by Glenn Taylor
Lizzie had forgotten what they were talking about. She dabbed her eyes with the cuff of her blouse and looked at him. “Thought about what?”
He stared out the windshield. The wiper blade was torn. It dragged a mud-colored smudge back and forth across the glass. “About all of this we’re doin.” He thought before continuing. “I don’t have no answers, Lizzie.” He squinted. “I just want out of the West End.”
Ledford had sold the house to Mr. Ballard from the filling station down the street. He was a good man, and he needed a second home. He had four boys, the youngest fourteen and the oldest twenty-two, all of them Golden Gloves contenders.
Mack thought about the house, the spot in the yard where the cross had burned. He thought about the job at Mann Glass. He told Lizzie, “I just want out of the factory and onto the land, and I ain’t lookin to spend my own nickels to do it.” They turned and went under the via-duct. “Ledford is putting up the nickels,” Mack said, “and he and Rachel got a mite more than two to rub together.”
APRIL 1949
LEDFORD HAD QUIT READING the newspaper. It gave him a stomachache, reading words like 38th Parallel. When a paper rode in with a lumber delivery, Ledford would toss it on the pile. He had a furnace stack to build.
He was hand-laying the stack in fieldstones he collected walking the property with a wheelbarrow. Around his growing chimney were wall studs and roof trusses, the bones of an unnamed marble company.
It was a Friday evening. April Fool’s Day. Ledford stood in front of the empty-walled factory and sipped his coffee. He walked inside, lifted the corner of a tarp on the floor, and threw the evening edition underneath, next to all the other papers he’d been saving.
His wheelbarrow was in the back, where he’d left it, half full of stones. Next to the furnace, under another tarp, sat the old marble machine he’d bought from Mr. King. Mack’s brother Herb was reshaping the rollers on a lathe, and Mack was working on the cams and shears himself.
Ledford finished his coffee and set the cup on the furnace bricks. He put his hand to them. Cold. He imagined them hot, a fire inside. He imagined that liquid glass running, orange as the sun.
For two weeks, the electric, water, and gas men had been on the property hooking the whole place in. Their handiwork was everywhere. Copper tubes and conduit stuck up from the ground like organ pipes. There was a hole in the ground where the natural gas line would come in to fuel the furnace. Ledford bent to the hole. He stared into it. He cocked his head and listened to its hollow call.
Across the Cut, Don Staples stood under a tree, planing wood he’d laid across two sawhorses. He’d retired from Marshall and moved out to Marrowbone in August. He was building a chapel at the clearing by the creek.
Rachel walked over to Staples with a canteen of cold water. “It’s quittin time,” she said.
He smiled. “Particularly for old-timers.”
Rachel assured him that he was a spring chicken. He sat on a saw-horse and split open his pouch of pipe tobacco. The smell caused Rachel to lurch. Smells were getting to her of late.
She’d gone to the doctor on Monday. She was pregnant again.
Mack and Lizzie came over and sat on the Ledford porch at sundown. The air was strange with the feeling of April Fool’s. Ledford wore a look of contentment on his face. He watched the children where they congregated at the roots of a tree. He opened his mouth and said, “Rachel’s pregnant.”
No one said a word at first. “You pullin my leg, Ledford?” Mack said.
Ledford assured him it wasn’t a joke. He shook his head and smiled. “Hell, all I got to do is shake it at her.”
Both men laughed out loud.
Lizzie smiled, but it wasn’t genuine. Though they’d become friends, she couldn’t look at Rachel then. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why some were so blessed with children while others were not.
Rachel smacked Ledford on the arm. She smiled, but hers was as false as Lizzie’s. A palpable guilt weighed on her for the way Ledford had told them, and she wished Lizzie would look at her. Rachel understood why she couldn’t. She poured herself more tea and the ice in her glass cracked and settled. The sound made her stomach lurch again. Her mouth began to water. This pregnancy was different from how the others had been.
In the front yard, Harold chased Mary in a figure eight between two maple trees. When he caught her, he tickled her armpits, and she laughed so hard she peed herself a little. Willy rumbled over from where he’d been kicking a ball against the house. At a year and a half, his gait was not unlike a drunk man’s, knock-kneed and zigzag. He came to his sister’s rescue. Harold allowed the little ones to pin him to the ground, no longer warm from the day’s sun. “Help,” Harold hollered, and the adults on the porch watched with one eye while they talked.
Downstream, Staples and Herchel were thirty feet up, on all fours on the roof of the chapel. They’d worked past quitting time once again, and the chapel was nearly finished, towering on its stilts. Dimple and Wimpy had suggested they build it up high off the ground. They’d seen what floodwater could do to the Cut, and the chapel’s location put it square in the path. Every other dwelling was built back from the creek, but Staples had envisioned his place of worship, and none could argue it. Already, a spring rain had come, and already, the stilts wore the mark of high water.
The two men drove nails into the rafters through sheets of tin and wood. Staples was tired. He bent four spring-heads before driving one home. On the next hammer swing, he came down hard on his thumb. He gasped, dropped the hammer, and brought his thumb to his mouth. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
Herchel smiled. “Goin’ to turn purple,” he said. “Then black.” He drove in the last nail of his line. “Means your pecker’s still a growin.”
“How’s that?” Staples frowned and blew on his thumb.
“When you hit your finger like you done, means your pecker’s still a growin.”
Staples laughed. Made sense to him.
The Bonecutter brothers rode by atop their new horses, tipping their hats as they went. They’d fixed up the crib barn and cut hay and gathered sawdust into head-high piles. The horses were a gift from the Ledfords.
The brothers said “Evening” to all, and when they passed the Ledford place, Dimple clucked his tongue and dug his bootheels in his horse’s side. Wimpy did the same, and they tore off up the hillside through the woods, the horses following a path they’d begun to cut on the brothers’ nightly rides.
The Bonecutters had once kept horses, long ago. Both brothers knew that a horse’s eyesight was unpredictable at night, and they wanted theirs to know the land by touch, even in blackness. It was something their grandmother had taught them to do, and it was something needed now more than ever. Behind the smiles of the new residents of Marrowbone Cut, black and white alike, was a palpable fear. An edginess evident in the eyes. More than once, some unknown hill neighbor had snuck onto the property and shot their guns to the sky. The still, pre-dawn air had carried throated calls of Niggers go home and No niggers in Wayne. The same had been painted in white on the trunks of big old oak trees. These were cowardly acts. None in thirty miles would do such things in the open. All knew the reputation of Dimple and Wimpy Bonecutter. Still, the brothers wondered if any of this was the work of the Maynards. Or maybe some ridgerunner family squatting on the edge of their acreage. The twins had always been happy to let such squatters be, but the recent displays of anger, however gutless, had put them of a mind to protect. To guard those who’d come to their land. It was a role they relished. It made them feel young again. High up on a horse, the brothers felt as strong as they had in the old days.
Dimple’s horse was a big buckskin gelding named Silver, like the Lone Ranger’s. Wimpy’s was a brown-and-white paint horse named Boo, shorter-legged than Silver and wider around the middle. She was a moody mare, and Wimpy’s balance wasn’t what it had been as a younger man.
As they disappeared into the woods, the sun droppe
d behind the hills and the children were called in to their homes.
After Mary and Willy were asleep, Ledford set the phonograph needle to a record he’d borrowed from Mack. It was Mahalia Jackson. Her voice filled the ten-by-twelve space they’d designated as dining room. Boxes were stacked on the big cherry table from Rachel’s girlhood home. They were full of cullet samples, broken glass from three different factories. Rachel stood over a box of red glass, her fingertips at their edges, her mind on her own mother. Ledford took her hand and led her to an open spot of floor by the stairs.
They danced. Mahalia sang, Going home one day and tell my story, I’ve been coming over hills and mountains.
It didn’t feel right to Rachel.
Ledford could feel it in her arms around his neck, the way they hung there, limp as wash on a line. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“I heard this playing at Mack’s. How about that voice?” He kissed her forehead. “Wait here,” he said.
She had an unexplainable urge to cry, but didn’t. She stood alone by the stairs. She looked at the front door of their new home. It had been hung crooked and stuck every time you tried to shut it. From the dining room, the needle scraped and the music went dead. Then silence, and then the tinkling of piano keys and the soft whir of a clarinet. He’d put on Claude Thornhill’s “Snowfall.”
They swayed together, Ledford pushing his hips against hers, but Rachel never came around. When he asked again what was wrong, she said only that she felt poorly.
“I’m just going to go lie down,” she told him.
After midnight, Rachel awoke to a pain in her stomach. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the light. She pulled up on her nightgown and down on her underwear. Spots of blood, some tiny, some the size of a dime, marked the white cotton.
She sat down on the toilet and cried. She had known it all along in her bones, but still she cried.
For a moment, she wished to God she wasn’t here, in a bathroom that smelled of sawdust in a house with a shallow foundation, on land she’d never known. She wished to be back in her mother’s house on Wiltshire Hill. She wished her mother alive so she’d have someone to talk to.
There was a thump at the bathroom window and a quick, shrill sound. Rachel closed her knees together and gathered the nightgown to her chest. Again, the thump at the window, but this time she was looking. It was a redbird, smashing itself against the glass and chirping an awful call. Again the bird pounded itself to the pane, and again. Then all was quiet.
“Rachel?” Ledford called out. He’d jumped out of bed and pulled his .45 from atop the highboy. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just a bird flying into the window.” She wondered why it was flying around in the middle of the night.
Ledford lay down again. “You all right?” he asked. Since the first neighbor fired a gun and hollered hatred from the woods, such wakings had become customary.
“I’m fine.” She’d wait till morning to tell him about the blood. She’d have to put a pad in overnight, go to see the doctor in town on Monday.
Rachel couldn’t sleep after that. She looked at Ledford, his chest rising and falling, his hand there on top of it, wedding band scratched and dull.
At the back door, she put on his rubber boots and barn coat and went outside. In her hand she carried a flashlight. She walked to the end of the house, just below the bathroom window. She switched on the flashlight. The redbird was not there. She bent for a closer look, thinking he’d crashed to the ground, but there was nothing. Not even a feather.
Then came a flapping up above. Still bent at the knee, Rachel shined the flashlight at the window. The bird had come back. It was perched on the roof’s edge, just above the sill. It looked down at Rachel, cocking its head this way, then that. In the flashlight’s beam, its eye was black and wet like glass. Rachel was still.
She stared at the eye of the redbird and it stared right back at her. Then, it quit its perch and dive-bombed.
The occurrence was too fast for Rachel to move, and it was upon her. She managed to shut her eyes and raise an arm, but the bird’s beak found the split between her ring and middle fingers, and it pierced the skin of her temple.
And then it was gone.
Ledford stumbled from the back door barefoot with his .45 in hand. He trailed a red flutter into the treetops, gun raised and oscillating right to left. He stuck it in his waistband and ran to Rachel. “Are you all right?” he asked. He knelt to her.
She’d rocked onto her backside and was touching gingerly at her wound. She laughed, loud and nervous. “It was a redbird,” she said. “It dive-bombed me.”
Ledford picked up the flashlight and turned her head in his hand. He lit up the small pockmark at her temple. Bluish, leaking a drop of blood. He turned the flashlight on the trees where the red blur had sought refuge. “What in Sam Hill?” he managed.
It was then that he remembered a dream he’d had, though he wasn’t sure when. In it, a cardinal had perched on a fencepost covered in locusts. They awoke and swarmed the cardinal, who did not move. The locusts twitched and shivered and ate and left behind a pile of bones the size of toothpicks.
Back in the kitchen, Ledford stuck a dish towel in the opened top of a peroxide bottle and tended Rachel’s wound. “It’s not anything to worry over,” she kept saying. He resoaked the towel and dabbed nonetheless.
When they’d sat down at the table, he asked, “What were you doin out there?”
Rachel looked at the mantel clock on the back of the range. It was almost two a.m. She looked down at her hands. Dirt had caked under the nails on the left but not the right. “I’ve lost it,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ve lost the baby.”
Ledford stepped around the kitchen table to her. He pulled her to him tight. His hand moved up and down her back by memory.
She did not speak further, nor did she cry. After a minute or two like this, she said, “I’d like a drink of liquor.”
His hand stopped. He could hear the tick of the clock behind him. “All right,” he said. There was a full pint of Ten High in the attic. Ledford had bought it but never cracked the seal. He walked to the stairs.
When he came back with the bottle, he didn’t look at her. He set it on the table and turned, pulled at the cabinet doorknob. It was stuck and only gave when he put muscle to it. He’d hung the magnet latches too close to the hardware. He wasn’t yet accustomed to his new hand drill.
Rachel wished she hadn’t said it. None had spoken a word on his not drinking liquor, and now she’d conjured up what she’d been glad to be rid of. Her hands clasped before the bottle.
When he turned, he held only one coffee mug. It rang sharp against the enamel table top when he set it before her. Their eyes met, and he winked at her. Smiled. He patted the gun in his drawstrung trousers and said, “I’d better go put this thing up. Liable to shoot my pecker off.”
She listened to his bare feet pad the hardwood as he walked away. She broke the seal on the bottle and poured.
Upstairs, Ledford checked on Mary and Willy. He put his ear to their noses and listened to the air going in and out. He cupped his hand to their foreheads to check for fever. The bedroom window was cracked a half inch—he could feel the crisp draw. A screech owl called from someplace way off. The children did not stir. And then, through the cracked window, Ledford heard the unmistakable blow and snort of a horse. It did not originate from far, and if he had to guess, it came from the muzzle of Boo the mare.
ABOVE THE CHAPEL door hung a sign. It was a four-foot length of broken siding, painted white and strung on roofing nails. Staples had found the wood in the scrap pile reserved for campfires, and the heavy-gauge wire had been left at the foot of an electrician’s ladder. He’d fingerpainted on the white sign the words that came to him one day while perched atop the chapel roof, beholding his surroundings, and he’d spoken them on the air.
Land of Canaan Congregational the sign read.
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br /> Staples stood outside the chapel, nodding at Mack and Lizzie and Harold, the last ones to crest the stairs and enter. He scanned the perimeter, as if hoping to spot more potential pew fillers, as if there were folks roaming the wooded Wayne hills on this Palm Sunday morning. He spotted Dimple and Wimpy coming across the holler on their horses. Staples stuck his finger and thumb in his mouth and whistled. They trotted over.
“Why don’t you come on and join us boys?” he asked them.
Dimple coughed and brought up a heavy load, spat it on the ground.
“Nossir,” he said. He let his horse bend to pick at a patch of grass still living amidst all the mud trample.
“Well, if you change your minds, I’m here. Every day.” Staples’ living quarters were in back of the chapel.
“Every day?” Dimple asked.
“Every day.”
“What religion do you preach?” Wimpy asked.
Staples pointed to his sign. “I use the terms loosely,” he said. “This land of yours is as fine as any I’ve come across. And I’ve given our chapel this name of Canaan because, like all of God’s earth, it belongs to each of us who are the offspring of Abraham.” He smiled at the blank stares before him. “And by the offspring of Abraham, of course, I mean everyone.”
“Everyone?” said Wimpy.
“Everyone.” Staples thought for a moment he might have convinced them to come inside. Dimple had cocked his head to have a look. Staples continued. “And the word congregational I use just as loose, for it refers to our independence from all other denominations.” He’d decided to simply go on reciting what he’d practiced for that morning’s sermon. If the two men before him decided to come inside, they could stand to sit through it again. “And, just as important,” he went on, “congregational refers historically to our commitment to the abolition of slavery’s ugly remnants upon this great country.”
They looked at him like he’d spoken in French.
Inside, the church pews shone with lacquer. They were solid white oak, six feet long and twenty inches deep. Plain. Stained to a golden brown. With six against the west wall and six against the east, the little church could seat seventy. On this day, nine were present.