All Their Yesterdays

by Ninie Hammon

  Granny’s eyes had flashed, and for one flickering moment, JoJo had thought Granny might actually slap her. She didn’t. The flame went out in her eyes.

  “If I’s to tell you some’m all corny like, it wouldn’t do you no good.” She’d reached out her big, gnarled hand and stroked JoJo’s hair. “But what I know that you don’t, child, is that you ain’t gonna hurt like this forever. You think you will, but you won’t. One of these days, you’ll be able to think ’bout Darrell and it won’t be painful.”

  Granny had stopped then and looked deep into JoJo’s eyes.

  “I can promise you ain’t always gonna be sad. But whether or not you can ever be happy again—that I cain’t say. That part’s up to you.”

  Granny had been right, of course. Wasn’t a whole lot that woman was wrong about. There come a day when JoJo thought about Darrell and smiled. She had even come to a place where she believed there might be a good life out there somewhere, waiting for her. That she could love and be loved again. That she could be happy.

  All that ended—she looked at the calendar on the wall—7 weeks ago. Saturday, August 26, 2000, to be exact. That’s the date they ought to put on her death certificate. It didn’t matter when her heart actually stopped and the blood no longer flowed through her veins. Shortly after noon on August 26, Joanna Darlene Sparrow died.

  She got up off the bed and walked to her dresser, pulled the top drawer open, and got out the envelope she’d stuffed in there when she got home after her walk with Will.

  She didn’t know what to think about Will, this man who’d barged into her life like Sherman marching into Atlanta.

  She plopped back down on the bed with the envelope in her hand. She…liked Will. Yeah, she did. But she didn’t like the feeling she had that he could look right through her, that he knew what she was thinking, might even know what she was planning.

  Then for one fleeting moment, she wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a father like Will, a man who didn’t pull punches, called them like he seen them. But the moment was over almost before it started. Didn’t matter what kind of father she had, what kind of man she married, what she did or said or thought or wanted—or pleaded with God for. Wasn’t nothing could give her a future she was willing to live in.

  Will was well-intentioned. He had a good heart. He just didn’t understand that the kindest thing anybody could do for her right now was stay out of her way while she done what she had to do so’s she could step into eternity on her own terms. That was all she had left.

  She opened the envelope and looked at the small white pills inside. When Dough Boy’d handed it to her, he’d told her to count them before she paid him. She’d give him the money and walked away. But she counted them now, held each one carefully, almost tenderly.

  …22, 23, 24.

  There was enough Oxycontin here to fell an elephant.

  CHAPTER 15

  WILL DIDN’T SO much sleep at Granny’s as pass out. Perhaps it was that feather mattress Granny was so proud of. More likely it was residual exhaustion. No matter where he had traveled in the past 20 years, he felt off balance, a little uncomfortable. Nothing and nowhere seemed to fit. It was like he always had sand in his shoe. But cradled tenderly in the protective arms of the mountains granted a security that eased tension out of him as gently as the sigh of a sleeping baby.

  Which explained why he’d slept so late. By the time he woke up, the sun shone in his window—after ten o’clock! He lay still and looked up at the ceiling. As soon as his mind oriented to being awake and began to fasten onto reality, it slipped back out of his grasp. No matter how he wallowed it around in his head, he couldn’t come to grips with the…otherworldliness of Ricky Dan’s son and the incredible…gift?…the boy had. Will could wrap his arms around Jamey’s talent. Surely, there were other documented cases of artistic gifts in unlikely people. And if he had to, he was certain he could go…well, somewhere and look it up and find them. But he was equally certain there were no documented cases of artists who could carve exact replicas of people they’d never met. Or…

  He had to drag his mind kicking and screaming to the place where it was willing to countenance the rest of Jamey’s gift. He’d examined the carving of Granny’s wedding; she’d pointed out to him details that weren’t in the original wedding picture burned in the fire, details nobody except the people who had been there could possibly have known. So how did Jamey? Will had examined the basketball carving, stared at it until he could see it with his eyes closed, like it was tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. A carving that was completed three days before either team suited up.

  The goat carving, the lost-cat carving—you could chalk those up to extreme coincidence. But the score of a basketball game?

  The only reasonable explanation was that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and Granny and JoJo were lunatics or liars—so much for reasonable explanations. Though in truth, it seemed the two of them didn’t have to swallow nearly as hard as he did to accept that Jamey’s carvings were…what? Magical? Yeah, maybe so. At the very least, they came from some place not governed by the same laws of time as the rest of the world, a place where past, present, and future were mingled in a way Will couldn’t even begin to understand.

  He sat up on the side of the bed and sighed.

  You can slice and dice it any way you want to, Pal, but the truth in long johns with the butt flap down is pretty simple: the kid can carve events and people he’s never seen and a reality that hasn’t happened yet.

  But that was absurd!

  Yeah, it was. It was also true.

  Will got up and wandered out into the kitchen, his hair a tousled display of bed head, and when Granny turned from the sink to greet him, she laughed out loud.

  “I’m that funny looking?”

  She put her hand over her mouth to hide her teeth and continued to giggle.

  “Aw, it ain’t that, Will.” For a moment, her cinnamon eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “I’m so glad to have you here, with your hair all upside down, the pure joy of it makes me wanna dance a jig or laugh out loud. And I’m too old to dance.” She gestured toward the table where an empty place setting still rested. “Sit y’self down and I’ll make you some bacon and eggs. Coffee’s hot.”

  “Just toast, Granny. Thanks.” Obviously JoJo had already left for work. “Where’s Jamey?”

  “He’s up the shed gettin’ a potato digger and a burlap bag so’s the two of you can go sangin’.”

  Will was grateful Granny had her back turned when she said it—couldn’t see the emotions that surely were displayed on his face. Ricky Dan had taught Will how to hunt for ginseng, showed him the kinds of places it was likely to grow and how to dig it up once he found it. Those had been the best times he spent with Ricky Dan.

  “Jamey Boy was supposed to go with Lloyd,” Granny said as she blew by Will’s request for “just toast” and cracked two eggs into the skillet of bacon grease. “They go ever now and then, not’s often as you and Ricky Dan usta. They had it set up for today, but Lloyd called this morning and said he wasn’t comin’, said you’s here, you’d oughta take Jamey.”

  She stopped and turned to Will.

  “Lloyd’s ate up with some’m. Sounds so mad and cold I ain’t even sure it’s Lloyd I’m talkin’ to. It’s ’bout you bein’ here, but for the life of me I cain’t figure why that’s got under his skin the way it has.”

  “He believes he has a right to be mad at me,” Will said quietly. “And I can’t say I blame him.”

  Before Granny could ask what he meant by that, Jamey burst in the back door and rushed into the kitchen. He held a burlap bag in one hand and a garden tool that looked like an oversized ice cream scoop in the other. For one breathless moment, Ricky Dan stood before Will, laughter in his voice as he delivered one of his famous one-liners: Will, you got to enjoy life; it’s got an expiration date.

  The image vanished as soon as Jamey opened his mouth. This was a boy in a Ricky
Dan suit, a kid as excited about going sangin’ as Will had ever been.

  “Granny said you’s gonna take me sangin’ ’cause Lloyd cain’t,” he said. “Are you ready? Can we go now?”

  “Soon as I finish breakfast.”

  Hunting ginseng had been a mountain tradition for generations. Though very little was used commercially in the United States, it was exported to Asia where it served as an ingredient in everything from toothpaste to chewing gum, in soft drinks, candy, and cigarettes. In Japan, ginseng was used to reduce stress, lower cholesterol, enhance strength—even make race horses run faster.

  But the plant wasn’t easy to find. And to command the highest price, it had to be harvested properly between August and November—keeping the branching forks of the root intact. Farmers’ domesticated ginseng plants sold for two hundred to two hundred-fifty dollars a pound, but prime Eastern Kentucky mountain ginseng could bring upward of five hundred dollars a pound—at least it used to when Will and Ricky Dan had taken theirs to Somerset to sell.

  “They’s sayin’ at the post office the other day that Wilson Fur and Ginseng in Russell Springs is payin’ eight-fifty for ’sang,” Granny said. “Least that’s what JoJo heard.”

  After Will finished his breakfast, he and Jamey set out up the hill behind the house past the shed where Jamey did his arts and then north across the top of the mountain. Two men and a yellow canary. ValVleen was perched on Jamey’s shoulder and every now and then she’d burst into a hauntingly beautiful melody of chirps and tweets.

  Will had to scratch around in his head to find the old maps, but once he located them and blew the dust off, he used them to guide him through the woods. He knew what to look for as a place ginseng would grow—shadowed land with good drainage. But he wanted to go back to the places he and Ricky Dan had found—partly because the ginseng would still be prospering there if it had been harvested properly by anyone else who’d come upon it over the years. But mostly because he wanted to take Jamey to the places he’d gone so often with Jamey’s father.

  They walked together in amiable silence for about 15 minutes, made their way through bright yellow oak and chestnut trees, crimson dogwoods, fiery red sumac and orange witch hazels and listened to the crackle of leaves hurried across the ground by a scolding wind. And to the call and response of barred owls, demanding to know Who? Who? Who’s out there?

  Will carried Jamey’s tattered backpack with their lunch—peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and bags of Cheetos—and a water bottle. Jamey carried the potato digger in a burlap bag thrown over his shoulder. When they crested a ridge, Will paused to catch his breath. Jamey hadn’t even broken a sweat. Booze had taken a heavy toll on Will’s body as well as his soul.

  That’s when Will noticed that Jamey wore a necklace. All he could see was the thin silver chain, almost too dainty for a piece of men’s jewelry.

  “What you got on the chain?” he asked and pointed to Jamey’s neck.

  The boy smiled as he fished around in his shirt for the pendant. When he found it, he held it up for Will to see—a tiny silver cross, plain, elegant in its simplicity.

  “JoJo give it to me. It’s her favoritest necklace.”

  “If it’s her favorite necklace, why’d she give it to you?”

  “Because she did.”

  Hard to argue that.

  Will pointed to a distant ridge. “I thought we’d check under that big rock outcrop on the south side of Gizzard Ridge—over by Tiresome Creek—you know the place?”

  “Uh huh, Lloyd showed me.”

  “We’ll go to the places your dad and I used to go first.” It was still hard for him to use the word “dad,” in relation to Ricky Dan, who was frozen forever in his mind as a young man not much older than Jamey. “Then we’ll check out some other likely spots.”

  “First thing you look for is rattlesnake ferns,” Jamey said, like a first-grader reciting the alphabet.

  “Very good,” Will said, struck yet again by Jamey’s eyes, the same luminous green as Ricky Dan’s.

  “Then spleen worts, Jack-in-the-pulpits, and…” Jamey’s face went completely blank, like somebody’d taken out his batteries. His eyes took on a far-away look and then he put his hands together in front of him, his fingers intertwined. Each wiggled back and forth, like the tentacles of sea anemones in a strong current. “And ginger, wild ginger!” he squealed. “Them’s the three things Lloyd and me look for.”

  His face darkened, like a cloud briefly crossing in front of the sun.

  “Granny won’t let me go sangin’ by myself, won’t ’low me to go no farther into the woods than the shed ’thout somebody goes with me. She says I’ll get lost.”

  “I got lost out here once. I’d probably still be lost if your daddy hadn’t found me.”

  Jamey’s eyes lit up.

  “How’d my daddy find you?”

  So Will told him the story. How he’d gone to look for wild mushrooms one morning and had been walking along a trail he knew well when his foot slipped and he slid down a long embankment. Rather than climb back up the crumbly, leafy hillside, he figured he’d go around and catch the trail at a different place. Then a windfall blocked his path and he had to go around it, a thicket got in his way next and he had to detour again. Pretty soon he was hopelessly turned around.

  “I got scared when I realized I didn’t know where I was and couldn’t even find my way back to where I’d slipped. I wanted to keep looking, to run around until I found the path, but then I thought real hard about what I should do, got real still like you just did. And I remembered what your dad told me to do if I ever got lost in the woods.”

  Jamey’s attention was so focused he didn’t appear to breathe.

  “He said, ‘Will, soon’s you know you’re lost, hug a tree. And you keep on a-huggin’ that tree ’til I come find you.’ ”

  A crease appeared between Jamey’s eyebrows that reminded Will of Granny.

  “That don’t make no sense. Why’d he want you to hug a tree?”

  “So I’d stay put. If you’re lost and you keep going, you get more lost, farther away from where you started. And it’s a whole lot easier to find somebody who stays in one place than it is to look for a moving target. It was almost dark before I heard him calling my name.”

  Will had hollered until he was hoarse before Ricky Dan came over the hill and down to the dry creek bed and found him. He’d wanted to be tough, act like getting lost was no big deal, but as soon as he saw Ricky Dan he broke.

  “I ran to him, threw my arms around his waist and started sobbing.”

  Ricky Dan had held him tight and let him cry.

  “I could hear your dad’s heart thudding in his chest and it dawned on me that he’d been scared, too.”

  When Ricky Dan was finally able to peel Will off, he got down on one knee, eye level with the boy and reamed him out good for wandering off in the woods alone, made him promise he’d never do anything like that again. Then he stood up and did a strange thing. He took Will’s hand—like Will was a little kid and not 10-going-on-11 years old!—and he held on tight as they walked back home.

  “He never told anybody that I cried when he found me,” Will said.

  “How come?”

  “He knew it’d embarrass me. Your dad joked and carried on, seemed to make light of things, but he was…a whole lot deeper than most people knew.”

  Will looked hard at the young man who was so very like Ricky Dan on the outside and struggled to find words to tell him what kind of man his father’d been on the inside.

  “Ricky Dan had Bowman’s strength and character and Granny’s humor and courage. He was brave—like you.”

  “Like me? I ain’t brave.”

  “You go down in that mine, work there in the dark, danger all around you. That’s brave.” Will paused. “I couldn’t do it. Tried, but I wasn’t strong enough. I’m terrified of coal mines, Jamey.” He worked to keep his voice level. “But your daddy, he wasn’t scared. He was a better
man than me.”

  Will turned away quickly and walked to the crest of a hill, then started down the other side. The rock outcrop and the creek he was looking for was on the other side of the next hill. Up ahead lay a small meadow.

  THE TARGET STOPPED right before it stepped out into the meadow at the base of the hill. The hunter moved the crosshairs slightly, fixed them squarely on the target’s chest. Could go for a head shot, but a chest shot was safer. Bigger area to aim at.

  The hunter drew in a breath and let it out slowly.

  Then he squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet hurling through space toward the third button on Will Gribbins’s shirt.

  CHAPTER 16

  LLOYD DIDN’T SLEEP at all the night before he went to Granny’s to make sure his own self that it was true, that Will was alive, that he really had shown up just in time to destroy Lloyd’s life. He’d tried to rest, but he couldn’t just lay there in the bed and stare at the ceiling. So he’d got up, smoked one cigarette after another and paced, watched the sky outside, saw the black become charcoal and then gray. Soon’s it was light, he’d gone outside and loaded up the piece of jet for Jamey.

  He didn’t go to work that afternoon at three—called in sick. He’d called in sick again this morning, too, after another sleepless night. But it wasn’t because he was afraid to go down in the mine with his mind muddy. He was alert, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he’d ever been. In fact, he was so totally awake and…alive…. he wondered if this was how them people felt who snorted cocaine up their noses.

  His son had told him about it. Hollered at him about it. Called him ig-nert and backward, said he didn’t know nothing, didn’t understand how it felt to be on top of the world—strong and powerful and in charge.