The Borrowed World Series | Book 8 | Blood & Banjos

by Horton, Franklin

  Debra cocked an eyebrow. “Baby wipes?”

  Charlie looked off, pretending he was studying a bush. “No, them other things.”

  “Tampons?” said Gary.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Hugh smiled. “Charlie, it sounds like you made a good haul, but there ain’t a thing in there that’s just for you. Did you only get stuff for other people?”

  “You all say we’re a tribe,” Charlie held his hands out. “I got stuff for the tribe. I figured I’d just throw it all in the pot and you all could figure out how to split it up between you.”

  “You don’t want to be responsible for handing out tampons and diapers?” Debra asked.

  “I reckon we better be getting home.” Charlie untied his horse and climbed into the saddle.

  Debra climbed onto hers and pulled alongside Charlie. “I’m sorry. I was just teasing you. I’m really impressed with what you did. That’s thoughtful of you.”

  “You all have been good to me,” Charlie said. “Reckon I should return the favor. That’s all.”

  “I’m proud of you too, Charlie,” Hugh said, feeling halfway bad about the things he’d thought on the way in. Maybe the boy had a dark side in there somewhere but perhaps he was entitled to after the things he’d been through. He definitely had a sweet and thoughtful side too. Eventually, one side would either win out or temper the other. That came with age.

  12

  Oliver’s House

  Oliver Poteet’s farm had been in his family for nearly one hundred and fifty years. Over that time they’d raised cabbages and beets, tobacco and cattle. They’d sold timber and made charcoal. They’d prospected the ground for coal, natural gas, and even gold. If there was a way to squeeze a dollar from dirt, they’d tried it. In return, they were good stewards of the land. They kept it healthy, balancing periods of regrowth and healing against the resources they took. They cared for the land and the land cared for them.

  Oliver’s proudest accomplishment during his tenure as the landowner was the camp. As he’d retired from actively farming the land, he used other means to keep money coming in for his favorite project. He leased sections of his property for grazing, growing, or cutting hay; continued to sell timber; and he allowed hunting clubs to pursue deer, bear, and turkey in his rich forests.

  When his only son died, leaving him without an heir, Oliver had his will changed. He set the camp apart as a non-profit organization and left everything he owned in a trust to keep the camp going after he passed. The farm would continue to operate as it had under his guidance and all proceeds would go toward raising more generations of Appalachian musicians.

  The farmhouse Oliver lived in was built not long after his ancestors purchased the farm. It had been expanded several times in order to provide additional space for growing families, but somewhere beneath the walls lay the original chestnut log cabin. There were places where you could tell if you knew what you were looking for. Places where a wall was noticeably thicker than the others or where a doorway was unusually low. Like many older homes in America, it had come into existence in a world without power, conditioned air, and running water. Now it would quite possibly go out in the same manner.

  Oliver’s bedroom had once belonged to his parents. He was born within those four walls and in that very same bed. He’d found getting old in the same house in which he had so many memories to be a strange experience. There was no avoiding the past. Even though his last few years there had been spent alone, his wife and son buried in the family cemetery behind the house, the place often felt...active. It was like life, or some semblance of life, continued on around him yet apart from him. He’d hear the voices of people who’d once shared the home with him. In fact, he could swear he often heard them speaking directly to him or calling to him from another place within the house.

  Sometimes he thought he saw them too. He’d be walking down a hall and catch a glimpse of his mother carrying laundry from one room to another. He’d smell his father’s pipe. He’d turn from the woodstove to see his brother sitting in an overstuffed chair like he was enjoying the fire. During the long, quiet days he’d experienced since the collapse, Oliver spoke to the dead more than to the living. It was truly an odd thing to be so old that you teetered between worlds, uncertain to which you belonged anymore.

  On this particular morning, as Sharon worked on her list at the camp, waiting for the children to awake, Oliver’s eyes fluttered open. Most days he got himself ready and was waiting for Sharon when she showed up to check in on him. Depending on how he was feeling, he might walk back to the camp with her or they’d just sit a spell on his porch and talk. He’d tell her little things he knew about how to get by without power. He’d explain things she might do to help them survive, wanting to help in the only way he could now that his body was withered and useless.

  He’d tried since the early days of the disaster to get her and the children to come live with him in the big house but she refused. There was certainly room for them in the vast old house. Oliver had given Sharon a hundred reasons why they should move in and she’d thrown back a hundred reasons that they shouldn’t. She wanted to keep the children in their routine. She wanted to keep them in their familiar surroundings. Sometimes he thought the real reason was that she didn’t want to impose on him. Other times he suspected it was because the camp was where she found the strength to go on. The place was special to her and she wasn’t ready to surrender it.

  He’d worked on her for a year, trying to build his case, to no avail. Just yesterday, he’d come up with a strategy he thought might have a fighting chance and he was going to throw it at her before cold weather returned. He was going to appeal to her pity, and claim he needed them to get by, that he was too old and frail to make it without them. She might suspect he was lying, or at least trying to manipulate the truth, but she’d give in this time. He just knew it.

  Now it was too late.

  That morning he awoke confused, feeling different than the morning before. He couldn’t put a finger on it but he was off somehow. Instinct took over, the habits of a lifetime. He’d done the same thing each morning for over eighty years and that impulse drove him onward. He made to swing his legs out of the bed but they wouldn’t swing. Trying to figure out what was going on, he tried to push himself up to a sitting position and was unable to do that either.

  As he lay there in the darkness, trying to wade through his muddled thoughts, trying to spot the truth hiding in the grass of confusion, he felt dampness on his cheek. He went to wipe it away but could barely move his arm. It wouldn’t do what he told it to do. With the utmost concentration, his body trembling from the effort, he raised his hand up in front of his eyes and saw the hand gnarled into a useless claw, curled like a fiddlehead fern in the spring.

  He understood in a vague sense what was going on now. This was the very thing his own father had died from. It had to be a stroke. A vessel in his brain had blown out like a weak hydraulic hose on an old tractor. What happened now? How long would he lay there before he died?

  He noticed then the vague outline of figures along the wall. It was a death vigil. Why would Sharon bring those children in here to watch him die? Had she been tending to him and he’d forgot that fact in his delirium? Then he noticed that the figures were not children and the woman closest to him was not Sharon.

  It was his wife.

  She was wearing a dark dress that he recalled from their son’s funeral. Her gaze was strangely impassive, her eyes holding neither sympathy, nor love, nor understanding. She could have been an insect watching him from the branch of a tree, a crow from a fence. With the same expression, Oliver’s son Bailey stood at his mother’s side, his hand resting supportively on her shoulder. To their left, Oliver’s parents stood watching too. He made eye contact with his father and received a nod, a gesture perhaps intended to offer support or indicate an understanding of what he was going through.

  Oliver grunted and managed to push himself closer to a
fetal position. His eyes screwed about wildly in their sockets and he saw more people, the walls packed like spectators at a sold-out show. He saw his brother Don who’d been crushed when the old Farmall tricycle tractor rolled with him. He saw his Uncle Tim who’d been killed in a logging accident and his cousin Duke who’d drowned in the New River.

  There were so many children he wondered where they’d all come from. He’d never seen the house so full of them. Then he realized they were the lost children, the babies stillborn or miscarried. They came here through crib death or croup, through internal problems unknown to the old country doctors and midwives. He saw the scarred face of Louisa, the great-aunt who died at four years old, her dress catching on fire while her mother made lye soap. Oliver had never laid eyes on the child before, her death predating him by decades, but she’d forever been the reason his mother wouldn’t allow him close to fires. Oliver understood that these faces in the room weren’t just family. They were the mythology of family. They were the legends and the stories. They were the architects of an entire system of belief. They were his history.

  A sound caught Oliver’s attention, wheels on wood. His first thought was a gurney coming down the hall for him. Maybe the ambulance was here? The undertaker? Was he already dead?

  Oliver’s door swung open. Unable to straighten his body to see in that direction, he twisted his eyes upward, trying to see who’d come for him. The rolling came closer and a face hovered into view. It wasn’t a gurney. It wasn’t the cold steel table of the undertaker. It was Sharon and her face held perhaps the saddest smile Oliver had ever seen.

  “Oh, Oliver,” she said, a single tear tracing its way down her dusty cheek.

  13

  Beartown Mountain

  Jim awoke to a low, throaty growl. He’d first thought it was Lloyd snoring, then worried that it was a coyote, but it sounded bigger. He didn’t immediately open his eyes, not sure he wanted to give away that he was awake.

  “Maximus!” a man snapped.

  The dog quit growling and stepped away, unrushed. Knowing he couldn’t play possum forever, Jim listened to the dog’s steps. Beneath the blanket, his hand snaked toward his Beretta. He cracked an eye open and spotted a man sitting on a horse regarding them. No weapons were visible but Jim couldn’t be certain he was alone. He could have help somewhere out of Jim’s line of sight.

  Jim made his move. He flipped his unzipped sleeping bag off his body and leveled his handgun on the rider. The stranger did not react, as if this was the logical progression of things, but the dog wasn’t having it. At Jim’s movement, the massive Anatolian Shepherd bared its teeth and growled again. Jim responded by aiming at the dog. Right now it seemed the more dangerous of the visitors.

  “Call him off,” Jim warned. “I’ll kill him, then I’ll kill you for making me kill him.”

  “Max,” the rider said. “Easy boy.”

  The dog settled onto its haunches and glared at Jim. He’d seen that look before. It wasn’t the first time a dog had called him an asshole.

  The man on the horse pushed his hat back and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “He wants to know why you’re in his territory.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry,” Jim said, not sounding like he meant it. “I didn’t know anyone was still working the farm.”

  “Tell him yourself. He’s sitting right there.”

  Jim frowned at the dog, deciding it was too early to be sitting there having a conversation with a strange dog. He shot a glance at Lloyd, who hadn’t stirred. He was still out cold, his sleeping bag pulled over his head. Jim guessed from the angle of the sun it was around 7 AM. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Gandy. I’m the head shepherd for Rockdell Farms.”

  Jim was sleepy, his back stiff, and there were a lot of pieces of information that didn’t compute. “There are shepherds around here? And Rockdell Farms is still operating?”

  “Could you lower the gun, mate? I’ve got a rifle and a pistol too but you don’t see me going around waving them at people, do you? It’s just bad manners.”

  Jim acknowledged the point by lowering his weapon. “Sorry. It pays to be cautious these days.”

  “Hence why I’m up here and not down there,” Gandy said, gesturing toward the lowlands with a toss of his head. “And yes, there are shepherds around, just not many. We don’t all carry staffs like Little Bo Peep. Rockdell Farms had nearly ten thousand head of sheep. With that many, they thought it best to get a real shepherd. I trained in Scotland and lived there for a number of years. They recruited me to come over here and run their operation.”

  Jim didn’t know what to say to that. “You’re still tending sheep? After all that’s gone on?”

  “Rockdell Farms isn’t operational anymore but what am I supposed to do with myself? I’m a shepherd with a big flock of sheep. I brought them up to the high camp for summer like I normally do.”

  “You alone, Gandy?”

  “I’m alone right now but there are others back at camp. Some of the other Rockdell folks came with me. Some of their families. There was too much shooting and craziness down below. It was making everyone a mite uncomfortable. Too many people dying.”

  Jim winced. “Yeah, I was probably responsible for some of that. Actually a lot of it. Things haven’t been easy.”

  “Sounds like a fucking war sometimes,” Gandy said.

  “With good reason. It has been a war at times. We can’t catch a break.” Jim cast another frustrated glance at Lloyd. He couldn’t believe his friend hadn’t woken up even with an entire conversation taking place right beside him. If this was his customary level of vigilance, they were screwed.

  “We haven’t had that much trouble up here in the high country. Most people are too lazy to come up this far unless they’re on horseback. We’ve seen a few hunters and that’s about it. You guys hunting?”

  “No, I live in the valley over that way.” Jim raised a hand and pointed toward his home in the far distance. “My buddy and I are getting away for a bit.”

  Gandy followed where Jim was pointing, then raised an eyebrow. “That’s where a lot of the shooting comes from. Not all of it, but quite a bit.”

  “Yeah. That’s part of why we needed a break.” Jim stood, nudging Lloyd until he eventually stirred. “Get up, dumbass. We got company.”

  At the mention of company, Lloyd stuck his head out of his sleeping bag and squinted at Gandy. “Who the hell are you?”

  Jim shook his head in frustration. “Get up, Lloyd. Catch up with the conversation. If he was a bad guy you’d already be dead.”

  Gandy nodded curtly. “You both would.”

  Lloyd tossed back his sleeping bag and sat upright. He was far from awake but at least he was semi-vertical.

  “Maximus and I were out checking the herd. Our camp is on the south ridge, above The Loop, if you ever want to stop by. Just announce yourself because some of our folks are kind of jumpy.”

  “Like me?” Jim asked.

  Gandy smiled. “Exactly like you.”

  “We might do that. We took this route because I wanted to see the burial cave.”

  “Ah, I’ve been in there myself. A bit spooky, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe, but it’s fascinating. I always wanted to see it. We’re going to hit the top of the mountain today and camp out there for a few days. I wanted to check out some of the old plane wrecks. There’s another cave I’d like to see if I can find it.”

  “Which one?”

  “There’s an old story that some deserters from the Civil War lived in a cave up here until the war ended. I wanted to see if I could find it.”

  Gandy furrowed his brow. “I’ve seen a few caves but I don’t know anything about that. There’s a nice one on the south face of the mountain that might be the one you’re talking about. I’ve only been in there once but it looks like it’s been well-used over the years. On the maps the place is called Raven Rock or Raven Cliffs. Something like that.”

  “I’ll look for it.
”

  “Best be looking for bears, too,” Gandy warned. “They’re thick as grasshoppers right now.”

  “We’ll be careful. How did your sheep fare over the winter with no feed and no place to sell them?”

  “We lost quite a few.” Gandy frowned. “Coyotes, dogs, bears, and a lack of supplemental feed. The herd did better than I expected though.”

  “They’ve got a market going in town,” Jim said. “I expect you’d do well if you wanted to take a few head down to sell.”

  “Hadn’t heard tell of that, but not much news reaches up this far.”

  “I don’t know the details. I’ve even heard that some businessman is going to do an auction in his front yard. Livestock and whatever crops people have to sell. You should check it out.”

  “If I go looking for the market, who do I say sent me? I didn’t get your name and I don’t know many folks down there.”

  Lloyd burst out laughing, the first indication he was coming to life.

  “What’s he laughing about?” Gandy asked.

  “Yeah, about that. You’ll probably get farther if you don’t mention that I sent you.”

  “I don’t even have your name, mate.”

  Jim shrugged. “It’s best that way. Come to think of it, you should probably forget you ever saw me.”

  “Ah, entanglements,” Gandy said. “I’ve had a few in my day too. No worries.”

  “You ever heard of that book about how to win friends and influence people?” Lloyd asked.

  “By Dale Carnegie,” Gandy said. “Yeah, it’s a business classic.”

  “Well, my buddy there never read it. In fact, he seems naturally inclined to do just the opposite. If he were ever to write a self-help book it would be on how to lose friends and kill people,” Lloyd said.

  Gandy cackled, looking from Lloyd to Jim. “Is that right?”