by Ron Rash
The girls came home for the funeral and stayed three days. After they left, there was a month-long flurry of phone calls and visits and casseroles from people in the community and then days when the only vehicle that came was the mail truck. Marcie learned then what true loneliness was. Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight. She bought extra locks for the doors because at night she sometimes grew afraid, though what she feared was as much inside the house as outside it. Because she knew what was expected of her—to stay in this place, alone, waiting for the years, perhaps decades, to pass until she herself died.
It was mid-morning the following day when Sheriff Beasley came. Marcie met him on the porch. The sheriff had been a close friend of Arthur’s, and as he got out of the patrol car he looked not at her but at the sagging barn and empty pasture, seeming to ignore the house’s new garage and freshly shingled roof. He didn’t take off his hat as he crossed the yard, or when he stepped onto the porch.
“I knew you’d sold some of Arthur’s cows, but I didn’t know it was all of them.” The sheriff spoke as if it were intended only as an observation.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have if there’d been some men to help me with them after Arthur died,” Marcie said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”
“I guess not,” Sheriff Beasley replied, letting a few moments pass before he spoke again, his eyes on her now. “I need to speak to Carl. You know where he’s working today?”
“Talk to him about what?” Marcie asked.
“Whoever’s setting these fires drives a black pickup.”
“There’s lots of black pickups in this county.”
“Yes there are,” Sheriff Beasley said, “and I’m checking out everybody who drives one, checking out where they were yesterday around six o’clock as well. I figure that to narrow it some.”
“You don’t need to ask Carl,” Marcie said. “He was here eating supper.”
“At six o’clock?”
“Around six, but he was here by five thirty.”
“How are you so sure of that?”
“The five-thirty news had just come on when he pulled up.”
The sheriff said nothing.
“You need me to sign something I will,” Marcie said.
“No, Marcie. That’s not needed. I’m just checking off folks with black pickups. It’s a long list.”
“I bet you came here first, though, didn’t you,” Marcie said. “Because Carl’s not from around here.”
“I came here first, but I had cause,” Sheriff Beasley said. “When you and Carl started getting involved, Preacher Carter asked me to check up on him, just to make sure he was on the up and up. I called the sheriff down there. Turns out that when Carl was fifteen he and another boy got arrested for burning some woods behind a ball field. They claimed it an accident, but the judge didn’t buy that. They almost got sent to juvenile detention.”
“There’ve been boys do that kind of thing around here.”
“Yes, there have,” the sheriff said. “And that was the only thing in Carl’s file, not even a speeding ticket. Still, his being here last evening when it happened, that’s a good thing for him.”
Marcie waited for the sheriff to leave, but he lingered. He took out a soiled handkerchief and wiped his brow. Probably wanting a glass of iced tea, she suspected, but she wasn’t going to offer him one. The sheriff put up his handkerchief and glanced at the sky.
“You’d think we’d at least get an afternoon thunderstorm.”
“I’ve got things to do,” she said, and reached for the screen door handle.
“Marcie,” the sheriff said, his voice so soft that she turned. He raised his right hand, palm open as if to offer her something, then let it fall. “You’re right. We should have done more for you after Arthur died. I regret that.”
Marcie opened the screen door and went inside.
When Carl got home she said nothing about the sheriff’s visit, and that night in bed when Carl turned and kissed her, Marcie met his lips and raised her hand to his cheek. She pressed her free hand against the small of his back, guiding his body as it shifted, settled over her. Afterward, she lay awake, feeling Carl’s breath on the back of her neck, his arm cinched around her ribs and stomach. She listened for a first far-off rumble, but there was only the dry raspy sound of insects striking the window screen. Marcie had not been to church in months, had not prayed for even longer than that. But she did now. She shut her closed eyes tighter, trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for, brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard. She prayed for rain.
II
RETURN
(In Memory of Robert Holder)
It had been raining that morning in Charlotte. Only when the bus groaned and sputtered into the high mountains above Lenoir did the first snowflakes flutter against the windshield, stick a moment before being swept away by the wipers. But here it has snowed for hours, with no sign of letting up. He swings the duffel bag across his back, wincing when the helmet’s hard curve bangs his shoulder blade. The bus shudders into first gear and heads on to Boone. Then the only sound is water. He steps onto the bridge and lingers a few moments above the middle fork of the New River. The snow on the banks makes the water look dark and still, like water in a well. A few yards farther downstream Holder Branch, the creek that begins on his family’s land, enters the larger stream. His right hand clasps the jacket lapels tight against his neck as he steps off the bridge and begins the two-mile walk up Goshen Mountain.
He wonders how many times he has made this walk in his head the last two years. Six hundred, maybe more? All those nights he’d lain awake in his tent, bare chest covered with sweat as sporadic sniper fire and mortar rounds broke through the whir and drone of insects. Because he knew oceans had currents the same way creeks and rivers did, he’d imagine one drop of water making its way from his home in North Carolina to the green waters of the South Pacific. He would follow that drop of water back to its source—first across the Pacific and on through the Panama Canal, then across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi to the Ohio River, then the New River, then the New River’s middle fork, and finally up Holder Branch. Sometimes he never made it all the way back. Somewhere between what his grandfather called the Boone toll road and his family’s farmhouse he would fall asleep.
Snowflakes cling to his lashes. He shakes them free and clasps the jacket collar tighter. It’s getting dark and he looks down at his wrist, forgetting his watch is gone, lost or stolen somewhere between the Philippines and North Carolina. He passes the meadow where he and his uncle Abe used to rabbit hunt, then passes his uncle’s farmhouse, the tractor that hasn’t been driven since June rusting in the barn. No light comes from the windows, his aunt down in Boone with her daughter until warmer weather. The creek is beside the road now, but an icy caul muffles its sound, just as the snow muffles his footsteps. The world is as quiet as the moments after the Japanese sniper fired at him from a palm tree.
He hadn’t heard the shot but felt it—a sensation like a metal fist hitting the side of his helmet. Knocked to the ground, he looked up and saw the Japanese soldier eject the spent shell. Though dazed, he managed to raise his own rifle, the BAR wavering in his hand as he emptied his clip. The sniper fell through the fronds, landing on his back, blood pooling on the front of his shirt. The Japanese soldier didn’t try to rise, but his right hand slowly reached up and freed a thin silver necklace from under his shirt. He touched something affixed to the chain, touched it as though only to make sure it was still there, then let his hand fall back on the ground. Peterson, the medic, had claimed the Japanese only worshipped their emperor. He’d believed Peterson, because Peterson had a college education and was going to be a doctor once the war was over. But now he saw Peterson was wrong, because around the wounded man’s neck was a silver cross.
The dying man spoke. The words didn’t sound angry or defiant
. By this time the rest of the squad was beside them. Peterson kneeled and jerked open the soldier’s shirt and peered in.
“What did he say?” he asked Peterson.
“Hell if I know,” Peterson replied. “Probably wants water.”
He was offering his canteen to Peterson when the Japanese soldier gave a last exhalation. Peterson jerked the cross and necklace from the dead man’s neck.
“Your kill, hillbilly,” Peterson said, and offered the cross and necklace. “It’s silver. You’ll get a couple of dollars for it.”
When he hesitated, Peterson smiled.
“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
He took it then.
“I didn’t check his pockets,” Peterson said as he got up. “You can do that yourself.”
Peterson and the rest of the squad walked to where a canopy of palm trees offered more shade. Once alone, he knelt beside the Japanese soldier, his back to the other men.
“Find anything else?” Peterson asked when he’d rejoined the others.
“No,” he’d said.
The snow falls harder, drifts forming where the road curves. The snow makes it hard to see and he follows the road as much by memory as sight. The road curves left and the incline steepens. He’s breathing hard now, unused to the thin mountain air that grows thinner each step farther up Goshen Mountain. In the Philippines the air had been so humid that it was like breathing water. The day’s fading light tinges the snow blue.
The road levels and he can just make out the black spire through the snow and trees, then the wooden building itself. He steps into the churchyard and walks around to the back. He leans on the barbed-wire fence post and looks into the graveyard. He squints and sees the new stone and for a moment cannot shake the uneasy feeling that it is his own, that he’s really still in the Philippines, dreaming this, maybe even dying or dead. But it’s his uncle’s name on the stone, not his.
He steps back onto the road and passes Lawson Triplett’s place and then crosses a plank bridge, the creek passing beneath to flow on the road’s left side. A ghost can’t cross fast-moving water, his father had once told him.
He knows there are mountains in Japan, some so high snow never melts on their peaks. The man he killed could have been from those mountains, a farmer like himself, just as unused to the loud humid island nights as he’d been—a man used to nights when all you heard was the wind. He remembers kneeling beside the Japanese soldier, the cross and necklace clutched in his hand as he’d said a quick prayer. Then he’d wedged his fingers between the dead man’s teeth, pried them open enough to slip the cross and necklace onto the rigid tongue.
He trudges past Tom Watson’s pasture, a little farther the big beech tree he climbed as a kid. The snow is easing some, and he can see better. The creek runs close to the road, little more than a trickle as it nears its source.
The road curves a last time. On the right side is the barbed wire fence that marks his family’s property. He passes above the bottomland where he and his father will plant corn and cabbage in a few months. He imagines the rich black dirt buried deep and silent under the snow, how it’s there waiting to nurture the seeds they’ll plant.
As he approaches the farmhouse, he sees a candle in the front window, and he knows it has been lit every night for a month, placed there for him, to guide him these last few steps. But he does not go inside, not yet. He walks up to the springhouse and takes his helmet from the duffel bag. He fills the helmet with water and drinks.
INTO THE GORGE
His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she’d always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.
Knowledge of the land was the one memory that refused to dissolve. During her last year, Jesse would step off the school bus and see his great-aunt hoeing a field behind her farmhouse, breaking ground for a crop she never sowed, but the rows were always straight, right-depthed. Her nephew, Jesse’s father, worked in an adjoining field. The first few times, he had taken the hoe from her hands and led her back to her house, but she’d soon be back in the field. After a while neighbors and kin just let her hoe. They brought meals and checked on her as often as they could. Jesse always walked rapidly past her field. His great-aunt never looked up, her gaze fixed on the hoe blade and the dark soil it churned, but he had always feared she’d raise her eyes and acknowledge him, though what she might want to convey Jesse could not say.
Then one March day she disappeared. The men in the community searched all afternoon and into evening as the temperature dropped, sleet crackled and hissed like static. The men rippled outward as they lit lanterns and moved into the gorge. Jesse watched from his family’s pasture as the held flames grew smaller, soon disappearing and reappearing like foxfire, crossing the creek and then on past the ginseng patch Jesse helped his father harvest, going deeper into land that had been in the family almost two hundred years, toward the original homestead, the place she’d been born.
They found his great-aunt at dawn, her back against a tree as if waiting for the searchers to arrive. But that was not the strangest thing. She’d taken off her shoes, her dress, and her underclothes. Years later Jesse read in a magazine that people dying of hypothermia did such a thing believing heat, not cold, was killing them. Back then, the woods had been communal, No Trespassing signs an affront, but after her death neighbors soon found places other than the gorge to hunt and fish, gather blackberries and galax. Her ghost was still down there, many believed, including Jesse’s own father, who never returned to harvest the ginseng he’d planted. When the park service made an offer on the homestead, Jesse’s father and aunts had sold. That was in 1959, and the government paid sixty dollars an acre. Now, five decades later, Jesse stood on his porch and looked east toward Sampson Ridge, where bulldozers razed woods and pastureland for another gated community. He wondered how much those sixty acres were worth today. Easily a million dollars.
Not that he needed that much money. His house and twenty acres were paid for, as was his truck. The tobacco allotment earned less each year but still enough for a widower with grown children. Enough as long as he didn’t have to go to the hospital or his truck throw a rod. He needed some extra money put away for that. Not a million, but some.
So two autumns ago Jesse had gone into the gorge, following the creek to the old homestead, then up the ridge’s shadowy north face where his father had seeded and harvested his ginseng patch. The crop was there, evidently untouched for half a century. Some of the plants rose above Jesse’s kneecaps, and there was more ginseng than his father could have dreamed of, a hillside spangled with bright yellow leaves, enough roots to bulge Jesse’s knapsack. Afterward, he’d carefully replanted the seeds, done it just as his father had done, then walked out of the gorge, past the iron gate that kept vehicles off the logging road. A yellow tin marker nailed to a nearby tree said U.S. Park Service.
Now another autumn had come. A wet autumn, which was good for the plants, as Jesse had verified three days ago when he’d checked them. Once again he gathered the knapsack and trowel from the woodshed. He also took the .32-20 Colt from his bedroom drawer. Late in the year for snakes, but after days of rain the afternoon was warm enough to bring a rattler or copperhead out to sun.
He followed the old logging road, the green backpack slung over his shoulder and the pistol in the outside pouch. Jesse’s arthritic knees ached as he made the descent. They would ache more that night, even after rubbing liniment on them. He wondered how many more autumns he’d be able to make this trip. Till I’m seventy, Jesse figured, giving himself two more years. The ground w
as slippery from all the rain and he walked slowly. A broken ankle or leg would be a serious thing this far from help, but it was more than that. He wanted to enter the gorge respectfully.
When he got in sight of the homestead, the land leveled out, but the ground grew soggier, especially where the creek ran close to the logging road. Jesse saw boot prints from three days earlier. Then he saw another set, coming up the logging road from the other direction. Boot prints as well, but smaller. Jesse looked down the logging road but saw no hiker or fisherman. He kneeled, his joints creaking.
The prints appeared at least a day old, maybe more. They stopped on the road when they met Jesse’s, then also veered toward the homestead. Jesse got up and looked around again before walking through the withered broom sedge and joe-pye weed. He passed a cairn of stones that once had been a chimney, a dry well covered with a slab of tin so rusty it served as more warning than safeguard. The boot prints were no longer discernible but he knew where they’d end. Led the son of a bitch right to it, he told himself, and wondered how he could have been stupid enough to walk the road on a rainy morning. But when he got to the ridge, the plants were still there, the soil around them undisturbed. Probably just a hiker, or a bird watcher, Jesse figured, that or some punk kid looking to poach someone’s marijuana, not knowing the ginseng was worth even more. Either way, he’d been damn lucky.
Jesse lifted the trowel from the backpack and got on his knees. He smelled the rich dark earth that always reminded him of coffee. The plants had more color than three days ago, the berries a deeper red, the leaves bright as polished gold. It always amazed him that such radiance could grow in soil the sun rarely touched, like finding rubies and sapphires on the gloamy walls of a cave. He worked with care but also haste. The first time he’d returned here two years earlier he’d felt a sudden coolness, a slight lessening of light as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Imagination, he’d told himself then, but it had made him work faster, with no pauses to rest.
