by Ron Rash
“No, he ain’t,” Laurel said.
“What is he then?”
“I don’t know, but he’s more than that, some kind of music player. He’s near stung to death.”
Hank lifted a red handkerchief from his back pocket. The cloth covered his face as he wiped sweat from his brow and eyes. When he lowered the cloth, Hank looked disappointed that the stranger was still before him.
“All right, but he’s not getting inside the cabin till he’s had a bath. He stinks.”
“Take hold of him,” Laurel said. “I’ll go fill the tub with water.”
Hank placed the man’s arm over his right shoulder, settled his hand on the stranger’s back as Laurel went on ahead. She set the washtub on the porch and poured in buckets of water until the well’s slim holdings grew muddy. She stirred in a handful of Borax before going inside for a washrag and cake of lye soap. Hank sat the man on the front steps and Laurel untied his shoes while Hank helped the stranger take off his shirt.
“Who are you?” Hank asked.
“I think his throat’s too swoll to talk,” Laurel said, pulling free the second sock. “Help him get his pants and step-ins off while I make a salve.”
Laurel nodded at Hank’s back pocket.
“I’ll need some of your tobacco.”
“This is all I got until Slidell goes to town again,” Hank grumbled, but handed her the drawstring pouch.
Laurel went in the front room and took the box of soda powder off the sink. She scooped two tablespoons into a rinsing pan, then tucked a wad of tobacco in her mouth and chewed, grimacing all the while. She mixed the tobacco and powder until it was a brown paste, then got the tin of black colish from the cooking shelf and made a tonic with water from the kettle. After fetching a towel and a pair of her father’s longhandles, she went out on the porch.
“Damn, sister. We don’t know the least thing about him and you’re fussing over him like he’s the king of England.”
“We know he’s hurt,” Laurel answered, “and we know there’s not another near to help him.”
She glanced toward the tub, let her eyes linger when she saw the man’s eyes were closed. The welts on his neck and chest argued at least as much poison as a copperhead bite. It just wasn’t in one place, which Laurel figured a good thing. The water had turned gray from the grime, but the effort had taken what pertness the man had left. The washrag lay limp in his hand.
“You’re going to need to lather his hair.”
“Do I need to spit shine his shoes too?” Hank answered.
“Hurry, and then get him dressed,” Laurel said. “We need to draw out that poison.”
In a few minutes Hank helped the man inside. His eyes were open as Hank eased him into the bed. Laurel propped his head up with a feather pillow and held the cup as he sipped the tonic.
“We’ll work our way up,” she told him when the cup was empty.
Laurel pinched some of the paste between her finger and thumb and covered the first sting, found seven more before she reached the hands and wrists. She freed the longhandles’ top buttons to salve his stomach and chest, last his neck and face.
“Damn if he don’t look like a bobcat for the spots on him,” Hank said when she finished.
“Twenty-one stings,” Laurel said. “That’s enough to have killed some folks.”
“You able to talk yet?” Hank asked, but the man shook his head again.
“Let him be, Hank. He needs to rest.”
Despite the warm tonic, the man was trembling, so Laurel spread a quilt over him.
“His clothes have got need of washing, and I need to get ours, so I’m going to be at the creek a spell.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Hank asked. “Stay here all the while so he don’t rob us blind?”
“He’s not got the sand to do that. Besides, I’ll have something he cares a sight more about than anything we got.”
“I’m at least taking the shotgun with me,” Hank said. “I’d as lief not have him beading its barrel on me.”
Laurel looked at the man. His eyes were more alert now, watchful.
“If you got need of the privy, are you able enough to go alone?”
The stranger seemed not to understand.
“Maybe you call it a doaks or outhouse,” Laurel said and the man nodded. “It’s out behind the cabin.”
The man nodded again. Hank took the shotgun from where it leaned in the corner.
“I’ve got to finish feeding and watering them calves,” Hank said, and went out the door.
For a minute Laurel stayed by the bed. The shivering stopped and the man’s eyes closed. His breath slowed and steadied into sleep. She studied the stranger’s face but found nothing that might tell her more. His left hand lay on the quilt, no knuckles scarred, no fingers stoved or bent from old breaks. Not a farmer or blacksmith, that much was for sure.
Laurel gathered the stranger’s clothes in her arms and went outside. Hank was walking toward the barn with the shotgun in his hand and a pail of water crooked in his elbow. In four months he had learned to do things one-handed she’d have not thought possible. He could drive a nail and work a posthole digger, rope a calf, and most anything else you had need for on a farm. He hadn’t been the least mewlsome when he came back from France but had dug in his boot heels and gotten on with his life, whether it was farmwork or sparking Carolyn Weatherbee. Hank could get contrary buttoning a shirt or trying to lift a cistern or some such, but it never festered in him.
When she got to the outcrop, Laurel worked the lye soap into the shirt and socks as gently as she could, but the cloth gave apart easy as wisps on a dandelion. Laurel did the pants last. Checking the back pockets, she found three folded twenty-dollar bills, within them a folded piece of butcher paper. She hesitated, but decided she’d earned the right.
The bearer of this note is Walter Smith.
A childhood affliction has made him not able to speak.
He wishes to buy a train ticket to New York City.
Laurel set the note with the money before dipping the pants into the creek. As she doused them for a final rinse, Laurel felt something else in the watch pocket. A coin she thought at first, because it was round like a wheat penny. But what she pulled out was a medallion strung on a thin chain. Circling the medallion’s outer edge was a single word. Laurel spread the pants on the rock so they’d at least dry a little. She held the medallion and chain in her palm, the metal blinking a bright gold as it caught the late-afternoon sunlight. Like the silver flute, it didn’t fit with the ragged clothing. She thought about placing the medallion and chain in the basket with the note and money, but the way it was hidden made it seem a more private thing. Laurel stuffed the gold back in the watch pocket and went up the creek.
At his camp, she opened the haversack and took out the flute case. The burlap contained nothing else but a single green feather. Laurel held the feather a few moments, wondering where he’d found it. Wherever, he’d thought it worth saving, which was a set-apart sort of thing for a man to do. Laurel put the feather and flute case back inside and shouldered the haversack. She gave the campsite a last look around. Nothing except socks too ripped to darn, some uneaten apples. As she made her way back to the outcrop, Laurel saw cardinal flower abloom on the creek bank. She picked some of the red flowers and worried them between her finger and thumb, rubbed the oil on her neck. Farther on, Queen Anne’s lace blossomed. Laurel smiled at herself for noticing it. Best see if this first flower works before you got need for the other, she told herself.
Though the cove below was steadily darkening, she let the pants dry a few minutes longer. Laurel sat on the ledge and clasped her knees. When she was seven, she’d found this place while hunting blackberries. As a child, the outcrop had been like a huge hand that lifted her out of the cove’s bleakness. Worst of all was the cabin. No matter t
he time of day or season or how many lamps were lit, it remained a dim place that, as long as Laurel could remember, always smelled of suffering. But up here the wide shelf of granite gathered the sun’s light and held it, swaddled Laurel in brightness. The light was like warm honey. Dewdrops on a spider’s web held whole rainbows inside them and a fence lizard’s tail shone blue as indigo glass. The water sparkled with mica. Sometimes Laurel laid flat on the outcrop so the sun could fall fuller on her, but most of the time, like now, she’d just fold her knees close to her chest with her hands, as if waiting for something or someone to arrive. Waiting. She had been waiting, waiting in the cabin as well as here for her life to begin, her life.
A leaky heart. That was what Doctor Carter called it. Laurel had memories of her father baling hay and plowing, of him and Slidell felling a big white oak with a crosscut saw. But that was before the evening her father hadn’t come in for supper and Laurel’s mother found him near dead in the field. After that, Doctor Carter came once a month and took his stethoscope from the black leather bag, pressed its silver bell against her father’s bony chest. Those had been the moments that frightened Laurel most, because there was always a pause when he moved the bell one place and then another, as if unable to locate her father’s heartbeat.
Everyone had to do more as he failed away. While their mother fixed breakfast, Hank fed and milked the cow and Laurel fetched eggs and water. Afternoons the two of them plowed fields and rooked hay and mucked the barn and all of whatever else to keep the farm going. Sometimes her father came on the porch and watched, once hobbled out to hitch a plow to the draft horse. After a few minutes, her mother hoisted him back to the cabin, all the while him gasping for breath and sobbing that he was nothing but a burden, that the world couldn’t be made a more sorrowful place. But when Laurel was twelve, she and Hank and her father found the lie of that.
Her mother had been chopping firewood and caught a splinter off a piece of kindling. She’d dug the splinter out with a pocketknife, which should have been the cure of it, but the wound swelled with pus. Her mother cut again, deeper, then poured turpentine in it before wrapping the thumb in cheesecloth. The next morning red streaks ran all the way up to her elbow. Hank went to Mars Hill for Doctor Carter, who came that afternoon and lanced the palm. It had been an awful thing to watch as the blade made its cleave through the flesh. Doctor Carter had soaked the hand in Epsom salts, then wrapped it in cotton gauze. You folks don’t die easy, he reassured Laurel and Hank. I’d not have given your daddy six months the first time I heard that heart of his halting and hissing, so I’m of a mind your momma will pull through. But she hadn’t. Laurel’s father cried that life wasn’t supposed to be this hard, that a man sickly as he was shouldn’t have a wife die on him.
Laurel had resented those words. He’d had a hard life but her father wasn’t alone in that. She became the one who cooked her father’s meals and dumped his chamber pot and changed his soiled bedsheets. She’d washed him and salved his bedsores. There had been plenty of misery put on Hank’s shoulders too. Slidell had helped some but Hank did most of the farmwork, at nine doing a full man’s portion. Their parents had managed to hold on to part of the money from selling the Tennessee farm, money they parceled out to buy what they couldn’t grow or make themselves.
Yet she and Hank had made it through, in part because they could count on each other. But it was more than just that, Laurel had always believed. It was also knowing that miserable as life was, there was someone else going through the same thing. As long as Hank could stand it, she could too, not just the hard work but the stares and snubs when they went to Mars Hill with Slidell. At night or rainy days or when the snow flew, they’d play cards or checkers or get out the wish book and pretend they had a thousand dollars and take turns picking out things until neither of them had a single penny left. As they got older, evenings Hank would whittle and Laurel would sew or read copies of the Marshall Sentinel that Slidell passed on to them. Sometimes she would take out the geography book Miss Calicut had given her and turn to a page and try to imagine such a farther land. But she never could. They were too distant. All the while their father lingered in the back room, more and more needful as the years passed.
Then Hank got conscripted. I’ll never see him again, her father lamented, and he’d been right. One morning Laurel came into her father’s room and he lay in the bed dead, his eyes open, as if in death still looking for pity. But Hank had come back. She had never let herself believe he wouldn’t. The morning he’d been shot, she had awakened in bed knowing that he had been hurt, but knowing also as the hours passed that he lived, that he would return.
Laurel rose and checked the rags the stranger had worn, found them yet damp. It was near dark but she’d let the outcrop’s warmth dry them a few more minutes. She sat back down on the granite and looked out over the cove to the blue mountains.
Waiting for her life to begin. Still waiting a year after her father’s death. But now she felt something was about to happen, maybe already had happened, a beginning this stranger might be part of. Laurel took the flute from the case and found the instrument heavier than she’d have reckoned. It seemed queer that music so light and airy could come from such a solid-feeling thing. She held the flute’s mouthpiece to her lips. His lips had touched here as well and the thought pleased her. Laurel made a tentative puff before placing fingers over some of the holes. The silver and her breath brought forth a low plaintive note.
Chapter Five
Except for two trips to the privy, the man did not leave the bed. He slept through supper and had not awakened when she and Hank went to sleep. In the morning, Laurel set Hank’s plate and cup before him and took coffee to the stranger.
“This may taste some different from what you’re used to. There’s chicory mixed in with the store bought.”
The man raised his back against the headboard and took the cup. The swelling had gone down and his color was back. The starch was back in him too. His hands didn’t tremble when he brought the cup to his mouth. Laurel nodded at the two stacks of clothes on the bureau, his money and the note beside them. The haversack was near the door and she pointed it out as well.
“I got your clothes washed best as I could but they’re in a sorry way,” Laurel said. “I read the note, so I know you can’t talk. But I can tell you hear okay, and if you done that note you can read and write.”
The man shook his head.
“You can’t?”
He shook his head again.
“Someone else wrote it for you?”
He nodded.
“Well, anyway, I need to get the daubings off you. They’ve drawn what poison they will. Besides, like Hank said, you don’t want to be mistook for a bobcat.”
Laurel went to the front room. As she filled a wash pan with water, Hank pushed back his chair and brought his plate and cup to the basin.
“His clothes are rags so I’m going to give him some of Daddy’s to wear,” Laurel said. “They’re too small for you so someone ought to get use out of them.”
“Damn, Laurel,” Hank said. “We’ve already doctored him and give him a bed for the night. That’s charity enough. How many folks have done anything for us?”
“Slidell has.”
“That’s one person.”
“And that’s all we’re helping,” Laurel answered. “You saw the note, the man can’t even talk.”
“Okay,” Hank said, “but I’m still taking the shotgun with me.”
After Hank left, Laurel sweetened her breath with a piece of licorice root and then took the wash pan into the bedroom, set it on the bed. The man closed his eyes as she rubbed scabs of paste off his face and neck. The washrag was thin and she could feel his skin against her fingertips. As Laurel leaned to free the paste from the other side of his neck, her hair brushed his shoulder. She swept it back behind her ear and tugged the dress collar close to her neck. Brash of he
r to be so near the man, maybe even dangerous now that he was stronger, but she didn’t fear him. He’d stolen, but he’d done that out of hunger. More than anything though, she didn’t believe anyone who made such beautiful sounds could be dangerous. Laurel set the cloth in the pan.
“I’ll let you dab the ones on your hands and belly,” Laurel said.
She took overalls, a chambray shirt, and socks from the bureau’s bottom drawer.
“After you finish washing, put them on,” Laurel said, setting the clothes on the bed. “Come to the front room and I’ll have your breakfast.”
The blackberry jam and cornbread and butter were still on the table so she set out a plate and knife. Laurel emptied the stove’s ash catch and fed more kindling into the firebox. She filled the berlin kettle with snap beans and potatoes to simmer for noon-dinner. Laurel looked around the room and tried to see it the way the stranger might. There wasn’t much to make notice of, no pictures or calendars on the wall, no radio or music box. Maybe the Franklin clock with its hands on the ten and two like stilled wings, or the rio lamp also on the fire board, or the woodstove with the word RAVEN embossed on its iron door. He’d notice the two nailed-together crates that held the books Miss Calicut had given her and probably the flour barrel and butter churn beside the washstand. But nothing bright and pretty like the flute.
When he came into the front room, Laurel saw that the overalls were a decent enough fit. She poured him more coffee and a cup for herself and sat down with him. The man acted near starved from how fast he ate the slavered cornbread, but he didn’t make notice of wanting more until it was offered. When he’d finally got enough, Laurel filled their coffee cups again.
“My name’s Laurel, though I guess there’s not much cause to tell you. It’s not like you can say it if you had need to, but I still like you knowing, especially now that I know your name. Is that what you answer to, Walter?”
The man nodded.
“My brother’s name is Hank. You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand. He don’t complain but his lot in life is the harder for it, at least in most ways. Not being able to talk, that’s got to be burdensome too. I’d think it could make you feel a lavish of aloneness. After my daddy died and Hank was over in France, I was here by myself and it was a hard row to hoe. I guess your music helps you to feel less lonesome, but I’ve never had anything like that.”
