The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

Fever quietened. Pulse not as tense. Family sent to bed with

  assurances. Snow packs ceased. Continue to sponge with water

  every thirty minutes. Patient less agitated, able to sleep with

  no irksome dreams or imaginings.

  Six A.M.

  Fever lessened. No sweats. Continue to sponge every thirty

  minutes.

  Ten A.M.

  Pulse full. Fever abated. Sleeps finely now.

  Two P.M.

  Patient awake and taking broth.

  Prescription: Stay in bed three days. Continue broth. Keep away

  from drafts.

  Boneset tea three times a day.

  Fee: Five dollars. Paid with five laying bantams and cured ham.

  FIVE

  Travis and Leonard rode northward with the windows down. They took Highway 25 and turned on 208, following Laurel Fork as the valley narrowed. Soon the air blowing in through the windows grew cooler and less humid. The stream ran on the left beyond the guardrails, the water a white rush and plunge occasionally slowed by deep pools the old folks called blue holes. Travis knew some huge hook-jawed browns had been pulled from these pools, caught with minnows or bass plugs by older men who’d fish a month to get one wrist-snapping strike.

  By the time they entered Shelton Laurel the stream was diminished enough that Travis could easily jump it, no bigger than the creek that had led him to Carlton Toomey’s pot plants, the place he went back to so often in his dreams. He was always caught in the bear trap, but when he shouted for help it wasn’t the Toomeys who showed up but a dark shape-shifting presence. Only when the presence spoke did it solidify to become his father, who claimed caught in a bear trap was exactly where a no-account son like Travis deserved to be.

  They now passed tobacco fields whose rows rippled out over bottomland in lush waves. The plants were healthy, their leaves bright green like lamb’s ear, stalks tall and straight and not riven. No blue mold or yellow spots. Travis knew if he touched these leaves he’d feel the same cool leathery dampness he’d felt eight days ago in his family’s tobacco field.

  The old man hadn’t let it go, the beer in the cab, the hospital bill. The grocery store manager had felt sorry for him and given Travis his old job back. He’d worked his usual forty-five hours there, but his daddy demanded twenty hours a week on the farm as well. Travis had done that extra work, suckering and topping tobacco in the fields every evening even though he’d bagged groceries all day and his aching Achilles tendon needed to be propped up and iced. To help pay hospital costs, the old man claimed, but Travis knew it was more to punish him, the same way his daddy had once done their black-and-tan when it killed a chicken, rubbing the dog’s face in the rotting carcass every day till the chicken was nothing but mush and bones.

  Then things had become even worse. One evening his hoe hit a yellow jacket nest. The insects boiled out of the ground and swirled a stinging halo around his head. Travis jerked off his cap, swatting at them as he stumbled across the rows fast as his game leg would take him, stung seven times before he was out of their range. The poison raised white welts on his arm and face and neck. The old man had spit a plug of Beechnut from his mouth, then dabbed the wet tobacco on each sting to draw the venom, all the while acting put out with him, like Travis had done it on purpose. You ought to have been looking better, boy, his father had said. Your damn hoe would have hit them as well, Travis had mumbled softly, but not soft enough.

  He’d seen it coming, his daddy’s right hand flattening, raised like he was taking an oath before the hand came forward, slapping him so hard it felt like he’d been hit by a two-by-four. The blow sent him to the ground, where he lay sprawled across a tobacco plant. Long as you live under my roof I’ll not abide your back sass, his daddy had told him.

  His mother had stood on the porch the whole time he packed the truck, trying to talk him out of leaving, downright begging him. But all the old man said was Travis would be back in a week. You ain’t got enough man in you to go it alone, his daddy had said.

  Travis shifted gears as the land rose sharply. He imagined the old man looking out the farmhouse window for over a week now for a pickup that wasn’t coming, because Travis had more sand in him than his daddy supposed. Travis imagined more—his daddy out in the fields alone and realizing how much of the farmwork Travis had done, his daddy stove up with regret about slapping him and wishing Travis would come home so he could apologize.

  “You can tell we’re getting close,” Leonard said, staring out the passenger window.

  Travis looked out and saw nothing other than a tractor working a cornfield.

  “Look at the mailboxes,” Leonard said.

  At first Travis didn’t understand. Some were new and silvery, some little more than rusting cylinders nailed to leaning locust posts. Then he saw the name Shelton. Saw it again and then again, each mailbox looming clear a moment then whisking away as the next rushed into view. Like a fast-turning calendar, Travis thought, but with one unchanging word instead of months and days.

  “Your kin, I suppose,” Leonard said.

  “I guess so,” Travis said, and remembered something he’d been meaning to ask Leonard.

  “One summer when I was a kid we had a family reunion at my great-grandmother’s house. Her clock hadn’t been changed for daylight savings time, and I remember one of my uncles saying her doing that was because of the Civil War.”

  “Roosevelt time,” Leonard said. “That’s what they called it because Roosevelt started daylight savings time. Lincoln Republicans like your great-grandmother didn’t want to go along with a Democrat’s idea.”

  “She was remembering what happened in Shelton Laurel in 1863?”

  “Yes,” Leonard said.

  They passed a store, its gas pumps reminding Travis of old-timey diving bells, then a white clapboard church and a field some farmer had let go, full of chickweed and bull thistles. A sure sign the soil had gone poor from overgrazing, his daddy always said, claiming any farmer sorry enough to let his pasture get in such shape wasn’t worthy of farming a hog lot.

  “Turn there,” Leonard said, pointing up the road at a shotgun-frame house on the right.

  Travis turned and bumped up a washout that passed close to the house before ending abruptly.

  “They don’t mind us parking here?”

  “No, they’re used to people coming.”

  Leonard lifted the metal detector and shovel from the truck bed. Travis took the shovel, letting it dangle at his side like a rifle as they followed a faint trail through a stand of white oak. The trail slanted downward and Travis shifted more weight to his left leg, set the right foot down carefully as though afraid of a stump hole. He iced the Achilles tendon every night, did the exercises the nurse had shown him, but it still nagged like a bad tooth. Farther down honeysuckle sweetened the air, a smell that reminded Travis of Lori’s perfume.

  She was in church this morning with the rest of her family. Not too far from here, Travis knew, eight miles at the most by road, less if you had a way to cut across Roundtop Ridge. She wanted him to go to church with her, and he would, maybe next Sunday. He’d have to get up early but it’d be worth it just to have an extra hour with Lori, to sit beside her and smell her perfume, feel her hand touching his as they shared a hymnal. He liked the way Lori always reached for his hand when they were together, how that made him feel he was protecting her.

  Soon the land leveled out and they stepped onto hardtop, a broad meadow on the road’s other side. A steel historical marker stood nearby. Travis read the placard and then went into the meadow. He tried to envision it, not the killing but afterward. Late January after a blizzard, the book had said. Snow pinked by blood. The dead half buried. Travis couldn’t imagine thirteen bodies, that was too much, so he thought only of the youngest, David Shelton.

  Maybe it was because the sun hovered high overhead now, but the meadow was intense with light, its pallor distilled, insistent, almost as if the place radiated somet
hing of itself from within. Travis wondered if the meadow would feel the same if he didn’t know what happened here.

  Leonard came up and stood beside him.

  “You know a place is haunted when it feels more real than you are,” Leonard said.

  As soon as Leonard said those words, Travis knew that was what he felt, not just now but over the years when he’d turned up arrowheads while plowing. Rubbing off the layers of dirt, he’d always had the bothersome notion the arrowheads were alive, like caddis flies inside their thick casings. He’d tried to make sense of the notion that time didn’t so much pass as layer over things, as if under the world’s surface the past was still occurring. Travis had never spoken of this feeling because it was something you couldn’t explain or show, like how to tie a fishing knot or check tobacco for black shank. But just because it was inside you didn’t mean it wasn’t real. And now he felt it here, more than even when he’d held those arrowheads.

  “You believe in ghosts?” Travis asked.

  “When I’m in this meadow I almost do,” Leonard said. He nodded at the marker. “It ought to feel even more that way to you. It’s your family’s blood that got spilled here.”

  Travis walked toward the creek, his hands brushing hip-high broom sedge whose coppery color shone in the meadow’s gathered light. Grasshoppers leaped stalk to stalk in brown and green arcs, the biggest ones whirring as their wings spread like paper fans. The creek ran thin and muted, a low gurgle where it rubbed over rocks. The morning of the massacre it would have been even quieter, the creek muffled under ice, no metallic chatter of cicadas in the high branches. Not much color either, gray sky and everything below it coated white. At least until the killing started. Travis tried to imagine what he’d read—David Shelton shot in both arms, his father and three brothers lying dead around him, the last Shelton still alive in that meadow speaking his last words: I forgive you all this—I can get well. Let me go home to my mother and sisters.

  Twelve years old.

  Travis thought of himself at twelve and when he’d been most scared. Probably sitting in the principal’s office waiting for his daddy to show up. He and Shank had put a green snake in their homeroom teacher’s desk, causing Mrs. Debo a near heart attack. Mr. Ketner had threatened everything short of the electric chair, but it was only when the principal called their parents that Travis became afraid. Whatever Mr. Ketner did, his daddy would do far worse with a belt. But knowing somebody was going to shoot you. He couldn’t imagine how terrifying that was. But as quick as Travis thought that he remembered Carlton Toomey opening his hawkbill, the soft click as the blade locked into place.

  He turned his mind from that thought, watched Leonard skim the metal disk over the broom sedge, Leonard’s face intent as he listened and interpreted the messages seeping up from the underworld, moving slow and tentative behind it, like a blind man using a cane. Leonard paused, let the machine comb a small area for a few moments, homing in on something. Travis watched Leonard lay down the machine and get the shovel. Leonard knelt and dug a few moments before raising a bottle cap from the soil.

  Travis walked back into the meadow, waited for Leonard to see him and take off the headphones.

  “Why are you trying here?” Travis asked.

  “Because this is where Keith’s soldiers piled them after the killing. The guy I got the detector from knew they were placed here as well, but he may have missed something.”

  “So I guess he tried it where they killed them too?”

  “Yes,” Leonard said, pointing near where Travis had stood earlier. “Over by the creek. That’s where he found a minié ball, or so he claimed.”

  “But you’ve never used it up here?”

  “No.”

  “You swept between here and the creek?” Travis asked. “Maybe something fell out of their pockets while they were being dragged.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Leonard said.

  “You mind if I try?”

  “Go ahead,” Leonard said, handing the machine to Travis.

  “How does it work?”

  “Sort of like tuning in a radio station. Just listen for a humming sound and move the disk to where it increases.”

  Travis put on the earphones and aimed the metal detector in front of him. He swung the disk back and forth, the machine heavier than he’d imagined. He took a step forward and did the same thing. Leonard motioned for him to take off the earphones.

  “Lower,” Leonard said. “You want it skimming the ground.”

  Travis began again, moving slowly toward the creek. He had covered only a few feet when the machine’s hum increased.

  “I got something,” he said, trying not to sound too excited.

  “Let me hear,” Leonard said.

  He placed the headphones on his head.

  “Just a rock with a lot of minerals,” Leonard said after a few moments.

  “How do you know?”

  “Experience. There’s more sound if it’s something worthwhile.”

  Travis moved across the heart of the meadow tentatively. Twice the machine made noises worth investigating, but both times it was a soft drink can. His arms tired but he kept searching. The machine’s hum increased again, the same sound as the cans had made, but Travis laid down the detector and dug.

  At first they didn’t know what it was, a crust of black dirt barnacling the metal.

  “Careful,” Leonard said. “Put it in the water to loosen the dirt.”

  They walked over to the creek and soon scabs of dirt began falling away, what Travis held becoming thinner, lighter, then revealing a straight wire laid across a second straight wire. He rubbed harder, his thumbnail worrying free the dirt under the wires. Soon he saw two perfectly round frames, a coin of glass embedded in one. The silver brightened in his hands as more dirt fell away. Travis was amazed that something so long in the dark could retain such luster. He rinsed the glasses a last time and rubbed them with his handkerchief, then pulled each silver temple slowly from the frames and just as tenderly refolded them.

  “I guess they rightly belong to you,” Travis said.

  Leonard shook his head.

  “I’d have never thought to look there. It’s your find so you keep them.”

  “You sure?” Travis said.

  “Yes.”

  A few yards upstream something rippled the surface. Travis studied the water intently and soon found the fish drifting with the current, a quick shudder of its caudal fin propelling it back to a feeding position. The fish rose again, curving back into the water, a flash of red dots and orange fins. I’ll be back for you another time, Travis thought.

  He held the glasses carefully as they walked into the meadow, the same way he might a bird egg or tobacco seedling. An idea settled in his mind, quickly became belief.

  “These glasses belong to one of them who was murdered,” Travis said. “If they belonged to one of Keith’s men he’d have picked them back up. The dead don’t need to see.”

  Travis opened his palm, let the sunlight fall full upon the silver.

  “I think they belonged to David Shelton,” Travis said.

  “How can you possibly know that?” Leonard replied.

  “It’s the size of them. They’re a more likely fit for a boy than a man.”

  “Where did you read that David Shelton even wore glasses?”

  “Nowhere,” Travis said. “But I ain’t read where he didn’t wear glasses neither.”

  “They could have belonged to a small man,” Leonard said, “or to someone before or after the war.”

  Leonard sounded irritated, and Travis supposed there was enough schoolteacher left in him to want the last say-so on things.

  “Do you think if we showed them to Dr. Hensley he’d know when they were made?” Travis asked, making it sound like a question instead of an idea.

  “Possibly,” Leonard said, but his tone was skeptical.

  “What about the other lens?” Travis said, voicing what he’d been th
inking for minutes now. “Do you think they shot it out?”

  “I don’t know. How could anyone know?” Leonard said brusquely. “Let’s go. It’s near noon and I’m getting hungry.”

  Sweat trickled down the back of Travis’s neck. Warm even up here. He felt the glasses in his hand, solid and real like the arrowheads. He would take them by Dr. Hensley’s office tomorrow, see if the optometrist knew when they’d been made.

  Leonard picked up the metal detector and shovel.

  “What ridge they buried on?” Travis asked.

  “The one we came down, near where we parked.”

  “I want to see it before we go back to the trailer.”

  “Only for a minute,” Leonard said, and led Travis up the hill and into a stand of white oaks. It was like entering a darkened theater. Leaves seined out much of the sunlight, the trees themselves pressing close. Travis stepped carefully, holding the glasses behind him in case he tripped over a root or rock. The loamy soil was soft and moist despite it being late summer. He felt his feet settling deeper into the cushiony ground and waited for his eyes to adjust. The names on the oblong block of granite slowly became clearer, as if rising out of a dense fog.

  “I’d of thought they’d each have a grave.”

  “Hard as the ground was that day it’s a wonder they got one dug,” Leonard said.

  “And it was their own people who buried them?”

  “Who else would have done it?” Leonard said. “They were trying to get them to the Shelton graveyard, but the oxen gave out. It was bury them right then and there or risk animals getting to the bodies first.”

  What was left of them lay in this earth, Travis told himself. He wondered if any of their bones remained. Maybe something made of metal like a belt buckle or boot eyelet. Nothing else.

  The dying had their lives flash before their eyes, or so folks claimed. Travis wondered what David Shelton had seen. Maybe just happy things like Christmases and birthdays, or a day when he’d caught a big trout or a pretty morning he’d gotten to go outside and play after days of rain. But maybe bad things too, like his daddy getting after him with a strap or fussing with his brothers. Travis rubbed his thumb over one of the wire frames, wondered if whatever David had seen he’d seen through these glasses. Wondered also if David had felt his heart constrict like a slipknot pulled tight in those last moments, as Travis’s heart had seemed to when the Toomeys discussed whether or not to kill him.