Years ago, though, long before DuPont Corporation, before white pines were planted and harvested to produce paper for Champion International, before water-powered sawmills at Corn Mill Shoals and Bridal Veil Falls in the 1900s, before Micajah, patriarch of the Thomas clan, was beaten and blinded by Union soldiers during the Civil War, Native Americans lived here. Today, centuries-old petroglyphs still speak to their presence.
David and I both knew that you should never, ever climb a waterfall. Nonetheless, we jumped over the creek that ran along the yard and headed straight up, over the moss-covered rocks. David went first, and I followed his lead, stepping wherever he stepped. The falls were staggered with ledges created by the rocks. One pool of water led to another drop-off and so on, and the moss overlying the rocks was surprisingly thick and firm, a brilliant emerald-green carpet. At one particularly steep ledge, David turned to take my hand to give me a lift.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
He waited while I found a foothold, grabbed a nearby limb, and heaved myself up. When we were finally at the top, we stood on a rock next to the falls to catch our breaths. From there, we could see the tin roof, the smoke coming from the chimney, and Eli waving from the driveway. We hollered and waved back.
Instead of climbing back down the waterfall, David and I bushwhacked our way back down the mountainside, through the rhododendron thickets. Inside the thickets, it was cool and dark. Leaves whacked my face as I grabbed at branches to slow my progression down the hill. The air was sharp and pungent, filled with the scents of mud and moss and rotting leaves. Finally, I gave up trying to be graceful. I sat and scooted down the mountain. When I reached the bottom, my pants were covered in dirt and mud, my palms bleeding.
I took off my shoes and whacked them against the edge of the porch while David went inside. He returned with two towels and two beers and handed me one of each.
“Why don’t you skip book club?” he said. “I’ll heat the leftover soup. We can listen to some music and watch the sunset.”
David’s shirt was filthy. Bits of leaves clung to his hair. His hands were cracked and calloused. And as I took in all this evidence of…what? His love? His recklessness? His never-ending optimism? I almost said yes. Almost.
Part of me wanted to pretend none of this had happened—the foreclosure, the taxes, the borrowed money. The rest of me was deeply angry. I had been excluded from specific knowledge about our finances and from decisions about how our money was spent. Perhaps David had been trying to protect me, to save me from the stress and worry he experienced daily, but in the end, it had all come to this, and though I truly only had myself to blame—for walking around with my head in the sand, for expecting him to handle our finances on his own as if I were from another generation, another time in history—my self-pity got the best of me, kept me from moving forward or backward or around. I was both literally and figuratively trapped here in this hollow, and it would be a long time before I could see how much of this mess was of my own making, the result of my unwillingness to assert myself and make the hard choices that would have made our lives better. I wanted to move forward, but I couldn’t.
“I can’t.” I said.
David held my gaze for a moment. I looked away. Then I put the unfinished beer down on the picnic table, climbed into my car, and drove away.
• • •
Finally, at the first of September, Eli walked into the kitchen at the Cape Cod house and announced he would be staying at the cabin from then on. The cabin was closer to school and would cut his driving time by twenty minutes. Perhaps he also dreaded the move and just wanted to get it over with, to put it behind him. So my final step toward moving in was not so much a decision as it was the result of indecision. I needed someone to tell me what to do, even if that someone was my eighteen-year-old son, so I left with him, my toothbrush and pillow wedged in the front seat between us.
For the next few months, the three of us—David, Eli, and I—walked gingerly through our new lives. When the shower leaked through the ceiling and into the toaster downstairs, we simply dried out the toaster. When a fuse blew whenever we tried to microwave a cup of coffee, David quietly replaced it. When the spring clogged due to heavy rains, he hiked to the top of the mountain and cleared the obstruction from the pipe that siphoned water from the creek. And on hot, muggy days when we still had to have a fire in the boiler to heat our water, we sweated profusely, as if it were a cleansing ritual. Thanksgiving passed, then Christmas, and we did not yet have all of our things from the old house. We were still two months away from the official foreclosure date, and we figured we had plenty of time. The longer we were at the cabin, the less we liked to think of the lives we had left behind. So we kept putting off the final move. And then one day in January, as I was driving home from visiting my brother in Florida, I got a call from David.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he said.
But of course, I would have believed anything at this point.
“I stopped by the old house to get some things, and the locks have all been changed.”
I was near the Green River Bridge at the foot of Saluda Mountain, almost home. Home, I thought. What a strange and complicated word.
“Are you there?” David asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I finally said.
“All the outside lights are on too, so they’ve had the power turned back on.”
We hadn’t actually meant to turn off the power. We had just forgotten to pay the bill—one of the many things we lost track of during those months when we lived in a daze, going through the motions of our lives like we were actors in someone else’s sad drama.
“I looked in the windows, and the house looks empty,” David said. “But the garage is full. I think they’ve moved all our stuff out there.”
“Call Tom,” I said.
Tom was our lawyer. According to Tom, the house still legally belonged to us, and no one had the right to enter without our permission. We could get in however we wanted, he said. We could call the sheriff’s department and ask for access. We could hire a locksmith to break the new locks. Or we could just smash a window and break in.
David and I discussed all of those options. A locksmith would cost money, which we clearly did not have. And any interaction with the sheriff’s department was to be avoided, just as a general rule. That left option three. So the night after I got home, a frigid January night, I rode shotgun with a sledgehammer wedged between my knees while David drove the getaway car, the van that now had 250,000 miles on it.
“Are you sure we won’t get arrested?” I asked David.
“No, I’m not sure,” he said.
“What if one of the neighbors calls the police?”
“We’ll just have to be fast.”
We passed cow pastures and empty cornfields, then wound along the French Broad River. The sky was vast and clear, the moon a tiny sliver. When we had lived here, I used to stand outside at night, searching for the Big Dipper and listening to the coyotes calling in the distance. Now, as we neared the house, it looked like a runway. Every exterior light was on, the driveway brilliantly lit.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
David pulled into the drive, then turned off the ignition and reached for the sledgehammer. He got out of the van, and in a couple of moments, I heard several vigorous thwaps, followed by the sound of metal hitting concrete. In a moment, the garage doors slid open.
“We’re in,” David called to me. “Come on!”
I put on a knit cap and gloves and got out of the van. In the garage doorway, I paused. Here was every single thing we had left in the house—televisions, a sofa, a chair, tables, books, and ten or twelve giant trash bags. I opened one of the bags and recognized the contents of a kitchen drawer. I moved on to the next bag, then the next, opening each and sifting through our possessions—cards, letters, drafts of stori
es I had written, medicines, cosmetics, photographs.
“Look,” David said, holding up a toilet wand. “They’ve bagged up everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down. I think they had a firm do this.”
Just then, a car drove past. It slowed, then turned and came back, pausing at the end of the drive before finally moving on.
“Let’s just get this loaded up,” David said.
I began filling the van seats with boxes while David heaved trash bags into the hatch. Finally, we had loaded everything we wanted except for one bag. I opened it, and there on top, wadded into a ball, was the watermelon-colored dress I had worn to both my daughter’s and my son’s high school graduations. I lifted the dress, smoothed the wrinkled fabric, and held it to my face, inhaling the scent of my old life. Outside the open door, katydids chirped, and somewhere in the distance, coyotes howled.
In the backyard, three of our animals were buried—a half-lame corgi mix named Julie, a beautiful, sleek border collie named Luke, and an orange cat my daughter had named Simba, after the hero from The Lion King. Also in the yard were countless Airsoft pellets, the rosebush my parents gave us on our twentieth wedding anniversary, a bullfrog we had dubbed Ernest, a row of towering Leyland cypress trees we had planted when they were saplings, a white lily a dark-eyed girl had given my older son on prom night.
“Are you ready?” David asked me.
He stood in the doorway. His blue jeans were covered in dust and dirt, and from a hole in his down vest, tiny feathers spilled onto the garage floor. He was perfectly still, a snapshot of a husband. It was something he did a lot now, silently watching me, weighing how close I was to hysteria, to running into the night and never turning back. He was sorry, I knew—sorry for me, sorry for our kids, sorry for the things he could have done differently and for the things he couldn’t have done differently, sorry for all of it. And I was sorry too—sorry that I had not been better, sorry that I could not be better now.
Of course, I knew there were many worse things than foreclosure. There were deaths and accidents and illnesses, people who, by no fault of their own, had horrific things happen to them, people who would have loved for their biggest problem to be that their house was being taken away. There were also men who would have given up and walked away long ago, who would not be standing in the doorway right now, waiting. No, I wasn’t ready, but clearly it was time to get ready. So I nodded.
“Good,” my husband said. “Let’s go.”
We headed out to the car with the last of our belongings, and as we wound along the river on our way back to the cabin, I checked and rechecked the rearview mirror to see if we were being followed. Maybe the neighbors had called Jeff and Denise. Maybe they had called the police. When we finally turned down the gravel road that led to the cabin, I rolled down my window and took huge, gasping gulps of air.
It was over, this part. Done. In a few months, our former home would be sold at auction to the highest bidder, everything we could have done and should have done a matter of court record. Then we could begin our new lives in earnest. And gradually, very gradually, I would begin to see that this was not so much an ending as a beginning, that my life was not so much a line as one intricate loop, winding back, back, back through time and then spiraling rapidly forward, the past, the present, and the future, the person I was and the person I had yet to become, all tangled into one.
Chapter Six
David and I were just beginning to settle into our new lives at the cabin when my grandfather’s youngest brother, Bill, died. Three months later, my grandmother’s closest sister, Beatrice, died. Ten days after that, on the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, my grandmother died. A few months later, my grandmother’s only living sister died—an entire generation of my family gone.
I had been very close to both Bill and my grandmother, and the close proximity of their deaths left me reeling, unmoored. To make matters even harder, in a frenzy of grief, my parents and aunt and uncle had begun cleaning out my grandmother’s home immediately after her death—as if death could be swept away, piled neatly into clean trash bags and dropped off at Goodwill or bargained away in a yard sale. This was the house my mother had grown up in, the place I had always considered my second home. Still, the day after my grandmother’s funeral, I helped my mother dismantle the kitchen, a task we could have completed blindfolded if someone had asked us to.
Sweat poured from my neck and onto my shirt while my mother and I sorted through over sixty years of plates and glasses and pots and pans. We drank tall glasses of iced tea sweetened with thyme syrup, and every now and then, my mother paused, a coffee mug or cast iron skillet poised above a box. Then she set the object on the table and walked away.
That afternoon, I found her standing at the kitchen sink by the window to the backyard. The bird feeder was empty, but it was a habit bred from years of watching cardinals and robins and gold finches vying with squirrels for seeds. I followed her gaze to the back field where a fat bunny languidly nibbled a patch of clover. When she spoke, her voice was a trembling whisper.
“I am really going to miss watching the bunnies,” she said.
That day, I loaded almost everything my grandparents had owned into my van. I brought home my grandmother’s soft, white hairbrush, her cantaloupe-colored bathrobe, her Tupperware and cast iron skillets, her china cabinet, a dressing table filled with bobby pins and curlers and packs of zinnia seeds. I brought my grandfather’s saddle, his soft, flannel shirts, a half-drunk bottle of Jacquin’s Rock and Rye.
Within days, my grandmother’s cast iron cornbread mold hung on my kitchen wall. Her old washboard was propped on the porch window ledge. The quilts my great-grandmother had made by hand were on our beds. Sometimes, I felt comforted by the presence of those remnants of my grandparents’ lives. Other times, I felt them pressing in on me—one thick, heavy weight. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t go forward. And in the midst of all this, Eli graduated from high school. In a few short weeks, he would leave for art school a few hours away, and though I was thrilled for him, here was yet another change, my last child leaving home.
Then one morning late in the summer, I was sitting at my desk on the second floor of the cabin when I heard Reba barking furiously. Sleek and stealthy, Reba was as close as a dog could get to being a coyote without actually being one. We had rescued her eight years before, when she was just a couple of months old, from a smokehouse in rural Madison County, and she never had become quite as tame as our other dogs. David and I were in Reba’s pack, and with us, she was a gentle and loving companion. She carried box turtles down the hill in her mouth and set them, softly, gingerly, at our feet. She rode shotgun in David’s truck when he went to the bank or grocery store.
However, despite our attempts to socialize her, she did not like other dogs. Once, she so viciously attacked our beagle mix, Kate, that years later, Kate still had a memento of that afternoon, a V-shaped cut in her left ear. And on more than one occasion, she and Hester had scuffled over access to the front door. So to keep the confrontations to a minimum, the five dogs rotated times outdoors. Reba was now downstairs, in our great room, because our dachshund, Pretzel, was outside.
At first, I wasn’t overly concerned. Reba was David’s constant companion, and she often barked to go out when he was outside working. But she was going to have to wait. When the commotion escalated, however, a series of frantic, high-pitched yelps, I headed downstairs. Even then, I still didn’t perceive what I should have perceived, that this was an unusual bark. A warning bark.
“Reba!” I yelled, running down the stairs. “Shut up!”
At the foot of the stairs, I stopped. Instead of barking at the door to go out, Reba faced my grandmother’s china cabinet in the corner of the great room. Her hair stood on end, and she repeatedly lunged at the base. A mouse, I thought. Another fucking mouse. And that was when I saw it. Long and lithe and unmistakably copper-colo
red, it weaved in and out of the china cabinet legs. For a moment, I could not move. I could not breathe. And then I threw open the front door and ran down the driveway, mud splattering the backs of my calves. Pretzel sprinted beside me, his long, taut body propelled on flailing legs.
“David!” I screamed. “David! There’s a fucking snake in the house!”
David was hoeing weeds in the far field. He wore a large straw hat, and he stopped and smiled a little—as if to say, how strange and yet absolutely believable is that? Then he headed up the drive, hoe in hand. I stood outside in the driveway and covered my ears with my hands while David ran inside. Moments later, he came outside carrying a bucket, which he set on a far corner of the patio.
“You can come back in now,” he said.
The dogs were quiet. I was quiet.
“It’s a copperhead,” I said finally.
“Are you sure?” David asked.
I was sure. I had seen the flat, pointed head, the telltale diamond pattern on its thick, copper back. Copperheads were one of two kinds of venomous snakes in our area. They were not as deadly as rattlesnakes, but a single bite would certainly send you to the hospital. Copperheads, I learned later, were attracted to rocks and water, two things we had in great supply. Our dogs could have been bitten. We could have been bitten. And worst of all, there could be more.
In the days that followed, I compulsively inspected every surface of the house—kitchen drawers, bathroom cabinets, sofa cushions, the boxes of my grandmother’s china, stacks of towels, under my bed, and under the covers. At night, I slept with a light on, our cat stretched across my chest. I was anxious and skittish, constantly on a state of high alert—code red.
On those nights, everything piled into one heap in my mind: Our tax problems. The foreclosure of our home. Bill’s death. My grandmother’s death. My grandmother’s empty house. My kids leaving home. The copperhead. Each event had jolted my center, severed my sense of stability and security. Each thing collapsed into the other, mingling, overlapping, entwining, until I was unable to discern the greater trauma. Too much had happened at once. I was not safe.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 7