Traveling Light

by Lynne Branard

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Millie replied and then let it go after that.

  I know she thinks Sandra and I are still close. She watched us grow up, watched how I took care of my little sister, how I learned to cook the family meals and looked out for her when we walked to school, how I set her on the handlebars of my bike and rode to Martha Day’s dance studio on Main Street until I could drive and then took Daddy’s car three days a week to Raleigh to get her to dance classes so that she could compete in contests and win all those pageants.

  My neighbor thinks having a sister must be the best thing in the world because she only had brothers; and for some reason the image of Sandra and me standing side by side in front of Daddy, dressed in new Easter dresses, holding hands, smiling even though our mother was dead and gone, is the picture she likes to keep in her mind.

  Millie doesn’t know that Sandra learned how to fill up a room and take over a place by the time she was eight years old, how she charmed her way into getting things from people—money, lessons, clothes, grades, engagements—how she thought I actually enjoyed doing everything for her, and how, even though she claims differently, she really doesn’t remember our mother. My elderly neighbor, wrestling with her own demons of depression and despair, doesn’t know about the fight we had when Sandra was a freshman and I was a senior. She doesn’t know how my sister stole away the only boy I ever loved, how rotten she is to Daddy, how she shrugs away my requests and never even realized how broken was my heart. Millie likes to think I’m happy, and why should I take that away?

  I glance over again at the box, at the remains of Mr. Roger Hart, the stilled butterfly carved on top, and wonder if he had siblings. I wonder if there’s some sister in New Mexico who doesn’t know what happened to the ashes of her loved one and who will weep at the sight of the box, who will clutch the remains to her chest and tell me a story of some break-in after the funeral or some crazy mishap of boxes and belongings and how she lost the ashes and thought they would never be found. She will say again and again how much it means that I found them and that I returned her beloved family member to her and promise her eternal gratitude and we will exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses, promising to stay in touch.

  Or maybe there’s a brother who will open the door, firmly plant his feet, pull back his shoulders, and tilt his chin, keep his hands loosely at his sides, smile the perfect smile, asking first if there is some compensation that will be given along with the ashes or if there were other items recovered from the storage building. Once these issues are cleared up and it’s explained that there is nothing else to hand over, he’ll exchange a warm and confident handshake with me and tell me that as much as he’d like to become involved, this is really not the best time for him and it is actually better handled by someone else. There will be the most sincere expression provided with the apology; but in the end, since there is no benefit, there will be no assistance offered.

  This thought crosses my mind and I realize that I am still slightly bitter regarding my sister. Even though what happened between Sandra and me occurred a very long time ago, I have not let it go.

  I pass the second exit into the town of Asheville, the one I’d normally take to get to my sister’s house. I would then drive along the state highway north for six or eight miles to the gated tree-lined driveway that winds up the side of a hill. There the grand estate sits, overlooking the city where she still thinks she reigns as queen, married to her king. There I’m sure I would find her eating her chef-prepared dinner with her perfect husband and her perfect children. She’d be drinking her second glass of wine and watching herself in the gilded mirror she hung next to the table, so approving of how it all turned out, so sure it was all by her own doing.

  I hit the gas without even looking north.

  “I hope it’s a brother,” I say to the box as I drive west, chasing the setting sun. “I imagine we’ll do better if there are just men involved.”

  I think about Daddy and the things he has told me about his family, especially about his twin brother and how hard they fought as children. How they gave each other black eyes, knocked out teeth, and pummeled each other all the way through their childhood and adolescence, but managed to build a genuinely good relationship later. I think about how he came to love his sibling, how he still calls Uncle Mack every Sunday evening to talk about sports and cars and anything else that happens to come up, how he seems happy and relaxed after making that contact every week.

  I glance in the rearview mirror, watch the cars taking the exit and heading in the direction of Sandra’s fancy house.

  “If I find a female sibling and if she’s got something against you,” I mutter out loud, “well, I’m afraid I can’t help you with her. Girls got their own ways to pummel.”

  I reach over and tap the top of the box.

  “You’re on your own if we find a sister.”

  chapter five

  FIRST stop is Newport, Tennessee, just across the state border from North Carolina, west of the Great Smoky Mountains, east of Knoxville. It’s a town defined more by the east-to-west interstate traversing through the middle of town than it is by the Pigeon River that first brought the European settlers to the area in the early 1800s. And it’s big enough to have hotels that are pet friendly but small enough that I won’t be stuck in some horrible commuter traffic when I leave in the morning. Newport is situated along the banks of that river and near the confluence of the French Broad, the Pigeon, and the Nolichucky in an area once known as the Forks of the River but now simply referred to as Douglas Lake, created in the 1940s. There’s a railroad station, a county courthouse, and a very rich history of moonshiners and shady lawmen. There is also a nice diner near the Holiday Inn that serves sweet iced tea and fried pickles and has just been designated “Cobbler Capital of the Smokies,” according to the write-up added to the menus at all the tables.

  I decide on the blueberry cobbler, since it’s too early for peaches and a little late for strawberries; and with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, I am happy to give them my vote to keep their cobbler capital title. The waitress, however, informs me the ballots have already been collected for this year’s contest. The next one doesn’t start until blackberry season, sometime in the fall.

  “What comes after that?” I ask.

  “Nothing until the cherries,” she replies, looking a little gloomy. “There’s a cobbler lull in the winter,” she adds. “We sometimes freeze the fruit and make a mixed berry one in December; but nobody is really interested. We’re all about the pies after Halloween.”

  She’s a young girl, not yet twenty, I’d say, and her name tag reads Blossom, which I find a little dehumanizing. As a salesperson, she seems to know her product better than most; and as a member of the food service industry, she is quick and professional. If I were a food writer or a restaurant critic, I’d give her four out of five stars just for not calling me honey when she took my order and for the way she can carry four plates on both arms without any apparent effort. Blossom is no lightweight.

  Daddy used to have a restaurant review in the paper. He rated places with little fork icons instead of stars and for a few months we got to eat for free at every place in Clayton and Smithfield. We’d go to the downtown Denny’s for breakfast, Dizzy’s Hot Dogs for lunch, and sometimes even dress up a little and hit the steak house for dinner on the weekends. It wasn’t long, however, before he ran out of local places to appraise. And when he contacted restaurants in one of the other towns—Raleigh or Durham, for example—no one really cared about how many forks they got in the Clayton Times and News, and it got to be too expensive to run the reviews. Besides, we both gained ten pounds and knew we needed to eat more meals at home.

  After a while Daddy ditched the restaurants for movies. And we still get to go to the cinema for free. He prides himself on giving good critiques, although some of the Baptists have complained that he sees too many R-rated movies
and they want a more “family-friendly” column. But Daddy refuses to waste his time watching “cartoons,” as he likes to call the G-rated films. I think he’s about to hand it all off to Dixie, who has been practicing how to write quick and informative reviews and who happens to have a two- and a six-year-old. It would be one more writing assignment he’s given away this year. I know something is going on with him; I just don’t know what and I haven’t asked. I guess I’m afraid to hear what he’d have to say.

  “You want some more tea?” Blossom is standing behind the counter but close enough to my table that I know she is talking to me. She’s pretty in a bohemian kind of way, long hair, no makeup; she’s the kind of girl I always wanted to be.

  I shake my head. “The caffeine will keep me up,” I reply. “I’m hoping to get a good night’s sleep, since I always have trouble when I’m away from home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “East of here, North Carolina.”

  She nods. “You’re not that far from home, then,” she says.

  “Not yet,” I reply, thinking she will probe a little more.

  “Warm milk?” she asks, not probing at all.

  “You serve warm milk?” The suggestion surprises me.

  She shrugs. “Some of the truckers say it works after driving all day. They’re all trying the melatonin and the tryptophan, green tea, warm milk—anything natural, since there’s a lot more random drug testing now. After that famous comedian got messed up when his limousine was hit by a booted Walmart trucker, the drivers say they get cupped in every state.”

  I assume “cupped” means giving a urine specimen, but I don’t ask. There are other diners sitting near me and I doubt they want to hear the word “urine” while they’re eating their fried pickles.

  “You serve a lot of truckers?”

  “That’s our bread-and-butter,” she answers.

  “Or cobbler?” I reply, smiling.

  “You’re funny.” She cocks her head when she says this and I get the sense that she really thinks I am.

  “No, not really,” I say, wondering why I’m disclosing a truth of my personality to a young waitress named Blossom, wondering if being on the road has already loosened me somehow.

  She heads around the counter and is now standing next to my table.

  “Where you heading on your trip?”

  “West to New Mexico,” I answer.

  She nods slowly, like a woman with more years of life experience than I had first imagined. I notice a tattoo on the inside of her arm. It looks like a stem with small green leaves wrapping around her biceps.

  “I’ve been there. Went with a vanload of hippies last spring. Rainbow Family,” she adds.

  “I’ve heard of them,” I respond.

  Jasper, a crusty old journalist from New York who moved to North Carolina and settled in Clayton about ten years ago, covered them in the seventies. I’ve heard about them for years. Mostly young, mostly harmless, traipsing about the country spreading goodwill. Blossom looks like she would have fit right in.

  Jasper won a Hillman Prize for the reporting. I read the piece and I thought he was fair and that the writing was decent although not exactly what I would call “award winning.” He sometimes handles the features for the paper when Daddy and I are swamped with some national news story that everybody expects will be covered.

  Jasper said he lived with the Rainbow Family for six months, which I guess is investigative reporting at its finest. Truthfully, I always thought Jasper stayed with the hippies more for the “free love” than he did for the writing; but that’s just my prejudice showing. Jasper just never struck me as a committed journalist and he seems to talk about sex a lot.

  “We camped along a river up near Colorado. In fact, it looked a lot like it does here.” She smiles. “But it wasn’t here,” Blossom notes as she buses my table.

  “How long were you gone?” I move my arms so she can pick up my plate and the napkins I balled up and placed near my knife.

  “Just a few weeks,” she replies, taking away my glass and utensils.

  She holds the dirty dishes in her hands, peering out the window facing the highway, reminiscing, I suppose.

  “It was fun in the beginning,” she tells me. “We’d drive awhile and then camp out under the stars. We cooked everything on a campfire, told stories, sang all these old folk songs, smoked some good weed,” she says, nodding, looking like she doesn’t care at all that she’s confessing to a crime.

  “But in the end, you missed Newport. You missed your home,” I say, thinking I know how this chapter ends, thinking that she’s standing next to me because her hippie trip didn’t work out and that the moral of her story is that there is no place like home.

  “Nah, it wasn’t that,” she answers. “I was pregnant when I left Tennessee. Didn’t know it until I was halfway up to Washington State.”

  The change of direction surprises me.

  “Not really fair for a baby to be born in a van. Figured I’d get a little more help here than I would living with people who don’t own anything more than sleeping bags and Grateful Dead CDs.”

  “And your baby?” I ask, thinking she’s probably going to pull out her phone and show me photographs.

  “Never happened,” she says with no real emotion. “Lost him the first night I got back.”

  I glance away. I have always been unnerved by loss.

  “Best thing, really,” she adds and I’m not sure if she’s telling the truth or just trying to ease the awkwardness that has now edged between us. “I figure I’m much better at pushing cobbler than I am at being a mother right now.”

  I turn to her and smile. I like Blossom. There is more to her than I have given her credit for.

  “I’ll have the milk,” I tell her, happy to take her suggestion.

  “It’ll help,” she says as a final assurance and walks away.

  chapter six

  IT is Casserole who wakes me up just as the sun is rising in the east over the Smokies. He is sitting next to me, his hot breath blowing on my face. I blink and yawn and suddenly remember that I was dreaming of a book of pictures, a photo album of sorts, the pages flipped and turning too fast for me to discern them. I was asking questions even as I dreamed. Are these pictures of people I know? Are they from the archives of the paper?

  I merely watched as the pages turned, detached from the book, detached from what the book represented, harboring very little concern or emotion regarding the faces or events I did not recognize. In my dream, I could tell that the album clearly represented a well-documented life but not an especially interesting one.

  “Well, I told you to get me up before seven,” I say to my companion as I sit up and glance over at the clock on the bedside table. It’s just after six. “But I think you might be taking your job just a bit too seriously.”

  Casserole turns and looks toward the door and then looks back at me. He has waited long enough and needs to go outside.

  My old dog was already three-legged when he showed up at my back door. He was skinny and weary, but still retained a certain amount of confidence that he was actually where he was supposed to be. I sat with him for a few minutes, rubbing his head, talking to him while assessing his physical condition. He wasn’t bloody and didn’t seem to be hurt; and after giving him some water and a little something to eat, I drove him over to the vet’s office.

  After a thorough examination, Clifford Hill, Clayton’s only veterinarian, seemed to think Cass was born this way, that the smooth tiny stump that should be a right front leg was not the result of an injury or fight. He thought then and still thinks that the dog is way too adept at movement and survival, that this handicap is clearly too much a part of his canine identity to have been a recent occurrence. He said Casserole just seems naturally accustomed to an unsteady life and that his knack of achieving balance is a
true lesson for us all.

  I figure our veterinarian talks this way because of his background in ministry. Clifford went to seminary and was planning to be a priest, when he realized he wasn’t so comfortable serving in a religious setting. He said he had always believed that the church provided a sanctuary for authentic relationships and a place for people to be their true selves, but then he came to the realization that this was not the case at all. Concerned and bewildered, he tried to talk to his mentors and to the other seminarians about this, but they all dismissed him as taking things too seriously; some even suggested that he was just plain crazy; and he eventually dropped out of seminary and went to veterinarian school.

  He says his vocation is better fleshed out now that he cares for animals; and I’ve learned from the town gossip mill that even though he no longer claims to report to a higher authority, he decided to keep a vow of poverty, living in the back of his office, giving most of the money he makes to animal shelters, and providing free care to those who can’t pay. And apparently he maintains his vow of chastity, too, since it’s well reported that he’s resisted more than a few advances from the single female pet owners in town who seem terribly concerned about their recently acquired kittens and puppies, apparently needing to take them to the vet weekly for an expert consultation or some kind of examination.

  “You don’t have to guess about animals,” he told me once, after Old Joe had come home from the fight with a rooster that left him blind and I had rushed him to Clifford’s office. “They’re loyal. They don’t hold grudges; and they understand the notion of kindness.”

  I watched as he held my cat in his arms to place the IV into his leg, so masterful with his tenderness.

  “Al, you can learn a lot from Old Joe,” he said as he laid him on the table to attend to his injured eyes.

  “Well, I’ve certainly learned that a chicken can whip a cat,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to make a joke. I was attempting to hide the fact that I was desperately afraid I was going to lose my pet. I could feel the red splotches forming on my neck and face and knew that I was nervously shifting my weight from side to side as I tried to catch my breath.