When Harlan was ahead of him by several paces, Carl heard him say, “Roy Stubblefield had it coming, Carl.” A minute or two went by, and Carl began to think that perhaps it was not Harlan who had said it at all, because the sentence repeated itself in his head several times.
They broke for bologna and tomato sandwiches under a white oak maybe seventeen feet around. Three men holding hands in a ring would have had a hard time encompassing it. Harlan took a parcel of wax paper out of his knapsack and unwrapped a handful of Oreos. The two men grinned when both of them twisted the black cookies apart and scraped off the white cream with their teeth.
“You’re wrong about that last part,” Harlan said. Carl was taken aback by the tone of certainty in his newfound friend’s voice. “I don’t think everybody hears them.”
They spoke little the rest of the day except to mark a particular plant or bird or track.
“Skunk cabbage,” one would say.
“Solitary vireo,” the other would say.
“Polecat.”
“Yellow warbler.”
“Dogtooth violet.”
They managed the entire drive home in a comfortable hush. Music rolled over them from the car radio as they headed into the sun that evening. It was good having somebody that understood you. Best thing for people like Harley and me, Carl thought, is to get out where the voice of the Big Entire, or whatever the hell it is out there, gets louder than all the ones inside a body’s skull. Find the tallest knobs with the tallest trees where the only voice we can hear is the one that says, You don’t belong here! Go on back to your ridiculous crackerjack box with its power lines and its refrigerator hum and its doors closing one room off from another. A voice that lets you know there’s no such thing as making sense of it all.
Carl decided to say one last thing when he got out of the truck that night, lightning bugs flaring off and on over Katherine’s vegetable garden.
“Nature talking to me doesn’t make me grind my teeth,” he said. “She has a right to her opinion. And as for the voices, well, they mean no harm.”
“Hard to tell sometimes though, isn’t it?” Harlan said as he shut the door.
Carl watched Harlan’s taillights disappear across the narrow ridge road over to the O’Briens’ place, where he imagined his friend stretching out on the floorboards, dreaming himself back to his little bamboo box in the jungle.
ELEVEN
Dusk. Nimrod Grebe floats near the ceiling, circling like a hound that cannot find a resting place, watching the blood pour out from a hole in the shoulder of the broken-down mess of a man sprawled on the floor below. He had not thought things through. Had not counted on missing his head, big old thing, head so big it was hard to find hats to fit it. Most of all he had not counted on Bett Ferguson’s children being the first ones to run up on his porch and look in through the screen and find him there, his blood mixing with the spilt cup of Heaven Hill. Worse, he has soiled himself.
In the years since Nimrod returned to Cementville (it was Taylortown he was returning to, really, not to put too fine a point on it) to live in his dead mother’s house, he has watched the neighborhood go downhill, from a reliable bunch of hardworking colored sharecroppers to successive clans of white trash who hollered and fought one another all hours of the day and night. Recent years, Nimrod watched from his front porch as Bett Ferguson’s five, six, seven children (he could never be sure how many there were) ran around the yard in their altogethers, white moon bottoms shining, lawless innocents climbing his crabapple trees and terrorizing God’s creatures with the hard green fruits. Sweet, really, but wild, just wild, having no daddy. Bett Ferguson, she’s all right though. How often Nimrod has stopped to visit when, at the end of the day, Bett props her swollen feet on a raggedy ottoman on the front porch. She has been nothing but kind to him, giving him rides to town, sharing big hunks of government cheese and whatnot. All he has to give is a few eggs from his banties, knowing full well she’s got chickens of her own.
“The kids love them little banty eggs,” Bett always tells him. She asks after his health. It’s been a long time since anybody else did that.
“I got a dirty liver, Bett,” Nimrod tells her, shaking his big head.
“Here’s some tomato juice I just put up,” she’ll say. “I got too much. It’ll spoil if you don’t take it off my hands.”
Nimrod brooks no judgment for poor Bett, daughter of that scoundrel Angus Ferguson who rode with the Klan. Her nephew Levon, now he is another matter entirely. Hellhound. And Nimrod knows from hellhounds.
It galls Nimrod that Levon’s face is the one that comes into focus now. Galls him so badly that the part of him floating against the ceiling drops suddenly to the floor and nestles itself, glove-like, back into his body, like some kind of charism inhaling the hot breath of God.
Levon rips the blue tape from Nimrod’s left hand and sniffs at the sippy cup. “I tell you what, boys,” he says to the silent children, their eyes wide, “that is one bad-smelling highball.” And Levon throws Nimrod’s cup out the window.
O’Donahue pulls up in his cruiser, big hell-colored light swiveling round on top like an evil eye. Bett must have got ahold of him. Sheriff figured on finding a dead body, because he picked up the coroner, Tommy Thompson, on his way out here to Taylortown. Malcolm Duvall from the funeral home pulls in behind the squad car. Duvall’s long black hearse doubles as the only ambulance for miles around, always rolling onto the scene whenever there’s trouble of a potentially mortal nature, its nearly silent V-8 engine gliding in like a vulture.
“Get back, kids,” O’D says. “Levon, what the hell you think you’re doing? This here’s a crime scene. Get those children out of here.” Malcolm and Tommy finagle the gurney onto the porch and through the door.
“He dead?” somebody says.
“Naw, more’s the pity,” Levon says. “What’s that blue stuff?”
“Blue?” Tommy says. Tommy Thompson has been county coroner so long that when he kicks the bucket himself, people will not be able to fathom anyone else filling the slot.
“All over his hand there . . .”
“Holy Mary,” O’Donahue says and lets out a long whistle. From Nimrod’s hand he wipes off blood that has already begun to thicken and turn black. Nimrod watches the sheriff’s face change as he figures out what is strapped to his hand with bright blue tape.
“I bet that’s his old war pistol.” Tommy whistles too. “I always took Nimrod for a happy man,” he says, as if Nimrod is indeed dead and not laying right there staring up at him.
“We cannot know a man’s insides,” Duvall the undertaker murmurs profoundly.
Well, if that isn’t divine revelation, Nimrod would say to Mac Duvall, were he not too weak to speak. Sheriff O’Donahue and the coroner and the undertaker all seem to receive his thoughts, the way that woman on television talks about reading minds, because they all look at him at the same time.
“Nimrod, what on God’s sweet earth were you meaning to do?” the sheriff whispers with that familiar mix of condescension and magnanimity and tired patience, as if Nimrod is a child and not a soldier once, of the 369th Infantry of the 93rd Division, who had received France’s Croix de Guerre for holding a line west of the Argonne for over a month, all before Mickey O’Donahue was even born.
“Can you tell us who taped this pistol into your hand?” O’D is hollering at Nimrod now, assuming as so many do that the old and the helpless are also deaf.
Nimrod looks the other way while the three men hold their breath against the stench and, With a one, and a two, and a—lift him onto the gurney they have dragged in through the door. Mickey O’Donahue, poor excuse for a sheriff, forgets and leaves Nimrod’s old World War I pistol lying under the overturned lounge chair.
“If he needs finishing off,” Levon starts to say outside, where he is leaning against the hearse. He shuts up when O’D glares at him. Levon squints at Nimrod lying there on the stretcher and smashes out his cigarette on top of Nim
rod’s mailbox. The hearse is gliding away, and Nimrod cannot stop staring—it is as though Levon Ferguson has, with his dark gaze, snared him in some evil thralldom.
Nimrod closes his eyes and hears his mother praying far off for the Lord to have mercy on her wretched son.
IF A MAN SUCH AS Nimrod kept a diary, a little hardback book with fake leather binding, if the sheriff and the coroner and the undertaker had come across such when they found him, it could have told of what led to that day. Show them what they know about happy.
What they found instead was a shoebox full of palm-sized notepads, the kind that always end up with a wire crooked out from the corner ready to gouge a hole in your breast pocket. A person doesn’t necessarily think, jotting down Scripture or recording a prayer he hopes might save his sorry soul, that such entries will be gazed upon by others as the writings of a man hopeless enough to commit (and worse, fail at) the final sin of despair.
Mac Duvall had it right: One person can’t know the things another person is wishing for, the dull little stones clutched under his rib bone, trusting they will turn to pearls someday. There are people who will borrow your hopes, thinking maybe they can turn your straw into gold. You can never be sure what’s guiding such people.
—In the evil land, please stay Your hand, give us righteousness that we might stand. Your hand shall wave from sky to sky, when You come to claim the apple of Your eye. When the evil one marches on the land, marches to deceive, who will stand?
Madeer, Nimrod’s own mother, mumbled such prayers through the steam rising from her ironing board. Thump, thump, the iron would complain over white shirts, piles of them that never grew smaller. She prayed into a cloud of flour while her big brown arms flung their flesh above a rolling pin. She prayed while she cut round hunks of white dough and threw them into the bacon grease. She squinted and prayed into the sizzle and pop.
The two of them would recite the grace and eat in silence, the lamp flame flickering on the wall. Then she would tell him the Bible stories in the dark. This was when Nimrod was small.
She told him about Nimrod the warrior rebel who came from the seed of Noah. He was a filthy wicked man, she said, a mighty tyrant.
Nimrod the boy lay on his cot straight as a stick and pulled his cover to his chin. “Why you name me after such a wicked man, Madeer?” he asked her.
“So you never forget the sin of Adam you carry, just like old Nimrod. I name you that so God keep His eye on you. I name you that so you wake up every morning and ax Him to rain His grace on your wicked soul. His grace is out there, boy, and He give it to those that ax Him for it.” His mother rocked back and forth on the end of Nimrod’s cot and sucked at her bottom lip and looked off beyond him as if considering what ghosts lurked there in the dark. She said, “Your name make the Lord nervous. He don’t forget that other Nimrod, who built the Babylon tower. He watch you, and He want you to be good. He don’t want to have to divide all the languages into seventy-two pieces again. We can’t halfway understand each other now, when we supposed to be speaking the same language.” Her shoulders shook with a laugh that had no sound. She would always end the night goo-goo-gah-gahing at her boy same as she had when he was a baby, hoping to make him snigger after she scared the drawers off him with her Bible stories. She would tickle his feet under the covers and say, “Don’t worry, boy, God got His eye on you. You the apple of God’s eye, Nimrod.”
Which was small comfort in the dark with a broken-hearted whippoorwill mourning lost love through the shivery glass of the window by his bed.
Nimrod never did forget what Madeer told him. He asked for grace to rain on him, and when he found himself in flood, he sang His praise. And when he found himself in drought, he examined his conscience for what slight he might have committed.
As a young man Nimrod went off. He wandered the land, worked for his food. He served his country without ever once killing a man that didn’t need it. And he was never hungry.
Got to where he was always thirsty though, rain of grace or no. At night alone in whatever four walls made home, Heaven Hill rained down his throat and the closest he came to wickedness was to laugh in the face of God. He swam in John Barleycorn’s pond and felt the same rapture the saints felt when they were tied to the whipping post.
Last job he had was hod carrier. His bricks built a bank tower in the center of a big city up north. It might have reached Heaven, for the ones who had the most money piled inside there. Nimrod worked until his spine hunched and ripped and burned, and when he learned his Madeer had passed through the veil, he crawled his way back to the place he was born. Knees all turned to gravel and stretched out rubber bands by then.
Most days found him after that on his porch from midday till the sun slipped behind the knobs looming over him like a pyramid made up of God’s minions, and him no more than a decrepit student of the Bible, clucking and acting the old woman, quoting Job and Numbers, Esther and Judges, same as if Madeer haunted his insides. Sundown, he closed the brittle leather cover on her Bible, placed it on his bedside stand, and took up his rock and his friend, his Heaven Hill. Just a smallish tumbler-full, he told himself each night, knowing there was not a soul around to give him Hell when he lost count.
Things went that way till the girl showed up.
THERE WAS MAYBE A QUARTER hour of light left. Fingers of sun glanced off the knobs to the west, the kind that stab at your eyes and make a person think of angry red seraphim lifting the hills and flinging them at their adversaries, the foot soldiers of the Evil One, like in that Heavenly battle, where God told Lucifer, Go then, my bright and fallen son!
That was when she first came. Nimrod heard her before he saw her, a tinkly voice circling around her like a body of bees. First she was a silhouette far up Crooked Creek Road, her boy hips waltzing with brazen importance. Then he could make out her finely muscled arms twirling a stick around her head, tossing it in the air periodically, her knees kicking above her belly as she high-stepped up his road. He squinched his eyes at her, a warning. She stopped in front of Bett Ferguson’s and called out.
“Aunt Bett!”
Out came Bett on her porch in a swarm of children and the two bantered back and forth. Nimrod cocked his head at an angle as if to catch the June breeze, but it did nothing to aid him in making out their words. He fastened on Bett’s smoky drawl. She seemed glad to see the girl.
In his head he hollered out to Bett, Don’t!
She was some kind of snake charmer, with that high tinkle voice. Nimrod did not trust that girl. Nor did he appreciate her cutting through Crooked Creek to get from the Chaney Farm, where she did odd jobs and looked after those sickly boys, over to her granddad’s trashy trailer. No reason she had to cut through this road when there was a perfectly good path, and shorter. Bett ought to tell her dirty little niece to jump in that creek, that’s what Nimrod thought, maybe wash some of the trashiness off her filthy young soul. She came closer and he could hear the song she sang, one of those terrible songs they play on the radio. He scooted his chair back all cattywompus, upsetting the notepad where he recorded highlights of Scripture. The corner of his eye caught the glow of her white ankles clomping up and down in cheap tennis shoes all smashed down at the heels. She high-stepped straight at him, twirling that stick like it was a sterling silver baton.
She slowed down and called out, “Hey, Mr. Nimrod, how you doing this afternoon?”
He dipped his head close to the Scriptures in his lap and ran his hand over his forehead beaded with salt pearls. You pretend not to hear, Spirit told Nimrod. Galatians 4:14: My temptation, which was in my flesh, ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God.
Rex, the yellow cur belonging to the Ferguson children, had been sleeping in the middle of the road. He got up and slinked off to the woods. Rex is a superstitious dog, wise to evade her. She stopped square in front of Nimrod’s house, and all lazy, brushed the top of his mailbox with her stick till he felt it crawl across his own skin. He couldn’t h
elp it, he had to look.
She up-arched one tweezed eyebrow, a crooked twig flicked toward the sky, and she said, “We been given another beautiful spring day, ain’t we, Mr. Nimrod?” like God had made it that way just for her.
Then she did it. She let her head fall back between her shoulder blades—that girl could not care less if it fell plumb off—and she opened her mouth and let out a laugh from the bottom of her gut, rumbling all the way up her white neck. No reason, nothing funny, no good reason at all to laugh. Nimrod dipped his face low. When she gathered her head onto her shoulders and got her breath again, he could feel her looking at him. He knew without taking his own two eyes from the Good Book that she was studying the top of his silver head.
“You have a wonderful rest of the day, Mr. Nimrod.” Then she commenced to hum, threw that stick high in the air, end over end. She caught it, perfect.
The laugh-out-loud girl went on, calling out to Jesse Greathouse and the other old people. Nimrod stood from his chair to stretch, and when he leaned out over the railing he was able to watch her progress down Crooked Creek Road. She would come this way tomorrow. And the next day.
AND SHE CAME BACK, AND was soon passing this way every day except Sundays when her granddaddy, old Angus Ferguson, made her pull three Plymouth Rocks from the coop behind his trailer and wring their skinny necks. She chopped off their heads and let those chickens run in headless circles till they couldn’t. After the slaughter she dipped them in a scalding bucket and plucked them and cut them up and rolled them in salted flour and fried them in the same manner her granny had before Angus lamed that poor woman’s arm. Their neighbors would smell the chicken shit and the blood and the horrible boiling feathers all week while Angus Ferguson gnawed on the chickens’ bodies from one Sunday to the next.
“Mr. Nimrod,” the girl would say, “in my fifteen years I’ve wrung too many necks.” These are the kinds of things she told him, standing at his mailbox.
Cementville Page 16
