The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  Hubert took the knife from his pocket and handed it to his father.

  “What you going to do to him?” Hubert asked.

  “What’s got to be done,” the elder Toomey said. “Now go on and get those damn machetes.”

  Hubert started walking toward the farmhouse.

  “I’m sorry I have to do this, son,” Carlton said.

  The knife blade made a clicking sound as it locked into place. Travis squeezed his eyes shut. For a few moments the only sound was the gurgle of the creek, and he remembered how it was the speckled trout that had brought him here. He remembered how you could not see the orange fins and red flank spots but only the dark backs in the rippling water. And how it was only when they lay gasping on the green bank moss that you realized how bright and pretty they were.

  August 12, 1852

  A.M.

  Summoned to Franklin Farm.

  Nance Franklin, age 34.

  Complaint: Female bleeding.

  Diagnosis: Excessive uterine haemorrhage.

  Treatment: Tincture of valerian. Black haw tea. Cold cloths

  applied to abdomen.

  Twelve P.M.

  Haemorrhage lessening. Continue to apply cloths and minister

  with valerian, black haw tea.

  One P.M.

  Bleeding arrested. Pallor improved. Pulse firm.

  Treatment: Bed rest for week. Dose of Dover’s Powder once

  daily. Black haw tea twice daily.

  Fee: Four dollars. Days work repairing my roof by two

  oldest sons.

  P.M.

  Dewy Morton, age 10.

  Complaint: Arm hurt in fall from barn loft.

  Diagnosis: Fracture of tibia, left arm.

  Treatment: Laudanum to set arm.

  Splint, cloth sling. Wear four weeks.

  Return to confirm salutory mending.

  Fee: One dollar, twenty-five cents.

  Paid with shoeing of horse.

  Royce McCall, age 31.

  Complaint: Fits, frothing at mouth.

  Diagnosis: Epilepsy.

  Treatment: Half-dram solution of iodine and iodide potash

  twice daily. Avoid excessive agitations of body and mind.

  Note: Next time in Asheville order Dunglison’s Treatise on

  Special Pathology and Therapeutics.

  Fee: One dollar. Paid with eight pounds butter.

  Attended lecture in Asheville by Doctor Justice on Botanic

  Medicine. Confirmed my views on eschewing cupping and

  blistering of patients and felicitous use of plants. Must devote

  further study to injurious symptoms of mineral preparations.

  TWO

  When he woke there was so little light he thought it must be night. The inside of his mouth felt tacked over with sandpaper. His ankle and head throbbed and his mind was stirred up like murky water. But it soon began to clear. Travis heard at first what he thought his own heart but soon realized the sound was the ticking of a clock. His eyes began adjusting to the dim light and he found himself in a room. He lay in a bed and a frayed quilt covered him to his neck, above a bare yellow lightbulb. Venetian blinds allowed in a few dim, motey stripes of sun. Enough to realize it was not full dark but early evening.

  Travis raised up on his elbows and the leg caught fire, not just where the trap had bit into his leg but lower. He remembered feeling the knife blade settle not on his throat but his heel. Carlton Toomey had worked almost delicately, using a slow, sawing motion. At first it hadn’t hurt enough to override the pain from the trap. Then he’d felt the Achilles tendon snap apart like a thick rubber band. Travis didn’t remember anything after that.

  A voice came from the room’s far corner.

  “I’d not try to move much.”

  Travis looked toward the voice, trying not to move anything below his neck.

  Carlton Toomey sat in a ladderback chair, dressed in the same work clothes he’d had on earlier. Travis remembered more quickly now, scattered images and thoughts put back in proper sequence. He remembered scaling the falls, the click of the trap, everything up to the moment he’d passed out the last time.

  Travis’s throat was so dry his voice was nothing more than an unintelligible raspy whisper.

  Carlton Toomey left the room and came back with a quart jar filled with water. Hubert came in the room as well and leaned in an easygoing way against the wall. Hubert had changed into jeans and a flannel shirt with its sleeves hacked just below the shoulders. He still wore the beads. Love beads, that’s what they’re called, Travis thought.

  “Here,” Carlton Toomey said, and lifted Travis’s head.

  Travis sipped until the glass was empty. Water had no taste, most folks claimed, but Travis knew if they’d been thirsty as he was they’d know that it did. Not like anything else you’d ever tasted, not like that at all, but the clear, cool tang he’d smelled in deep, mossy woods after a long rain. The water helped him think better, maybe because one bodily alarm bell had been stilled. The pain in his head and leg seemed to pull back a bit as well.

  “Hate I had to take that knife to your foot,” Toomey said, “but we got to be certain sure you don’t forget there’s a price to be paid for stealing. I’m of a mind you got off easy. There’s places in this world they’d have cut your hand off.”

  “I need to get to the doctor,” Travis said.

  Carlton nodded.

  “That’s where we’re soon enough headed. But some things got to be made clear first about what you’re going to say when we get there.”

  “You’re gonna regret this,” Hubert said. “We best put him below the falls. It ain’t too late.”

  “We’re not doing that,” Carlton Toomey said, “so shut up about it.” He turned back to Travis. “The quicker we get some things clear the sooner we go to the hospital. If we dodder around here too long that ankle likely could get infected, especially with a rusty old trap germing it up. They might have to chop that leg of yours plumb off. You hear me?”

  “Yes sir.” Travis wanted to say more but the pain made it hard to talk.

  “You’re going to tell whatever busybody wants to know that you fell climbing the falls. Not a word about that trap neither. You never was on my land and you never saw no pot plants. The only reason we showed up was you yelling for help. You understand?”

  “Yes sir,” he said again.

  Hubert stepped closer to the bed. He was a big man, though not as big as his father. His nose had been broken, maybe more than once, enough that it swerved to the right, making his whole face appear misaligned. He looked at Travis as though he were nothing more than a groundhog or possum they’d caught.

  “He ain’t going to do it, Daddy. Soon as he gets to that hospital he’ll be testifying like a damn tent-revival preacher.”

  “He’ll do like we tell him,” Carlton Toomey said. “Travis here is smart. Smart enough to outslick us twice, smart enough to keep his mouth shut now.”

  “I won’t tell,” Travis said, and he was suddenly more afraid than he’d been before, because he remembered the hawkbill’s blade, how for a moment he thought that blade was going to slit his throat. “I swear it, Mr. Toomey.”

  “Then tell it back at me what you’re going to say when we get there.”

  Travis told how he’d fallen trying to climb the falls, how the Toomeys had found him. The words came hard, and a skim of sweat covered his face when he’d finished.

  “One other thing,” Carlton Toomey said. “Who’d you sell them plants to?”

  He didn’t bother to hesitate or lie.

  “Leonard Shuler.”

  “He know where you got them from?”

  “No sir.”

  “Didn’t go out of his way to ask, I bet,” Hubert said to his father.

  Carlton nodded, his eyes on Travis.

  “Satisfied him to act like them plants fell out of the sky, and you just shackling along with nothing more to do than stretch your arms out and
catch them.” Carlton turned the glass in his hand, the same way he might test a doorknob. “That seems to be more and more a problem around here,” he said, “people thinking anything they happen across is theirs for the taking.”

  Travis shifted his leg slightly.

  “My leg’s hurting bad,” he said.

  “It’s likely to hurt more when we start moving you,” Carlton said. He turned to his son. “We best get to it.”

  The two men lifted Travis from the bed and the pain returned, reverberating through his body until they laid him in the car’s backseat. He knew the men had been working on this vehicle, not the green pickup, because the hood was still up. For a few moments Travis had a terrible fear that it would not start, that the Toomeys would have to do more repairs while he waited in the backseat. But Carlton Toomey slammed the hood shut and got in.

  “Take the truck and get them plants down to Dooley,” he told his son before cranking the engine. “We’ll meet back here.”

  “What about the pills?”

  Carlton Toomey nodded at a paper bag in the floorboard.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Carlton Toomey said. “I know someone obliged to take them off our hands.”

  They bumped out of the yard and onto a dirt road leading to the two-lane.

  “It won’t be long now,” Toomey said, but it seemed forever to Travis because the fire in his leg hadn’t dimmed much since they’d laid him in the car. What Carlton Toomey had said about the bear trap’s rusty steel worried him. Old Man Jenkins had once told about a man up near Flag Pond who’d gotten lockjaw from rusty barbed wire. The man had lost his ability to swallow and drowned from a cup of water his wife poured down his throat.

  Travis raised his head slightly, spoke to the back of Toomey’s head.

  “Make sure they give me a tetanus shot,” Travis said, gasping the last word as they hit another bump.

  Carlton Toomey’s dark eyes appeared in the driver’s mirror. The eyes seemed disembodied, as if they’d slipped free from the face.

  “I’ll try and remember to do that,” the big man said. His gaze returned to the road but he continued speaking. “There’s probably near a million ways a man can die, but I reckon not many would outworse your throat clamping shut on you.”

  They were in Marshall before either spoke again.

  “You ain’t forgot what you’re to say?”

  “No sir,” Travis said.

  He felt the car turn a last time and stop, then hands eased him out of the backseat. He opened his eyes to be sure those hands did not belong to one of the Toomeys. Two men dressed in white laid him on a gurney as Carlton Toomey’s face loomed over him a last time, close enough that he could smell tobacco and onion.

  “See, I told you I’d get you here,” Toomey said softly. “I kept my word and you best keep yours.”

  Then the gurney was rolling and Carlton Toomey’s face fell away like something unlodged by a current. Rectangles of fluorescent light passed above Travis and he felt like he was looking out a train window, a train moving away from Toomey, and because of that he could close his eyes now and not imagine a gleaming knife blade about to slit his throat.

  CARLTON TOOMEY ARRIVED AT THE TRAILER JUST AS DARKNESS made its final ascent up from the coves and ridges to the tree line. He didn’t blow the horn, just cut off the engine and waited. Leonard was surprised the older man knew where he lived, for they’d always done their transactions at the Toomeys’ farmhouse. I don’t make house calls, Carlton had once told him.

  “You caused me a whole passel of trouble today, professor,” Toomey said. The sobriquet was one Leonard had never cared for. He’d told Carlton he’d never been a professor and was not a teacher of any kind anymore, but the elder Toomey continued to use the title, always with a little extra emphasis on the word.

  “What do you mean?” Leonard asked.

  “Your pot supplier ain’t a very good middleman. He has this interesting notion that he don’t have to pay them who growed it. He just struts up on my land and picks it like it’s no more than blackberries.”

  Today had been the hottest of the summer, the trailer near unbearable except for the cold beers Leonard had been drinking since midafternoon, so a few moments passed as he filtered Carlton Toomey’s words through the alcohol.

  “I didn’t know you were growing. I wouldn’t have bought from him if I’d known it was yours,” Leonard said, telling the truth, because Carlton Toomey was not a man you wanted to cross.

  “And it never entered your mind to ask where he was getting it?”

  Leonard’s bare feet stood on ground that, like the trailer, still retained the day’s heat. No moon was out, and the stars had yet to pitch their tents and spark their small fires. He could barely see Toomey though their faces were no more than a yard apart. He’d never realized how much darker night could be in the mountains until he’d left them, seen nights in the Carolina piedmont and the Midwest. It seemed as if the coal-dark core of the mountains flowed out on nights like this, rose all the way up to the floor of the sky.

  Toomey laughed softly.

  “I’d likely as not have asked either. Kind of like looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  A light came on as Toomey opened the glove compartment and removed a crinkled paper bag.

  “Planting that crop was Hubert’s idea. Young folks go out in the world and come back with all sorts of notions. Got that pot-growing idea from the hippies, like they’d know anything about how to make do in the world. Too bad that boy missed Vietnam. That would have shown him the real what’s-what. Anyway, I told him we’d try our hand at growing this year and see the worth of it. I still figure us to make a profit but there’s been more bother than I’d counted on. I’ve a mind to just stick to these pills.”

  Toomey offered the paper bag to Leonard.

  “Brought you some black beauties and some 747s. A hundred will cover it.”

  “I haven’t sold what I bought from you last week,” Leonard said.

  Toomey let his elbow settle on the window’s lower frame, the bag in abeyance between him and Leonard. He shook the bag, the capsules making a dry rattling sound as they clicked against each other.

  “Never hurts to stock up. Besides, after buying pot stole from me I’d think you right eager to prove we’re still partners. Matter of fact, if I was you I’d probably add another twenty to boot just to show it was all a misunderstanding. That or one of them Plotts. It’s getting pretty damn obvious I need me a guard dog.”

  Carlton shook the bag again.

  “That’s the sound of extra profits, professor.”

  But the dry rattling sound brought to mind something else, what Leonard had heard one morning years ago in a brush pile. He’d looked closer through the tangle of sticks and spotted the triangular head and thick coiled body. What he’d heard that morning and heard again tonight was a warning. Leonard removed five twenties and two tens from his billfold, handed them to Toomey, and took the bag.

  “Thank you,” Toomey said, vigilantly folding the bills before placing them in his shirt pocket. “Glad all this is behind us. The rest of these chuckleheads I deal with can’t figure their way out of a one-door shithouse, so it’s nice to deal with a man with some smarts about him. That’s why I done business with you in the first place. Needed the intellectual stimulation. Been good for you too. Leastways you ain’t clerking in a Seven-Eleven no more.”

  “Yes,” Leonard agreed. “It’s been good.”

  Carlton chuckled. “I’ll never forget the day I come to that store to check you out. The way I was talking to them farmers you figured me for just another simple no-sense hayseed, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think I ever figured you for simple,” Leonard said. But he knew the older man was partly right. Others loitered in the store that day and Toomey had joined their conversation about hunting and tobacco, Carlton’s diction and grammar mimicking the other men’s, making it easy to believe he was no different from those men. But onc
e the others left, Toomey had winked at Leonard conspiratorially, then talked about Jimmy Carter’s economic policy fifteen minutes before offering to expand Leonard’s side business to quaaludes and uppers. Carlton had refrained from using colloquial language or subject-verb errors during that conversation. Just to show you this one time that I do know the King’s English, the big man had said.

  Carlton placed his hands on the steering wheel and leaned his head slightly forward, as if Leonard’s words had pressed a heavy weight onto his back.

  “No, I sure ain’t simple,” he said. “Some folks blame me for every meanness done in this county, from selling heroin to stealing kids’ lollipops. Say I even killed my wife. Others say only a child of God could sing gospel the way I do. I guess I’m somewheres betwixt and between, like any another man.”

  Carlton gestured toward the bills in his pocket.

  “There’s some fellows who’d have bowed up their backs about a matter like this. Men like that just keep on being stupid till they get themselves in a real bad fix, like it did that boy.”

  Carlton Toomey paused, seemed to be waiting for Leonard to ask about the “bad fix” Travis had gotten into. But Leonard said nothing.

  The trailer’s front room lit up with a gray muted glow. Voices came from the television.

  “Still with you, is she,” Carlton said. “That girl’s like a mule following a carrot on a stick. Show her some pills and she’ll go anywhere. Of course she does put a dent in your profit margin.”

  Toomey cranked the truck but let the engine idle.

  “Not that I blame you. She’s been rode hard but there’s some pretty left in her yet. Everything has a price, I reckon.” Toomey paused. “Listen at me. I’m pontificating like I’m the teacher, not you.”

  “I’m not a teacher anymore,” Leonard said.

  Carlton Toomey turned on the headlights and put the truck in gear.

  “It’s been a damn long day. I need to get back to the house and make sure that boy of mine done what I told him. He takes after his momma in the brains department, but ain’t that ever the way of it.”