The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

“How would you know?” Sharon said. “I’ve lost weight this summer and the ring was a little loose.”

  “It’s got to be here somewhere,” Muir said. We stood still to let the water clear so we could see the bottom. Old Pat come paddling over but Troy pointed to the bank and told her to go set. We looked down into the water but couldn’t see nothing but sand. Troy got down in the water and searched the bottom, and then come up for air. Muir done the same, and they done it again and again, but couldn’t find any sign of the ring.

  “Maybe if we just felt along the bottom with our feet we could find it,” I said.

  Sharon cried and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t think you planned to marry me anyway,” she said.

  “You know that’s not true,” Troy said, and took her in his arms. Me and Muir looked at each other and then looked away. I searched on the bottom a little more and then went back to the sandbar where Old Pat set.

  THAT EVENING AFTER supper and after the dishes was washed and dried, we set on the porch talking until it was near dark. Sharon didn’t say much. I guess it broke her heart to lose the ring and to know that Troy wasn’t going to marry her before he went overseas. I felt bad for her but knowed there was nothing I could do to cheer her up. I’d married the man I wanted to and couldn’t share her misery. She’d be left alone when Troy went to England.

  Velmer got out his boxes of firecrackers and two boxes of kitchen matches, and him and Troy and Muir carried them out into the yard. Because Old Pat was sensitive about loud noises, as most dogs are, Troy told me to hold her on the porch by the collar. She was nervous, maybe smelling gunpowder. I gripped her collar and patted her head.

  Velmer lit the first cherry bomb and throwed it into the field across the road. We watched the sparks of the fuse and then the flash, and the boom echoed off the trees on the Squirrel Hill. Old Pat jumped and whimpered. “It’s OK,” I said to her. “It’s OK.”

  Every time a firecracker flashed and boomed Old Pat jumped. Dogs hear better than people and I reckon the blasts excited and scared her. I hoped she’d get used to the noise and calm down, and I talked soothing to her.

  “Now this is a six-incher,” Troy called. We seen the flare of a match and the sparks of fuse arcing through the air. Old Pat made a leap and jumped right out of my hand. She was bigger and stronger than me.

  “Oh no,” I hollered as she bounded away. “Stop her!”

  I guess she’d seen the big firecracker in the dark and thought it was a stick Troy had throwed for her to retrieve. It may have been an automatic thing: if a stick was throwed, she was supposed to go after it.

  Muir made a grab at her but she run around him. There was just enough light to see her dash across the road and seize the big firecracker in her teeth. She’d started back across the road when there was this big flash. Sharon screamed and the boom echoed off the mountain. “Oh no,” I cried.

  I run toward the road, but Troy yelled, “Bring a flashlight.” Papa went into the house and brought a flashlight out.

  “Let’s get her out of the road,” Troy shouted. Troy and Muir carried Old Pat up the steps and into the yard and laid her in the grass.

  “She’s still breathing,” Troy said. When he shined the light on Old Pat’s head I seen blood and hair and turned away.

  “You don’t want to look,” Troy said. “Her tongue and jaw has been blowed away, and her mouth is burned.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?” I said.

  “We must put her out of her suffering,” Troy said. “You all go back on the porch.”

  Mama and me led Sharon back on the porch and Papa come out of the house carrying his .22 rifle. I figured Troy couldn’t bear to kill his dog and would let Papa or Muir or Velmer do it. But I heard him say, “Give me the rifle.” Troy ever did have a nerve of steel in an emergency.

  “Let’s go in the house,” I said to Sharon and Mama. We’d just reached the living room when we heard the shot. Sharon winced and started crying again.

  Troy didn’t come inside for a while. I reckon he got a shovel and him and Muir dug a hole at the edge of the garden and buried Old Pat while Papa held the flashlight. Troy was all sweaty when he finally did come in. He washed his hands and face in the kitchen and come back to the living room.

  Sharon must have been reaching into the pocket of her dress for a handkerchief when she gasped and cried, “Oh my God.” We all turned to her as she held up the engagement ring.

  “I forgot I put it in my pocket when I changed into my bathing suit,” she said.

  Seventeen

  In the months after we got the telegram Mama wouldn’t talk about Troy at all. I thought it was a good thing at first. While everybody else was asking about how he died and saying what a fine man he was and how handsome and talented, Mama just stayed quiet and kept her thoughts to herself. I could understand why she just wanted to go on with her work and not rub salt in the sore of her grief by reminding herself of her loss. Sharon, when she come to the house, would talk about nothing else, and Mama just let her talk.

  I got mad at Aunt Lou who come with Garland one Sunday after dinner and asked Mama when she was going to have a funeral for Troy. Her and Mama had always been outspoken to each other.

  “We can’t have a funeral until the body is returned,” I said.

  “Who says?” Lou answered. “He’s dead and the boy deserves a funeral.”

  “The army will send his body back after the war,” Papa said. “The letter they sent says he’s buried in a cemetery in Cambridge.”

  “Who knows when the war will be over, and who knows whether they will ship the casket back?” Lou said.

  “We’ll just have to wait,” I said.

  Mama had gone back into the kitchen where she was sorting silverware into the drawer under the counter.

  “After the explosion I wonder if they found anything to put in that casket,” Lou said.

  “We don’t need to talk about that,” I said to her.

  “I mean, how could they tell one body from another after such a crash,” Lou said.

  “Will you stop it!” I said, my breath short with anger.

  Lou looked at me like I’d slapped her with a dirty dishrag. “I’m just trying to help,” she said.

  But as the weeks and months went by I seen it was not necessarily a good thing that Mama wouldn’t talk at all about Troy. She’d sealed up her thoughts and her grief inside her and she wouldn’t let any of us touch it. What she felt and what she thought was pushed down far from the light of day. Whenever I brought up Troy she just turned away and went on with her work. Before that I’d always thought of her work as soothing and healing for her, but it seemed to me she used work the way a drunk used liquor or a drug addict took morphine. Work was a way of avoiding herself and her connection to what had happened.

  “You ought to rest some,” I said to her. It was spring and she’d started working in the garden, planting the first peas and lettuce, dropping taters.

  “There’ll be plenty of time to rest,” Mama said.

  “When will you take the time?” I said.

  She used to sweep the yard and scour away any chicken piles and sprinkle branch sand on the dirt once a week. Now she done it at least twice a week. She took her bucket all the way to Kimble Branch and carried back the sand. When she finished with the yard it was bright as a sheet of fresh paper. It was so perfect you hated to see chickens come back and mess it up.

  The first change in Mama I noticed was that she started looking older. She’d always been so strong and her hair had stayed light brown. But after Troy died there was streaks of gray, and by the next year her hair was almost all gray. In just a few months she looked like an old woman. She’d always stood so straight and had strong shoulders from all the work she’d done. And now her back was bent and her shoulders slumped, like she was carrying a great burden.

  And then I noticed she’d act different. She would suddenly snap at you. She had always been kind and polite, but s
ometimes she’d turn sarcastic. If I made a suggestion, she’d blurt, “Are you telling me what to do?” And sometimes she’d forget things too. She’d always been the kind of person who never forgot nothing. She could remember what frock she wore to the first day of school on Mount Olivet. She could remember what Ma Richards had said to her on Gap Creek. But one Saturday the next summer I looked in the egg basket in the dining room and seen it was nearly full.

  “Why have you not took the eggs to the store?” I said.

  “I did,” Mama said.

  “You ain’t.”

  “I reckon I know what I’ve done,” Mama said.

  When I showed her the basket full of eggs she got flustered. She’d forgot to take the eggs and butter to the store that week. That had never happened before. The money she got from the eggs and butter was her money. All her life she’d depended on that money, and she’d forgot it.

  From time to time I’d find a pot boiling on the stove that she’d forgot. That can happen to anybody of course, but it was not the kind of thing that had happened to her very often. She’d always been able to do several things at once, as a woman has to, a woman that has took care of a house and raised younguns and worked on a farm and canned things for winter all at once. The beans that got burned and the water that boiled away didn’t bother me at first. That could happen to any of us, especially if we was worried and tired.

  But one day I come into the kitchen and Mama was standing in front of the stove watching water boil in a saucepan. Fire was blazing in the stove and the kitchen windows had steamed up. The bag of grits was open on the counter and I seen she must have been fixing to make grits for supper.

  “The water’s boiling,” I said.

  Mama looked like I’d woke her up. “I hate grits,” she said. She kept standing there, and it come to me she’d forgot what she was doing.

  “Here,” I said, and picked up the bag of grits.

  “I’ll do that,” Mama said, and took the bag from me.

  Mama had always liked to be in charge of her kitchen, but she appreciated help too, especially when I helped her fix dinner or wash the dishes or mop the floor at the end of the day. But now she acted sometimes like she feared I was trying to take over the kitchen. If I started to mix batter for corn bread, she’d say, “I’ll do that” or “Will you dump these peelings in the backyard?” It was a side of her I’d never seen before. She acted like she was afraid I’d try to run her house while Papa and Velmer and Muir was away.

  One time I seen she was out of sugar, and when I got off from work at the cotton mill I stopped at the store and bought a five-pound bag of sugar. But when I reached home and put the bag on the counter Mama said, “Where did that come from?”

  “You’re out of sugar,” I said.

  “That’s not the kind of sugar I use,” Mama said.

  “It’s exactly the kind of sugar you use,” I said. “See, it’s Diamond Brand.”

  “I never used that in my life,” Mama said.

  “It’s what you always used.”

  “Are you telling me I don’t know what I use?” Mama snapped.

  “I know what you use,” I said, but seen I shouldn’t have argued with her. It just made her mad.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Mama said. “Have you completely lost your mind?” I didn’t say nothing more, for it wouldn’t have done no good.

  Mama had always been the most patient and kind person I’d ever knowed. She almost never lost her temper, and she helped everybody that she could. She give meals to hoboes and beggars and cooked dinner for the preacher. She made clothes for her children and worked like a man in the fields and done everything she could to make us healthy and comfortable. And some of the time she was still like her old self, calm and attentive. But her temper got short more quick and more often. She’d lash out all of a sudden at the least little thing. A loud noise would bother her. And sometimes if she was looking right at you she couldn’t hear what you said. She was by herself most days while I was at work. I started to worry about her, and I worried about what I could do for her.

  One Sunday when Papa was home I told him I was a little concerned about Mama, that she was acting strange.

  “She’s getting old, like all of us,” he said.

  Papa had always refused to admit that Mama got sick. He’d get mad if she was sick. I reckon it was because he depended on her so. He couldn’t stand to think that she was sick. He was irritated by the idea that she was not well, and he refused to admit there was anything wrong with her.

  And Mama was the kind of person that tried to ignore her own sickness. All her life she’d just brushed aside whatever fever or headache or cold she had. She waited on other people that was sick. She’d nursed Papa when he had pneumonia and took care of Mr. Pendergast and Ma Richards when they was dying. She helped all us younguns when we had measles and mumps, whooping cough and scarlet fever, chicken pox and pleurisy. If she got sick she said nothing and went on with her work. And most of the time she just throwed the sickness off. Ignoring it was the best medicine. That was how strong she was.

  But this time was different. She insisted on working, but I’d never seen her so weak. If she set down it took her a big effort to push herself up. And it was like she had to remember how to get up. One evening she went out to gather eggs in the henhouse while I was peeling taters for supper, and when she didn’t come in for a long time I waited and finally figured I’d better go see about her. When I got beyond the hawthorn bush I found her standing in front of the chicken house looking toward the big walnut tree. She was holding the eggs she’d collected in her apron and looking like she’d lost something.

  “You better come in,” I said. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  “I’m trying to remember where the guinea nest is,” Mama said.

  “You don’t have no guineas,” I said. “You haven’t had guinea hens for years.”

  “I have to find the nest,” Mama said. “I don’t want the eggs to rot.”

  I seen it was better not to argue with her. She’d not had guineas for ten years, since a mink got into the henhouse and killed all her guinea hens.

  “You go in and get warm,” I said. “I’ll look for the guinea eggs later.”

  Because Mama had always worked hard she slept well at night. She was never one to stay up all night reading the way her mama had done. But one night that next winter I woke around two o’clock in the morning and thought I smelled smoke. I got up and put on a housecoat and when I opened the bedroom door I seen a light in the living room. I wondered if Papa or Muir had come home in the night and started a fire. Or I thought maybe something had caught fire. I hurried to the living room and there set Mama in her rocking chair wrapped in a blanket. Wind pushed against the side of the house and rattled the windows, and a little smoke escaped from the fireplace. The wind must have been from the southeast, for that was the direction that made the fireplace smoke.

  “It’s smoky in here,” I said.

  “Can’t help it,” Mama said. “It’s a windy night.”

  “It is,” I said, and stood with my back to the fire to warm my butt.

  All wrapped up in the blanket Mama looked like some figure out of the Bible. I’d never seen her setting up in the middle of the night before, unless somebody was sick and she was nursing them.

  “Sometimes I just want to scream,” Mama said. “The headache’s busting behind my forehead and the blood is thundering behind my ears.”

  “Did you take some aspirin?”

  “And I can’t sleep. Nobody could sleep with such a headache.”

  “I’ll get you some aspirin,” I said. I went to the kitchen to take two aspirin from the bottle on the shelf and I got a glass of water. When I brought them to Mama she waved me away.

  “Aspirins won’t do no good,” she said.

  “What you need is some coffee,” I said. When I had a headache a cup of coffee was the thing that made it go away fastest.

  “Coffee
won’t help,” Mama said.

  I made her take the two aspirins and then I went to the kitchen to start a fire in the stove. It took me several minutes to get the water boiling for coffee. I hoped that by the time the coffee was made Mama would be asleep, but she wasn’t. She set by the fire looking at the flames like the fire was a moving picture. I know a fire can look like whatever you imagine it to be, a road winding way back into the mountains, a storm at sea, a crowd of people waving.

  “The church at Gap Creek was built with bootlegger money,” Mama said, like she could see the church in the flames.

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said.

  “I reckon bad money can go for a good purpose,” Mama said.

  I thought maybe she was feeling better because she was remembering the old days on Gap Creek when she was first married. But the next thing she said was, “I won’t never see that place again.”

  “Of course you will,” I said.

  Mama drunk some of the fresh coffee and I drunk a cup, and I set up with her until it was almost daylight. But the headache didn’t go away. The aspirin had no effect, and neither did the coffee. I got her to go back to bed finally and then I fixed breakfast and went to work.

  Mama didn’t go to church the next Sunday. Papa and Muir went to church, but I stayed at the house with Mama. And I fixed dinner while they was away. Mama tried to help and I let her do what she could. But she found it hard to keep her mind on whatever she started. She begun to scrape some carrots, but I found her standing with the scraper in her hand and looking out the kitchen window.

  To my surprise Papa brought the preacher back to the house for dinner. It was like Papa didn’t think Mama was sick. He acted like if he just went on as usual she wouldn’t be sick. Mama had fixed dinner a hundred times for different preachers, but now she couldn’t even fix dinner for herself. But I’d killed and fried a chicken and made rice and biscuits, gravy and peas, and opened a can of sliced peaches the same as Mama would have. But I hadn’t made a coconut cake. I didn’t have time for that.

  I got the table ready while the men talked in the living room by the fire, and I hoped everything would go like normal. When we all set down at the table the preacher said grace, but I noticed Mama didn’t even bow her head. That sent an icy splinter through my bones. When we started eating the preacher looked at Mama and said, “Mrs. Richards, I hope you’re feeling better.”