The World Made Straight

by Ron Rash

  Leonard coughed and a thick warmth rose again in his throat. Rain fell harder now, the fog thickening. He looked up and couldn’t see where the gorge and road met. He wanted the fog to thicken even more, wrap around him like a cocoon, a warm swaddling cocoon where he could rest awhile.

  After a few more minutes Toomey spoke again.

  “I’m warming up,” the big man said groggily, the rise and fall of his chest perceptively slower. “I’ll be OK here. Just get up to the road and flag somebody down. Take some of this money and flash it. That’ll make them stop.”

  Carlton Toomey closed his eyes and began humming “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown.” Soon the tune was barely intelligible. Then there was no sound at all, nothing but the slightest movement of lips. Finally not even that, the chest as still as the mouth.

  Leonard cupped his hand and sipped again, his hand now so numb he had to watch it dip into the water and rise. He looked at the huge still body of Carlton Toomey and remembered how in the meadow Toomey had said that killing a person wasn’t an easy thing to do. But killing someone was easier than a whole lot of other things in life. Appealing in its finality as well, because it only had to be done right once. Easier than love or happiness or making money or raising a child. So easy you could do it with no more than one finger pressing a small curve of metal or the jerk of a wrist. Or simply doing nothing at all, Leonard thought, just being there and letting it happen.

  Easier than healing.

  Joshua Candler had made the choice to side with the shooters that January morning. The journal had made clear the doctor’s feelings afterward, but what of his feelings those moments after Colonel Keith slashed the air with his sword? Leonard believed he knew now. He understood why the page was blank.

  What light filtered through the rain and fog dimmed briefly for a few moments and then came back. Leonard assumed a cloud had passed over the sun, then realized that the sun wouldn’t be out if it was raining. He remembered how radiant the tobacco leaves had been, so green it was like something you could not only see but hear, a kind of verdant hum like the vibration of a tuning fork. He wished tobacco were on this bank, or some dogwood trees, something that could brighten like that as it held a bead of water on a leaf.

  Leonard lay down on the sand, head pillowed by his right arm. Swaths of fog began overlapping. The unhurried, delicate movements reminded him of something he’d seen before, but the fog seemed to have worked into his mind, making everything harder to find. Minutes passed before he remembered Professor Heddon’s last class at Chapel Hill, the motion of his teacher’s maimed hand as it followed the music. The fog thickened until there were no more swirls, just one vast silence, white and depthless.

  Leonard coughed, more blood filling his throat. He pushed his elbow against the sand and raised himself for a few moments, let the blood drain back down. He laid his head on the sand and closed his eyes. Soon the sound of rushing water broke through the fog and steadily increased and he knew it must be raining harder upstream. The bead on the tobacco plant was part of that water, flowing out of the field and into the creek, joining the millions of other raindrops to make this stream wide as a river. After a while water gathered beneath him, lifting the weight from his body, lifting him away from the pain as well. The water made a soothing sound as it moved around and under and he was so glad he wouldn’t have to crawl out of the gorge after all, because he knew the water would take care of that, would carry him all the way down to Marshall and not only there but then into the French Broad and on west to the Ohio and the Mississippi, all the way to the ocean and then across the ocean and to the beach where Emily waited and he would have her tell him every single thing that had happened since that night he’d crawled out her window and he would not stop listening until every day and every hour had been accounted for and then they would wait for rain and only then walk above the beach where plants grew and find some frond or fern that held a bead of water and he would gently cup his hand to the plant and show her more than he could ever tell her, a pearl of rain held in his open palm.

  FIFTEEN

  They had spoken little on the drive from Shelton Laurel and there seemed nothing to say now, so they sat on the bench in silence. Dena held the ticket in her right hand, thumb and index finger rubbing the paper’s slick surface. Travelers shuffled by, most too consumed hauling their own burdens to notice them. Those who did let their eyes pause on his rain-sogged clothes and the mud daubing her hair seemed more sympathetic than judgmental. Travis suspected that bus terminals attracted people all too familiar with catastrophe. Unpainted concrete gave the room a dreary hue. Being in the terminal reminded Travis of childhood days when a steady gray rain fell morning to evening and it felt like the sun had been forever washed from the sky. Terminal. The word fit this room. He reminded himself that this wasn’t a place people stayed but passed through en route to other places, places they surely believed were better.

  The bench’s top slat pushed uncomfortably into his spine. Dena had chosen this seat while he bought the ticket, chosen the bench for reasons other than comfort. It faced the parking lot and the loading platform, so they could gaze through the wide wall of glass and see which showed up first—Leonard, the Toomeys, or the bus. Dena’s face no longer registered fear, only a weary resignation. She wouldn’t resist. She’d done all her fighting at Shelton Laurel. Truck or bus, Travis believed she’d walk out the terminal doors and get in, probably without a word or change of expression. She just wanted to see it coming.

  The bus came first. As it unloaded Dena went to the ticket booth and borrowed a pen, wrote something on a scrap of paper she did not give him until they were outside. “This is where I’ll be,” she said. “At least for a while.”

  Travis read the address and phone number, placed it in his billfold. He did not know if he should hug her or say goodbye or merely walk away. Nothing felt right. They both seemed to want to say something but neither found the words. Dena finally just turned and boarded. The door closed and air brakes whooshed. The bus pulled out from under the awning and turned right onto Highway 25.

  Travis drove back toward Shelton Laurel, watching the on-coming traffic for Leonard and the Toomeys. Mountains soon pressed closer to the road. He passed a yellow sign that warned of falling rock and soon afterward had to switch lanes to avoid a chunk of granite big as a hay bale. Rain came harder now and condensation began to cloud the windshield. He rolled the window down and the cool wet air brushed against his face. Though his mind was active nothing he thought of gave him any comfort. He finally remembered the speckled trout he’d caught last fall. The fish would be more active now that spring warmed the water. Maybe it was too early for any mayflies or grasshoppers but the rains would wash plenty of worms and grubs into the pool. Completely safe, the water too murky for it to be spotted by an otter or kingfisher.

  When he got to the meadow no one was there, no vehicle either, and that was a relief. His great fear had been finding Leonard dead, one or both of the Toomeys dead as well, killed by a rifle Travis had loaded with his own hands. So at least not that, not the worst thing. He turned off the engine. Dribbles of rain streaked the windshield. Out in the meadow fog wisped. The broom sedge had not yet thickened, and he could see a mayapple’s broad leaves hovering over its delicate white flower. Like the speckled trout, protected. He tried to figure what to do next and the only answer seemed go to the trailer.

  Travis turned the truck around and headed down the mountain. The rain soon quit and he could see better, well enough to spot the skid marks on the blacktop. They could have been an hour old or months, but he couldn’t remember them being there before so pulled onto the shoulder. Below, the pickup lay crumpled against a boulder. Hubert Toomey’s head jutted through the windshield and Carlton Toomey lay half in the stream and half out, something green clutched in his right hand.

  Travis made his way into the gorge, not trusting just his feet for balance but using hands as well to slide and bear-crawl to the bottom. He
was almost at the creek before he saw Leonard. Travis kneeled beside him and pressed two fingers against Leonard’s wrist. The skin was cold. When he finally released the wrist, Travis’s fingers left an impression, as if they’d been pressed into dough. A few tears welled in his eyes but he blinked them away. Crying seemed too easy somehow.

  There was no need to check the Toomeys’ wrists for pulses, but Travis stepped into the shallows where Carlton Toomey held a fistful of money like a shriveled bouquet. Travis tried to open the hand and the whole body moved. It floated a few yards downstream before lodging on a sandbar. Travis pried the fingers open one joint at a time until the bills slipped free. He stuffed the money in his front pocket before looking a last time at what surrounded him. Not that he needed to. The scene had already settled in his mind with the cold solidity of a creek stone.

  Travis climbed out of the gorge and drove straight to Marshall. He called the Highway Patrol and reported the accident, then went to Franklin’s Drugstore and bought a long manila envelope and stamps before crossing the street to the post office. He took the piece of paper from his billfold and wrote the address on the envelope before putting the money inside and sliding the envelope into the slot marked OUT OF TOWN. She’ll just spend it on pills, Travis couldn’t help thinking, but remembered what Dena told him last fall about starting to believe people could change. At the least the money wouldn’t end up in Sheriff Crockett’s hands or someone sorry enough to claim kin to the Toomeys. One thing done right, maybe even a kind of beginning, he told himself.

  He got in the truck and leaned his head back, closed his eyes in the vain hope that he might escape, even if for just a few minutes, the knowledge that three men were dead from an accident on a rain-slick road, a road they wouldn’t have been on if not for him. But an accident, he told himself, because the stalemate between Leonard and the Toomeys had been resolved, almost certainly by the money in Carlton Toomey’s fist. Resolved peacefully because any real harm, any killing, would have been done in the meadow. They were just bringing him back to the trailer. An accident on a slippery road. “An accident,” Travis said aloud, and opened his eyes.

  The rain had started again, a sound on the pickup’s roof like time quickening. He pulled out of the parking lot and soon came to the river. Rising water widened the banks, deepened the French Broad’s color to the rich brown of cured tobacco. Across the river a new-plowed field covered a squared acre of bottomland like a dark wavy quilt. His life was beyond such fields, but Travis knew he would never forget this smell or the cool moist feel of broken ground. He inhaled deeply, held it in like a man savoring the taste of a last cigarette. The road curved briefly, then straightened as he began the long ascent north to Antioch.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Shelton Laurel Massacre was an actual event. Although I have taken liberties as far as geography and names of Confederate participants, the descriptions of the massacre are based on an account in the July 1863 New York Times. Phillip Paludan’s excellent book Victims was also helpful.

  Special thanks to my agent, Marly Rusoff, and editor, Jennifer Barth, as well as to Tom Rash, Phil Moore, James, Caroline, and Ann.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Winner of an NEA poetry fellowship, RON RASH has published two previous novels, Saints at the River and One Foot in Eden, three collections of poetry, and two of short stories. He holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.

  RON RASH is the author of the prizewinning novels One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River, as well as three collections of poetry and two of short stories. He is the recipient of an 0. Henry Prize and the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. For Saints at the River he received the 2004 Weatherford Award for Best Novel and the 2005 SEBA Best Book Award for Fiction. Rash holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University and lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT

  “This is the third novel by Ron Rash that has brought my life to a grinding

  halt–but to praise Rash simply as a powerful storyteller would be to

  overlook his gifts as a profoundly ethical writer and, at the same time, a poet

  with a fine and tender eye for the beauty of nature. What I love and admire

  most of all about this book, however, is its fierce confrontation of a human

  dilemma that has sparked too many of the world’s most violent tragedies:

  the burning question of just how much allegiance we owe family and

  community, including the ghosts from our past.”

  –JULIA GLASS, author of Three Junes

  “The World Made Straight is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing

  kind of work, a work of genius–genius and insight and poetry and the

  kind of language that whispers to me like music coming back off

  dense wet hills and upturned faces.”

  –DOROTHY ALLISON, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

  “Rash writes with beauty and simplicity, understanding his characters

  with a poet’s eye and heart and telling their tale with a poet’s tongue.”

  –WILLIAM GAY, author of Provinces of Night

  PRAISE FOR RON RASH

  “Rash tells his story with subtlety and with the best kind of empathy.”

  –The Wall Street Journal on Saints at the River

  “Captivating… His clear, concise prose and regional voice add an

  authentic veneer to this rich tableau of southern life.”

  –Entertainment Weekly on Saints at the River

  “Equal parts vintage crime novel and Southern Gothic, full of aching

  ambivalence and hard compromises, and rounded off by bad faith and

  bad choices, One Foot in Eden is a veritable garden of earthly disquiet.”

  –Los Angeles Times Book Review on One Foot in Eden