The Weight of This World

by David Joy

  When she knelt beside him, he could finally make out her face. “I finished painting the room,” he said.

  “You didn’t need to do that. I could’ve finished,” she said. “Now, come on and let’s get you up.”

  April took Aiden by the hand and he tried to come up from the ground, but his body was mush. When he finally rose to his feet, he was so dizzy he nearly fell over, but he blinked his eyes until the feeling passed, then stood drooping in the yard until he’d regained some sort of control. “Where’s Thad?” he asked.

  “Down there, I guess. But I don’t know.”

  “I’m glad he made it home,” Aiden said. April was beside him and Aiden put his arm over her shoulder so he wouldn’t fall as he stumbled drunkenly down the hill. When they were to the trailer, April led Aiden inside and helped him onto the couch. The place was still ripped apart, but he was too out of his mind to pay any attention. April leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, and she put her thumb against his mouth and he puckered his lips to kiss her back. “Tell Thad I’m glad he made it home,” Aiden said. And then he closed his eyes and was asleep.

  (22)

  A light drizzle that seemed more to hang in the air than fall started around midday. It looked like Ireland, or at least that’s what the folks who’d come to see the property said. April didn’t know if that was true or not. She’d been out of those mountains only twice in her entire life.

  Their names were Pat and Connie Lathan, and they were up from Atlanta. Pat had been a urologist and Connie had retired as the provost of the Savannah College of Art and Design, something she kept repeating as if her career had trumped her husband’s. Pat was stubby and had a wild swath of hair swept across his head. He wore a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses with thick frames that circled his eyes and didn’t seem to fit his style at all. Connie had undoubtedly picked them out. She was tall and lean and dressed to the nines with high-waist slacks and a thin silk blouse that made her figure stunning, even in her midsixties. Pat talked so fast that April had a hard time understanding what he said, while Connie’s words rolled out of her mouth in a low-country drawl. April had neither met nor seen people like the Lathans in all her life. Nothing about them made sense. It was like she was looking at aliens.

  “Dr. Lathan wants to plant that hillside with Christmas trees,” Tom Rice said. He’d had the listing from the beginning and assured April that he could sell the property if she was patient and willing to negotiate. So far he’d only brought three people in a little over a year, but April was hopeful.

  “Christmas trees, huh?” April ran her eyes over Pat as if she might have missed something, but she hadn’t. She turned to Tom Rice, who stood before her, just a pudgier, balder version of the boy she’d gone to high school with. Tom had never been much to look at and she would’ve laughed at him if he’d had the nerve to ask her out back then. But now he owned a real estate firm that had made a fortune during the boom, and he’d lived far enough below his means that he hadn’t lost his ass like all the others when the market tanked. She focused back on Dr. Lathan. “I think Christmas trees could do well here.”

  “You do?” Mrs. Lathan squealed in horror. She eyed April with a sneering skepticism, then turned that expression toward her husband. “I personally think he’s gone batty.”

  Pat stood silenced and Tom Rice’s eyes were wide like he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to break the tension.

  “I think they’ll do just fine,” April said. “The Hoopers have made a lot of money through the years growing Fraser fir just over that ridge.” She nodded to someplace back behind the house that could’ve just as easily not existed at all for what the Lathans knew of this country. “You’ve got the Hoopers on that side and there are some Fowlers on up from there, and all of them got some of the prettiest trees in this country. Even had one in the White House one Christmas.”

  “The White House,” Dr. Lathan said. “You hear that, hun? The Hoopers even had a tree in the White House.”

  “You’re saying people have grown presidential trees on this property?” She stressed that word presidential as if to dismiss everything April said.

  “Not on this property, no.” April stared at Connie and did everything in her power to keep a smile on her face. She’d gotten up early, put on her makeup, curled her hair, and slid into the nicest thing she had, a pretty cotton sundress that fit her perfectly, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing she could do to pass for anything more than backwoods to a woman like Mrs. Lathan. April was Kmart classy at best. “There hasn’t been trees grown on this property, but we’re right in the heart of some of the finest firs there are. That’s a fact. And it might even bode well that the land hasn’t been touched. The soil might be richer.”

  “The soil will be richer,” Dr. Lathan repeated sternly.

  April suddenly realized that they hadn’t made it off the front porch. “I have some coffee inside if you’d like to come in and see the house.”

  “That’s okay, dear.” Mrs. Lathan squinted her eyes as if to get a better view through the mist. “And who owns that little trailer down there?”

  “I do,” April said. “The property runs past that and then cuts over through those trees for a ways and back up to the top of this ridge, then it kind of takes an angle down to the road where you came in. But the trailer down there, it’s a part of the six acres. My son lives in it right now.”

  “Someone lives there?” Mrs. Lathan looked absolutely appalled.

  Dr. Lathan seemed to pay attention only to the property lines April had drawn, appearing satisfied with what he envisioned.

  “We really should step on into the house,” April said. “There’s no sense in standing in the rain.”

  “I kind of like the feel of it,” Dr. Lathan said. “And, besides, we don’t have any interest in the home.”

  April cocked her head to the side thinking she’d misunderstood.

  “That’s the thing I didn’t get a chance to tell you on the phone, April. The Lathans are interested in the property, but just the property,” Tom Rice tried to explain. “Not the house or the trailer. Just the land.”

  “I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at.”

  “We already own a home,” Mrs. Lathan said. “It’s in Wade Hampton.”

  “I know a girl who does some housekeeping there.” April tried to make small talk, tried to say something that might make Mrs. Lathan look at her differently, but it didn’t work.

  “We divide our time between there and Atlanta.”

  “So I still don’t think I understand,” April said. “What interest do you have in this place, then?”

  “Well, there’s no land in Cashiers,” Dr. Lathan interjected. “Our community is divided into small lots, see, and there’s certainly no room for Christmas trees.”

  “I could die,” Mrs. Lathan screeched. “Like I said, he has absolutely gone batty.”

  “What they’re saying, April, is that if they were to make an offer on the property it would be for the land, just the land.”

  April stood there and tried to process everything that had been said. After a while, she pushed herself to grin and met eyes with Dr. Lathan. “Christmas trees, huh?”

  “Yes, Fraser fir. Presidential trees in every direction.” Dr. Lathan opened his hands out over the land in front of him. “I can see it now.”

  April laughed at his theatrics and it seemed to please him that she was amused. But really what she found amusing was what he thought he could do on this land. There was nothing simple about growing trees, and anybody with half a brain would’ve known that. Trying to farm trees on six acres was one of the stupidest things she’d ever heard. She certainly expected some highbrow doctor and his wife to have better sense than that.

  Most of the families who raised trees in Jackson County had been cabbage farmers decades ago. When trees outpriced cabbage, they ph
ased out their land year by year until the cabbage was gone and they had ten generations of tree stock, a transition that took a decade to make profitable and even then left them to scrape by. It was as if Dr. Lathan believed trees had to be easy work, a lot easier than, say, tomatoes or strawberries. After all, the woods were full of trees and no one toiled away to make them grow.

  April was certain he’d roll a tractor onto himself or get bit by a rattlesnake, but she wasn’t entirely sure if that would be all that bad of an end. If he cleared all of the land this fall and managed to get trees in the ground, he’d be lucky if he ever got to see one tree wrapped in lights with an angel on top at Christmas before he killed off. The more April thought about it, Dr. Lathan’s old lady was right.

  “He’s gone stark raving mad,” Mrs. Lathan said, and they all stood there and laughed for a minute longer.

  When the rain poured down, the Lathans and Tom Rice hightailed it for his notchback sedan, hollering they’d be in touch. April wasn’t entirely certain whether that was something that pleased her or made her sad. She watched them drive past the trailer at the bottom of the hillside and she thought she saw Dr. Lathan wave at her. His wife beside him seemed to turn toward the trailer, where Aiden was still asleep, Mrs. Lathan probably questioning how the hell people could live like this. April thought about all of the time and money she’d dumped into the house. She and Aiden slaved away to turn this place into something nicer than it’d ever been. All of that work, and this place was nothing more than a joke to these people, a house to raze, a lot to clear-cut, and all for nothing more than shits and giggles, just a hobby. Dr. Lathan wanted to play farmer.

  But April was over it. She didn’t care what the Lathans thought about her or her house or this land or her life. She’d suffered too long to care anymore. She’d been cussed and hit and spat on for so damn long and all she had to show for it was a house and a piece of land that other folks wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot stick. She was tired. And if those people wanted this mountain and they were willing to cut a check, then by God they could have it. She was sick of staying put and hoping for better. She’d been waiting on better her whole life, and better never came.

  She was soaking wet and the rain was still coming and she no longer knew whether to go inside or just keep standing there. So she just stood there figuring why the hell not, and hoped to God they’d make her an offer, because if they did, she was done. She’d take the money and never look back.

  (23)

  The sun did not rise on Bonas Defeat. Before daylight could climb over the ridgeline, clouds swept across the fracture of sky over the gorge and brought an early-morning drizzle that could be more heard in the trees than felt on the ground. Ashen-gray clouds pushed against one another and built into a greater darkness, and by noon the rain was upon him.

  Thad was climbing a craggy path along the edge of the spillway at the head of the gorge when the storm came. The spillway crumbled into stones at the bottom, but the concrete slope up top was slicked with green algae where a thin veil of water always flowed. The concrete quickly darkened from white to a leathery brown under the rain. What first streaked by in heavy sheets soon became one solid torrent. By the time he made it to the top of the dam, Thad’s clothes were soaked through.

  The lake was low with a wide rim of clay-caked stone and sand outlining dark water that seemed to steam as the rain fell. A murder of crows strutted about like black chickens on the bank and picked through litter discarded by fishermen: beer cans and pale blue containers that had held night crawlers, balled-up wads of fishing line, and an Igloo cooler busted to pieces against the rocks. Thad figured the lake was lowered so that men could work on the dam, but there was no one around, just a CAT bulldozer and trackhoe, their yellow paint chipping around scabs of rust, their tracks muddied with clay. He headed through the rain up a road above the spillway and did not see the fork until he was upon it. To the left the old logging road wound into the valley and came out at the metal bridge where he’d begun, and to the right the road led past Slickens Creek to where Highway 281 cut south toward Rock Bridge and Round Mountain and north around Tanasee Lake and Wolf. He kept right at the fork, his footsteps stamping brief impressions in the muddy gravel but soon washed away and gone.

  Only the men who had been there knew how it rained in Afghanistan. Until he was there to feel it pelt his helmet and see it with his own two eyes, everything Thad had ever been taught as a kid made him believe that there was nothing but desert. That wasn’t true at all. In Afghanistan, the rain had its own season.

  Late October or early November a daylong sandstorm would blow in from the west to signal the start of rain. The temperatures would drop and then the rains would come, sometimes so much water that they would spend entire days filling sandbags and building retaining walls to divert what otherwise would have washed them away. All the year’s rain and snow was contained in the months between November and April, and there were times that the men were hammered by storms. The wet season ran right into fighting season. Nothing ever eased up one bit.

  It was the February before Thad came home for good when a blizzard struck and left sections of the mountains in six feet of snow. There were standing temps twenty below and drifts so deep that even the Humvees became useless. When all of that weather hit so suddenly, the entire division out of FOB Rushmore added aid missions to their patrols. Thad’s squad worked to get supplies—clothing and blankets, food and fuel—into mountain villages where barefoot children were frostbitten so badly by the time the soldiers reached them that there was no choice but to amputate. Thad remembered walking through draws where tribes of goats and sheep had huddled together to weather the storm only to freeze with open eyes and iced fur that cracked like bottle glass when he nudged at their bodies with the steel toes of his boots.

  He remembered one time he dipped snowballs in water so they were hard as rocks and hid them behind a bank near the latrine. That evening he waited for Darnell Johnson to finish shitting out his MRE. When Darnell came out, Thad clobbered him in the side of the head with a snowball and had another one into his neck before Darnell realized what was happening. Darnell was a monster who’d played on the line at some all-black college in South Carolina before he joined, and the minute he caught sight of Thad, he barreled full speed and tackled him into the snow. They wrestled for a second or two, both of them laughing their asses off, before Darnell took control and shoved a fistful of snow down Thad’s throat. When it was over, Darnell stood up and kicked powder onto him, and Thad just lay there in hysterics with his nose bloodied as he flapped the outline of an angel into the ground.

  Thad laughed and turned around to say something, but there was no one there, just empty road and mountains. He was alone and this was not the place where his mind had wandered. Even through the gray haze of rain, this place was too green. He was in Little Canada, humping down Highway 281 with a shotgun in his hands.

  Somewhere up the road, tires hissed across the wetted pavement and the car was nearly there before he heard it. A patrol car running the highway to the county line veered around the curve ahead, and Thad barely had time to jump the guardrail into the laurels before the headlights swept across him. He lay on his stomach in the wet leaves and ferns until the car had passed and then for some time after until he was certain they were gone.

  Just before the bridge where Tanasee Creek emptied into the lake, a trail cut by pickup trucks and four-wheel-drives sloped away from the highway toward the creek. The grass between the tire marks was high and fanned out over the gravel so that he could hardly make out where the tires had been. By the creek, a rusted burn barrel dented and ragged with holes stood between two metal folding chairs. One of the chairs had bent legs and leaned toward a fire pit circled by stones, the coals now old and weathered into nothing more than blackened earth. Thad looked upstream. The creek wrapped around a sharp bend before a final plunge pool that slowed to slack water in the space between hi
m and there. If he followed the stream far enough north, he would wind up on Charleys Creek, then home.

  As he hiked upstream, Thad could tell by the way his bones ached that he was coming down. The dope always made his back hurt worse and he wished that he had some alcohol to numb the pain, but he didn’t. So he trudged forward over the rocky back of a serpentine streambed that meandered between mountains for miles. Only when his knees felt like they would burst if he took another step did he stop to find shelter.

  High water from weeks when the rain did not cease had cut a bank beneath the roots of two scarlet oaks that seeded so closely together in the beginning that time welded their trunks into a single tree. Pebbles made a bed that transitioned to a wall of dark soil, water dripping from the veined root ceiling above. Thad tucked himself inside the cut bank and watched as a crawdad backed away from him toward the stream with its claws raised and pincers opened. When its tail found water, the crawdad slipped into the stream and vanished. Thad scrounged for leaves and twigs to start a fire, and his body trembled from a day spent drenched with rain. His cigarettes were soaked through and the flint of his lighter would not spark at first. Midges and crane flies swooped down and lifted to light, their bodies hopping Us against gravity, until Thad finally made a fire and smoked them out of the cut.

  The fire was small, but still it seemed to help him reclaim some of the heat he’d lost. He lay there and rolled a soaked cigarette back and forth in front of the flames, and when the paper and tobacco were finally dry enough to light, he tried to ease his mind, though it did no good at all.

  The water in his clothes sank back into the ground as he lay there and remembered. Pulling guard was always the worst because one man was responsible for keeping everyone else alive while they slept. It wasn’t all that much different from running point in that sense, but at least when everyone was on their feet, every man had a gun in his hands and a finger over the trigger; they could all keep an eye out for one another. Night watch was different because the trust was in one man when the others shut their eyes, even though they all knew that he was just as tired as they were.