The Cove

by Ron Rash

  “I got muscadine wine in the larder,” Laurel said to Walter. “You’d be better off drinking it than what’s festering in that jug, especially come morning.”

  She went inside and got the bottle and two tin cups. She poured some in a cup and swallowed, tasted the deep purple of the muscadines. Laurel handed the cup to Walter.

  “Taste of it,” she said.

  He sipped from the cup and nodded.

  “You go ahead and drink that,” Laurel said, and poured herself half a cup.

  She took another swallow and felt the wine dribble down her throat.

  “Anybody else want some?” Laurel asked, but all the men, including Hank, shook their heads.

  “But you haven’t tried this, Hank,” she said, and offered him the cup. “I made it last September while you were gone.”

  “I’m fine with what’s in that jug,” Hank answered.

  “Just a taste,” Laurel said, still holding the cup out.

  “No,” Hank said firmly, looking away.

  How long will it be before you’ll let me and Carolyn drink from the same dipper, Laurel was tempted to ask.

  Hank turned to Ansel.

  “What do you hear about Paul?”

  “The telegram said his lungs is scorched. Hurt his eyes too but he ain’t blinded, and that’s a blessing for there’s many what have been. But he won’t never be the man he was. That’s some sorry bastards to use gas like that.”

  “Even in a war, you’d think some things wouldn’t be allowed,” Boyce added.

  “Yes, you’d think so,” Slidell said, then more softly, “but it never seems the way of it. Hank knows that as much as I do.”

  “No, what happened to you was worse,” Hank said. “I was a soldier, not a child.”

  For a few moments the men were quiet. Walter had finished the wine but shook his head when Laurel offered more. She finished her cup and set it beside the bottle as well.

  “They say for sure yet when Paul’s coming home?” Slidell asked.

  “He’ll be in that Washington hospital till November,” Ansel said. “If he’s doing okay then, they’ll send him home.”

  “Feith’s talking up a big to-do when Paul’s train comes in,” Boyce added, “having a band and letting the schoolkids come and all such doings.”

  “I bet Miss Calicut will have her class go,” Laurel said.

  “She best not for their sake,” Hank said. “Feith is liable to sign them up.”

  “That’s the God’s truth,” Ansel agreed. “He’s a gung-ho fellow for getting a body volunteered and over to the fight.”

  “Except if that fellow is his ownself,” Hank said.

  “Having a rich daddy does have advantages when a war starts up,” Boyce said. “Get to put on a uniform and no one within a thousand miles who’ll kill you for the wearing of it.”

  “He still got those school lads dandied up in shirts and britches?” Hank asked.

  “He was last Saturday,” Boyce said. “Feith struts them around like peacocks, all the while them saluting and yes sirring him. Gives him something to do when he’s not bedeviling that German professor.”

  “Feith claims him for a Hun sympathizer, maybe even a spy,” Ansel added. “Yes, sir, Sergeant Feith and his troops will be storming that college any day now, dodging chalk and erasers all the while.”

  “Makes me and Ansel glad we don’t get to town much,” Boyce said. “It’s bad enough to hear about such nonsense, much less see it.”

  Slidell lifted his guitar from the case and leaned close to the instrument. He plucked each string and then turned the wooden pegs until he was satisfied.

  “Fetch out your dulcimer, Boyce,” Slidell said, and turned to Hank. “These boys said they can’t stay long.”

  Boyce opened the case and settled the dulcimer on his lap, a raven feather in his right hand. Walter was looking at the dulcimer intently.

  “You ever played one of those?” Laurel asked.

  Walter shook his head.

  “But you’ve heard one before?”

  Walter nodded.

  Slidell and Boyce began to play and Ansel joined in. As Ansel sang And there’s no sickness, toil, or danger in that bright world to which we go, Laurel wondered if Walter believed what the song claimed, that there was a place where no one got sick and the lame walked and he would be able to speak. But what good did that do in the here and now. It gave you some hope, Laurel supposed, and that was something, but it didn’t change the day to day very much.

  “That was a good one,” Hank said as the men paused and passed the jug.

  “Amazing how a couple of drinks always makes my guitar sound better,” Slidell said. “I guess some of the fumes seep into the wood and oil the squeaks out of it.”

  Slidell turned to Walter.

  “Get that fife of yours and join us.”

  Walter hesitated.

  “I’ll fetch it for you,” Laurel told him, and went inside.

  “I’ve not seen a fife like that one,” Slidell said when she returned with the flute. “Mind if I have a gander?”

  She handed it to him. Slidell let the flute balance in his palm, measuring the weight as he read the words etched on it. Slidell whistled softly and handed the flute back.

  “Pure silver and made in Paris. Good thing it was there instead of Vienna. If it had been, Sergeant Feith would claim you’re bunging spy notes in it.”

  The men began “Shady Grove.” Walter listened to the first verse and then raised the flute to his mouth. He entered the song so smoothly that Laurel wouldn’t have known he was playing except his fingers moved and lips rounded. It wasn’t so much a soaring sound but something on the song’s surface, like a water strider crossing a creek pool.

  “You two are going down a trail I can’t follow,” Boyce soon said, and raised his hands palms up as if surrendering.

  Ansel quit singing as Walter and Slidell played on. The guitar and flute tightly wove their sounds and then untangled them, did that several times until Slidell shook his head and the guitar’s strings stilled. Walter played on for a few more notes. When it was over, the only sound was the fyce grinding the bone.

  “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard,” Boyce finally said. “It makes me want to turn this dulcimer into a ball swatter.”

  “You two ought to haul that down to Asheville,” Ansel added. “They’s folks will pay cash money for music handsome as that.”

  “There’s a blessingness in the having heard it,” Laurel said, touching Walter’s forearm and leaving it there for a few moments.

  “More Walter than me,” Slidell said. “I was the caboose dragged along by the engine.”

  They played on, Slidell drinking alone now.

  “Be careful, Slidell,” Hank warned. “That stuff’s going to light up your head like a stick of dynamite.”

  “It’s same as snake poison,” Slidell replied. “Keep getting bit and it don’t hurt you near as bad.”

  Darkness filled the cove now but for the lantern’s yellow smudge. Boyce looked toward the notch and laid the dulcimer back in its case.

  “Time to go,” he said to his brother, who nodded and stood.

  “Just a couple more songs,” Slidell said, but the brothers stepped off the porch.

  Slidell put up his guitar and rose as well, wavering as he stood. He lifted the jug, tilted it but nothing sloshed.

  “Ah, me,” Slidell sighed. “Nary a thing left but a skullbuster come morning.”

  The three men mounted their horses and went up the trail, the lantern’s glow quickly vanishing.

  “Time for bed,” Hank said, “at least for me.”

  Walter was about to rise and go inside as well, but Laurel let her hand settle on his forearm.

  “Thank you for playing your flute.”

>   She searched for something more to say, but the words had been held inside too long. They would be heard by a man she didn’t know, a man who even if he understood what she was trying to say, could not tell her so.

  “I guess we’d best go on in,” Laurel said. “I know you’re tired.”

  It was Walter who rose first, but not before he’d settled his hand over hers a few moments, as though he had some inkling, Laurel thought, of what had been left unspoken.

  Chapter Nine

  Where we going now, sir?” Wilber, the younger brother, asked.

  Chauncey pointed to a building with wide steps and marble pillars.

  “Is there another professor there we need to question, sir?” Jack asked.

  “No, we just need to find which German books the library has.”

  “Do we have to write down all their names too?” Wilber whined.

  “If you boys want to be dismissed, just say so and I’ll take you home,” Chauncey answered. “It’s not something Paul Clayton would do but maybe you boys haven’t got the soldier spirit like Paul.”

  “We got it, sir,” Jack said, glaring at Wilber.

  “All right then,” Chauncey said, “but we need to go by the automobile first.”

  “That professor was shaking like a wet hound,” Jack said as they walked across the campus. “He ought to be too, especially after he admitted his ownself he talked to them Germans with no one else around who understood them.”

  “I bet they got him to sneak secret messages back to Kaiser Wilhelm,” Wilber said. “He could of hid them in that metal thing on his head.”

  “He’ll not do it no more though,” Jack said. “We sure set that professor straight. He won’t be going back for no more visits. I bet he won’t stir farther than he can throw his own shadow.”

  Chauncey couldn’t help but let a smile lift the corners of his mouth. Professor Mayer had been scared. There was no doubt about that. Sweat had popped out on the old fool’s brow even before claiming he’d gone to Hot Springs in the first place only because he’d been asked to read some of the Germans’ letters. But Chauncey had outslicked him there, asking why he’d kept going back to socialize with a bunch of Huns. The professor’s eyes had teared up and he’d started blubbering that it was a chance to practice his German. All the while the professor had the hearing machine clamped to his head, wires running this way and that and him fidgeting with the dial, which made him look even more ridiculous.

  When they got to the Model T, Chauncey handed Jack the ledger and fountain pen and took off his belt and holster.

  “Why are you doing that, sir?” Wilber asked.

  “Because there’s mostly women in libraries and real soldiers respect women. Seeing a pistol might give them the vapors.”

  As they walked toward the entrance, he thought of how his mother had wanted him to go to college. Chauncey, like his daddy, had argued he’d learn more about banking by being in one instead of a dusty classroom. Besides, he had never cottoned to school much, especially recess when other boys called him chicken when he wouldn’t roughhouse. He hadn’t been chicken. It was just that, unlike them, Chauncey had nice store-bought clothes he didn’t want ruined.

  When they came to the building that housed the library, Chauncey paused to study the letters chiseled above the thick oak doors. Latin or Greek, he knew, and thought how even during a war English wasn’t good enough for the college. Chauncey nodded at the boys and the three of them went through the foyer and into the library wing. On the wall was a painting of an old man who didn’t look that much different from Professor Mayer, though he didn’t have the hearing gimcrack on his head. In front of the bookshelves were wooden desks and chairs. Some were occupied by students, their books and tablets splayed out before them as they slowly turned pages or dipped their pens into ink wells and wrote. The main desk was to the right. They moved to the room’s center, the boys wide eyed at the tall ceilings and row after row of filled shelves. A male student came to the front desk with a book, an audible click as the librarian stamped the inside cover. It wasn’t Miss Yount but a student assistant. A pretty young woman, another reason to be glad Miss Yount wasn’t there. As the male student passed them on his way out, he didn’t meet Chauncey’s eyes. Too embarrassed, Chauncey knew, because he was hiding out at a college when real men were fighting a war. Chauncey looked beyond the tables and chairs to where books were lined up row after row as if poised for an attack.

  “Come on,” he told the boys.

  As they passed the front desk, Chauncey saw that the student librarian was even prettier than he’d first thought, rosy cheeks and eyes a deep blue. Her perfume smelled like roses. She smiled at him and he was tempted to smile back but a serious demeanor was more appropriate. Still, Chauncey had obviously made a good impression. He’d come back some other time, without the boys. They went into the stacks and began checking book spines. He went through five shelves before he found letters that weren’t English, but the books were in languages other than German. They’ve hidden them, he thought, but there were more foreign books on the next shelf. He found one that looked promising and compared it with the book confiscated from Professor Mayer. Chauncey studied the page in the library book first.

  Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher

  verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

  Then he looked at the professor’s book.

  Widerspreche ich mich?

  Na gut . . . ich widerspreche mich

  Ich bin geraümig . . . ich enthalte Massen.

  It was like deciphering a secret code as he searched for similar words. He looked farther down the pages and found one match and then another and then a third. He handed the library book to Jack and then others until both boys had their arms full.

  “Take them over to an empty table,” Chauncey said.

  There were thirty-seven. Chauncey opened his ledger and took out the fountain pen he’d used at the savings and loan. Customers noticed the pen’s gold cap and gold bands but, more important, they saw how solid and sturdy the pen was, and by extension the institution itself. When Chauncey wrote up a payment or a loan, he didn’t have to keep dipping the pen in an inkwell like a chicken pecking corn. His words flowed with a steady assurance. He wrote Mars Hill Library on the ledger’s second page, skipped a line, and began copying book titles. The language looked sinister, especially the two dots that resembled a rattlesnake bite. The words could mean anything.

  He peeked over at the front desk. The pretty student was still there but now Miss Yount had joined her. It seemed the old hag had been around Mars Hill forever and everyone kowtowed to her. She had a sharp tongue and no qualms about using it on anyone from a sassy child to Preacher Wilkenson. Miss Yount was tall too, especially with her hair balled up on her head. Jack handed him the last book and he wrote down the title. The table was covered with books and Chauncey thought how he’d be doing a service for Mars Hill and the whole country if he took a match and dropped it on them. Old and dusty as they were, they’d burn quick as that Hun zeppelin did in New Jersey. As he closed the ledger, Chauncey glimpsed his letter to Governor Bickett. He reminded himself to mail it before he took Traveler out for an afternoon gallop.

  “We’ve done important work today,” Chauncey said and capped the fountain pen. “Maybe it’s not so exciting but lots of times that’s the way it is in the army. Even at the front you spend more of your time waiting than shooting or bayoneting the enemy.”

  They were walking toward the door when Miss Yount came around her desk and blocked their departure.

  “What are you doing?”

  Chauncey didn’t like Miss Yount being so close. She smelled of horehound and talc and her hair hovered over him like a cannonball. The steel-rimmed glasses made her eyes big and bulgy.

  “I was checking for books that might be written to aid the enemy.”

&nbs
p; “Did you find any?” Miss Yount asked. “If so, I’ll need to take them out of fiction and poetry and shelve them in the rhetoric section.”

  Chauncey glanced over at the front desk and saw the young librarian listened.

  “I won’t know until I send the titles to Washington,” Chauncey answered, putting some barb in his voice too.

  “Be that as it may,” Miss Yount said, “you aren’t leaving this library until those books are shelved and in the right order.”

  Chauncey met her eyes, knowing she expected him to cower like some snotty-nosed brat or lackey at the general store. He kept his eyes right on hers and didn’t blink.

  “I am not a student, Miss Yount. I am a soldier.”

  “A soldier,” she said. “Then why aren’t you in Europe?”

  Chauncey knew his face reddened but he wasn’t going to look down or to the side or anywhere else besides into her ugly old gogglified eyes.

  “These boys need to go home,” he said. “They have their evening chores to do.”

  “You won’t need them,” Miss Yount answered.

  Chauncey thought about stepping around her but he knew she’d block him and that would only make it worse. He noticed the student librarian still smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile like earlier.

  “Go outside and wait for me,” he told the boys. “I need to talk to Miss Yount alone.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, his voice sullen.

  Chauncey waited for the boys to get through the door.

  “I’d not normally do this, but I will this time.”

  He didn’t look at the student librarian as he passed the main desk. Chauncey thought about whistling to show putting the books back didn’t bother him one whit. But as he placed the books on the shelf, a better idea came to him. He turned so Miss Yount couldn’t see and took out his fountain pen. On the first page of a book, he wrote Miss Yount is a Hun loving . . . Chauncey paused. It was a word he had heard only a couple of times and never seen spelled. Either way, she’ll know what it means, he figured, and wrote kunt. He set the book back and wedged Professor Mayer’s book onto the shelf as well.