A Land More Kind Than Home

by Wiley Cash

  I’D BEEN FOLLOWING THE TIRE TRACKS FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES when I heard a muffled noise atop a crest in the road. It was a soft sound, and at first I couldn’t make out what it was. I slowed down and crept up the hill in the hope that I’d see whoever was up there before they saw me.

  Up ahead, parked just off the left side of the road, was the service truck one of the boys at the scene had mentioned. Even though I was a pretty good distance behind it, I could hear that the hushed noise was the sound of country music blaring from inside the cab.

  I came up from behind the driver’s window and saw Jimmy Hall sitting inside the truck with his head leaned against the steering wheel. I took a second and planted my feet firmly in the snow, and then I flung the door open and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out. His feet kicked all along the floorboards, and empty beer cans and crushed cigarette packs tumbled out into the snow. A country song blasted from the radio, and I slammed the door and the music throbbed against the windows.

  He struggled with me good for a minute, and he tried to pry my hand from around his collar, but he was too surprised and drunk to fight. I drug him around in front of the headlights and forced him to his knees in the snow. I pulled my gun out of my holster and whipped him across the face with the barrel. The sound was dull and heavy, like hitting a tree trunk with a bat. I whipped him again and heard the bridge of his nose crack. Blood came out heavy like tar, and I watched it run into his mouth and down the front of his coat. He chewed on it like it was a plug of tobacco he was trying his best not to swallow. He wanted to talk, but his words sounded like his tongue was thick. He looked up at me and tried to blink the heavy snowflakes out of his eyes.

  “It was a goddamned accident,” he finally said. He tried to clear his throat, and he coughed and spattered blood onto my hand and my sleeve. “It was an accident,” he said again.

  I held him by the collar and stared down at him until he quit talking. He rolled his head forward, and his body went limp like he’d passed out. I cocked the hammer on my pistol and put the barrel to his forehead. I raised his face to mine.

  Sometimes, when I get to thinking about it, I wish I’d have blown his damn head off right there and left him laid up in the snow with his brains hanging up in the limbs of some old pine tree. I didn’t do it, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think about it every day. Every single day. I’ll be damned if I don’t think about how easy it would’ve been just to take care of it all right there.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  We stayed like that for a while, me standing and Hall on his knees in the snow with the barrel of my gun against his head. It was quiet, but I could hear the heavy flakes light on the tree branches overhead, and I heard the hushed pulse of music coming from the stereo inside the truck. A baying dog wailed in the cove below us.

  “Ask those boys,” he whispered.

  I lifted my boot and pushed him onto his back and out of the beam of the headlights. I raised my pistol and squeezed the shot into the trees overhead. It rang through the woods and echoed across the valley. A screech owl flushed at the noise and swooped down from the darkness above. I turned in time to see it soar across the road and disappear into the snow-covered boughs of a pine.

  Jimmy lay on the roadside breathing heavy. I walked over and stood above him. “Get up,” I said. He didn’t move. I kicked him, but he still didn’t move. I put my pistol back in the holster and reached down and grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled him to his feet. He had trouble standing up, and I leaned him against the front fender and rifled through his pockets.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “I ain’t decided not to yet,” I said.

  I opened the driver’s-side door to the truck and took the keys out of the ignition. The radio went off, and the night was suddenly silent and still. I walked a piece up the road and stopped at the edge of the woods and looked into the darkness where I knew the trees were standing. Then I threw the keys as far as I could, and I listened to them ricochet off the tree branches and trunks until the sound of their falling was swallowed by the snow. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw that the road continued a hundred yards up the mountain and disappeared around a bend. Through the trees I could see a few lights shining in the valley. I went back to the truck and found Jimmy leaning against the hood where I’d left him.

  I opened the door and pushed him into the truck. “You can walk home when you sober up,” I said. It was dark and I could barely see him, but I heard him groan as he sprawled his body out on the bench seat. I knew he’d die if he passed out in that cold truck up on that mountain. I didn’t find that to be too bad of an option, and I slammed the door to the truck and walked back down the road.

  THE SNOW HADN’T QUITE FILLED HIS TIRE TRACKS IN, AND I WALKED just between them on my way to the car. It was late, and the lights in the valley to my left were beginning to wink off for the night. I turned my collar up to keep out the snow, and I buried my hands deep inside my coat pockets. The wind picked up and blew through the trees off in the darkness on the right-hand side of the road. The creaking limbs and branches sounded like hundreds of squeaky doors opening and closing in an old farmhouse.

  When I reached the car, I opened the door and climbed inside. The seat followed the slope of the car and tilted down into the ditch and made it difficult to sit upright. I slid down the vinyl toward the passenger side and settled my back against the door. I started the engine and radioed the station in Marshall and told them where I was.

  “How’s the weather up there?” asked dispatch.

  I took my finger off the receiver and looked out the windshield. “I’m sweating my ass off,” I said. “What the hell do you think it’s like?”

  The line was quiet.

  “I’ll send someone up that’s got a wench,” he finally said.

  “I’ll be here.”

  I set the CB back on its cradle and cranked the heat. Hot air poured out of the vents and my face and ears got warm. I held out my hands and felt the blood slowly creep into my fingers.

  I watched the windows fog over, and I pictured Sheila in the kitchen at home, reading a book or flipping through a magazine and looking up now and then to check the window for headlights and listening for the sound of a car door being closed. I didn’t know how in the world I was going to tell her about Jeff, but I kept forcing myself to remember that I knew the routine: the pause on the steps of a stranger’s porch before you knocked on the front door, the awkwardness of answering questions and drinking coffee in the kitchen while you watched a family grieve. I’d broken this news what felt like a hundred times, but now it was my own family, and I’ll be damned if I could remember how to do it.

  It almost seemed like payback for all the times I’d sat in those kitchens answering questions, thinking about nothing but the hot dinner and the cold beer I was missing, the warm fireplace and the boots I was ready to kick off and leave on the bedroom floor. But now the comfort of those things was far from my mind, and I couldn’t think of anything except the fear on Sheila’s face while I stumbled through what I had to tell her, expecting any minute to hear Jeff’s keys in the front door, the sound of his footsteps coming through the foyer, his body filling up the doorway in the kitchen. His voice saying, “Mama, why are you crying?”

  But the new memory of Jeff’s body smoldering on the roadside forced itself into my head and forced out those imaginings, and just below the noise of the cruiser’s engine and the steady stream of the heat coming from the vents I could hear the sound of steam hissing beneath that blue sheet. I thumped the back of my head against the passenger-side window and tried to keep the tears out of my eyes.

  IT SEEMED LIKE HOURS HAD PASSED WHEN I HEARD THE NOISE OF metal striking metal underneath the cruiser. I opened my eyes and saw pale, murky light coming through the fogged-over glass. Somebody’s fist beat hard on the driver’s-side window, and I slid up the bench seat and wiped away the condensation. Bright lig
ht poured through the cleared spot, and I squinted my eyes against it.

  Jimmy Hall’s face pressed itself against the other side of the glass. Both his eyes were already dark and swollen, and the bridge of his nose was split open and bleeding from where I’d cracked him with my pistol. I sat and stared at him, and I wondered if he had anything in his hands that I couldn’t see.

  “Pop your clutch and drop it in neutral,” he said.

  I was too shocked to move, and I watched him turn and walk back to his truck, where I lost him in the glow of the headlights. A second later his truck’s engine roared and I felt something tug at the front of my car. I killed the engine and put it in neutral and opened the door and struggled out into the snow. The cruiser lurched in the ditch behind me.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled over the noise. His headlights hid his face behind the windshield, and I ran toward his truck and beat on the hood. The snow was near blinding, but I could make out his face once I was through the light. He stared at me through the glass. “I don’t want your help!” I hollered.

  Behind me I heard the frame of the cruiser groan as the towline popped from the snow and cinched tight under the strain. Hall slowly backed the truck away from me and the high beams hit my eyes again and all I could see was the bright light through the falling snow. I stood and stared into his retreating headlights.

  The cruiser’s undercarriage breached the top of the ditch, and the frame scraped against the packed snow. I turned just in time to see it loose itself and roll out of the gully and into the road. When it did, the towline swung with it and tore through my pants leg and ripped into my thigh. I fell to my knees. My hand went toward the pain, and I could feel where my pants were already warm with blood.

  The engine on Hall’s truck geared down, and he put it in park and stepped out onto the road. I scrambled to my feet and saw his silhouette coming toward me in the light. He stumbled past me and bent to the ground and unhooked the towline.

  “I had an extra key,” he said on the way back to his truck.

  “I didn’t need your help.”

  “You got it anyway,” he said. He cranked the winch, and I watched as the line slid along through the snow and came to a stop at his bumper. He fastened the hook to the line. “You broke my nose,” he said.

  “I wish I’d shot you,” I told him.

  “I don’t expect that to change now,” he said.

  “It won’t.”

  “I didn’t expect it would.”

  He looked up, and we stared at each other and I realized how quiet it was once the roar of the truck and the sound of our voices had died away. I walked to my car and climbed inside and cranked the engine and put it in reverse. My thigh throbbed from where the line had torn into my skin. I heard Hall yell for me to stop, and I turned and looked out the windshield. He stood in the light of my high beams.

  “I’m sorry about your boy!” he hollered. I sat and looked at him, and then I turned my cruiser around and headed down the mountain.

  WHEN I GOT HOME, I PARKED AT THE TOP OF THE DRIVEWAY AND stared at the house. All the lights were off inside, and it was silent. I stepped out of the car and leaned onto the hood and listened to the engine cool. Snow fell down into the collar of my coat, and my hands felt heavy and cold. A lamp turned on in the bedroom and light slowly flooded the house, and I knew Sheila was inside moving from room to room on her way down the stairs to the door. She stepped onto the porch and called my name, but I couldn’t figure out how to open my mouth and answer her.

  She walked down the steps, and I watched her silhouette move across the snow-covered lawn against the bright light of the house. She stopped once to pull her robe around her and kick the snow from her slippers. She reached me and looked into my face.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked, and then she waited for me to say something. She gave me a worried smile. “You’re going to be a snowman soon if you stand out here too much longer.”

  I looked down at her and tried to think of what to tell her first, but I felt like I’d been buried deep in the snow and that she’d arrived just in time to dig me out. I opened my mouth to speak, and I felt the cold air on my tongue and saw the heat from my breath rise like smoke before me.

  Adelaide Lyle

  TWELVE

  YES, I REMEMBER IT ALL: ELIZABETH AND LOTTIE COMING over from the church and showing up at my door just after dark on Sunday evening, Julie right there in between them, hardly able to stand up on her own. Them two getting her to lie down on the sofa in the front room and then taking me into the kitchen to tell me what had happened, and me asking “Why?” over and over, “Why? Why was that boy in the church again?” I tried my best to keep my voice low so Julie couldn’t hear it, but each time the question just got louder and louder because those two women didn’t have no answer for me. “Why?” And then all that fighting out there in the yard.

  It wasn’t but Tuesday morning, just two days later, that Sheriff Barefield came back to ask me all about them bringing Christopher over to my house after it had happened, and “Wasn’t it you who always watched those kids?” All I could give him was a “yes” to that question and nothing else, not because I didn’t want to but because there wasn’t nothing else for me to give. But if I’d have wanted to, I could’ve told that story from the very beginning, thinking back years and years ago to a night when I trudged up that mountain in the snow because Ronnie Norman’s truck wouldn’t go no farther. And now the sheriff coming here and sitting down in my kitchen all bucked up like a rooster, staring me in the eyes like there was something else to it, something I wasn’t telling him. Something I didn’t want to say. Like I couldn’t remember the look on Julie Hall’s face when that little boy crowned and I lifted the hood from his eyes: eyes as crystal clear as spring water and not a lick of fear in them. Clear like glass and him staring up at me without ever opening his mouth to cry. It seems like it was so long ago, but I remember it all. I may be an old woman now, but I can remember it all. I remember the very night he was born like it was yesterday.

  When I heard it, I sat straight up in bed.

  “What’s that?” I said, and wouldn’t you know there wasn’t a soul there to answer. Never had been nobody but me, but still there I was sitting straight up in my bed. “Who’s there?” I called like I expected an answer from a voice that hadn’t ever been there. I’ve lived alone just about all my life except for those years up on Parker Mountain with my great-aunt before she sent me off the mountain and down into town.

  There wasn’t a single time when I was little that I didn’t live with her in that old cabin that smelled like dried leaves and lavender in the winter and damp earth and bergamot in the hot summertime. She was a storyteller if there ever was one, and she’d shell beans into a patch quilt she’d spread out across her lap and talk about my dead mama and daddy like they’d just stepped out into the yard to check the sky for rain clouds. My only memory of my mama is a wispy shadow thrown against the cabin wall by candlelight, and in my mind my daddy is a black shadow blotting out the sun in a cleared field. But she brought them back to me and made sure I understood the lives that had come before my own.

  Her memory was sharp as a blade. She could remember the exact year of the best burley tobacco crop she’d ever raised, and she could tell you the name and lineage of just about every person up on Parker Mountain, even though most of them folks had less than nothing to do with us. She’d shuck bushel after bushel of corn in the candlelight and tell me the names of all the animals on her daddy’s and granddaddy’s farms. I’d work alongside her and listen to her talk as far into the night as she’d let me. I was just an itty-bitty little thing, even for my age, and she was the oldest person I knew, and I thought she must have been the oldest person who had ever lived.

  It was 1919 the year I left her, the year she made me go. Late spring, and hadn’t nothing come up out of the ground fit to eat, and Lord knows we didn’t have no cash money and nothing to trade with. There wasn’t much to g
o around for none of us then.

  “You need to get off this mountain and down to the city and get yourself set up to a job,” she said. “We ain’t going to last the summer through on what we got, and besides, it’s time you lit out on your own. Girls your age been give away by now and laid up with a baby or two and a piece of land all theirs.”

  I was fourteen, and I didn’t know any better; I just figured she wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t know we’d have both probably died had I stayed the summer through.

  Now, I had me a choice to make between Marshall, which is the county seat, Burnsville over there in Yancey County, and Asheville. Well, I’d been to Marshall once or twice before and back then there wasn’t too much there but the courthouse and a couple of feed stores and the like, and I figured Burnsville wasn’t much better than that, and knowing what I know now it would’ve been a long, tough trip there. I decided I’d go to Asheville, and I can tell you this, and this may surprise you when you hear it, but that’s the farthest away from Madison County I’ve ever been. I ain’t never had no reason to go no farther.

  BUT IF I DON’T REMEMBER COMING INTO THE CITY THAT SATURDAY evening in the spring with all those trees budding along the French Broad River, that man on the wagon that carried me in from Weaverville pointing to that brown water and saying “We had us a flood here three years ago,” and then I looked out on the banks and seen some of them market and warehouse buildings all tore up from the river rising like it did and carrying with it all them tree limbs and all that trash and whole heaps of other stuff from downstream.

  We came in the city from the north, and if that wasn’t the dangdest thing I’d ever seen, taking that cart through the farmer’s market on Lexington Avenue and all that food looking like it had just been ripped off the vine and all them chippies there wearing their makeup and their powder and waiting on them farm boys to close up their stands and pack up their wagons and spend a little time with them before lighting back out for the country. We rode right through there, and my head almost fell off with all the looking around I done.