Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Dusk is in its slow dropping. I look back down at Mama’s headstone, which is cracked down the middle through her name. Elspeth Fuller, Loving Mother. Cara Lynn’s marker is whole, with the three little words, Angel Called Home, forced to hold all the grief me and Mama felt after we lost her. I think of Daddy, but he’s a vague imprint in my past. It has never bothered me much that we buried him with his own parents down in Atlanta, but I did worry for Mama’s spirit when I chose to have her put here with Cara Lynn instead of next to him.

  It’s hard to breathe. I realize I want to make a particular confession, after all this time, but I can’t. “I’ll come back on Sunday, my girls,” I say, keeping an eye on the gaps between scabby pine trunks. “I’m sorry I brought all this to your rest.” I walk back down the hill, but I can tell I’m only traveling toward the past, not away from it.

  —

  “God doesn’t see color, children,” was how Sister Heaven would always start. This was what passed for recess in that nameless school. “But another”—here she would pause, as if in condemnation of that unknown other— “another believed you must be God’s color to be His child. So He sent me here. He was the Author, mine and yours, and He begins to eat His legacy from hunger, even dead as He’s been these sixteen years.” You could hear all those capital letters in her voice every time. And the distaste.

  But she always went on. It was surely a voice of some music, Sister Heaven’s, coming out of a vessel so small half us kids could look her in the eyes, though we rarely did. We feared eyes. Her dress swallowed her up into a shapeless white cylinder, with only the ugly dyed orange of her hair and the verdigris of her spider veins to bring a shock of color. She’d sometimes call us boys Adam, and say that Adam had been as dark as we were until he got rewritten.

  We never knew for sure where she came from, if she was born out of some myth or the Appalachians themselves. But there was one day we didn’t have to crawl—she told us her birth church was named the Hands of Providence, but talked abstractly about the Sisters of Eden forming in secret to do what best suited God, in spite of being bound by the Hands’ written lore. For this fabled Author wanted to know what our God could see, and as the man lived on through his work and his influence, so did that great Blindness.

  At two most afternoons she’d have us close our arithmetic books. It was the subject that made our minds most open to God’s grace, she told us, for He had laid the universe out on lines like a web. Everything was a ratio and accounted for, and like all lines, they would one day converge upon a point of glory. This only puzzled us. Cara Lynn asked her, “Then how many arms does God have?” Sister Heaven stared at her a long time—Cara Lynn was her favorite—before answering with a sweet smile, “More than a thousand spiders, if that’s your meaning, dear.”

  We all knew what came next. Sister Heaven would turn away as we passed the tub of greasepaint around, and once our faces were pasted in white she’d roll her standing mirror off to the side, exposing the ragged hole in the wall. One by one she’d send the seven of us crawling through and on a downward slope, the rough walls of the tunnel scraping against the older among us, Samuel and Glenda, who were twelve and thirteen. Thinking on it now, I can’t say how long we’d crawl. It feels like it was minutes. It feels like it was much longer.

  Then the church yawning before us, its mouth always open in its sleep. Then cool air full of dust rain in the meager shafts of light. Our eyes full of learning, our mouths full of hymns. All of it leading into a confused worship.

  —

  There’s nothing back at the trailer but dirty laundry and my poor garden withering in the heat. A pile of thoughts I’ll have to sit through. So I don’t turn off on 52 but keep on into town. I pass the courthouse and the jail and through our historic little corridor of pillared homes and a nostalgia that’s always been faded, trying not to think about who might’ve hanged from the limbs of these gorgeous oaks when they weren’t much more than saplings. Feet twitching above ground that was still just about damp with Cherokee blood. When a boy’s made to paint his face white, the man he ends up as doesn’t much like to dwell on unpleasantness. I’ve earned that much, I tell myself. I hope it’s true.

  Ellijay might never crack two thousand people, but the world’s touched it even so. The Appalachians cast their shadows over pastures and fields lined like notebook paper. They cast their shadows over the dealership selling the tractors that draw those lines. Here, on the other side of my life, I could tell Sister Heaven that all lines don’t meet in a point, or glory, but I never knew where she was buried, and I couldn’t visit her if I did.

  A piece of larger America does huddle here, like lint in a pocket. We got a Starbucks and an outlet mall. Two antique stores on Main Street. A lawyer for when things fall apart. We keep getting by.

  The last patina of sun coats everything in a peculiar yellow. It’s thicker each day. Even the air in the truck with me is stained, and my arms look jaundiced. Two men pushing a wheelbarrow stop and stare as I pass, their heads on slow swivels tracking me, their brows darkened. I picture them in white hoods, can’t stop myself from doing it, even though it’s been an age since I saw that kind of thing. It strikes me that the town’s emptying of folks of late, and I realize again how different things have felt all summer. Something more than just a white-skied drought. I’ve been slow to catch up to the knowledge, but now I’m seeing it in the seams of the town.

  It’s awful to think the shootings at that church up in Charleston, or the new president all the whites sicced on us, didn’t feel as unsettling as this, not even when it seemed every other house here had a Confederate flag suddenly appear in its yard. Like those banners had been folded out of shame in closets all those years and now there was some obscene pride to be had. The country didn’t so much step back into a darker time as shine a light on where we still were.

  Shameful, yes, but the few black folks here have always kept our heads down. It’s an easy thing to do, because outnumbered as we are, isolated as we are, it’s not like we can keep a finger on the pulse of things. Even my own experience has found a way to pass under the bridge, in its way. People here don’t give any trouble nowadays, even the backwards ones. I keep to myself, lingering on in this lily-white town, and some would say rightly it’s because my mother and sister are buried here, while the rest don’t notice me at all. It’s where I belong, putting all the old maids to shame. I make do with what I sold Daddy’s farm for back in ’87. There’s so little to need.

  I stop the truck by the little square of land where in 1952 the new Negro school was opened. I remember Mama crying one night, on account of there was supposed to be plumbing in the new school, but what they’d given us was just a shack with the white children’s old desks. The place didn’t even have a name. Cara Lynn had told her it was all right, there were only seven of us kids to go to it, and Mama had cried harder at that.

  After the fire me and Cara Lynn didn’t go back to school. Mama told me a year or two after about the Supreme Court’s decision, a right turn on an ugly road, but this little corner’s where my education ended, excepting for Mama’s home teaching.

  It’s a Citgo station now, has been a fair number of years. Before that it was other things that met passing fancies. I’m half-mad for sitting here, listening to memories that have long been quiet, stirring them like a stick digging in a riverbed. If someone’s built a new church, let it rot out in the trees.

  Even so, this place has got my bones humming, and I fear my mind’s close to opening to it all—what happened when Sister Heaven would call on me to take my turn in the church, and Cara Lynn after, and the peephole into God’s Eye. That this last feels like the worst tells me all I need to know about the sweetness of forgetting.

  Night has come full now. Three months the rim of sky has been without stars.

  —

  Sleep’s far off, tired as I am. The lamp pooling its light around my chair, Daddy’s Bible in my lap, dust from its cover on my fingertips.r />
  It’s been a day that calls for ghosts, so I don’t know if I’m surprised there’s something in the trailer with me. It doesn’t want to be seen, or else it doesn’t want me to know I’m imagining it. It stands at the edge of my senses, watching, as it hangs elsewhere in a place whose reach I cannot imagine, spooling out its revelations at me. The air thick with hunger. I hear a small and furious scratching in the air, as of pen on paper, and think of what Sister Heaven said about Authorship.

  I don’t even have to close my eyes now to see me and Cara Lynn in that church. Crawling like grubs beneath the high earthen ceiling with light leaking through pinholes. The pale walls covered in chalk and crayon, clotted from sap on the pine boards—drawings slowly eating the room, of symbols and deaths and always the mountains leering down at everything. I see them clear as a lens: mountains reaching down from the sky to clasp their earth-rooted kin, great segmented worms twining in the gaps; that green forest with a white cross rising like a periscope; a building in orange flame, a long-armed white figure in its center, two X-ed eyes and gaping mouth. It seems now that this last was where I first got the idea to burn down the schoolhouse, and a proud shame flushes my skin. I let the doing of it come back to me—the rush of the flames over cheap timber, Sister Heaven’s first screams, my realization that she was inside the little building. I even smile a little—it’s how I kept Cara Lynn away from all that, for a time, at least.

  Sometimes there were tall, narrow men there in the church, always back in the corners, watchful. They wore white hoods most of us were too young to recognize. Those who were older surely thought of crosses soaked in kerosene and driven into dying lawns.

  But we learned not to see these figures, like our folks learned. Our senses were drawn to that wet sound at our backs, lips smacking, a throat expanding and swallowing, and us knowing our turn wasn’t long now. I’d watch my sister prepare to put God into the circle she’d drawn, whispering her ideas but scared to act on any of them. A long satisfied sigh behind me, then my name spoken, “Pearson,” and in my mind even now I am turning.

  Sister Heaven’s mouth would be slicked wet, that blind white dress open down to her belly, exposing her heavy, swollen breasts smeared with white paint around the nipples. I knew even as a young boy how strange such immense things were on such a small frame. But I’d go to her, whimpering, lower myself to my knees. She’d lick the top of my head as I suckled, as Cara Lynn kept her promise and didn’t watch. The sandpaper of her tongue on my hair, a stream of words like “God blesses they who see, He changes them, He protects them from this, He raises them from the dead come Judgment Day” hot against my scalp, and when it was all done she’d line us up single-file. To look through the hole cut into the back of the church.

  But what we saw through that second hole is still, mercifully, ill-defined. My inscrutable visitor has moved closer to my chair, a distant heat leaning over my lap, and from nowhere three drips of white paint patter onto my leg. The lamp goes out and I sit in the dark. I wait a long time but it doesn’t happen yet.

  —

  My eyes burn with tiredness all morning. There’s a box of chalk waiting on a cinderblock outside the trailer and I stand and look at it. Look out at the stunted woods around my half-acre, the brome grass thigh-high along the tree line. Look at the flat milk sky. Finally pull out a white stick of chalk and draw it across my forehead, a sick, heaving lurch in my stomach.

  It’s already close to ninety out, but I weed my garden and break off the squash leaves that have clusters of eggs underneath. I sweat myself through and imagine Mama standing by the road, telling me to get on inside and quit being a fool. I compromise, drag a ratty lawn chair into the shade of my stoop awning and find something to think about other than steeples.

  But I can’t sit still. I go in and I come out, busying myself with chores that don’t need doing. Past noon, I’m resting in the chair again when I become aware of something crawling through the brome toward the trailer. Stalks like old wheat shake in the windless morning. They twitch in a second place farther back.

  And someone’s standing just inside the curve of woods, screened by the brush of tree limbs and kudzu. I can’t even tell if it’s dark or pale. After a while the figure fades back, and the weeds start bending in the opposite direction, a quick tide toward the trees.

  I think of the other schoolchildren, all dead or gone or both. Whatever congregation this new church has gathered in its forest, I’m the only one left of Sister Heaven’s pupils. But why they’d want anything to do with us is lost in a long-ago fog, if I ever knew. Memory itself is something like a cataract. It can be a blessed clouding.

  The day winds down, pearly streaks of sun tangling in the vegetation. I can’t remember the last true sunset. I get Daddy’s Bible out and sit in the recliner, but like last last night I don’t open it, just trail my fingers across the pebbled burgundy cowhide.

  And I wait some more. That scratching, writing sound comes again, from the other chair near the door. The small noise carries on and there must be so many words. There’s the sense of an appointment I must keep, a tension in the air like a bell that knows it will be struck, but for a while longer is empty of resonance. I hope someone will see to it I’m buried with my girls.

  —

  I wake in a pinkish-gray hue to find two women lying with me, grinning and spooning each other. For a moment all I can think is that I fell asleep in the chair, not the bed. My mind won’t let me move past that. The women are ancient and naked and loose-skinned, eyes as wide as their smiling mouths, and though I recognize Mama and Cara Lynn, I can’t tell which is which. They’ve both withered to the same age, a lifetime past their deaths into a strange sisterhood. But what steals my voice is that they’ve turned white in the grave. There’s even freckles dusting their arms, speckling their noses. Dirty red hair tangles and hangs from their skulls, no hair they ever could have grown.

  But it’s them, and my heart clenches with familiarity. I’m sure it will give out but it fights to catch its rhythm as the two sagging things leer and slide against each other on top of the sheets. The skin of their bodies folds together and apart. I can’t seem to reconcile their sameness. Cara Lynn was my twin but I see myself so strongly in both of them, as if they’ve taken my face and shared its negative between them.

  Still I can say nothing. The grins fade but their mouths retain the shapes, and I am struck by their eyes. I see their knowledge, that I was the one who snuck down to town that evening and set the schoolhouse on fire. How I hid in the trees out back and watched the great orange light swell and recede in the dark. I never dared breathe a word of it to Cara Lynn.

  They each break the silence of my childish shame with the same words. “His church above the earth, His children in the earth,” but somehow their voices don’t overlap, it’s like they’re speaking parts of each sound in turn that all fall together in puzzle pieces. “His blindness falls away.”

  My voice, lost for a final moment, climbing up my throat. I can only rejoice, sickly in the face of such horror, for I have missed them so much.

  “He blesses—” Mama says.

  “Those—” Cara Lynn says.

  “Ready—”

  “Who see—”

  “The sky, Pearson—”

  The end of it’s a clot of syllables, and their tongues follow this rush of words, bloodless tubes rich with dirt, and at last I shrink away. “Leave me be!” My voice tears at my throat. “You’re not them!” I let myself fall off the mattress, my hip shrieking in pain.

  The women leap from the bed and half-run from the room, ungainly things loping along the floor. My heart feels like a pine knot in a fire, and I’ve got no choice but to sit on the bed and let it decide if it wants to burst or keep on.

  The pink has given way to a white tinged with orange when I make my way outside. Not one is a true color. It’s all filtered through that bland nothing. The box of chalk has been scattered in the grass over by my garden, and the way the cu
cumbers and squash sag makes me bend over and lose the corn flakes I forced myself to eat last night in a daze, still white with milk, which gets me retching again. How did I get milk? Why in hell did I drink it? I could never bear to so much as look at it, and it’s worse now that I remember why.

  When the trembling’s gone I get to my feet, unsteady, and it’s plain there’s nothing to do but drive out to the feet of the mountains that have wallpapered my life. The whole of Ellijay is held in a vacuum, that yellowing tint starting to stain everything again. The road snakes in a gradual rise until I crest First Mountain, the steeple still rising out of the treetops, the sentinel in the green sea. I cry a while, and the crying shocks me nearly more than everything else, because I realize I haven’t done it since Mama died. That’s more years than many folks get to live, and I wonder if it has a meaning, that I never got close to anyone again. That I kept my head down this whole long half a century.

  But there are things to see to. I roll down the hill and turn into the graveyard’s lot, get out and hobble my way up another rise. Through the rows of headstones to the laurel oak. A circle has been burned around each of their graves, and within those rings the ground has sunken in a foot or more deep.

  “Oh what have they done to you?” I groan like something grievously wounded, and the tears come again, all useless salt and heat in the rust of my old eyes. I can’t even guess who “they” could be—I never met this God around whose Eye our lives briefly revolved, and Sister Heaven died in my fire. Mama told me there was a funeral, though she wouldn’t let us go, even when Cara Lynn broke my heart by wanting to.

  But if God has built His church—I picture Mama and Cara Lynn inside it, worming across its floor. I look up and ask for a sign. For the drought to break and a wall of rain to come crashing down. I will be seventy-two years old come October, but I cannot allow my girls to be fouled like this, by God or by whatever was blaspheming as them in my bed.