by Ninie Hammon
“You can’t go in the water with your clothes on, silly girl.”
She squirms and wiggles, and as soon as the last vestige of cloth is gone, the chubby, naked toddler takes off for the creek bank. The water’s only six or seven inches deep. Becky’s favorite thing in all the world is to sit in the creek and splash. But the water’s cold, and she eases her way in, shivering all over in a comical way that makes Grayson laugh again.
He removes his boots, the special cowboy boots Uncle Jim had given him for Christmas. They’re his prize possession, and he sets them side by side on the creek bank, then rolls up the legs of his too-long pants—Carter hand-me-downs—and tiptoes into the chilly water.
“C’mon, Becky. It’s not that cold,” he says.
She moves a little deeper, into maybe two inches of water.
Grayson leans over and splashes water onto her bare belly. She squeals and runs back up on shore.
“I’m sorry, I won’t do that again. I promise.”
But Becky stays resolutely on the shore until Grayson wades out and turns away from the creek to the task at hand. Before he went in for lunch he’d arranged the rugs over the long, sturdy sycamore tree limb that sticks out like a clothesline about five feet off the ground. Four rag rugs—one from the parlor and one from each of the small bedrooms—are draped over the limb.
Grayson picks up the broom he’d tossed aside when he made his dashing tackle for Becky and begins to pound on the first rug. Dust flies up in a haze around it, and Grayson immediately begins to sneeze. He thinks, for probably the ten thousandth time, that Pa ought to make Carter beat the rugs and let him milk the cow—dust didn’t make Carter sneeze. But it was about rank. The grunt job went to the youngest; that was the way of things.
He hears a small splash, and Becky squeals. He turns and sees that she is now sitting in the water, patting it with her hands.
Back to the pounding.
Whap.
Whap.
Whap.
The broom knocks dust into the air, and Grayson breaks a sweat. That’s when he starts to sing. “Hear that loo-nesome whippoorwill…”
He likes Hank Williams, listens to him on the big radio in Bennett’s Five and Dime and at Uncle Jim’s house. Uncle Jim has three radios, and when Grayson and Carter visit—which isn’t often because Pa says his brother isn’t a good influence on the boys—he lets them listen to the Grand Ole Opry.
Becky giggles and splashes.
Grayson finishes the fourth rug and goes around to the other side of the rugs and starts again on the first one.
“He sounds too blue to cry…” Grayson takes up the song where he left off.
His voice isn’t bad, he thinks. Maybe he could be a singer someday like Hank Williams. Pa wouldn’t likely let him do that, though. Those singer folks didn’t go to church or even say grace before meals, least that’s what Carter says.
“The midnight train is whii-nin’ low. I’m so loo-nesome I could cry.”
He peeks around the corner of the rug at Becky. Sitting in the creek, she pats the water and giggles when it splashes in her face.
Then he…forgets about her.
At least, that’s what his father says he did. Later, his father yells at him that he was so busy daydreaming, singing those awful, sinful songs and the like that he forgot about his baby sister in the creek.
Grayson honestly doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what happened. He is beating the rugs, listening to Becky splash, beating the rugs, singing his song, beating the rugs and…
He stops to wipe his brow. And it’s quiet.
Too quiet.
He steps out from behind the last rug—he’d worked his way all the way to the end—and looks at the creek.
Becky is lying on her back, her long blond hair flowing out around her head like a yellow fan. The water is just deep enough that it is flowing over her face. She is not moving.
“Becky!”
He screams. He runs to her, but he can’t seem to move fast. It’s like nothing will happen fast enough, like the twenty feet between him and the creek has stretched out into a mile.
He yanks the little girl up out of the water, screaming her name, but she is as limp as a broken doll. He shakes her, yells at her to wake up, to open her eyes, to look at him. He is crying now, sobbing her name, begging her, pleading with her to wake up and talk to him.
But she is silent. And cold. As cold as the water.
It is a long time before he turns with her cold, limp body and starts back with it toward the house. He walks right past the hickory tree. He hears the bees buzz as if from a great distance. Some of them sting him. He feels it, but it doesn’t hurt. He just keeps walking.
It seemed to take forever to get from the rugs to the creek. It takes only seconds to get from the creek to the house. His mother must have seen him coming because she screams from inside the house and runs out the back door wailing, her arms out. She grabs Becky out of his grasp and sinks to the ground sobbing.
His father comes running from the side yard where he’d been chopping firewood. Carter appears from somewhere. His parents are yelling and crying and…and Grayson stands there with his arms at his sides, limp, with such a huge hole in his chest that he doesn’t even feel connected to his bottom half, can almost feel the wind blowing through where he has been ripped open, cut apart.
Words don’t make any sense to him, but later, he recalls some of them. Doesn’t matter if he remembers because he doesn’t have to. He will hear the same ones over and over again for the next seven years, while his father’s face grows more gaunt, his eyes get wilder, his hair gets grayer, and the smell of liquor appears on his breath almost every night.
He will hear his father say—mostly on those evenings when the smell is strongest—that he’d trusted his baby girl to her older brother. He’d trusted Grayson to take care of her.
“How could you do it?” his father screams at him that July afternoon when the sun is hot and the blue jays are cawing in the trees. “How could you kill your own baby sister?”
The words echoed in Grayson’s brain, clanging and banging like a wrecking ball slamming into the stone of his heart, knocking out hunks of it that flew through the air in slow motion.
The pain of remembering cored in like a dentist’s drill. Grayson squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, trying to shake the images loose. But they’d been welded to his consciousness and nothing short of his own death could dislodge them.
Gradually, he relaxed as the sway of the bus soothed him, drifted into a troubled sleep where shadowy figures leaped up from behind clumps of grass, fallen tree trunks and bushes—like targets in a penny arcade. The figures weren’t gooks, though. They were Grayson’s father.
“Hey!”
Grayson felt a large hand grip his shoulder and shake it.
“Hey, wake up!”
He was awake. But he wasn’t. Not if awake meant fully in the here-and-now, responding to reality. By that definition, he was somewhere on the near side of sleep, a netherworld where then and now melded into a place that was neither, a landscape he knew well. He opened his eyes. Sunshine so fierce and bright it peeled back his corneas forced him to squeeze them instantly shut again. He squinted through a forest of lashes at the big black man who’d glared at Grayson’s seatmate when he’d tried to sit beside him.
“You makin’ all kinda noise, gruntin’ and moaning,” the man said. “You gotta shut up, quit disturbing the rest of the folks.”
“Sorry,” Grayson mumbled and opened his eyes to look full into the black man’s face. He couldn’t read the look the man’d given him before, but he could read this one.
The two men faced each other for a moment without speaking.
“How long you been back?” the black man asked.
“About…” Grayson looked at his wrist but there was no watch on it. “What’s today?”
“You gonna be like this for a while. Took me six months. And even now, sometimes…”
>
“When did—?”
“I don’t talk about it.” The black man cut him off. “And you’d best shut up about it yo’self. Found out the hard way that don’t nobody want to hear the truth of it.” He leaned a little closer. “You’d be doing yourself a huge favor if you was to decide right here and now that you ain’t never gonna tell a soul what you seen over there.”
The black man straightened and strode forward to his seat. Didn’t look back, merely picked up his newspaper and started reading.
* * *
Even after all these years, it still felt odd to Carter not to go to church on Sunday morning. His childhood didn’t contain a single memory of missing church. Not Sunday morning. Not Sunday night. Not Wednesday evening prayer meeting.
He and Grayson had sat with their mother on the front row. Their shoes polished, their shirts and pants starched and pressed. Ma had always smelled of Blue Waltz perfume. Pa had gotten her a bottle—it was heart-shaped—once on a trip to Charleston to visit his brother. It was the only perfume she owned so it was reserved for Sunday mornings. A big bottle of perfume could last years if you only dabbed on one drip a week.
He had once mouthed off to his mother that he’d sat through hundreds of sermons and couldn’t recall the content of more than half a dozen of them so what was the point in going every Sunday? His mother had responded that she’d fixed dinner for him and the rest of the family every evening for his entire life—how many of those meals could he remember?
“Your daddy feeds his flock every week. Some meals is more memorable than others, I’ll grant. But every one of them meals was fixed for hungry people, folks who needed food, and whether they was particularly memorable or not, they fed folks and kept them going for another week, and that’s what matters.”
Of course, later, when his father started to lose it, his sermons became more and more memorable—for the histrionics, the theater, the terror, not for the content. In fact, the best Carter could remember, there had been little content of any kind in the last years, certainly not in the final months. People hollering and falling down, foaming at the mouth, shaking like they were having seizures. People shouting out in languages that Pa said were speaking in tongues, but any fool could tell were only people babbling out in nonsense syllables while other equally addled people deigned to translate the babbled nonsense into English nonsense.
In the end, it was all craziness. Craziness and snakes, of course.
Carter knew his mother didn’t share his relief on Sunday mornings. He knew that for her, every Sunday morning when she opened her eyes and was too sick to get out of bed and go to church, she felt anything but relief. But his mother’s faith was real. Maybe his father’s had been, too, early on, before Becky’s death.
Carter sat up carefully in the early morning light. Then stood and stretched. He couldn’t stifle a sigh. Later today, he’d have to go back to Charleston, and every time he came here, it was harder to leave.
“You look like a man who could use a cup of coffee.”
Carter hadn’t heard Piper come into the room from the kitchen, and he jumped.
“I didn’t mean to startle…” she spoke softly. “I actually believe we’re the only ones up. Sadie never sleeps this late. And your mother hardly sleeps at all.”
He crossed the room to her, and when she turned back toward the kitchen he reached out and took her arm. He hadn’t meant to do it, didn’t plan the action in advance. His hand and arm had acted independently of his brain. He turned her slowly around to face him.
“Piper…” He found he had nothing to say. The moment drew out. His heart began to knock so hard his vision blurred, and he could feel each beat in the big artery in his neck. She stood looking up at him with eyes the color of a Hershey bar. He began to lean toward her and she toward him. Did she speak his name? He wasn’t sure, with his pulse thundering in his ears.
“Good morning, Mr. Carter,” Maggie said, and Carter felt his emotions slam into a brick wall at a dead run. “You’re up early. Is it church you’re planning on going to?”
The little girl stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the parlor. She had come in from the back porch so quiet she could have sneaked dawn past a rooster. The spring on the screen door that always squealed like a gut-shot yak hadn’t made a sound. At least, he hadn’t heard it through the pounding of his heart in his ears.
Carter forced himself not to step guiltily away from Piper. He merely looked at the child and said, “No, actually, I wasn’t planning on going to church this morning. Were you? Does your family go to church on Sundays?”
“I hear Sadie,” she said.
He and Piper both looked toward Sadie’s bedroom door, where the child had slept in her big-girl bed for the first time last night. Neither of them had heard—
Sadie cried then, a sleepy, whiney mewl. But Carter would have sworn she hadn’t made a peep until—
“I’ll get her,” Maggie said, and scampered off toward the bedroom before Piper had a chance to move.
Piper took a step away from him then, moved easily out of his grasp.
“Like I said yesterday,” she said. “My own personal nanny.”
Chapter 13
Grayson intended to get off the bus in the Morgantown Greyhound station and call Carter, though he no longer had much hope of an answer. He’d tried without success after breakfast in the bus terminal in Pittsburgh more than three hours ago. Obviously, Carter was out of town, too. Swell.
But when Grayson stepped off the bus into West Virginia air, breathed it in, he found himself striding away from the station with his duffel over his shoulder, just walking, absorbing with all his senses the achingly beautiful mountains. He stopped at a corner and shaded his eyes from the sun, which was balanced precariously on the mountaintop before it tumbled down the western side. The jungle had seemed a hideous, monochromatic wall of green, but the forested hillsides here were dappled, resplendent in varied green hues and shades, granting them texture and a depth that blended now with the dark velvet shadows of approaching evening. Grayson stood and stared, his eyes drinking in his world in such great heaving gulps that he feared he might choke.
Then he shifted his duffel bag on his back, felt the weight of it and exhaustion settled with a groan into his bones. The West-Virginia-air exhilaration grayed out, and all he wanted was to sit down. He looked around, disoriented, hoping he hadn’t walked too far from the station.
“You lost, soldier?”
He turned to see two men in a pickup truck. Two mountaineers. Ball caps pushed back on their heads, both had plugs of Skoal tucked under their lower lips. One had a full beard that had caught a considerable amount of snuff drool. The driver was clean-shaven; his face round, fat and jovial. He was the one who’d spoken.
“No, I ain’t lost,” Grayson said. Ain’t lost? Where did that come from? His father’d never allowed West Virginia dialect from either of his sons. “I just got off a bus from Pittsburgh, and I was…looking around. It sure feels good to be…home.”
His voice had actually wavered a little. He hadn’t realized how much he meant it until he heard the word come out his mouth. In fact, he hadn’t even dared to admit he was home until now, this very minute. He wasn’t waiting to go out on some patrol he might not come back from. He was on a street corner in Morgantown, West Virginia, and for him the war was over.
He knew his eyes were wet and hoped the men in the pickup truck couldn’t see it. “I guess I am a little lost. Which way’s the bus station?”
“You need a lift?” the bearded man asked.
“Sure,” Grayson said. The sudden exhaustion had left his legs shaky. If it was more than a block or two back to the station, he’d have a hard time making it under his own steam. And since he couldn’t reach Carter or anybody else until morning, a bench in the station would be his bed for the night.
“Lemme get that poke for you,” said the bearded man. He hopped out of the truck, hurried around it and started to heft Gra
yson’s duffel bag into the back of the pickup truck. “I’ll ride back here with it, give you more room up front.”
“You don’t have to go to any trouble for me.”
The man looked him square in the face.
“You been fighting for the United States of America and if’n I can give up my seat so you can set down comfortable, then I’m proud to do it.”
Grayson’s heart swelled in his chest so unexpectedly, he didn’t speak because he didn’t trust his voice. That girl in the San Francisco airport with her hippie friends and her peace cross and love beads—she didn’t speak for all of America.
He slid into the seat beside the cheery driver.
“Where you going, soldier?” he asked, as he ground the gears and shoved the lever into first.
“Back to the station to spend the night. I can’t reach anybody to come get me until the post office in Sadlerton opens on—”
“Sadlerton!” He leaned his head out the window and called to his friend perched on Grayson’s duffel in the back of the truck. “This feller’s from Sadler Hollow!” He turned back to Grayson. “This here’s your lucky day, soldier. We’re from Cedar Ridge. Come down here yesterday to look at buying a boar, but it was puny, had rheumy-looking eyes. We’re on our way back home, be going in the direction of Sadlerton. We’ll carry you right up to your front door.”
“I can’t ask you to do that. It’d be miles out of your way. I’ll just sleep in—”
“You’ll do no such of a thing!” The big man pointed a beefy finger at Grayson’s wedding ring. “I s’pect you ain’t seen the missus in a right smart while. You can sleep in your own bed tonight if’n we take you.”
Grayson certainly couldn’t argue that logic. He smiled.
“I do thank you kindly, Mr.…”
“I’m Lester Haggerty,” the man said and favored Grayson with a nearly toothless grin. He gestured toward the back of the truck. “That there’s Tuggs McIntosh.”
“Grayson Addington,” Grayson said. “But my friends call me Gray.”
