication, I still prefer Emerson’s old pickup to my Saab, and Steinberger’s barbecue to Legal Seafood’s lobster. I still prefer male friends to female—though who has time really for either?
I couldn’t say why I chose Boston for a place to prop up my feet—not that there’s time for that either—and the weather here makes me wear shoes. Don’t hear me wrong: I love this city—as cities go. I love its quirky little streets: Water and Milk. And cobblestone-pocked Beacon Hill—where I live. I love Mike’s Pastry’s cannoli in the North End and the bookstores, quirky and musty and marvelous, sprinkled through the whole town.
But some nights just before I drift off to sleep, listening to the rumble of car wheels on my cobblestone street, I hear Emerson’s voice and his bluegrass guitar, or see Jimbo dangling from the rope swing, one hand on the rope, the other melodramatically over his heart, and singing to Sanna, and also to me,
When the night has come
And the land is dark …
And I enter my dreams on those nights hearing banjos and dulcimers and mandolins, all mixed up with Motown, and watching a sea of blue mountains roll out before me, smelling the sun on the hemlocks and damp, fern-carpeted forests, feeling my bare toes sink into warm, wet red clay.
No, I won’t be afraid,
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me …
And I am trying, I think, to stay there, to not have to leave ever again.
But even then, sometimes my dreams take a nasty turn, the clay turning to embers beneath me. And I cannot move. Or maybe just don’t.
_________
On the way to our first trip back to the Blue Hole, to visit where we’d just buried Bo’s ashes, Em drove and L. J. and I shared the cab seat with him and Big Dog, who sat at our feet, her head still and sad in my lap. Not one of us talked as we drove down the Pike. We passed by Steinberger’s, then looped left by the Overlook.
There was an old Pinto parked there off the side of the road that clung to the edge of our Ridge. We all knew whose it was—whose drunk of a momma’s it was.
L. J. motioned for Em to slow down.
Emerson tapped on the brakes, but didn’t slow down too awfully much. “Nope,” Em said.
L. J. motioned again.
Em’s head popped around. “NO ... WAY.”
“Don’t you think,” L. J. asked pointedly, “Jimbo would’ve wanted us to find Welp? And not give up on him yet?”
That was the problem with our having hung out with Jimbo for so long, his always digging out room for a chance that somebody could change.
There was Welp, sitting with his tires just where our Ridge gives out of strength and lets the earth fall away into cliff, and down three thousand feet into valley. The Pinto was idling loud and irregular, metal pings and heavy, hard thunks that shifted the loose soil beneath it.
Em slammed the truck into park. “You screwed up, Welp,” he called out, his hands clenched on the wheel. He took a deep breath and met L. J.’s eye, and I could see my brother was groping for something like mercy. But shaking his head, his hands turning white at the knuckles, he came up only with this, strangled there in his throat: “You screwed up big time.”
Welp sat there in his car. He nodded.
L. J. inched his way out of the cab and approached Welp slowly, like the car might just be driven right off the side of that ridge. “Perhaps Welp,” L. J. said over his shoulder, “is cognizant of having screwed up.” He stood a couple of arms’ length from the Pinto.
Welp looked out his driver’s-side window, his shoulders starting to heave. “I tried to stop it, right there at the end. I don’t know what happened. Me and Mort was supposed to be just having some fun. And then the old guys come along and things got out of control and … You got to believe me: I tried to stop it, right there at the end—”
L. J. nodded—real slow, and held out a hand. “You got to put that car in reverse and come on out of there, Welp. Come on out of there now.”
“I even wrote a letter. To them. Said I was sorry. So sorry.” His whole body convulsed as he cried. “I gave it to a nurse down to the hospital, before they left town. Did you know that? I gave it to a nurse. And I wrote one to Bo, and snuck in one night and read it to him and his daddy.”
L. J. moved one step closer. “You did some good, then, Welp. You did some good. You throw that car in reverse now, and you tell us more.”
My heart beat loud and heavy and irregular along with the car’s engine, the violence of the Pinto’s motor shifting the gravel beneath its tires.
Welp sat there, just sobbing behind the wheel and he reached up a hand to L. J., just fingers to fingers, and touched.
“So sorry,” Welp said one more time.
Then his foot pressed the gas of his momma’s old
Pinto to drive off the edge of the world.
“Bobby!” I screamed.
For an instant, Bobby’s foot mashed the brake, the car’s front tires slipping forward and down.
“Bobby!” I called from the truck bed, and scrambled out as I yelled, “Bobby, Jimbo was talking about you at the last.” When the words formed in my mouth, they were a lie, something I spit out to keep a car from plunging over a cliff—a selfish act, really, words to keep us from living through any more death than we already had. But shouted out like they were, echoing there at the edge of our mountain, Bobby’s miserable face turning to listen, it suddenly hit me that my lie was also the truth.
The Pinto’s front wheels shifted on the loose shale and dead leaves at the rim of the Look. The car’s front end sank as the tires lost their grip on firm soil.
“Bobby!” Em yelled, as the Pinto nose-dived into thin air.
_________
When the flashing lights had come and gone, and the tow truck had observed the pile of scrap metal it needed to fetch three thousand feet down, and after the police had finished shaking their heads that Bobby Welpler had managed to throw himself out the driver’s-side door before the car had plummeted down, or that he’d managed to cling onto a rock until we could pull him to safety, after all this, we piled in Em’s truck. Bobby huddled with us in the bed of the pickup, all of us shaken and numb, and went to the Hole. We sat there by the grave in a huddle, and looked at the water and wept. Even the boys. Even me. Nobody was there swimming, so the stirred-up brown had gone a dark almost-blue.
Bobby lay facedown alone on the granite palm, and whatever he said, to Jimbo or Jesus or whoever it was he imagined could hear—we let him say it in peace. We let him alone until he was done being alone, and then we hung onto each other, what was left of us, on into the dark.
_________
They tell me folks back home still talk about Jimbo and us and that summer, and argue on about just who was to blame, or where the trouble back then really began:
“Jimbo Riggs, if you’re asking me.”
“You lay off on that boy, bless his sweet heart. He was as good a thing as this town ever growed.”
“Sweet on that colored girl was what he was, I tell you what.”
“You ask me, it was the fault of them newspaper editor’s kids. You just look where both of them ended up if that don’t tell you how—”
“I heard Bobby Welpler got hisself mixed up in the thing. Heard that was why he left town and why he come back, and why he built his momma that house.”
“I tell you what, it was the fault of that family from … where was they from?”
“Then they should’ve had better sense than to set down here, seeing how they didn’t belong—a monkey could tell that by looking.”
“They shoulda knowed better than be playing with fire. Pack of fools, what they were.”
But I could tell them it wasn’t like that, wasn’t Bo’s fault or mine or his daddy’s or Bobby’s—not even Mort’s: It was the fault of the Blue Hole, and how it made us forget how things were.
Em still goes back there sometimes when he visits from the West Coast. He says the Hole is most always empty, and the rope swing rotted through. He says the rose still grows where we buried Bo’s ashes, and it still blooms every summer, clear through the hottest of months—like it thrives on the heat somehow, or like it’s found some kind of home deep in the woods by a pool of nearly-blue water.
_________
Roses grow too in the Public Garden in Boston, perhaps one reason I come here so often. Maybe I’m drawn here by the way the willows tickle the pond and swan boats come swimming by, and though I could do with a few azaleas and magnolias, I’m real fond of its bridges and fountains and roses, its children digging in dirt, just like I loved to do with my brother. My brother and Jimbo.
I was there this morning. Between meetings at the State House, where I work. I stopped at the Starbucks on Charles for the espresso I take into the Garden for an occasional break from my black pumps. I don’t ordinarily pay much mind to the folks who pass by: All those baby strollers and diaper bags only make me feel ancient, make me wonder if maybe I forgot to ask for Door Number Three on the way to success. So I take my work with me when I go, and rarely look up except to admire the landscaping, especially the roses, and now and then to pet someone’s golden retriever—they’re everywhere here.
But this morning two people stopped just in front of me and caught my attention. They were both dressed in business getup, had to be from some convention down Boylston at the Hynes Center. The woman was nodding at whatever the man was saying, but she was gazing away, absently—like women do when they’re only tolerating a man. I know the look pretty well.
I was admiring the black—nearly blue—of the woman’s thick hair when she turned. Her skin was the color of homemade hot cocoa, and even though she was small in the frame, she held her head high and back stiff, like a queen or a saint or a general—like Joan of Arc maybe. And her deep eyes sent me falling into my past, way back to where the good caught on fire, and the bad started clouding in thick and spinning on up to today.
I don’t swear that it was who I thought it might be. I sat for a long while like a missing person’s ad artist and tried to sketch in my mind the lines and hollows and swells that age likes to add. Still I wouldn’t swear. People change in twenty-five years.
But here’s what I did, sitting there by the Boston Public Garden pond, truly blue, a thousand miles north of the Blue Hole, which wasn’t: I scrawled a note.
I was late for a meeting already. Because of the face and the two dreams crashing head on, or maybe just because I was imagining things, I’d spilled espresso all down my suit, and me with a power-point presentation at ten. So I didn’t stop to talk—and I know better than to speak to strangers in Boston.
So I just handed the woman with the face and the skin and the eyes and the black-licorice hair a note, and then left. It said only this:
Remember the Blue Hole.
It wasn’t a question, or a battle cry either. Just words offered out for the taking.
And I signed it:
Shelby Lenoir
Then I crossed that out and wrote Turtle. Because one summer when I was too hot to think straight, she made me her friend.
And at the last minute, I added just this one more thing:
I’m sorry. So sorry.
Maybe the words, those extra four little ones, couldn’t hold up under the weight of what I wanted to say, didn’t nearly explain about the nights I still saw in my sleep, me standing in the door of the Moulavi house, and not moving. Watching the sky and the lawn and the world turn to fire. And not moving. Watching the white that billowed and whipped through the night, through the black and the red. And me never moving, not until fire shot up into the dark and the roof—and the world—fell in on our heads.
I’m sorry could never tent over all that, but there it was, at least said. For things done and left undone, Emerson would say now—now that he talks liturgy like it was regular English. Lord have mercy.
The slip of paper had my office number on the letterhead, but I’ve been in meetings all day. And somehow, maybe, I’m nervous to check.
Anyway, what are the chances?
Maybe—most likely—I handed the note to a stranger, and she figures she got assaulted this morning by a fool in a nice suit. With coffee stains down the front. And black pumps. And maybe I am one—a fool.
Only a fool would think—and I know this—that maybe the phone might ring sometime today and the voice at the end would say—and use contractions to say it, “It’s all right, Turtle. Turtle, it’s okay.”
_________
Maybe, back at the Hole, we were all fools—our whole mangy pack that caught one summer on fire and watched our world fall out from under
our feet. Fools, dangerous fools.
And maybe Jimbo was right all along: “There’s times,” he once said, “a fool’s a fine thing, an almighty fine thing to be.”
… a little more …
When a delightful concert comes to an end,
the orchestra might offer an encore.
When a fine meal comes to an end,
it’s always nice to savor a bit of dessert.
When a great story comes to an end,
we think you may want to linger.
And so, we offer ...
AfterWords—just a little something more after you
have finished a David C. Cook novel.
We invite you to stay awhile in the story.
Thanks for reading!
Turn the page for ...
• Reader’s Guide
• A Conversaion with Joy Jordan-Lake
• Resources
Reader’s Guide
1. Discuss the scene in which Turtle urges Emerson to stop and pick up the new girl. Turtle quickly feels a hint of regret over her decision, though she couldn’t have predicted what it would eventually lead to. Why do you think she feels that twinge of regret so immediately? Can you recall any moments in your life which felt equally pivotal, and how did you react? What was the outcome?
2. Joy Jordan-Lake created a diverse and most memorable cast of characters. Who do you relate to most, and why?
3. Farsanna says, “In America, it is everywhere the land of opportunity, my father says … ‘It is the ... end ... of the rainbow.’” Farsanna’s journey in this novel reminds her and the Pack again and again about this rainbow. Discuss how this statement could take on different meanings for each character, and discuss whether you believe there was any rainbow to be found on Pisgah Ridge.
4. How did you react to the scene in Reverend Riggs’ church? What do you think is the appropriate reaction for faith-based communities in the face of similar situations, which may have nothing to do with race or ethnicity at all, but instead with differences of all kinds?
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