by Ron Rash
Maybe this wasn’t ever your home, I told myself. Maybe somewhere else is your real home. Maybe your real father isn’t dead, just the part about him being murdered by people who raised you a lie. Or maybe it is all a lie. One second I believed one thing, and the next I believed just the opposite.
I didn’t move from those steps till they drove up.
‘Why ain’t you finished?’ he asked.
‘I got tired.’
He looked put out with me.
‘Sheriff Alexander’s done set up a roadblock. He says we can’t come back tomorrow.’
He looked at the rows of uncut cabbage.
‘Damn, son, that’s a sure ten dollars we could have used.’
‘Billy,’ Momma said, and she said it sharp.
His voice softened.
‘The sheriff said you was there when Mrs. Winchester got burned.’
‘Yes, I was there,’ I said, not meeting his eyes.
‘I’m sorry you were,’ Daddy said. ‘I reckon seeing such would take the starch out of most anyone. Don’t you fret none about that cabbage, son. I shouldn’t have spoke ever a thing about it.’
‘We better get going,’ Momma said. ‘Sheriff Alexander told us not to tarry.’
We got in the truck but he didn’t crank the engine. He and Momma stared through the glass at the farm. For the last time, I suddenly realized. Any other day I would have tried to say something make them feel better.
But not this day.
‘It’s a pretty place,’ Momma said. ‘I don’t notion I knew how pretty till these last few days.’
‘But it won’t be much longer,’ he said, but in a soft way.
‘That’s the worst thing,’ Momma said. ‘Even if I never laid eyes on this valley again, there’d be a comfort in knowing it would stay the way I’d always known it, not buried under a lake.’
They stared a while out the window, maybe trying to freeze it in their minds so they’d never forget.
‘We best be going,’ he finally said. ‘There’s nothing for us here anymore.’
The truck bumped down the drive. Momma kept looking back, even when we got on the road. It was like she expected the farm to disappear the second she took her eyes off it.
We passed Mrs. Winchester’s mailbox. The ground where the house had been looked like someone had spread a black quilt over it. All that was left was the brick chimney and tin roof. That and a few wisps of smoke. I could feel Momma and him tense as we passed by. I wondered if Sheriff Alexander had told them Mrs. Winchester had talked to me.
The road curved away from the river. The sun had fallen behind Sassafras Mountain, and the woods were shadowy. The air had a chill to it.
‘There’ll come a hard frost tonight,’ he said.
He said it without thinking, talking more to himself than to Momma and me, because it was a natural thing for him to take notice of, natural as smelling rain coming or spotting blue mold on a tobacco leaf. He’d been a mill worker for months but a farmer for decades.
‘What on earth,’ Momma said as the road straightened out, because two police cars and a white Carolina Power truck were parked in Travis Alexander’s front yard.
The sheriff stood on the front porch, his deputy and the Carolina Power man I’d seen earlier that afternoon beside him. Travis Alexander stood on the porch too, his hands clasped in front of him like a man praying. He wasn’t talking to God though. He was cussing, some of his words shouted at the engineer but most at his brother as Sheriff Alexander put his hand on Travis’s arm and helped him down the steps and into the back seat of the patrol car.
‘Lord help us,’ Momma said. ‘What awful thing more can happen in this valley.’
I didn’t change into my pajamas that night, just took off my boots and laid down on my bed in my jeans and denim work shirt. I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much sleeping. Instead I’d be thinking, searching for the words I’d speak come morning, words that would have to be chose careful to get me to the truth of what I had to know.
But I had all night. I wanted a little time before I searched for those words. I turned on the radio, because sometimes music can take you out of yourself when you’re bothered. I found some good music—Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater—but it might just as well have been dentist chair music for all the attention my mind paid to it.
I cut off the radio and stared at the ceiling. I didn’t want to close my eyes, because I knew soon as I did I’d see Mrs. Winchester sitting on the floor, flames rising from her lap like something she was cradling.
After a while I cut off the light. An ambulance wailed out on the by-pass. Someone across the street slammed a front door, a car passed a few yards from my window. All town noises none of us had gotten used to.
‘We’ll rent a few months and then get us a place out in the country,’ he’d said after we moved in.
‘It can’t be soon enough for me,’ Momma had said. ‘I don’t see how anyone gets any sleep with such racket all hours of the night.’
I started putting words together in my mind and then erasing them. It was like I was doing a crossword. Every word had to fit in a certain place. But they didn’t fit, no matter how many times I scrambled them up. She’d lied to me almost eighteen years, so she was good at it. The words I wanted would hit Momma so fast and hard her face couldn’t help but show the truth right then and there.
The newspaper thumped on the driveway across the street before I knew what I was going to do. It was a simple thing, so simple I shouldn’t have taken a whole night to figure it out. I wouldn’t even need words, at least not at first.
I slept then, maybe just a few minutes, maybe an hour, but when I woke I smelled coffee.
For a few moments it was like I’d completely forgotten yesterday— Daddy and Momma were who they’d always been, Mrs. Winchester was alive and whatever secrets she had she kept to herself. Then I felt the Gold Star pricking my skin like a briar. I got out of bed and laced up my boots. I took the Gold Star from my pocket and closed my hand over it. I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen.
Momma was putting the milk in the refrigerator. I waited for her to turn around. When she did I opened my palm.
I’d done the right thing, because her face told me more than any words. She pressed her back against the refrigerator, almost like I held a spider or snake in my hand.
‘Mrs. Winchester gave it to me,’ I said. ‘She told me you know where my father is. Where is he, Momma?’
‘Oh, God,’ Momma said. She sagged like I’d punched her in the stomach. She put her hands over her face like she was trying to hide what part of her she could.
‘Tell me, Momma,’ I said. Then I said the thing I didn’t believe. ‘She says you killed him, Momma.’
‘Your momma didn’t kill him. I did.’
He stood in the doorway, bare-chested, shaving cream covering his face like a fake beard.
‘Don’t say it, Billy,’ Momma said.
‘Where is he buried?’
The words came from me, but it was like they came from another person’s mouth, somebody I didn’t know any better than I knew the two strangers listening to those words. This is a dream. It has to be. Open your eyes, I told myself.
But my eyes were already open.
‘That old woman told you a passel of lies,’ Momma said, like my ears hadn’t just heard him say it was all true. ‘We don’t know nothing of what she told you. She was a crazy old woman. She was liable to tell you most anything.’
‘Where is he buried?’ I said again, but I wasn’t looking at Momma anymore. I was staring at the man who stood in the doorway.
‘A lie will always find you out,’ he’d once told me years ago.
Whether he believed it then I reckoned he believed it now. He looked me dead in the eyes. Whatever he was going to say would be the truth.
‘The side of Licklog facing the river. Next to a big ash tree.’
‘She told me I couldn’t let that water cover him
up,’ I said, the words still like someone else’s words. Maybe they always would be, I thought, because maybe the person I had been no longer existed.
‘She lied,’ Momma whispered.
‘He ain’t going to stay down in that valley and be covered up,’ I said, still looking at him. ‘You’re going to show me where he is.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘Don’t, Billy,’ Momma said. She was crying now. Then she looked at me. ‘Don’t believe it, son,’ she said. ‘Don’t believe it even if it’s true.’
She reached her arms out to me, but I stepped away.
‘Don’t go back there,’ she said. ‘Let that lake cover it all up, son—the good and the bad.’
‘He can’t do that, Amy,’ he said.
‘Put the shovels in the truck,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll get dressed and be out there in a minute.’
It was strange how he said it, so calm and matter-of-fact, like we were going to go dig up some redworms for fishing. Maybe he’s trying to trick me, I thought. Maybe he’s going to go out the back door and disappear. How could you know what a stranger might do?
Except he wasn’t a stranger, and telling myself he was didn’t change things a whit. I knew him, even now, knew him well enough to know he wasn’t going to run.
I stood there and waited. He came out of the bedroom dressed in his farming clothes, the clothes Momma had put in the bottom drawer once he’d started work at the mill. He’d wiped off the shaving cream. I could see his face, and despite all that had happened it was a face I knew.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He looked at Momma.
‘You staying here?’
‘No,’ Momma said. ‘I’m going.’
It seemed like I was one of the astronauts walking on the moon. Each step I took seemed in slow motion. It was like everything I had ever known, even how to walk, was uncertain now. I got two shovels and threw them in the back of the truck with the cabbage sacks I hadn’t filled. They came out in a minute, her pulling on a sweater while he locked the door.
‘Give me the keys,’ I said. ‘I’m driving.’
He did what I told him. I cranked the engine and drove out of Seneca, making one more trip back to Jocassee than I’d planned.
I drove fast, faster than I should have because the roads were slick with rain. The windshield wipers made their tick-tack sound, and it seemed a reminder of time running out. Carolina Power had said it would take ten more months for the lake to fill up, but in my mind it was like I was racing water rising by the second.
‘It ain’t already underwater, is it?’ I asked. ‘That’s not likely,’ he said. ‘It’s high ground.’
‘We can’t do this,’ Momma said. ‘It’s too late, years too late,’ but it was like she was talking to herself.
It wasn’t like a dream anymore. What I felt was just the opposite, like everything in my life had been a long, deep dream till I opened my hand and showed Momma the Gold Star. It was like I had just been born and was seeing the world for the first time. What I was seeing and hearing could have made me cry like a newborn baby. But it didn’t. There was a coldness in my heart that kept any tears froze deep inside me. We listened to the windshield wipers as we headed up into the mountains, the sky above us gray and low.
I turned off the blacktop and onto the dirt road. The road curved and dropped. I braked and jerked the steering wheel to keep us on the road.
‘Slow down, son,’ he said.
But I wasn’t going to slow down. I bumped and swerved on down the road, not much caring if I ran off or not.
Then I came out of a curve and saw the roadblock laid in the middle of the road like a giant sawhorse, the silver patrol car parked on the left edge of the road. Sheriff Alexander looked right at me through the windshield as I swerved to the right side. I ran two wheels into the ditch and clipped the roadblock. I swerved back onto the road and kept going, past Travis Alexander’s farm, then Mrs. Winchester’s before turning, leaving the road where the mailbox said Holcombe.
I didn’t go all the way up the drive. I scraped and bucked over the ditch and into the cabbage field I hadn’t harvested. I didn’t stop until I came to water.
I got out and took a shovel from the truck bed.
‘We’ll need this too,’ he said, and handed me a cabbage sack.
That’s when I realized what should have been clear from the start. What we were going to find wasn’t going to be in a coffin. Murderers didn’t put their victims in coffins.
Sheriff Alexander’s car came up the drive. He slowed for a second in front of the house, then bumped down the field edge and parked twenty yards from the truck. He didn’t try to drive through the field. Unlike me he was worried about getting out of there.
‘What in the hell are you all doing?’ Sheriff Alexander said as he limped toward us.
‘What should have been done a long time ago, Sheriff,’ he said. ‘What can’t be hid no longer.’
‘And what’s that, Billy?’ Sheriff Alexander asked.
‘Holland Winchester. The man I killed.’
Sheriff Alexander stopped like he’d been hit by a two by four. He stood there not ten yards from us. It seemed he couldn’t take another step. His weight made his shoes sink deeper in the mud, almost like he was taking root in the ground.
‘You can handcuff me if you want,’ he said, holding his hands out to Sheriff Alexander. ‘But I ain’t going to run. I never figured to do that, even in the worst of it.’
Sheriff Alexander didn’t move and neither did any of the rest of us.We just stood there with the rain dripping off us like statues on a courthouse lawn.
‘It’s too late, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander finally said. His voice was gentle, a gentleness you wouldn’t think such a big man would have in him, especially after all the meanness he’d seen as a law man.
He stepped toward us, his shoes squishing as he pulled them out of the mud.
‘Let’s get out of here, Billy. Whatever’s been done has been done. We’re too old to change it now. Let the water cover it up.’
‘I got to do it, Sheriff,’ he said and lifted the other shovel from the truck bed.
‘What about you?’ Sheriff Alexander said to Momma.
‘Surely you’ve got enough sense to know I’m right.’
Momma looked at Sheriff Alexander and then she looked at us. It was like she wasn’t sure whose side she was on.
‘It’s got to be done,’ she finally said.
Sheriff Alexander shook his head like he was put out with all three of us. He took his glasses off and wiped the rain from the lenses. He was thinking about what he was going to say, what he was going to do. His gray eyes looked beyond tired, like they’d seen more than they could bear the last few days and their grayness was nothing but smoke left over from something snuffed out. You could tell he hadn’t slept much last night. I wondered if it was what had happened with Mrs. Winchester or what had happened with his brother that had kept him awake and drained the light from his eyes.
‘Where is he?’ Sheriff Alexander asked as he put his glasses back on.
‘Across the river,’ I said.
Sheriff Alexander looked at the water that covered the lower part of the field. His eyes followed it across the river bed and to the foot of Licklog.
‘This isn’t going to be easy. That river’s deeper now.’
‘You don’t have to go,’ I said.
It was raining steady now, and the clouds promised it would only get harder. I stepped into the water.
‘I’m going, son,’ Sheriff Alexander said, his voice angry. ‘But I’m getting a rope out of my trunk first. I don’t want someone to drown doing this, so you just wait a damn minute.’
Sheriff Alexander walked over to the patrol car and got a rope, but not before talking on his radio.
‘You lead,’ he said, handing me a rope end.
I picked up the shovel and cabbage sack with my free hand. I stepped into the water, the
rope straightening out behind me.
‘You next, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
‘I’m going too,’ Momma said, reaching out for the rope as well.
No one argued with her—Sheriff Alexander grabbed the other rope end and wrapped it around his hand like I’d done.
‘I’ll carry that shovel, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘You just worry with holding on to that rope.’
The water barely covered my boots at first. I was still in the field, or what until a few days ago had been a field. It was like slogging through a black-water swamp, for the mud hid the limbs and trees the loggers had left. I stumbled twice before I’d even got out of the field. I could feel the others behind me, the rope tightening and tugging each time they stumbled or paused. I glanced back and it was a sorry-looking sight. The rain had drenched their clothes, and they hung onto the rope like shipwreck survivors. They’ll never make it, I thought. I’ll end up crossing this river alone.
Beyond the field the going got easier despite the current. The river ran dingy from the rain, but unlike in the fields you could make out the bottom. I found the shallows below a blue hole and started across. I took my time, looking for patches of white sand between the trees and limbs and rocks. The water rose to my kneecaps but no higher.
I didn’t know I was across until I bumped against the bank. I half-stepped and half-crawled to where the water got swampy and still again, but not before I’d slipped and slid back down the bank a couple of times. It was a hard thing to do without dropping the shovel or cabbage sack.
I pulled the others up the bank.
‘That river’s rising,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘This needs to be done fast.’
Sheriff Alexander handed the shovel to him.
‘This way,’ he said, not waiting for Sheriff Alexander to finish looping the rope. He led us through the shallow water, using the shovel like a cane to keep his balance when he stumbled.
We started up Licklog. The rain came harder now, a cold rain, the kind that soaked to your bones. We were all shivering and miserable, not a stitch of dry clothing among us. The clouds looked low enough to touch.
