by Lisa Wingate
He knew that something was terribly amiss, though I attempted to keep the story from him. “I am merely in a yank to be on the road,” I said. “You disappear into the woods, Thomas, and I am left waiting and waiting. You promised to be back within twenty minutes.” Tom had been gone so long, I had begun fretting that he and the Klansman had run across one another in the forest and had an altercation. I was relieved to see him back at the car.
“I spent a bit longer than I thought,” he admitted. “There’s a confluence of springs and a waterfall down thataway. I took the time to stop a fella fishin’ and ask about it. I wanted to get the name so it could be in your notes for the guidebook.” He paused to look me over closely then. “But that’s not why you’re nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs, Alice. What happened while I was off yonder? And don’t think of lying to me over it. I’ll ask the girls, and you know they’ll give me the story anyhow.”
I had no choice but to relate the tale.
He was incensed, just as I had feared he would be. His impulse was to go after the man and come to fisticuffs with him to defend my honor.
“Don’t be foolish, Thomas,” I scolded, once again feeling more like a parent than a colleague. “The man assured me that there isn’t a law officer on this mountain he cannot count as a relative. We’ll end up hanging from a tree, pictured on one of those despicable postcards.”
All that had happened then came back in one crippling blow. The photographs from the postcards swirled before me, along with the Klansman’s words, his touch, my own imaginings of the terrible sensation of a rope snapping tight, cutting off air, suffocating life. I began weeping and covered my face, collapsing in on myself.
Tom gathered me up as I sobbed against man’s inhumanity to man. If Satan has toeholds that allow him to claw and climb from the underworld to this one, they lie in our failure to see ourselves in others.
I had no concept of how long I wept. When Tom finally helped me into the car, I was limp and wrung out. The girls were silent as little birds sensing something dangerous near the nest.
“Your mama’s just tired,” Tom said to Emmaline. “Don’t you worry about it a bit. She needs some rest and she’ll be shipshape again. You girls keep quiet awhile and watch out the window, find what’s pretty to see.”
I thought of the Apostle Paul’s words to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren … whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely … think on these things.”
Sleep came, taking me all at once and consuming me. For the first time, I wanted to leave this place and know no more of it. Even amid the dream mist, there were the sweet mews of newborn babies as Merry Walker’s midwives delivered them in the ancient ways, and then the groaning for breath as ropes tightened and feet dangled, nothing to hold them but air.
We camped that night in a glen by a stream, and even after pitching the tent and listening to Tom tell stories by the fire and catching fireflies to make lantern jars and tucking the girls into the rear seat and floorboard of the car to sleep, I lay staring out the window, sleepless. Above, a myriad of stars glittered between the dark circles of tall pines and maples. I attempted to ponder their beauty, but instead I found only a question, one I could not answer. How can God allow such abominations to flourish unchecked in this world?
The answer came in a question, Ruby.
God, in reply, asked, “How can you?”
If I had thought that my purpose in the Writers’ Project was to record the grandeur of this country, and to document ordinary lives, I now understand that my purpose here is at once much greater and much smaller. As small as the tale of one human life. As great as the moment when one man finally understands what it is to walk in the shoes of another. So many of the world’s ills could be cured if only we knew the joys and hardship of others’ paths.
It was in that thought I finally found solace and through the dark hours of morning drifted into a ragged sleep, lulled by the girls’ breathing, but awakening at every sound outside the car. The Klansman’s threats lingered with me, and they must have haunted Thomas as well. In the morning, I noticed that he’d slept with a pistol nearby. He was hollow-eyed and weary in a way I’d never known him to be. He seemed older than himself, his carefree step gone as we cooked a camp breakfast and made ready to travel. Before departing our little resting spot, he insisted upon giving me lessons with a pistol and his rifle.
“You oughta know how to use ’em both, Mrs. Lorring.” He delivered a long and stern look.
“I suppose I should.”
Ziltha, you’re aware, of course, that I have never touched a firearm in my life; Papa would not have considered such a thing either genteel or proper, but indeed, I wanted to learn. Given the unpredictable nature of our work here, it seemed prudent.
Perhaps I should not have shared so much with you, Sister Dear. Forgive my need to discuss these events with someone. Having no womenfolk of my own here, my letters are my only confidante. I feel certain that, living with an adventuring husband such as Benjamin, you will view my revelations with a practiced and practical eye. Please do not worry over me. I am well, and I am determined. I have been given a great commission in these mountains and I intend to fulfill it.
I am also, as it happens, a crack shot.
All my love,
Alice
“So what’d you think?” Clyde asked, and I suddenly realized he was leaning across the end table between his recliner and my mom’s. “How’s that for a tale?”
“Wow.” I lowered the plastic sleeves that held the letter. Clyde had insisted on sealing up the rebuilt pages before letting me have them. It was a slow process, so I’d worked downstairs a bit and then taken care of lunch while I waited, but instead of eating his sandwich as I read, Clyde had been finishing up another letter, all the while grumbling about how hungry he was.
“It’s interesting, but it’s … sad at the same time,” I admitted. “You know, when I read these things, it feels like it should be a couple hundred years ago, not just two generations back.”
Like Alice, I’d lived a fairly sheltered life, closeted in a safe, working-class neighborhood and attending a private school. I’d occasionally experienced prejudice in other countries as an adult but not the kind of blind hatred Alice described in her letter. I’d certainly never had to look it in the eye.
Clyde repositioned in his chair, letting out a harrumph as he returned to his process of painstakingly tweezing shreds onto one side of a plastic sleeve, then laying the other side over the top and stapling carefully around the paper’s borders to hold the letter together without the aid of tape. The floor around his feet was littered with maintenance-manual documents he’d torn from his old notebooks, so as to experiment with sleeves while I was gone.
“Not even a couple generations.” He eyeballed a shred of paper through his bifocals. “I remember that sort of thing. Colored fellas come home from World War II and figured they oughta have it better after that. They’d got some respect while they was in the service, had kinfolk die, earned a military paycheck, seen the world. They come home, and they wanted to be treated like soldiers. Over in Europe, they didn’t have to go to the back of the bus. They’d got a taste of livin’ like men.
“Some folks thought they’d gone real uppity. There was a way things’d always been, and a colored man who expected different or wanted to use the GI Bill for college … well, he flew in the face of it. I ain’t sayin’ everybody was thataway toward the coloreds. There was plenty, includin’ my daddy, who thought them Jim Crow laws was bad. There was plenty who’d seen the pictures and the films of the death camps over in Europe and couldn’t abide things they might’ve turned a blind eye to before.”
Peering over his bifocals, he picked up the box of scraps, shook it, searched for colors and textures that matched his current letter in progress. “I know my daddy wrestled with it in his job. In ’48, Truman desegregated the army, and that made folks real edgy. If my daddy recruited a
young colored kid and that kid’s family had been somebody’s sharecroppers since slavery days, like as not that farmer would show up on our doorstep, hotter than a pistol over it. He could see how it’d squeeze his own family’s livelihood if Daddy took them boys away for a stint in the service.
“There was a time we was livin’ down in Robeson County—Daddy was a recruiter there, too, and he was doin’ pretty well with the Lumbee Indians, but there’d been some problems with the Ku Klux Klan over the Indians race mixin’ with the whites. Daddy’d heard that Catfish Cole hisself was settin’ up a KKK rally right in the heart of Lumbee territory. Daddy was afraid there’d be bloodshed over it, and he went there to try to bring home some of the boys he’d signed. Turned out, Daddy ended up right down there in the middle of five hundred mad-as-spit Lumbees with guns and about a hundred Klan marchers. I remember that night my mama kep’ us all huddled in one room. She was scared to death Daddy wasn’t comin’ home.”
Leaning over the card table again, Clyde added another scrap of paper, then reached for his tweezers to maneuver it into place. “My pap was the kind of fella other men knew not to trouble with, though. They were scared of him. To tell the truth, I was too. You didn’t question him. You sure enough did mind what he said, though. Was a different time, back then. You knew better than to go around cryin’ about whether your daddy took you fishin’ or hugged you enough. You respected the man, and if he supported a family and didn’t drink and didn’t beat your mama, you thought you was a pretty lucky kid.”
He rolled a look my way. “How about you leave me be awhile, so’s I can eat my lunch and finish up this letter? Some afternoon coffee sounds good. Usually, this’d be my naptime by now, but you got me workin’.”
“All right. Sure. I’ll go take care of some things.” I purposely sidestepped Clyde’s comments about fatherhood. I had a feeling those were aimed at his kids.
If he knew I’d tried communicating with them, we wouldn’t be sitting here happily putting letters together.
The future was a slippery slope I wasn’t ready to approach again. For now, for this one rainy day, I wanted to enjoy the temporary cease-fire in the Excelsior war. The issue of Clyde was so complicated, it tied my brain in knots. It was easier to wander off to my room and call Denise to see how things were going at Bella Tazza. She still wouldn’t tell me where she’d come up with the rest of the money for the range hood, but things at the restaurant were back to normal.
“Listen, Whit, I’ve gotta run.” She shuffled me off the phone before I could dig down to the truth about the money. “We’re slammed with Saturday traffic, and I mean slammed. Looks like it’ll be a rush day.” She sounded more weary than excited, which only made me feel that much more guilty as we said good-bye.
I sat in the chair by the window, staring out at the water-slick rooftops of Manteo and thinking about Mrs. Doyne. I still needed to contact her about the rent. Closing my eyes, I tried to compose an explanation in my head. Maybe I’d tell her that the range hood had put us behind a little—would it be all right if the rent was just a couple days late?
This was so unfair to her. I hated taking advantage of her kindness.
With any luck, the museum would have some decisions for me soon … and some money.
My thoughts drifted, wandering back to the Captain’s Castle. I saw Mark on the porch and Rip in the yard … Joel’s arm wrapped in a white towel …
I imagined a teenage daughter who wasn’t there anymore …
The next thing I knew, I was waking up and three hours had flown by. I pushed to my feet, logy and confused, slowly remembering the morning, the plastic sleeves, Clyde.
When I returned to the living room, he was napping in his chair with Ruby at his feet. Another letter lay atop the table, completed.
I went to the kitchen and made coffee. The noise woke Clyde, and he gave the cup I brought him a curmudgeonly look. “Slowest coffee I ever had.”
“You looked like you were sleeping, so I left you alone.”
He handed the new sleeves to me, matter-of-factly. “There’s the next letter.”
“Thanks.” I turned again to Alice’s story, letting it carry me into the past, into what had been written long ago.
Dearest Queen Ruby.
“One of the times we was movin’ from place to place, I seen them doors in the mountain, like the ones that’s in the letter there,” Clyde interrupted before I could read any further. Knobby, red knuckles indicated the letter I was holding. “Don’t ’member where we was goin’, but I looked up the mountainside—it was someplace in Tennessee—and there was doors built right into the side of the mountain. I piped up and asked what was them doors.”
“Doors … in the mountain?” I couldn’t decide whether I was more compelled by Alice’s latest letter or the bait Clyde had just tossed out. The letter, I decided, could wait. Later, Clyde might not be in the mood to talk. Our cease-fire might be over.
“Sure enough. Way up high, a boy come out of one. There was no house there, just the mountain, with a door in it. That boy stood there watchin’ us go past. But then, when I tugged my sister’s sleeve and pointed, the boy was gone and there was just the door. My sisters joined in on the questions too. We were all tired of bein’ piled in the backseat of that old Packard by then. Daddy was in the mood for tale tellin’ that day, I guess—sometimes he got that way at home, but mos’ly he kept his talkin’ at the office, where it could win him recruits.
“‘Back in Depression days, folks lived in them caves,’ he told us. ‘If the bank took their house, they went out and found a cave someplace. They’d build doors on the front to keep out the critters and the cold.’” A bushy gray eyebrow lifted. “That’s somethin’, ain’t it? Folks livin’ in that way?”
“Yes, it is.” All those times my mother and I had driven through the mountains … somewhere hidden beyond the trees, were there caves with doors on them?
“Hadn’t remembered about my daddy tellin’ that story in years, either … not until Alice’s letter come along. I ’member, back then, I thought it’d be real fine to make a house in the mountain. I told my daddy we oughta try it, and my mama got the shivers. Her family had hid out in a cave at the end of the war in Germany, and they pretty near got buried alive when the bombs dropped. I didn’t talk about the cave houses anymore after she gave us that tale.”
Watching Clyde, I saw the young boy in the back of that car. I imagined all the history he would live in the coming years—history that deserved to be preserved and shared with his sons and the grandchildren he never saw anymore. Maybe if they knew what he had experienced, they would understand him better, be able to forgive. “You really should take time to write those things down. Or record them on a digital recorder. Those memories shouldn’t be lost.”
“Nobody cares about them old things.” He went back to work and left me to read Alice’s letter, but for a moment, I only stared at the words, my mind preoccupied with my stepfather’s life. I let my thoughts drift again to the crowded Packard as the breeze blew through and a boy stood on the side of a mountain, watching a car snake along an old two-lane below. That wouldn’t have been so very long after Alice and Thomas discovered those mountains with Emmaline and Able curled together in the backseat.
What had Alice learned about the doors in the mountain?
Dearest Queen Ruby,
It is a fine day, indeed! A miraculous day, and though you know me to have been generally more pragmatic and routine in matters of faith, I cannot attribute these recent events to anything other than divine providence. We have discovered the location of some Melungeons.
I do believe it was by God-given appointment that Able and Emmaline noticed two little girls playing in the river in their white chemises. We were proceeding slowly, as a man with a horse cart had the road. The trees were thick on both sides, a sharp peak to our right and a drop-off to the river on our left. I had threatened Tom with his life, should he try to bypass the horse and cart under these cond
itions, so we were creeping along, with Tom not in the most famous of moods.
This was the reason, this and the warm day, that the girls noticed the children in the river and the doors on the mountainside across the way. Had we not rolled down the windows, we would never have heard the little girls singing below.
“Look, Mama!” said Emmaline, pointing with great excitement, her arm dangling from the car. “Mama, there’s doors in the hill!”
I followed her line of sight, and in the next gust of wind I saw the doors and then the two girls in the river, splashing about like pixies. As we were making no time anyway, we pulled off the road at a covered bridge just down a bit, left the car parked in a wide spot, and hiked back upwater with Able and Emmaline in tow. Tom was afraid we could be disturbing a bootlegger’s camp, but with the children present and their clothing not the least bit ragged, I doubted that they were any such thing.
So, of course, they were not. What was found, when we had labored along the creek and then been led uphill by the children, was a village built into the hillside, not unlike the ancient pueblos you and I once admired in the mountains of Colorado. Ziltha, some forty souls live in the caves here! Various families reside two per cave in the larger ones, and some caves hold only one family. They have built doors across the openings to hold away the rain, snow, and wildlife, and this is how they stay.
Having lost their homes, farms, or employment in other places, they have found their way here and formed a community of survivors. They hail from many walks of life—some Cherokee, some mountain folk who were born in these hills, some who have gone away and come back. They live off the land, and what the land may provide. They fish, hunt, trap, and dry meat. They have, between them, two cows, which give eight gallons of milk per day. These are divided among the families.
