The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  We’d been so worried about Mama we’d paid little attention to the news in the last few weeks. I’d seen in the paper the headlines about the big bombs exploding in Japan, and people had talked about a new Atomic Age and how the whole world might be blowed up. But I’d hardly noticed the talk. All I could think about was Mama and wondering what we could do for her.

  When the funeral was finally over and we walked out of the church into the hazy heat, a whole string of cars come up the road with their lights on, horns beeping and blaring. There was even a Model A making its oogah-oogah sound. Some of the cars when they seen us stopped honking, but others just kept blowing their horns. I reckon people was beside theirselves with the news.

  When we got into the limousine Sharon said, “How dare those people make such a fuss? They’re just a bunch of hoojers.”

  “It’s the end of the war,” I said.

  “That’s what it must be,” Muir said. He took my hand.

  “How do you know?” Sharon said.

  “What else could it be?” I said.

  As we drove up the road to the cemetery we met cars blasting their horns one after another. One had a big sign on the side that said, THE WAR IS OVER. OUR BOYS ARE COMING HOME. Most stopped blowing their horns when they seen us. But some didn’t.

  “They should be ashamed,” Sharon said. “They have no consideration.”

  “They’re so thrilled they’re not thinking,” Muir said.

  “They’re making all this racket, knowing Troy won’t be coming home. He’ll never come home,” Sharon said.

  “They’re not thinking about that,” Muir said.

  “They ought to have some decency,” Sharon said.

  For once I agreed with Sharon. I knowed Troy’s death was the furthest thing from these people’s minds. They didn’t intend to hurt us. But even so, it was thoughtless. I resented their mindless enthusiasm and serenading. I was angry in spite of myself.

  After we drove around the hill and to the top of the cemetery knoll and got out of the limousine and walked to the tent and set down, we heard the cotton-mill whistle blow again and again. Guns went off and there was a boom like a stick of dynamite had been lit. Truck horns on the highway and car horns all up and down the valley echoed off the ridges. Church bells rung at Mountain Valley and Cedar Springs and Mount Olivet. There was such a racket you couldn’t hardly hear the preacher’s prayer beside the grave. I kept thinking how the dirt piled there beside the grave was almost the same color of red as Troy’s hair.

  Nineteen

  After the war was over and the world was at peace, everybody expected things to be better if not perfect. After the long Depression and the years of war it just seemed things had to get better. The boys was coming home and there was now electricity all up and down the valley and even on Mount Olivet and Mountain Valley. The paper said there was a new age beginning, the Atomic Age. There would be big rockets, and people might go to the moon. To hear the newspaper tell it, there was to be a new day of peace and prosperity.

  Except what really happened was that when the war ended a lot of people got laid off from their jobs. All the work for the war effort was over, and with the soldiers coming back there wasn’t near enough jobs to go around. Most soldiers had been too young to look for work before they went into the service, but now they needed jobs. There was no more work for Papa and Muir at Fort Bragg, and Velmer had quit his job as a barber at Fort Jackson before he was laid off. Papa still had the little checks from Troy’s insurance coming every month, but that was all. Both Muir and Velmer went back to farming in the summer of 1946, because that was all they could find to do.

  And just when we thought the world was at peace you started hearing talk about the Russians. People said the Russians had gobbled up half of Europe and wouldn’t let go. They made everybody there become a communist and killed them that wouldn’t. The newspaper was full of stories about communists taking over everywhere, in places I never heard of, like Bulgaria and Albania. The newspaper warned that there was communists in this country, infiltrating government and almost every organization. You never could know what was legitimate and what was a communist front. People said there was Russian spies everywhere, in the government, in the army, even in schools all over the country. Spies was stealing the government secrets and giving them to the Russians. Papa said the Russians was worse than the Germans.

  One day this letter from the government come to Papa. It said if he filled out the enclosed form and sent it back, Troy’s body would be brought from England and buried wherever he chose in the United States. One big ship would carry all the coffins dug up from the cemeteries over there and bring them home at no cost to the families. It occurred to me when I read the letter that bringing the casket here and having a funeral and burying Troy beside Mama might just make us all sadder. But it was what we’d promised Mama we’d do. And it was what Papa wanted too. So I helped him fill out the form and we mailed it in.

  Now you never know how things will turn out. What you predict will almost never happen. I guess the world likes to surprise you. Like I said, after the war was over almost nobody could find work. I stayed on at the cotton mill and Muir preached at a church when he was invited. And when he had some free time he started working on the church on the mountain again. Weeds had growed up around the place, and the road up the mountain had washed out in several places. He took a shovel up there and smoothed out the road, and he cut the weeds with his mowing blade. One pane at a time he replaced windows that had been broke by storms or kids throwing rocks. Papa helped him put new shingles on the roof.

  I guess people thought it was strange that Muir, now that he was older, returned to his dream of finishing the church on the mountain. With Ginny gone nobody supported him except Papa. I thought it was strange myself, but I didn’t say nothing. Because he didn’t have a job and didn’t have a regular church to preach in, he needed something to keep him going. I could see that, and I reckon Papa could too.

  Suddenly in the spring of 1947 Preacher Rice had a heart attack. He didn’t die, but he was too weak to preach anymore. Muir was asked to fill in for a week or two, and I can’t tell you how pleased he was to be invited by his own neighbors. There was grumbling, of course, as there always is. People said he’d left the church and tried to build a rival church on top of the mountain. He hadn’t meant for it to be a rival church, but that’s what people said. And some people remembered how Muir’s mama and grandpa had gone to the Pentecostal revivals way back yonder before he was born, and they still held that against him.

  I was happy for Muir, for even if it was just for one or two or three weeks he’d get to offer sermons here to his own people. He’d been traveling around to speak and this would be a kind of homecoming for him. This was the place where he was embarrassed when he first tried to preach. I knowed it made him nervous to think of speaking there again. It made me nervous too.

  Muir got out his best herringbone gray suit and polished his black shoes. He had a tie of dark ruby red. He put oil on his black hair so it shined. All dressed up he looked like a lawyer or a banker.

  I expected the worst, because so many bad things had happened to him on Green River. It was a place where things just seemed to go wrong. Nothing that had to do with the church ever seemed to work out. I was so nervous that morning as I set in the choir where Mama had always set I was wet under my arms. I was almost afraid to look around, for I knowed people was just waiting for Muir to make a fool of hisself. Christian people can be the meanest people there is, and nobody can gossip and quarrel like members of a Baptist church.

  Imagine how surprised I was when Muir stood up behind the pulpit and acted so calm. He acted like he’d done this every Sunday all his life. I hadn’t heard him preach in a long time, for mostly he’d preached at some distance from home. He was older now, and his work away from home during the war had matured him, and maybe marriage had matured him too. I liked to think that. He was my husband, and these days I seen him ever
y day, but even so, I was surprised at how natural he acted. And it was partly acting, for I was certain he was nervous, though he didn’t show it. Even his voice was soothing.

  “We have gone through the trials of a great war,” Muir said. “And we’ve lost many loved ones. But for those of us who’ve survived, who are here now, the Lord has given us a new chance.”

  Muir seemed so strong and quiet and sure of hisself the air in the church was soothing. There had been so much hardness, such bitterness in that church, but Muir’s voice seemed to ease the tension. It was a voice of conciliation and openness. I was not surprised when he opened the Bible and read from Ecclesiastes 3: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”

  Muir talked like a sermon was natural as rain falling on an April morning or the leaves turning yellow in the fall. Even though he was my husband he didn’t seem hardly like the nervous and excited man I’d knowed and lived with. He talked like the right words just come to him without effort. He was speaking his thoughts. It was not the way he talked at home. It was a different voice and a different manner. As I watched him I thought how he was like an actor, a good actor, playing the role of a preacher. Through practice, years of thought and study and practice, he’d learned the role. That was thrilling to me, for I’d always loved acting. I seen that we are always learning our roles, rehearsing our roles, and playing a part. It was strangely comforting to think that as I watched Muir be a preacher in front of the whole community, in the church where he’d embarrassed hisself many years before.

  In spite of some people complaining, mostly women that hadn’t liked Ginny, the deacons invited Muir to preach again another Sunday and then another. They give him fifteen dollars every time he preached. It was the most money we’d made in a long time. During the weekdays Muir worked in the fields, and on Saturdays he worked on the church on the top of the mountain, and on Sunday he preached at the church at the bottom of the mountain.

  One Monday night just after supper a car drove up to the house. Curtis Stepp that was chairman of the board of deacons and three other deacons got out. “Is Muir here?” Curtis asked. Muir was out at the barn. I told them to go set by the fire and I’d get him. It passed through my mind that they’d come to tell Muir he couldn’t preach no more at the church. I knowed Curtis had never liked Ginny and had voted to throw her out of the church when she attended the Pentecostal services many years ago.

  Muir was drawing water for the horse, and he was as surprised as me when I told him the deacons had come to the house. As soon as we got back to the house I told the deacons to set down and I’d make some fresh coffee.

  “This won’t take long,” Curtis said. Then he turned to Muir. “Would you be interested in being the pastor of the church?” he said.

  “If people want me to be pastor that will be fine,” Muir said. “If people don’t want me to be pastor that will be fine too. But as far as I know Preacher Rice is still the pastor.” Muir didn’t sound as sure of hisself at home as he did in the pulpit. He’d not learned to play the role of preacher out of the pulpit yet.

  “Preacher Rice has resigned. His health will not permit him to pastor a church anymore,” Doug Williams said.

  “I’ll serve the community as best I can,” Muir said.

  “Then we invite you to be our next pastor,” Curtis said.

  “Won’t the whole congregation have to vote?” Muir said.

  “They will follow our recommendation,” Curtis said.

  “Then I will humbly accept,” Muir said.

  I couldn’t hardly believe what I was hearing. Muir becoming the pastor was the last thing I expected. Given all the troubles with the church building on the mountain and his quarrels with Preacher Liner a few years ago, it didn’t seem possible. It was strange that in a few short years things could change around so much. I knowed that Papa as a deacon would have supported Muir, but I also knowed that Papa would have had to excuse hisself when they voted on his son-in-law. When the deacons left I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or cry. But there was a smile of deep satisfaction on Muir’s face.

  I’D HEARD THAT Sharon had got married and I’d seen her once up town with her husband. Sharon had not told me she was getting married. She just quit coming to the house or sending cards at Christmas and Easter the way she had done. She had every right to get married. It’d been five years since Troy had died, which was more than a decent amount of time. The war was over. And besides that, she’d never even been married to Troy. She was not exactly a war widow, much as she’d acted like one.

  She had no reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed about marrying someone else. Except she obviously did feel ashamed, the way she broke off from us and never did tell us. I thought about it a lot and decided the reason she felt bad was maybe because she’d overacted a little when Troy died. Troy’s death was so sad it just made Mama set in the corner and brood and say almost nothing for days. But Sharon had acted like it was the end of the world for her. She’d acted like there was no meaning in anything for her now that Troy was gone. She acted like she could never be reconciled or happy again, and nobody could take Troy’s place. And yet here she was married to somebody else. What must have embarrassed her was the way she herself had done.

  I got a ride to town with Velmer in the ugly army surplus truck he’d bought for almost nothing. He always parked in the lot behind the feed store where you still sometimes seen a horse and wagon or a mule and wagon parked in the years right after the war. The lot was only a block from the old A&P store on South Main right across the street from the courthouse. But to get to the store from the parking lot you had to cross the side street at a place called Greasy Corner where all these old hoojers in overalls hung out talking and spitting tobacco juice and laughing at dirty stories. When a woman walked by, these unwashed and unshaved geezers from skid row and back in the hills, some of them red eyed from liquor, would watch her like she didn’t have a stitch of clothes on. It always scared me a little to walk by there.

  I’d got out of earshot of them old lechers and almost to the A&P store when I seen this neat-looking man in a tan jacket and brown hat. He was not a tall man, but he walked like somebody proud and determined. The woman beside him wearing a light blue dress and a dark blue jacket looked familiar, and I recognized with a start it was Sharon.

  When I spoke to her she turned around and when she seen me she blushed so that even though her skin was dark you could see the flush. “How have you been?” I said.

  “This, this is Albert,” she said.

  “How do you do?” I said.

  “This is Annie Richards, no I mean Powell.” The man tipped his hat to me, and then it must have occurred to him who I was, for he backed away, pulling at Sharon’s hand. But when he seen she was going to stay and talk to me he hurried on up the street, like he was afraid I had some catching disease or he was very late for an appointment. Sharon watched him go and then turned back to me.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said. “We heard you was married.”

  Sharon stepped closer to me and said, “Albert don’t like for me to mention Troy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not sure exactly what I meant. I looked her in the eyes, trying to be as friendly as I could.

  “He gets mad if anybody mentions Troy,” Sharon said. “He throwed away the boxes of arrowheads you give me. He took the boxes and flung them in the creek.”

  I shook my head because I didn’t want to say nothing critical about her husband.

  “Albert said he could compete with a living man,” Sharon said. “But he couldn’t compete with a dead man.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it. I could see she’d lost weight. It was pretty clear her marriage had not been a happy one. I tried to think what to say to her.

  “We’re bringing Troy’s body home,” I said. “Papa signed the papers. When the casket co
mes we’ll have a funeral.”

  “Where will the funeral be?”

  “At the Green River Church where he was a member. Muir will preach the funeral. He’s the new pastor there. Can you believe it?”

  “I’ll try to come, if you can let me know.”

  “There will be an announcement in the paper.”

  It made me sad just to watch her as she walked on up the street to catch up with Albert. I tried to think of what I could do to help her but couldn’t think of a single thing.

  WHEN TROY’S COFFIN arrived finally at the funeral home in town Papa got a letter asking when he wanted to schedule the service and saying there’d be no cost for the funeral. It was the undertaker’s gift to the family of a soldier who’d been lost. I drove to town with Papa and we set the funeral for the following Sunday. The funeral parlor director suggested that we have a visitation hour just for family at the funeral parlor the day before the service.

  “It often helps families at this sad time to spend an hour with the loved one the day before the funeral,” he said. That seemed thoughtful of him and we agreed.

  So on Saturday evening we all met at the funeral home, Papa and Velmer, me and Muir, Effie and Alvin, Lou and Garland, and they brought Carolyn, Mama’s younger sister that had never got married. Her other unmarried sister, Rosie, had the flu and couldn’t come.

  It was an awful feeling, going into the fine room with carpets and lamps and this gray casket with a flag spread over it. It was hard to think Troy, who we hadn’t seen in six years, was laying in that box, and it has hard not to think he was there. Papa had never looked so old as he did when he walked up and put a hand on that casket. He trembled a little and I nudged Muir to stand close to him in case he started to fall.

  “Hank, are you going to open it?” Carolyn said.

  I turned to look at her. I couldn’t hardly believe my ears. When Carolyn was young she was a terrible flirt. She had busted up couples that was about to get married and would then drop the boy and move on to another that was engaged. Mama said she done it just to prove she could. Now that she was old she mostly liked to gossip and to stick her nose in other people’s business.