by Taylor Brown
She turned around, flanked by the perforated lard cans in their rows.
“Want to see what I been working on?”
“All right.”
She strode past him. His sleeves were rolled up; he felt the colorless fuzz of her arm tickle his skin as she passed. Her shoulders hovered motionless as she walked, her lean hips swiveling beneath them. She was slightly splay-footed, her toenails unpainted. He followed her to the worktable, where a brimless pink hat was perched rakishly on a wooden head.
“Pillbox hat,” she said. “You know who was first to wear them?” She didn’t wait for him to say. “Roman soldiers. Called it the Pannonian cap. Can you imagine all those scar-faced legionaries wearing hats like this?”
Rory shook his head. He was hooked on how far her words could range, carrying him far beyond the mountains, into other centuries and countries. They told him how little he knew, how much he still wanted to know.
“The special thing is the color,” she said.
Rory leaned closer, looking over her shoulder at the hat. It was a fleshy pink, like a dog’s tongue or wad of Bazooka gum.
“They say Eisenhower is going to be elected next month,” she said. “And Mamie’s favorite color is pink.”
“Mamie?”
Christine rubbed her fingers lightly over the flat crown of the hat.
“Ike’s wife. They say she got married in pink, drives a pink car, even dyed her pets pink once. Pretty soon women are gonna be lining up for hats this color, you watch. It’s going to be the thing, and I’ll be ready.”
A vein pulsed in her neck, small as a worm. Rory wanted to rub his chin against it, to find it with his tongue and teeth.
“That’s smart of you.”
“It’s my ticket out of the mill. I don’t aim to be a toe-sewer the rest of my life.”
He placed his hands on her waist, lightly. She rotated in place, facing him, pulling her hair across her mouth like a mask.
“When I heard Ornias, I knew it was you.”
“Yeah?”
She pulled her hair away from her mouth. He was breathing her breath.
“Daddy’s like to catch you.”
She was tiny beneath the thin cotton shift. Rectangular, hard. He placed his thumbs into the creases above her pelvis, feeling the muscles of her stomach constrict.
“Let him.”
He kissed her. Her tongue found his, quick as a dart, and he felt himself flood, his blood surging up and up and up. He lifted her tiny from the floor, onto his hips, and she hooked her bare feet behind him, their breath torn ragged from their mouths. He yanked the sheet from the car and cranked open the door and they spilled panting and clawing across the seat, their faces twisted, their teeth bright and sharp.
The shift was bunched high at her waist. Her flat belly gleamed with sweat, with the wet slashes of his tongue. He pulled the thin cotton to her chin and dove for her breasts, the nipples hard as buttons in his mouth. Little cries from her throat. He wanted the taste of her, her mouth and her sex. His blood would leap the bounds of his skin.
“Rory,” she said. “Rory.”
His hand found the back of her neck, gripping it like a handle, his mouth seeking the hollows beneath her chin. He lapped them, the sting of her on his tongue.
“Stop,” she said. “I can’t.”
She began to struggle, retreating farther up the seat, her legs and arms sprawled for traction.
“Stop!”
He did, waking as from a trance. He found himself kneeling on the seat, his chest heaving. She sat cross-legged against the far door like a cornered animal, the blood high in her cheeks.
“Daddy caught us out here in his old car, it’d be both of our asses.”
“I ain’t afraid of him.”
“You ought to be.”
“Why’s that?”
“He wasn’t always a preacher.”
Rory raised up, looking about the machine they were sitting in.
“That’s where this old hot rod come from, isn’t it? That trunk used to jingle of a night.”
“That was a long time ago, before I was born. He’s past all that.”
“Is he?”
She opened her mouth to say something, then didn’t. Her legs and arms were still crossed, her body knotted against him.
“He says you’re trouble. Says you work for Eustace Uptree on the mountain.”
“You knew that the first time you saw me.” She didn’t say anything, and he leaned forward, across the seat. “Didn’t you?”
“He says you don’t have the Spirit in you.”
Rory leaned farther across the seat, kissing distance from her face.
“Damn him. I’d boot the Holy Ghost from his ass for an hour with you.”
She jutted her chin.
“Big talk from a one-legged man.”
The words pierced him, blade-cold. A hot pang in his chest, like loosed blood.
She saw the damage.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached out for his hand. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
He whipped his hand away. His heart was crashing.
“Remind me.” He could feel the meanness slipping into his voice. “Remind me how he lost that eye?”
“Timber-cutting accident.”
“Is that right? Funny thing is, seems he lost it awfully close to the time they flooded the valley.”
“So?”
“So that’s right about the time they killed that mill boss’s son, and my mother cut out one of their eyes with a cat’s paw.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“I already did.”
She slapped him, hard. The echo of her palm stung his face.
Rory swallowed, slowly, and turned his other cheek.
“How’s that for the Spirit?”
She was already out the other side of the car, gone.
* * *
Granny was on the porch when he tore up the drive. He stepped out of the car and slammed the door. The window glass rattled in its frame. After Christine left, he’d stood a long time before the rows of serpents in their round tin homes, imagining what the venom of a viper might feel like under his skin. He remembered the schoolhouse words. Hemotoxic. Necrolytic. He imagined the shuttled cells of his arteries bursting, his blood whirling water-thin, unclotted. His flesh deep-eaten at the wound, a dark sink of rot spreading from the bite like the very spirit of evil.
He’d turned off the light, closed the door. Christine had chained the dog to a metal post in the yard. It lay watching him, whining, as if with love. He walked across the grass, toward the road. He passed alongside the house, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of something in the window, white as a ghost. He turned, and there it was, the bone-white visage of the little boy, Christine’s brother—Clyde—watching him from inside the house. Rory waved, but the face registered no change. Just that same scowl, like something shaped in a mold.
Now he stomped up the porch steps in his shirtsleeves, the cold stinging him, and stood in front of Granny. The wind was up, the near-naked trees clamoring and swirling at the edge of the meadow. The bottles moaning, clinking in their branches. She blew smoke from her nostrils.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re going to dig up that fucking eye from wherever you got it hid and give it to me.”
“Say I am?”
“Damn right you are.”
She hawked and spat—the gobbet hit the planks with a thud.
“Just ’cause you got a cock swinging between your legs don’t mean you can order me around. I never bent to no man and I ain’t about to start.”
Rory picked up the rocker beside her and swung it into a porch column. The chair shattered, the skeletal fragments falling curled and broken at his feet.
“You bent plenty,” he said. “Ain’t you now?”
Granny stood from her rocker, slowly, unfolding herself sword-straight beneath him, her heavy breasts nearly touching the heaving plane
s of his chest. He could feel her breath against his neck, her voice playing like a blade against his skin. An edge he’d never heard.
“Careful what ye say,” she whispered. “Lest some old woman don’t cut ye pecker off some dark night.”
“I’m in love with her, Grandma.”
Her chest rose, fell. Her tongue worked around the inside of her mouth. She lifted a hand to touch his face and nodded, a slight wetness in her eyes. Then she walked off the porch, into the night.
CHAPTER 21
Rory was up before the cock’s crow. The floorboards groaned beneath him, the eastern ridges blood-edged by the first sliver of sun. A jar sat gleaming on the porch rail, still covered here or there in chunks of dirt and turf from its moonlit excavation. He sat in one of the unbroken rockers, the jar clutched in his lap, and he was the greatest fool in the world. The king of fools. If the printers of playing cards saw fit to introduce a fool into the deck, it would be a character of his likeness, a man holding the bloody lump of his heart in his hand—an organ he’d cut out himself.
He held the jelly-jar before his face. In it floated a detached eye, ball-shaped with a red tail of nerves like a creature netted from the black depths of the sea, jarred and preserved for exhibition. For the profit of carnival showmen or museum curators. An organ not torn from the socket of the man he suspected and accused, whose daughter he loved. This eye was blue, a sealike color he didn’t recognize, and he didn’t know whether to be relieved or punch a hole in something.
The wind rose, rattling the curled bones of the broken rocker. The bottles and branches and leaves, the very contours of the land, heaved beneath him. He squeezed the jar in his hand, veins rising like worms from his flesh. He pictured the glass crushed in his fist, the eye bursting in his palm. A world destroyed, yolked through his fingers, lost like all those stories at the bottom of the lake. He held the jar to eye-level, staring unblinking at the bodiless orb, trying to detect any provenance in its shape or color or pattern or gleam.
“Rory.”
He turned, startled, to see Granny lashing a robe about her waist.
“I told you there wasn’t nothing in that eye but trouble.”
He looked again to the jar, the eye warped slightly behind the time-crazed glass.
“It isn’t him.”
“Who?”
“That pastor. Adderholt.”
“Well, now you know.”
He set the jar on the porch rail, turning the eye away from him, outward, like some terrible sentinel.
“I don’t know shit.”
* * *
It was about noon when the ranch-wagon came grumbling up the drive, bouncing over ruts and churning through slogs. Granny set aside her knitting and lit her pipe. Rory was down at Eli’s—so he said—and she thought she had new customers until the men stepped out. There were two of them, bearded. They wore rumpled suits and eyeglasses with thick black frames and each carried a leather notebook. They looked up at the chestnut tree a long moment, open-mouthed, before approaching the porch.
“I ain’t buying,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Whatever it is you selling. Some new god, probably, or Britannicas.”
One of the men was short and round, the other tall and gangly. Neither would fit very well in a store-bought suit, which is what they wore. The short one spoke.
“We’re biologists, ma’am, with the university in Chapel Hill?”
He said it like she hadn’t heard of the place.
Granny blew the smoke from her nostrils.
“What is it you want?”
“This tree you have here,” the man swept his arm, “it’s an American chestnut.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you aware how rare it is?”
Granny shrugged.
“Some. They’s about all gone.”
The man nodded.
“Yes, ma’am. We estimate three and a half billion blighted since 1900.”
Granny raised her eyebrows.
“Billion?”
She remembered, after Anson’s death, seeing whole hillsides blighted, the once-mighty hardwoods toppled over their rotted-out trunks, their felled branches clinging to one another as if in mourning. She remembered wondering if it was somehow related. All those dead boys in that Great War and the previous, maybe the earth was too sad to support such mightiness. Maybe something cankerous had gotten into the dirt along with all that blood, here and across the oceans.
The man smiled grimly through his beard.
“Billion,” he said. “They are nearly extinct in the wild. My colleague Dr. De Groot and I have been on the road for six weeks searching for a live specimen. We’ve been as far north as Pennsylvania, in fact. Then we heard rumors of one up on Howl Mountain. So here we are.”
“Well, you found it.” Granny gestured with her pipe. “You ain’t cuttin’ on it, though.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “We just want to take some samples is all.”
“What for, you hunting for its secret?”
“Something like that.”
“You got a theory?”
“A few, actually. Best one being it’s contracted a virus of some kind that fights the blight fungus. If we can identify such a viral agent, we can—hopefully—inoculate others with it. It would be a great step toward saving the species.”
“Have at it, then. I don’t aim to stand in the way of that.”
The man turned and looked at the tree.
“May I ask about the bottles?”
Granny sucked her teeth.
“You got vials in those laboratories of yours, full of things shouldn’t never get out?”
“Some.”
“There you go.”
“And that?” The man pointed to the jar still sitting on the porch, filled with the bloated tadpole of an eye.
“Too late,” she said.
She eyed them close while they made their study of the tree. A lot of evil things had been done in the name of science. Not under her watch, they wouldn’t. But the men proved kind, even reverent. They fawned over the big survivor. They studied the bark, making notes, and erected a tripod, taking close-up photographs of the heavy threads of bark that twisted their way up the trunk. They measured the tree’s circumference with a tape measure made of waxen cloth and stood far back in the meadow, bending to examine the tree through the scope of a surveyor’s device. They donned rubber gloves and picked leaves and twigs from the soil, housing them in labeled jars, and they filled vials with soil from the base of the tree. They collected the spiny, palm-size burrs that had fallen from the branches.
Not too many, Granny made sure. Each burr held up to three nuts that she used for turkey-stuffing and open-fire roasts. Rory fed them to the hogs to sweeten their meat. What the people and hogs didn’t eat, the whitetail did. They would come out of the woods at dusk, light-hoofed and slim-born, like beasts made of smoke and light. She would sit stock-still, hardly breathing, watching the black velvet of their noses, the dark gleam of their eyes. The way a buck’s antlers glowed bone-white in the dusk, cradling the dying sky. This tree, whose kind once fattened the beasts of the mountains, would stand kinglike in the meadow, crowned in golden leaves, as if shielding the deer from the coming dark.
The scientists approached the porch after finishing their study.
“You get what you need?” Granny asked.
“We hope,” said the short man.
“You the only ones working on this?”
The scientist shook his head.
“No, ma’am. The Department of Agriculture, they’re trying to crossbreed American chestnuts with Chinese specimens like those that carried over the fungus. But it isn’t going to work.”
“No?”
“The hybrids might be blight-resistant, but they’ll be too stunted. To compete in these mountains, you have to be strong and tall. Otherwise, you won’t be able to reach the light.”
Granny nodded. This little
man, she might have underestimated him. He seemed to have the right idea about things. The scientist looked at his shoes a moment. They were dress loafers traumatized by weeks on the road, scuffed and seam-split, bulging at the sides.
“Ma’am, may I ask what herb you were smoking when we arrived?”
Granny narrowed one eye, as if aiming down the barrel of a gun.
“What’s it to you?”
The scientist crossed his hands behind his back.
“Dr. De Groot and I, we have our own, ah, side project. Not sanctioned by the university, you understand. Our interest being, well, not purely academic. Dr. De Groot here, he is a Dutchman, has traveled extensively, collected seeds from a number of locales. Thailand, Tibet, Morocco. We’re developing our own strain of cannabis. An optimal blend of the sativa and indica species.”
“Optimal, huh?”
The man produced a glass vial from the inside of his coat, stoppered with cork. It contained two large buds.
“Flying Dutchman, we call it. Problem is, ma’am, we are plain out of rolling papers.”
“Say you are.” Granny knocked her pipe against the heel of her hand, clearing the ash. “I might could help with that.”
* * *
“Teeth like butter mints, hair like spun gold. You should of seen them, boy.”
“I did see them,” said Rory. “I’m the one sent them to you, if you don’t recall.”
“We could have us a double date or something.”
They were sitting in Eli’s garage, the hood of the Ford propped open.
“I think those two are looking for higher-class cuts than us.”
“They invited me to their party tomorrow, didn’t they?”
“And who’s bringing the whiskey?”
Eli leaned back on his shop stool, eyeing Rory over his cigarette.
“Got-damn sourpuss is what you are. What happened, that little heart-sabotager of yours went and sabotaged your heart like I said she would?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What’d you do? Tell her you suspected your mama scooped out her daddy’s eye with a cat’s paw back in ’31?”
Rory didn’t say anything.
Eli leaned forward, squinting through his own smoke.
“You did, didn’t you? Jesus H., what’s in that head of yours? Sand? Pea-gravel? You might be dumber’n I ever thought.”
