The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  But what Carlton had done to Travis changed that belief, not just the act itself but its cool deliberateness. If killing the boy was in Toomey’s own best interest, he would have raked his knife across Travis’s windpipe with no more regret than slicing an apple.

  Carlton’s forearms rested on his knees, hands clasped, back and head leaning forward, listening so intently he didn’t notice the men’s gestures. He appeared mesmerized by the music. The song ended and the bass player stepped to the edge of the stage and spoke. The big man shook his head. The guitarist leaned toward the microphone.

  “Help me get him up here,” the guitarist said, “and you’ll hear a voice so pretty you’ll wish you could put a bow around it and give it to your sweetheart.” People clapped and cheered until Carlton left his seat, the boards sagging perilously as he stepped onto the stage and positioned himself behind the microphone. He did not speak to the musicians or the crowd, just leaned closer to the mic and began singing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” The musicians did not join in. They kept their hands at their sides, deferring to the power of Carlton Toomey’s voice.

  It was his delicacy that Leonard found most disconcerting. The big man sang softly, the words easing from his mouth with the gentlest of phrasing. Toomey’s eyes were closed, hands clasped to his stomach like a man concealing some private wound. The midway’s rambunctiousness became more distant as the people on the front row leaned slightly forward. Leonard wondered what Professor Heddon would make of this performance, especially if he knew what had been done to Travis. Tears streamed down the face of the woman who sat next to Leonard as Carlton Toomey sang of crossing Jordan.

  Leonard got up and walked back to the midway, Toomey’s voice soon lost amid other sounds. He found Dena at the arcade, maneuvering the same toy crane toward the same watch. Leonard watched the crane’s jaws hover, then fall, dull steel teeth dribbling colored pebbles as the crane raised up. She put in another quarter. The crane dropped, grazed the watch, and rose.

  “We need to get to the arena,” he told her.

  “I had it one time,” Dena said. “I really did. But it slipped out at the last moment.”

  Since he’d won the last three years, Leonard went last. He had shot against all the men before and knew his only serious competition was Harold Watkins, a former Green Beret from Spillcorn Creek. Watkins shot fifth and his Ruger placed three rounds in the bull’s-eye. As the next-to-last shooter stepped to the line, Leonard took the clip out of the Colt and six wadcutters from the cardboard box. He held the bullets in his fist a few moments. Despite being metal they had a waxy feel as they rolled in his palm. He loaded the clip and pushed it into the magazine.

  “Your turn,” the man in charge of the contest said.

  Leonard stepped to the line and set his feet, drew in a breath and closed his left eye. He squeezed the trigger and didn’t hear the shot.

  “Bull’s-eye!” Travis shouted from the stands.

  Leonard did the same four more times.

  They walked back down the midway afterward, the hundred dollars stashed in Leonard’s billfold. Travis carried the trophy, and Leonard knew the boy wanted the people they passed to think he’d won it. Many of the booths and tents had shut down for the night, and the wind blew steady as though summoned to fill the void left by the now-absent crowd. Loose tent flaps made a dense slapping sound. Tension ropes creaked. Like walking through a ghost town, Leonard thought, and wondered, as he had in a Midwest farmhouse years earlier, if a place could feel truly lonely only if humans had once been present.

  TWO NIGHTS LATER THE TOOMEYS SHOWED UP AT THE TRAILER. Dena drove back from the Ponderosa and a pickup followed, its high beams aimed at the front window as the vehicle idled. The Plotts made a few perfunctory barks before returning to the trailer’s warmer underbelly. As Dena climbed the steps, Leonard heard a deeper male voice behind her. She came in laughing harshly, her pink blouse unbuttoned. A few moments later Carlton Toomey filled the doorway. The big man smiled when he saw Travis.

  “Didn’t know you and Leonard had a guest tonight,” he said to Dena.

  “He ain’t no guest,” Dena said. “He lives here.”

  “Lives here, does he. That kind of explains a few things,” Carlton said, then nodded toward the back room. “Go get what you come for and don’t be all night about it.”

  Dena walked unsteadily down the hallway, knocking a book off the shelf as she passed. Carlton Toomey resettled his eyes on Travis. There was something disturbing in how he stared at the boy, the absolute blankness of the gaze, the way Leonard imagined a shark’s eyes would be.

  “How’s that leg of yours?” Carlton asked.

  “It’s OK,” Travis muttered, looking at the floor as he answered.

  “I reckon you learned your lesson about climbing waterfalls.”

  The truck revved outside, followed by three quick blasts of the horn.

  “Young people,” Toomey said, speaking to Leonard now. “They got no patience. They want something never a second later than right now. Most times the sooner a body gets something the sooner it’s gone.”

  Carlton stayed in the doorway, as if unsure the trailer’s floor would support him. Leonard wondered exactly how big the man was, at least six-two and three hundred pounds. If Carlton Toomey wished, he could keep everyone in the trailer the rest of the night. There was no way Leonard and Travis could have moved him from the doorway.

  “It’s sort of like this young coon dog I had,” Carlton Toomey continued. “Ran him with a couple of older dogs but paid no mind to them. That whelp was always out ahead, like as not rushing right past where the coon was. One night them dogs got after an old sow coon, ran it all the way into the river. The old dogs knew what that was about, but that young one went in after her. That coon got out midriver and let the pup get good and tired. Then she just swum over and tapped his head with her paw, that head going down for a second and then popping back up like a fish cork. Just kept doing it till one time that head didn’t come back up.”

  Carlton Toomey looked at Travis and smiled.

  “If that dog had got away he’d have known better than to do it again, don’t you reckon? I bet he’d have paid more mind to them older dogs.”

  Dena rejoined them in the front room. She’d smeared more lipstick on, more paint dabbed on her nails as well, but her blouse remained unbuttoned. Surrendering, Leonard thought, the same way an animal losing a fight bares its belly. In her hand she carried a battered yellow suitcase, its cloth covering torn in the upper right corner. The suitcase had been lived out of, opened and closed enough that now only one of the snaps shut.

  She walked past Leonard to the door. Her high heels clacked on the linoleum, each drunken step careful as though maintaining her balance on a foot log. Carlton stepped inside the doorway so she could slip by.

  “Don’t worry,” Carlton said. “We just want her for the weekend.”

  He lingered in the doorway a few moments longer, his eyes on Leonard.

  “This boy and me are square, provided he keeps his mouth shut to the law. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  “Yes,” Leonard said.

  “Figured you’d know.”

  Carlton Toomey opened his massive right hand and revealed the car keys. “She won’t need your car no more tonight,” he said, and tossed the keys to Leonard. The truck horn blew again but Toomey ignored it. He looked the room over, let his gaze settle on the stereo.

  “I saw you at the fair, professor. From the look on your face you hadn’t reckoned I could sing that good.” Carlton settled his eyes on Leonard. “There’s some who said I should have tried to make a go of it in Nashville, but it seemed too doubtful a way to make a living. I never was much for taking risks.” Carlton paused. His voice became more contemplative. “I’d not do it for money anyway. A few things in life ought to be done just to lighten folks’ loads, and there ain’t nothing that’ll do that better than a good gospel song.”

  Leonard couldn’t tel
l if Carlton was being ironic. Toomey half turned, put his foot on the first step.

  “I sung once at a big tent revival in Hot Springs. Sang ‘Just as I Am’ and had them that was never saved and them that was backsliders all crying and getting right with the Lord. Even the preacherman claimed it was my singing more than his sermon brought them up front. The way I figure it I’ve done enough good for the Lord that he will cut me some slack in other areas. Just like he done Old King David.”

  Carlton turned and walked out to the truck. The high beams scouring the window veered away and were gone. Their appearance and departure had been so sudden Leonard could almost believe it had been a hallucination.

  The trailer seemed to expand in the big man’s absence. Travis sat down on the couch but didn’t pick up a book or turn on the TV. He merely stared out the window where darkness had regathered. The only sound in the trailer was the heat pump’s steady hum.

  “What’s bothering you?” Leonard finally asked.

  Travis looked up but said nothing.

  “She’s thirty-four years old,” Leonard said. “She has to look after herself.”

  “I don’t think she knows how,” Travis said.

  Leonard walked over and locked the door.

  “If that’s true it’s too late to teach her,” Leonard said.

  DENA DID NOT RETURN UNTIL MONDAY MORNING. LEONARD was in the kitchen when the truck came quickly out of the woods and swerved to a stop in front of the trailer. Dena gingerly got out of the cab. Hubert Toomey was already turning around as Dena lifted her suitcase from the truck bed. The handle slipped free from her hand and the suitcase flung open when it hit the ground. The truck did not pause as it bumped down the drive. Dena stood there a few moments, arms at her sides, shoulders hunched, the gaping suitcase and its contents littering the ground around her. Leonard was reminded of jerky black-and-white newsreels in which European war refugees stared blankly at the camera. Dena stooped to gather up her cosmetics, the hairbrush and toothbrush. She picked up her nightgown last, brushing off the dirt before folding it delicately in a precise rectangle. This gesture, more than the blank stare, made Leonard leave the window and go outside to help her.

  Dena looked worse up close, bloodshot eyes, lower lip split and swollen. She smelled, a dank cloying smell, like newspapers rotted by water. Leonard was glad the boy had already left for work. Dena walked stiffly and winced when she sat down on the bed’s edge.

  “I’ll run you a bath,” Leonard said.

  When the water reached the right temperature, he went back to the bedroom. Dena lay on the bed, her eyes open but glazed. He helped her to the bathroom and got her clothes off. Dena let the warm water cover her body, almost to her chin, the back of her head pillowed by the bathtub’s porcelain rim. Leonard rubbed some soap on a wet washcloth and handed it to her.

  “You really are my sweetheart,” she said, her voice slurred, “taking care of a bad girl like me.”

  She lifted the washcloth and tentatively dabbed her lip.

  “I’d have stayed with them if they’d let me,” Dena mumbled. “They’re rough but at least they think I’m sexy. They don’t have to pretend I’m somebody else.”

  She let the cloth slide from her hand, closed her eyes.

  “Call if you need help getting out,” Leonard said, and went into the front room. If she passed out, her head might slide underwater. Probably would be a blessing, he thought, but soon he checked on her. Dena’s eyes were closed but she smiled faintly.

  “I’m just resting,” she said. “I’ll get out in a minute.”

  Leonard sat down in the armchair. On the coffee table was a book he’d checked out from the library, but he did not pick it up. The volume was a study of conflicts between the Cherokee and rival tribes, conflicts not always settled by negotiation. Like Keith’s Confederate troops at Shelton Laurel, the Cherokee sometimes killed their prisoners, larding captives with fat before burning them at the stake.

  Others.

  That was the word at the bottom of the January 17 ledger entry, placed after the names of the regiment’s sick and injured. A word far enough down the page it could be easily missed. Leonard believed he knew who those others were. He imagined Doctor Candler applying salves and plasters to the streaked backs of the women, maybe ministering to some of the men taken prisoner as well. Perhaps one of those he treated had been David Shelton. Leonard imagined the doctor tending to the boy, noting how much he had grown since that long winter evening four years earlier and telling David Shelton’s father as much, for the father would be locked in the cabin as well. The two men reminiscing about the night David almost died. One father talking to another, forgetting for a few minutes the two sentries posted outside, the war itself beyond the cabin door as they recalled other shared moments—a hunting party they’d both been part of, a horse auction or lazy hour passed one Saturday outside Tom Whitley’s General Store. The other men huddled in the cabin’s one room would surely join the conversation. Dr. Candler had probably ministered to every man there at one time or another. They would have their own memories of arms set, stitches sewn, fevers cooled, memories not of just when Doctor Candler had ministered to them but to their families as well.

  Perhaps they had talked into the night, late enough that David Shelton would grow sleepy and lie down on a tick mattress in the corner, his glasses folded and placed on the fire-board. Perhaps the boy’s father placed a quilt or coat over him as he lay there, and all the other men, including Doctor Candler, thought of the beds and homes their own children slept in and then not just thinking but speaking aloud of them, their number and ages, speaking their children’s names like incantations. Each recollection bringing more of the old world back inside those hand-hewn logs as if that world might yet be recovered. It could have occurred that way, Leonard believed. Only Lieutenant Keith knew the men would be executed in the morning. Doctor Candler, like the prisoners, believed they would be marched to the stockade in Knoxville.

  But two days of being shot at from outcrops and ridges might have caused the doctor to be less amiable. The prisoners would have known what had happened to their women. The two gold stars on his coat collar marked Doctor Candler as a healer, but the butternut uniform itself was the same as those worn by the torturers of their mothers and wives and daughters. Perhaps all that passed between the doctor and each of the men was a tense, cloaking silence, glances that never met the other’s eyes.

  Nevertheless, whatever else had or had not occurred, Doctor Candler had ministered to them. The obliqueness of Others implied he’d done so at the displeasure of Keith and Allen and probably other men of the 64th. He had noted again, in an entry only two weeks earlier, his low supply of chloroform and laudanum. Medicine used on the enemy might not be available when needed for men in the 64th. But Doctor Candler had followed an oath he’d made before the one given to Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.

  January 17, 1863, Shelton Laurel

  Dewy Morton. Dead at roll call. At least laid to rest in his home

  county. Many in this war will not have even that.

  Boyce Alexander. Left arm amputation due to minié ball.

  Improved. Laudable pus. Gangrene unlikely since no black

  spotting on wound. Gave one-half dram of laudanum.

  Isaac Ponder. Flux lessened. Continue to drink tea of dogwood

  bark every four hours.

  James Jackson, frostbite. Immersed limbs in cold water before

  intense movement of affected region. Tincture of iodine

  applied. No blackened skin.

  Billy Revis. Amputated two toes left foot.

  Chloroform—five drops. Capital saw. Cauterized with flat blade

  of Keith’s Bowie knife.

  Note: Address Allen about need for more chloroform and

  laudanum.

  Recommended Revis, Ponder, Alexander relieved of duty.

  Recommended Ross, Johnson returned to duty.

  Others

  T
EN

  Dena returned late New Year’s Day in a white pickup driven by a man who’d introduced himself as Gerald the night before. He’d actually knocked on the trailer door and made small talk with Leonard as Dena dried her hair. Well mannered, Leonard thought, at least compared to her other two recent suitors, who’d merely blown their car horns until Dena appeared. Nevertheless, when Leonard heard the pickup turn off the blacktop, it occurred to him that the truck might belong not to Gerald but to Carlton Toomey. Not coming for Dena—one weekend had evidently been enough for her and the Toomeys both—but to find out why Leonard hadn’t picked up his January quota of pills. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see him, Leonard told himself, get it over with.

  “You need to get rid of that thing,” Dena said as she came in. “It’s bad luck to keep it up past New Year’s.”

  The scraggly fir beside the stereo balanced precariously on a stand made of crossed planks and ten-penny nails. The colored lights Leonard had strung around the trailer for the potheads’ amusement draped its branches, the fir so puny and thin-needled it sagged under their weight. Red and white fishing bobbers served as ornaments, strips of tinfoil covering the tree’s slumping shoulders like a ragged, gaudy coat. The tree had been Travis’s doing, cut and set up early Christmas morning. Gifts for Leonard and Dena had been set under it as well, some Hoppe’s gun oil for Leonard and a Whitman’s Sampler for Dena. When Leonard had taken a five-dollar bill from his pocket, Travis had refused the attempt at a return gift. I wasn’t expecting presents from you all, he’d said.

  “I’ll take it out soon as we finish studying,” Travis said now. “I don’t need any bad luck with the GED coming up.”