The Truest Pleasure (29 page)

That night I dreamed I took Pa's gun and climbed the mountain by myself. I found Thurman Johnson and his sons and daughters and daughters-in-law chopping trees, clearing the mountaintop.

“In the name of Jesus stop,” I shouted.

“We're all working for Jesus,” Thurman said. “We're building a church to keep out screamers and blasphemers.” Tobacco juice run from the corner of his grin. All his kin was looking at me. They had chopped down peach trees and apple trees too.

I raised the gun at Thurman, but just as I pulled the trigger I woke up. My heart was racing and I trembled in the bed.

The next morning Tom hitched the horse and wagon as soon as we had finished breakfast. I was glad Pa wasn't going to walk to the top of the mountain. Tom brought the wagon around to the gate and Pa carried his shotgun and his musket out of the bedroom.

“You won't need those,” I said, remembering my awful dream.

“You never know,” Pa said.

“I don't want you to get excited,” I said. “It won't do your heart any good.”

“I won't,” Pa said. “We've got to see what has been done.”

I walked out to the wagon with him, and Jewel and Moody and Muir followed me. “You all go back inside,” I said. They stopped on the porch. “You be careful,” I said to Tom.

I watched them drive out of the yard toward the pasture gate.

“Is Grandpa going to shoot Johnson?” Moody said.

“Nobody is going to shoot anybody,” I said.

Pa and Tom come back just before dinnertime. They looked tired, like they had been working all day. Pa had a gray look, the way people do after a heart attack or major disappointment. He climbed from the wagon and carried the guns into the house.

“What happened?” I said. But Tom drove to the shed to unhitch.

“Did Grandpa shoot them?” Moody said.

“Be quiet,” I said.

I put cornbread and beans and squirrel pie on the table, but I wasn't hungry. Moody set down and I told Muir to quit picking his nose. Pa come out of his room and set down as Tom returned from the barn. Pa said grace and the children started eating.

“Is nobody going to tell me what happened?” I said. I looked from Pa to Tom and back. “Has the cat got you-all's tongue?”

“He took up the stakes,” Tom said.

“Who did, Johnson?”

“He had pulled up the corner pins,” Pa said. “Every marker up there has disappeared.”

“That's illegal,” I said. “He can't do that.” But even as I said it I had the awful insight that people will do anything they think they can get away with. And the bolder the act the more apt they are to get away with it. My bones felt rotten with dread.

“How do you know it was Thurman?” I said, just for the sake of trying to sound reasonable.

“We seen him,” Tom said.

“He was up there?” I said.

“Him and his boys was right there cutting timber,” Pa said.

“And you didn't run him off?” I said.

“I said, ‘Thurman, what are you doing on my land?'” Pa said. “And he said, ‘Ben Peace, what are you doing on mine?'”

“The lowdown scoundrel,” I said.

“I said, ‘Thurman, you know we settled this line long ago.'”

“‘No we didn't,' says he. ‘You've been using Johnson land for nigh a hundred years and I'm putting a stop to it.'”

“And what did you do?” I said.

“I said, ‘Thurman, you know the markers are where they've always been.' ‘What markers?' he says. ‘Can't find no markers.'”

When Thurman said that, Tom and Pa went looking for the corner pins, and they saw all the markers had been pulled up and hid.

“What have you done with the stakes?” Pa said to Thurman.

“I ain't seen no stakes,” Thurman said. “But come next summer I'm going to harvest my apples and peaches on this ridge.”

“That's when I knowed I'd better get away,” Pa said. “I didn't want to end my life killing somebody. Last man I shot at was a Yankee sharpshooter at Petersburg. Last thing I said to Thurman was, ‘I'll see you in court.'”

Both Pa and Tom looked defeated.

“Mama, what is going to happen?” Jewel said, with tears in her eyes.

“Nothing is going to happen,” I said, “except Thurman is going to be taught a lesson.”

“Thurman has been coveting our land all his life,” Pa said. “And he figures this is his last chance to get it.”

“Well, he will die disappointed,” I said.

“What are you going to do, Mama?” Moody said.

“I'm going to swear out a warrant for trespass,” I said.

“He is depending on us doing that,” Pa said.

“He is depending on us not doing that,” I said. “He thinks we won't take the trouble.”

“It won't do any good,” Pa said. “The court will appoint a surveyor, and Johnson will hire a lawyer to bribe the surveyor or he will lie to the surveyor about the corners.”

“Do you have a better idea?” I said. Neither Tom nor Pa answered. “Then we'll go to town tomorrow,” I said.

Word of the dispute traveled fast. Florrie come that afternoon and said David had heard it at the store. She said Thurman bragged that he had run Tom and Pa off his property.

“The Johnsons have always been trash,” Florrie said. “During the Confederate War they was just outlaws and thieves robbing from widows and children.”

“The Devil protects his own,” I said.

“Everybody lets a skunk have its way,” Florrie said.

Tom's silence worried me. I was angry and I knowed Pa was terrible upset. But Tom didn't say anything all through supper that night. And later while we set by the fire he just stared into the flames. He set like he was studying on something. I knowed how much the land meant to him, and his silence scared me.

“Now don't you even think of doing anything,” I said as we was going to bed.

“Somebody's got to do something,” he said.

“I'll do something,” I said. “I'm going to see the lawyer.”

“A lawyer won't help,” he said.

“A court order will help,” I said. “A court order will put some fear into Thurman.”

“These cases get dragged on for years. Only ones to profit are lawyers. People lose their places just to pay the fees.”

He was right about that. But it didn't do any good to study on it. The time for settling disputes with guns and fistfights
was over. Both Pa and Thurman was old men. Maybe Thurman didn't care if he got shot. I had heard he was ailing, getting feeble. That made it all the more surprising he had chose this time to claim our land. That night I kept thinking about what I'd say to Lawyer Gibbs. I rehearsed the facts and the story of the dispute with the Johnsons. I decided removal of the boundary markers was the most important point, more than cutting of the timber. Johnson could claim the line was further down the mountain, but there was no excuse for disturbing the corner pins without a court order. The destruction of the markers had to be the center of my case.

The following day was cold and overcast. In the early gray November morning Tom drove Pa and me to the depot.

“Can't I come?” Jewel said. “I want to go to the cloth store.”

“You have to stay with the younguns,” I said.

“I want to come,” Moody said.

“Me too,” Muir said.

“I'll bring you a poke of candy,” I called back to them.

It had been a year since I had gone to town. I shivered with excitement and fear. I had put twenty dollars in my purse to pay the lawyer and get something for the children. I took another ten from my jewelry box. I hated to go to town for it made me feel dizzy and lost to be among so many people.

We drove through the mill village just as people was going to work. The mill hands carried lunch pails with them. They looked like prisoners lined up to go through the bars. At the same time the night shift was leaving. The lint on their shoulders and hair looked like frost. They slumped in the cold morning.

The depot was on the hill past the village. We drove by the lake and Crossroads Church. Tom stopped at the platform and give me a twenty-dollar gold piece. “Pay what the lawyer asks,” he said. “I'll be here when the train comes at five-thirty.”

I saw I had to do this for Tom, as well as for Pa and the children. The place meant more to Tom maybe than anybody else. I had never gone to talk to a lawyer before, but I was going to make this trip count, whatever had to be done.

There was half a dozen people waiting on the platform. One of the Jenkins boys had a crate of chickens he was taking to market. Tildy Tankersley stood there with a bandage around her jaw. I guess she was going to the dentist. “I hear you're having some trouble,” she said, talking from the side of her mouth.

“If it's not one thing it's another,” I said.

“The Lord lets his own be tested,” she said. She talked slow, as though in terrible pain.

Everybody was watching Pa and me, and I felt like they knowed exactly why we was going to town. Bad luck is made even worse when everybody knows about it.

I was glad when the train come grunting and groaning up the mountain. There was a steep grade above Saluda, and every time the train arrived at the depot it looked tired-out and covered with sweat. The pant of the locomotive was fast as a dog on a hot day. When the cars come to a stop I started to climb up but the conductor stood on the steps and yelled, “Stand aside. I say stand aside!” I jumped back and he handed a mailbag to Wiley Waters. I had forgot how rude conductors would talk to you.

When we finally got on and set down I was shaky with anger. The seats looked smaller and dirtier than I remembered. Maybe it was an old car. “We could have drove the wagon,” I said to Pa.

“That would have took half a day just to get there,” Pa said.

Once the train started I felt better. It always lifts my spirits to move. The train creaked and squealed at first and then begun to pick up speed. I could hear the thud of the puffing engine. We pulled through the big cut beyond the depot where the tracks curve across the divide and down into the valley of the French Broad. There was houses above the cut, and a few hickories that still had yellow leaves. As we come out above Flat Rock I saw men butchering a hog hoisted on a walnut limb. The scalding water boiled up to the clouds.

The fields along Mud Creek was level as an ironing board. Water from October rain stood in low spots. The soil looked sooty.

“This land never was no count,” Pa said. “Just fit for a town.”

Beyond the creek we passed sheds and shacks and lots covered with scrap metal. There was a sawmill, lumberyard, brickyard. Warehouses echoed each other across the tracks. A gravel heap was held by pilings. As we come alongside the platform men with hand trucks and pushcarts moved toward the back of the train.

Women in fine dresses and velvet hats, and men in fancy coats, was getting off the forward cars. Carriages lined up to meet them. I saw a woman in a lavender coat and hat that could have been Mrs. Vanderbilt. She looked slim and beautiful.

The main part of the town was on the hill above the depot. I took Pa's arm and we hurried up Seventh Avenue toward
Main. There was pawnshops and secondhand stores along the avenue.

“Do you want to see my new shipment of cloth?” a man shouted from the doorway of a dry goods store.

“Let's go right to the lawyer's office,” I said.

Most of the lawyers in town had offices at the south end near the courthouse. We walked almost the length of town to get there. A trolley clanged down the middle of Main, and there was horses going every which way. My head buzzed with all the movement. It was hard to remember what I was doing among the confusion.

Lawyer Gibbs's office was on the second floor of a building just beyond Drake's Store. We climbed the dark carpeted stairs to a waiting room. A young man set at a desk piled with papers and bundles tied in red ribbons. “How may I serve you?” he said. He had garters above his elbows.

“We want to see Lawyer Gibbs,” I said.

“And what is the nature of your business?” the clerk said.

“It's about our boundary line,” I said.

“I see, a land dispute,” he said, and raised his eyebrows.

“Tell the lawyer Ben Peace wants to see him,” Pa said.

But we had to set in that dark room near an hour before talking to Lawyer Gibbs. I don't know if he was at court and come in a back way, or if he was just working with his papers. It was almost dinnertime when the young man admitted us to see him.

“Good to see you, Ben,” the lawyer said when we finally walked in. He rose and shook hands vigorously with Pa. “And this is Ginny? Why I've not seen Ginny since she was a button.”

Gibbs's desk was also covered with folders and bundles of papers in red tape. It was hard to believe people had wrote so many thousands of pages. There was stacks of papers on the floor, and books piled in corners and spilling out of bookcases. The room smelled of paper and dust and some kind of cologne.

I explained to Mr. Gibbs why we had come, and he listened, turned in his chair toward the window. I described the boundary line and how long it had been where it was.

“Have you had the line surveyed?” the lawyer said.

“The line was run about thirty years ago,” Pa said, “the last time Johnson made trouble.”

“And the boundary was marked?” Gibbs said.

“It was marked,” I said. “But Johnson took up the markers.”

“How was it marked?”

“With iron pins at the corners and a right-of-way cut along the line,” Pa said.

“And the pins are gone now?” Gibbs said.

“Every one of them.”

“And I suppose the right-of-way has grown up?”

“It had till Johnson started cutting timber there,” Pa said.

The window of Gibbs's office looked out over rooftops. There was false fronts and walls of brick and sooty chimneys. A clothesline stretched from poles. Birds set on telephone wires and a cat crouched on the edge of a wall watching them. It seemed strange to be looking over people's roofs. Some roofs was covered with tar paper and had puddles on them. Smoke leaned from chimneys. It was the drabbest thing I had ever seen. But way beyond the smoke and wires I could see the line of mountains. Overcast covered the tops of ridges, but the blue
slopes looked clear and fresh compared to the clutter and soot of rooftops.