‘They told us we had till 6:00 tomorrow,’ I said.
That was what the Carolina Power man had told Daddy the last time he’d come round, the same man who’d told us last winter not to plant anything, because there was a chance our part of the valley would flood before harvest time. But Daddy had told the Carolina Power man it was our land for a few more months yet, and he’d damn well do what he pleased, Sheriff Alexander stepped closer, his shadow falling over me.
‘I’m not here about that,’ he said.
He looked across the field, then back toward the house. ‘Your Daddy and Momma aren’t here, are they?’
‘No sir,’ I said. ‘They took the last of the furniture down to Seneca.’
‘Your daddy take a job down there?’
‘He’s working at Dobson Mill.’
‘So you all are living there now?’
‘Yes sir. I’m just here to cut this cabbage.’
Sheriff Alexander didn’t say anything to that. He just stood there above me like he was listening for something. But the only sounds were the chain saws farther down the valley near Laurel Fork. He stared across the river at Licklog Mountain. The mountain had been scalped, mainly just stumps and rocks now. He looked up toward Crossroads Mountain and saw the same thing.
It was easy enough to guess what he was thinking, for like Daddy he’d grown up here. Though he’d left years ago I supposed it still bothered him to see it all changed.
‘Momma and Daddy will be back to pick me up at five,’ I said, because his gaze was far-off, like he’d forgotten why he came.
‘Maybe that’s just as well,’ Sheriff Alexander said, looking at me now. ‘I came to see you. I’ve got a problem and you can help me.’
I stood and dusted the dirt off my jeans. Whatever he wanted of me, I wanted to be level with him when I heard it.
‘What kind of problem?’
‘Your neighbor Mrs. Winchester. She says she won’t leave until she talks to you. I’d just as soon not have to drag an old woman out of her house like she’s a criminal, but if she doesn’t come willingly I’ll have no choice. That water’s not waiting for anyone.’
I looked toward the river and knew the truth of what he said. The tobacco was already underwater, and the land I stood on would soon be. I was in a race with the water to see who would get to the cabbage first.
‘Are you going to help me, Isaac?’
I kept staring at the water, taking my time before I answered. I knew I was going to go see her, but a part of me wished I wasn’t. I wanted to get the cabbage cut, get it all over with today and never have to come back.
I’d grown up knowing there was no future here, that Jocassee would sooner or later be covered in water, so I’d never let myself get attached to it the way Momma and Daddy had. I’d always known someday I’d have to leave. That’s why I’d been in ROTC in high school instead of FFA and why I was headed to Clemson next fall on an ROTC scholarship.
‘Why does she want to see me?’ I asked, looking at eight rows of uncut cabbage.
‘She didn’t say. She just said she wasn’t leaving until she did.’
I looked at my watch. I could take off a few minutes and still get the cabbage cut by five.
‘All right,’ I said.
I left the butcher knife and half-filled sack where they laid. We walked up to the house, Sheriff Alexander huffing and limping the whole way. I’d heard he’d been a good football player at one time, but he was in sorry shape now. It was easy to see why he wasn’t running for sheriff again. He looked wore out, ready for checkers and a pair of bedroom slippers.
‘I’ll give you a ride,’ he said.
‘I can walk over,’ I said. ‘Besides, I need to stop by the house a minute,’
‘I don’t mind waiting,’ he said, so I just nodded.
I stepped into the house where I’d lived almost eighteen years, and it was like a building in one of those western ghost towns on television where the wind blows dust and tumbleweeds through empty streets.
Anything that would have made you believe people had lived here— chair, bed, TV, or picture—was gone. Daddy had even taken up bricks from the hearth. My steps echoed through the house, a lonely, empty sound. I walked into the room Daddy had added the year I was born. Something brown and clawed swooped past my head. It flapped down the hall and out the front door.
That gave my heart a jump start. It pounded so loud I could hear the beating, or so it seemed, because everything else was so quiet and still. I went to the far corner of the room where my bed had been. Daddy had been a good farmer, but he wasn’t quite as handy with a hammer and nails. A couple of the floor boards hadn’t been nailed down good. When I was a kid I’d made a cubby hole under one of them.
I lifted the wood. Besides peppermints and sweet drinks, Mrs. Winchester had given me one other thing when I was a kid, something I’d forgotten until Sheriff Alexander’s visit reminded me. I rooted my hand in the space under the board. I brought up a couple of arrowheads and buffalo nickels before I found what I was searching for.
I looked around the room a last time. I’d slept in another house a month, but mornings when I woke there was always a moment I expected to see these walls, to see the sun slanting in through these windows. I was learning that leaving a place wasn’t as easy as packing up and getting out. You carried part of it with you, whether you wanted to or not.
We didn’t talk on the way over to Mrs. Winchester’s, but the radio was on, Johnny Cash singing‘I Walk the Line’. I tuned it out and thought about what it would be like to live in a dorm next fall with a bunch of people my own age. It figured to be quite an adjustment, especially since I’d had no brothers or sisters. I wondered if even at Clemson there would be times I’d wake up and think for a moment I was still up here.
I bet there would be, and I bet there’d be times I’d be lonesome or worried about passing a course and wish I was back bedding tobacco with Daddy or sitting down to Momma’s biscuits and gravy. Every kid leaving home feels this way, I told myself—excited but a little scared too.
Sheriff Alexander cut-off the radio when we pulled in behind the hulk of rusted metal now more lattice than truck. Creeper, honeysuckle and the trumpet vines Daddy called cow’s itch covered the metal like a green net. Orange flowers blossomed from the trumpet vines.
Sheriff Alexander glanced at his watch.
‘I’ve got to go see my brother,’ he said, ‘He’s as stubborn about leaving as that old woman. You tell Mrs. Winchester she’s got thirty minutes to talk to you and get together what she’s taking to the nursing home. You tell her even if she’s not ready we’re going anyway, I’ve got to get her down to Seneca and myself back up here. I’ve plenty enough other things besides her to deal with today.’
I opened the car door.
‘Thirty minutes,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
I smelled kerosene as I stepped on the porch. The door was open, so I walked in, the front room dark as a movie theatre, the kerosene fumes so thick it was more like breathing water than air. Quilts and blankets and balled-up pages of newspaper covered the front room’s floor, all of it reeking of kerosene.
I heard a ticking sound and looked at the clock, its hands still where they’d been a decade ago. Kerosene dripped off the fire-board and onto the hearth like time itself leaked from the clock’s base.
Mrs. Winchester stood in front of the fireplace. She wore a black cotton dress. A Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, Momma would call it. She held a five-gallon steel can in her right hand. l crossed the room and took it from her. Nothing sloshed in the bottom. She’d poured out every drop.
‘I’ll not allow that lake to cover up this house,’ she said. ‘I’ll burn it to the ground first.’
Mrs. Winchester’s words were slurred, the left side of her face froze like a mask. Her right hand reached up to the fire-board where the picture of her youngest son stared down at us, but it wasn’t the picture she took from the mantle. It was a box of kitchen matches. I took them from her.
‘You can’t do that,’ I told her, though I had no idea why not.
‘Let’s go out on the porch,’ I said, because the kerosene fumes gave me a headache. I took her by the arm and led her out of the gloomy house and into the light. It was cool for late September. The radio had claimed we might have our first frost come morning. I asked her if she wanted me to get her coat, but she shook her head. She sat in the rocker, and I perched myself beside her on the railing.
I stuffed the matches in my front pocket. As I did my fingertip jabbed against the Gold Star.
‘Here, before I forget,’ I said, pulling the medal out of my pocket. ‘I brought this for you.’
I held the Gold Star out to her.
‘That there belongs to you, not me,’ she said.
‘I think you ought to keep it now,’ I said.
She reached out her right hand then, but she didn’t take what I offered. Her cold, veiny hand curled my fingers back over my palm. Her hand pressed mine into a fist, and she didn’t let go, her grip stronger than I would have thought for a woman that old. I almost lost my balance, reached with my free hand to grip the railing as I felt the Gold Star’s points break my skin and dampen my palm with blood. Mrs. Winchester squeezed my hand harder. A blood drop fell on the gray wood under our hands. The stain it made was no bigger round than a piece of double-00 buckshot, but it was enough to make her let my hand go. I stuffed the Gold Star back in my jeans.
‘He wanted you to have it,’ she said, the words slurred enough to make me think maybe I hadn’t heard her right.
It made no sense, her saying‘he’ when her son hadn’t even known me.
‘He?’
‘Holland,’ she said, like that would clear it up. Her brown eyes looked deep into mine now. The side of her face that wasn’t froze twitched like a current ran under her skin.
I gripped the railing with both hands. Whatever she’d been waiting to tell me all this time, I knew she couldn’t hold it inside any longer. It was like my mind was trying to beat her to it, because I was bringing up things from the past that connected me to that soldier above the fireplace.
What my mind grabbed on was what she’d said years ago about me looking like her son. She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed such a thing.
‘You’re a Winchester, aren’t you?’ Mr. Pipkin had said the first day I’d walked into my eighth grade home room. The way he’d spoke made it clear he didn’t much like the idea I might be.
‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m a Holcombe.’
‘Then your Momma must be,’ Mr. Pipkin had said. ‘No sir. She was a Boone.’
But Mr. Pipkin had looked at me like he thought I was lying, and he’d held a grudge against me from that first day to the end of the school year.
‘He wanted you to have it,’ Mrs. Winchester said again, like maybe I hadn’t heard her the first time.
‘Why?’
The smell of kerosene filled the porch now as if it had soaked through the walls. Mrs. Winchester’s eyes met mine, and it was that same hungry look she’d had in church when I was four years old.
‘Because you’re his son.’
When she said that it didn’t matter that I gripped the railing with both hands, because it was like the wood I sat on no longer connected to the porch or anything else. It was like that moment on a swing when your outstretched legs and feet reach out over your head. For a second you’re suspended in midair, defying gravity, and your hands grip the ropes even tighter, because you know you’re about to fall.
But there were no ropes for me to hold on to.
‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.
‘Don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘Believe your own eyes.’
She nodded at the door.
‘Go back in yonder and study that picture. Look at it good. Even if you won’t hear the truth you’ll see it.’
I didn’t move, probably couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. My mind brought up all sorts of memories, each one like a piece of a puzzle being put together. I remembered how at family get-togethers my relatives sometimes remarked to Momma and Daddy about my brown eyes, how rare they were in the family, and it was kin on both sides saying that.
I remembered how Momma and Daddy had always tried to keep me away from Mrs. Winchester, how Momma had dragged me through the barbed wire and back onto our land that morning she’d caught me leaving Mrs. Winchester’s house. There were other things, like me being an only child, and the way Daddy had sometimes looked at me, almost like he saw something that made him afraid. It seemed every second my mind dredged up something else.
I no longer felt like I was hanging in midair. I was falling now and I hoped I’d hit so hard I’d knock myself out, because I didn’t want to remember anything else. Mrs. Winchester reached out and grabbed my wrist, like she’d read my mind and feared I’d tumble right off the porch.
‘If there was ever another way I’d have not told you,’ she said, still gripping my wrist, ‘for you’ll have burdens enough in your life without this. But you’re the only one that can do what’s got to be done. You’re the only one that can get them to tell you where your real daddy is.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
The kerosene fumes were so thick now it was like we were underwater. My head pounded and my eyes watered. I felt like I was drowning.
‘Your real daddy,’ she said. ‘Them that raised you know where he is.’
‘He’s alive?’
‘No, he ain’t alive.’
This must be a dream, I told myself, because that’s exactly what it felt like all of a sudden—a dream where everything seems real then suddenly nothing at all makes sense. Open your eyes and you’ll see you’re in bed, I told myself. I blinked but nothing happened. I was still on the front porch and Mrs. Winchester was still in her chair beside me, her cold hand clamped like iron around my wrist.
‘You don’t know where he is?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then why would Momma and Daddy know?’
‘Because they killed him.’
Suddenly the wood I sat on was nailed solid to the porch again, the world firm under my feet. Maybe the stroke has done this to her, I thought. Maybe she’s just old and addled. When I freed my hand from her wrist, I felt bony fingers that didn’t want to let go of me.
You really had me going for a minute, old woman, I thought. Had me believing all sorts of nonsense.