In time other vehicles arrived. Their drivers saw John Rye in their headlights, bent before the blazing wreck with his arms spread wide. After a while a contingent of firemen hurtled past him pulling a heavy cloth hose, and a state trooper’s big gentle hand came to rest upon his shoulder. This stanched the visions, but by then John Rye had seen enough.
He disappeared for seventeen days, during which time his wife Janie (six months pregnant with Micah) filed a Missing Persons report with the state police and his coworkers held a seven-minute, company-wide prayer vigil. There was no trail for the police to follow until a single transaction in Vonore, Tennessee, some fifty miles south of Knoxville, emptied the Ryes’ cautiously tended savings account. John Rye returned the following day. It had taken him all that time to find the landscape he’d glimpsed in those visions, driving the dirt backroads at the edge of the Smoky Mountains National Park, hiking along streams into the thick sunless woods, sinking his boots into rhododendron must, sleeping on the forest floor and sustaining himself, as he’d done in Vietnam, with a diet of peanut butter and grape juice.
The boulder, the bristle fern, the pewter mountain stream: All this he’d located in a thick holler of second-growth hardwoods tucked between the Great Smoky and Unicoi Mountains, near the southwestern edge of the national park. He tracked down the land’s owners—descendants of a defunct family logging company—and offered three times the going rate per acre. From that cash deal—brokered on a Saturday evening at the home of a bewildered Vonore attorney in overalls who kept asking if John Rye understood that, because of its border with the park and the TVA’s Adahihi Dam holdings, the land was more or less inaccessible, except by foot, and therefore “kinda worthless”—he emerged with seventy-seven acres. With the deed in hand he returned to Janie at 4 A.M., shaking her from sleep. “John?” she said, noting a new and unrecognizable quality to his eyes, as stark and strange as if they’d changed color.
The couple was packed and gone before sunrise. “Are you sure it was really God? God himself?” she asked him on the drive south, drinking what might’ve been the last Coca-Cola of her life through a straw. The tone of his yes was enough for her.
For seven weeks, while John Rye built a windowless cabin out of poplar and locust logs, they lived in a tent. The closest spot to park his truck was a forty-minute walk from the boulder-and-stream homesite, so John Rye had to haul everything overland: He drove pigs through the woods, humped sacks of flour and sugar on his back, dragged a crateful of chickens up the sloping deerpaths on a skid. In the meantime Janie prepared a garden, in a clearing John Rye had sawed, and combed through her Bible seeking precedent for this vision God and a Ford Fairlane had dictated to her husband. Janie was not without her own secular smarts—she’d completed twenty-two hours toward a Master’s degree in Environmental Science from the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga and worked briefly at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—but this did not override her faith in both God and her husband’s peculiar genius. At night she drank dandelion-root tea and languidly rubbed her swollen belly while John Rye, gaunt and exhausted, slept from dusk until dawn, too tired to even witness nightfall. He had to take Janie’s word about the abundance of fireflies. Three months later, Micah was born in a summer thunderstorm. Moments after she emerged from her shrieking, dust-caked mother, her father carried her outside and washed her in the rain, braying, stomping his boots in the deep shiny mud puddles.
She’d described her childhood as magical, to Talmadge—as a nineteenth-century idyll, Little House on the Prairie relocated to 1980s Appalachia. She taught herself to catch brook trout by standing stone-still in the stream, with a dress on, luring in the trout with the shady lee her dress made, and then, with a quick whap of her hand, batting them to the bank. She roamed the woods with Tusker, a stray Plott hound they’d adopted (a boar hunter’s dog, they figured) after it refused to scram. Every year, after his annual trip to town to pay taxes and load up on supplies, her father delivered stacks of books into the house, culled from library discards, which Micah and her mother would bust into like children assaulting presents beneath a Christmas tree. She helped plant corn in the spring, harvest greens and pick hornworms off the tomatoes in the summer, butcher hogs and goats in the fall, gather kindling in the winter. Her greatest childhood fear, she’d told Talmadge, was a tyrannical rooster her father nicknamed Ho Chi Minh, or Ho for short; the rooster was always jumping her in the yard, drawing blood more than once. But she had no scalding nightmares to recall, no moments of dread. She described hardships (failed crops, coyotes mauling livestock, a lightning-struck oak that came down on the chimney) but little tragedy—only a miscarriage by her mother, when Micah was five, that prompted a three-month rift in her parents’ marriage during which Janie turned against John Rye, God, and personal hygiene, in that order, though eventually she recovered her devotion to all (in the reverse order).
But that was before they were discovered—before everything changed.
This happened in the autumn of Micah’s tenth year. A young agent with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency happened upon the family homestead while searching for black bear poachers. Appalled by what he’d witnessed—Micah, barefoot and grimy, being homeschooled in a hand-hewn log cabin lacking plumbing and electricity; John Rye, butchering a pig and sporting what the agent reported as a “ZZ Top–style beard” that was speckled with blood; and Janie Rye, making soap by stirring a pot of grease and lye and hickory ashes with a spicewood stick—the agent called the state’s Children’s Services Department. Two sheriff’s deputies flanked a social worker (stumbling uphill in a pair of red peep-toe flats) to the Ryes’ cabin, where Micah was seized, at unnecessary gunpoint, and driven to the hospital in Maryville. She’d only been in a vehicle once before, when one year earlier she’d accompanied her father on his annual supply run to Vonore. When the social worker dialed the car radio in to a Huey Lewis song, Micah began to cry, because the unfamiliar noise hurt her ears; the social worker, however, interpreted this crying as tears of grateful relief, tightening her grip on the steering wheel and accelerating the car as a tear of pity rolled down her own cheek, the righteousness of her career choice confirmed. At the hospital Micah was given a battery of tests and a fusillade of shots by a chainsmoking doctor whom she overheard muttering, to a nurse, “Where do they ever find these backwoods imbeciles?”
A three-month stay in foster care followed. Her foster parents called her Tarzan and took personal offense at her distaste for Hamburger Helper. They dressed her in hand-me-down, Chicago Bulls–branded clothing from their teenage son Zack, who played Atari video games for hours at a time, sometimes eating his Hamburger Helper with one hand while maneuvering the joystick with the other. Though she could read at a high schooler’s level, and had several stanzas of William Blake committed to memory, she was placed in the first grade, where, because she physically towered over the other students and because she was woefully unequipped to converse with them, she was isolated and predictably scorned. When a third-grader named Brad Bonds smeared dogshit on the back of her shirt, at recess, she did what she thought was reasonable and removed the shirt; this provoked a military-level response from the recess monitor, who draped her naked torso with his sportcoat and kept his eyes trained on the ceiling as he marched her to the principal’s office. The following day, she beat Brad Bonds to the pavement with a red plastic baseball bat, causing blood to leak from his ear. This, however, only aggravated the harassment. In gym class the boys took turns spitting loogies into Micah’s hair.
In the meantime her father pressed a legal battle to have Micah returned to him and Janie. This required making humble amends with Janie’s parents, semi-prosperous retirees who were reasonably incensed that John Rye had “kidnapped” and “brainwashed” their daughter, then hidden a grandchild from them. They refused to hear anything about his sacred calling (which he exaggerated, inventing detailed instructions from God to mitigate what might be seen as the vagueness of his actual calling),
suggesting that his invocation of the Christian Almighty was a disguise for something uglier, like Hare Krishna–ism or Catholicism. Could he even imagine the shame, they asked him, when people asked about Janie and they could provide no answer? “After a while,” her father confided, “we just took to saying Alaska.” They were suspicious about Janie’s absence, waving away John Rye’s explanation that she’d needed to stay back to tend to the animals and crops; her father even asked, the ice in his scotch-and-soda trembling seismically, “Why should we believe she’s even still alive?” When they asked to see a picture of Micah and John Rye had none, Janie’s mother fled the room in tears, viewing the lack of photographic evidence as bedrock proof of his egotism and parental unlove. In exchange for their aid, they made demands on John Rye—annual visitations, public schooling for Micah, and for the Lord’s sake some indoor plumbing—to which he submitted with an escalating series of winces.
The bureaucratic hurdles he faced were staggering. He and Janie had breached laws regarding proper medical treatment, education, adequate shelter, even emotional neglect (for isolating Micah from other children). As a favor to Janie’s parents, a family friend and Knoxville lawyer named Fred Taylor helped John Rye navigate his way through the court system. “You understand, however, that getting your daughter back to you doesn’t mean y’all will be able to go back living that way, right?” Taylor asked John Rye one afternoon, in his law office on South Gay Street. By this time John Rye had shaved his beard and cut his long hair and outfitted himself in new clothes from the Gap. Bands of louvered sunlight striped the wall. John Rye held his head in his hands. “Do you?” Taylor said. Red-eyed, tight-jawed, John Rye nodded. “Whatever it takes,” he whispered.
Three months is what it took: three months of hearings, depositions, court-ordered meetings, several different upbraidings by several different judges, and three subpoenaed appearances by Janie (whose increasingly weakened mien caused her mother to once break down sobbing and attack John Rye’s chest with her fists). On a wickedly cold morning in February, Micah was handed back over to her father outside the Knox County Chancery Court building, along with a sheaf of notarized paperwork. On the ride back home John Rye stopped to buy her a Coca-Cola and some candy—during her suburban quarantine, she’d developed a mad crush on Reese’s Pieces—and picked up a two-liter Coke for Janie, as well. They didn’t say much on the drive. Micah laid her head against her father’s shoulder, grazing on her Reese’s one piece at a time, as the town gave way to farms then to steep-sided woods. “It’s all over now, sweetness,” John Rye said, lightly patting her knee as he steered the truck off the pavement and down a grass path that winter had turned pewter.
The absence of chimney smoke was the first distressing sign John Rye noted, as he and Micah crested the ridge. Then: an eerie silence, as if coming upon a ghost town or blast site. No loping, barking, slobbersome greeting from Tusker, no chickens pecking the yard. He quickened his pace, Micah saying, “Daddy, Daddy, wait,” as she struggled to keep up, tripping on a loose stone, tumbling earthward. He veered off toward the livestock pens, sprinting now, shouting Janie Janie as he hurdled the fence. When Micah caught up with him, clambering onto the fence, he was twirling near the pigpen the way a wild horse panics at its first corralling. At his feet were the remains of their pigs, four of them, picked over by vultures, what was left of their skin gray and crispy and curled upright. “What’s happened?” Micah said, as her father jumped past her, hurtling toward the cabin. There he found Tusker, alive but only barely, unwilling or unable to rise, his skin sucked tight to his ribs. The dog thumped his tail at John Rye, throwing up dust clouds. In the goat pasture he found only gnawed and shattered bones. Micah fell onto Tusker, kissing his ears and rubbing the washboard contours of his sides, while her father shouted for her mother, shouted until his voice went gravelly and then was gone, shouted until night had fallen and Micah had collapsed into an inadvertent blank sleep on the dirt floor beside Tusker.
They never found Janie Rye.
Nor did the mystery ever clear. Had they not seen Janie, at her three court appearances (when she’d walked down the mountain to meet John Rye’s truck at the road), certain hypotheses might have applied: that she’d broken her neck in a fall from the mulberry ridge, eaten the wrong species of mushroom while foraging in the deep woods, etc. But the hogs had died, John Rye concluded, before her disappearance; whatever had happened to her, it wasn’t a freak accident. Some sort of breakdown had preceded it. He kept playing and replaying back his memories of their three drives to Knoxville—what she’d said and hadn’t said, the long grim silences he’d construed as being byproducts of their invaded, smashed-up lives, the way she’d vacantly dismissed his apologies for making her singlehandedly shoulder the upkeep of their homestead, the cloudy stare she’d given him when he’d driven away the last time. He’d watched her, that time, in the rearview mirror, a lone spindly figure on the roadside, pale and immobile, becoming smaller and smaller in the mirror before vanishing—not before he’d tapped his brakes, unsettled by her stillness—as he’d crested the hill. He wondered now if she’d ever hiked back uphill, or if she’d stood there, absorbing the roadside silence, gauging the choice between the tangled leaf-strewn path leading home and that clear striped asphalt road leading . . . where? Had it all been too much for her—the reunion with her parents, the raw scorn of the social worker and judge, the forced inventory of her last dozen years—the psychic pricetag, with compounded interest included, of her obedience to a secondhand filmstrip from God?
Deputies roamed the woods behind splotchy bloodhounds, interrogated John Rye for hours. They asked about the possibility of another man (“Look around,” John Rye snorted), asked if he’d held Janie against her will, if he’d ever smacked her around (“A man’s got a right sometimes,” one of the deputies goaded him), asked over and over again about the miscarriage and what they’d done with the tiny red fetus. They inspected his guns, unbolting them, shrugging. One deputy picked up Janie’s banjo, dumbly plucked a string.
John Rye hissed, “Don’t you touch that.”
“Easy, cowboy,” the deputy replied.
“I said put it down.”
Flaunting the banjo electric guitar–style, the deputy took three steps toward John Rye and, grinning, said, “You gwine go all Rambo on me?”
John Rye said nothing.
“Are ye?” the deputy said.
John Rye felt his molars grating together.
The deputy leaned in close enough for John Rye to smell the midmorning’s Slim Jim on his breath. “We gwine find her,” Micah heard him whisper. “We know what you done.”
But they didn’t: find her, or come close to establishing her fate.
“So what’d they ever decide?” Talmadge had asked Micah. This was early on, when they were riding back from Burning Man to San Francisco in the back of Lola’s camper van. At this point Talmadge was still unsure of the dynamic—unsure who this girl was who’d rescued him, clothed him, fed him, and was presently captivating him with her mad sad sylvan history; unsure also who the other girl was, the butchy surly one driving up front; and furthermore unsure what his role might be in this inscrutable threesome, if any. Fate had handed him something new and alluringly weird; best to roll with it.
“Missing person,” she’d explained. “No note, no signs of suicide, no signs of anything. Like she’d ascended to Heaven, man—body and soul and everything.”
This dissatisfied Talmadge, who despite his Catholic upbringing had little patience for open mysteries. “What do you think?”
The question seemed to knock her off balance, as if, improbably, she’d never quite formulated her own hypothesis. “At first,” she said, haltingly, “I thought—I mean, I guessed I hoped—she’d just gotten lost. Like I’d gotten lost a lot, you know? Somewhere out by the gum swamp, where it’s easy to get all turned around and shit. That’s what I’d tell my daddy at night—that Mama’d gotten lost, that she’d come back, and he used
to put his hand on my cheek and say, ‘Then God’s gonna lead her back home.’ But after a while I guess I knew that wasn’t true. After that I used to—I dunno, I guess I wanted to believe she’d died some peaceful death, got snakebit in some beautiful holler or something, died with a smile thinking bout us even though, I mean, who dies with a smile? I was just a kid, man.”
“What about now?”
“Now?” She sighed. The imbalance Talmadge had noted earlier began to make sense: She didn’t much like her hypothesis. “Now I think she must’ve just . . . gone, you know? Hitched a ride somewhere, I don’t know where. Just started all over again. Changed her name, changed everything. Maybe she had more inside of her than anyone knew.” Another sigh, a wag of her head. “More conflict, I mean. More . . . look, Daddy couldna been easy, he wasn’t easy as a daddy, so . . . she just—left.”
For a long while Talmadge was silent, hushed by his proximity to genuine human tragedy—something he’d never personally experienced, unless you counted Dick Bertrand ditching Talmadge’s mother after twenty-three years of marriage and all the resultant domestic mayhem that had engendered, all of which, while genuinely painful to him, Talmadge understood as middle-class farce: tragedy wearing a pair of pleated khaki trousers and sipping a gin and tonic on the lawn. Still, he bristled at the openness of the case. People didn’t just vanish. Not with Facebook and everything. “What about your dad?” he pressed her. “What’s he think?”
“That,” she said, pausing to inhale, “is where things got ugly.”
At first, she explained, John Rye blamed himself. For leaving Janie alone all those weeks, overloaded with chores and crunched by fear and loneliness; how terribly it must’ve ached, he realized, to be feeding those snuffling pigs every morning, casting scratch grain to the chickens, all the while friendless and ignorant of the whereabouts of her child and husband, and then, worse, holing herself up in that cabin come nightfall, staring at Micah’s empty bed or maybe curling herself atop it as if to make sure the straw mattress didn’t exhale its telltale dent. He’d seen Janie wrecked by the loss of one child; to lose Micah, even temporarily . . . she couldn’t have withstood it, he now realized. It must’ve been too much. This line of thinking led to wider self-recrimination, as he expanded the circumference of his guilt: for neglecting Janie’s role as the not-seer of divine orders, as the disciple to his prophet, for having demanded double faith from her—faith in his sacred flaming vision, but also faith in him, as the messenger, the reporter, the interpreter of that vision, in him as holy vessel. Had he deserved such faith? And had he—had he really—(these doubts came to him in the predawn darkness, as he’d watch Micah asleep with Tusker, watch their ribs rise in syncopated rhythm)—had he really actually seen what he’d thought he’d seen? What if he’d misread the message? What if it hadn’t been God?
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