Acres of grass began at the tree line, and I walked the rolling pastures where I had played as a kid, built model rockets and set them off from Carson’s launching pad, built forts, had campouts, and ran a dirt bike ragged. The property was punctuated by two gently sloping mounds that rose high over the valley.
In Dogwood, a town surrounded by hills, there is limited vision. Even from the tops of mountains you don’t see for miles because there is little break in the trees. But from this spot the world spread out in extravagant ways. Industrial smokestacks to
the north, the lights of TV and radio antennas to the west, swirling smoke from chimneys, and a sky so close you could touch it.
Above the easternmost knoll rose another hill with the tallest pine trees on the property. The ground was littered with pine needles most of the year, and in the fall the pinecones fell like snow, creating a warm, rustic bed for woodland animals.
This was my nightly routine—exploring the landscape of my youth, retracing angles and slopes I had searched and now savored. It was part worship, part salvation—a city of refuge in a world that screamed for safety.
I saved one leg of the trip for last. As I felt my eyes sting and give way to Clarkston’s restless sleep, just before I let myself drift the rest of the night, I turned to face the wall, took Karin by the hand, and we strolled up an imaginary stone walkway. In my mind, she wore a thin, white nightdress that fluttered in the breeze and clung to her legs. Her hair shone in the gloaming and blew across her face and neck, tendrils cascading along her shoulders in the evening breeze.
The stairs led to a brick walkway above the tree line. I put an arm around her, and we turned to watch night descend on this world atop the valley, oblivious to the shadows below. In the summer and fall we sipped tea or she carried a glass of wine as we gazed at the beauty of the mountains. In winter, snow formed a white blanket that covered creation, making everything appear new and fresh and real.
The final ascent took us to the highest point, where I had built a home. Huge windows on either side of the front door stared as we approached. I saved most of the trees and let them buttress and accent the house, perfectly framing it.
“Will, it’s beautiful,” she would say.
“It’s ours. We’ll love each other here. We’ll have children and raise them on these hills and watch them fly.”
In my life, in the actual real world, my lips have touched Karin’s only twice. But in my dreams, I have kissed and made
love to her a thousand times. I do not know if that dream will ever come true. Perhaps we will both be too old to fall into each other’s arms before she is ready, but I am willing to wait.
True desires of the heart are worth the wait.
“Hey, gimp, get up,” a voice said from some distant hill.
Coming out of the fog, I looked into the face of my brother. At six feet one Carson is a little shorter than me, but what he lacks in height he makes up in brawn. His muscles looked tight, his neck as thick as a bowling ball. His arms were tree trunks, his legs massive. He’s a linebacker on steroids with a little less rage and sunglasses to hide sleep-deprived eyes.
His voice has always been a cross between my father’s and a bear’s. He has a deep, resonant quality with an edge of authority, and I imagine tawny young men with shaved heads following him into the mouth of hell itself if he beckoned. Though I had tried to smooth out my upper-Southern accent, pronouncing
i
’s like “eye” instead of “ah,” he had done nothing to lose his. He always said the way he talked was fine and people up north sound “uppity,” and people down south sound like they talked around marbles.
“You
reddy
?” he said.
I sat up and snapped my eyes open. I didn’t recognize anyone in the station, and when I looked at the clock, I realized why. It had been three hours since I’d returned from reporting to the parole officer.
“Got the car double-parked. Come on before I get a ticket.”
I grabbed my Clarkston-issued overnight bag and followed.
Carson had that same familiar gait, like a farmer carrying a little too much on one shoulder, both feet striking the heel and going all the way to the toe. His arms dangled, and he moved with confidence. “You bring me anything? License plate or something?”
“That’s funny.”
“I’s just asking.”
“I brought you a present for every time you’ve visited in the last year.”
“This is it here,” he said as we reached the car. He opened the trunk, but I threw my bag in the backseat.
It had been years since I’d ridden in a car. The leather seats smelled new, and it felt good to stretch out. I’d seen this car in commercials, as sleek as a race car but a bit more practical. The front panel looked like a cockpit for a jumbo jet, and his audio player was placed in the radio compartment.
“This thing looks like it could cook your breakfast for you,” I said.
“Lots of things have changed since you went away. We have running water now. Can you imagine that?”
I smiled. “And you don’t have stripes on your shoulders. What happened?”
“My feet. The army nearly ran me to death, and my arches fell flatter than Susie Wilcox’s chest.”
Susie was one of Carson’s old flames. After they broke up, she was a target for criticism.
“How is Susie?” I said.
“She married some old boy out on Barker’s Ridge. Probably met him at the dog track on one of the days she wasn’t running. Heard tell she had a bunch of kids and got big.”
“How big?” I said, biting at his joke.
“Not sure, but they say she’s supersize now. I swear, Will, that girl was so bucktoothed she could eat a cantaloupe through a picket fence. Every time I kissed her, it felt like I was getting a tonsillectomy.”
One thing that did not come easy to Carson was the subtle put-down. I knew as long as we kept the conversation “out there,” among people of the community or in Congress or the military, we were all right. But there was always the point when we ran out of other people to talk about and he turned his salvos to our family.
“I need a drink,” I said, my throat parched like fire. “Not a drink drink, just something wet.”
He turned into a gas station near Cabell Huntington Hospital and filled up while I went in and bought a bottle of Mountain Dew. I had exactly $34 in cash and a check for the money I’d made working at the Clarkston heavy machine refurbishing plant. I had made about a dollar a day, but some of that was taken back because of fees. It was enough to get me started with a few months’ rent in some other town, away from the memories and the stares and the talk behind my back.
“Is Mama planning on me living with her for a while?” I said as we pulled away. “I assume she could use the help around the house.”
“You sure you want to take that on?” Carson shook his head. “Jenna has a hard time going near the place. Says it clogs her sinuses. She thinks there’re dust mites in that house older than we are.”
“She’s probably right.”
“Jenna offered to go over and do Mama’s hair for her since she doesn’t get out much. Told her she’d do the biggest dust mite’s hair for free.”
As I discovered, Jenna worked at Eula Johnson’s salon, the only one in town, if you didn’t count the barbershop where all the men got their hair trimmed if their wives didn’t do it for them.
“How is Jenna?” I said.
“Tolerable.” He merged onto the interstate, ascending the ramp and reaching the speed limit quickly—something I could never do in the car I drove here as a teenager. “We’ve had our share of problems, but . . .”
“But what?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. That’s all.”
“Anybody that would stay with you for this long deserves a combat medal.”
“You got that right.”
I looked for familiar sights along the road. When you’ve been away from home, especially in forced exile, you lose the signposts of
place
. It only took a few—one advertising the news team at Channel 3, another showcasing the shops at a new mall in the area. I saw the holy grails on the hillside—a Sam’s Club, the sacred shrine of life in the hills. My theory has always been that West Virginians like Wal-Mart because it returns them to their roots. Our grandparents and great-grandparents planned their trips to town, riding on wagons pulled by horses, then bought their supplies for the month. Wal-Mart is just another general store where you buy in bulk and prepare for the apocalypse.
Carson punched a couple of buttons, and classic rock filtered through the speakers. Grand Funk Railroad, the Who, Styx, and Kansas. The songs took me back to days running the interstate, living life as fast as I could, as if it might end the next day. I’d learned that speed and a little bad judgment can change life in drastic ways.
Carson turned the volume down on “Sweet Home Alabama.” “Looks like you stayed in pretty good shape inside. Little on the puny side, but Mama’s cooking will fatten you up.”
“Didn’t have much else to do except stay literate.”
“You make it out of there okay? You know, you didn’t get hurt or anything, did you?”
I had prepared myself for three questions. This was number one. He wanted to know if anyone had gotten to me, if I’d been violated by some inmate. “I did okay.”
“It’s harder when you go in young, I guess,” he said.
We passed a splattered opossum with its unmistakable long tail and sharp nose amid the viscera, blood, and intestines. On the hill above stood a white church, as familiar as Wal-Mart. The opossum almost looked like a sacrifice.
Two songs later Carson dropped the second question wrapped
in a tone of concern. “You’ve got an uphill battle coming back here. I don’t know why you changed your mind about heading up to Morgantown, but people have been talking ever since they ran that newspaper story a couple of weeks ago. Mama can’t even set foot in Foodland. I have to drive her down to the Kroger in Barboursville because she thinks nobody will recognize her. Still, she wears sunglasses and a scarf.”
“I’m going to play it low-key,” I said evenly. “I promise not to put a sign around my neck that says, ‘I’m Will Hatfield. Hate me.’”
“You don’t have to wear a sign. Your face is enough to bring down the judgment of God for the people around here. I get enough of it at the office.”
“What do they say?”
“You hear it on the grapevine. Passed along at church picnics and bars and the produce section at Big Bear. How you really didn’t pay the price. That what you did deserved a lot worse than just being locked up a few years.”
I had prepared for this, but the words stung even worse coming from my brother. Not that I expected understanding and compassion.
“They’re saying that they’re gonna get justice their own way. That’s what bothers me the most. And Jenna . . .”
“What about her?”
“You know how it can be at a beauty salon. Those people talk it up like it was the second coming of Lucifer himself, you moving back here.”
“How would they know I’m coming back?”
Carson shook his head and waved off the question. “She comes home crying sometimes. Those people have judged us, tried us, and hung us a thousand times.”
“What do
you
think?”
“About what?”
“About me serving my time? Do you think I paid the price?”
“Aw, I’m not getting into it. That’s between you and the law. From that perspective, you’ve fulfilled every requirement they made. What you have to live with inside is another thing. I expect that’ll stick with you a long time. Longer than those people want to know.”
“Why did
you
come back?” I said. “You could have lived just about anywhere.”
Carson turned off the music and we rode in silence. The verdant hills rolled past like postcards of our youth, and it seemed he was loading his cannon and aiming at something. When he had the target in sight, he began.
“This place is in my soul, deep down to the bone.” He cursed. “It’s like some people look at Jerusalem or Mecca or one of those Middle Eastern countries where they make their women cover their faces with towels or veils or whatever. That’s what this is—a hillbilly holy place. Doesn’t matter how far I traveled, Europe or Africa or South America or Asia—what a hole that place was—I always knew I’d come back here, being close to Mama and Daddy and the family. The whole screwed-up, dysfunctional family.”
I had never seen Carson so impassioned, unless it concerned sports or his beer brewing. He was an amateur brewer and had mixed his hops and barley in our garage when he was eighteen. How he kept it a secret from my mother is one of the mysteries yet to be unraveled. He didn’t keep it a secret from our father because he and Dad had taste tests and even entered competitions until Carson went to college.
“I’ve never tasted a tomato better than one grown in Uncle Luther’s garden,” Carson continued. “I’ve never seen a hillside you can put seed into year after year and watch it grow the sweetest corn, the greenest, most delicious beans this side of heaven. I’ve been to Paris—what an awful, rat-infested slum that place is. They took us to Versailles and let us walk around in gardens with every imaginable flower in the world, and I tell you it doesn’t hold a candle to those three weeks in fall when the leaves burst into a
rainbow along the hills around here. It’s like living at the end of the yellow brick road.”
We passed another exit and a blighted strip of homes. “Bet Versailles didn’t have as many trailers. Or liquor stores.”
“This place owns me lock, stock, and barrel, Will. And I own
it
—we’ve got a big piece of it coming to us, you know. The roots go deeper than any ocean on the planet. I don’t want to live in any city you could name. I don’t want to live down south, where the bugs are bigger than our dogs or cats. I don’t want to live out west, where the earthquakes and mudslides bring houses down or the Midwest, where tornadoes chase you into hiding. Name me one place on God’s green earth that’s better than right here and I’ll kiss your rear at midfield at the next Super Bowl.”
“Only if I get to sing the national anthem too,” I said.
The closer we came to the Milton exit, the tighter my shoulders became, a slow-moving ache that coursed through my body. I sensed a shortness of breath, as if I were climbing into the thin air of an unwelcome mountain.