High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (31 page)

*   *   *

Last year, Amad told me the good news he’d heard about Sarah. I didn’t even know she’d gotten married, or that Nikos had been out of the picture for so long. We were hanging up the sign for store number two, two beaches south, in Huntington. Teri was pleased. I have to say that good news about Sarah sent me down a deep dark hole. In fact, Amad and I were supposed to celebrate that night with dinner, but I excused myself and went home, where I got very drunk with Dad. And when I say that, I mean I got drunk while my poor Dad lay twisted in bed, not saying a word and completely immobile. He’d been lying there for over a year. He was here, but he wasn’t here at all. Only his eyes were alive, lit with that same anxious fire that showed on his face for as long as I could remember. That final night he saw something, I don’t know what. If I were more romantic, I would say my mother’s ghost was there in the room, and that he saw her. Because his face softened, and his eyes cooled, his heart was eased. A peace descended upon him, a peace he’d been looking for his whole life. I don’t know what frightened me more, watching death slowly descend upon my father or how he seemed to welcome it body and soul. I kissed his still head. I sat with him for a very long time. And then I went outside. I walked, and then I ran over the sand, like a free beast, running alive into the night.

NO MORE
DOMINION

WOODFORD, KENTUCKY, 1801

They come along the path out of the wood and rounding the tall tulip tree, all one hundred feet of sky-scratching smooth brown bark, the wide waxy green leaves growing in clusters. Past the coffee trees and thick leathery bean pods that dangle like bats from the branches. It’s dusk and the air is rich with river smell, and with pig meal, and the char of the canebrake burning. Some come on horseback, but most come carriaging, gathered on wagons. Two wheels, four wheels. The clop and crack of hooves on limestone like splinters in the evening air. There is the buzzing chirp of katydids as bony hooves slap rock. And behind the farmhouse, brook water passes through tufted grass into a blanket of watermeal buds. Some of the wagoners ring handbells as they ride by in procession. The clappers knelling doleful as the sun goes low. The drivers click at their teeth, side-mouth, waving at the small boy as they ride by the farm.

Orr yells, “I don’t know, Daddy. And there’s more wagons up the way.”

He pulls his hand from his pocket and opens his palm. His daddy’s voice is low. Orr sees him, barely, through a cloud of smoke by the crackling canebrake high on fire. His father cutting a girdle in a hickory’s bark by the riverside, says, “You steer clear. Just pick a pig. Go on now.”

A baby shrew he found in the grass hugs blindly there at the boy’s fingers, its whiskered and pointy snout sniffing at the air. A cashew, pink and soft. Orr nudges it some, and shakes his palm gently every time the shrew gets steady.

Another wagon rolls by.

The driver wears a hat whose brim hides his eyes. And the loping gait of the horses teases Orr with every rise and fall, just short of letting him see the driver’s face. It’s a long wagon with four wheels, plain, flat, and filled with children. He closes his fist over the shrew. A short boy waves at him, jumping and grabbing at a low branch passing overhead. One thing’s sure, jumping boys haven’t lost their mothers yet. That boy’s too happy, must be his mama’s back home alive. Another dizzy coming on; Orr is feeling poorly, maybe a fever.

“Orren Laudermilk, you get away from the road.”

He turns to see his father coming up from the riverbed, the canebrake behind him burning alive with red fire. His father coughs as he walks, waving the smoke from his face. Jumping from the fence, Orr wipes at his pant legs and opens his palm. The pink ball of shrew uncurls itself. It sniffs, raising its head, sizing him up maybe. He rolls the tail softly between his fingers.

“What you got there?” His daddy brushes his fist with the hat.

“Nothing.” He puts his hand in his pocket.

“You don’t look no better, all ghost white.” Orr’s daddy presses his forehead with the back of his hand. “Warm as toast. Can’t be pox. Can’t be.” His daddy feels the air for moisture with his fingers. “We need rain before our grass goes brown. And you can make yourself useful even when you’re sickly.” He points toward the hogs and pigs behind the fence, scattered about on their bellies and sides in the yard. Pink muddy mounds of belch and snore. “It’ll be fall before long, and your time to kill. We’ll do it together, I promise. But you need to pick the pig.”

Orr nods some, Yessir.

“Look at me.”

Orr looks.

“Your mother’d be in hearty agreement. No good reason to be afraid of killing.” His father motions toward the yard.

“Yessir.” He looks at the pigs, not sure what it will mean to pick a pig. Picking’s not the same thing as killing, he knows that much. He nods toward the wagon up the road, and says, “Where they off to?” A sour spark fills him up, thinking what other kinds of places in the world there are.

“Oh, I can guess right, I bet.” His father’s face is broken with lines like tree bark. “You done the luck jars yet?” He yawns. “Put them with the soap. I filled a bag with every last bar. With any luck we’ll sell all of it. Don’t you leave it till morning. I’m leaving early and you’re not well enough for travel.”

“I never get to go into town.”

“Plenty to do right here.”

A wagon passes with a thin man in the driver’s seat wearing bright red suspenders. The man nods.

Orr and his father keep their ground.

A young lady stands in the back of the wagon, her face shadowed by a bright yellow bonnet.

“Come on now,” his father shouts at the wagon. “You all scaring my hogs!”

She walks toward the edge of the wagon, looking almost like she’ll jump if she gets the chance. She says, “It’s gonna be a glory day, and you all should join us tomorrow. We can dance with Him in His presence.” She shakes herself like she’s been doused with cold water. “You know about Heaven and hellfire, boy?”

Orr looks up at his Daddy, closing shut his hand in his pocket.

“We’re not particular, and you don’t talk to my son,” his daddy says as the lady in the wagon rides off. A bell makes a high, clean racket in the evening. “Makes no odds,” he says, looking at Orr. “Put them luck jars in the wagon, could fetch as much as three dollars apiece. Should be a good morning with all these folks going up.”

Some men on horseback come galloping. Orr moves closer to the path. The horse legs work feverishly, tossing up dirt clods and lime shards. He’s not so scared and he blocks his face from the dust as steam rises from the nostrils of the horses, their wet mucus shining.

“Get over here,” his father says. “Before you get yourself walked on.”

He turns back and stands beside his father as the men ride by.

Trees vein the blue dusk, and a sudden flutter like sheets of rustling paper comes from the slow-burning cane. He looks back that way, at the cave in the hill by the bank rocks, and the bats come rushing out of it, spat from a sick mouth, almost eclipsing the orange leaves of fire. The dizzy in his head drives the wet chill on his skin.

“Fire’s about done,” his father says, walking back toward the canebrake. “And you all keep moving now,” he says louder.

Orr watches his father scoop up his hat from the river and toss water at the fire. He pulls his hand from his pocket, opens it, and he can barely see the shrew in the evening light. He pulls a sharpened piece of cane wood from another pocket. He stares until his eyes see better. Not so sure he can do it, kill a pig. He turns toward the river, and his father pulling down the cane char. The moon is out somewhere, making a cold glow over and through the woods. He looks up, can’t find it. He looks down where now he sees the shrew nuzzling. He once watched his father sever the head of a deer with a rusted saw. They never let him see his mother’s body. Already a year now without her. He pushes at the shrew with the cane blade and looks back at his father hacking at the grasses. He stabs lightly at the shrew’s belly, seeing how far he can push without breaking the soft pink skin.

“Get those jars in the wagon, Orr. I’ve got an early morning.”

He wipes away a cold sweat from his warm face. It makes a dark spot on his sleeve. He presses the blade against the shrew’s soft tail as it bustles on its back like an upturned bug. The shrew squeals. He turns away, his small body bucking with revulsion. Bitters from his stomach spit up into his throat. Sometimes he naps with the hogs. Pig bellies are round and tough like leather. He slaps at a fly on his neck, and again he pokes the tip of the blade into the soft belly of the shrew.

“Why you dawdling? You
need
to get in bed.” His daddy comes up beside him again.

“I’m going, I’m going. There’s still light left.”

His father kicks a rock toward the path. “Dammit, Orr.” He points at the hill beyond the path, where a large black sow, the oldest, freely grazes on the hill. “Get her in the yard. Now.”

Orr rolls the cane back and forth between his fingers. Another wagon coming. “Why there so many wagons?”

His father bends and picks a stone from the grass. “Un-neighborlies telling us all what’s what. God don’t play particular and neither should we.” He throws the stone and hits the wagon broadside, the rider turns abruptly. “You’re breaking up stones from my path!”

His daddy says, “They used to come around some, and knocking on your door. But I haven’t seen them out this way since before your mother’s gone. Must be a camp meeting up north some.”

A lone rider approaches and slows, pulling up his reins, rubbing noises as they tighten around his gloves. He lets a rider go on beside him, and says, “You all should join us riverside tomorrow. A glory day and these years are glory years! We’re living in the Lord’s last century now!” He removes his hat and shows a smooth bald head. The man looks up. “These days are Last Days, and Heaven and Hell are hungry.”

Orr looks back at his father.

His father says, “Get moving out of my land.”

The rider smiles. “My scalp is clean like my conscience. And I’ll see you tomorrow yet. No staying away, I hear. You best bring your boy when the Lord comes calling.” He stands in his saddle and slaps at the neck of his horse, galloping off.

His daddy says, “Let’s just hope these folks got dollars in their pockets. Ladies do like soap, all kinds.”

“Where they all headed?”

His father studies him, and then says, “You see all around? Take a good look.”

Orr looks.

“All the God we need and church, too.” His father shows the wood, and the river. “All of this is mine. And yours. God’s, too, if there is one. And it don’t cost a penny from your pocket.”

Orr nods his head: makes sense.

“Your inheritance, boy. Good land to work, and the character of your mother. May not be much, but it’s yours.” His father looks around the farm. “This is everything.”

“Yessir.”

“You remember the Montgomerys who moved back east? We had business.”

“Yes sir.” The youngest Montgomery boy had shown Orr how to whittle.

“They was like these but different. Catholics. Same thing, but different. At least they had enough sense to keep to themselves and never come knocking.”

Orr’s bones ache, and he thinks of dead pigs, and horses gone, and of his sleeping and buried mother. All of them in one place. He’s warm and cold in all different parts of his body.

He says, “God’s here, too?”

“All we need of Him.”

Orr thinks on this. So He’s somewhere else, too, where we don’t need Him.

He looks at the pigs in the yard, his stomach weaseling up in his throat. Mamma’s in a place where we don’t need Him.

His daddy rubs his fingers together. “And I can’t figure why God’d want my corn to dry anyway.”

Orr opens his palm and watches the shrew crawl. His father snaps a broken branch from a hickory and walks off, saying, “Every few years they get together, particulars in bunches, swearing God is particular. All that sort of horse shit. Your mother, she wouldn’t hear none of it.”

The shrew’s fine, just fine. Get the jars on the wagon pull, and bed the sow.

A blond woman passes along in the back of a flat wagon. She stares about, looking lost, misplaced. Her face is long and blank. She reaches out a hand toward Orr. She’s reaching. He wants to take it, not sure why.

His father says, “Give me any tulip tree, a hundred feet high, and I’ll bow down like any one of them.” His father waves at the path. “Wave goodbye, Orr. They won’t be back for a long while.”

Orr waves. His father tosses a stone. The bats fly over, screeching, changing positions in the trees.

His father says, “Just like them, moving in bunches. What Kentucky needs is independent persons. You, me, and like your mother was.”

A wagon stops and the driver tips his hat to the boy. The driver says, “Get on now.” He smacks the resting horse’s back. “I said get on!” But the horse stands still with his eyes bewildered, and looking backward, spying on Orr and what lies in his palm.

A thin switch snaps backward, comes down with a cleaving thwack. The driver shouts, “Get on!” And the horse snarls and buckles from the switch, rearing slightly, then falls forward into a reluctant trot.

Orr buckles, too, and is sure he smells the burning stripe on the horse’s hide. His father’s voice comes from behind him.

As the smell of cane char wafts from the river.

The black sow watches from the hill.

She’s fat and she’s proud, lifting up her gray snout, her black belly swaying as she moves. She’s queenly there against the sky, the biggest of the lot. The oldest one of all. Her tail curls up in silhouette. A hot sick stirs in Orr’s stomach. He shivers, heaves, and vomits. Not much, but it empties him. He wipes his mouth and spits. He cries some, but makes sure his daddy can’t see. He dries his eyes, and opens up his palm. He presses the blade to his own soft neck, looking down there at the baby shrew. He presses hard, but does not break his own skin. It hurts. It’s not that he’s just afraid of killing, but also of what lies beyond the act, and he can’t seem to figure it. He pulls the blade away, and puts it back in his pocket. He sets the shrew down in the grass. He walks across the path toward the black sow grazing in the dark.