by Taylor Brown
A pair of stone lions guarded the entrance to the pagoda, lichen-clad beasts with square heads and heavy paws. “Foo dogs,” the Marines called them. There was a nisei in their platoon, Sato, whose older brother had fought with the 442nd Infantry Regiment in World War II. All Japanese Americans.
“Komainu,” he said. “Lion dogs. They ward off evil spirits.”
Someone had thrown his shirt over the head of one of the beasts. Rory pulled the garment away, so the creature could see. He stepped on into the temple. The air felt cool here, ancient, like the breath of a cave. The black ghosts of old fires haunted the sconces. The place smelled of incense and Lucky Strikes and nervous Marines. Their gear lined the walls. He had never been in a place this old. Granny was never one for churches—“godboxes,” she called them—and those in the mountains seemed flimsy compared to this. Desperate cobblings of boards, some no more than brush arbors. But standing here alone, nearly naked at the heart of the temple, he felt armored in the stone of generations. Swaddled. No bullet could strike him here. No arrow of fear.
He wanted to remain in this place, so still and quiet amid the hills of guns. But a cold wind came whistling through the temple, lashing his back, and he remembered that fall was coming soon, for leaves and men. Blood so bright upon the sawtooth ranges, and the screaming that never stopped.
He could never forget.
* * *
Rory woke into the noon hour, his bedquilt kicked off, his body sweat-glazed despite the October bite. His lost foot throbbing, as if it were still attached to the bruised stump below his knee. He rose and quickly dressed. His bedroom window was fogged, the four panes glowing a faint gold. Paintings, unframed, covered one wall. Beasts of the field, fowls of the air—their bodies flaming with color where the sun touched them. They reminded him what day it was: Sunday.
He scrubbed his armpits and washed his face, slicked his hair back and dabbed the hollow of his neck with the sting of Granny-made cologne. He donned a white shirt that buttoned to the neck, a narrow black tie, the bowler hat that had been his grandfather Anson’s. He looked at his face in the mirror—it looked so old now, as if a whole decade had snuck under his skin in the night. The flesh was shiny beneath his eyes, like he’d been punched.
He was sitting on the porch, carving the mud from his boots, when Granny came out. She had a pie tin balanced in the crook of one arm.
“I can get that,” he said, jumping up.
“I’m fifty-four years old. I ain’t a god-damn invalid.”
She sat primly in the beast of a car, straight-backed, as if she were riding atop a wagon. It was no stretch to imagine her riding shotgun on a Wells Fargo stagecoach, a short-barreled shotgun in her lap. She looked at him as he slid behind the wheel.
“You had the dreams again?”
“No,” he lied.
“You need to take that tincture I made you.”
“I have been.”
“You been pouring it through that knothole in the floorboard. That’s what you been doing.”
Rory fired the engine, wondering how the woman could know the things she did.
In an hour they were down into tobacco country, square after square of mildly rolling fields passing on either side of them, the clay soil red as wounds among the trees. Giant rough-timbered curing barns floated atop the hills, like weathered arks, holding the brightleaf tobacco that would fill the white spears of cigarettes trucked all over the country. Chesterfields and Camels and Lucky Strikes. Pall Malls and Viceroys and Old Golds. The highway wound through Winston-Salem, where the twenty-one-floor Reynolds Building stood against the sky like a miniature Empire State. It was named after R. J. Reynolds, who rode into town aback a horse, reading the newspaper, and went on to invent the packaged cigarette, becoming the richest man in the state.
“They say it’s the tallest building in the Carolinas,” said Rory.
Granny sucked her teeth, wearing the sneer she always did when forced to come down off the mountain.
“It ain’t whale-shit compared to the height of my house, now is it?”
They passed Greensboro and Burlington, assemblies of giant mills, their smokestacks black-belching day and night, while beneath them sprang neat little cities with streetcars and straight-strung telephone lines. They passed Durham, home of Duke Power, which electrified most of the state, and then on into Raleigh, passing along the oak-shadowed roads as they wound upward toward the state asylum at Dix Hill. It was massive, a double-winged mountain of brownstone that overlooked the city, four stories high, the narrow windows stacked like medieval arrow slits. The center building looked like something the Greeks had built, four giant columns holding up a triangular cornice, with a glassed rotunda on top.
They signed the paperwork and sat waiting. When the nurse came to fetch them, Rory went in first. His mother came light-footed across the visiting room floor, hardly a whisper from the soles of her white canvas shoes. She was like that, airy almost, like a breath of wind. She could be in the same room with you and you might not even know it. Her black hair was pulled behind her head, waist-long, shot through with long streaks of silver. Her skin ghost-white, as if she were made of light instead of meat. As if, squinting hard enough, you could see her bones.
“They treating you good?” Rory asked.
She nodded and took his hands. Her eyes shone so bright, seeing him, they ran holes in his heart. She said nothing. Never did. She was always a quiet girl, said Granny, living in a world her own. Touched, said some. Special. Then came the night of the Gaston killing, and she never spoke again. Rory had never heard her voice. He knew her smell, like coming rain, and the long V-shaped cords that made her neck. He knew the tiny creases at the corners of her eyes, the size of a hummingbird’s feet. He knew the feel of her hands, so light and cool. Hands that had scooped out a man’s eye with a cat’s paw, then hidden the detached orb in the pocket of her dress.
There had been three of them, nightriders, each in a sack hood. The year was 1930. The men had caught her and a mill boss’s son in an empty cabin along the river. The place was condemned, destined to be flooded under when the waters rose. They bludgeoned the boy with ax handles, but she fought them, finding a cat’s paw from a scatter of tools, an implement split-bladed like a cloven tongue. She took back from them what she could.
An eye.
None of them was ever caught.
The boy they beat to death was named Connor Gaston. He was a strange boy, people said. But smart. He liked birds, played the violin. His father ran the hosiery mill in town. A boy of no small advantage, and she a prostitute’s daughter. Probably one herself, the town said. Didn’t she live in a whorehouse? Wasn’t she of age, with all the wiles and looks? Hadn’t she lured the boy there to be beaten, robbed?
She refused to defend herself. Some said a hard blow to the head had struck her mute. Others said God. The doctors weren’t sure. She seemed to have one foot in another world. She had passed partly through the veil. The Gastons wanted her gone, buried. Forgotten. This stain on their son’s name. The judge declared her a lunatic, committing her to the state. Her belly was showing when they trucked her off. Rory was born in the Dix Hill infirmary. The Gastons were already gone—packed up and returned to Connecticut, with no forwarding address.
Rory and his mother sat a long time at the table, holding hands. Rory asked her questions, and she nodded or shook her head, as if too shy to speak.
“Any new paintings?”
She nodded and brought up the notebook from her lap. They were birds, mainly, chimney swifts and grey shrikes and barn swallows. Nuthatches, bluish with rust bellies, and iron-gray kinglets with ruby crowns. Carolina wrens, chestnut-colored with white thunderbolts over their eyes, and purple-black starlings, spangled white. Wood thrushes with cinnamon wings, their pale breasts speckled brown, and lemon-breasted waxwings with black masks over their eyes. Cardinals, red-bright, carrying sharp crests atop their heads, and red-tailed hawks that wheeled deadly over the earth.
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They were not like prints on a wall. These birds were slashed across the paper, each creature angular and violent and bright, their wings trailing ghostly echoes of flight. They were water-colored, slightly translucent, as if she painted not the outer body of the bird but the spirit, each feather like a tongue of flame. Strange fires that burned green and purple, rust and royal blue. Rory knew that eagles could see more colors than men. They could see ultraviolet light, reflected from the wings of butterflies and strings of prey urine, the waxy coatings of berries and fruits. Sometimes he wondered if his mother was like that, if she discerned the world in shades the rest of them couldn’t see. As if the wheeling or skittering of a bird’s flight were a single shape to her, a poem scrawled in some language the rest of them didn’t know.
His heart filled up, like it always did. Tears threatened his eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” he said.
As always, she sent him home with one. This time it was a single parrot, lime green, with red flushes about the eyes. He would paste it on the wall of his room, part of the ever-growing aviary that kept him company.
* * *
It was late afternoon when they started toward home. Rory lit a cigarette, Granny her pipe. Their smoke unraveled into the slipstream. They passed city cars painted swan white or flamingo red, glade green or baby blue—bright as gumballs under the trees. Every yard was neatly trimmed, many staked with small signs that read: WE LIKE IKE. The people they passed looked strangely clean and fresh and of a kind, like members of the same model line.
Soon they were out from beneath the oaks and the traffic thinned, falling away, and the land began to roll and swell, an ocean of earth.
In the old days, Rory would ask Granny to tell him stories of his mother. Of how beautiful she’d been and how kind. Of how she once held a death vigil for a giant grasshopper she found dying on the porch, singing it low lullabies as it lay legging the air on its back, green as a spring leaf. How she buried it behind the house with a little matchstick cross.
“Girl had angel in her blood,” Granny used to say. “Where she got it, I don’t know. Not from me.”
But all those old stories had been told, again and again, save one. The story only his mother could tell.
What really happened that night in the valley.
* * *
The land rose before them, growing more broken and steep, the mountains hovering over the horizon like smoke. Howl Mountain was the tallest of those that neighbored it, the fiercest. It rose stout-shouldered and jagged, like the broken canine of some giant beast. On its summit floated a spiked island of spruce and fir, a high-altitude relic of prehistoric times. The wind whipped and tore through those ancient evergreens, whirring like a turbine, and it did strange things. It was said that gravity was suspended at the mountain’s peak, and in the falling season the dead leaves would float upward from the ground of their own accord, purring through the woods, as if to reach again those limbs they’d left.
There was a lot of blood in the ground up there, Rory knew. Guerrilla fighters from the Civil War, throat-cut and shot and hanged by rope, and frontiersmen before them, mountain settlers with long rifles who warred with the Cherokee, dying with arrow-flint in their bellies, musket balls in their teeth. And who knew how many rival tribes in centuries past, blood feuds long forgotten before any white man showed his face, the bones of the fallen scattered like broken stories across the mountain. Some said it was all those men’s souls, trying to rise, that made the dead leaves lift.
Rory thought of what Eustace had told him, when he was little, of how men in the mountains had made a sport of eye-gouging and nose-biting. How those wild-born woodsmen faced each another inside rings of roaring bettors, their long-curved thumbnails fired hard over candle flames and greased slick with oil, and how Davy Crockett himself once boasted of scooping out another man’s eye easy as a gooseberry in a spoon. Back then there was no greater trophy in your pocket than another man’s eye, followed closely by the bit-off tip of his nose. A cruel story, like any Eustace told, but designed perhaps to make the boy proud of what his mama had done when cornered.
He was.
He just wished it had not stolen her voice, and he wondered sometimes if there wasn’t something wrong with him, that he wasn’t himself silenced by what he’d seen in Korea. By what he’d done.
He looked at Granny.
“Is it true you got that eye hid somewhere, stolen by some deputy you had in thrall?”
She sniffed.
“Ain’t nothing but trouble in that eye, boy. Some things are best left buried.”
“I got a right to see it.”
“Sure. And I got a right to tell you to go to hell.”
CHAPTER 4
Granny May sat in her rocker on the porch. The hills lay gold-dusted under the autumn sun. Soon the bruises of purpling ash would appear, the bloody stabs of red maple. The colors would peak, flaring from yellow into that momentary gold—all those crowns held kingly and legion to the sun—before the leaves fell browned and crackling to the earth.
This was the best time of year for root-hunting, digging up the raw ingredients for the medicines she made. The teas and tinctures, potions and poultices. In the summer, the plants spent their energy producing leaves and flowers and fruits. In the fall, they drove their nutrients down into the earth, anchoring themselves to survive the hard winter months. When she moved through the forest, she was surrounded by friends. Neighbors. She knew more than their names. She knew the shapes of their leaves, like tiny pennants or knives or hearts, and the size of their bulbs and berries and fruits. She knew the dark gullies where some liked to hide, and the bright patches of forest where others reached for the sun. She knew the scent of their leaves and roots, rubbed between her fingers and lifted to her nose. There were plants that could heal the heart or lungs, the skin or gut or blood. Plants that could stir or settle the body, lift or level the mind. There were roots that could cut you loose from yourself, to skirt the spirit realms, or ground you root-deep in the earth. There were plants that could kill.
There was Solomon’s seal, which grew like a spine in the ground, with a perfectly circular vertebra for every year of age. It could soothe the stomach and clear the lungs, slacken excessive bleeding during a woman’s time of month. You could draw it from the earth by hand. There was the sassafras tree, whose leaves were often mitten-shaped, chewed into a poultice for poison ivy, the roots dried and steeped for teas to purify the blood and warm the spirit. There was water hemlock, which could cause the most violent of deaths, rife with seizure and convulsion—unlike the poison hemlock of Europe, which shuttled philosophers so gently into the dark. There were these and so many others, a wonder of herbs and plants that ran in green feathers across the mountain, ready to be plucked, and those she grew in hidden plots beneath the trees, whose smoke could soothe pains of the body and spirit, slow time to a crawl, spark giggles from the stoniest hearts.
That morning, she had harvested a seven-leafed perennial known as rabbit’s foot or spikeweed, digging and coaxing the long strings of roots from the moist bank of a dry stream, where a bed of mossy green stones tumbled down the mountainside. She would mix the root with honey to make a cough syrup—much needed this time of year—and save the honeyed pieces of root as candy to soothe sore throats. She had washed the moist mountain dirt from the roots, and now they lay drying on a wooden rack in the sun, their pale arms curling like the tentacles of baby krakens.
Granny leaned back in her rocker, packing her pipe, and looked out over the high country of her home. Her blood had been in these mountains a long time, two centuries nearly. Her people had cut timber with axes and crosscut saws, building cabins no bigger than bear dens. They had raised hogs, which they turned loose to fatten on the fallen nuts of the forest, and grown “whiskey trees”—corn—stirring giant copper pots of mash with handmade paddles. They had fought in every war of a young nation, siding with the Union when the state seceded, and they had hunt
ed roots and beasts of every stripe, lining the mountainsides with the iron jaws of traps. They had done whatever they could to keep alive, the same as she had done, and they had died and died and died. They died in the grip of influenza or the hemorrhages of childbirth. They were crushed beneath widowmaker limbs or kicked by mules or burned in stilling accidents. Some walked off into the forest and never came back. Few died of old age.
She was getting older now, sure. Her steps were heavier than they used to be, her feet flatter, her joints more attuned to changes in weather. Her hair, once as black as a crow’s wing—the work of rumored Cherokee blood—had lightened to an oaken gray. Those high cheekbones—another gift perhaps of her part-blood—those didn’t sag. And her mind was still good. The hell if she would ever let that go.
This time of year, always, she found herself thinking of Anson, her husband, killed so long ago in France. She’d met him just before the first frost. It was one of those harvest dances in the western end of the county, and she’d gone with some of the neighbor girls, one of their older brothers driving the wagon. She wasn’t but fourteen. The barn, blue in the night, was warm-lit from within, light like golden whiskey spilling out through doors and busted sheathing. The fiddlers were sawing away, foot-stomping, their songs alive and quick-grieving like the wind.
She was wearing a gingham dress her mother had made her, red and white, and her hair was the color of night, done up in pins. Her mother had spent hours pinning it up, fixing it just-so—this from a woman who never wore her hair in anything fancier than a topknot. Now, years later, Granny knew why. Womanhood had been upon her then, her breasts swelling, shiny black curls sprouting between her legs. Her monthly time coming. And her father, the no-count spawn of an old hard line of mountain people, had begun to look at her funny when he was on the jug. He commonly was. Her mother wanted her out of the house. She wanted her daughter to find a man.
There were boys slumped outside the barn on nail kegs, in the shadows, sipping on something they snickered over, keeping it hidden. Eustace Uptree was the biggest among them. The leader. She paid them no mind, none of them. Anson wasn’t with them. She knew who he was already, from a summer dance, and she was looking for him.
