by Billy Coffey
“That they dead.”
She plopped down beside me and shrugged the snake away. It landed on the ground near my feet and twisted like a toy about out of batteries, pink mouth sliding open like a yawn. Fear kept me from running. Fear and pride.
“You from the city.” A statement, not a question. “I ain’t never knowed nobody from the city. But you best be goin’ on now.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m a Dullahan. My daddy’s Earl and my momma’s Constance. We live down in Shantytown.” She pointed to the sea of trees between the hill and the mountains.
I waved out toward the town side. “I live over there.” Not looking, not with that snake laying at me.
“That’s why you better go. Don’t nobody from Camden talk to a Shantie. It’s unheard.”
“But we are talking,” I said.
The way she stared at me, so full and complete, scared me even more than the snake between us.
“Because you got to know you’ll get in trouble. Or me. Earl finds out I’m up here talking with a town boy, he’ll skin me. Earl Dullahan’s fierce.”
“I don’t want you getting in no trouble,” I said. “I’ll go on.”
“No, you have a turn. It’s pretty, ain’t it?”
I said it was awful pretty, but I wasn’t talking about no hill.
She turned with a wave and a “Seeya,” skipping over the ruts and ridges with a sureness I could not fathom. I looked down as the snake quit its flopping and I called out, saying she’d forgotten it.
“You can keep it,” she said, “so long as you don’t tell nobody you seen me. Okay?”
“What’s your name?”
“Michaela,” she called.
“I’m Owen.”
“Good to meet you, Owen.”
I watched the pines below claim her and then sat upon that hill until suppertime to see if Michaela would return. Next morning I walked up there again and laid a handful of dandelions, tied into a bunch by their stems, beneath the oak. That afternoon the flowers were gone. In their place was a small chunk of quartz set in the middle of a finger-drawn circle.
The next days brought the same and the same. We came to the hilltop all that summer, sometimes finding each other and other times only a rock or a tangle of dandelions the other had left behind. Then, right about the end of July, Michaela and I agreed we’d meet daily after the sandlot games were done and before my folks got home. Sometimes I’d get there first. Most times she’d be waiting, and those would be the best days of all because she would smile at my coming. She’d say I shouldn’t be there and then scoot over so I could sit beside her.
She was Micky to me by the dog days of August, when you are fooled into thinking summer will last forever. Then came the first edges of autumn and rumors of school and a sadness creeping between us.
“We can’t talk to each other at school,” she told me, this less than a week before summer’s end. “Dullahans is soiled. ’Sides, you’re from town and I’m a Shantie. Can’t nobody know we’re friends, else we won’t be friends at all.”
I struggled with that logic but found no hole in it. Micky was right about the Dullahan name. It was spoken in town only with either a sneer toward her daddy, Earl, or a sad shake of the head with regards to her momma, Constance, a good woman gone tired by a life spent chained to the wrong last name. Dad spoke of the Shanties as a crop ripe for spiritual harvest. Momma would go silent whenever those of the Pines were mentioned, staring into her plate of supper or cup of coffee.
“We can still meet here,” I said. “After school. Momma’s never home until six. My dad too. That’s like two hours almost.”
Her hand slipped into mine, birthing a shiver no friend should give. She said, “Okay. After school, then. And if one of us can’t come, the other’ll wait. Like an hour. To make sure. We’ll leave a marker for the other to find so we’ll each know we been here. I’ll leave a rock, you some dandelions. Or grass if it’s the wintertime. Only knot it so’s I know it’s you, okay?”
It was more than okay. Micky and I may not have met every day, but it was most, and as one year turned to two and three, our time together became a constant in my life second only to baseball. I guarded those stolen hours between the end of school and suppertime as treasure. Fool that I was, I believed that secret could be kept forever. But two young children running off every evening, even for a little while, are bound to raise suspicion.
It was Constance who spied us together first. She followed her daughter one afternoon not long after my first year of school in Camden began, watching us from a spot just inside the Pines. The next morning she sought out my momma. Turned out the two were already familiar with one another, the library being one of the few places in Camden where the poor could get something free. I don’t know if Micky ever realized how close our friendship came to ending that day; she never knew of our mothers’ conversation, and Mom made me promise I would never tell. According to her, “Constance only wanted me to know where all you were going, Owen. She begged me not to put an end to it, so I won’t. You just don’t get in any trouble with that girl, and don’t you ever tell your daddy.”
“You ain’t mad?”
“There’s no sense folk not having a thing to do with other folk just because of what they are or aren’t. I’d’ve listened to a thing like that, you’d’ve never been born. And besides, Constance thinks you’re about the only thing holding that poor girl to this world.”
And maybe I was, if only for a while. Micky had found out about her momma’s bad heart only months before. Constance was sick, Earl no more than a mean drunk, and I the only friend Micky had. She kept to herself in school as one more poor kid among many, wearing the same cutoffs and white tee every day except for when the snows blew down from the mountains, at which point Constance would take her to the Goodwill for a threadbare coat. And Micky was right—Camden kids and Shanties may have been thrust into the same school, but they did not mingle, not ever, nor did their mommas and daddies in town. Least of all did any in Camden have a thing to do with a Dullahan, who were to a person considered plain white trash.
But what my momma never knew, what maybe no one but Micky ever did, was how much that plain white trash out of Shantytown kept me in the world too.
-6-
After batting practice everyone retreats to the clubhouse for a last little bit of ease. Players mingle and gripe about their slots in the order or how they are not in the order at all, how the Yanks are throwing Mussina tonight and he always gives us a rough time. The card game at the center table is intense. Someone turns up one of the televisions to help drown the noise of the crowd above.
From the chair in front of my locker I spot Country sitting off to himself. He wears a smirk as he watches the goings-on, too tired or old to join in the games of youngsters. I want to go over there. Say I grew up watching him, even copied his stance all my junior year of high school until Dad asked why I’d started holding the bat so high off my shoulder, I’d never catch a low fastball. Instead, I only watch him, kept in place not by the awe of being so close to a genuine hero but by memory alone, and dig into the back pocket of my jersey pants. From there comes a small bit of quartz I hold aloft to let the facets play among the room’s lights. I have carried this rock for a dozen years whether to Youngstown or Bluefield or Bowie. Now New York. In many ways it is the one thing that remains of her. I may have come from Maryland in such haste that I forgot my toothbrush, but I would never leave behind Micky’s first gift to me.
I don’t know when our hours together grew to something more than friendship. The summer before we began high school. Maybe earlier. Maybe at our first meeting when I was twelve. It was the slow-building kind of love you can’t help but yield to. The kind that, looking back, seems all but inevitable. Our mothers’ blessing helped things along—Mom sneaking us into the house for summertime lunch when she was off and Dad was working. Constance scraping up enough to take Micky and me to the matinee in Mattingly aft
er I’d spent the morning with Travis and Jeffrey.
Yet it was the hill that drew us together as much as anything. It’s funny how a place can feel like home, like that’s where you belong. There was only that old oak above and the soft ground beneath, a whisper of wind laced with the scent of pines and wildflowers on some faraway peak, but it was all we needed. There our trials were left away such that nothing else existed, nothing mattered, and that was a lie Micky and I would do just about anything to believe. On our hill I was overcome by a sense of time and place stripped to their barest elements. It was a thing I could manage only in bits and pieces on a ball field. Leaning back into my stance and feeling the barrel of the bat lowering, counting the stitches as the ball left the pitcher’s hand to judge their spin and direction. But it was always the fleeting sort of peace when I was at the plate. Never the lasting kind, not even now.
“I tell you something?” she asked me once, this during the long summer before we started at Camden High. “I think God sent you. I never did believe in God. Ain’t no church in Shantytown”—looking down over the slope of our hill toward that sea of pines—“Daddy says God won’t go there. But I think God comes here, and I think He brung you with’im.”
“Only reason I first come up was to find an arrowhead.”
“You can think that. But I think He knew I needed somebody. Don’t matter up here I’m from the Pines and you’re from town, Owen. This is our spot.” She moved a piece of blond hair behind her ear and took my hand, pointing with the other out where the Blue Ridge rose tall and regal. “How long you think it took to make something like that? Billion years, I bet. Bet it took a million more for all them pines and wildflowers to grow on every ridge and holler just so we can smell this sweet wind. Probably it was a thousand years to make this hill for that wind to climb up, a couple centuries to make this oak so the wind can sing through.”
I said, “I ain’t never thought of that.”
“Well, I have. And you know what I think? I think all that creating was did for us alone. Just for you and me to have this little while. And I think maybe you better kiss me now, Owen Cross, or else I’ll burst.”
And so I did, right there and then so as not to disappoint a God who’d spent so much time doing all that making for us. It was a tangle of lips and teeth that felt awkward but so utterly fine that Micky and I kissed again after and every time we came to the hill from then on out, and I don’t know if that’s what you call love but it’s close. To us we were held together by a bond unbreakable, and the forbiddenness of what we had only grew our passion more. We kept ourselves secret all through high school until that terrible summer of 1990. There was no choice otherwise. My father would never allow a girl to come between him and the future promised through his son. The scandal of a townie boy like me, golden and destined for greatness, mixing with the plain white trash of a Dullahan girl would be too much for either of our families to endure.
What held us was the small promise of a few hours on the hill and the bigger one of the years to come. By my senior year I had signed a full baseball scholarship to Youngstown State, Ohio, which may as well have been darkest Africa to a people whose business rarely took them away from the valley. The Camden Record carried a nice article. Mom saved it along with the picture (me, Dad, Coach Stevens, and Youngstown’s head coach, a muscled ex–minor leaguer named Frank Solis). From there it would be a quick road to the minors and the major leagues. And Micky would be coming with me. I was going to take her away from everything.
-7-
Until that summer I had only been to Shantytown once, when Constance Dullahan’s heart finally gave out. Micky was the one who found her sprawled out in the front yard. The day’s mail had blown from Constance’s hand like so much chaff. That was the first time my trips to the hill almost got me in trouble. We had only a few hours together before Dad got home, but I couldn’t leave Micky there in such mourning. She clung to me and wouldn’t let go. Daddy near skinned me when I got home, saying he was near to calling Sheriff Townsend. Momma was the one calmed him down. She told him getting out in the fresh air never hurt anybody, and she said the same for the next three nights so I could comfort the girl she knew I loved.
News came out of the Pines of Constance’s death and funeral. Mom made Dad’s favorite supper of pork chops and grits. She fawned over the exploits of his day and nodded in agreement when Dad said it isn’t education kids need these days but the Lord, then took that opening to give her speech.
“They’re laying Constance Dullahan to rest tomorrow. Poor woman loved her Flannery O’Connor, though I expect she understood little of it.”
Dad humphed.
“Think I may go down there. For the service.”
“To Shantytown?”
“Be the Christian thing, Paul. Don’t you think?”
“Ain’t no wife a mine stepping into the Pines by herself, Greta. And I cain’t go with. Got to get the field ready for the game.”
“I’ll take Owen then.”
I wore the only tie I owned, a red one with blue stripes Mom said would suffice so long as I kept my shirt tucked. The knot in my throat felt to tighten that whole way, poking at me like a fear. Not far along Route 340, Mom turned right onto a narrow strip of road hidden by a tangle of briars to one side and a thick stand of pines to the other. A fog of gravel dust engulfed the car. The only marker in that place of dead fields and withered trees was a bullet-riddled sign that read 25 MPH. Above us sat a wide sky empty of even the crows and carrion birds.
All I had ever known of Shantytown had been told by Micky, and only from the vantage point of our hill. Names mostly, people and roads, though none with any detail that painted living there as anything different from the rest of Camden. The stories told by my parents and kids from school declared it a bleak place of poverty and addiction—anything from moonshine to heroin could be had in Shantytown—where the only power greater than want was ignorance.
From our oak the place looked little more than a labyrinth of mud lanes hidden by pines as tall as buildings and thicker than a wall. Yet as Mom drove on, checking the directions Reverend Sebolt had drawn for her on a piece of library stationery, there was neither distance nor obstacle to keep me from beholding what so many in Camden chose to ignore. Past my vision rolled shacks and single-wides pitched in the final battles of a losing war against time and gravity. Dogs near feral pulled against thick chains wrapped around porch posts, screaming mad barks. Diapered children hid behind leafless trees. One boy no older than three answered Momma’s wave with a raised middle finger. An elderly woman stood in the knee-high weeds of her tiny front yard, cursing us while making shooing motions with her hands. Faces numb and dead of hope peered out from blackened windows opened to the hot breeze. Hulks of rotting cars. Piles of trash—old appliances, crumbling furniture, an overturned sofa. Creeping vines covered everything, as though the land sought to heal itself of some deep wound or merely cover its own shame.
I said to Momma, “This is how Micky lives. This is how they all live here.”
She turned at a cut in the narrow lane, studying the paper in her hand. Earl Dullahan’s truck sat just inside. Two shovels were propped next to the lowered tailgate. A small group of mourners were gathered in ragged Sunday clothes, though I paid them no mind. All I could consider was the slight rise of land through the windshield and the small clapboard cottage atop it no bigger than our woodshed. Never before had I seen Micky’s house. In all our years she had never described that place, nor given an account as to the hardness of her life. That she was poor needed no saying. Most in Camden were. But the hovel in front of me was of a poor I had grown up not knowing existed, and not merely because the windows were streaked with filth and the siding had begun to peel and the roof shingles curled like black scabs. The house looked wrong somehow, on some deeper level. Like sadness had distorted it as despair can a person. It spoke of a life beyond mere want, worse than disease. Shantytown was like a bruise on an apple that reached
all the way to the core. I wondered then if that was why we had all come that day. If such hopelessness had been Constance’s end.
“Lord,” Momma said. “This breaks my heart so.”
We got out of the car and made our way to the house as the Harper twins, Barry and Gary, stepped out from the open door and onto the porch. Their frayed jeans and plain T-shirts were dampened with sweat. One of them (I couldn’t tell which—not even Jeffrey’s daddy could tell them apart even though both boys worked at his grocery) waved at Mom with a dirty hand.
“Those boys bury the folk here,” she said. “Out in the Shantie cemetery.”
Earl Dullahan stuck his bearded face through the wide window from what I assumed was the living room, woozy-looking and drunk. I did not see Micky. Mom led me up the steps as the knot in me tightened. Stars flickered at the corners of my eyes as I entered the house. The lump in my throat pushed upward, wanting out. There was no place for it. All the paltry living room could hold was a small television and a worn green sofa standing on its end against one wall. The rest of that narrow space was taken up by the pinewood coffin set in the middle of the floor.
It’s the smell I remember, a cloying scent of cheap air freshener that could not mask the mold and rottenness beneath. The Harpers kept on the porch, gawping through the big open window like it was something they were watching on cable. Reverend Sebolt stood at the casket’s head. Earl swayed next to him. He swiped at his beard and stared at the box like he was trying to figure out how it had gotten there. And though my mind raced and my heart broke and it felt as though I would scream at any moment, that was all I could consider as well—how that front door was much too slim to maneuver a coffin through.
Reverend Sebolt clasped his Bible. He possessed the solemn countenance of a weary traveler through a world of dangers and snares. He asked in a low voice, “We ready, Earl?”
The man nodded slow, then turned to shout over his shoulder: “Get out here, girl. Folks is waitin’.”
