by Ninie Hammon
“Use my office,” E.J. said. “There are two lines. Anybody else who wants to call …?”
Viola turned to Malachi. “Call Neb. Tell him to come get us.”
Sam knew what she meant was to call the Martins, who lived at the bottom of the ridge, give them a message. The Tacketts didn’t have a telephone.
Abby rushed to Sam and grabbed her hands.
“Please, you got to help me. I got to get up Lexington. My Cody’s waitin’ for me. Will you take me?” Abby gestured toward Sam’s car, the only one parked in front of the store, though there were now a dozen people in the parking lot. “You still got a car. You could take me. I’ll pay you.” She looked around, disoriented, only just now missing the purse she must have left in her truck. “I ain’t got no money now, but I’m good for it. You know I am. Just … please …” The desperation in her voice was heartbreaking. “Please help me.”
“Abby, we don’t know what’s going on or how long it will last, but we do know that right now, you can’t cross the county line or you’ll just end up here, sick.” The girl was devastated and Sam fought for something to say that would make her feel better. “Nobody knows what it is, why it is. It just appeared and I’m sure it’s going to disappear the same way — poof, not there anymore. Then life can go right back to normal.”
“You think it’s just gonna go away?”
How would Sam know? In truth, Sam did not think it was going to go away, though she had absolutely nothing to base that belief on, no empirical data to support it. Of course, she couldn’t tell poor Abby Clayton that. “Sure I do. We’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it’ll—”
“Tomorrow!” Abby couldn’t have sounded more horrified if Sam had suggested she build an altar to Satan right there in the parking lot and sacrifice her baby son on it. “I can’t wait until tomorrow to get my baby!”
She looked into Abby’s faded-blue eyes, focused on capturing her attention.
“Look at me Abby. Listen. I will help you. I promise I will. But right now helping you means not letting you go running off into the Jabberwock—”
“The Jabberwock. The Jabberwock. Stop calling it that!”
“—and making yourself sick. Are you listening to me? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Onliest thing I understand is I ain’t there and my baby needs me.” She looked down at the front of her shirt where a wet spot had appeared. “See there! See what I mean. I been pumping so there’d be extra for when I come home. But they done used that up by now and it’s time to feed him. I’m supposed to be there — right now! — nursing my baby.”
“I will take you to Lexington myself, okay? I will drive you to the hospital and go in with you and help you gather up your baby’s things. Just as soon as it’s possible to leave. But it’s not possible right now.”
Abby said nothing, just looked daggers at Charlie. Then she shook her head and made some kind of sound, like a baby rabbit run over by a hay baler. She sat down, right there in the middle of the parking lot, put her head in her hands and started to cry.
Holmes Fischer was standing nearby, looking worn and desperately in need of a drink. He looked at Abby and announced to everybody and nobody:
“Anybody given any thought to the other side — out there beyond the Jabberwock? The people who are expecting us.” Abby looked up when he said that. “When Abby here doesn’t show up at the hospital. When Hayley doesn’t show up at” — he turned to the teenager who’d just regained her sight — “where was it you said you were going?”
The girl looked like he’d kicked her in the belly with a pointed-toe cowboy boot.
“I wasn’t going nowhere! I just borrowed my mother’s car to … go for a ride, that’s all.”
Fish blew her off.
“Well, whatever. The point is that somebody out there is bound to start wondering what happened to us.” He smiled down at Abby. “And come looking for us.”
The hope that bloomed on Abby Clayton’s face was as bright as her smile had been a hundred years ago when she’d been buying a package of onesies in the Dollar General Store.
“Ya think? Ya think somebody’ll come?”
Sam quickly put a smile on her own face that fit there like a stick-on name tag. Somewhere deep inside, the Essential Sam didn’t believe for a minute the Jabberwock could be beaten that easily.
Chapter Twenty-One
In a reasonable world — which this had ceased to be the moment they’d all fallen off into black light — Sheriff’s Deputy Liam Montgomery would have stepped in and organized all that came after the trip to the county line. He was, after all, a sworn-in law enforcement officer. But a uniform did not a police officer make. Liam was still mildly disoriented. His nose had never completely stopped bleeding, and it quickly became clear to Charlie that he didn’t have a whole lot of experience — as a police officer or anything else.
Liam had called in to the sheriff’s department to confirm that Sheriff Mason had, indeed, gone fishing in Lake Cumberland yesterday, which left Liam and Senior Deputy Skeet Phillips on the hook for policing. Phillips was nowhere to be found. The sheriff’s department operated out of a little office in the Ridge, the only one of the handful of communities in the county that was formally incorporated into a town, though it had been unincorporated at some time in the past and Charlie didn’t know when or why. Maybe there hadn’t been a why. Maybe it had just been a process of decay, like a shoelace gradually coming untied so that it gets looser and looser until the shoe finally comes off altogether. It wasn’t likely there’d been an official un-incorporating ceremony, complete with a bottle of champagne to shatter over the bow of the not-a-legal-town-anymore to christen it. It was more likely it just happened when nobody was looking and by the time they did notice it didn’t matter anymore because they didn’t care.
Charlie had taken Merrie on a little tour of the county when she’d first arrived early yesterday morning. An excuse for nostalgia. Coming here for the last time seemed to mandate a survey of her past, her “heritage.” The old man who owned the strawberry patch where she used to go with her mother to pick baskets full of berries the size of ping-pong balls had come back to Nower County to live after the First World War and her mother had asked him why he’d returned. He’d said the one thing in life they can’t take away from you is where you’re from.
“You can lose your house, you can lose your family, you can lose a bet, you can lose your job, or your driver’s license or your mind or your will to live or the card that tells you the date of your next dentist’s appointment,” he’d said, “but you can’t never lose where you’re from. That’s yours for permanent, for always.”
But as time went by, Charlie had come to think of where she was from as less a thing she couldn’t lose and more something she couldn’t get rid of. Like gum on her shoe, the little nowhere place in the Kentucky mountains would always stick to her. It had in some ways defined her, she knew, though she couldn’t have articulated how that was. After she left, it became merely an empty spot in her mind where she never went, the reality of it a “nowhere” populated by people trapped by circumstances. Charlie didn’t know anybody who’d actually moved to Nower County on purpose.
No, that wasn’t true. There had been the Amish family named — what else? — Yoder who had stayed on after they’d built her mother’s kiln.
Sylvia Ryan had transformed the two-car garage on their shallow three-acre lot at the base of the mountain into an art studio when Charlie was in elementary school, and no car ever saw the inside of it again. One whole side was nothing but shelves, built at right angles to the wall with walk space between; they were the residence of all manner of pots, bowls, vases, cups, ashtrays -– just about anything you could make out of clay — that her mother sold in shops all over the eastern part of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. The other side of the garage was home to a potter’s wheel and to long tables with benches where she conducted classes to teach others how to make an as
htray. Taking a “ceramics” class from Mrs. Ryan — particularly since there was no charge for the class and supplies were furnished — was enough of a curiosity that probably half the women in the county had eventually shown up to take advantage of it.
Most of the “students” had no idea that making a pot or a bowl or an ashtray required so many steps and that the end products had to be fired in her mother’s kiln.
Charlie remembered construction of the kiln because the outside structure that sat in the back yard beside the garage door was built by a crew of Amish stone masons from Pennsylvania and they were an oddity her friends actually came to her house to see.
Their haircuts were ridiculous, the buttons on their shirts and pants didn’t match and most of them were in dire need of serious dental work.
The kiln they built was a six-by-six-by-six-foot marvel with stone walls a foot thick and a door that sealed airtight. She and her friends had watched from the window of her room as the Amish men cut the stone pieces from larger pieces of stone and fit them together so tight you couldn’t slide a piece of paper between them — “as tight as an Egyptian pyramid,” or so her mother claimed.
Her mother’d paid to have a lock installed on the door above the handle and she kept it locked whenever she wasn’t using it, didn’t want some kid to wander in and get trapped there.
A company from Louisville had come down and installed the guts of the kiln that fit inside the stone walls. A control panel just inside the garage was equipped with all manner of dials, knobs and gizmos to set the temperature. The kiln had its own designated gas line from the big butane tank that used to sit in the backyard.
A couple of months after the kiln was complete, Charlie was stunned to see a horse and buggy clip-clopping down Barber’s Mill Road. Her mother told her the Yoders had liked Nower County so much, they’d moved to a little farm down the road. Charlie didn’t know if there were still Yoders living in the county, or if they, too, had drifted away.
Nower County was a good-sized place in terms of landmass and geography. But it was in the mountains and the majority of its acreage was uninhabitable by virtue of it being — duh — on the side of a mountain. Farms like the Yoders’ were sandwiched into narrow hollows.
A handful of small communities dotted the landscape.
One was called Killarney in the southeastern part of the county, where the mountains were steep, the hollows deep and the residents standoffish and clannish. The Tackett family had lived in those mountains for generations.
One of the communities was called simply Twig. It was a collection of houses, a Pentecostal church building and its accompanying cemetery. The building had been vacant when Charlie left and it still was, so dilapidated now it looked ready to collapse. But the cemetery appeared to be a growing concern. Clearly, there were three or four times as many dead people in Twig as living.
Wiley was a community in the northwestern part of the county near the Rolling Fork River, which snaked along, back and forth between Nower and Beaufort Counties. The Wiley Bridge was an authentic covered bridge that spanned it in Nower County, a historic structure that was ruled unsafe for school buses when Charlie was still in grade school. There was no way to get the kids from the northern part of the county to school in Persimmon Ridge without crossing the river. So the bus stopped, the kids got off, the bus crossed the bridge, the kids crossed on foot behind it and got back on the bus.
Ten miles south of Wiley was the community of Persimmon Ridge, which was neither on a ridge nor boasted the presence of a single persimmon tree. It had been for a time a real, legally incorporated town. Known only as “the Ridge,” it had had a post office, a small courthouse that housed the property valuation administrator’s office, the county clerk, the office for the circuit judges who rotated through a four-county circuit, a big high-ceiling courtroom that took up most of the second floor and the sheriff’s department that served the whole county with a handful of deputies and half a dozen cruisers.
The Ridge had even had a “jail,” a small building not a whole lot larger that a two-seater outhouse with bars on the lone window where you could lock somebody up until the state police had time to pick them up and transport them to Carlisle. The Ridge had a small hospital/nursing home, two resident doctors and a chiropractor, three dentists — an old man who had brought in the younger men so he could retire — a volunteer fire department, three schools — elementary, middle and high school — a Masonic Lodge and a funeral home.
Main Street in the Ridge had boasted a couple of banks, real estate offices, attorney’s offices, a restaurant or two, furniture stores and clothing stores.
Then the coal mines, which had provided steady employment to a huge percentage of the working men in the county, closed. Three factories in neighboring Crawford County to the east — an underwear factory, a casket factory and a factory that built cupolas and church steeples, called the Steeple People, shut down, and put the Nower County residents who commuted there every day out of work. An industrial complex in Lexington had employed a surprising number of Nower County residents. When it downsized, they all lost their jobs.
Then the parkway that would have brought the world back to the county was built in Beaufort County instead.
There were probably dozens of other reasons — Charlie was no sociologist — why the town and the county had died. They just had. Victims of the domino effect of economic circumstances. The jobless moved away, looking for employment, the young left after school, never to return. With fewer and fewer customers, the small businesses closed. The dwindling tax base and smaller number of students forced the schools to close. Not enough patients for the doctors, the dentists and the hospital. The post office was shut down. One thing after another had reduced the Ridge to … not a ghost town, that would have been better, Charlie thought, more scenic. Everything gone, doors on broken hinges, shutters blowing in the wind, a tombstone on the site of a dead community. What had actually happened to the Ridge and to the rest of the county in other individual ways, was they hung on. Almost everything closed … but a store or two here and there managed to make it. A beauty parlor. A pool hall. No official community services, but the sheriff’s department still employed an elected sheriff and a couple of deputies … and Charlie had no idea how they were paid or where the department got the funding for the upkeep of an office or vehicles. There were fire trucks and perhaps volunteers to man them. Charlie’d seen the trucks at the fire station when she drove by. But on the whole, starting long before Charlie graduated from high school and accelerating in the years afterward, Nower County literally became Nowhere County, its people nowhere people. And with the passage of years, the county slowly sank below the horizon of the consciousness of the outside world. Like it didn’t exist.
Chapter Twenty-Two
What followed her return in E.J.’s van from the mirage on the county line to the parking lot of the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere was the longest day of Charlie McClintock’s life. Every minute seemed to take an hour and as the hours stacked up one on top of the other like a pile of cordwood, the world got stranger and more unmanageable.
By virtue of — Charlie didn’t know what; nature hates a vacuum, maybe? — she and Sam Sheridan had fallen into the role of “in charge” at this disaster scene, which was what it rapidly became. It was as if a tsunami had crashed down on the county and the Dollar General Store parking lot was where the survivors had washed up on shore — in various levels of incapacitation.
Oh, she and Sam weren’t forced to take the job. They could have bailed, left, gone home — shoot, Charlie had tickets on a plane back to Chicago tomorrow night and she’d barely started going through her mother’s things. But you didn’t just turn your back and walk away from a catastrophe and leave the victims lying there sick and bleeding. You helped. You did whatever you could. That was the price of admission to the human race.
Charlie loved football — had loved it even before she’d married Stuart. She unders
tood the phrase “calling an audible.” That was when the quarterback’s play wasn’t working and he called out a new one on the fly. She and Sam hadn’t had much of a play designed in the first place — a hasty “I’ll take care of the new arrivals” from Sam and an “I’ll see to the walking wounded” from Charlie. And that play quickly disintegrated into all the players calling audibles all the time. Controlled chaos. Controlled most of the time. Some of the time.
The moniker Fish had hung on the phenomenon became more fitting by the hour. The people of Nowhere County had somehow been pulled through a mirror into a whole new world where the usual principles of the functioning of the universe flat out did not apply anymore. And the foreignness of it all — each new person who looked at them with confused eyes and asked “Where am I? How did I get here?” couldn’t have been any less frightening than wandering through Wonderland, fearing an attack any minute by a monstrous dragon called the Jabberwock … and you’d left your magical “vorpal sword” in your other pants.
When Malachi’s brother Neb — short for Nebuchadnezzar, which it was rumored he never did learn how to spell — arrived to pick up Malachi and his mother, Malachi refused to leave.
“They need help here,” he said, to which his mother replied, “This ain’t none of your concern, boy.” To which he replied, “Then whose concern is it?”
Charlie didn’t know what Malachi’s rank had been in the military — didn’t even know which branch he’d served in — but he was as good at giving orders as he was at taking them. He was good at organizing, too, and devised systems and some semblance of organization as they assembled the growing number of volunteer helpers into teams to assist Sam and Charlie in caring for the fast-growing number of Jabberwock victims, getting them back on their feet and into the shade of the roof overhang on the line of empty strip mall businesses. When they were finally able to stand and think, they used E.J.’s phones to call someone to come get them or found a ride home with somebody already there.
