by Taylor Brown
“Nefarious? No, sir.”
“I might think you was a degenerate. I might think you was the kind too often found at the bottom of a ravine out on the edge of my county. Slipped his footing, too drunk on his own medicine.”
Eli was standing behind Rory. He cleared his throat.
“Sheriff? If I might—?”
Carling cut him off.
“Don’t feed me your bull, Uptree. I know who your uncle is.”
Eli sidled closer, lowered his voice.
“No, sir, Sheriff. But I was just thinking, what if we was baking for you?”
The man’s napkin, gravy-speckled, still hung from his throat.
“You blind? I’m already eating. You interrupted my got-damned lunch.”
“You ain’t eating stackcake.”
Carling straightened. He cut his eyes up the street, down, then back at Eli.
“Talk.”
“See, Sheriff, this here is Granny May’s grandson.”
Carling stood still taller, looking down at Rory.
“Maybelline Docherty?”
“Yes, sir,” said Rory.
Carling worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth, as if he’d lost something in there. He squinted into the distance, possibly the future. His free hand toyed the edge of his napkin.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You bring me one them stackcakes your Granny used to make. You bring it to Sunday-night service. That’s tonight. You do that, I might could believe you’re transporting that sugar for your granny.”
“Yes, sir,” said Eli. “We can do that.”
The man holstered his pistol. “You can and you will.” He turned to Cooley and his kinsman, his big hand still resting on the butt of his gun. “As for you two, you and none of your rotgut kin is even supposed to be in my county. I advise you to get the hell back to Linville before I finish my lunch.” He turned and took in this whole scene on his Sunday street, a sneer of disgust on his face. “Ball-hootin’ blackguards.” He stepped over the makeshift bludgeon lying there on the sidewalk and back into the café.
Cooley watched him go, then turned to Rory. His face twisted perversely, a dread asymmetry of halves.
“You’re one lucky son-bitch, Docherty. Weren’t for him, they’d be mopping you from this here sidewalk.”
Rory walked back to the car, Eli behind him.
“Big talk from a boy ate himself a hundred-dollar lunch.”
The boy’s eyes skewed vertical, as if they might arrange themselves in totem, one atop the other, and Rory noticed for the first time the two fleshy bubbles on the boy’s neck—the serpent’s bite.
“You ought to put that smart mouth on the track, Docherty.”
Rory opened the driver’s door of the Ford, speaking across the roof.
“Why’s that?”
“Because dying’s better than wishing you had.”
Rory tapped the roof with his fist, thinking of the deer in the road.
“You might be smarter than I thought, Cooley. You just might.”
IV. NEW MOON
They were sitting side-by-side between the shelves, cross-legged. Connor wore short sleeves, his veins branching down his thin, golden arms. Bonni wanted to trace those rivers of blood, climbing her fingers under his shirt, searching for their source. Connor was looking at her newest piece, painted in the high turret of her room the previous night.
Wait, did you see these yourself?
Bonni nodded. It was a pair of small green parrots, yellow-headed, with a flush of orange about the eyes. She’d seen them as a girl.
Where?
Down in the valley along the river. Came out of a sycamore hollow.
These are Carolina parakeets, said to be extinct. The last known specimen died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918.
He took her hand.
Come on, we have to go see.
Mama says it’s not safe in the valley no more.
For us it is.
They descended into the valley on the chestnut mare that Connor rode to school each day. His violin case and books were lashed over the beast’s rump. Bonni’s hands rested on the boy’s hips. His waist was so taut. She leaned to his ear, her words light as bees’ wings.
Is it true what they say about your daddy teaching you to box?
The boy’s back straightened, as if he’d been stung.
Two hours each morning, he said. Or I’m not allowed my binoculars or violin.
CHAPTER 19
Granny had her sleeve rolled up, her arm working a mixing bowl tucked against her hip. Rory came into the kitchen with a finger in the air, his cheeks bulged with words, and she told him to get the hell out. She’d baked him out of trouble before—schoolteachers and deputies and wardens, a dime-store shopkeeper who caught him lifting a pack of dirty picture cards—but she’d never baked for any Presbyterians before. She did not like to start. She knew them: walking so chin-high through town, looking down their noses if they looked at all. Most simply turned their heads the other way when they passed, like they didn’t see her. The women, at least. The men, they had their own looks, some of them. Animal eyes that made her feel naked and small, at least in daylight.
In that first bawdyhouse, the one in Boone, they would come climbing the stairs in the midnight hours, seeking what cures her body had to give. The biggest men made suckling boys, groping so madly for something in the dark. Medicine she had to give and would. Now it was their wives who came, their stately sedans rocking up the mountain, the women stepping out in their heeled shoes, as far from the earth as they could get. The look on their faces, you’d think they were stepping into a feedlot.
They wanted the old cures the town-doctors couldn’t give them, and the ailment they sought most to remedy came as no surprise. They wanted the powders they could slip into their husband’s coffee or whiskey, that might make him stand tall again through his trousers, or perhaps a little dose of something for themselves, for those days when the neighbor-boy came to cut the grass or clean the gutters—when the last thing you wanted was a dry spell.
She knew they suspected her cures were something not quite Christian, even witchcraft, for faith in the old ways was slipping. Still they came, paying always in paper money, and when they looked long down their noses she stared right back at them, as she had in town long ago, on the sidewalks and in the stores. The women and men both. She never once lowered her head. It wasn’t in her to. She’d fed Bonni every day of her life, no matter the sin it took, until the state took her away, and then she fed Rory. She hung the bottles in the tree to keep him safe. She prayed while he was in Korea. Prayed and prayed. Not to the church-god, exactly. To her own. One that lived closer, up on the mountain, perhaps. For here was a place fit for a god to live, not in any building or book. Here she was understood. She was wicked, sure, but no hypocrite. She had fought every day of her life, same as the beasts of the field. The bloody Christ nailed naked and roaring to the cross—his bones iron-split, his body whip-flayed to the meat—he was hard as they come. Surely he prized grit, a game heart. Same as she did.
The rest of it, she could give a fuck.
Rory stepped again into the kitchen, hungry probably, and she drove him out with the wooden spoon, dripping spots of batter on the floor. She didn’t care. The floors and counters were covered in flour and sugar already, the apples and cider simmering on the stove. Eggshells sat in the slop bucket, fated for the pigs, and jars of cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg stood open-topped by the sink. She was making an eight-layer stackcake like the one they had the day she got married in 1913. Back then they were too poor for a store-bought cake, so each family in attendance baked a single layer, the thin cakes stacked one atop the other like the stories of a house, each mortared with sweet apple filling. That was how people did then on the mountain. Years later the old stackcake became fashionable again, this time among people who could afford any cake they wanted, and when she returned to the mountains with Rory as a baby, she sold her stackcakes th
rough a bakery in Boone until someone—some nosy Presbyterian, probably—discovered who made them, and that was the end of that.
She poured the batter into a pair of hoecake pans she’d buttered, then lowered the hot jaw of the oven, hinges groaning, and set them side-by-side on the rack. She closed the oven and wiped her hands on the old apron she wore, blowing the fallen hair from her eyes. She’d always hated to bake, more so even than lying on her back for a living. Perhaps the anti-cake campaign of the Presbyterians those years ago had been a blessing in disguise. She figured one blessing warranted another, and the old wicked light came into her eyes. She went hunting through the shelves and drawers of her pantry, the roots and powders and potions, searching for just the thing. She found it in an old coffee tin, cuttings from the secret garden she kept in the trees beyond the house.
She was bent over a seething pot, chuckling to herself, when she felt the floor pulse again with footsteps. Rory launching a third offensive, she figured, and she raised the wooden spoon over her head, advancing toward the door.
“Boy, I done told you twice now—”
She stopped. It was Eli standing in the threshold, his eyes wide with terror, glued to the spoon like it was an ax. She made no move to lower it from skull-cleaving height.
“Rory sent me in, hoping to get him a biscuit. Said you was less likely to give me a paddling.”
Granny eyed him up, down.
“Don’t be so sure.”
* * *
The Presbyterian church was in the middle of town, a rich-looking behemoth of red brick with four white columns holding up the front, an arrow-point bell tower that looked ideal for a sharpshooter. Stained-glass windows lined the sides, luminescent in the last rays of the day’s sun, and there was an annex jutting out from the rear. Rory parked down the street and got out. He never felt comfortable in Boone. He knew the people down here were suspicious of Granny, this witch-woman on the mountain who read auguries and concocted potions. This once-whore, rumored to set hexes and speak with spirits. Of course, such prejudices didn’t stop them coming up the mountain when the medicines of the lower world fell short.
He walked up the sidewalk, holding the cake. It looked like a pet ghost, covered as it was in a white cloth. The big doors of the church hummed with organ music, and he thought better of a straight-on approach. A walkway ran down the side of the building, and down this he tromped, the shards of stained glass catching the light above him. Flaring, fracturing. He wondered what would happen if he slung a rock through one. He imagined an angry mob issuing red-faced from every door of the place to beat him down or string him up.
He’d slicked back his hair and put on one of the shirts he wore to see his mother, and he walked up the steps to the back door of the place and knocked. A woman in a peach-colored suit opened the door. Her hair was balled high atop her head, and her face was round and bright, bearing the slightest extra chin. She grabbed his wrist in one hand, her nails varnished.
“Oh, a cake! Now aren’t you the sweetest? Come now.” She tugged him along. “I have just the place for it.” She led him into a fellowship hall and there to the dessert table, where she shifted a plate of cookies an inch this way, a dish of brownies an inch that. She took the cake from him and pulled off the cloth with a gasp of delight. She looked over her shoulder at him. “Now whose boy are you? I need to know who I have to thank for this fabulous cake.”
Rory shifted his weight to his good foot.
“Maybelline Docherty, ma’am.”
“I’m not sure I know her—”
Rory cleared his throat.
“Granny May,” he said.
The woman straightened. “Oh.” She folded the white cloth that had covered the cake and handed it back to him, her eyes walled off. “How nice.” She turned and walked away, and he saw her whispering to another woman in front of the punch bowl.
“Bitches.”
Sometimes he wondered if it was more than just Granny that rattled these people. If it was his mother, too. These brickhouse Christians, they feared misfortune like a curse, like something they could catch by touch or word or tongue.
He leaned one shoulder against the wall and looked away from them, waiting for Sheriff Carling and the others to come flooding into the hall. He was starving, subsisting on the single biscuit that Granny had allowed him. As long as he had to be here, he intended to take full advantage of the long tables of food. There was chicken baked and fried, pulled pork, greens drowned in yellow ponds of butter. Baked beans and mashed potatoes, bowls of dark gravy, layered casseroles of every color and description. But first: the stackcake.
Granny had grasped his hand on the way out the door.
“Don’t you go eating none of that cake, hear? It’s for the congregation, not you.”
“I won’t,” he lied.
He could feel the organ music more than he could hear it, an energy surging through the walls, building in ever-greater mountains of power, rising into a long, sustained plateau before stopping. Soon the parishioners came filing in, dressed in their Sunday finest. The men were carrying their hats, the women a-chatter, missalettes flittering in their hands like white little birds. They crowded the food table like trough-feeders, and Rory made for the table of sweets. He cut himself a handsome slice of the stackcake and found an empty table and sat himself in a folding chair to eat.
He was surprised when the chair next to him groaned: Sheriff Carling sat down with a mounded plate of food. A cake wedge the size of a garden shovel sat on its own plate.
“Eight layers.” He prodded the cake with the flat side of his knife. “She’s went and outdid herself.”
Rory forked himself a bite.
“Didn’t know if anybody would eat it, seeing who made it.”
Carling chewed a hunk of pork in the side of his mouth. He nodded.
“Oh, these people is mainly schoolteachers and professors, clerks and bankers and lawyers and accountants. Hardly venture out of town. They’re afraid of anything outside the city limit.”
“What about you?”
Carling quit chewing.
“I don’t make trouble for the mountains as long as they don’t make trouble for me.” He pointed his fork at Rory, lowered his voice. “But I got you here for a reason. Seems shit’s been starting to flow downhill here of late, and I don’t like it. You can tell Eustace that.”
“I’m sorry about the sugar, sir—”
Carling leaned forward, looking left and right.
“It ain’t about the got-damn sugar,” he hissed. “I had some federal man come sniffing around last week, asking questions I don’t like to answer. I told him as little as I could, but it ain’t the same as it was when my daddy was sheriff twenty-five years back, when Eustace and the rest of them had their little county trades.” Carling sat upright, smiled hello to an old lady walking past, then bent again to Rory. “Now it’s ugly. Worse than Prohibition ever was. You got pop-skullers like them Muldoons running what amounts to poison, making more money than God, sprouting up like weeds I can’t even begin to trample down. This federal man said they caught one of them Muldoons the other week had him a Thompson submachine gun on the floorboard.”
“Cooley?”
“Hell, no. You think he’d still be walking free?”
“Where’d he get it from?”
“I don’t know. Point is the son of a bitch had it, and that’s the kind of thing the government can’t ignore. It’s never been the same since they flooded that valley in thirty-one. Whiskey’s got to run down out the mountains now to feed the mills, and the money runs up. And you know who we can thank for that.”
“Who?”
The old tanker eyed him balefully, then grunted.
“Who you think?”
* * *
Rory excused himself to the restroom. He was feeling strange. He had the feeling as he walked across the room that everyone was watching him over their food, suspicious of his blood or history. He walked a straight line to sp
ite them, forcing the standing rings of people to part, their eyes cutting against him. The door to the men’s room was narrow and groaned. Inside he bent over the sink and washed his hands and splashed cold water on his face. The light was dim, a single weak bulb, and in the mirror he thought for a moment that he saw not his own face reflected but that of his grandfather, Anson Docherty, killed in 1918. Rory’s age. Cut down in a French wheat field by German teenagers in spiked helmets. A man seen only in the one photograph Granny kept of him on the fireboard, square-jawed and tall in his dress blues, his cap set jaunty over one eye. A vision slightly blurred, made as if with ash and charcoal instead of light.
He shook his head and dried his hands, patted his cheeks with a hand towel. Two men had come and gone while he stood before the mirror. He opened the door and stepped again into the room; it was different than before. The voices were purling like water, gushing invisibly over the tables, and the bulbs looked of a lower wattage. They hummed with yellow light. The food table had elongated, a long tongue glistening with feast. A metallic ditty rose from the scrape and rattle of silverware.
Rory simply stood there, in thrall to the scene. He was breathing through his mouth, as if to inhale the voices, the light and food. How hungry he was, and it seemed he could eat the bulbs hanging from the ceiling, these electric fruit. He could drink the language of men, and be sustained by the mere scent of chicken skin and buttery greens.
He blinked.
Now a pair of young women were standing before him, wearing hats. Their teeth were unbelievably white, as if store-bought, their breasts sharp as weapons beneath their blouses. Their nails were painted the pale pink of kitten paws. Rory backed up a step.
“Your name is Rory Docherty, right?”
Their accent was clipped and clean, as if they were from Charlotte or Richmond. Rory nodded, distrusting his tongue. He took another step backward, unable to help himself. There was little room; the wall nudged his shoulder blades.
“Janette and I, we’re in school at the teachers’ college?” The girl looked left, right. “We heard, if we want whiskey, we should talk to you.”
