Ashes To Ashes

by Gwen Hunter

  She was so resilient in her youth. The world could move beneath her, quaking and heaving, and she would flex and spring with the motion. I felt my own inflexibility keenly, staring up at her. My world had changed around me twice now. Once with Jack’s death, and again only minutes past, with proof of his infidelity. A betrayal that had left me feeling seared, like a wound cauterized by brutal surgery. I put that thought aside for later consideration, and smiled again.

  "I take it you’ve made a decision not to hide in the barn anymore?" I teased, moving into the bathroom and facing myself in the mirror. I flinched at the sight. I really was a mess, all puffy and red and hollow-eyed. I focused on her reflection over my shoulder, her clean, soft beauty, skin pink and young.

  I took a deep breath. The movement hurt my ribs. I was sore from hours, weeks, of solitary crying. "Miccah’s, huh?" It was Jack’s favorite restaurant, a dark, rough paneled place with uncomfortable booth seats, cobwebbed lighting fixtures, and delectable food. Left to my own choices, I would never have passed through the door again.

  "Yeah. They have a special on shrimp and crab legs." It was my favorite. I used to salivate at just the mention of shrimp and crab. Jas was watching my face in the mirror as she spoke. I was being manipulated.

  Sighing, I turned the shower spray to hot and pulled off my T-shirt, tossed it into the laundry bin. The rest of my clothes followed, clothes I had worn as I looked at photographs of Jack and Robyn. I stepped into the shower, feeling dirty and sweat-slick.

  Jas had only one parent left. On my own I might have hibernated for months, but for Jasmine’s sake, it was time to get on with my life. She might be nearly grown, nearly ready to move ahead with her own life, but for now, Jas needed me. And though she didn’t know it, she needed me to clean out Jack’s office, deal with the troubling hints of wrongdoing, and destroy the evidence of his long ago affair with Robyn. She needed to never know the truth I had discovered.

  "How much weight have you lost?" she said over the sound of the water.

  I paused, a hand on the liquid soap. "I don’t know," I fibbed. I did know. Seventeen pounds. But I wasn’t going to admit it. Jas had been trying to feed me for weeks and I had been tossing plates of post-funeral food out to the dogs. "Not enough in my thighs," I added, looking down.

  "I can see your bones," she yelled as I closed the door and steam boiled up around me.

  I pretended not to hear, burying my head beneath the scalding spray. When I got out of the shower long minutes later, the bed was stripped, the vacuum was roaring and Jack’s shoes had been placed neatly in his closet. Another part of him was gone. I waited for the tears, the misery, the pain. But there was nothing except a numb emptiness.

  Scrubbing my hair dry with a towel, I pulled out the cosmetics that might help heal my tear-dried skin. Or at least hide the worst of the damage. Fortified with makeup, I entered the closet I had shared with Jack and considered my wardrobe. Especially the "skinny clothes" I had saved from the last time I was this small. They were hopelessly out of style.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I leaned back, relaxing against the Jeep’s padded headrest, and closed my eyes. It had been an easy, quiet night at work, this first night back in the ER since Jack died, due to the rain that fell in a steady sheet for six hours. I had been hoping for a busy evening, wide open, full of traumas and codes, people who needed me. Instead, by the end of my shift, I had helped treat a dozen sickly babies, one bilateral pneumonia in a nursing home patient, two headaches, and a drunk who had spent his disability check on several cases of malt liquor instead of his prescription Phenobarbital. He had a bad case of DTs mixed with grand mal seizures. Not a pretty sight. Dawkins County Hospital had several "regulars" who routinely drank away their medication money.

  ER nurses and doctors often had a difficult time working with noncompliant patients, and drunks were the worst. Alcoholism was a disease, but compassion was difficult when a man was vomiting, seizing, cursing and kicking, all symptoms he could have avoided had he stayed on the wagon and taken his medicine.

  Compassion was the first thing to go in my profession, and I had long ago become cynical about most of the patients who frequented the emergency room. Yet I loved my job, still derived satisfaction from being a nurse, still needed the rush of adrenaline and victory when we brought someone back from the edge of death. It didn’t happen often in such a small, rural hospital, but it did happen, and I had missed the excitement, the frenzied tumult of traumas and turmoil.

  Then I remembered Jack, his hands and bare feet blue, his face mottled and purpled and crusted over with blood. Tubes hanging from his mouth and arms. His clothes in a heap on the floor, jagged edges where they had been cut away by my friends trying to save his life. And then I remembered the photographs.

  I started the motor and the Jeep roared to life before settling into a heavy thrum. It had been Jack’s Jeep; now it was mine. Placing my hands where his had rested, I pulled out of the parking lot and left the Dawkins County Hospital behind.

  Hospital property was county land, outside of Dorsey City—called DorCity by the locals—and was located near the FHA—the Federal Housing Authority—the sheriff’s department, the county jail, and the highway department, "near" being a relative term in the empty square miles of undeveloped land. There were miles of rolling hills, fields, pasture, and acres of timber and forest between each county building. As the hospital lights faded behind me, I called Jas to tell her I was on my way home. It was an old ritual, begun many years ago when Jack had worried about me traveling alone. The cell phone was for vehicular emergencies. The 9mm locked in the glove box was for trouble.

  I had never needed the gun, except for the time I hit a deer with my car near midnight. It totaled my car and left the deer in agony. I’d emptied the ammunition clip into his thrashing form, caught in my headlights. That was the twelve-pointer mounted in Jack’s office with a bronze plaque bearing my name and the date of my kill.

  I got the answering machine at home, left a short message, and hit the end call button. Jas was still with Topaz, the two girls out cruising. Jas had her own cell and a .32 locked in her glove box, the only legal place to carry a loaded weapon in a car in South Carolina. Jas was a far better shot than I and preferred a smaller weapon. I left a message on her cell too, and dropped the phone in the passenger seat.

  Black night swept in as the hospital lights fell behind, and the roar of tires on asphalt was a soothing sound, the headlights reflecting off pools and brightening muddy ditches left by the earlier rain. The Jeep was the only car on the road at half-past eleven.

  Dawkins is one of South Carolina’s largest counties in terms of square miles; mostly rural, the wide open fields of soy, cotton, corn, and hay flashed by, broken by stands of tall pines in perfect rows, and dark, empty textile mills with cracked concrete parking lots, barred doors, and boarded up or broken windows staring into the night. Cheap foreign textile imports had cost the county thousands of jobs and seriously depleted the tax base back in the seventies, in many ways returning Dawkins to its pre-industrial, agricultural roots.

  When foreign imports were mentioned, the state’s most vitriolic senator would redden and splutter and offer a practiced speech, often bringing up Dawkins’ unemployment rate as a result of international free trade and foreign imports. It was one of many well-rehearsed performances that had kept Senator Vance Waldrop in his powerful Washington position for two decades. My husband had contributed to Vance’s campaigns for years and referred to the man as a friend.

  Vance had come to Jack’s funeral, posing with his hand in mine as the local papers snapped his photo for the next edition. I didn’t like Vance and resented being used to further his career, but there was little I could do short of making a scene, and I couldn’t do that to Jasmine.

  The senator had called twice since the funeral to offer his condolences. Now I wondered if he had a hidden motive as well. Perhaps Davenport Hills and a problem that included murder? I had let the ans
wering machine in the hallway handle his mournful words, and erased the message as soon as the connection broke. Now I wondered if that had been wise.

  The bright red gleam of animal eyes caught the headlights to the right. Too high up for rabbit, possum, stray dog, or cat, the usual roadside victims. I slammed my foot down on the brake pedal. Brakes squealed, tires ground, seeking purchase on the wet asphalt. A doe dashed across the road. I pulled the wheel left. Hard. And said something succinct. A phrase for which my Nana would have washed out my mouth had she heard.

  The doe’s back hoof was captured in the passenger headlight, up high and flying. Six inches from the glass. And then she was gone. The Jeep rocked to a sliding stop, straddling the center line. Headlights stared into woods that dropped off sharply to the side of the road.

  I was breathing hard. Hot sweat prickled beneath my arms. My heart was racing, my body remembering the experience with the twelve-point buck and the accident that had totaled my car.

  There was movement in the trees as the doe vanished, leaves and branches waving, tossing large droplets from the recent rain. The fact that Dawkins County had the state’s largest number of deer-versus-car accidents for two years running did nothing to ease my fright.

  Before I could regain a sense of calm, I pulled back into my lane and continued home, driving slower than usual and watching for the tell-tale red gleam of eyes in the bushes beside the road. Deer wouldn’t lie down and sleep in heavy rain, yet they seldom ran in wet weather unless spooked. I watched for packs of wild dogs, or illegal hunters poaching in the off season. Of course, the wind alone could have startled her into my path.

  Still agitated, I flipped on the radio hoping for music to settle my mind. Instead, I got Jack’s favorite preacher on Jack’s favorite radio station, Christian broadcasting out of Asheville.

  I turned off the radio.

  Slowing, I made a right at Felix’s Texaco on to the unmarked road that once had been a part of Ethridge. The township had vanished with the advent of polyester in the sixties. The town’s sole employers—the Ethridge family—closed the cotton gin, the depot, the corner store and Ethridge Knits. Soon after, Ethridge itself disappeared from the state maps. All that was left was a Feed and Seed Store, a couple of churches, and the local vet’s office.

  I took a right on to Mount Zion Church Road, drove beneath I-77 and back into the darkness as rural surroundings again enfolded me. A splatter of rain pounded the windshield. Dawkins County was a pocket of farming and textile communities, only now being introduced into the computer age. Yet, it was only minutes from the symphony, the museums, the design shops—the cultured gentility of southern city life.

  Jack moved us here the first year of our marriage, trying to escape the crime and the smog and the noise of city living. We moved away from Charlotte and the social climbing obligations insisted upon by my mama and daddy, back to my family farm, to live just down from my Nana on the several hundred acres of forest, fields and pastures of Chadwick Farms. We moved toward a simpler lifestyle, hoping to find a safer and calmer place to rear our child, a place close to Jack’s business, yet green enough to breed the horses he remembered from his childhood, the Friesians once raised by his grandparents in Maine. I’d learned to love his horses. Then he died. Standing in the shadow of the grand old brick church building, listening as clumps of earth thudded onto the steel of his coffin lid, I had buried Jack in the red clay of the First Baptist Church cemetery. Remembering, my hands trembled on the wheel.

  Slowing the Jeep further, I negotiated the bridge over Magnet Hole Creek and rounded Trash Pile Curve only a mile from my house. The site was a ninety degree curve in the road that had taken more lives and collected more refuse than any unofficial dump in the county.

  A mattress and a load of shingles, remnants of some nearby renovation, partially blocked the left lane. The debris was in a dangerous spot; if a driver was traveling too fast, he might overcompensate and end up in the creek. It wasn’t a wide creek, but there were some spots in Magnet Hole Creek deep enough to swallow a car and hide it forever.

  I reached for the cell to report the mess when headlights appeared, pulling out of Chadwick Farm Acres, the subdivision near our home. The car was traveling fast. Too fast for Trash Pile Curve. Blinking my lights to warn them of the rubbish as they sped by, I slowed, watching my rearview, dialing the sheriff’s department by touch. It was busy. I coasted in the darkness.

  The car behind me swerved, its lights leaving a red streak on the night. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, useless in the distance. And then the red tail lights tilted, first to the right. Then down.

  "My God." I whispered. In the silence of my car, I watched the lights roll over and over, the headlights illuminating the trunks of trees, green twisted ropes of climbing kudzu, glinting off the rain-swollen, churning water of Magnet Hole Creek. And then there was only darkness.

  I closed my mouth, remembering to take a breath. Fumbled for the turn signal in my shock. I whipped the wheel hard left, executing a three point turn.

  Somehow I turned the Jeep and dialed 911 at the same time.

  "Nine one one. What is the nature of your emergency?"

  It was Buzzy, an EMT who moonlighted nights at dispatch. "Buzzy, this is Ashlee Davenport. I’m reporting a single car accident at Trash Pile Curve on road four fifty one. I’m at the location now." I hit the gas pedal and whipped the wheel again. My hands were shaking. "They went off the road."

  "How many victims, Ash?"

  I slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road, angling my headlights down. "I see one, but the car’s upside down. And the creek’s up. You better call out the squad," I said, referring to the Rescue Squad. "I’m going down. I’ll light flares."

  "I’ll send the cavalry."

  It wasn’t exactly the proper response for a dispatch operator, but the analogy was heartwarming, something I desperately needed after my brief glimpse of the body below. It was male, impaled on a broken branch sticking up from the muddy bank of Magnet Hole Creek.

  I cut the motor, my feet hitting the pavement before the engine died. With a single flip of a switch, I lit the Jeep’s overhead emergency lights, the yellow ones the county permitted on any Rescue Squad vehicle responding to an emergency. The lights Jack had installed the day he bought the Jeep.

  In the blinking yellow glow, I opened the back hatch and pulled out six electro-flares. Three of the yellow strobes went in the road behind the Jeep, three in the road on the curve, visible to anyone traveling from I-77.

  My heart beat hard and fast as I ran back to the Jeep, the rhythm irregular. I had never responded first to an accident. Not alone. Always before I had been one of several who reached the scene at once. Or I had Jack. He had helped to fund the Rescue Squad and had trained most of the volunteers. He had led the squad in hundreds of dangerous rescues over the years. Jack was everywhere in my life. And nowhere. Except in photographs of an old affair. . . .

  "Damn," I whispered to the night and to my dead husband, as I reached for the red emergency supply box in the back of the Jeep. Opening it, I checked my supplies and pulled on heavy blue trauma gloves over my trembling hands.

  "Flashlight. Blankets," I counted off. "Backboard," which I leaned against the Jeep for someone else to bring down. "Jacks. Extra flares and batteries. Fire protection gear," which I ignored. I lifted the twenty-two-pound supply box—called a jump kit in squad speak—feeling the strain in my shoulders and back. Jack had always carried it before.

  Pausing in the lights of the Jeep, my shadow was thrown in a dozen different directions by the headlights and the flashing emergency lights. I couldn’t get a clear picture of the car below me. It was hidden behind a stand of young oaks, green with early summer foliage, tall briars, and splintered driftwood, resting beyond a patch of tangled, leafless honey-suckle and old kudzu curling with fresh green growth. I smelled gasoline. More faintly, wild lilacs. And the stench of dead fish and garbage. Below, someone groaned.

 
; Flicking on the flashlight, I slipped down the muddy incline to the car. There was no clear path. The car had been airborne for part of the way down. Red mud caked on my nursing shoes, squashed up over my ankles and down inside my shoes. Briars grabbed at my scrub suit. I heard a rip over the sound of my breathing and the groans from below.

  I should have grabbed the heavy raincoat that was part of the fire protection gear. I would need it in the mud below, but it was too late to go back.

  Behind me, a second Jeep roared up and braked to a halt, yellow lights and headlights adding to the glare. I turned and waited an instant as a door slammed and a form moved into the lights.

  "That you, Ash?"

  "Yeah! Bring the backboard and some rope," I shouted.

  "Right behind you!"

  Relief sped in my veins and I remembered to take a breath as I slid on down the hill. I had no idea who had joined me so soon, but the rest of the cavalry couldn’t be far behind.

  In the light of the flash, the body I had first seen looked surreal. A life-sized, mangled toy. A branch had penetrated low in his abdomen, and poked out, slick and red and jagged between his shoulder blades. The smell of feces and the amount of blood let me know that if he wasn’t already dead, he soon would be. He wasn’t a priority. The woman was.

  Her legs were trapped beneath the car. Her upper body protruded. She had a broken left shoulder and multiple compound fractures in her left arm. If she lived, she might lose the arm. She would surely lose the use of it.

  Her face was a pulpy mass. Blue eyes watched me intently. Her mouth worked silently, filled with blood and broken teeth.

  "Help me. Help me. Help me," she mouthed.

  I couldn’t believe that she was alive, let alone conscious. Kneeling in the muck beside her, I dropped the jump kit and cleaned out her airway with my fingers. She took a ragged, wet breath.

  I had wanted traumas and emergencies and crises, and now I had them. And I wasn’t ready. Not for this. In the distance I heard a siren. Then another. The rest of the cavalry had arrived.