by Tony Earley
Eventually the growl of the engine withdrew to a great distance. Bucky rode on the front bumper of the truck, draped in a peacoat and holding on to his sailor hat, but he was too far away to worry about. Someone wearing mittens tenderly cradled Jim’s face. He leaned into the hands, and breathed on them to keep them warm, and rubbed his cheeks against the scratchy wool.
“That feels nice,” Chrissie said. “Your face is warm.”
“I love you so much,” Jim said.
“Oh, I love you, too, Jim. But do you know the answer?”
“What answer?”
“To number twelve.”
“I didn’t know we had any homework.”
“It’s due tomorrow, Jim. Now I have to go ask somebody else.”
“No, wait,” Jim said. “Don’t go. I bet I can figure it out. Tell me the problem.”
“Okay. There’s these two trains,” Chrissie said. “And they’re going two different directions. We have to calculate the area.”
“Of the trains?”
“Yes. It’s a train problem.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean the volume? If you told me the dimensions of the cars and how many there were, I bet I could figure out the volume.”
“No. The book says area.”
“But I don’t know how to do that,” Jim said. “How do you calculate the area of a train? It’s a three-dimensional object. Do you mean surface area, or what?”
“You’re going to get us in trouble.”
“No, I just want to marry you.”
“I want to marry you, too, Jim, but you know I can’t.”
“Why not? We can ask Norma for the answer.”
“No. Look what’s behind us.”
Jim lowered the quilt and peeked out over the top. He saw Bucky Bucklaw running easily in the distance behind the truck. His body looked solid, but it seemed to be made out of darkness. And as Bucky ran, the darkness peeled away in sheets, like ashes, or gauze, and caught the wind and billowed out in shreds behind him.
Jim pushed himself hard against the cab of the truck. He pulled the quilts up over his face but could still see Bucky running along the starlit road. And Bucky must have seen Jim watching him, because he waved and sped up and flew toward the truck until he was within arm’s length of the bed.
“No!” Jim yelled. “Get away! Get away from me, Bucky. I’m not kidding around.”
The darkness peeling off Bucky made a flapping sound, like newspaper, as the wind whipped it away. Jim hoped that Bucky would eventually blow away and disappear, but he didn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
“What’s the matter, old buddy?” Bucky asked. “Are you scared? Are you scared of me, now that I’m back?”
“I ain’t scared of you,” Jim lied. “I just want you to get away from me. That’s all.”
“Are you going to my house?”
“No. We’re not going to your house.”
“You are, too.”
“No, we’re not. I don’t even know where your house is. We’re going somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere. I don’t know where. I’m not driving the truck.”
Bucky laughed and pointed at Jim. “You’re lying to me, you old hound dog. You are, too, going to my place. Hey. Watch this.” He ripped a swatch of darkness about the size of a handkerchief off his left arm and held it up and let it go in the breeze. “Woo-hoo!” he yelled. “Did you see that? I’ve been doing that all night.”
“Please go away, Bucky,” Jim said. “I’ll leave Chrissie alone. I promise I will.”
Bucky leaned forward and placed both palms flat against the truck bed. “It’s a little late for that, old buddy,” he whispered. “There’s a ladder in the well. Ask Daddy about it when you get there.”
The truck started up the first steep grade of the mountain, and Jim tipped to one side and pitched forward and hit something solid with his shoulder. He knew instantly that it was Bucky’s coffin, and that he would have to fight Bucky because he had collided with it. Bucky shouted and flew into the truck bed and covered Jim so thoroughly with darkness that Jim could neither breathe nor see. Jim screamed and punched and kicked but got tangled up and couldn’t free himself.
“Get off!” Jim yelled, thrashing wildly. “Get off me, Bucky. I’ll kill you! I swear to God, I’ll kill you if you don’t get off me!”
Then the darkness tore away around him, and Bucky’s spirit exploded into a blast of angry, frigid air, leaving Jim on his knees searching for it in the quilts. He had killed Bucky all over again, and again wanted to bring him back. The truck stopped suddenly, sliding briefly on the gravel, and Jim rolled against the cab, banging his head. He grabbed it with both hands and curled up in a ball.
“Please leave me alone,” he whimpered. “I didn’t really want you to die.”
“Jim!” somebody yelled. “Hey! Jim!”
Jim opened his eyes and saw the head and shoulders of a dark figure on the running board of the truck, looking at him around the back of the cab. For a second he thought Bucky had come back to fight him some more, but then he recognized Uncle Al.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Uncle Al asked.
Jim sat up and looked warily at the coffin. He realized he was freezing and wrapped his arms around his knees. He began looking around, trying to figure out what had happened to the quilts.
“Bucky,” he said. “Bucky was in here with me, and we were fighting.”
“You say you were fighting with Bucky?”
“Yes, sir,” Jim said.
Uncle Al glanced at the coffin before disappearing into the cab. Jim heard him say, “He says he was fighting with Bucky.”
Uncle Zeno climbed out the other door and looked around the back of the cab. “You say Bucky was back there with you?”
“Yes, sir, but I guess it was just a bad dream.”
“I reckon it was. What did he say?”
“I don’t remember. He told me to leave Chrissie alone.”
“Sounds like a guilty conscience to me,” Uncle Al said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my conscience,” Jim said. “I haven’t laid a hand on that girl.”
“You want to ride up here with us?” Uncle Zeno asked.
Jim stood and began sorting out the quilts. “No, sir,” he said.
Uncle Coran’s head appeared beside Uncle Al’s. “I’ll ride back there, Jim,” he said. “I ain’t scared of no knothead ghost.”
“You’d be afraid of this one,” Jim said.
The uncles were quiet for a moment or two. “All right, Doc,” Uncle Zeno finally said. “You get covered up again and we’ll finish this job.”
The Red Canoe
JIM DIDN’T go to sleep again the rest of the way up the mountain. He closely watched the road unrolling behind the truck and kept a wary eye on the woods in the dark places where the trees grew closest to the right-of-way, but he didn’t see Bucky again. The fact that Bucky did not haunt Jim while Jim was awake more or less convinced him that he had dreamed the whole thing. The dream, however, seemed more real to him than anything he could think of that he knew for certain had actually happened. He tried to pull the quilts more tightly around himself, and he wondered if a ghost who appeared in a dream was considered a real ghost, or if you had to be awake when you saw it in order for it to count. Ghost or dream, Bucky had at least been on his way home, a destination Jim found hard to hold against him. Jim was quite sure that when he died, home was the one place, aside from heaven, he would want to go. He tried to tell himself that any ghost who would run all the way from Hawaii just to get back to North Carolina couldn’t be all bad.
Once the road climbed through the switchbacks and into the valley at the top of the mountain, Jim noticed that most of the stars had dimmed to the point where he could no longer see them and that the sky had begun to brighten into the noncolor of the day when it’s still deciding what it wants to be. Up the narrow tracks that climbed into the hollows Jim occa
sionally spied the sleepy glow of a kerosene lamp burning in a kitchen window. A solitary planet remained lit low in the sky and he found himself wondering if God had forgotten to blow it out. He wished once again that he knew enough about the stars and planets to say, Look, Chrissie, there’s Jupiter, or Mars, or whatever it was, but he also knew, now that daylight was almost here, that he wasn’t so interested in astronomy that he would go to the necessary trouble of learning about it. Many Varmints Eat Much Juice Saturday Unless Nobody Pays was the sentence Norma had come up with in eighth grade to help them memorize the names and orbits of the planets, and that was probably all he would ever know about the subject. Norma had recently gotten her hands on an old college calculus book and studied it at home for no other reason than that she loved math. Jim couldn’t think of anything, other than Chrissie, that he cared about that much.
Uncle Zeno turned off the headlights around the time they passed Penn’s house, and by the time they reached the Bucklaw place, the first rays of new sunlight had climbed out of the valley, casting long, tentative shadows against the mountainside. Nothing in the landscape suggested that bad news had recently arrived here, or would ever come. The orchards rolled away from the farm road in prosperous formation, ridge after terraced ridge, all the way to the top of the mountain. The grass was combed white with frost. The fruit trees glittered like fountains whose water had sprung suddenly from the earth, only to freeze before it touched the ground. Jim began to wonder about Bucky’s parents. How could anyone who lived looking onto a scene so precisely beautiful even imagine they might one morning see a strange truck coming up the road with their son’s body laid out in the back? Uncle Coran had been right. None of this made any sense. Jim gently nudged the coffin with the toe of one boot. “Hey. Wake up, Bucky,” he said. “You’re home.”
As they approached the house, Jim spotted the two German shepherds who had attacked his car back in the fall silently streaking toward the truck, their ears up, their bushy tails straight out behind them. He scrambled to his feet and threw his arms over the cab, ready to climb onto the roof. But when the dogs drew close they yelped and pulled up before reaching the road. They trotted in small, tight circles, their tails between their legs and bellies low to the ground, before loping away at an angle, looking back over their shoulders. Only later would Jim realize that the smell had stopped them.
The house was two stories tall, constructed of quartz fieldstone Bucklaw Sr. had pulled out of his orchards when he moved to this side of the mountain and cut away the timber. After all these years, the rocks still bore the orange color of the dirt from which they had been dug. In the yard, Uncle Zeno stopped the truck and blew the horn. Jim caught a glimpse of Chrissie wearing a white nightgown, framed in an upstairs window. He moved his hand to wave at her, but she disappeared so quickly he had the fleeting notion that she must be dead, too. Before he had time to wonder what she was doing here, the front door opened and Bucky’s father stepped onto the porch. Mr. Bucklaw put on his hat and adjusted the brim and closed the door behind him. He stared for a long moment at the truck, his face expressionless, his breath billowing evenly from his nostrils in quick white snorts. Jim thought, He’s going to blame me, and fought the urge to leap down and run.
Mr. Bucklaw came slowly down the stairs, never taking his eyes from the bed of the truck, and took four steps into the yard before he crumpled at the waist. He dropped to his knees and wrenched his hat from his head and began slapping the back of his neck with it. Jim held his hands over his ears. The uncles scrambled out of the cab and rushed to Mr. Bucklaw and pulled him to his feet. Uncle Zeno and Uncle Coran wrapped their arms around him so that he couldn’t hit himself anymore, and Uncle Zeno crooned the same wordless, soothing noises he might have made to a spooked animal. Uncle Al worked the crumpled hat from out of Mr. Bucklaw’s fingers. He looked down at the hat, then around for somewhere to put it; he tried to mold it back into shape before finally giving up and holding it awkwardly in front of himself, crown down, like an usher passing a collection plate. Jim jumped down from the truck but gave the uncles and Mr. Bucklaw a wide berth.
Only the uncles holding Mr. Bucklaw kept him from collapsing again onto the ground. “Ohh,” he moaned. “Oh, sweet Jesus. I can’t do this.”
“Let’s get him to the house,” said Uncle Zeno.
The toes of Mr. Bucklaw’s boots dragged the ground as Uncle Zeno and Uncle Coran helped him away from the truck. At the house the uncles lowered him onto the second step. He leaned forward until his chest rested on his thighs. “It’s too hard,” he said. “I just can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
Uncle Zeno and Uncle Coran sat down on either side of him, without touching him. Uncle Al extended Mr. Bucklaw’s hat. Mr. Bucklaw took it and flung it into the yard, almost hitting Uncle Al with the hat and Uncle Zeno with his arm. Uncle Al didn’t go get it.
“I don’t understand,” Mr. Bucklaw said. “Where did you find him? How did you end up with him? All we got is the telegram they sent us. They ain’t said nothing about when he was supposed to come home.”
“He came on the train last night,” Uncle Zeno said. “The stationmaster got us up because we live right there. Nobody’s sure where he came from.”
“I would have come and got him,” Mr. Bucklaw said. “He’s my boy. I got a truck. I would have come and got him.”
“We didn’t think you ought to have to do that,” Uncle Zeno said quietly.
Mr. Bucklaw rose upright and gaped at Uncle Zeno. “What am I saying?” he said. “You came all this way. You came all this way and it dark and brought Bucky home. I thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t say that sooner.”
The uncles all turned away. Jim rolled a small stick back and forth with his toe.
“Now what do I do?” Mr. Bucklaw asked. He gazed almost eagerly into each of the uncles’ faces. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Uncle Zeno spoke as softly as Jim had ever heard him. “You need to put him somewhere,” he said.
“Put him somewhere,” said Mr. Bucklaw. “I need to put him somewhere.”
“Tell us where,” said Uncle Coran.
Mr. Bucklaw looked blankly around the yard before pointing slowly up the steps. “In the house,” he said. “I guess we ought to put him in the house.”
“We might need to stop and think here for a minute,” Uncle Zeno said.
“What?”
“He’s not in too good a shape,” said Uncle Zeno. “The body’s not. You may not want to put him inside just yet.”
“Oh, God,” Mr. Bucklaw said. “Please don’t tell me that.” He tilted slowly, then listed and fell sideways onto Uncle Zeno. He began to cry with his face mashed against Uncle Zeno’s arm. Uncle Coran took him by the shoulders and guided him back to vertical.
“Maybe we ought to put him on the porch for now,” Uncle Zeno said. “I bet he would like it out here on the porch, where he could see.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Mr. Bucklaw sobbed. “The porch. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
The front door opened and Chrissie stepped outside. She was wearing Bucky’s Aliceville letter jacket. Uncle Coran stood up and took off his hat.
“Side porch,” she said to Uncle Zeno. “We’ll put him on the side porch for now.”
Mr. Bucklaw reached toward her. “Chrissie, I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“You need to come on inside, Mr. Bucklaw,” she said. “You need to come inside and go see Mrs. Bucklaw. We’ll take care of things out here.”
Mr. Bucklaw nodded. Uncle Zeno and Uncle Coran lifted him to his feet. “That’s Bucky’s fiancée,” he said.
“We’re sorry for your loss, Miss Steppe,” Uncle Zeno said, removing his hat. Chrissie nodded. Uncle Al cleared his throat and went after Mr. Bucklaw’s hat.
“She’s been staying with us and helping Mama,” Mr. Bucklaw said, starting heavily up the stairs. “Chrissie, is Mama all right?”
“No, sir,” Chrissie said. �
��She’s not all right. She looked out the window and saw who it was. You need to go upstairs.”
Mr. Bucklaw left the door standing open behind him. Chrissie closed it, then walked to the edge of the porch and studied the truck. She bit her lower lip.
“Things haven’t been too good here,” she said.
“Here’s his hat,” said Uncle Al, handing it up.
“Thank you.”
“What do you want us to do?” Uncle Zeno asked.
“Sawhorses,” Chrissie said. “I guess we’re going to need sawhorses.”
“Jim will go get the sawhorses,” Uncle Zeno said. “Where do y’all keep them?”
“Wood shop,” Chrissie said, pointing back down the road. “Between the first barn and the big packing shed.”
“Go get two sawhorses, Jim,” said Uncle Zeno.
The wood shop was a simple frame building, sided with corrugated metal and open at one end. Just inside the opening sat a single worn-looking, split-bottomed chair, its legs half buried in wood shavings. A lantern was suspended from the rafter above it with a piece of baling wire. Hammers and mallets and saws and wood chisels and files hung neatly above a workbench at the opposite end. Another lantern hung above the bench. Along the wall to Jim’s right a red canvas canoe rested on the sawhorses he had been sent to find. He drew his finger along the brightly varnished side of the canoe and looked inside. The frame was made of bent and polished ash, as gracefully formed and light-looking as the skeleton of a bird. The seats were woven of narrow oak splits into an intricate diamond pattern.
