Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  He pushed himself upright, planted his elbows, rested his chin in his hands and went on thinking about things left outside.

  Snakes found cracks in rocks and walls where they slept through the winter. The remaining birds fluffed up their feathers and sheltered under roof eaves. Cattle and horses and dogs and cats had their barns; mules had at least a shelter of brush piled over a low-hanging limb. Deer had their hidden brakes, rabbits their secret holes under fallen trees. Even the panthers had their winter lairs.

  And that left people.

  He lifted his head and asked: “You reckon there’s people out there without a place to stay tonight?”

  “For sure there is. Those who don’t belong anywhere.”

  He could feel them. People in their thousands crowding around the outside walls while he and his sisters sat safe and warm within the wooden cover, while chicken cooked in a big pot and biscuits waited in the oven.

  I am here, Charles thought very slowly, I belong here and that is important. Just as he was falling asleep, he wondered why that should be so.

  The last leaves fell, suddenly, all at once, filling gutters and drainage ditches. Mr. Varnado raked them into piles and set them afire, and his sister complained that the soot spoiled her drying wash.

  Charles climbed to the roof and found the town newly visible without its covering of leaves—water tower, clock tower, and four church spires. He saw the peaked red roof of the railroad passenger terminal. Through the winter-cleared air he heard the high-pitched clicking of the big freight trains as they sped along the tracks past town.

  He went to Sunday school. He sang in the choir at the Children’s Christmas Program. He won the angel-drawing contest. His prize was a grape-flavored jawbreaker. He kept it in his pocket, saving it carefully. After a few days the lint and dust on it was so thick that he had to spit out the first few mouthfuls of sweetness.

  The Saturday before Christmas Mattie and Charles rode to town on the new electric trolley. (Just Charles and Mattie. Nancy had a cold and stayed home with Mr. Varnado’s sister, Aunt Anna.) As they rattled along the streets, bells clanging at each and every corner, Mattie pointed out the sights: the waterworks, the gasworks, Tilton’s Lumberyard, McClellan’s Department Store, County National Bank, the Ford Motor showroom, the Elite Café, the General Jackson Hotel, the Armory, the Winchester Arms Hotel, Delmonico’s Restaurant, the Methodist church, the Presbyterian church, the First Baptist church, all in a row.

  They got off at the town square—where a bronze soldier waved his sword over a pyramid of cannonballs—to tour the county courthouse. Boards creaked noisily under their feet as they went from floor to floor staring at portraits of judges and governors and a long gold-framed list of men who had died in the Civil War.

  Were these in the cemetery where they had picked the crab apples? “Maybe,” his sister said, “but maybe not. Sometimes they just bury soldiers where they die, wherever it is.”

  So, he thought, the dead were scattered all across the earth, not just in the places they’d lived. They were sprinkled like seed puffs blown in the wind. Only, he corrected himself, seed puffs carried life.

  At dusk electric lights came on in the square, clusters of five bulbs suspended from black iron poles, like giant grapes. “It is just beautiful,” Mattie said. “I love to watch them come on.”

  “You’ve seen it before?” Charles’s breath made Indian smoke signals in the air.

  “Of course I have.” His sister laughed. “Mr. Varnado and I ride down almost every month just to see them.” She scrubbed at her red nose. “Now it’s time to go. We’ll take a different streetcar this time.”

  Sparks from the trolley’s overhead power line showered like fireworks as they rode past redbrick buildings, stores, and warehouses, all of them glittering with electric lights inside. They crossed a weedy trash-littered river, faintly yellow tinged. “Would you believe,” his sister said, “in the spring the water here rises almost to the bridge. Look, Charles, the railroad yards.”

  He stared at a maze of tracks, twisting in and out of each other, writhing without ever moving, the color of water snakes. Engines wrapped in clouds of steam, thudding and whistling. Lines of freight cars, rolling, coupling, crashing. One huge building, glowing with orange light. “The roundhouse,” his sister said. “They repair the engines in there. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Yes, he thought, yes he had. In a Sunday-school book, a picture of hell.

  His sister nudged his shoulder. “Lean out and have a good look. That freight’s going to cross right in front of us.”

  Black-and-white-striped gates, tipped with lanterns, dropped down to block the road. The train moved slowly across, big driver wheels turning ponderously, thudding the air with blows of steam. His face grew wet, then icy cold. He drew back, pulled up his collar, wiped his face on it.

  Now his sister was leaning out to wave to the engineer; her red mittens flashed back and forth in the light. (Like she was washing a window, Charles thought.) The engineer smiled and raised his cap to her, half bowing. “That is a friend of Mr. Varnado’s,” she said. She settled back in her seat, comfortable on the hard wood.

  Awed, Charles thought: How wonderful that must be, to have people wave to you in the easy way of old friends.

  The signalman swung aboard. The brakeman came to stand in the door of the caboose. The train became a set of fading lights, and their trolley creaked and swayed into motion. Up a small hill, past a big park, and down a wide street with big houses on each side. At each corner electric lights threw down a yellow glow.

  His sister nodded with satisfaction. “There’ll be lights on all the streets in a few years, that’s what the newspaper said.”

  The trolley was moving faster now; there were no stops here; no one to get on or off. The houses all seemed to be painted white. They all seemed to have iron fences, black spears pointing straight up at the night sky. Glass ovals glittered in every front door, and all the rooms were bright with electric light. Motorcars turned into gravelled drives.

  “There are lots of cars here,” Charles said.

  “Mr. Varnado says that someday we will have a car. Look there, that is where Mrs. Harrison lives.”

  Charles had only a confused impression of towers and porches and frost-burned lawns where iron stags stood guard, antlers defiant against the dark.

  “I’ve been inside there,” his sister said proudly. “Just last week she sent and asked me to come talk to her.” She smoothed her skirts across her knees. “She ordered all the butter I can make and three white loaves twice a week. If I do any preserving, she will take some of that too, she especially wants fig. And she has promised to tell all her friends about me.”

  There was a firm crisp resonant tone to her voice, one that wasn’t usually there. The sound of money, Charles thought, that’s what that is.

  All at once Charles was very tired of seeing and thinking unfamiliar things. He closed his eyes.

  “Don’t go to sleep now. This here is our stop.”

  He stumbled off the trolley into overwhelming darkness. “Mattie,” he shouted.

  Close by her voice said, “Whatever’s the matter with you?”

  Then he saw that the night wasn’t all dark, that there was a dim glow from the houses all around him, cracks of light through drawn curtains.

  “Come on now.” She walked briskly down the street, bent forward, hands folded under arms for warmth, heels thudding and skirts swishing. A dog barked, sound muffled by house walls. Stars glittered through bare branches overhead. On each side, slate-lined drainage ditches reflected the small light, dull and flat and frozen.

  The moon, just beginning to come up, shone on the windows of their house, blind as old men’s eyes. In the kitchen Nancy slept in the rocking chair, wrapped in a quilt. Aunt Anna dozed, head down on the kitchen table, her breath whistling and gurgling softly. In the silent seconds before his sister’s cheery voice echoed through the room, Charles felt a soft cocoo
n of comfort in the old kitchen—worn linoleum, greasy sooty black range, scrubbed warped-wood counters with chipped white enamel basins hanging beneath them, rusty red pump by the sink.

  At the end of school in June, his father sent for him.

  “Foolishness,” his sister complained to her husband. “Charles is better off here.”

  Mr. Varnado said quietly, “Might be he’s needed.”

  Mattie sniffed. “There’s too many people in that house right now.” And then she set herself to making bread—though it wasn’t her regular baking day—banging bowls and pans and talking all the time.

  Mr. Varnado sighed, put on his hat, and went to play checkers with his brother Ralph at the drugstore. (They were partners there; they had taken over after their father’s death.) People who came in for a soda or a headache powder would often stay just to watch them, they were such good players.

  Not much had changed at the farm, Charles thought. The hinge on the front gate was still broken; you had to lift up the whole thing to get by, which was why none of them ever came in that way. The henhouse wall was still patched with a piece of roofing tin. By the vegetable garden, the small stirrup hoe was still leaning on the fence, still had a split handle mended by twisted wire. In the garden itself (who had planted it, Charles wondered) the potatoes, tomatoes, peas, pole beans, sweet corn for table eating, onions, cabbage were thriving, needing only some weeding.

  But things seemed older, their edges more frayed. The piled stones that held up the corner of the porch (as they had for as long as Charles could remember) now shifted and shook a lot more when anybody walked carelessly across that corner. In the kitchen there never seemed to be enough cups and plates, and only a few forks and spoons. The curtains hung limp and heavy with dust and grease—his mother had made those curtains, had stitched them out of odd bits of dress material into a kind of patchwork. Charles felt a sudden turn in his stomach, which he’d learned to recognize as sorrow. He faced it, battled it, and forced it to go away. Then he took down the curtains, washed them carefully, starched them, found the flatiron under the big bed, and spent an hour ironing them.

  His grandmother had died during the winter. His grandfather sat in the shady corner of the porch, pale blue eyes staring at nothing, hands folded, cane between his knees. No matter how hot the day, he never sweated. His skin had a fine white powdery look, like dust. Sometimes, like a turtle, he would draw down his head between the wide straps of his overalls, so that his large hairy ears rested on his shoulders. He’d sit there by the hour, crouched inside the bones of his body. One late August day the old man left his chair and walked slowly to his bed. He took out his false teeth and put them under the pillow. He lay down, face to the wall, pulled up the quilt as if he were cold, and would neither move nor eat. He breathed slowly through four days, then died. His passing was so quiet and so gentle no one was ever quite sure exactly when he was gone.

  That left Hiram and his sons, Caleb and Buck and Samuel and Charles.

  Caleb was planning to marry Odell Jackson soon as the cotton was in. He was building a room just for them, adding it next to the kitchen. During the quiet period in late summer, when the cotton was making and there was little else to do, he finished it. Every evening he went courting. He’d come back late, fast asleep, letting the horse find its way. It was an old animal, slow and reliable, and Caleb slept soundly, stretched along its neck, hands clenched in the scrawny mane.

  Hiram was courting too: Barbara Wells, Preacher Evans’s widowed daughter. She was childless, near forty, an energetic woman and a fine housekeeper. He went to church with her every Sunday (though he had never gone before), listened to her father’s sermon, and had Sunday dinner at her house. He took Samuel, who was fourteen, with him. Every Sunday, early in the morning, the small wagon, drawn by the youngest and prettiest of the six mules in the yard, rolled sedately down the road, bouncing and swaying through the ruts, Hiram driving, Samuel hunched beside him on the seat, miserable.

  Buck and Charles were left with the Sunday chores. They finished the work quickly and carelessly and then went swimming in the little river beyond the pasture lots. There was a pool there, a horseshoe of boulders and gravel below a small waterfall. Ferns, like a sparse beard, grew along the sides. Cedars put down their long stubborn roots into cracks of rock. The hot afternoon sun drew a strong smell of tar from their shiny blue-green foliage. The water was deep and cold and the color of dead leaves. Bees droned past, invisible in the glare. From the pasture, half a mile away, they heard the flat clank of a cowbell as the herd grazed.

  Buck lowered himself into the water, swam a quick circle, shook himself dry. He was the tallest of the brothers, the whitest-skinned and the fairest-haired. In the brilliant glare he seemed to be shining from inside.

  “How do you like old Pa taking up Jesus.” Buck grinned at the sky.

  Charles said nothing. Buck often talked to himself out loud and didn’t require an answer.

  “Another preacher’s daughter. Just like Ma. You want to know something else?”

  “What?” Charles said hesitantly.

  “Little brother, you don’t say a word about this, swear you won t.”

  “I don’t carry tales,” Charles said. “You know I don’t.”

  “I joined the army. Sneaked off to Sellers Crossing and joined up.”

  “You did what?”

  “Pa’ll be madder than hell, but I got to get out of here. I got to do something before I go plain crazy. And that’s the way it is.”

  The way it is: but Charles hadn’t known. For all they’d lived in the same house and slept not a foot apart, he hadn’t even guessed. And Buck hadn’t said…There were secrets in Buck, hidden places, shadows and mysteries. It was like that game at school—blind man’s bluff—where he went blundering around in the dark, trying to find people who hid from him.

  That was the last summer Charles spent on his father’s farm.

  Buck went off to the army. Caleb brought home his bride, and three months later their son was born. Hiram married Mrs. Barbara Wells who, despite her age, was soon expecting a child. The house was so crowded that Samuel, who was sixteen, slept in the barn all that winter. In the spring he ran off with Martha Thompson (daughter of Alvin Thompson, foreman at the cotton gin at Sellers Crossing) to the secret shelter they’d built along Wilcox Branch.

  After a week or so their food and their money ran out and they came back. They went first to the Tucker farm, but Barbara Tucker, infant drooling on her shoulder, told them to go away, while the other Mrs. Tucker, two babies at her skirts, watched big-eyed and openmouthed. After that the couple went to the Thompson house. Martha’s mother sent a message to her husband to come home quick.

  The young people sat in the porch swing and waited for Mr. Thompson. He came at a run, grabbed Samuel away from his daughter, and punched him so hard that he crashed through the porch railing into the flower beds. Mr. Thompson sucked the blood from his split knuckles and jumped through the broken railing after him. Samuel crawled under the house. Mr. Thompson, who was too fat to follow, grabbed his ankle. Samuel squirmed and curled around and bit the already bloody hand. Mr. Thompson roared with anger and went for his shotgun while Samuel scrambled out the far side and disappeared. Mr. Thompson fired both barrels under the house, blowing holes in a couple of water pipes. That night he locked Martha in her room and nailed the window shut from outside, leaving only a small crack for air. As soon as he fell asleep, she broke the glass, climbed out, and joined Samuel. She came back in the morning—alone this time. Samuel’s face was swollen and a couple of his teeth were loose, and he wasn’t taking any more chances with her father. She walked into the house while her parents were having breakfast. “I’m hungry,” she said, “and so’s Samuel. I’ll eat here and then I’ll bring him his.”

  Her mother shrieked; her father said testily, “For God’s sake, woman, be quiet.”

  And Martha, pieces of grass and straw stuck in the eyelet trim of her dress, her
face smeared with dirt and her hair all uncombed, smiled and sat down at their white enamel table and began buttering herself a piece of bread. Right there and then Mr. Thompson realized that there was nothing he could do, except repair the broken window, find a preacher who was broad-minded about such things, and have a wedding in his front parlor.

  Samuel found a job at the livery stable, and Mr. Thompson built a house for the young couple in the corner of his own property. Every evening the kitchen lights of the two houses shone each into the other.

  Sometimes Charles dreamed about the farm, the way it had been when his mother was alive, when there’d been flowers all around the front porch, bright colors in the summer sun.

  He told his sister.

  “Why do you want to go and dream about that hard-scrabble farm.”

  Charles was surprised at the anger in her voice. “It wasn’t bad. I kind of liked it,” he said to Mr. Varnado.

  “Of course,” Mr. Varnado said diplomatically, with all the experience of his years as a train conductor. “It’s a good farm.”

  Mattie snorted. “The trouble with you, George, is that you’re city-born.”

  “I am, my dear,” he said placidly, “I am indeed. But Charles is not. And he may have very different ideas.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  Mr. Varnado lit his Sunday cigar.

  Charles went to school, played baseball, did his homework, worked summers at the Varnado Drugstore. In the seventh grade he began a feud with a tall red-haired boy named Earl Borders. After school each day, at the very edge of the playground, they pushed and shoved, swung their book bags and rolled on the ground, locked together, punching and biting. In the mornings they lay in ambush behind fences and houses and sheds, throwing rocks and nails and broken bits of flowerpots. Once they hit Mrs. McCrory’s dog as it slept on her porch. Its howls brought her out with a broom and a poker.