One Foot in Eden (3 page)

‘If he doesn’t come home tonight I’ll bring some men with me in the morning,’ I told Mrs. Winchester. ‘We’ll search the woods and river, if we need to.’

I wrote down my telephone number.

‘Here,’ I said, handing it to her. ‘You call if Holland comes in tonight. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning.’

I got in the patrol car and bumped down the dirt road. I thought again about what Holland had said to me two weeks ago about some men being better able to stand things when the shooting starts. I knew he was talking about more than just not getting killed or maimed so bad you wished you’d been killed. Holland was talking about how some men weren’t much bothered by the killing. I had been, and I carried with me the glazed eyes of every Japanese soldier I’d taken the life from on Guadalcanal. But I’d fought with men like Holland who seemed bred for fighting the same way gamecocks are. Their eyes lit up when the shooting started. They were utterly fearless, and you thanked God they were on your side instead of the other. Like Holland, they’d wanted souvenirs from their kills, mainly gold teeth carved out with Ka-Bar knives, leaving the mouths of dead Japanese gapped-toothed like jack-o’-lanterns.

As I slowed at the mailbox with ALEXANDER painted on it, I wondered if Billy Holcombe could kill a man. If Holland Winchester didn’t show up by morning I was going to have to give that question some serious thought.

Travis’s truck was parked beside Daddy’s, and Travis himself was on the roof. He’d heard me drive up but kept hammering until he’d used the half dozen nails clenched in his mouth. Then he stepped down the ladder to where I waited. We’d been born less than two years apart, and though we were both gray-eyed and tall, I’d always been big-boned like Daddy, while Travis favored Momma. But Travis had filled out in the last few years. There was no mistaking we were brothers, at least on the outside.

‘What brings you up here,’ he said, and not in a welcome way. ‘I know it ain’t your family.’

His saying that rankled me, mainly because of the truth in it .

‘I’ve been looking for Holland Winchester.’

‘What’s he done now?’ Travis asked.

‘Disappeared.'

‘And you’re wanting to find him?’

‘Not particularly, but that’s my job.’

‘Well he ain’t here, Sheriff.’

I let the ‘Sheriff’ comment pass. I didn’t want this visit to end like the last one.

‘I was going to take Daddy over to Salem for supper.’

‘He’s done ate,’ Travis said. ‘There was a time you’d have known that.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Mending fence in the far pasture.’

Travis waved the hammer toward the roof.

‘That’s why I’m doing this now. Everybody but Daddy knows he’s too old to be cat-walking a roof. If he was here he’d not let me get up there without him helping me.’

Travis clamped his mouth shut like it was a spigot he’d let run longer than he meant to. He glanced at the roof. I knew he wanted to get back up there, away from me. A whippoorwill called from the white oak in the back yard, its cry mournful as a funeral dirge.

‘How are Will and Carlton?’ I asked.

‘Come around once in a while and you’d know.’

‘I been meaning to,’ and soon as I spoke I knew my words to be the wrong thing to say.

‘Been meaning to,’ Travis said, his words mocking mine.

He stared at me, the same way he’d stare at a stump in his field or anything else bothersome he’d just as soon not have to deal with.

‘How long has it been since you seen them or Daddy? Five months? Six? You think if you buy Daddy a cafe meal that’s some big thing?’

‘I don’t need this, Travis,’ I said.

‘No, you don’t,’ Travis said, twisting my meaning. ‘You ain’t needed anything up here for a long time.’

Travis raised his hammer. For a second I thought he might throw it at me.

I couldn’t have blamed him if he’d tried. Once we’d been close in a way I’d never been with my other brother or sister.

‘You boys are ever alike as to share the same shadow,’ Momma had said when we were growing up. She hadn’t been just talking about how we favored one another in our looks. It was something deep inside us— the way we knew what each other was feeling or thinking, the way we didn’t argue and fight like most brothers. We had never said it, but we’d always believed no matter who else came into our lives—wives, children —we would always be that close. Travis believed I’d betrayed that pact, and I knew he was right.

‘I got to finish this roof,’ Travis said.

‘Tell Daddy I came by,’ I said, getting back in the car.

I drove out of the valley, the sun sinking into the trees. By the time I got on the blacktop, twilight had turned the strange color it always does in August, a pink tinged with green and silver. That color had always made it seem like time had somehow leaked out of the world, past and present blending together. My mind skimmed across time like a water spider crossing a pool, all the way back to 1935 when I was eighteen and Clemson had just offered me a football scholarship.

‘I want to do something to help you celebrate,’ Janice Griffen had told me as we left homeroom. ‘How about dinner, at my house? My father will grill us steaks.’

I had been too flustered to say anything but yes. Not only flustered but surprised by the invitation. Janice was a town kid, a doctor’s daughter.

I had parked our family’s twelve-year-old truck a quarter mile from Doctor Griffen’s house. I wore my church clothes, my dress shoes blistering my heels as I walked past big white houses with front yards green as new money.

Doctor Griffen had met me at the door. He’d placed his arm around my shoulder and led me down a hallway wide as the road that led to my family’s house, a burgundy-colored rug cushioning my steps.

I followed Doctor Griffen to a den lined with bookshelves. A mahogany writing desk filled one corner, a radio big as a pot-belly stove in the other.

‘Have a seat,’ Doctor Griffen said. ‘Janice will be down soon.’

In a few minutes we gathered around a huge oak dining room table. What struck me at that moment was how everything in that house seemed solid as that table, solid enough to weather a Depression that had caused men once rich to wander the country begging for work and food.

But I had been wrong. Even at that moment the house, the carpet and furniture, the very chair I sat in, was an illusion. Almost all of Doctor Griffen’s money had been lost years before in the stock crash of 1929, the rest five years later in a land deal.

‘Try your steak, Will,’ Doctor Griffen said after the prayer. ‘If it’s too rare I’ll put it back on the grill.’

He spoke in a light-hearted way, as if an undercooked steak was the biggest concern he had. He was doing all he could, as he would the next three years, to keep an illusion alive for his daughter and wife.

I picked up my knife, but two forks lay to the left of my plate.

I hesitated.

‘This one,’ Janice had said, handing me the larger fork of the two.

When I drove into Seneca streetlights were on, the movie house marquee as well. SINGING IN THE RAIN COMING SOON, red letters claimed. There were plenty of farmers praying that marquee was right. The air seemed heavier, as it always did after I’d been in the mountains. I parked the car in front of the courthouse and walked across the street to McSwain’s Cafe.

Darrell McSwain sweated like Satan’s own cook as he flipped the liver mush and hamburgers sizzling on his grill. A fan blew right on him, but all it did was keep the smoke out of his face. Couples filled the booths. I nodded at the folks I knew and sat down on a stool. The jukebox played Lefty Frizzell’s ‘Too Few Kisses Too Late.’

‘So what will you have, Sheriff?’ Darrell asked. ‘How about some cool weather?’

‘Sold all I had to a drummer. Last I seen of him he was highfooting it to the Yukon.’

‘Then how about some ice tea and a burger.’

‘I can manage that,’ Darrell said, and turned toward his grill. Someone had left a Greenville News on the counter. The Air Force was bombing the hell out of North Korea. Batista had more problems in Cuba. But these events seemed somehow farther away than when I’d read about them this morning. It was as if being in Jocassee had taken me out of the here and now.

‘How are they going to do this year?’ Darrell McSwain asked when he lay my supper on the counter.

I’d played football three years at Clemson, so Darrell and a lot of other people assumed I had some kind of lifelong loyalty. They seemed to forget what had happened after the spring game my junior year. I’d tore up my knee in that game, and Clemson had found a loophole to take my scholarship away.

‘We’ll make sure he gets his degree,’ Coach Barkley had promised Daddy when he recruited me, and that had been important to Daddy and especially my Uncle Thomas, who had the most education of anyone in Jocassee.

‘There’s nothing more valuable than what is behind this glass,’ Uncle Thomas had once told me, opening a child-tall bookshelf and handing me a book. ‘Knowledge is the one thing no one can take away from you.’

I’d done my part, good grades in high school and at Clemson, but one hit on the knee and suddenly good grades and a promise made three years earlier no longer mattered.

‘I haven’t been keeping up with them, Darrell,’ I said, and he moved on down the counter with his tea pitcher.

I walked over to the office afterward. Mrs. Winchester hadn’t called. I told Bobby to go home and get a good night’s sleep, because it looked like we might be traipsing through woods and water come morning.

After a while I went home too, or at least what I called home now. Janice was in bed reading her book on Charleston.

‘How was your meeting?’ I asked.

‘Frustrating, as usual. Gladys Williams had her silly suggestions. Anne Lester wouldn’t agree to anything.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

I undressed and got into bed. In a few minutes Janice lay the book on the table and turned off the lamp. The window was open, but no breeze fluttered the curtains. It was a night when sleep would come slow and fitfully, a night I would stare at a ceiling I could not see and think about the choices I’d made in my life, the choices my brother had reminded me of.

I pressed my chest against Janice’s back, my hand rubbing her hip.

‘No,’ she said, moving away.

The heat lay over me thick and still as a quilt. The only thing stirring was my mind, remembering that first year Janice and I had been married, remembering the nights Janice reached out for me. She would go to bed first because I’d be up to midnight doing my school work, my body bruised and aching from the afternoon’s practice. The lights would be off, and I would undress and lie down beside her. Janice would pull me to her, no nightgown or slip, only her warm skin smooth against mine. I would be exhausted and she half asleep, and somehow that made it better, as if our hearts had an energy that went beyond our bodies, like we’d stepped out of time into the sweet everlasting.

I finally got out of bed, walked into the living room and picked up
Red Carolinians
, the book I’d just begun when Bobby had interrupted me that night two weeks ago. The story was one I’d heard about and seen parts of growing up in Jocassee, a story of people living and working land for generations and then vanishing, leaving behind the arrowheads and pieces of pottery I’d turned up while plowing. Leaving behind place names too—Jocassee, Oconee, Chattooga—each pretty, vowel-heavy word an echo of a lost world.

I thought of how the descendants of settlers from Scotland and Wales and Ireland and England—people poor and desperate enough to risk their lives to take that land, as the Cherokees had once taken it from other tribes—would soon vanish from Jocassee as well. Fifteen years, twenty at most, and it’ll be all water, at least that was what the people who would know had told me. Reservoir, reservation, the two words sounded so alike. In a dictionary they would be on the same page.

There was a kind of justice in what would happen. But this time the disappearance would be total. There would be no names left, because Alexander Springs and Boone Creek and Robertson’s Ford and Chapman’s Bridge would all disappear. Every tombstone with Holcombe or Lusk or Alexander or Nicholson chiseled into it would vanish as well.

I looked at my watch. Past midnight and Mrs. Winchester still hadn’t called. As I finished the book’s last sentence, I wondered if Holland’s body might also vanish under that coming water.