I grabbed the front of his shirt, lifting him out of the chair. My knuckles pressed against his breast bone.
‘You don’t know a thing of what I feel.’
‘You’re right,’ Travis said, his eyes still looking straight into mine. ‘I knew once but not anymore.’
The room seemed to close in around us. Whatever my life had been and was to be had come to this moment when I held my fist against Travis’s chest.
‘No, Will,’ Travis said, his eyes no longer looking into mine but looking behind me.
I turned and saw my nephew, my namesake, with a pocketknife sprouting from his fist, the other twin beside him, hands clenched.
‘Put it down, son,’ Travis said.
‘Not till he lets you go,’ Will said.
I opened my fist, stepped back. The room’s white walls widened again. We all stood there for a minute, sharing nothing but the same name.
‘Will they let me see him?’
‘Yeah,’ Travis said, rubbing his chest. ‘They’ll let you.’
‘You might need this,’ Laura said, and handed me a hospital pass.
I showed the pass to the nurse on the second floor, and she led me to the room. Daddy lay stretched out on the bed, his eyes staring at the ceiling, tubes taped to both arms. His skin was tinged blue, each breath an effort. Travis was right. It would have been better if he’d died in his fields, feeling the land against his body, seeing trees and crops and a sky that promised rain.
‘We’re trying to make him comfortable,’ the nurse said. ‘Does he know I’m here?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
The nurse left the room.
I held Daddy’s hand, and I knew it for a dead man’s hand. It was that cold. A hand that did not acknowledge mine. His eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. His body was nothing more than a husk now. I prayed for his soul, but he didn’t need my prayers. He’d lived a good life and treated people a lot better than they’d sometimes treated him.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ I said aloud.
And I was, but it was too late to matter. He was gone from me now and never coming back. I held his hand until the nurse came back in to change his sheets.
‘I’ll be back this evening,’ I told Travis. ‘Leave a message with Janice if something happens.’
Travis nodded. He knew my meaning.
I drove on up into the mountains, a blue sky overhead, but plenty of rain had fallen. The creeks ran quick and muddy. The fields were no longer dust. It had been a soaking rain, the answer to prayers and dead black snakes and shee-show and whatever else people had found to believe in.
Billy wasn’t in his fields, but I hadn’t expected him to be since it was too muddy to get much done anyway. You might get some corn and beans after all, Billy, I thought as I followed the other men’s muddy footprints down the field edge to the river. Already the corn stalks seemed to be standing taller, the beans greener.
The river was high, fast and muddy like the creeks. Crossing was a lot trickier than yesterday. I found a limb to use as a staff and took my time. I gave a shout, and Bobby answered downstream. The water was too high to use the grappling hooks. All Bobby and the rest of the men were doing was hoping to find what water had already brought up on its own.
By eleven the river crested. Tom and Leonard cast the grappling hooks into blue holes as the rest of us walked the banks. The river had washed up tree limbs and a tractor tire and even a rod and reel. But it still hid Holland. We stopped at noon and ate donuts and drank Cheerwines Bobby had brought.
‘If that storm didn’t bring that body up I don’t know what the hell will,’ Bobby said as we sat on the bank.
‘It sure enough brought up most everything else,’ Tom said. We watched the river flow past, almost as clear now as it had been the day before and not much higher.
It was the river I’d been baptized in.
‘Washed in the blood of the lamb,’ Preacher Robertson had said as the blue sky fell away and water rushed over me. It seemed Preacher Robertson held me there forever, but I hadn’t been afraid. I was ten years old. I had felt the power of that river and believed it nothing less than God Himself swirling around me.
After we ate, Tom and Leonard worked the blue holes while Bobby and me waded in and poked bamboo poles under banks and between big rocks. All we found was snakes and muskrats.
‘Let’s go,’ I said at four o’clock. We recrossed the river and slogged our way back up the field edge.
‘You go on back with Tom and the others,’ I told Bobby when we got to the cars. ‘I’ll be along directly.’
I watched Tom’s car disappear around a bend, then stepped into Billy Holcombe’s yard. I heard a rasping sound coming from the woodshed and walked over and peered inside. At first I saw nothing, but my eyes began to adjust to the dark. Billy slowly took his form behind what looked like prison bars. Like a haint shape-shifting, my older kin would have said. But I was the ghost, haunting a valley where I no longer belonged.
Soon I saw the bars he worked on were wood, not steel. He hummed to himself, so soft it sounded no louder than a wasp’s drone. I could smell the wood, wild cherry, and I knew the crib was as much for his wife as for the child. Whatever had happened between Holland and her, the crib was a sign she and Billy had gotten past it.
She had stuck by him the last few days, lied for him. Whatever had happened that morning, she’d had to make a choice between Holland and Billy and she’d chosen Billy.
Billy kept on humming, and I bet he didn’t even know he was doing it. I listened to a man who believed his future was going to be better than his past, a man who’d woke up to rain-soaked fields and the knowledge come fall he’d have a bumper crop. A man about to learn he’d gotten away with murder.
I wondered what would happen when Carolina Power ran him off his land. Billy’s parents had been sharecroppers. This land didn’t connect Billy to his family the way Daddy’s land connected him to ours.
Billy’s land signaled a break from his past, from what his family had been. Maybe land to Billy was just something to be used, like a truck or plow horse. Billy might think his ship had come in when Carolina Power bought his place for a few dollars an acre more than he’d paid for it, at least until he saw the price of a farm like his in another part of the county. Maybe he’d take that money to Seneca or Anderson and buy a house with an indoor toilet and electricity and think he’d found paradise. He’d work in a mill where he’d get a paycheck at the end of every week and not have to worry anymore about drought and hail and tobacco worms.
Other changes he wouldn’t like as much, things that would make him miss being behind a horse and plow. He’d have to ask permission to get a drink of water or take a piss. The work would be the same thing day after day, week after week, the mill hot and humid as dog days all year round. He’d breathe an unending drizzle of lint he’d spend half his nights coughing back up.
His work would give him no satisfaction, but he’d have a wife and child to go home to when the mill whistle freed him at day’s end. There were men who would envy that about him if nothing else.
As for my life, it was in Seneca. My morning telephone call had woke me up in more than one way. It had been a reminder of something I had already known despite what I’d been able to pretend for a few hours—I had chosen my life long ago when I had picked up a fork, picked it up in a house I had believed to be solid and permanent as anything on earth.
But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don’t need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.
I watched Billy through the bars, knowing in a few minutes I’d drive out of this valley. I’d look in my rearview mirror and watch the land disappear as if sinking into water.
When I had become a deputy I had made out my will and stipulated that I was to be buried here in Jocassee with the other Alexanders. I hoped I would be in that grave before they built the reservoir so when the water rose it would rise over me and Daddy and Momma and over Old Ian Alexander and his wife Mary and over the lost body of the princess named Jocassee and the Cherokee mounds and the trails De Soto and Bartram and Michaux had followed and the meadows and streams and forests they had described and all would forever vanish and our faces and names and deeds and misdeeds would be forgotten as if we and Jocassee had never been.
I wish you well, Billy, I thought. I stepped closer and blotted out most of his light.
‘You got away with it,’ I said and left him there, his hands shaping the future.
A
t first it was just a kind of joke between me and the older women. They’d lay a hand on my belly and say something silly like ‘Is there a biscuit in the oven’ or ‘I don’t feel nothing blossoming yet.’ Then we’d all have a laugh. Or a woman more my own age might say, ‘A latch-pin can poke holes in the end of them things,’ or ‘Nuzzle up to him of a sudden in the barn or the field edge and that will do the trick.’ Such words made me blush for they brought up notions I’d never known women to talk of out amongst each other.
Me and Billy hadn’t wanted a baby right away. We had a full enough portion just getting used to one another so he wore a sheath each time he put himself inside me. As that first year passed we settled in and got easy and comfortable in our marriage, the way a good team of horses learns to work together and help each other out.
We had a good harvest that fall and got ourselves a little ahead and our second winter together a night came when I said ‘You don’t have to wear it’ and he knew my meaning. That night as we shared our bodies the love was so much better, for the hope of a baby laid down with us.
The weeks went by and I didn’t get the morning sickness or tired easy or any of the other signs. Then it was six months and then our third anniversary. We held each other most every night but when the curse was on me. Yet it didn’t seem to do no good. The older women still made their comments but they wasn’t as funny now and I suspicioned they wasn’t meant to be.
‘It’s time you started your family,’ they’d say, like as if it was their business to tell me such.
The younger girls, girls I’d grown up with, would make a show of their young ones whenever I was around.
‘Ain’t she a darling,’ they’d say to me or, ‘You want to hold him?’
They all everyone of them seemed to be saying to me I wasn’t a woman till I had a young one of my own.
‘Are you and Billy getting along?’ Momma finally asked one afternoon when she came to visit.
‘Yes, Momma,’ I said. ‘We’re getting on fine.’
But Momma was doubtful of my words. She looked out the window where Billy was drawing water for Sam.
‘A marriage ain’t no simple thing to keep sprightly. It takes some tending to.’
‘I know that, Momma,’ I said.
‘I bought you some things,’ Momma said, and took some lipstick and cheek rouge from her pocket. ‘A man likes his wife to pretty up for him sometimes.’
‘I don’t need you to buy me such things, Momma,’ I said, but she pressed them in my hand.
‘You make yourself up with that lipstick and cheek rouge,’ Momma said. ‘And put on that blue dress to show off your eyes. You do that tonight, Amy. It’ll make a difference. I’m certain of that.’
But Momma was wrong. It made no difference at all.
When it came December me and Billy finally went to Seneca to see Doctor Wilkins. We sat there most forever before the nurse called our names.
‘You can go out to the waiting room if you like,’ Doctor Wilkins told Billy after a few minutes.
‘No,’ Billy said. ‘I’ll stay.’
Doctor Wilkins put me in his stirrups. He laid a sheet over my legs and opened me up.
‘No tumors or infection,’ Doctor Wilkins said. ‘That’s a good sign.’
Then he took what looked to be ice tongs and opened me way wider. He put a tube in and blew into that tube while he listened. I gasped for the pain of it.
I looked over at Billy and his face was studying the far wall. ‘Everything looks to be fine,’ Doctor Wilkins said.
Doctor Wilkins opened his desk and reached Billy a sheath. ‘I guess you know what I need,’ Doctor Wilkins said. ‘There are some magazines in the back bathroom. When you finish bring it back and I’ll put it under the microscope.’
Billy got all red and shame-faced but he did what was asked of him. Then Doctor Wilkins looked under the microscope. He stared long and careful and that was sure no good sign.
He finally took his eyeball off the microscope.
‘I can’t find a single live sperm,’ he said.
Going back home that afternoon was ever a long and silent ride. I looked out the window and the world seemed dead. The mountains was bald-looking and brown, the trees shucked of their leaves, nothing more than skeletons of what they’d been in summer. I looked out on those bare mountains and a memory I’d been trying for months to keep pushed deep in my mind corked up to the surface and wouldn’t go back down.
It was a memory of me and my brother Matthew and the day I broke his body. We’d been in the barn loft doing the work Daddy had sent us there to do. At least I was doing it. Matthew was being contrary and not doing nothing but sassing. I was twelve and him only eight. It vexed me to have to do it all.
‘Get on over there and do your part, Matthew,’ I’d said, and shoved him toward the other bales. He’d tried to keep his balance and tottered back to where the loft window laid open like a trap door. He took that last step backwards and it was like he’d just stepped off the edge of a cliff hang.
Momma and Daddy hadn’t punished me for what had happened, never spoke a word of blame about it. Yet I’d blamed myself plenty. Those first couple of days when Doctor Griffen wasn’t sure what might happen in the long run I’d wished more than anything in my life it had been me that fell through the window loft. When Doctor Griffen said Matthew would walk again that made it bearable but just barely.
What bothered my thoughts was that as much punishment as I’d heaped on myself for what happened, maybe God figured it wasn’t enough. I’d near killed a young one once and I’d not be trusted with another.