by Ron Rash
Mrs. Ponder had grown up in Madison County herself, come back after graduating from UNC-Greensboro and married her high school sweetheart, a dairy farmer who’d barely graduated high school. Mrs. Ponder’s left hand rested on the desk, and Leonard saw she no longer wore a wedding ring. He thought about telling her it appeared he wasn’t the only one whose life hadn’t turned out as expected.
“Thank you for your help,” he said.
Leonard walked back down the hall, studentless now. He passed classrooms, some doors open, some shut. Chalk tapped a blackboard, a projector whirred, typewriters clattered, then a room where a man near Leonard’s age spoke of the past.
Why can’t you just let them take a different test on the material? one of the parents had said that afternoon in Illinois. Six people had been in the conference room: the principal, Leonard’s department head, himself, and three parents. He’d looked out the window before he spoke at what passed for landscape in southern Illinois—a few scraggly cottonwood and bald cypress poked into an endless unscrolling west toward Missouri and Kansas. At that moment Leonard had realized how truly oppressive the openness was, its wide possibilities he no longer believed in. By then he was no longer living with Kera and Emily. He and Kera passed each other in the school’s hallways with little acknowledgment, negotiated evening and weekend exchanges of their daughter with the cold formality of pawnbrokers.
School policy stated cheating was an automatic zero, and Leonard had reminded the parents and principal of that policy, then gotten up and left the room. But school policy had been only part of why he refused. Stacks of unmarked tests and essays cluttered his desk. Lesson plans unwritten. Finding the energy and focus to make a new test had seemed impossible.
On the way back to the trailer, Leonard stopped at the Winn-Dixie and bought two cases of beer to bootleg. He paid with the twenty dollars in rent money Travis had given him last night. Money he shouldn’t feel the least bit bad about taking, because Travis couldn’t have found any place short of a tree stand where he could have stayed as cheap. Leonard was barely out of the parking lot before he’d downed a beer and pulled another from the opened case. Entering the school had brought back memories he’d tried to keep submerged. The dark glossy sturdiness of the lawyer’s desk. An ink pad’s plush, mossy dampness as the policeman blacked his fingers and thumb. Emily asleep in his bed while he spent the night on his apartment’s ragged couch. The click of metal locking around his wrists.
“YOU CAN’T GIVE UP BEING MR. TEACHER, CAN YOU?” DENA said the following Friday night. “Even after what that little bastard did to you in Illinois.”
She sat up in bed, still fully dressed as she manicured her nails. Dena kept them long and pointed, painted bright red like a warning. Sometimes they seemed to be what she cared most about, these hard inflexible parts of herself that could be cut into and feel nothing. She spoke rapidly, and her hands moved restlessly from nail file to cigarette, switching the radio station as well whenever advertisements replaced music. All sure signs she’d been helping herself to the black beauties.
“That’s not what I’m doing.” Leonard was searching the closet for a book Travis had asked for. Dena reached for the radio on the bed stand, trolled the red dial through static and song snippets before settling on Johnny Cash singing “I Still Miss Someone.” Even if he’d never heard the song before, Leonard would have known it was Cash. No one else had a voice like that, smooth and rough at the same time, like water flowing over gravel. A voice capable of transforming sorrow and regret into something beautiful. Surely some consolation in that, Leonard thought, but evidently not enough to keep Cash off pills and out of drunk tanks. For a few moments Dena appeared immersed in the song as well. Then she picked up her nail file.
“Bullshit,” she said. “This trailer’s turning into a damn schoolhouse. Nobody wants to do nothing but read and talk books. I can’t even turn on the TV without one of you complaining.”
Leonard found the paperback and marked a chapter.
“Let’s go to the Ponderosa,” Dena said, unable to keep her mouth any more still than her hands.
So much better when she took quaaludes, Leonard thought. Maybe he should hide the uppers from now on, but she’d bitch about that, remind him she’d doubled his sales. Which was true, for she seemed to know every doper and pill freak in the county.
“Not tonight,” Leonard said.
“I’m tired of being cooped up in a tin box in the middle of nowhere.”
“Nobody’s making you stay.”
“I know that.” Dena pouted. “I just want to go out once in a while. That boy’s seventeen, and he gets out more than I do.”
Leonard laid the book on the bureau beside his car keys. He sat back on the bed edge, bent down to untie his boots.
“At least let me borrow your car so I can go myself. I’ll take some pills and sell them, make you some money.”
“High as you are you’d likely run my car into a ditch.”
“Pills make you drive better,” Dena said. “That’s why truckers take them.”
“Truckers usually aren’t drunk as well.”
“I ain’t going to drink nothing. I just want to get out for a couple of hours, do a little dancing.”
Leonard pushed his boots under the bed, felt them bump up against Dena’s suitcase. The trailer was getting crowded. After he and Kera split up, he’d turned on the TV or radio each evening just to hear a human voice, not only in Illinois but when he’d moved back to Madison County. Often he’d leave the radio on all night, something to mask the emptiness if he couldn’t sleep. He had done that until Dena moved in. Now he had all the background chatter he needed. The way it always was, Leonard reckoned—wanting what you no longer had, what you hadn’t wanted when you did have it. “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, Nobody Wants to Die.” He couldn’t remember who sang that one. Not Cash, though Cash had the voice for it.
“Please,” Dena said. “I’ll be back by twelve.”
Some peace and quiet at the risk of a wrecked car. Not a great deal but he decided to take it.
She lifted the keys off the bureau and left, but not before putting on lipstick and perfume, a pair of tighter jeans.
Leonard cut off the radio, went to the kitchen, and got a beer. He picked up the paperback and leaned against the bed’s headboard. The rain had come hard that afternoon, and the stain was back on the ceiling, hanging over his head like some ominous cloud in a cartoon. More of the past making itself visible, same as the glasses the boy had found. Dr. Hensley had verified Travis’s notion that the glasses were fitted more for a child’s head than an adult’s. The straight temples verified mid-nineteenth century, Dr. Hensley had added, and the lens was made for someone nearsighted, not farsighted. In other words, not some older man’s reading glasses, which had made Travis even more certain they belonged to David Shelton.
Leonard sipped the beer and listened to the night. The crossfire racket of crickets and cicadas sounded more intense, almost frantic, as if warning each other of the coming evenings when their voices would be stilled. Not long till then, Leonard thought. Fewer bird sounds soon as well. The whippoorwills and broad-winged hawks would fly south first, then the catbirds and sparrows. Copperheads would crawl into rock gaps and under cliff hangs to den, a week or so later the timber rattlers some folks called satinbacks doing the same, twining into medusan knots of fang and flesh. Everything getting dark and less, as if the mountains had spread their shoulders and pushed out much of the world as they braced for the coming winter.
Leonard picked up the paperback, opened it to the chapter he’d marked about warfare between the Cherokees and the Creeks. The boy continued to surprise him. Being interested in Shelton Laurel was one thing. That was local history, the boy’s own kin involved. But reading about Germany and Russia and now Indians, then asking perceptive questions about what he’d read was impressive. Many people would wonder how that kind of intellectual curiosity could be suppressed. But Leonard knew.
Twenty years earlier he’d gone to the same high school. Unlike Travis, he hadn’t tried to hide his capabilities. The teachers hadn’t either and filled his hands with plaques and certificates at year-end assemblies.
He’d paid a price for that. The students from Marshall, especially those from well-to-do families, resented how his success emphasized their shortcomings. They made jokes about his patched jeans and his family’s weathered clapboard farmhouse. The boys who came from backgrounds like his own shunned him, though one might occasionally trip him in the lunchroom, bump books out of his hands in the hall. It was only the poorer girls, the ones mapping out futures other than babies and farm chores, who respected him. Sometimes former classmates came to buy his drugs. Thought you were going to make something of yourself, he’d heard more than once, and knew they were pleased he had not, that his life was no better than their own.
After the fourth beer Leonard took the letter from the bottom drawer. Two pages but not many words because of a child’s high wide letters. He went into the front room and dialed the number included in the letter. Static sizzled in his ear, then the Australian-inflected message he’d heard for six months saying, This exchange is not in service. No idea on earth—Leonard supposed he was one of the few parents who could say that about his child’s whereabouts and mean it.
It was almost one when Dena returned. Travis was back from his date with Lori but still awake, reading the chapter Leonard had marked. When she came in, Dena told the boy there were better ways to have fun at night than read. Leonard heard the couch springs squeak as Dena sat down. She took the book from Travis’s hands and laughed when he asked for it back. I can show you some things you won’t find in a musty old book, Dena told him.
“You need to leave him alone,” Leonard said when she came to the bedroom, her lipstick smeared, reeking of cigarettes and beer as if she’d lain down on the bar floor and rolled in the butts and spills.
“Why?” she asked. “Jealous?”
“No.”
Dena raised the back of her hand to show a fresh burn mark.
“Bet Hubert Toomey ten dollars I could do it,” Dena said. “I won. Even got to keep the cigarette.”
Dena closed the door and undressed, letting the clothes fall to the floor. “Striptease,” she said, and flung off her bra. She was removing her panties when she lost her balance and fell giggling onto the bed.
“I told you not to get drunk.”
“Maybe I don’t like being told what to do,” Dena said.
“If you don’t want to be told what to do you can get out of my trailer.”
“Maybe I’ll just do that. There’s men that would take me home. The Toomeys offered. Carlton’s always been sweet on me. Next time I might take them up on it.”
The bedsprings creaked as Dena moved closer to the nightstand, her hand reaching for the radio. She fumbled with the dial until she raised a soft rock station from the static, then got up from the bed and stood before Leonard, her eyes closed as she swayed to the music.
“See anything you like?” she said.
When he didn’t answer, Dena sprawled on the bed again. Leonard wore only boxer shorts and she rubbed the flat of her palm over his stomach. She pressed closer and let her head lie on his shoulder.
“Show me you still want me,” she said, almost tenderly.
“OK,” he said, “but cut out the light.”
Dena removed her hand from his chest.
“Why? So you can’t see me. So you can pretend I’m somebody else. Probably that ex-wife of yours.”
Nothing was said for a few moments.
“You go to hell,” Dena said, and turned her back to him. Leonard cut off the radio and light, but sleep wouldn’t come. He should have drunk more tonight, he told himself, taken some pills as well and fallen into a spinning, incoherent darkness.
Dena did not stir when he turned on the lamp. The ledgers filled the closet’s top shelf, each in chronological order, beginning in 1848 and ending in 1863. Leonard took down the 1859 and 1860 volumes. It had the heft of a family Bible. He knew it was the cotton rag paper, so much more substantial than wood-based paper, that and the leather binding, but the words themselves seemed to give the volume much of its weight. The binding creaked like a rusty hinge, pages falling open to the entry Leonard had turned to most often over the years. The words were printed in a careful hand, as if the writer had anticipated a moment like this in the future when the entry would be read by other eyes.
Leonard imagined the good doctor putting on his hat and wool overcoat and placing the CLOSED sign on the office’s front door, maybe even a note tacked underneath telling his whereabouts. Taking with him his wooden medical case as he walked the hundred yards down Main Street to his white clapboard house to tell his wife where he was going. Surely picking up his daughter, holding her in his arms, and promising a peppermint or play-pretty when he returned. Then out to the stable, his mare curried, tacked, and watered, the medical case strapped behind the cantle. It was the worst time of year for such a journey, winter solstice making the day the shortest of the year, balancing dark and light. Snow falling as well, cold air getting colder as he rode into the higher mountains. Not just the snow would slow the horse but the land itself as it bowed up, hardened into granite outcrops that allowed only a diagonal ascent of switchbacks and cliff hangs. As the chill seeped under his collar and gloves, he’d have wished he were home with his daughter and wife by the hearth. All the while knowing there was a very good chance he would be too late, find not a patient but a corpse.
Doctor Candler hadn’t turned back, perhaps in part because he remembered the first time he’d saved Maggie Shelton’s son. Or parental empathy, thinking what if it were his own child. No doubt he continued through that hard country mostly because it was his duty as a physician. That made it easier, Leonard supposed, not really a choice after all. It would have been full dark by the time he got there. He’d have let one of the Shelton men walk the horse out while he went into the cabin to do what he could.
Leonard studied the entries, imagined the raspy sound of the quill pen each time Dr. Candler took the ledger off the fire-board and wrote more words. He imagined the family gathered by the hearth, younger children going to bed first and then the older ones. Dr. Candler would have sent the parents to bed as well. The cabin would have grown quieter, the only sounds the hiss and crackle of the fire, the rustle of corn shucks as the family settled into sleep.
The handwriting on the 3 A.M. entry was not as clear and precise as the others. Letters blurred into one another, as though the page had been tilted and ink bled beyond the quill pen’s dips and slants. Leonard wondered if this reflected the doctor’s weariness or a lack of light. He imagined Joshua Candler seated by the bed, squinting to check his pocket watch by candlelight and then writing the entry. Up all night, maybe smoking a briar pipe or drinking chicory coffee to stay awake as the freezing air slashed through gaps in the cabin’s chinking. He’d have kept his heavy wool overcoat on, used the poker to coax fire from the hearth’s graying log mound. It would be inevitable that he’d think of his own child asleep back in Marshall. Leonard wondered if Doctor Candler talked to the boy through the night, called him by name, bent his head to say his own prayers for David Shelton.
But this was not the entry Leonard was searching for. He opened the 1860 volume, then turned through January and into early February before he found it.
David Shelton, age nine.
Complaint: Blurred vision. Headaches.
Diagnosis: Nearsighted. Eyes possibly afflicted by Scarlet
fever.
Treatment: Sent to Asheville to Doctor Vaughn for
optometric exam.
Fee: None.
January 2, 1863, Marshall
(Last day of furlough)
Nancy Ponder, age 58.
Complaint: Grievous flow of bowels.
Diagnosis: Flux.
Treatment: Purge of bear oil and peach leaves.
Fee:
Promise to check on Emily daily after baby born.
Ellie Winchester, age 8.
Complaint: Chicken pox.
Diagnosis: Same.
Treatment: Hot sassafras tea three times daily. Oatmeal and
baking soda bath morning and before bed.
Fee: None.
Transcribed letter to take to her father.
Nancy Cathey, age 26.
Return visit from Dec. 30.
Much improved. Continue to drink ginger tea twice daily at
onset of menses.
Fee: None.
Marcie Alexander, age 51.
Complaint: Puniness.
Diagnosis: Torpid liver.
Treatment: Mayapple-root tea twice daily.
Fee: None.
Received word today Julius wounded at Corinth in October.
SEVEN
The fishing rod rattled in the truck bed as Travis drove north toward Antioch. Daylight savings time had ended at midnight and Travis felt disoriented when he checked for rain clouds. Twelve o’clock, his watch said, but for six months the sun had not been overhead at noon. The sky seemed to have slid forward, dragging the sun with it.
Lori came out the door in jeans and tennis shoes, a purple sweatshirt with ASHEVILLE-BUNCOMBE TECH printed on the front. The same denim backpack she’d brought to the hospital dangled from her right hand. Probably some sandwiches inside, though he’d told Lori to eat before he picked her up.
“This one’s for you,” she said, and pulled from the backpack not a sandwich but a sweatshirt. “It’s just like mine. Got them Friday when Momma took me to fill out financial aid forms.”
“Thanks,” he said, and laid the sweatshirt on the seat between them.
“Don’t you want to put it on?”
“No,” Travis said, trying not to sound irritated. “I’d just get fish slime on it.”
Lori took a book from the backpack. “Got some reading for English tomorrow. Thought I’d get a little of it done while we’re driving there.”
