by Silas House
“I’m only allowed to give out two listings per call, sir,” she said, polite but firm. “But I only have three. Hold, please.”
A computer voice rattled off three phone numbers and Clay jotted them on the inside of a book of rolling papers Cake had left on the coffee table. He clicked off the phone, lay it on his chest, and sat back on the couch. He stalled as long as he could, then finally picked up the phone again.
No answer. He tried the next number and stubbed his cigarette out while the phone rang. After twenty rings, a teenage girl said hello, hateful and quick, in a questioning tone.
“Hello, is this the Stampers’?”
“Yeah, who is this?”
“I’m trying to reach a man by the name of Bradley Stamper. Is this his house?” He heard his own nervousness and was afraid that his voice would crack, like the voice of a boy calling a girl for the first time.
“No.” He could sense that she was thinking about what else to say. “Why would you want up with him?”
“He was a friend of my mother’s. She passed away when I was little, and I was just trying to find out some things about her.”
“That was my uncle,” she said, and paused as if she expected him to say something else.
Was, he heard her say, and didn’t reply.
“He got kilt in Vietnam. They tole my family that he was a MIA, but they finally give up, I guess. My granny still won’t accept it, but my daddy thinks he’s dead.”
Clay couldn’t believe how easily these words came out of her mouth. He felt like he was watching himself from far up in the air. The house was full of winter silence, and it seemed to press in on him. He was suddenly burning up, so he walked across the room and opened one of the windows, letting in crisp air.
“Mister, you still there?” the girl asked.
“Are your people Catholic?” he asked. His mouth was so dry that chalky strands of saliva stretched from the corners of his lips like strings. He couldn’t swallow.
The girl cackled out laughing. “Lord no! If my granny heard you say that, she’d die stone-hammer dead. My granddaddy was a Holiness preacher for ages.”
“Well, thank you. I appreciate your help.” He hung up before she said good-bye, and put his face into his hands. He felt guilty at his lack of grief, but still felt like crying. No tears would come. He held his palm up, studying the medallion, and realized that he had never even missed his father. Only now that he realized that he was a part of two whole people—their creation together—did he feel this new emptiness.
He put the Saint Christopher necklace around his neck, felt the cold of the medallion on his skin spreading out over his chest and down into his arms, and lay his head back on the seat of the couch. There was no intense sensation issuing from the medallion now—it was just cold. He wished for some feeling, prayed that his father’s spirit might enter him, but nothing came. Things of the spirit never came when you asked for them. He looked up at the ceiling, one hand flat on the floor, the other running a finger over the raised figures of the medal: a man packing a child on his back.
CLAY AWOKE THE next morning on the couch, curled up with his knees under his chin. He could see his breath seeping out white on the air and jumped up quickly, as if someone were watching him. He closed all of the windows, wondering how in the hell he had slept in such cold. He looked at his hand to see if the medallion had left an imprint on his palm, but it hadn’t.
He showered quickly, the hot water stinging his cold skin, and dressed while his coffee brewed. Then he was heading down the highway with the radio turned all the way up. He held a cigarette between the fingers of his driving hand and balanced the coffee cup with his other. A light snow fell like flour across his windshield. The mountains were very gray and the river did not move.
He drove through the town, which hadn’t awoken yet, and up over the high, winding road to Victory. He turned down into a short holler and saw Evangeline’s small rented house sitting there, pushed back into the mountain.
ALMA HADN’T GONE to bed at all the night before and was still standing in the middle of her room sliding the bow over her fiddle. A new tune had come into her mind late in the night, and she had not been able to go to bed for trying to make music out of it. Evangeline didn’t care—she could have slept through a full orchestra, and besides, she hadn’t gotten home until nearly five o’clock, just two hours ago.
When a song came to Alma, she couldn’t do anything until she had picked the right sound out of her mind. The fiddle seemed to take control of her, but only when the music was just right, only when Alma’s fingers were able to find that ancient, singular place on the neck. Now, as she played with her head tilted to the side and eyes shut, it seemed she stood above the floor, dancing about the room without moving her feet.
The song intensified, becoming wild and uncontained, and the fiddle took over. It pushed her arm up, pulled it down, made her fingers go where they needed to be.
Evangeline knocked open the door so hard that the doorknob banged back and left a mark on the wall. “Can’t you hear, dammit? He’s knocking so long he woke me up.”
“Who?”
Evangeline breathed out hard. She couldn’t even open her eyes, they were so heavy, and she leaned against the door frame as if she were about to drift back to sleep. “What about who?” Despite her grogginess, she managed to mock Alma in a little girl voice. “It’s Prince Charles, for all I care. Go see your own damn self.”
Evangeline padded down the hallway with Alma close on her heels, still holding on to her fiddle. Alma considered Evangeline’s short concert T-shirt with her Looney Tunes panties showing beneath.
“I hope to God you didn’t go to the door like that,” she said.
“Well, I did,” Evangeline said, and fell onto her bed.
Clay stood in the door looking like a cigarette ad. Tight Levi’s, a corduroy jacket, straight white teeth, and that clean, wavy hair. He held a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
• • •
THEY DROVE TO LONDON and ate at a truck stop by the interstate, where coal trucks and eighteen-wheelers slid off the ramps onto I-75, speeding toward Lexington and Cincinnati, Knoxville and Atlanta. They ate breakfast and fed quarters to the jukebox. Finally, Clay got up and went to the pay phones at the front of the restaurant. Alma watched as he flipped through the phone book quickly and then came back to the table with a thin, wrinkled page of the book in his hand.
He smoothed the page on the table and pointed at a name. “Lookee here. They’s only three Stampers in the London directory, and that girl said my grandpaw was a preacher. Look.”
Alma leaned very close to the table and read aloud: “‘Stamper, Reverend Lee and Belle, Thirty-five Slate Ridge Road.’”
“Reverend,” Clay says. “That has to be them. Them’s my grandparents. Lee and Belle Stamper.”
“You ought to go there, Clay,” Alma said, and put her hand atop his.
“Naw, I wouldn’t know how to go about something like that.”
The waitress approached, holding a pot of coffee high in the air. Alma scooted her cup to the edge of the table. “If you don’t want to talk to em, just drive by and see where your daddy growed up.”
“You want some more coffee, honey?” the waitress asked Clay.
“One more cup,” he said, and looked across at Alma to let her know he didn’t want to talk about this in front of a stranger.
The waitress pulled a green ticket pad out of her apron pocket with her free hand. “You all interested in pie?” she asked.
“I’m not,” Clay said.
“Ma’am, do you know where Slate Ridge is, here in London?” Alma asked, before Clay could stop her.
The waitress set the coffeepot down on the table, as if she was used to giving directions and knew that it usually took awhile to explain. “Lord, yeah. It’s down the road a ways, little place called Hawk. Easy to find.”
“Just turn right out of the parking lot here and go straight on the main road. You’ll pass an old coal tipple that’s been shut down awhile. And two or three little jottemdown stores. Go over the bridge and you’ll be in Hawk. They’s a big sawmill soon as you get into Hawk—you’ll smell it before you see it, the way it’s been raining. Sawdust stinks worse than anything in the world when it sours.” The waitress paused long enough to nod and wink to a man who had come in and tipped his hat to her. “Right there, you’ll turn and go up Slate Ridge. That mountain goes way back up in there.”
It was easy to find. As soon as they started up the mountain, Clay had Alma looking for mailbox numbers. The boxes bore neither addresses nor names. They saw an old man stacking firewood up against his house, and Alma leaned out the window to ask where Lee Stamper lived. The old man refused to holler out the information and took a long time about walking away from his rick of wood to lean on the truck door and ask Alma to repeat her question.
“Now, old Preacher Stamper is dead, but his wife still lives up here,” he said, and spat tobacco juice into the ditch beside the road. He gave them directions and added, “Hope you all wasn’t trying to find him and ask him to marry you all, cause he’s sure been dead two year.”
The house sat back away from the road, but it was close enough for Clay to take in every detail. He stopped right in the road, leaned on the steering wheel, and sized up the place. The house was built in the old way, with two front doors coming out onto the porch, which most likely meant that it had no hallways within and each room led into the next, making a U from one front door to the other. The porch was crowded with a dozen plastic chairs that could be stacked atop one another. There was a porch swing whose chains had been gathered up so that the arms of the swing touched the porch ceiling. A thin line of smoke made its way out of the chimney, as if a fire had just been started in the grate. The yard was wide and flat, with a huge snowball bush to one side and a row of apple trees lining the driveway. The snowball bush had a large circle of worn-away branches that suggested children had used its fragrant, flexible limbs to make a playhouse beneath the cover of summer foliage. An older-model Ford truck with a camper shell sat in the driveway. There were two stickers on either side of the bumper. One read JESUS IS SOON COMING, and the other announced NRA. Beyond the truck, he could see a car house sitting behind the house, an old metal Nehi sign nailed to its side. Two small mountains came together behind the house and sloped down toward each other like the place where a woman’s hip meets the side of her belly.
“That’s it,” Clay said. “That’s where my daddy growed up.”
“Clay, won’t you go to the door? You ain’t got a thing to lose. If you don’t, you’ll wonder about it from now on.”
Clay said nothing and acted as if he had not even heard her. He kept his eyes on the house. He knew his own grandmother was sitting inside, but there was no use in going in there and introducing himself. He saw no reason to start a relationship that had no beginning.
“I just can’t do it,” he said. “One of these days I might, but not now.”
“It’s what you ought to do,” she said. “You bound to have wanted to, or else you wouldn’t have come got me so early this morning and come to Laurel County. I’ll go right in there with you.”
Clay shifted the truck back into drive and pulled away. “Not now,” he said. He spoke carefully, afraid she might hear the tremor in his voice. “I just wanted to see where my daddy growed up.”
They drove home without speaking. Alma sat close to him, one hand on his leg, listening to the hum of the tires on the blacktop. All the way home, he tried to picture what his father had looked like. He never had seen a picture of him and was certain that he never would.
12
GOD WAS LOOSE in the church house, and the Holy Ghost ran rampant among the people, sizzling through the air and hitting the women until they were forced to shake with wild abandon, succumbing to the spirit, throwing their heads back and speaking in unknown tongues, dancing out into the pews and rushing round and round the church, swaying like waterless swimmers in front of the altar, screaming loudly and taking off to run up and down the aisle.
The men stood with their arms raised heavenward, their eyes tightly shut, their mouths moving with silent prayers. The pastor paced back and forth on the altar, throwing his arms straight up while he shouted, “Have your way, Lord! Have your way!” The guitarist ripped his strap from around his torso, threw his guitar down, and began moving about the altar. He had never received the Holy Ghost before, and when he began to call out in tongues, the whole congregation felt the breath of God upon them. They danced and hollered, shouted and swayed.
Only Easter stood still. Her hands clenched the pew in front of her as she stood with her head bent low. Surely the Lord was among them, she knew that, but she could not feel him this Sunday night. It was like being sober and walking into a honky-tonk at midnight: everyone else so happy, so filled with life, while you felt nothing in particular. She couldn’t understand why she was being left out, and she kept her eyes shut tightly, praying that the spirit would come to her.
Guilt rested upon her soul as heavily as the spirit weighed on everyone else around her. Why was she condemned to feel such pain for something that was really not her fault, something that would have happened regardless of what she had said? She kept going back to that day while the rest of the congregation churned about her.
It was New Year’s Day, and it had been snowing ever since the night before. The cold was bitter, more severe and freezing than Easter could remember its having been in a long while. She had awakened with a feeling of dread and burden but had no clear sight as to what was troubling her. She tried to shake the uneasy feeling and go about her chores.
El was stuck on the interstate somewhere between Black Banks and Cincinnati, so she was left to fend for herself during the storm. She had to get coal to feed the Stokermatic. She put on a heavy mackinaw and a pair of El’s work boots and trudged out in the knee-deep snow with coal bucket in hand. The snow had stopped that morning around daybreak. Easter had heard all of her life that sometimes it got too cold to snow. She felt the cold grind into her bones and set into her teeth.
A large drift had shaped itself right in front of the lean-to. She got a shovel out of the pump house and cleared a way into the coal. The snow was so thick that it seemed as heavy as clotted dirt. She bent over to gather the first pieces of coal and nearly blacked out. She was not one to give up easily, but her head swam around so fast that she feared passing out and falling into the drift. She carried the empty bucket back into the house. When she got inside, the phone was ringing, and her fingers were so numb that she dropped the receiver on the table before she was able to regain some feeling and bring the phone up to her ear.
“Easter?” Anneth said from the other end of the line. “We’ve got the rest of my stuff from Glenn’s and we’re fixing to head home. I was afraid you’d call up here while we was on our way and be worried to death.”
“You better just stay there at Lolie’s until this snow melts,” Easter said breathlessly. “Hain’t no way you’ll make it over Buffalo Mountain in this.”
“Naw, I’m coming home, now. Clay don’t like staying in a strange place, and he’s begging to come home. Besides, we done went all the way over to Glenn’s and got my stuff, and we didn’t have no trouble. We’ll be taking it slow, though, so I’ll see you in a little while. Love ye.”
“Anneth!” Easter said into the dial tone. She slammed the phone down and went to the stove to warm her hands. She said a silent prayer: Lord, watch over my people.
It was always something with Anneth. Never mind a winter storm or closed-down roads or whatever. She had quit Glenn after the New Year’s Eve party where they had fought in front of everyone. Anneth had called early this morning.
“I’ve quit him this time. I’ll never go back to him.”
“Where
you at right now, then?” Easter had asked.
“Over at Jewel’s.”
“At his sister’s house! You ought not be there, if you’re wanting rid of him.”
Anneth had talked very clearly, as if she had everything figured out at last. “She knows how Glenn is. She takes up for me over him. Besides, she lives right over next to Israel and Lolie. Israel said he’d help me load my stuff up and bring me to your house.”
Easter had swallowed her coffee hard. “In this big snowstorm?”
“I need to do this today, Easter. It’s my New Year’s resolution—get plumb and final broke away from Glenn Couch—and that’s what I’m going to do, blizzard or no blizzard,” Anneth had said. “If I don’t get my stuff right now, I’ll never get shed of him.”
“You can get that stuff later, Anneth. Just stay still,” Easter had said.
“No, I’m going, now. Lolie’ll keep Clay while I run over there. He’s still asleep. He stayed there last night while we went partying,” Anneth had said. “We’ll be all right. Glenn’s still laying drunk up his brother’s house, and I know that big coward—he won’t be going back home until this snow lets up.”
“What if he is home, though? He’ll go absolutely wild if he sees you there, come to get all of your stuff.”
“You worry too much, Easter,” Anneth had said.
That had been hours ago.
Easter said another prayer and ventured back outside. The day was so gray and overcast that it looked like early dusk. The sky churned and seemed to moan overhead, like some sick living thing. She raked coal into the bucket and took it inside to dump in the pail that stood by the stove, then went outside again to fill the extra bucket. As soon as she stepped outside, she heard a vehicle making its way up the holler.
The vehicle, a rusty green four-by-four that she recognized as Glenn’s work truck, pulled into Easter’s driveway. As she sat the coal bucket on the back stoop, she saw him come around the side of the house with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He was an extremely tall man—tall in the way she remembered men being in her childhood, when men seemed bigger and more stout—and he always wore a derby hat, just as men had when she was little. She figured this was what had attracted Anneth to him in the first place, this singular sense of style, this big presence he had. When he entered a room, he filled it up and everyone looked his way.
