The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “I did.” He finished his coffee.

  “You know who he was?”

  “I do.”

  Hovis stood, coffee mug in hand, and shuffled toward a basin beside the stove near a worn lead water pump. He was moving like an ancient man again, and I sat back in my chair, afraid that he was through talking to me about anything.

  Without warning he darted toward the bed as if he were twenty years old, scooped up his rifle, clicked the safety, and pointed the muzzle right at my head.

  “I know who he is,” Hovis said steadily. “But I’m not sure about you.”

  I knew better than to rile him in any way. This wasn’t the first time he’d had a sudden mood shift in my presence; in fact, it had happened many times. Twice he had shot at me. But he’d never pointed a gun at my head. It was disconcerting.

  “Why aren’t you sure about me, Hovis?” I asked as calmly as I could manage. “I’ve come to this place dozens of times to talk with you.”

  “You don’t bring the tape machine,” he snapped, “you come from the police, and you don’t understand the visitor. That ain’t like the Fever Devilin I ever knew.”

  With very little reflection, I realized he was correct. Any other time I’d come to visit him, I’d brought my old Wollensak, whether I’d needed it or not. And I’d never been to visit him before with any agenda other than collecting odd stories and checking on mountain genealogy. I’d approached the entire interview like a stranger. What had made me do it?

  “I see your point,” I admitted. “I’m not behaving the way I usually do.”

  “That’s right.” The barrel of the gun didn’t move.

  “I’ll tell you why I think that is. Besides you and me, the stranger visited Lucinda Foxe last night. You know that she and I are engaged.”

  “What?” The gun lowered and a huge grin appeared. “You and that nurse woman? Spoke for?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to show my relief at the change in his demeanor. “I’ve declared for her.”

  “I’ll swan.” He sat back on his bed, gun still in hand, grin still on face. “That’s a good match, that is. She’s always been very kind to me. And so have you. The boy visited her last night, too?”

  “Yes, he did. And I’m worried about it.”

  “Damn.” His eyes seemed to clear a bit. “What am I doing pointing a gun at you? I tell you what: Being in that nut house, the county house? I believe it makes me worse, not better.”

  He was probably right. I’d been to the place only once, but it was sufficient to tell me that the prevailing philosophy there came more under the heading of incarceration than of aid. Most of the patients were given double doses of their medication every day—something I’d heard referred to as chemical lobotomies. Which, of course, made it easier to handle the inmates on the inside and made it much harder for the inmates to adjust on the outside. That was government psychiatry at its best. A bit of compassion colored my irritation at having a gun aimed at me.

  “That’s all right,” I assured him, my pulse slowing. “I haven’t had enough coffee this morning. I probably needed a little excitement.”

  “I wouldn’t have shot you much,” he offered.

  “Look, Hovis,” I said, rallying. “I am here because Skidmore asked me to come, but I’m also here because I’m involved, and so is Lucinda. I want to know what’s going on. And you know something about all this. Something you’re not telling me—even though I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”

  It was a good gambit, guessing there might be a secret and then pretending to know what it was. It worked very well in Blue Mountain, where everyone had deeply hidden secrets, and everyone’s greatest fear was that those secrets would be discovered.

  “Okay.” He let go a heavy sigh, and the smile left his face. “I’ll tell you. But you got to keep it in your heart. This ain’t for Skidmore Needle. You got to promise me that. This is for you and your intended, so you’ll know what’s what. Promise me.”

  I clasped my hands, stalling. What to do?

  “See, Hovis, if it has to do with the murder—”

  “What I want to tell you don’t have a thing to do with the killing.” Hovis leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “And we both know that the boy who visited us last night ain’t dead. I can’t say I’m exactly sure who that was on the road this morning. But you know it weren’t the boy.”

  I stared back at him, unwilling to give anything away.

  “So promise me you don’t tell nobody else what I say to you,” he concluded.

  “If it has nothing to do with the murder,” I said haltingly, “I suppose I could keep it to myself.”

  “Is that a promise?” he snapped.

  “Yes.” My eyes were steady, aimed right back at his.

  He nodded once, accepting my solidarity.

  “The one that visited us last night,” Hovis whispered, “is not of our time here on this earth. He wanders in and out of a river. Sometimes he’s here, sometimes he’s not.”

  I hadn’t meant to roll my head backward, it just happened.

  “I know!” Hovis insisted at a stage whisper. “I know it seems impossible. But that one travels. And when he does, he always finds his brother, and kills him.”

  “What?” I blinked.

  “That body on the road out there this morning,” Hovis said so softly I could barely hear him, “was his brother. He’s chased him down the hallways of time, Fever. The one we talked to last night? That was Cain!”

  Five

  Even out in the sunlight around the shack, I couldn’t shake the eerie mood Hovis had woven into the fabric of our conversation. Once he’d told me that our visitor was a man who ignored the confines of linear time, I’d begun making my way out the door. Not because his insistence made me nervous, but because I knew there was nothing coherent that could come from his belief. He had spilled over into the boundless regions of his own subconscious, and would be of little further help to my inquiries.

  He did, however, prompt me to want to speak to Lucinda right away. As I made my way across the meadow toward the fence, I devised a sort of surprise luncheon scenario, the kind people in love sometimes enacted, as I understood it.

  “You come back when you talk to your intended,” Hovis called out from behind me. “You tell me what she said, hear?”

  I waved in his direction without looking back. In seven more steps I was over the fence and grabbing the chrome on the door of my truck.

  Lucinda was the head nurse at the county hospital. If she had been born a hundred years earlier, she would have been the midwife of our town—two hundred years earlier and she might have been its witch. Long out of high school and college, she somehow had managed to maintain not only a student’s looks but also an enthusiasm for learning new things I found absolutely fascinating. Her desire to gather new ideas was the perfect complement to my passion for discovering old ones. There seemed no end to the things we could find in common, or the joy we found in sharing those things. And while this perfectly balanced friendship assured our relationship of solidity, there were always new horizons to be explored in other aspects of our mutuality—aspects of a more physical nature. Oddly, those explorations were the one subject we never discussed. It was as if talking about them would take them out of the astral plane on which they existed, and make them merely ecstatic, instead of transcendent. Perhaps it had been the mention of John Donne in Hovis’s shack that created the psycho-sexual metaphysics in my mind as I parked my truck in the visitors’ parking lot of the county hospital. Whatever had prompted those thoughts, they were the perfect fuel; they propelled me through the revolving doors, down the isopropyl-alcohol-scented hallways, all the way to the central nursing station.

  “Well.” Lucinda’s face seemed to glow a more healthy amber than the fluorescent lights would ordinarily have allowed. “This is a surprise.”

  Her dark auburn hair was nearly hidden by the white cap; black eyes flashed and made her perfect porcelain face see
m even more pale.

  “I’m a little surprised myself,” I admitted, gliding up to the counter.

  “I love that pumpkin sweater on you,” she said, setting down the file she had in her hand.

  “And I think you know how I feel about your nurse’s uniform.”

  She blushed. Several other nurses did, too.

  “My plan is to spirit you away for a spot of luncheon,” I said quickly, “and you can’t say no because if you do you’ll have to stay behind when I leave and answer a few dozen questions about my penchant for starchy white dresses.”

  She shook her head.

  The nurse beside her laughed, looked up at me, then said to Lucinda, “You know we can cover things while you’re gone. And it is nearly lunchtime at that. Go on ahead.”

  I beamed at said nurse, whose name tag said STACY CHAMBERS.

  “Nurse Chambers,” I announced, “I’m going to see to it that there’s a little something extra in your Christmas stocking this year.”

  Nurse Chambers lowered her face but raised her eyes to meet mine.

  “Well, Dr. Devilin, I don’t usually wear stockings, but I’d make an exception in your case.”

  The other nurses gave forth appropriately scandalized nonwords, mostly along the lines of ooh.

  I nodded. “Serves me right,” I told Nurse Chambers. “I should never attempt the idle flirtation. I only invite such mockery.”

  “What makes you think I was mocking?” Nurse Chambers jutted her chin in my direction.

  “Because he knows if you were serious,” Lucinda answered, “I’d have to place-kick you into the middle of next week.”

  “Might be worth it,” Nurse Chambers said, blinking at least three times.

  “Fine,” Lucinda said breezily, rounding the counter of the nurses’ station, pocketbook in hand. “Remind me about that when I get back from lunch.”

  “’Bye,” Nurse Chambers oozed.

  A few of the other nurses made the same noise.

  “Perfectly grown, adult nurses,” I said, falling in beside Lucinda, heading back down the hall for the exit, “behaving like high school girls.”

  “It’s your own fault,” she accused, taking my arm.

  “I disagree. It has nothing to do with me. People who work in hospitals have enlarged libidos. Ask anyone. Why else would there be so many doctor shows on television?”

  “And I suppose it’s catching? Your libido seems to provoke you to speak differently to my nurses than you do to anybody else in town.”

  “Yes, because it is catching.”

  “God.” She went first through the revolving door.

  Once we were out in the autumn air, her face lost a bit of its ebullience, and she fell silent.

  “Okay, so you know why I’m here,” I admitted.

  “About last night.” She didn’t look at me. It seemed obvious that she didn’t want to talk about her experience with the visitor.

  “Did you know that the person who visited you also came to my house, and also spoke with Hovis Daniels?”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “And did you know,” I continued, standing beside her, hoping she would look at me, “that Skidmore called me at six this morning because he’d found that man dead on the dirt road behind the Jackson place?”

  Her eyes shot to mine.

  “And did you know—”

  “Stop.” She held up her hand. “That man is dead?”

  “No, as it turns out, I don’t think he is.” I motioned for her to come along to the truck. I didn’t want to have the conversation in a parking lot. “Skid thought it was the man, but I went to look at him, and it wasn’t the same person. It was, however, a very similar face, and the dead man was dressed in our visitor’s clothing. So.”

  “Let’s go,” she murmured, heading for my truck. “I have to tell you what he said to me last night—even though you won’t believe it.”

  Miss Etta’s diner was crowded, as usual. Lucinda and I waited for a table by ourselves, even though several customers invited us to sit with them. I made half-hearted excuses about wanting to sit alone with my fiancée that were taken for embarrassment.

  When a table finally came available, Lucinda set her purse down on it, and I took off my sweater to leave it on my chair. The room was stiflingly hot, though Miss Etta, asleep behind the cash register, had on a thick cardigan and was covered with an old, well-used quilt.

  We made our way though the noisy tables to the kitchen, where there were plates piled beside the stove. The service was simple: Take a plate, dish up anything on the stove—or in it—and take it to your table. Eat heartily; pay six dollars as you left. The price had only recently gone up. And the food was a healing prayer.

  The fried chicken that soaked for twenty-four hours in cold buttermilk before being turned into golden clouds was the local favorite, but I always preferred the game birds—Miss Etta’s euphemism for any bird her great-great-nephew Boomer had caught or shot the morning before. Quail, partridge, dove, pheasant, wild turkey—usually a combination of all—were in the dish. The birds were boiled, and the meat was pulled from the bone, dredged in flour, lightly sautéed in olive oil, then placed in a casserole dish with turnips dug that same morning, greens intact, and fresh purple-hull peas. Everything was covered in chicken broth and cloves of garlic and cooked in an oven whose temperature gauge had long since been lost. But the dish had slow-cooked overnight, and it was hidden in the oven under tinfoil. I always fancied that not everyone knew to look in the oven, there were so many earthly delights on the stovetop. My delusions were shattered nearly every time, of course; the dish was always at least half empty when I went to put some on my plate.

  Lucinda, inexplicably, put only steamed spinach, whole honeyed baby carrots, and a single piece of Miss Etta’s Special Sourdough Bread™ on her plate.

  The sourdough bread was a bit legendary, in that many claimed Miss Etta’s starter came, in part, from the same sour mash that her moonshining neighbors used to make distilled spirits. These distilled spirits, however illegal they may have been, would have gotten any ten sinners into heaven. I knew because I had tasted it. Offer a bit of it to St. Peter and anything else would be forgiven, any other transgression washed clean; the great gate would swing wide. That same ecstasy could be found in Miss Etta’s bread. You could taste the corn ripening in the field, the woodsmoke from the still, and the cold breeze as it washed through the maple trees, dropping jagged red leaves all around you. Every bite was a scandal.

  Armed with such manna, we wound our way through the crowd, back to our table, and I began to eat. Lucinda began, instead, to talk.

  “Wait until you hear this, Fever,” she whispered, though it was hardly necessary in the noise of the room. “That man last night? He told me all about his wife, the woman he loved—that he was married to right after the Civil War.”

  I stopped chewing for a moment, but that was all.

  “He told me,” I said calmly, “something about going to fight in World War I—and he regaled Hovis Daniels with tales of espionage in occupied France twenty years later.”

  “How is Hovis?” she asked, her voice warming.

  “Crazy as he can possibly be and still be out of custody.” I breathed in the steam from the game birds, eyes half closed. “He held a gun on me and then told me that our visitor was Cain.”

  “Was Cain? From the Bible?”

  I nodded, unwilling to waste a word when chewing was a much more delightful occupation.

  “Well, he means no harm, bless his heart,” she sighed, staring down at her spinach.

  “So about the guy, the visitor,” I prompted.

  “Yes.” She settled into her seat, picked up her fork very primly, and held it over her plate. “Here’s what he said, as far as I can remember. It was so strange. He said he’d suffered a trauma. He said the first thing he could remember in life was the sound of someone singing. He woke up in a field hospital and heard it. He saw that he lay in bed, del
irious, one among hundreds. Most of the other men had had their hands or feet or arms or legs hacked off. He had been dragged from the battlefield at Gettysburg. The singing he heard came from a group called the Hutchinson Family. They’d been at the field hospital for a month.”

  She stared at me.

  I never ceased to marvel at Lucinda’s ability to talk about the goriest subjects over a meal. Working in a hospital had inured her to the horrors of failed or flawed human flesh.

  “What are you thinking?” she demanded after a moment.

  “Sorry.” I swallowed and stabbed my fork at the game bird. “This is really good. Look. He was talking about the Hutchinsons, a fairly famous singing group. Sometimes they’re called America’s first protest singers. They went around Civil War camps—”

  “That’s what he said!” She couldn’t hold back. “The group he heard had moved from camp to camp entertaining Union troops for several years. They were renowned performers, especially in the person of the black-haired soloist Polly.”

  “I don’t know her, but they were all deeply committed abolitionists and advocates of equal rights for women.” I leaned forward. “These ideas, new as they were at the time, were a feature of all their performances. Most of the songs they sang protested war. All war. General McClellan, in fact, made the decision to cancel all their performances. He said their music was a disgrace, and their ideas were too radical. McClellan halted their tour in Gettysburg and ordered them to disperse, but they did not. Instead they wrote to the president. And when Lincoln heard about the singers’ plight, he countermanded McClellan’s decision. He told the general to reinstate the tour, at the general’s own expense. And do you know what Lincoln said? He told McClellan, ‘Theirs is the music I want my soldiers to hear. In times like these, art is the only thing that keeps us alive.’ Isn’t that great? Of course, the irony there is that shortly thereafter, President Lincoln went to see a play and lost his life in the theatre.”

  Lucinda set down her fork. “Do you want to hear what he told me, or do you want to do all the talking?”

  “Sorry.” I immediately put more food in my mouth. Best way to shut myself up.