The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  Amidst that horror, Dwayne Brewer was wrecked by a single heartbreaking thought. There was nothing he could do to stop what was happening. No matter what he did, the last thing in the world he loved was melting away like wax.

  The smell he’d worked so hard to ignore turned his stomach then. He pushed to his feet and walked outside because there was no breath left in the room. Outside, a sharp wind stood the hairs of his arms on end and Dwayne closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky. He could feel the sun warming his pale skin and he blinked awake to a golden light so piercingly yellow that it was as if he’d become a honeybee held in the palm of a dandelion. The air danced with the musk of dying leaves, an autumn crowded with oakmoss, oud, and leather. He breathed deeply and it filled his lungs with a calming sort of warmth.

  How such wickedness survived amidst the beautiful had always baffled him. Why He would fill a world with this kind of suffering, a puzzle that carried no rhyme or answer and sat in Dwayne’s heart like a stone. All he knew was that all his life he’d been asked to carry and he was tired. Me and You been at each other for too long, he thought. The two of us, we’ve never seen eye to eye.

  TWENTY

  Calvin Hooper pushed himself back in a weathered gray rocking chair with the toes of his leather brogans. Mrs. Moody sat next to him, the two slowly inching closer and closer together the longer they rocked. A speckled blue heeler named Prescott lay with his head resting flat on the porch planks between his front paws, smacking his lips with his tongue, panting, and looking back at the two of them when Calvin spoke.

  “I don’t think I could eat another bite if I tried.”

  “Something tells me when that pie comes out of the oven, you’ll find room,” Mrs. Moody said. “I bought that candy roaster off Lebern Dills. Went in there to see him about a church raffle and it looked about as pretty as a sunset sitting there on his floor.”

  They’d come for Sunday supper, Calvin and Angie, Marla, Rusty, and the kids, the whole house filled with smiling and laughing and fighting and bickering like it always had been. Mrs. Moody stretched three cans of salmon, a heap of pole beans, red potatoes, and vidalias, and two cakes of corn bread into a ten-dollar meal that fed them all.

  Calvin could hear pots and pans clanking inside the house as Marla and Rusty split the dishes, her washing and him drying. Out in the yard Angie was carrying their littlest one, an amber-eyed little girl named Ruth, while the three boys showed her a lean-to they’d built at the edge of the woods.

  “So, you bought that girl a ring yet?” Mrs. Moody looked over and raised her eyebrows.

  “Not yet,” Calvin said.

  She reached across and placed her hand on top of his fingers. Liver spots dotted her hands, veins raised and blue, and she squeezed tight to his knuckles. “You know I’m giving you a hard time.”

  “I know it.”

  “But you ain’t going to find one better than that,” she said. “A woman like that doesn’t come along every day.”

  “She’s a good one,” Calvin said, and that was it, because men here never said anything more than that, never let emotion show or opened their hearts with their tongues.

  “Well, I’m going to run in the house right fast.” Mrs. Moody leaned forward and pushed herself up from the rocking chair. “You need anything while I’m up?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The dog stood and raised his ears. He watched her with hopeful eyes and she scratched under his chin as she passed. When she was inside, Prescott plopped back down on the porch by Calvin’s feet, curled himself into a ball, sighed, and closed his eyes.

  The weather had turned warm the past two days. Seasons were strange anymore, the world turning more peculiar as time passed. Nowadays, there might come two feet of snow that melted off by the next afternoon, then the day after that they were back to T-shirt weather in the middle of December. But it was nice to be sitting there right then. All Calvin could think was, This is as nice as I’ve felt in a while.

  Over by an empty dogwood at the corner of the yard, Angie had the child hugged to her chest with one arm, her other wrapped around the youngest boy’s waist as she boosted him into the tree. When he had ahold, she backed up and he swung his leg over the limb, hauled himself up, and climbed higher. The two older boys were already nearing the top and the little one was tearing up the tree like a monkey to catch them. Angie turned back toward the house with a big smile on her face. Calvin met her eyes and she shook her head.

  He raised his hand cupped to his mouth and hollered, “They’re going to break their necks!” And Angie nodded, but didn’t say a word or turn around to stop them.

  Seeing her standing there with that little girl on her hip, Calvin knew Mrs. Moody was right: Women like Angie Moss didn’t come around often. He could see himself buying her a ring, something simple because that’s what she’d always said, just something simple. He could see the two of them at the front of the church, all the folks who loved them smiling silently from the pews, see that little girl in her arms right then as their own. More than any of that, though, Calvin could see the two of them growing old together like everyone around them, like his own parents and like hers, sharing a quiet kind of love the same as Mrs. Moody and Darl’s father. That kind of love wasn’t for anyone outside the two of them. It was private and silent, sufficient as grace.

  Something tapped against the porch planks beside his chair and Calvin looked over to find what had slipped from his pocket. There on those weathered slats as shiny as a coin lay the bullet he’d found in front of his face when he awoke in the grave. Calvin snatched it up, something so tiny filling him with a sense of exposure, like all that he carried was suddenly out on the table for anyone to see. He held that cartridge inside his fingers and scrubbed his thumb against the brass casing as if he were rubbing a worry stone. Ever since that day, he’d carried it. Ever since that day, it was impossible to forget even for a moment how quickly the hammer could come down.

  The spring creaked open and slapped the screen door closed as Mrs. Moody came back onto the porch and the sound startled him. She had something wrapped in an old prairie queen quilt stitched from flour sacks and scraps of clothes. When she was standing in front of him, she held it out to him and Calvin took it from her hands.

  “I wanted you to have this,” she said.

  What he held was heavy, and as he folded back the quilt he could see the stainless barrel and gray laminate stock, a short brush gun Darl had bought a few years back, for a hunting trip he took with a fellow named Goob to chase black bear in Maine.

  “I can’t take this,” Calvin said.

  “Yes, you can,” Mrs. Moody insisted. “He’d want you to have that.”

  “You ought to give it to one of Marla’s boys.”

  “Those boys will have plenty,” she said. “He had a couple hunting rifles that belonged to his daddy and I figured I’d save those for the boys once they get old enough to have them. But this one I want you to have. He saved up for that rifle and that hunting trip for two years, and when him and that boy piled out of here I think that was about as happy as I ever saw him. They had one of those GPS giving them directions and it routed them right through New York City. I can see the two of them in that pickup truck with dog boxes and a pile of walkers bawling in the back driving down Park Avenue.” She laughed and shook her head. “He used to love when you’d go in the woods with him, running bear. I don’t know that that was your cup of tea, chasing a bunch of dogs all over creation, but he loved it when you went with him.”

  Calvin ran his fingers over the receiver, shouldered the rifle, and ran the lever, its action smooth as silk. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you’ll take those boys out in the woods when they’re older and tell them stories about their uncle.”

  “I can do that,” Calvin said.

  “Then there’s nothing else to say.” Mrs. Moody re
ached across and patted him on his cheek the way she always did, squinted her eyes and clenched her jaw. No one had said a word about Darl that entire afternoon and there’d been something nice about that, something nice about life getting back to how it was even if that feeling was short-lived. The thing about this old world was that nothing had come along yet that could slow or stop its turning.

  They sat for a long time without speaking, neither having words to say nor having any want to say them. Sometimes proximity was all that a person needed and that simple act of being close carried no need for sound. Tomorrow the sun would rise over the balsams the same as it had forever, but right then Calvin Hooper and Mrs. Moody watched its descent. The afternoon lowered dim as candlelight, a yellow pale but stunning. He watched Angie chasing the boys through the yard, all of them screaming and laughing, and all he could think was, I have so much to lose.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The teal Grand Prix was parked in front of the crumbling shack where Sissy Brewer lived. Dwayne had driven his brother’s car home. The car’s faded paint was a strangely bright juxtaposition to the whitewashed boards that curled away from the home’s crudely framed bones. Dwayne was around back grabbing a can of mixed gas he’d let Carol borrow that summer. He could hear someone banging on the front door.

  “Jackson County Sheriff’s Office,” they yelled. “Mr. Brewer, I need to speak with you. Jackson County Sherriff’s Office. I need you to come to the door.”

  Dwayne Brewer peered around the side of the house, a dwelling on the verge of collapse. Stillwell stood on the porch with his right hand resting on the handle of his sidearm. Forest-green paint on the front door was aged to little more than stain, the grain of the wood raised on the surface like braille. He was beating the door with his fist till it shook loosely on bent hinges against the rotten jamb.

  “Jackson County Sheriff’s Office,” Stillwell yelled. He stood there in a pair of olive drab 5.11 cargo pants and a black polo with a badge embroidered on the left breast. His hair was parted neatly. His face was clean-shaven.

  A dried leaf scratched its way across the porch and a wood hen screeched somewhere off in the timbers. There was a window to the left of the door. A small bench sat in front of the windowsill with a chipped terra-cotta pot holding gray dirt and a gnarled dead plant. Stillwell knelt with his hand shading his eyes and leaned close to the glass to peer inside. The windowpanes were wavy glass clouded with grime, and as he rapped on the glass with his knuckle, the pane rattled against the grilles.

  “Mr. Brewer. Jackson County Sheriff’s Office. If you’re inside, I need you to come to the door.”

  “He ain’t here,” Dwayne said as he stepped around the side of the house into the open.

  Stillwell jumped at the sound of Dwayne Brewer’s voice, his strong hand gripping his pistol. “Where is he?”

  “Beats me,” Dwayne said. He wore a pair of muddied blue jeans and a yellow-tinged wifebeater that hung loosely over his barrel chest. Dwayne Brewer looked almost simian, like something from a carnival that might make a living eating glass. “Ain’t seen him.”

  “That’s his car, ain’t it?” Stillwell nodded to the Grand Prix.

  “Yeah.”

  “So his car’s here, but he ain’t?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “How the hell I’m supposed to know that?” Dwayne canted his head to the side and waited for an answer, a red can of gas in his right hand.

  “You don’t find it strange his car’s here and he’s not?”

  “Of course it’s strange, but Sissy’s queer as a football bat. Besides, it’s the tail end of ginseng season. He’s got honey holes down in Oconee where the berries ain’t even dropped. Hell, he might have run down there or on over into Georgia, for all I know. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “And how would he have gotten there?”

  “Might’ve hopped a goddamn train for all I know.”

  Stillwell came off the porch and walked to where the two of them were within arm’s reach of one another. He was nothing standing next to a brute like Dwayne, Stillwell barely reaching his shoulders and Dwayne having him by a good hundred pounds. I bet you I could stretch you out like a rabbit, Dwayne thought. I could take you by the legs, stretch you right fast, and break your neck like a rabbit’s.

  Seeing Stillwell standing there lit Dwayne afire inside. While his brother rotted into nothing through those trees, the law was beating his door off the hinges. No one wanted to let a sleeping dog lie. No one wanted to give them a lick of peace.

  “What you sniffing around here for anyways? Thought you was supposed to be figuring out what happened to that Moody boy?”

  “I am.”

  “Then like I said, why you sniffing around here?”

  “Trying to talk to your brother about anything he might’ve seen while he was stealing Mr. Coward’s ginseng. That’s what you said he was doing, right?”

  “And what the hell’s ginseng got to do with what happened to that Moody boy?”

  “Nothing necessarily.”

  “So why’s a homicide detective worried about an old man’s ginseng patch?”

  “We ain’t lucky enough to have a homicide division,” Stillwell said. “I’ve got a dozen open cases piled on my desk right now. Poaching ginseng lands on my plate the same as missing persons or murder.”

  “A man’s got to prioritize.”

  “What you doing with that gas can?”

  Dwayne Brewer looked down like he’d forgotten what was in his hand. “Needed mixed gas for the chainsaw. Forgot I’d let Sissy borrow it for a weed-eating job a couple months ago.” He looked at Stillwell with an expression caught between boredom and disgust. “Think I’ll be getting on to the house.”

  Stillwell held tight as Dwayne glided past him and headed across the yellowed yard. “Where’s your car?”

  “Down at the house,” Dwayne shouted without turning.

  “How you getting home?”

  Finally, Dwayne stopped and spun back. “House is right through the woods a ways. Kitchens Branch is right over those hills.” Dwayne nodded into the trees. The sunlight hit him just so, his eyes lit black as onyx.

  “Want a ride?”

  “No,” Dwayne said, and turned.

  “You see your brother, you tell him to call me,” Stillwell shouted.

  Dwayne lifted the gas can high as if to sign that he’d heard him, but he didn’t turn back and he didn’t answer, he merely wandered farther into the thicket of saplings and brush, the woods closing in around him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Dwayne had not been back to the cellar, but as he made his way home through the woods he could not pass without speaking. Sitting the gas can by the door, he lifted the heavy bar and made his way inside.

  “They’ve come looking for you, brother,” Dwayne said. “And I don’t see them dogs letting off any time soon.”

  In the month since Dwayne brought his brother into the root cellar, Carol Brewer’s body had deflated like a forgotten balloon. All of the fluids had drained into an island around him, and now, nearly five weeks after he’d been killed, his skin was a dark grayish-brown and thin as tissue paper. Carol’s face was no longer recognizable and Dwayne could not bring himself to look.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Dwayne leaned his head back against one of the pitched supports and closed his eyes, then let his chin fall to his chest. Setting his hands in the dust at his sides, he opened and closed his fingers, building tiny ridges of dirt between them, and then he traced shallow waves around his handprints. Suddenly he remembered a time when his back was striped and bruised from an extension cord his father swung like a bullwhip. He was only ten or eleven. Sissy might’ve been five or six. But glancing at a long shelf of rough-hewn pine along the wall to the right, he could see the mud pies lined up and hear Sissy sa
ying, “You got to let them cool,” like it was happening right there in front of his eyes.

  The boy had an old bath towel tied around him like an apron and was playing house. Dwayne had scolded him for acting like a fag, but Sissy didn’t care and before long his brother was playing right along and the two of them laughed and cut up and forgot for a short while what exactly they were hiding from. Sissy had a smile that could make a man forget he was dying. Crow’s-feet spread at the corners of his eyes, his smile wide and his teeth unusually straight. That image stayed in Dwayne’s mind like a photograph, and thinking of it, he chuckled under his breath and grinned.

  The camouflage pants Sissy wore moved at his thigh like something was trying to come out of his pocket. Dwayne stared blank-faced and awestruck. The fabric jerked about again and something showed itself from beneath Sissy’s leg, first a small, brown head swimming back and forth to free its body. Climbing to his feet, Dwayne watched as a young, rib-slatted rat crawled its way from underneath his brother’s corpse and sprinted to the corner of the room. Fury and wrath grew within him and Dwayne held his arms wide as he loped forward.