The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  His Grandfather Candler had brought him here two weeks before Leonard left for his freshman year at Chapel Hill. A Sunday afternoon, his grandfather was still dressed in his church clothes. They had not come down a ridge or on the blacktop two-lane but followed a rhododendron-flanked skid trail that ended on the creek’s far side. They parked the truck and crossed a foot log where the creek ran slow and deep. His grandfather stood in the meadow’s center and waited as Leonard walked over to the roadside and read the marker. Leonard had known some killing had occurred up here during the Civil War, something people didn’t like to talk about much, but only when he read the marker’s inscription did he know exactly what.

  “I wanted you to know about this from your own people before you learned some other way,” his grandfather told him. “My father’s father, your great-great-grandfather, was Joshua Candler. He was in the Sixty-fourth.”

  “So he helped kill them?” Leonard asked.

  “I don’t know that, if you mean did he actually shoot any of them, but he was here when it happened, and he knew every man and boy who did get killed that morning.” His grandfather had paused, then spoke, his voice softer. “Before the war, he was their doctor.”

  They didn’t speak for a few minutes, just stood in the meadow as a breeze moved through, brushing the broom sedge as if it were the mane of some huge golden animal. Surely there were sounds of insects and birds, but all Leonard remembered was how the wind seemed to be saying hush, hush, hush, calming the meadow.

  It was Leonard’s grandfather who broke the silence.

  “You know a place is haunted when it feels more real than you are,” the old man said, and began walking back toward the creek.

  Leonard followed.

  “I’ve got his journals and I’m giving them to you soon as we get back to the house,” his grandfather said as they walked. “You’ll learn things in them related to what happened here, but there’s another reason I want you to have them. Your smarts didn’t just spring up like a daisy in a bunch of hogweed. There’s been smart folk in this family before. You read those entries and you’ll see what I mean. Knowing that ought to confidence you some when you’re down there at the university.”

  When they’d left the meadow his grandfather did a curious thing. They didn’t cross on the foot log but walked through the creek, a place thirty yards downstream where the water ran fast and thin. Leonard asked why. Because a ghost can’t cross quick-moving water, his grandfather had answered matter-of-factly.

  Lori shrieked as Travis aimed a snowball at her. She turned and the snowball hit the back of her coat. They were near the marker and Lori chased after Travis, both of them falling and laughing, Travis finally stopping and raising his hands in surrender. Leonard set down the metal detector, wondering why he’d bothered to bring it. The machine sank into the snow, only part of the disk above the white leveling.

  The Sunday afternoon his grandfather gave him the ledgers, Leonard had laid the sixteen volumes on his bed. The mattress’s middle sagged under the weight and there was barely room to prop himself against the headboard. The bed seemed precarious as an overloaded barge. Leonard had read the volumes in chronological order. At first there had been no observations other than what was relevant to Doctor Candler’s duties, but that changed as the months passed. The ledgers began to include more than just his patients’ complaints: tonics learned from a Cherokee midwife, a description of a bear hunt, a poignant note about an infant whose mother had died. Other comments confirmed that Joshua Candler’s book learning had not stopped when he’d left Chapel Hill, including a note about the purchase in Asheville of The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare. An intelligent man. You saw that in the way he began questioning treatments learned in his two terms at the Louisville Medical Institute. He was, in the parlance of the day, a botanic physician, a small group of healers best known for their use of plant remedies and their refusal to bleed patients.

  It had been after midnight when Leonard opened the 1863 ledger, soon coming to the January 17 entry, at the bottom of the page the word Others. Even now, two decades later, Leonard remembered the moment he’d turned the page—the dusty closed-closet odor of the paper and the leather binding, the way the lamp’s soft light nestled on the bed. Most of all how quiet it had been, everyone else asleep, the only sound the grandfather clock in the hall dripping its seconds as he lay there among more time, days and months and years of it. On the next page was only whiteness. At first Leonard thought the page had been accidentally skipped and turned to the next and found the January 19 entry noting the continuing treatment of several men for frostbite. But no mention of the prisoners or of Shelton Laurel. He’d examined the ledger’s concertina fold carefully. No January 18 entry had been torn or cut out.

  “I’ll be up there in a minute,” Travis said, his words shouted to Lori but breaking Leonard out of his reverie. Leonard turned around and watched Lori trudge up the ridge.

  “She was cold,” Travis explained when he joined Leonard. “I told her to go get warm in the truck.” The boy took a hard plastic case from his coat pocket, removed the silver-framed glasses. Travis lifted each wire temple slowly before walking to the creek edge where the men had been massacred. He turned and faced Leonard before rubbing the lens with his handkerchief, setting the temples on his ears and pushing the bridge higher on his nose. The boy stuffed his hands back in his coat pockets for warmth.

  “They’re too tight to be a good fit for my head,” Travis said. “But they could fit David Shelton.”

  A snowflake stuck to the one lens and the boy delicately brushed it away. He squinted his left eye. “It’s kind of blurry, like looking through water, but I can see you well enough.” Travis opened his left eye. “David Shelton could have been looking through these glasses when they shot him. Standing right where I’m standing.”

  For a few moments the boy appeared transfixed, not wiping away the snow that thatched his hair and lay on his shoulders like epaulets. Leonard gazed across the creek at a white oak, an old tree a good fifty feet high, its branches gray and skeletal. Leonard imagined the rings inside the oak, the darker whorls for the winter when growth slowed, the lighter wider ones of summer’s expansion, all spiraling back into the past, maybe as far as 1863. The flurries increased, flakes big as the lens Travis peered through. Snow spread clean and level over the meadow. Maybe a blank page was all history could be in the end, he thought, something beyond what could be written down, articulated.

  Travis took off the glasses.

  “I’m going on up. We’ll be in the truck or at the grave.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Leonard said.

  “You going to sweep some?”

  “No.”

  Travis came over and handed the glasses and case to Leonard.

  “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “Put them on. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it makes you feel different being here. Closer to it somehow.”

  The boy moved on up the ridge as Leonard stepped across the meadow and stood by the creek. White drifts and ice narrowed its banks, the water quiet and dark. Snowflakes fluttered into the creek, lit the creek’s surface a moment and dissolved. Ephemeral.

  Lieutenant Keith’s fourteen-year-old nephew had been shot and killed shortly after joining the 64th. The Shelton Laurel killings, especially the killing of David Shelton, could have been nothing more than a belief in Old Testament justice. But the treatment of the dead implied something more than mere retribution. A sergeant had danced on the bodies when they’d been dumped in a ditch, vowing to push them into hell. By the time kin had gotten to the meadow, wild hogs had eaten one man’s head off. The true object of war is the warrior’s soul, Simone Weil had claimed. Easy enough to believe here, Leonard thought.

  Leonard turned from the creek. Snow filled footprints quickly now. What gray light the sky gave made the ground appear unmarked, no footprints, no squirrel or rabbit tracks. He stepped into the meadow, the snow
shushing under his boots.

  Lieutenant Keith and Colonel Allen had chosen this open area deliberately, for they knew eyes watched from nearby cliffs and ridges. The killings were a performance for the men who hadn’t been captured, a warning acted out like a play. And what role for a man who’d been against secession yet had not fled to Tennessee with his first cousin to join the Union forces? A man who had not volunteered for the Confederate army but had been conscripted, evidently letting his allegiance be decided by which side first chose to place its claim on him. Several of the prisoners begged for time to pray, but Keith had only raised his sword in response, then let it slice the air to loose the first volley.

  Leonard suddenly felt lighter, less substantial, as though the meadow were absorbing his very being. He looked down at his hand, making sure the glasses hadn’t slipped free. They were still there, held loosely as if he’d captured some small fragile creature. His hand tightened so fingers as well as palm could feel the glasses’ solidity. Leonard no longer knew if his eyes were open or closed. For a few moments the glasses seemed the one thing keeping him in the world. Then gravity resettled on his shoulders, replanted his feet firmly on the ground. He felt the snowflakes brushing his face, the cold working its way under his coat collar.

  According to the New York Times article, David Shelton had been killed after his father and three brothers. The boy had seen his father shot in the face and begged the soldiers not to do the same to him. At first they hadn’t, by accident or design shooting him in both arms. He continued to plead for his life until a bullet hit something vital. Then they dragged him over to lie with the others, probably by the feet, not noticing or caring when the glasses slipped from his face.

  Leonard opened his palm, held the glasses a few moments as if measuring their weight. He did not raise them to his face so he might see this place through their silver frames. Instead, he walked up the ridge, pausing once to look back at his footprints fading behind him. Footprints that morning in 1863 as well, veering off Knoxville Road and into this meadow. Afterward thirteen fewer sets of prints walking out than had walked in.

  Travis and Lori waited at the grave site. He handed the glasses to Travis, who placed them back in the case. The wind blew harder on the ridge and Leonard tugged his lapels tighter around his neck. Travis or Lori had brushed snow off the grave marker, but the names quickly disappeared again.

  “We better go,” Leonard said, turning away from the grave. “I don’t want us on these roads in the dark.”

  The snow had quit by the time he and Travis dropped Lori off. On the western ridges, a band of intense pink-orange light singed trees stark and black. The light seemed to flatten out beyond the horizon, as if its source were more earth than sky. They drove south, talking little. When they got to the trailer, Travis’s truck was there but Dena wasn’t. Leonard went to the bedroom and found the bottom drawers open and empty, all her clothes and toiletries taken from the bathroom.

  “It was wrong for her not to let us know she was leaving,” Travis said, visibly upset. The boy went to see what kind of vehicle had taken her away, but snow had erased the tire tracks. He came back inside and searched for a note. But there was no note.

  Leonard’s only surprise was that Dena had stayed long as she had.

  March 23, 1863, Clinton, Tennessee

  Robert Winchester dead of scarlet fever. The wonder is he hath

  endured so long.

  Jesse Harmon. Flux. Treated with tea made of blackberry root.

  Tyler Matheson. Flux. Same treatment.

  Thomas Jenkins. Coriza. Fever abated. Pallor much more

  sanguine.

  Lamar Davis. No fever. Laudable pus.

  Recommended Harmon and Matheson relieved of duty.

  Recommended Davis returned to duty.

  Hard snow after midnight brought a sight this morning that

  shall never dim in my memory. Waked by a vexing dream at first

  light, I arose and perused our campsite. In the clearing where

  men had bedded down, there was to be seen only unmoving,

  white mounds. I could not allay the sensation that I stood before

  fresh, unsettled graves and for a few moments it seemed everyone

  on earth save I alone was dead. Then the officers stirred from

  their tents at the clearing’s edge. Isaac Ponder blew his bugle,

  and I watched the land tremble alive as men rose in the whiteness

  as though arrayed in the fine linen of the righteous on the world’s

  last day.

  TWELVE

  On the first Thursday in April, Travis waited in a windowless basement classroom to begin the GED exam. His stomach felt queasy. Despite six months of studying, he feared everything learned might slip from his grasp quick as a trout returned to water. Two women who looked to be sisters sat in the back. Another woman, much older, was on the front row, her long gray hair pulled tight into a bun. A heavyset man sat closest to Travis. It wasn’t just the overalls and black-rimmed fingernails that made clear the man’s livelihood. The odor of turned-up earth and spring onions clung to him, reminding Travis it was planting time. The room was warm and the farmer used a balled-up handkerchief to dab perspiration off his forehead. Then he opened the bib pocket on his overalls and set a pair of glasses and a pocket watch on the desk. The watch made a soft click as it sprang open.

  In a few minutes a man came in carrying a cardboard box. He introduced himself as Mr. Atwell and passed out pencils and the first test before going over the instructions so meticulously Travis felt like an idling engine about to overheat. Finally Mr. Atwell set a stopwatch on the Formica desk. “Open your booklets and begin,” he said.

  Travis did what Leonard told him to do—read each question slow and not guess unless he’d narrowed the answer to two possibilities, focus on each question the same way he’d focus before casting a lure or squeezing a trigger. Most of the questions were so easy Travis wondered if some were trick questions that merely seemed obvious. He finished every test but the math, three problems to go when Mr. Atwell called time.

  “How’d you do?” Leonard asked as they walked outside to Travis’s truck.

  Travis rolled his head in a slow circle and heard a soft crackling in his neck. The sun was so bright he lowered his gaze. It felt like he’d spent the morning chained up in a dungeon.

  “The math was pretty tough, but I tried to do what you said, narrow to two and guess. I was pretty nervous at first.”

  “That’s natural.”

  “At least I got the one right about two points being equidistant from a central axis.”

  “I’m glad we went back over that one last night,” Leonard said.

  They got in the truck. Three pages stapled together lay on the passenger seat, State Employment Application at the top of the page, beside it a brown paper bag.

  “That the application for the library job?” Travis asked.

  “Yes, I filled it out while I waited.”

  Leonard opened the bag.

  “I went and got you some lunch,” he said, and handed Travis a hamburger and Coke. “Go ahead and eat. You have to be hungry after four hours in there.”

  He ate the hamburger while Leonard perused the application. The farmer came out of the building and sat on a bench, took out a pack of rolling papers and a tobacco tin. He tapped out his tobacco and expertly rolled a cigarette.

  Travis finished the Coke and drove out of the parking lot. Travis thought about a question he hadn’t been able to answer. It was the one formula he and Leonard had not gone over, one that dealt with consecutive positive integers. Too late to fret over it now, he told himself.

  “How long before you get the results?” Leonard asked.

  “Mr. Atwell said since there were just five of us he’d have them graded by the end of the afternoon, but the results wouldn’t be mailed till next week. That big farmer was about to bust a gut to know how he did. He fussed so much about having to wait a
week that Mr. Atwell finally said we could call him at home.” Travis pulled the piece of paper from his pocket with the number written on it. “We can call after six.”

  The temperature was only in the mid-sixties, but as they drove out of the lot Travis rolled down the window. He smelled the plowed earth and wondered if he would ever stand in a tobacco field again or spend minutes with his hands under a spigot rubbing off tobacco resin. His daddy was one of the few growers who still wove his plants into thirteen-leaf bunches, what the old-timers called hands. Near any jackleg can grow corn and the like, his daddy often said, but there’s got to be pride in you to grow tobacco right. Spread on the market floor, those knit bundles had been irrefutable testimony to their devotion and hard work, their pride, his as well as his father’s. The buyers from Winston-Salem and Durham who gathered in the auction barn acknowledged as much, always paying a little more for his daddy’s crop. Some of the older buyers claimed they could pick out Harvey Shelton’s burley blindfolded, that it had a richer smell.

  If he’d passed the test, Travis could have pride in something else, not just for graduating high school but how he’d done it living on his own and holding down a full-time job. The old man might not care about the degree, had never cared much for what he’d called book learning, but he’d have to admire the effort it took.

  “You mind if we stop by the library?” Leonard asked when they came to the Mars Hill turnoff. “I got to drop off this application.”

  “Fine by me,” Travis said.

  The librarian nodded at them familiarly when they came inside. The main library in Marshall contained a lot more books, but Travis liked this library better because it was less crowded. He could wander the stacks without bumping into other people, find a corner and not hear so much as a whisper while he read. It made him feel like every book had been placed on the shelves just for him.