Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  Ned drove to the cemetery, not fast, not slow, just drove, and he parked in front of the gate, locked for the night, and looked into the cemetery to see if he could spot the place where they had buried Sylvan Glass, and he found it, marked by a single spray of roses from the Kiwanis Club, “With Deepest Sympathy, Our Sister in Heaven,” and he banged his fists against the gates until his hands bled, rattled the rusted steel but they did not open and no one came, no one listened, although everyone heard. He pulled the box from the flatbed, dropping it on the ground, mad now, crazy mad and struck dumb with his grief and his solitude in all this, alone, a boy, a carpenter boy who had not even done his best work in burying his brother, but done what he could.

  He dragged the box around the high wall of the cemetery, until he came to a narrow open place on the side of the road that was nearest to the place where Sylvan lay, and then he said “fuck” out loud and went back to the truck and got a shovel and started digging close to the wall that separated Charlie Beale from Sylvan Glass, and it took a long time. He stopped, thinking it was enough, but he saw as the light began to fade that it wasn’t enough, and so he jumped back down into the hole and dug until it was dark and that would have to do, feeling the chill of the cold walls of his brother’s grave, and he slid the box in, and started shoveling the dirt, jumping at the thudding sound of every shovelful as though he were being smacked repeatedly in the face.

  When the dirt was up to his waist over the body of his brother, he threw the shovel in the road, and began to climb the mound, tamping down the dirt with his feet, like he had just planted a row of potatoes, and kept thumping with his feet until there was only a gentle mound, no higher than his shin, and he paused, and tried to think of some words to say, some words that would be different and more true than the words that had been said over the body of Sylvan. He spoke of blood, the bond of blood, and he spoke of the dirt and the animals, and the beating heart, the beating heart, the beating heart of brothers.

  And then he was done, and it was over, and Charlie was laid to as much rest as he was going to get, and Ned picked the shovel up out of the road, careful even now, of his tools, and he drove home, back to the only house Charlie still owned, and he sat on the porch, the porch light on, tilted back in an old cane chair, and he drank whiskey until he was unconscious, with everybody watching, waking from sleep and watching, and when he woke up and it was still dark and he was still drunk but not drunk enough, he went in the house and got more whiskey and he drank that until he passed out again, and this was to be how he spent his days, in public agony, a cacophony of grief and inebriation. Day after day and night after night, he sat there drunk and drinking and nothing would stop him, and they all knew it, and the women began to bring him food, and the men liquor, and sometimes the twins came and sat with him, just sat, knowing there was no comfort to be given, so profound was this grief, so reckless was this sweet youth with the sympathies of his heart, and there was no diverting what was happening, and so they abetted, believing they shouldn’t but knowing there was nothing else that they, as Christians, could do, and within seven weeks the boy had drunk himself to death on an open porch in the middle of town while everybody watched, and, by that time, Harrison Boatwright Glass had gone out into the country and bought himself a new bride, a true redhead, who walked into a situation she knew nothing of, inherited a place she tried to make the best of, the second wife, the redneck beauty who couldn’t do the simplest figures in her head, and she was the new wife and the brother Ned was dead and it was winter and the snow fell on the graves of Sylvan Glass and Charlie Beale, the places where nobody would go and stand witness, not ever again and that was the end of the story. That was almost the end of the story.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  WE CAME HERE this morning . . .” the man said.

  “You came here because, like everybody who comes here, you were having your hair cut at the barbershop, or you were buying some lavender sachets over there at the Herb Farm, and the barber or the butcher said his son was a real Beebo, and you had never heard that before, and you wanted to know what it meant, and they told you to ask me. They told you I was there. They told you I knew him.”

  “Yes,” the man said. “The barbershop.”

  They sit across from me, the lawyer and his lawyer wife, and they’ve been sitting there all day and it’s late and the coffee is all gone, I can smell the burning of the scorched pot, and there wasn’t any skimmed milk anyway, and they want to know. They all want to know. Such a simple thing, or so they thought when they came in the door. But they can’t know, they can’t understand without the whole story.

  “I didn’t sleep all night, that night. Nobody did. Before it was light, I got out of bed, and the only light on was up the street, where the brother sat drinking in the dark.

  “I dressed, it was cold by then, the winter was on us, so I put on a coat and I crept down the stairs so my parents wouldn’t hear, and I ran through the town toward the cemetery, past the houses where the curtains and the shutters were still drawn, because I wanted to see. I had to know where he was.

  “I got down to the cemetery, and it was getting light, and I could see through the bars of the gate, across the graves to where the one new grave lay, and that had to be hers, but I had to know. I had to know where Charlie was. There was only the one grave in the cemetery, and he had to be somewhere.

  “I circled the wall, hugging it close, feeling the cold of the stone, and it was a long way around. It was an old cemetery and people had been being buried there for two hundred years, so it was big, and it seemed a long way around.

  “Then I saw it. I saw it, and her at the same time. Claudie, standing in the dark, in black, no coat, a veil over her face. Beside her was a young white girl I’d never seen before, and never saw again. They were holding rolls of material—linen and silk and cotton, and they were unfurling these over the mound where Charlie Beale lay.

  “They were standing there, and where they stood was a mountain of flowers. The most beautiful flowers. The flowers rose up over my head, over Claudie’s head, even, every flower, must have been, in Lexington and Staunton, white flowers and red roses, and lilies, every flower from every cooler. Planted here and there were those kind of arrangements they make for funerals, sprays of mourning, with satin ribbons that said, Dear Friend and Sadly Missed and Our Prayers Are with You and Farewell, and the people of this town, they had driven, singly, secretly, each of them, to every flower shop and they had laid the flowers on the grave. And it was all wrapped and beribboned by the fabrics from all the dresses Claudie would never make for Sylvan.

  “Claudie walked over to me, and she took my hand, and we stood there as the sun was coming up, and we could see the frost on the flowers, and there was nothing to say, we knew, we knew everything so there was no need to speak. We were glad that, from behind their drawn curtains and shutters, the people of the town, in the night, had come out, and would not let him lie unmourned, unmarked, unloved.

  “We stood, the black woman and I and the strange young woman, until it was fully light, and the frost had dissipated until there was no more sparkle left. Charlie Beale had not gone into the dark without notice.

  “Woman, girl, and boy. Black and white. The sun coming up on an event that was already yesterday, the day before yesterday, the past. But it wasn’t past, and it wasn’t over, and we both knew it, although we didn’t say anything then, or ever. It was enough to know, to know the story, to have been in the story, a part of these lives, touched by them, the bearers of their witness, their truth, what was to be their legend. Which is why you’re here.”

  “And the envelope . . . ?”

  “. . . was of course the deeds, the deed to every single piece of property, dozens of them, rocky lots and fertile fields and waterfalls and river bottomland, and it was a source of great anguish and disquiet to Boaty Glass, who even filed a lawsuit, but the law looked the other way on Boaty Glass this time, and that is how I became, at the age of six, t
he richest landowner in Rockbridge County.”

  “Yes,” said the man.

  “Yes. And you want to buy a piece of it, Pickfair, the old place, and I’m going to sell it to you, because it’s time. I’m not young and I have no wife or children, never had, which is maybe what some psychiatrist would say is the product, the result of all this, this life I’ve led, apart from the start, alone by nature and habit, not liking it much but living with it. Living in this house, Charlie Beale’s house. Not the house of my mother and father, but this one, where he lived, where the brother drank himself to death on the porch in the freezing cold, fed and liquored by kindly neighbors.

  “It’s a harsh story. It is, as gentle as it looks from the air, not an easy county. But you can’t live on the land without knowing the land, you can’t walk on it without knowing that your footsteps are not the first.

  “Claudie Wiley and I stood there that morning, and we knew that we were to keep the story, to keep it to ourselves, but keep it. The dead were owed some respect, but it wasn’t long before the first barber or butcher watched his son jump in the air, catch a ball and swivel his hips to throw to first, and turned to his neighbor, awed by the grace and splendor of it, to say, ‘That’s my boy. He’s a real Beebo.’ And, since that day, whenever any boy excels at baseball or football or lacrosse, they call him a Beebo, and that boy wears that name with pride, not even knowing the story, but knowing that there is no better thing for a boy to be.”

  “And no girls?” says the wife.

  “No, ma’am,” I say. “Incorrect, I know, but that’s the way it is. You might say, not every boy is a Beebo, but every Beebo is a boy.”

  We discuss a price, and water, and easements, and all those sad modern ways we have of trying to keep the land from being consumed by vulgarity, and they’re good people, I guess, they need some dirt under their nails, but they’ll do all right. They get up to go. We shake hands. It has been a long day.

  “Now it’s your land. But it’s important, at least to me, that you remember that it’s not just your land. There is a history. Now you’re part of it. Good night.”

  And off they go.

  I RINSE OUT THE coffee pot, make the coffee for the morning so all I have to do is flip the switch. I put out one cup, one saucer, one silver spoon balanced on the rim, my mother’s wedding china and her wedding silver, used every day because every day is all there is, and I move silently through Charlie’s house, turning off the lights one by one, until the rooms are ghostly in the lamplight from the street. The breeze outside rattles the gutters once or twice, but everything’s stable, everything fixed in this house where I have lived for almost fifty years, this house whose rooms I know, the rooms in which nothing, not one single thing, has ever happened since, and not one thing has been moved, or torn down, or even changed.

  EPILOGUE

  ILIE IN BED, and I think about those eager young people who will come with their money and take over Pickfair, and knock down some walls to make a great room, as they call it, and put in a pool, and raise their children, and I wonder if they will remember, if they will feel it in their hearts, or if what there is will begin to be lost. I tried. I tried to keep everything. It can’t be done. It can’t be done.

  As I told them, I’m not young, and it’s time to let go. I wish I didn’t have to let go to strangers, but that’s the way it is. There is no one else. The world I live in is filled with strangers, now, the old ones dead, the new ones careless with the past.

  No, there is only me, now. Only me.

  I turn out the light, and I lie in the dark and smoke a Lucky Strike by the light of the streetlamp. In Charlie Beale’s house, in Beebo’s bed. Make of it what you will. And suddenly I think of what I had meant to tell them, and I tell them now, before I sleep:

  There is in this valley a beating heart. It is always and ever there. And when I am gone, it will beat for you, and when you are gone, it will beat for your children, and theirs, forever. Forever. Until there is no water, no air, no green in the spring or gold in the autumn, no stars in the sky or wind from the north.

  And when you cannot speak, it will speak for you. When you cannot see, it will be your eyes. When you cannot remember, it will be your memory. It will never forget you.

  And when you cannot be faithful, it will save a place for your return. This is a gift to you. It cannot be taken away. It is yours forever.

  It is the narrative of this world, and the scrapbook of your own small life, and, when you are gone into ash and darkness and the grave, it will tell your story.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am the luckiest writer in America. Lynn Nesbit is my agent and my friend, Chuck Adams is my editor, and Algonquin chooses to publish my books. No writer makes a book alone and no writer could have a stronger team. To all the people at Algonquin—Chuck, Robert Miller and Michael Taeckens, Ina Stern, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Kelly Bowen and Brunson Hoole, Craig Popelars and Lauren Mosely, as well as the extraordinary Kendra Poster, I give special thanks with all my heart.

  Some people have a genius for friendship. Guy Trebay is one of them. His support and constancy and advice are a godsend. Liz Wright is another, the best cheerleader a writer could have. In Dana Martin Davis I have found a new sister to my soul, and her kindness and friendship lift me every day.

  I am also grateful to Beckett Rosset, who gave Charlie a body, James Whiteside, who gave him his heart and soul, and Robert Hoyt, who gave him his passionate and reckless nature. These men, who don’t know each other, are bonded by kindness and intelligence and strength, and they have brought Charlie to life in this book, and I thank them. I am beholden to Eugene Orza as well, for letting me draw on his vast store of baseball knowledge, and for his friendship.

  Mitchell Kaplan and Cristina Nosti, of Books & Books, did an extraordinary thing for me: they gave me a paradise of space and light and time to finish this book, and without them, it would never have gotten done.

  Stephen and Julie Perkins have been a constant source of friendship and delight and affection, and if they didn’t live down the road, I’d move.

  Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Luke Sandler have become more than associates. They are my friends, and their support and enthusiasm sustains me every day.

  Finally, to all my friends and colleagues who run and work in the country’s independent bookstores, big and little, metropolitan and far-flung, you are my heroes. Your intelligence and bravery astound and humble me.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2012 by Robert Goolrick.

  All rights reserved.

  “Valentine’s Day” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1987 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  There is an actual town of Brownsburg, Virginia, and it is a beautiful town, one of my favorite places on earth. But it bears no resemblance at all to the Brownsburg in my book. The parameters, population, and other specifics of my town are completely fictitious, as are the lives of the citizens. There is also, by the way, a town called Ordinary, Virginia, and I would have set the book there, but nobody would have believed it.

  ISBN 978-1-61620-155-5