It’s 1969! Wanda wanted to scream. Perhaps there was something to her grandmother’s wish for her; maybe getting out of Cementville, at least for a while, would do her some good. Under a dark green canopy Wanda, in the dress she’d worn beneath her college graduation gown eight years before, sat in the front row of folding chairs draped in black sashes. The heft of Martha Goins’s thigh buttressed her on one side, Loretta’s brittle frame on the other. Evelyn’s coffin lay before them on the contraption that would lower it into the hole, a green cloth tastefully draped over the mound of excavated dirt. Several men who did odd jobs around town had been engaged to fetch the flowers from the funeral home and now the earthen mound was buried in great heaps of gladioli, lilies, and roses. Wanda’s unweeping face bloomed crimson then blanched ghostly pale then went to crimson again with the dawning awareness of her new position as official heir. Father Oliver’s somnolent voice was reading to them about ashes and dust. The priest seemed to have been rendered listless by the summer’s repetition of tracts from the Books of Wisdom and Job and Lamentations. Wanda let her eyes drift over the cemetery lawn studded with stone tablets in shades from white to deep onyx.
She thought once that she saw the lurking figure of Angus Ferguson behind a clump of wild bittersweet, and she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, whatever it was, phantom or pariah, was gone.
TEN
He had nearly forgotten what it was to be outside on those nights when a person can just about read the newspaper by the light of the moon. And here now Katherine Hume Juell lets him sleep on the screened-in porch that runs along the side of the house, same as he used to every spring, all the way until fall, or until he couldn’t feel his feet. Best is when a full bladder wakes him before dawn and he’ll stumble out into the yard and stare at the sky all filled with swirling red angels and powdered with a thousand stars. Naturally the Big Entire sees to it that the moon doesn’t light the place up every single night of the month, its very preciousness making it the best time of day or night, because that’s when the voices in his head settle to soft whispers and seem more concerned with naming planets and stars and nocturnal creatures than with ordering the likes of Carl Juell around.
He has long since quit apologizing for the voices, but he doesn’t go around talking about them very often either, since mention of it runs the risk of people jumping to conclusions: Oh, he’s psychotic or schizophrenic or what have you. Carl doesn’t waste his time or theirs, trying to disabuse people of that notion. At least his voices take turns. It can be crowded in there, but it’s reasonably orderly.
“Write it down, Uncle Carl,” his niece Maureen is always saying, “maybe these characters have stories to tell.” But Carl knows he would be doing nothing but sitting around writing stuff down all the time, once he got started. Maureen knows crazy and not crazy. “You just have a creative mind,” she says. Maureen is very smart for thirteen.
Carl is beginning to be glad his brother’s wife said yes, at least he is pretty sure she said yes, when the people at Eastern State Hospital suggested that Carl come live with them. Carl lived at the hospital a long time—not for as long as he can remember, as some people say, but only since right after his and Willis’s father went off to the barn and swung himself on a rope over to the Big Entire, which is plenty long enough ago.
The people at Eastern State, now they were crazy. The ones that could not perform chores on the hospital grounds drooped in big circles around the walls of the Day Room, forgoing the tables of bead stringing and jigsaw puzzles. When they managed to steal outdoors they continued with their circling. They could be found wandering in the woods barefoot at the very edges of the hospital grounds, as if they were being paid to measure out the tall chain-link fence. Carl does not often allow himself to think about them wandering the borders of the property that way, because it makes his feet hurt to remember his own wandering. He does not like to think about walking the blacktop over near Shakertown, miles from the hospital, with feet so cold he may as well have had knives laid blade up inside his slippers. When his feet went from violent hurting to being free of all feeling, the hills around him began to fade, and the air went so white there was nothing but the absence of all color crawling down his throat and suffocating him from the inside out. He was sitting on the sheer limestone palisades overlooking the Kentucky River when they found him. The hospital people said he was missing four days, although Carl believed they exaggerated. For Carl it ran together into one single long white night with black edges that curled in like bony fingers, like Cathy Earnshaw scratching on the window glass, crying Heathcliff! Heathcliff! It was the harshest December on record, the hospital people said. They said it was a miracle Carl did not die of exposure. After that it took a long time for things to get right again.
But now he lives out here with Willis and Katherine and Billy and Maureen, and he is good. Forty-two whole days he has been here and not a single episode. He won’t wander again because he does not want Willis to decide he is crazy. He does not want Willis to decide this is all a bad idea, allowing Carl to sleep here in the same house with his and Katherine’s children.
Oh, Carl does thank the stars that he is not crazy.
They had tried to teach him to pray in the hospital but he chose not to pin down an Almighty, because Carl did not particularly want to draw the attention of anything powerful enough to hold all this flotsam together. He secretly believed most people were foolish to assign names to such a force. As far as Carl was concerned, it was a thing too large to fit inside a name, although in his head he called it the Big Entire.
The day Carl was dismissed, Doctor warned the family that schizophrenia is a disease your mind keeps telling you you do not have, which is why people stop taking their medication. He spoke to Carl and Willis and Katherine very slowly, as if they were children. “It’s more common than you might imagine,” Doctor said. “We think perhaps one in a hundred people have the disease.” Which Carl thought was pretty scary. You could bump into any of these nut jobs at any turn in the road. Carl knows he is not supposed to call sick people nut jobs. They were always reminding him of that at Eastern State. Doctor said that scientists thought maybe it had to do with a person’s dee-oxy-ribo-nucleic acid. Then too there was a study that said if a woman had the influenza when she was pregnant, that might be what caused the illness, or if she took too much aspirin or if—But what was the sense thinking about the odds of all the stuff that can happen to you when you haven’t even been born yet, that’s what Carl was thinking—and perhaps Willis was thinking the same, because he interrupted Doctor and said that it didn’t matter now what caused it, we are family, end of story.
Now Carl has a job, a real job, not just raking and sweeping, although sometimes sweeping. He started last week with Rafe Goins, part-time three mornings a week with the A-number-one best auto-body shop in all of the county, maybe even the state if you believe the Yellow Pages. It was a job Rafe had been saving for his son Donnie Ray, but now Donnie and his dress uniform are rotting in the ground over at Holy Ghost Cemetery, his name on a brass plaque at the new veterans’ park next to the distillery.
Last Monday, while Carl and Rafe extracted parts and pieces from Willis’s Hupmobile that got ruined when a tree fell on Willis’s machine shop, Rafe told Carl his life story.
“Everybody’s got a story, Carl,” he said. Rafe said he had started on at Slidell Cement at sixteen, when the plant still employed a couple hundred people. “Everybody said how lucky I was to get on, seeing as they were cutting people right and left. Robots.” Rafe made a disgusted face. “Robots’ll ruin this country, Carl, you heard it here. Let me tell you, I was a caged animal. Got drunk every weekend. Started to have run-ins with the law every time I turned around. This was before Martha, of course.”
Rafe quit talking and after a long silence, Carl decided that story-telling was not Rate’s strong suit. He watched Rafe move in and out of the guts of the Hupmobile like a surgeon set on cleaning the cancer out of a hu
man being, even talked to it every now and then, half apologetic, as if the car was an elderly lady he was trying to make comfortable. Carl stood by with plenty of rags and a bucket of naval jelly and cleaned the parts as Rafe handed them to him.
They stopped for lunch and Carl ate the sandwiches Martha Goins would have been making for Donnie Ray if he had come home from the war breathing instead of in pieces. Carl had all but forgotten the thread of Rafe’s life story, when Rafe started in again.
“Well, after one particularly bad scrape with the law, I landed in the state pen. You probably remember that, Carl, you were still around then. Three years stamping out license plates. Heh heh, there you go buddy, you and me both can relate to that locked-up, bat-shit feeling. You know what I’m talking about!” He jabbed Carl in the ribs, and Carl realized Rafe was drunk. “Anyway, I got out, and my daddy sent me to a trade school in Tennessee. Eventually I came home, opened a little shop.” Rafe looked around him at the orderly, if a bit dank and greasy, building. The expression on his face was one of mild surprise. “And I commenced to build a name for myself. This here is a business that is the envy of many a local man.” He handed Carl a chrome-plated wheel disc. Carl polished it until he could see his own ungrinning face. He thought briefly about his father standing in the barn whistling, saying he never thought he would see the ’33 Victoria looking so fresh. Carl’s father and his uncle had maneuvered the Hup around gravel roads and up and down Council Street when they were young men on the prowl.
Carl and Rafe catalogued and labeled each piece of the automobile, and Rafe took out an advertisement to sell the parts in the Hemmings Motor News. The money didn’t mean near to Willis what the car did. But Rafe Goins delivered the Hupmobile Victoria a death with dignity, improving upon the death-by-lightning ending to the car’s own life story.
“It is service that really makes a business,” Rafe told Carl. “Don’t ever forget that. Customer satisfaction.”
Carl had to agree. Not every auto-body man knows that. People trust somebody that would take particular care with what other folks might regard as another useless heap.
Take Harlan O’Brien, Carl thought as he polished the parts. The town hero had not come home in quite the shape people needed or expected him to be. People didn’t get Harley. The only person who seemed really comfortable around Harlan O’Brien was Carl himself. It was a puzzle for a while, why he and Harlan got along so well. Carl could see how, when Harley first came back, everybody was in his face. Naturally they meant well, people trying to get him to talk the way they will. How had he been caught? Did the gooks torture him? Was there really such a thing as phantom pain when you get something cut off? And what about the rescue, the Special Forces’ blazing guns, and all that? They thought they were just being sociable and concerned, kind of a mixture of pity and hero worship. Carl recognized the looks on their faces, from long stares to secretive glances to bald scrutiny. The same way they looked at him. Behind the scrim of friendly curiosity, people were fearful Lieutenant Harlan O’Brien might pull a knife on them or commence with maniac shrieking at the drop of a pin. They had heard all about shell shock and were waiting—hoping?—for something big to happen. But Harley had neither use nor need for their compassion and their flattery. They caught his drift quick enough and eventually did leave him alone.
Now, some of them had gone so far as to suggest Harlan O’Brien was capable of worse than flying off the handle. Willis’s son Billy has told Carl of big talk at Pekkar’s. He’s too good for us, people said. Some were throwing around accusations. When they got drunk enough they made loud demands for an arrest. Gook woman or no, they said, murder’s murder. Some of them wanted to see blood. Levon Ferguson egged them on.
Carl and Harlan had been in school together, but they weren’t what you would call friends. Things felt different now though, and Carl burned with a tiny flame of hope that he had finally found someone to talk with about his theories.
LAST SUNDAY HARLAN SHOWED UP at the Juell house in his father’s truck, wondering would Carl want to go for a drive with him. As the two of them rode deep into the forest covering the eastern part of the state, Carl got the sense Harlan O’Brien was looking for something. Before long he figured out that it was big trees, the ones old enough and tall enough to dwarf the rest of the forest canopy. Carl admired Harlan’s knack for picking the finest specimens. Harlan said sitting under big trees helped him leave behind all the noise.
What noise is that? Carl wanted to say, but he was pretty sure he already knew. Carl suspected he wasn’t the only person with a boatload of blabbering going on inside him at any given moment. It was quiet there in the hills under the trees, but he wasn’t sure whether any place was quiet enough for minds the likes of his and Harlan’s. He did not care whether Harley’s voices were the result of a shitty prison camp in a faraway jungle or if they were the kind that might be located in a fancy psychiatrist’s notebook. He had not an ounce of envy for Harlan O’Brien. At least the voices in Carl’s head spoke English.
They located an obscure trailhead deep in the woods. Harley pulled his father’s farm truck off in a pillow of dust and turned off the ignition, keys jangling. Lemuel O’Brien had paid Rafe Goins to rig the farm truck with hand controls for his son so that he could operate the vehicle, what with the special fake foot and all.
Carl read the Forest Service sign. LOST MAN TRAIL, it said. They had traveled seventy or eighty miles and were at the northwestern edge of Daniel Boone National Forest. Lost Man Trail—what are we doing here? was what Carl wanted to know, but that was not the kind of question you asked somebody like Harlan O’Brien. Carl kept his face blank—a skill he had perfected at the hospital—so as not to give away his trepidation. Harley squinted at him, regardless of Carl not having said a word, and swung his stump down. He reached around and pulled his left foot off the jump seat behind him and strapped it on. They commenced walking.
They maintained silence a good distance up the trail, stopping occasionally to reconnoiter. Turkey vultures circled the cloudless sky over the valley. Carl cleared his throat, a bit too loudly. He swallowed big.
“I don’t always trust what I see in Nature,” he said. “It’s worth taking the time to make sure what you’re seeing is Nature making the choices, and not some A-hole from Texas draining Her blood and trying to pass it off as ‘stewardship’ or ‘conservation.’ Daddy taught me about that kind. He said you might as well accept there has always been greed, people stripping this and that out of the Earth. All of us share the guilt. The metal it takes to make a car, for instance, or wood for a house. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I accept that. I am not stupid. I went to school, not as long as some, but I know some things.” Carl glanced over at his companion. There was no way to tell if Harlan was getting the drift. He sucked in some more air and went on.
“Take a for-instance. Doesn’t it wrench you to watch a starling pester a downy woodpecker to death and finally throw that poor thing out of her nest and then stomp her eggs and throw her bald-headed babies on the ground to rot by their mama’s carcass? Some will say, Well, that’s Nature for you! But starlings are not natives to this place. Man in his infinite wisdom imported those thieving winged rats here from England.” He shut up for a bit, huffing some with the increasing arduousness of the climb. They rounded a bend. Before them lay a vista that made them stop. Carl put a hand on Harlan’s shoulder and spread his other arm, an embrace of the desolation below and about them, a fresh clear-cut hacked into red-brown hillside ripped and ridged by rain. Laid out wide like a young girl left behind by a gang of rapists.
“All that soil will soon run into the creek and off to the ocean far away from here. Those red roads you see slashed across there like streaks of blood,” Carl whispered, “they cut across the state. I hear they’re hauling off the tops of whole mountains.” His voice had taken on the tone of a so-called man of the cloth he’d heard under a tent once when he was a boy. “You don’t have to look too close to see the dif
ference. You wonder: Is it Nature doing the damage to herself, or is it fellers in some big skyscraper in Houston looking for coal or sometimes what they’re calling shale oil, or is it—” This was the part Carl hated. “Sometimes you got to look in the mirror and ask, Is it us?”
Harlan, silent, had his eyes pinned on something straight ahead, which Carl took as a motion to continue.
“That’s preaching though, and I’m no preacher. I don’t go in for God and the hereafter and whatnot, and whether or not we get multiple cracks at this mortal coil. I just know things. Harlan, I’ll say this about that and then I’m done.” Carl swallowed hard again and licked his lips. “There are all these highways everywhere out there in the air, see, layers upon layers of them, all at once going in every direction, connecting all our heads. Whizzing through every time and every age. In the top of all our heads there’s this invisible hole, tiny as a pinprick. Once in a while, some soul pulls off the highway and takes a sharp left-turn detour down the hole. The soul didn’t choose you necessarily, although sometimes I wonder about that part. Maybe I’ve got a flashing neon sign saying, Eat at Carl’s!! Stop in for Good Food!! Last Chance!! The soul pulls off. Me, I’ve come to expect these visitors. Everybody’s bound to have them, the way I figure. They just don’t talk about it. Afraid of people thinking they’re crazy. So mostly I keep my mouth shut too.”
And for the moment, Carl did. He’d gone on longer than he intended. He would keep his mouth shut and let this information sink into his friend’s poor addled brain and hope it gave him some relief. They walked for what to Carl seemed an eternity, even with his two working legs. A red-tailed hawk swooped across the trail not two feet in front of them, and they sucked in a breath at the same time, then laughed and shook their heads.
Cementville Page 15
