Troy asked me if I’d go with him to the Anhalt house and I said I would. As we drove up the Cabin Creek Road I held his paintings and drawings in my lap. It was late summer and some of the sumacs along the creek and the poplars on the ridge had already started to show their fall colors. Old Pat rode in the back; she liked to put her paws on top of the cab and feel the wind ripple through her fur in warm weather. It was awful pretty, driving up that winding road into the deep valley of Cabin Creek. The big flat face of the rock called the Mareslide gleamed high on the mountain above.
“What if she don’t want to pay you nothing?” I said.
“We’ll just see what she says.”
Troy and me had seen Ellen Anhalt at the store several times, and we’d seen her with her husband and sister earlier, at school events like the Halloween party and the Christmas party. But we didn’t know her well, and neither of us had seen her since her husband died. She was said to give Christmas presents to some of the kids on Mount Olivet and in Mountain Valley.
Her house was back off the road up the holler and there was a sign at the entrance that said PEACEFUL VALLEY mounted on an old wagon wheel. The road was neat, with white gravel on the tracks and the brush trimmed on either side. First thing I seen at the house was a bank covered in flowers, including chrysanthemums, and stone steps going up to the porch. The house was made of logs, but it was twice as big as most houses in the community, with dormer windows and what must have been a big attic. And at the side of the house there was a garage with two doors. It would take a lot of money to build and keep a house like that.
When we got out I carried some of the pictures and Troy carried the rest, as Old Pat followed us up the steps. Troy told her to set on the porch until we come out. Before we knocked, Mrs. Anhalt opened the front door. She was wearing brown slacks and a kind of embroidered cowboy shirt.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and showed us into the dark living room furnished with leather chairs and couches, and a glass-covered coffee table. The ceiling was high as a church, with the beams exposed and polished. First thing I noticed was all the Indian things on the walls, a feather headdress, a blanket, tomahawks, spears, the head of a buffalo.
“My husband collected Indian artifacts,” she said. “He was an ethnologist.” She told us to set down and asked if we would like some tea.
“No, thank you, we just now finished dinner,” Troy said. Troy had learned it wasn’t polite to accept refreshments when people offered them.
“I love art, especially local art and folk art,” Mrs. Anhalt said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Troy said.
“I didn’t mean to imply that your paintings are folk art,” she said, and laughed.
“No, ma’am,” Troy said.
Mrs. Anhalt took her glasses off the coffee table and said, “Now let’s see what you have brought me.”
Troy laid the pictures on the couch beside him and handed the first one to her. It was an oil painting, mostly dark blue, of a trail of moonlight on the river, like you would see if you was standing on the bridge looking west. It was painted on Masonite. Mrs. Anhalt turned on a lamp so she could see better.
“Oh, this is wonderful,” she said. “I love it.” She laid it on the end of the coffee table and Troy handed her the next picture, a water color of a golden eagle soaring against a blue sky. It was one of my favorites of Troy’s pictures.
“You do have a gift,” she said, studying the picture like there might be a secret hidden in it. “I like this one especially,” she said.
The next picture Troy handed her was a painting of Pisgah Mountain seen from the CCC camp. The dark peak shot up into the sky steep as a fodder stack. A touch of ice gleamed near its top like a diamond eye.
“This is heroic,” Mrs. Anhalt said. “You have caught the nobility of the mountain, its dignity and authority.” I thought that was an odd way to talk about a mountain peak, but there was a kind of truth in what she said.
Next Troy handed her his painting of the Pink Beds, which showed pink phlox covering a meadow and the blue mountains beyond, with the curved face of Looking Glass Mountain reflecting the morning light. It was an awful pretty painting.
“You have caught the magic and the splendor of the mountains,” Mrs. Anhalt said. She held the painting in the lamplight like she wanted to eat it. I was thrilled that she liked Troy’s pictures so much and I know he was too. Every picture he showed her she oohed and aahed over, except maybe the picture of the dynamite exploding the side of a mountain. I don’t think she liked that one as much.
“It’s a shame to tear off the beautiful face of a mountain,” she said.
“With a scenic road more people can see the mountains,” Troy said.
“That may be,” Mrs. Anhalt said. “But it’s still a shame to blast away the ancient shape of the ridge.”
When she’d looked at all the pictures Mrs. Anhalt stacked them carefully on the coffee table. “We’ll come back to them later,” she said. “Now I want to show you the photographs of my husband and my sister.”
She went to a chest of drawers and took out two pictures in frames and brought them to us. They was the kind of pictures that had been took in black and white and then colored so the eyes was blue and the hair brown, and the sister’s cheeks had a little pink on them, and the lips was touched with red.
“Wasn’t Arnold a handsome man?” Mrs. Anhalt said. “Of course I may be biased.” She laughed.
“He was a handsome man,” I said. He looked like somebody that might have been a bank president.
“I met him at the University of Chicago. I was a student in an anthropology class.” The picture of Mr. Anhalt must have been took when he was around forty.
“I always said Mertis was the prettiest of us sisters,” Mrs. Anhalt said. The woman in the other picture had her hair cut short, like the style had been fifteen years before.
“She’s awful pretty,” I said.
“It seems impossible she’s gone,” Mrs. Anhalt said. She put the two pictures side by side on the coffee table and looked at them a long time without saying nothing. I couldn’t think of anything else to say myself. Finally Mrs. Anhalt looked up at Troy and said, “What I want is a portrait of each, about twice the size of these photographs, to hang on the wall either side of the fireplace. I want them done in color, as lifelike as you can make them. Do you think you can do that?”
“I haven’t done a lot of portraits,” Troy said. “I’ve done one of Uncle Russ and one of the instructor at the CCC camp.”
“Of course you can,” Mrs. Anhalt said. “You’ll have the photographs to go by.”
I knowed Troy wanted to paint the portraits. He loved to try new things. But he was slow to answer her. I reckon it was the way she insisted that made him hold back. “I have to go back to the CCC camp next week,” he said.
“But you can work there,” Mrs. Anhalt said. “Look at all these pictures you’ve made in the camp.” She pointed to the pile of pictures on the end of the coffee table.
“I’ll give you ten dollars each for the portraits and five dollars each for three of the paintings. That’s thirty-five dollars all together.” I almost gasped at the amount of the money.
“I’ll do my best,” Troy said.
Old Pat had been whimpering and whining on the porch, but we’d ignored her. But when she started yelping and whimpering I couldn’t ignore her no longer. I knowed from the sound of her voice she was excited and upset. She was no longer on the front porch but at the side of the house, or the back of the house.
“I’ll go see what’s the matter,” I said.
“You should keep your dog in the truck,” Mrs. Anhalt said.
“I’ll put her back in the truck,” I said. I figured Troy could finish making his deal with Mrs. Anhalt while I went to see about Old Pat.
I had to walk around the house to find Old Pat. She was standing on her hind feet with her paws on the sill of the window at the back of the garage, whimpering an
d yelping. She was so nervous she dropped down on the ground and then jumped back up on the window ledge.
“What’s wrong, old girl?” I said.
I looked through the window, but it was too dark to see anything at first. I thought there might be a dog or other animal in the garage. But as my eyes adjusted I seen lace on a pillow and a head laying on the pillow. It was the face in the photograph of Mr. Arnold Anhalt. I shivered and hollered out because I seen it was a coffin with the top open. And then I noticed a funny smell a little like some chemical from biology class. As my eyes adjusted even more I seen there was another coffin and the woman from the other photograph was laying in it. When Mrs. Anhalt had had the bodies dug up she’d not sent them up north for reburial but brought them to the garage.
The back door of the house opened, and Mrs. Anhalt seen me looking through the window and called out, “You get away from there!” I was too stunned to answer her. Troy come out of the house and asked what was wrong.
“You two can leave right now,” Mrs. Anhalt said.
Troy come over and looked through the window and gasped. Pat yelped and whimpered.
“I couldn’t bear to live without them,” Mrs. Anhalt said. “I couldn’t leave them in the cold ground.”
I took Old Pat by the collar and backed away. When I got to the corner of the garage I hurried toward the truck, and Troy followed me. But then he run back in the house to get his paintings before we drove away.
That visit with Mrs. Anhalt seemed stranger and stranger in the days afterward. It begun to seem like something that never happened, just something we’d dreamed. I wasn’t sure I believed it was real, but Troy had been there, and Old Pat had been there too. And then it was in the paper, how the man who come to work on the generator had seen the bodies in the garage and reported it to the law. There was even a picture of Mrs. Anhalt on the front page, and a reporter had interviewed her.
“I know people will think I’m awful and weird,” she told the reporter. “But I’m just an ordinary person, and I love my husband and sister so much I couldn’t be without them. It was such a comfort to keep them near me.”
The law couldn’t decide what to do with Mrs. Anhalt for a while. The paper quoted some people saying she hadn’t broke any laws. The sheriff said it was against the law to dig up a body without permission of next of kin. But Mrs. Anhalt was next of kin. Finally a judge ruled that it was unlawful to keep a body aboveground unless it was sealed in a vault or mausoleum.
The paper said Mrs. Anhalt had a mausoleum made out of bricks in her backyard there by Cabin Creek. The mausoleum was locked up, but there was a window in its wall where the morning sun could shine on the faces of her husband and sister and she could look at them at any time. People on Green River talked about it and some boys even slipped in at night with flashlights to have a look at the bodies in the caskets. But Mrs. Anhalt had rigged up a light that flashed on when somebody come near that little brick building. When the floodlight blazed on in the dark it nearly scared those boys to death. As far as I know they never did go back.
But the saddest thing about that visit to the Anhalt house was how it seemed to cool Troy’s enthusiasm for drawing and painting. He never said so, and I never did either, but after that he never seemed to work at his pictures as hard. You might have thought it would have the opposite effect. You might have thought that after Mrs. Anhalt had showed so much interest in his work and praised his talent he would have been more determined than ever to draw and paint and sell his pictures.
Maybe he got too busy working in the CCC and, after that, in his job at the cotton mill and then building barracks at Fort Bragg. Or maybe he spent his free time with Sharon instead of his sketches and canvases. But whatever it was he didn’t devote as much energy to his art anymore. He did keep drawing and painting pictures—he never give it up completely—but it was not the same.
Some might say that as Troy got older he kind of outgrowed his pleasure in art. It didn’t give him the satisfaction it had before. But I think it was two things that caused him to make fewer pictures. One was Sharon, who did take up more and more of his free time. She was jealous of any time he didn’t spend with her.
The other was that visit to the Anhalt house. There was something about Mrs. Anhalt’s oohing and aahing and choosing some pictures and passing over others, and offering him so much money and then telling us to get away, that soured Troy a little on the picture business. His hopes had been built up high, and then smashed. He felt ashamed, like he was guilty of pride and overreaching. I can’t quite explain it, but I could feel it without him telling me. That visit jolted him and made him feel ashamed, about hisself and the pictures, and he started turning away from making more pictures. Maybe it would have happened anyway and Mrs. Anhalt only made it happen sooner. We’ll never know for sure. But the fact is his mind was never on his art the way it had been before.
THE FIRST TIME I seen Sharon Peace at the dime store I thought she looked skinny and young and scared. I reckon she’d just graduated from high school three years after I did. She looked so dark skinned you might have thought she was an Indian. The manager brought her over to the candy counter and told me to break her in.
“I’m moving you to cosmetics soon as Sharon can take over here,” he said. He’d flirted with me and tried to go with me when I first come to work. But I’d brushed him off the way some of the girls couldn’t. I wasn’t afraid of him because I knowed he was married and had to do everything on the sly. Once he whispered to me, “How about a date, Miss Annie?” I pointed to the place on the counter where boxes of dates was kept. “Do you want a pound or half a pound?” I said real nice. He never asked me again.
That first day Sharon worked was a Monday and business was slow. I showed Sharon how to open boxes of candy and fill the bins, and how to scoop out and weigh a pound on the balance scales. The little weights was kept under the scales, quarter pound, half a pound, pound. Most people bought either a pound or half a pound.
Sharon said her daddy owned an apple orchard down toward Saluda, beyond the so-called Blue Ridge Divide. They also had some cows and sold a few gallons of milk a day. But the price of milk had gone so far down in the Depression you couldn’t make a profit from apples and milk. That was why she’d took the job in the dime store, that and so she could live in town. “I figured I’d see more good-looking boys in town,” she said, and giggled.
“This is the place to be seen by good-looking boys,” I said.
Maybe because Sharon had come from the country to work in town and was nervous about getting started, I kind of took her under my wing. I told her where I was staying and she asked if she could board there too.
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “The food’s nothing to brag about, but it just costs five dollars a week.”
Sharon was grateful for any advice I give her. She was the kind of girl that was eager to please everybody and I warned her about the manager and other married men that would flirt with her. But she learned her job quick enough and I moved over to the cosmetics counter, which was considered a step up from the candy counter. It was thought the prettiest girl in the store would be placed at the cosmetics counter where face cream, bath powder, perfume, nail polish, nail files, eye shade, eyeliner, lotions, conditioners, colognes, and other beauty products, including combs and hairbrushes, was sold.
I soon learned that the cosmetics counter was a much harder job than the candy counter. Almost all the customers of cosmetics was women, and women are much harder to wait on than men. Women will come and look at things for what seems like hours, opening bottles and sniffing. They’ll spray samples of perfume on their wrists till they smell up the whole store, then walk away without buying anything. Some old sisters will say cutting things to you, and some will slip a bottle of perfume or nail polish in their coat pocket. I had to learn when to be nice and when to be cool. That was the hardest part. Yankee women and Florida women in the summer would treat you like dirt under their feet. I rec
kon they seen local store clerks as nothing but servants or trash.
It was a relief to get off from work and walk back to the boardinghouse with Sharon. She looked up to me because I was older and more confident and got the attention of more boys. She felt nervous to be in town where she didn’t know many people, and she depended on me to guide her. We eat together and listened to the radio together, and sometimes went to the picture show together at the theater on Main Street that cost a dime. Sometimes we wrote postcards to our folks at home even though we’d see them on the weekends.
It was the third week when Troy was home from the CCC that I invited Sharon to come stay with me. I told her she’d have to help with work because Mama was drying apples for winter and I’d have to peel and slice apples. Sharon said that was fine because she was used to doing that kind of work at home.
Now I knowed Sharon was already struck on Troy because she’d seen him when he come after me on Saturday evening one time. But then all girls was interested in Troy, though he didn’t seem especially interested in any of them. When we come out of the store with our bags Troy was waiting there in the truck. He got out and opened the door of the cab, letting Sharon get in first to set beside him. He put our bags in the back of the truck. All the way home he asked her questions and told jokes. I’d never seen him pay that kind of attention to any girl before.
I don’t reckon anybody knows what draws a man and a woman together. It must be some kind of sixth sense, something nobody understands. I didn’t think of Sharon as especially good looking at all. She was kind of skinny and dark like she’d been out in the sun all summer. She had brown eyes and a kind of round face. Her hands looked a little too big for the size of her arms. I thought I knowed what attracted men, but now I’m not so sure. Sharon was slim and well made, that was all.
But all that weekend Troy opened doors for her and pointed out things to her. He was usually friendly and always polite, but this was different. It surprised me and pleased me to see love take hold of him and Sharon. I guess I was a little jealous too, for he paid less attention to me. You could see the love growing in their eyes when they looked at each other, when they stood close together, when Troy took her hand to help her down the steps or through a fence.
The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover Page 18
