Brier Country : Stories from Blue Valley [1 ed.] 9780826212795

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Brier Country

Brier Country


S T O R I E S B L U E

F R O M

V A L L E Y

Elaine Fowler Palencia

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2000 by Elaine Fowler Palencia University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 04 03 02 01 00

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palencia, Elaine Fowler, 1946– Brier country : stories from Blue Valley / Elaine Fowler Palencia. p. cm. ISBN 0-8262-1279-4 (alk. paper) 1. Country life—Kentucky—Fiction. 2. Mountain life—Kentucky— Fiction. 3. Kentucky—Social life and customs—Fiction. 4. Appalachian Region, Southern—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title. PS3566.A4584 B7 2000 813'.54—dc21 99-058478

⬁ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the 䡬 American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Stephanie Foley Typesetter: BookComp Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Galliard and ITC Isadora

FOR MY PARENTS, NOLAN AND RUBYE FOWLER AND FOR RACHEL AND JEFF


“North of the Ohio River migrants from the southern Appalachians are known as Briers.” Note on Brier in Jim Wayne Miller’s Brier, His Book (Frankfort, Ky.: Gnomon Press, 1988).

Deep-rooted speech climbs columned memory, leafing out into songs and stories, as ivy scales a wall. A land and people finds it has a voice, discovers a tongue to say itself . . . —“The Country of Conscience,” Jim Wayne Miller, Brier, His Book

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Guard Your Man

1

The Shoe Woman

10

The Smallest Show on Earth

25

Not Paid For

35

Waiting for Snow

43

The Long-Haired Dictionary

52

The Three Graces

65

Monroe

78

Salvation on Calfkiller

89

Briers

111

Man on Horseback

116

The Monday Club

124

Emus

131

The Coach’s Wife

139

I Stand in the Doorway

149

Now with the Other Pickled Animals

156

Acknowledgments

Some stories have previously appeared in the following journals: “The Shoe Woman,” Virginia Quarterly Review; “The Smallest Show on Earth,” Chattahoochee Review; “Not Paid For,” Appalachian Heritage; “Briers,” Journal of Kentucky Studies; “The Monday Club,” Murderous Intent; “I Stand in the Doorway,” Mediphors; “Waiting for Snow,” The Distillery. The author would like to thank the Illinois Arts Council for financial support and the Red Herring Fiction Workshop for helpful critiques. Dr. Nan Ward provided information on girls’ basketball in Kentucky for “Guard Your Man.”

Brier Country

Guard Your Man

for sixth period on the first day of school, the door to Coach Jones’s office opened and he appeared in the doorway with his back to us, talking to someone inside. We, his class of freshman girls, sat warily on the risers of the gym, fingering the handwritten excuses in our pockets. It was the fall of 1961 in Blue Valley, Kentucky, and most of us wished we were anybody but ourselves, preferably either Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee. Some of our p.e. excuses were written by our mothers; some we had forged. The rules at Tolliver School said that girls needed one physical education credit to graduate from high school, but we didn’t intend to earn it. Under no circumstances were we going to sweat, ruin our hairdos, or dress for gym. For one thing, we’d seen the gym suit: a hideous blue cotton bag with a bunchy elasticized waist that made your rear end look like a blue pumpkin, and gathered bloomer legs that left red rings around the fattest part of your thighs. Every girl in high school had to buy one, but only teachers’ pets ever actually wore theirs. For another thing, we had heard how unpredictable Coach Jones was. Maybe he would make us play dodgeball, yelling at us for throwing like girls and stinging us in the legs with the ball himself; or maybe he would retreat to his office to watch television until time for boys’ basketball practice, leaving us to amuse ourselves. We knew these things because Tolliver School was small, twelve grades under one roof. Word got around. “All right, let’s do it,” Coach Jones said to the invisible person, who now stepped out of his office. W H E N T H E TA R D Y B E L L R A N G

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Watching them walk toward us, we giggled. He walked with the careful, pigeon-toed walk of an ex-athlete, shoulders shifting with lazy confidence. The woman walked just like him. Hitching up his pants, Coach Jones said to us, “Listen up, now, girls. Want to introduce your new gym teacher to you. This here is Missus—” “Miss,” rasped the woman. “Took my maiden name back when I divorced.” “Okay. Miss Carpenter. You prolly don’t remember when she was a cheerleader over at the college—that was a little before your time. Now, I want you to give her your full attention and show her the kind of respect and sportsmanship we’re known for here at Tolliver. Ma’am, this is a fine bunch of young ladies. Okay, girls, any questions, if not, let’s have a good class.” Duty done, he minced heavily back to his office and shut the door. We whispered among ourselves. Not for a moment did we believe this bulldog had ever been a cheerleader. College cheerleaders were only a little lower than the angels. Miss Carpenter’s prematurely saltand-pepper hair was cropped like a man’s. She wore no makeup, and her cheeks were pocked with acne scars. Short, with a beefy torso and wiry legs, she wore navy blue Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, black high-tops, and men’s white athletic socks with a red stripe at the top. Around her neck hung a silver whistle on a clean white string. She carried a basketball under one arm and, in the other hand, a clipboard. Her flinty eyes sized us up. In a gravel voice, she began to call the roll. One by one, we produced our written excuses, then went back to whispering. Despite her gruffness, we weren’t too worried about her. In eighth grade we had had a female gym teacher named Mrs. Harris— she of the orange lipstick, hoop earrings, and pink toreador pants. All she required was that we learn two square dances, the schottische and the Virginia reel. She rather liked excusing girls from participating because it was “a young lady’s special time of the month.”

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“Do you want to lie down in the nurse’s room?” she would coo, one arm around the malingerer’s shoulders. With a boom, something hit the wall behind us. Girls screamed. Miss Carpenter caught the rebounding basketball with one hand. “Now that I’ve got your attention,” she growled, and tore our excuses in two. Then she pointed at the door of the girls’ locker room. “Suit up. Every blessed one of you.” When we returned to the gym, hugging ourselves and hunching our shoulders in the hated suits, she said, “Today we’re starting girls’ basketball. Six on six, some people call it. The only way you can get out of suiting up is to bring a doctor’s excuse.” None of us had ever heard of six on six, or seen girls play ball as a team. In Blue Valley, the only organized sports activities for girls were ballet and baton twirling. That day we learned that a girls’ team consisted of three forwards and three guards. Neither trio could cross the center line; so that while three forwards worked for a basket at one end of the court, impeded by the three guards of the opposing team, the other forwards and guards waited on the other side of the center line for the game to come to them. If a guard was fouled, one of her team’s forwards shot the free throws for her. Also, there was the two-dribble rule: a player had to pass the ball or shoot after only two bounces. Struggling along with us was a pretty senior named Grace Mary Hawthorne, who was new in town and needed one p.e. class to graduate. Thanks to our upbringing, we did not feel particularly limited by the half-court game. We were used to waiting beside a line we couldn’t cross: don’t go out of the yard, come straight home after school, don’t go up in the balcony of the movie theater, don’t walk around at night, don’t read that book, nice girls don’t do that. When we mentioned at home that we were learning basketball, our mothers wondered what had gotten into Coach Jones. Didn’t he know that girls’ basketball was illegal in Kentucky, that the state

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legislature had abolished it in 1932 to keep our ovaries from falling out? Only scattered private schools still played it. And what, they marveled, had happened to Bonnie Carpenter, who used to be so cute? Somebody said that a woman who looked like that ought to stay upstairs. Somebody else said that her husband had left her for a sixteenyear-old girl. The chicken-or-egg question was, did he run off because Bonnie wasn’t cute anymore, or did she lose her looks because he left? Not that anybody was condoning what he did, but a woman couldn’t let herself go. And they weren’t so sure they wanted a divorced woman teaching physical education. One busybody even called the principal. He assured the woman that as long as girls’ basketball remained merely a teaching unit in physical education classes, no law was being broken. In his professional opinion there was no danger of it ever becoming more than that. As he himself was on his second marriage, the divorce issue never came up. Meanwhile, Miss Carpenter taught us to guard and to pass. She demonstrated free throws, jumpers, and layups and showed us how to set screens. Like a hunter wading in a pack of hounds she moved among us, patting a shoulder here, correcting a stance there. At some point Rhonda Pennington, who was built like a fence slat and could actually hit the basket, started calling her Coach. Instantly we all did. At the end of a month, Coach Carpenter scheduled an after-school scrimmage with a gym class from Greasy Ridge, twelve miles away. Like the operator of a shell game who always keeps a hand on the shell hiding the pea, while teaching the game to the whole class, Coach allowed certain combinations of players more playing time together, so that by game day, we all knew who would be starting. Grace Mary Hawthorne, who as a senior had only to dress out every day to get the credit she needed to graduate, had worked hard to earn a starting guard spot. On a Thursday afternoon, the Greasy Ridge girls got off their bus in the selfsame gym suits as ours. They looked scrappy and quick, but had uglier hairdos. We were town, they were country. Not knowing how to act, our class all wadded up on one end of the bleachers and

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giggled while Coach conferred with their teacher, a portly woman in a shirtwaist dress and white canvas sneakers. Our audience was composed of three boys who were supposed to be in detention and, surprisingly, old Miss Jackson the librarian, who slipped in carrying a spiral notebook and sat down, uninvited, at the scorer’s table. An informal poll of the class members still living in Blue Valley reveals that no one remembers who won the game. Susan Cassity recalls that on the tip-off, the ball was batted out of bounds three times before anybody caught it and put it in play. Rilma Bailey remembers her embarrassment when her first inbounds pass hit the backboard. Mary Faye Blair recollects that Coach Carpenter was the referee. When she sent Mary Faye back in after a rest, she called a technical foul on her for not reporting to the referee, who was herself. What all of us do remember is this: just as the two teams took the floor, the door to the gym opened and in walked a tall, handsome woman with a face as pale and smooth as the petals of a camellia. She wore a wide-brimmed black straw hat, under which her jet-black hair was twisted up in a French roll. Her lipstick was deep red. She was dressed in a black silk suit with a choker of pearls and pearl stud earrings, black gloves, and black high heels. With a frilly wave in our direction, she took a seat on the end of the risers and smoothed her skirt. Grace Mary Hawthorne’s face lit up. “That’s my mother!” she exclaimed. The next week, when we scrimmaged a bunch of college girls at the college gym, Mrs. Hawthorne was again in attendance, wearing another elegant black ensemble set off by burgundy accessories. This time she sat behind our bench and clapped her gloved hands softly whenever we scored. No one ever paid closer attention to anything than she did to our games. Her fine profile never turned away from the court; and when Grace Mary played, her face became luminous with intensity. After the game at the college, she, Grace Mary, and Coach Carpenter were still talking at courtside when the rest of us, showered and dressed, left the gym to go home.

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Slowly, going three steps forward and two backward, we improved. The teams we met weren’t any better. Girls’ basketball in Moore County was an idea that was waking up after a long sleep. Except for the silent Miss Jackson, who had evidently appointed herself scorekeeper, Mrs. Hawthorne remained our only fan. Otherwise, she was never seen in town. We knew vaguely that Mr. Hawthorne was managing the brickworks over in Carter County and that the Hawthornes had bought the old Tyler place out in the country, halfway between here and there. In November, we played our sixth game and final game. We had played the college girls twice, the p.e. class at Greasy Ridge twice, and Bethel once. The only other team in the entire region was at Maple Shade School. After we played them, our principal decreed, Coach Carpenter needed to move on to a unit on calisthenics. Our p.e. class fit in two station wagons, one driven by Coach Carpenter and the other by Miss Jackson, who sat on a pillow in order to see over the dashboard. On the afternoon of the Maple Shade game, we were ready to move out of the school parking lot when Coach Jones came hotfooting it out a side door, waving his arms. Coach rolled down her window. “Hang on a second,” he panted. “Got room for one more?” “This is everybody,” said Coach Carpenter. He turned and motioned at the side door. Out came his daughter Christy, a sixth grader. He said, “Got room for her? I’ve already gotten her excused from class. I just want her to see a game.” Coach Carpenter looked Christy up and down, all five eleven of her, and broke into a grin. “You bet,” she said. When we arrived at Maple Shade School, way out in the sticks, we were horrified to find the tiny gym filled to bursting with the entire student body. Because there was even less to do in Maple Shade than in Blue Valley, this game was a significant event. And it got worse. Taking the court in our gym suits, we found the country girls of Maple Shade wearing real, if shabby, green satin uniforms. These were castoffs, we

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later learned, from the boys’ B team. There was even a male referee— the Maple Shade principal—in a striped referee’s shirt. Coach Carpenter looked surprised at the preparations, but her instructions to us dealt only with basketball fundamentals. Mrs. Hawthorne wasn’t sitting in her usual place behind our bench, but we didn’t have time to wonder about her. Before we knew it, the buzzer sounded, the referee threw up the ball at center court, and we were swept up in the noise of the crowd and the helter-skelter court action. After a couple of chaotic minutes, both teams settled into their normal levels of play and we understood just how doomed we were. The surehanded Maple Shade forwards and guards shuttled the ball back and forth among themselves, scoring almost at will. They seemed hardly aware of our presence on the court. We suspected that they had been practicing a full-court game, maybe even scrimmaging against boys. Miss Jackson stood up and made a megaphone of her tiny hands. “Guard your man, girls! Guard your man!” Actually, we were playing worse than usual, and Grace Mary was playing abysmally. Looking around for her mother, she missed so many passes that Coach had to sit her down. Near the end of the first half, Mrs. Hawthorne slipped in a side door and took the nearest vacant seat, across the gym from us. Beneath her red velvet cloche, her face looked strangely long and bony, her eyes sunken. She kept blotting her forehead and neck with a folded handkerchief. Her presence calmed us a little. In the third quarter Coach put Grace Mary back in, and she stole the ball twice. We finished only seventeen points down, which meant that in the second half, our first team had nearly outplayed their second team. On the way back home, we sang and told jokes and felt fine. It probably helped that we hadn’t been socialized to value winning as much as boys did. We played Maple Shade on a Friday. On Monday, Grace Mary wasn’t at school. On Tuesday morning, Coach Carpenter came around and got each of us out of class, telling us to bring along our coats. When she had us all assembled in front of school, she told us that

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Mrs. Hawthorne had died sometime Friday night or early Saturday morning, after a long battle with breast cancer. Her doctor had been waiting at the hospital to admit her on Friday afternoon, as soon as she returned to town from the Maple Shade game. Coach pointed at the two station wagons she had wangled the use of one last time. We climbed in for our final road trip. At the old Tyler place, a woman we didn’t know opened the door and ushered us into a dim hall saturated with the smell of dying flowers and baked ham. Grace Mary stood in the living room blank-faced, receiving mourners by the casket. Coach stepped up to her, and they hugged. Uncertainly we filed past the flower-banked coffin. Mrs. Hawthorne wore a royal-purple dress. Her mouth was painted shiny maroon, a shock against her white skin. None of us had ever faced death on her own. Always before, there had been the hand of an adult relative on a shoulder and a mature, accompanying voice saying the right things to the bereaved. We gazed here and there, trying not to look twice at the silent space among the flowers. I remember the grackles pecking on the lawn, a woman in gold loafers who was missing an eyetooth, a heavy silver coffee service gleaming on a sideboard, a spider spinning in a high corner. Coach stood looking down into the coffin for a long time, legs braced apart, hands clasped behind her back, jaw muscles flexing in and out. The death-stunned husband and the college-age son came over to our group. Mr. Hawthorne waved a hand toward the windows and said in a tight voice, “She loved the hills. We thought maybe if we moved back here—.” With a yelping sob he turned his face into the shoulder of his red-eyed son. About a week later, Grace Mary returned to school—silent, older, and with dark hollows under her eyes. Because she was a senior and had different classes, we didn’t see her until we gathered in the gym for the last class period. None of us knew what to say to her. Even if we had known, people aren’t that demonstrative in Blue Valley.

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If you make the least little show of emotion, somebody is sure to tell you to straighten up. When Coach Carpenter came in, we were doing the usual things, half of us lounging on the bleachers and the others haphazardly practicing cheerleading jumps and cartwheels. Grace Mary was standing under one of the baskets, staring into space and hugging herself as if she were cold. Coach gave her a long look. “Laps!” she barked. This was how class always began. While Coach checked the roll and got out equipment, we ran ten laps. This time, however, she put down her clipboard and fell in at the tail end of the straggling pack. In one lap she had worked her way up beside Grace Mary, her barrel torso rolling gently side to side, her small feet twinkling over the floor. Lap ten came and went, then lap fifteen, then lap twenty. Coach chugged along impassively. We started to hurt. Thirteen years in the future, the efforts of people like Coach and Mrs. Hawthorne would pay off, when the legislature would reverse itself and allow girls’ basketball programs in the state again. But we didn’t know that. At lap twenty-six, Grace Mary started to cry. The girls running nearest to her started crying, too. She cried until her face was puffed and red and the front of her shirt was wet. Around and around we went. At some point, the number of laps ceased to matter. We were gasping, staggering, holding our sides. We didn’t know why, but nobody wanted to be the first one to drop out.

The Shoe Woman

Dear Faye, You know how I love finding bits of local eastern Kentucky color for your enjoyment. As I was making my daily climb up the post office steps this morning, I saw something quite bizarre. Do you remember my blue-and-white spectator pumps, the ones I ruined at President Gray’s lawn party? I know I wrote you about the tragedy: I stepped back against a low stone wall and scratched the left heel rather noticeably. They cost a small fortune and I was so sorry to have to part with them, but they went to the Women’s Club White Elephant Sale, along with an armload of dresses that suddenly bored me. You know how that is—the crushing dissatisfaction with one’s wardrobe that comes on quite by surprise. Anyway, today at the post office a woman was going up the steps just ahead of me, wearing my shoes. You should have seen her: a real country type, with hard, stringy legs and the dirty tan of someone who works outside in all weathers—lank, brown hair scraped back from her face and held behind her ears with two white plastic barrettes—a buttsprung dress of pink polyester with a hideous cluster of purple plastic grapes pinned to the shoulder—a beige plastic purse that looked like a loaf of light bread with a handle attached. Do you get the picture!?! My first thought was somehow to rescue my poor shoes, as if they were puppies I had accidentally given to a cruel master. I suppose she walks to town in them. But here is the odd part. As I was crossing the lobby on my way out, she was buying stamps from Charlie Nickell, the postmaster. And she turned and watched me all the way to the door. 10

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I am sure there is no way she could know that the shoes were mine, so why was she looking at me? ’Tis true I was wearing my new pinkand-blue voile, which is very flattering, if I do say so. Anyway, I must get busy grading papers. How’s the weather in Alabama? Greetings to Mandy and Cody. Dear Julia, Your description of the shoe woman was priceless. When I read it to Potter at supper he said, “She sounds like a Buttermilk.” Cody—sharp as a tack—asked, “What’s a Buttermilk, Grandma?” I explained that it was a name Aunt Tansie’s generation had for the children who went to the county school, because they were too poor to take sweet milk in their lunches. Cody said, “Can I be a Pepsi?” He is just too cute! Which reminds me to tell you that Mary Alice Weatherby and Bunny Chastain are starting a drive to buy our dear old Williford and turn it into a children’s museum. Isn’t that wonderful? The Williford School spirit lives! There’s to be a meeting at Bunny’s next week, which of course I will attend and give your salutations to all. Dear Faye, Is the children’s museum to be about art or science? If science, I should think that Mandy could help set it up, if not run it. After all, how many people in Pringle have a master’s degree in biology? Did she apply for the job at the high school? I know the divorce was hard, but it’s time she straightens up. As nice as it is for you to spend all this time with Cody, they surely can’t live with you forever. Oh—the mystery is solved about the shoe woman, as you called her. This morning when I went in the p.o., I passed her on the way out. She was still wearing my shoes and that awful pink dress. Of course I didn’t speak to her. But when I was in the alcove where the mailboxes are, I smelled this sweet-sour, tomato-soup smell of sweat and I turned around and there she was. She is younger than I thought, maybe in her late thirties. She asked if I could do her a favor. When I asked her what it was, she said, “Would you back my letter?” Now,

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you must remember those family letters that Cousin Fred has, which predate the common use of envelopes. In those days, one folded a letter, sealed it with sealing wax, and wrote the address on the back of the written pages. So what she wanted was for me to address a letter for her. It turns out that she has a son stationed overseas and had bought a birthday card in town for him. Ordinarily her younger son writes and addresses the letters for her, but she wanted to get the birthday card in the mail that day. This didn’t solve the question of why she had been staring at me, but eventually that came out, too. It seems that Charlie Nickell had for some reason commented to her that I taught at Blue Valley College. That set her thinking that I must therefore “write a pretty hand.” Hence she decided that I was the one to ask, if she ever needed a letter “backed.” Dear Julia, No sooner had we organized the Williford Museum Initiative, with yours truly as secretary, than that witch Betty Sams wanted to know why she wasn’t on the board. Now a bunch of the other Outsiders are stirred up, too. I wanted to tell her, “You didn’t belong then and you don’t belong now.” Stay tuned. As for Mandy, I don’t know what happened about the job at the high school; she won’t talk to us about her prospects. To tell you the truth, it’s been a little tense lately. The other night at supper, Cody came out with a bad word—really bad—and Potter jerked him in the bathroom and washed his mouth out with soap. Mandy was furious, said all Cody’s friends talk like that, it’s MTV. “Not as long as he puts his feet under my table!” shouted Potter. Thank goodness I still have that bottle of terpin hydrate. I had to have a little nip to calm myself down as soon as I was alone. But as Mother used to say, this too will pass. Oh—yesterday at church, Reverend Sharp asked about you. Precisely what he said was, “How’s Julia doing among the Appalachian mountaineers? Is she smoking a corncob pipe yet?” I thought it was quite mean for a minister to say, but Potter thinks it’s because James has never gotten over your leaving Pringle all those years ago to teach

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in the Kentucky hills (remember the eighth-grade hay ride!!) As for that wife he’s got—imagine a minister’s wife who can’t play the piano! And half the time she has a sick headache to get out of leading youth group. At least that’s my suspicion. Coincidentally, Cousin Martha and I were just laughing the other day about Aunt Tansie saying that you might as well be going to an African mission when you moved to eastern Ky. Or didn’t I ever tell you that before? Dear Faye, Letter before last, you asked about Maisie Stone. Yes, she is still working for me, and very glad I am to have her. I don’t know whether I ever mentioned that there are only three black people in Blue Valley: Maisie, her son Crozier, and an elderly handyman. Of course, why would there be blacks here? There is hardly work for white people on these poor little farms. And so many of the women prefer to do their own housecleaning—the Scotch-Irish peasant mentality, I suppose, passed down in the genes. You know, when I first came here I tried to hire some of these little country girls to clean, but they ate me out of house and home. They did not know how to be servants and could not be trained. But Maisie knows. Yesterday I left a bowl of pickled peaches in the refrigerator to chill for my supper. They were a gift from my neighbor Mrs. Hudgens. Just as a test, I counted them, because it was Maisie’s day to clean. When I got home that night, every single peach was still there. Must mark quizzes before bedtime. Dear Julia, Just a hurried card from Mobile. Potter has a chainsaw convention here. On the spur of the moment, I decided to come along. Am having a grand time in the hotel spa, getting massages, mud wraps, and so forth. Tonight we’re going to a dinner dance. Dear Faye, Here is another chapter in the continuing saga of the shoe woman. Today she was waiting for me under the WPA mural in the p.o. lobby. It seems that her son is involved in that police action we’ve been seeing

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on TV. Usually she picks up his letters at the p.o. and takes them home for son Benny, 11, to read aloud. By the way, the father’s name is Pharaoh! Not only can he not read either, but he “has gristles in his grind,” whatever that means. Probably it means he’s on disability and our taxes are supporting him. Anyway, our shoe woman, Mrs. Dye, has become afraid that the letters might upset son Benny, if, for instance, son Curtis were to write about getting wounded. I guess you saw where the three American boys were killed over there—so senseless. The upshot is, that I am to read the letters aloud to her before she takes them home. She gets mail at General Delivery because the Army son sometimes sends money and she’s afraid it will get stolen out of their rural mailbox. I really don’t mind, since I go to the p.o. every day, anyway. Tell the Reverend James Sharp that I said hello (but don’t you dare try to make more out of it than that!) Somehow I still can’t think of him as a minister. Dear Julia, The most horrible thing has happened. I don’t expect I will ever get over it. When we got home from Mobile, I sensed at once that the house was too quiet. Lydia came out of the kitchen and said Miss Mandy (she still calls her Miss Mandy) and Cody were gone. Mandy told Lydia that she would be in touch. In touch. And it’s too true. She left most of the things that are stored in the garage, but all their clothes are gone, as well as Cody’s big tricycle. Potter is down talking to Sheriff Foley now. Of course Mandy is of age and hasn’t committed a crime, but surely something can be done. What have we done to deserve this? Dear Faye, Have you heard anything from Mandy yet? I know she is fine. She’s a smart girl and a good mother. But what about the no-neck redneck? She can’t run out on his visitation rights. Does he know she’s gone? Do not blame yourself.

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As for me, everything is going along the same—classes, bridge club, investment club, book club. The students don’t seem to be as respectful and dedicated as they once were, and that’s a trial. You know what Dr. Oldfield used to say: A student is like a pencil. Nothing comes out of it unless it’s pushed. But I weary of the pushing. I see the shoe woman about once a week. Did I mention the place on her cheek? The first time I saw her, it was an angry little sore, maybe the size of a mosquito bite, on her left cheek. But it is getting progressively larger. Today she had a folded square of sheeting taped over it. My guess is that as a country person, she has a prejudice against doctors. Dear Julia, They are in Atlanta. That is all we know, and all we need to know, apparently. Mandy’s friend Gretchen called to tell us. She doesn’t know any more, either. Oh, why did Mandy go outside the family with this? Today at the Museum Initiative meeting, Betty Sams gave me the most sickening smile and asked how Mandy was, so I’ll bet it’s all over town. Potter and I have wracked our brains to think how we could have headed this off. He has gone to see Sheriff Foley again. About your shoe woman—I wonder if she has any good furniture you could buy. People like that often have antiques around that they don’t recognize as such. Cousin Martha was driving along one day and saw an oak ice chest sitting on the porch of this little tumbledown shack. She paid the man on the porch three dollars for it, had it refinished, and now it’s in their den—beautiful. Anyway, you might ask. Dear Faye, I doubt the shoe woman has much furniture of any kind. The weather has turned bitter, yet she only wears a nylon windbreaker over a cotton dress. I had to get out my blue wool coat with the silver fox collar for the walk to school. She need not worry about son Curtis’s letters upsetting anyone, by the way. The boy is in a foreign country, living through an historical situation, and all he notes are

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the crops, types of trees, livestock, and food. He is surprised that they grow corn there, he saw a nice stand of birches, he “hasn’t had a good full” in three days because Army food is strange to him. Then there is his diarrhea to be discussed. It reminds me of something Rev. Danforth said about the boys going to World War II and not appreciating Europe: You can’t gather eggs without a basket. This boy doesn’t see anything except what reminds him of home. Besides, a sixth grader knows more spelling and grammar. Well! I certainly have gone on, I don’t know why. I’m too busy to worry about people like that. Dear Julia, At this late date, Lydia has suddenly remembered that right before Mandy left, she received a long-distance phone call—collect—from a man. Of course we had to tell Rusty, since he would be picking Cody up on the weekend. He accused us of being in on it, to keep Cody away from him! I don’t care if he is a DuBois, we should have gotten a restraining order on him from the beginning. You are right, he is a redneck. I don’t know what Thanksgiving will be like this year without immediate family. You are always welcome, it goes without saying. But I know you are busy. I just hope I can get decent chestnuts. Dear Faye, Thanksgiving is alas out of the question, as I have already accepted an invitation from Mrs. Hudgens. She would be so disappointed if I were to cancel, bless her heart. I feel she depends on me. Her brother, who is in direct sales cookware, will be here, and I am providing the mincemeat pie. I also had another offer, from Miss Palmer at the library. It is surprising what an active social life I do have in a place like this. But thank you. I have had such a trauma this week with one of my students, who insisted he did not plagiarize a paper he wrote for me. My position is that it would be impossible for anyone from Letcher County to write

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that well. Letcher County is very poor and in the heart of the coal country. A lot of people there do not even have indoor plumbing. Of course I will prevail—Dean Barkley always stands behind the faculty— but the young man has been quite disrespectful. Has it occurred to you that Rusty himself might be behind Mandy’s disappearance? Dear Faye, No letter from you yesterday. Are there new developments regarding Mandy and Cody? I’m sure all will end well. But when one sees how much trouble children are, one wonders why there are so many of them in the world. I’m sorry if that sounds hard-hearted; I’m only thinking of you. My arrangement with the shoe woman is becoming something of a burden. For one thing, the son’s letters are so dull that I can’t imagine why he bothers. Some kind of blind, rudimentary need to connect, I suppose, like worms groping toward each other underground. Such people have no eye for the telling detail. For another thing, I have to look at that awful place on her cheek. Despite the bandage, I can see that the edges are now puckered and sunken in, like the rim of a sinkhole. Yesterday, able to take no more, I demanded to know if she’d seen a doctor. She replied, “They’s a woman up home’s going to make me a poultice to draw out the poison. I’ll get shed of it, don’t you worry.” Such language—and anybody can see it’s cancer. Yet the poor thing possesses a certain native courtesy, which I have previously noted among the locals. A while back, she brought me a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and chicory to thank me for my help. Granted, they’re only weeds, but I appreciated the gesture. Dear Julia, Sorry to have skipped a couple of days. Doctor Rumsey gave me some pills and I seem to sleep a lot. We received a note from Mandy with an Atlanta postmark, but no return address. She says she was suffocating in Pringle. I don’t know what she wants. Pringle is the

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cultural capital of northern Alabama, not counting Huntsville and Fayetteville, and everybody she knows is here. Cody is in school—she says he’s enjoying this “great adventure”—and she’s working at a copy shop. So much for all that money spent on her education. Potter is with Sheriff Foley now. I must correct your view of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. They are not weeds, but garden escapees. Isn’t it funny how the value and beauty of a plant goes down when it’s labeled a weed; whereas if those two were still cultivated in flower gardens, we would be paying florists for bouquets of them. I’m so glad Mother can’t see the way Mandy is behaving. Must have a nap. Dear Faye, Hope your Thanksgiving went well, under the circumstances. Did Uncle Ferdie tell about Little Grandma stealing her pony back from the Yankees again? It wouldn’t be a family dinner without that. I had a very nice time at Mrs. Hudgens’s. She is quite broadminded for this town and didn’t mind the brandy in the mincemeat in the least. Her brother Austin is very funny, though I wouldn’t call him our kind of people. Curtis Dye expects to be home soon, so the end of my p.o. ordeal is in sight. When I asked his mother what he would do after the Army, she said, “I’m hoping he’ll make a teacher. Hit’s a dream of our’n, him a-setting up in front of a classroom. Don’t you think he could? He writes so good.” I replied that I should be happy to see him follow his preference in the matter. This is what the subjunctive is for—to evade the truth in delicate situations. What do people do who don’t know how to use it?!? Dear Julia, My hand is shaking as I write. Sheriff Foley pulled some strings and got Mandy’s address. Yesterday he and Potter drove up there. She is living in this horrible apartment complex with a masseur named Lars. You can smell cat urine and foreign cooking in the stairwells. She met the masseur at that fitness center she went to while Rusty was at the

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banking institute. She says she’s happy and Sheriff Foley says it’s clear she isn’t being held against her will. Rusty is taking her to court. I can’t go on. Dear Faye, Mandy is acting like a spoiled brat. I would like to smack her winding. Has she forgotten she’s a Bone? Take care of yourself. I am busy busy busy with papers and exams at this time of year, plus this is my month to host both the bridge club and the book club. As a result I’ve mailed a couple of your letters at the college rather than swing through town on my way to school. This morning when I did go to check my box, poor old Mrs. Dye was waiting for me like a lost dog. She said she’d missed me and was worried I was sick. Here she is, looking like Death eating a cracker, and she’s worried about me. I was almost touched. She pulled out a jar of dill pickles and presented them to me with this comment: “These is good and crispy because I made ’em at the right time of the month. If a woman makes pickles during her monthlies, they’ll go soft. But I got a good scald on ’em.” It was a huge treat to have three of your letters to read all at once. Dear Julia, This afternoon, I heard a commotion at the door. When Lydia opened it, Cody came bursting in and threw his arms around my legs. Mandy let Rusty have him for a long weekend. You can say what you want to about Rusty, but he’s one of us. Yes, he’s rough around the edges, but Bear Bryant was like a father to him, and that can’t be discounted as an influence. He promises that Christmas will be happy—just let him handle things. With Potter’s angina acting up, I’m inclined to let him take over. Dear Faye, Well, as of today we won’t have Mrs. Pharaoh Dye to kick around anymore, so to speak. She informed me that the “finance” (sic) of the Army son (Curtis) is going to take over the letter-writing and letterreading. I must say I was a little piqued, after all the time I’ve spent on

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her, to be cast aside like an old shoe—to coin a phrase. I doubt that this fiancée, who works at Hardee’s, will be able to furnish the extra information I did—geographical and political commentary which set Curtis’s benighted missives in a context. Not that I actually care. In fact, I’m well rid of her. People who saw us together so regularly probably thought we were friends. Dear Julia, Are you sulking? It’s been days since I’ve gotten a letter. I’ve been very busy w/ Christmas shopping. Here are a few articles from the society page. I thought I was more photogenic than that! In my humble opinion, it’s a blessing that this shoe woman is out of your life. Judging from your letters, you had gotten far too involved with her—tho’ just in a sociological sense, I’m sure. After all, she’s a nullity; yet you wrote about her all the time. Aunt Tansie never even spoke to Buttermilks when she met them in the street. That’s not being snobbish, it’s just recognizing the way the world is. They had their own friends. Dear Julia, Have I said something to offend you? Are you not feeling well? Never have you been silent for so long. Mandy got fired from the copy shop. So things are not so rosy out in the real world. She’s working as a temp. Rusty says we must hold on and not rush to her aid. Potter has told Rusty to tell her that she and Cody are expected for Christmas, but without the Swede. Somehow I feel we are in control again. Oh— Margaret and I have forced Betty Sams out of the Museum Initiative. I won’t write again until I hear from you. Even a housewife has to make time to maintain a daily correspondence. Dear Faye, I suppose I have been ill. In a way. Or—I don’t know. First I should explain that when the rainy weather started this fall, Mrs. Dye stopped wearing my shoes and instead would appear in gray plastic ankle boots. Naturally, after the fiancée took over the mail, I didn’t

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see her anymore. Then one day last week, as I was walking up Main Street to school, I saw my shoes again. They were in the window of the shoe repair shop with a price tag of $3.00 clipped to them. Mr. Lewis, the proprietor, told me that Sylvania Dye brought them in to be resoled but she died before she could pick them up. Sylvania—it’s pretty, isn’t it? Faye, I didn’t even know her first name. I never cared enough to ask. I saw her decline and I did nothing because she wasn’t our sort. The fiancée had to take over because Sylvania—how strange to say it—could no longer walk to the p.o. And now Curtis will come home too late to see her and little Benny will be without a mother. I would like to send money but I don’t even know where they live. I wonder if Benny has a dog, I wonder if he would like one. They’re not in the phonebook. I feel like—I don’t know what. She trusted me with her son’s letters, which were precious to her. Dear Julia, Pull yourself together. You sound as bad as I do when I forget my pills. This woman’s life is not your fault. Rusty said it best the other day when he came to dinner: People like us simply cannot be faulted in personal relations. We always do our best, we have good manners, and we’re honest. That’s all that can be asked. No more time today. Dear Faye, Sylvania Dye is still on my mind. I know you will think I’m crazy, but in atonement for my behavior with her, I gave Maisie Stone my blue winter coat with the silver fox collar. I’m sure she never had anything one-tenth that expensive in her life. I wanted to give something that I really didn’t want to part with, and it worked. I feel so much better now, even though she hardly thanked me. What does Cousin Martha say about Mandy’s situation? Dear Julia, May I just say what a scare you gave Lydia by telephoning after all these years? I’m sorry I wasn’t home, particularly because she always makes such a mess of relaying messages to me. She said something

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about Maisie quitting? Well, of course—I could have predicted that. Giving her that coat no doubt ruined her as help. Lydia also said you were looking into a void. I told her she must have misunderstood. Did you say that you were looking to avoid something? Did that Dye woman try to blackmail you? I wouldn’t put it past her. Then Lydia said, “Is Miz Julia going through the change? She sound strange.” Well, are you? I felt quite weepy last year until Dr. Rumsey gave me those pills. Not the tranquilizers, the hormone pills. Maybe you should get some, too, if you can find a competent physician there. Here is something that should cheer you up: Potter has gotten Buck Walters to look into the Swede’s immigration status. If we can get him deported, I am sure Mandy will come to her senses and realize that when all’s said and done, it’s really one’s own people who matter, and who stand behind you. I know you will be too busy to come for Christmas, but we will be thinking of you. Dear Faye, Thank you for the lovely card. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and now my birthday, I am quite worn out from celebrating. The crowning touch was that Eleanor Palmer (library) and I drove down to the Boone Tavern for a birthday lunch on Saturday—their roast lamb and dressing is out of this world and the spoonbread is on a par with Grandma Lewis’s—and then we stopped at this authentic, regional pottery place where I bought myself a decorative bowl that matches my living room drapes. Wish you could see the effect. How is the weather there? Here spring has arrived and a rime of green softens the hills and valleys. Dear Julia, I have had roundabout news of you. A couple of weeks ago at DAR, Margaret told me that her new niece by marriage (little B.J.’s wife— they met at Auburn) has an uncle who is dean at Blue Valley College. Small world, etc. His name is Eldon Barkley. Margaret told the niece, Bootsie, to ask him if he knew you. Yesterday Bootsie (eligible for

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DAR, happily) reported that she had talked with her uncle and of course he knows you well from all those plagiarism and cheating cases you’ve brought before him. But then he mentioned something that I don’t understand, as apparently you’ve not kept me informed. He said that you’ve been battling with him about the mentor program, which is supposed to link excellent students with professors in their field. But, against the rules, you’ve demanded to be the mentor of a young man, a freshman who is flunking out, and he’s not even majoring in your area of expertise. I believe she also said he’s on the G.I. Bill. Is this someone I would know, that is, someone you’ve previously mentioned in letters? For the time being, I told Margaret that the niece must have garbled your name or something, for this can’t be you. I know you would not go against a merit system in favor of the kind of hillbilly that you want to keep out of higher education. I’ve heard you often enough on the subject! Do explain so I can straighten this out for all of us. Dear Faye, Just a quick note to stay in touch. Bootsie sounds dumb as grits— which would make her a good match for B.J. As for the student in question, I am simply helping out a young man who badly wants to be a high school teacher but who himself received very poor training at the primary and secondary levels. Moreover he’s been out of school for several years, in the Army as you say, and is supporting an invalid father and a younger brother and, it turns out, a little sister as well. It’s all in a day’s work and I don’t know why Dean Barkley even brought it up. It’s not as if I’m asking for a salary increment or time off for it. This is just something I’m doing with my left hand, as Father used to say, and frankly, I didn’t think it important enough to mention to you. Why in the world would you imagine you have heard of him? And why, for that matter, are you so interested? I certainly don’t like being accused of hiding something! I will say that the young man is making excellent progress, which just goes to show. Nothing else happening here. I won at bridge last night and received

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the most hideous little prize—a pink china cow with gold horns. We have a new member, a young faculty wife with absolutely no taste, and it was her turn to furnish the trophy. The raspberry swirl brownies sound scrumptious. Could you please send the recipe? I’m always needing something new to take to my club meetings. Hi to Mandy and Cody and a Happy Easter (busy time of year for me) to all.

The Smallest Show on Earth

the sign in the bend of the road, it had been seven hours since breakfast. There had been no restaurants all day. Around one, at a gas station, he had a cigarette and a cup of coffee that tasted like tires. Since then, there had been only forest, small empty hillside pastures, and an occasional tin-roofed shack. He recalled a traveler’s rule of thumb he discovered the first year he was on the road for the company: the more uncommon the name of the town, the less likelihood of finding anything to eat in it. Today he had been through Maple Shade, Seven Up, Orient, and Elf King. He did not smoke in the car, only on his stops. This is how he had kept his habit to half a pack a day for twenty years. So he was more than ready to pause for a cigarette and a bite to eat. The sign was nailed to a sycamore tree.

BY THE TIME HE SAW

Big Top Cafe Foot Long Hot Dogs See Authentic Miniature Replica Of World Famous Zarga Circus Zarga, Ky. 3 mi. Zarga was not on his map. He braked and stared at the road that sloped off to the right, through a rocky field strewn with cedar trees. The surface was oil-and-chip but well-maintained. When he was on the road he never had time for a detour. Today he had time to spare. For a moment he tried to imagine himself continuing on the main road, but the thought depressed him strangely. He made the turn. 25

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When his boss told him about the retraining seminar, he threw in a round-trip plane ticket to sweeten the pill. The seminar was all the way over on the coast, in Virginia Beach. When he refused the ticket and said he’d prefer to drive, the boss shook his head in disbelief. Then he laughed. “One of a dying breed, eh?” The retraining seminar was supposed to resuscitate him. The forest thickened, tightening around the road. Sliding in noiseless grooves, a lead ceiling of clouds glided into place over him. His was the only car on the road, and he liked that. He was always a back-roads man, even as a child. While his older brother and his baby sister roamed the town in noisy, joyous packs, he would fall under the spell of a rock he was kicking and follow it down alleys and across parking lots until, inexplicably, he reached school after the bell had rung, reached home after all the cookies had been eaten. Very early he learned that missing out was a part of life. It was a useful lesson, even a comforting one. The preoccupation with happiness that operated at all levels of society today was a puzzlement to him. When he was growing up, nobody in his town thought about whether they were happy or unhappy. They were too busy making a living, too busy getting through the week. As a result they were neither happy nor unhappy, and he had grown up to be neither. Well, perhaps it was the way he grew up or perhaps it was his temperament. Sometimes he thought he must have fewer needs and feelings than other people, because he never saw anything he wanted to buy in the magazine ads or on TV, not even the beautiful girls who advertised the products. His idea of a good time, and he was sincere about this, was a dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes with brown gravy, canned peas, a dinner roll with one pat of butter, and a piece of banana cream pie. He had this every Sunday noon at the Blue Bonnet Cafeteria and followed it up with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Then he went back to his room and took a nap. The pleasure of this holiday lasted well into Monday. Once he was engaged to a sweet girl who taught piano lessons and directed the children’s choir at the Methodist

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church, but he was gone a lot because of his job, and eventually she married a man who sang baritone solos at weddings and worked in a hardware store. He was disappointed at the time, but he did not mind thinking about it now. People older than he assured him he was still young. He didn’t feel he’d changed much since high school. Sometimes he needed to put on weight and sometimes he needed to take off a few pounds. However, he had noticed that it was getting hard to find the brand of hair oil he had always used. A weather-beaten billboard shouldered its way out of a tangle of sawbriers. Big Top Cafe Handmade Lemon Shake Ups See the Smallest Show on Earth Music and Lights Zarga, Ky. 2 mi. Actually he had another career in mind. He wanted to be an actuary. But in the middle of his first year at community college, his father died and he had to go to work to help out at home. His mother needed an operation. Then she needed another one. His sister was married and gone by then, and his brother was trying to get his janitorial supply business going. He traveled to high schools all over the southern part of the state, sometimes as many as ten a day, repairing typewriters and office machines. Time after time he would arrive at a begrimed stone building somewhere deep in the hills and walk into the typing room. The air would be thick with steam heat and typewriter clatter, chalk dust, and the aromas of floor wax, young unwashed bodies and dimestore perfume. The teacher would rush forward, a heavy dumpling in a wool suit and white blouse, her hair permed into cast-iron curls, her eyes magnified by her glasses into the eyes of a giant fly—the kind of teacher he was always afraid of in school. Whispering urgently she would motion, “Come this way, we’ve been expecting you. Can anything be done?” And he, the godlike surgeon, would step briskly

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into the next room, already shrugging off his coat and unsnapping the clasps of his tool kit, to where the dying mimeograph machine huddled against a stained wall. One look and he knew he could save it. He would miss those moments. Slowing to take a curve, he came upon an abandoned farmhouse. The yard was a snarl of ragweed and thistle. The roof had caved in; the doors and windows were agape to the copperhead and the Virginia creeper. “Exactly,” he said aloud. All over his former territory, schools stood empty and decaying, dotting the landscape like tombstones: the victims of consolidation. Soon he was driving twice as many miles to make the same number of stops. That was one arm of the pincer. The other was electronics. When things started going electronic, the big new schools wanted computers, typewriters with memories, computerized photocopiers that were as difficult to repair as an ICBM. The company had taken his repair function away, made him into a salesman who didn’t understand the things he was selling. After the retraining, he wouldn’t be on the road anymore. They were going more to walk-in and mail-order sales. He would be in a brand-new store in Hillandale Mall, between Pic ’n’ Pay Shoes and the Hallmark Card Shop. This was his farewell tour. Big Top Cafe Soft Swirl Ice Cream Famous Hand-carved Zarga Circus Showtime Every Half Hour 1 mi. He saw this sign as he was nearing the top of a hill. The road looked to go straight over the crest of a ridge and down. From the top he expected to see blue-green waves of hills breaking against the horizon. Instead, he found himself looking down into the largest automobile graveyard he had ever seen. An entire valley had been filled with junked cars. The built-up road ran across it like a bridge

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skimming a turgid steel river. As he started down, his lips twisted at the desecration of nature, the sheer mass of dead metal. Cars, trucks, campers, motorcycles, vans: many of them were only a year or two old and without a mark on them. Could they not have been repaired? He wondered if this was where Detroit brought last year’s models that didn’t sell. Buying and selling suddenly sickened him. Obscurely, the place frightened him. As he drove up the opposite slope out of the pit, his engine knocked and he had a flash vision of jointed metal hands snaking out to grab his rear bumper and pull him backward. He coaxed the gas pedal down. The needle of the speedometer shivered and held, as if caught against an invisible wire. He floored the gas. With a jerk the needle broke free. In a moment he was streaking along a high, straight road, bathed in the tingling sweat he used to get on roller-coaster rides at the county fairs of his youth. Removing a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, he patted his face. He shook his head at his own foolishness. And yet off to the left, a vine bearing flame-colored clusters licked up a fence post, and for a moment he was a toddler again, sitting in his blue high chair in the kitchen. His mother, young, her cheeks red with cold, her brown hair wind-tousled, danced up to him with an armful of trailing, berried branches. “Look, darling! Bittersweet!” All at once he saw that he should have gone into forestry. He should be living in a cabin with plain pine furniture and bare floors. Outside his window, finches, cardinals, and towhees scrabbled at a bird feeder. The sun streamed in like angels and alit on the windowsill, sparkling in a Mason jar filled with bittersweet. Where had the years gone? Where was the young woman who was his mother? He looked around him. This was Zarga. It was a town once, but no more. Weedy railroad tracks ran behind it; the road ran through it. There were five buildings. Four of them were weathered gray. Judging by the rusted Butternut Bread and Royal Crown Cola signs on the screen door, one was once a grocery. The one with an empty flagpole in front had been a combined feed

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store and post office. Two, now with plywood nailed over the windows and doors, were houses. The fifth building was freshly painted, bright pink with sky-blue shutters. In the grassless yard two beds of red and pink petunias grew in white-painted truck tires. Between them stood a plaster gnome painted green. Blinking Christmas lights festooned the gutters and porch railings of the house. Over the front door hung a painting of a lemon-yellow lion with a curling red tongue. A cartoon balloon issued from his mouth: BIG TOP CAFE. The dirt parking lot beside the house was packed hard from the tires of many cars, but at the moment his was the only vehicle in Zarga. He parked and stepped out. Calliope music started up inside the house. As he climbed the steps a voice boomed, “Come in! Come in! Step right up!” The man in the doorway could have been any age. His longish black hair was combed straight back from his forehead in a greasy mane. He wore a gold satin tunic closed with blue braid frogs, red satin trousers, and shiny black boots. When he smiled his teeth looked small and sharp and very white. His lips were a moist red. “Welcome, welcome! The next show is about to begin!” he cried, bowing and sweeping his hand toward the tables. The cafe took up a single wide room. Along the wall to the right stood a counter and stools. Behind the counter all the machines were lit and working: a popcorn machine, cotton candy machine, hot dog steamer, bubbling glass coolers of purple, orange, red, and yellow fruit drinks. The tables were arranged in a semicircle along a velvet rope, much as the tables in a nightclub border a dance floor. Against the left wall, an old man wearing thick glasses and a butcher’s apron sat at a smaller table, carving something out of wood. Shavings and scraps lay on the floor around him. He did not look up at the new arrival. The knife winked and danced in his thick fingers. But he, the new arrival, took in these things only peripherally. His interest, from the beginning, had been caught by the display behind the rope. He sat down at a table and leaned over the barrier to study the details.

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Ablaze with tiny lights, the Smallest Show on Earth sat on a table big enough to seat twelve for dinner. A stiff, triangular flag that said Circus Zarga flew from the top of the tent; the canvas, rolled up on the near side for viewing, had been cleverly stained and weathered so that it looked like a real, working big top. Inside, the performers in all three rings paused in frozen action. In the right one, a midget clown in a baby bonnet and diaper paddled a fat tramp clown. A clown with a big cigar in his mouth and a flowerpot for a hat rode a unicycle, with a monkey in a ruffled collar perched on his shoulder. A vast-bosomed female clown in an orange wig sprawled halfway through a somersault, her tattered skirts fallen back to show red polka-dotted bloomers. He felt someone near and turned. A girl in a pink satin ballerina outfit was setting before him a paper cup of lemonade, a sack of buttered popcorn, a bag of peanuts, and a hot dog in a frilled paper tray. His stomach clenched with joy. Returning his attention to the circus, he grabbed at the food, unseeing, and stuffed it in his mouth. The intricacy of the circus mesmerized him. Everything had been thought of, down to the last water bucket and tent peg. In the center ring a lion tamer in a safari outfit defended himself with whip and chair from five lions posed on red and gold stands. Every hair of their coats had been miraculously scored in. The third ring held the most beautiful sight of all, a scattering of trapeze artists suspended in deathdefying grace, like pink and silver butterflies affixed to the tent ceiling with pins. “Amazing,” he said to the circus man, who stood quietly by with folded arms, and he pointed to the audience; for this was the most remarkable feature of all. The grandstand was full to overflowing. There must have been a thousand people there, and each one of them was carved as a fully realized individual. There were old men in overalls, young men in high school letter jackets, men in business suits, bald men, and bearded men. He saw women holding babies, grandmothers in housedresses, young women in ponytails and jeans, well-dressed women, pregnant

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women. The children came in all sizes: clean and dirty, chubby and thin, laughing with delight and crying from overexcitement. There was even a little boy with a dirty face and torn clothes crawling under the tent to get in free. Everybody was there, he thought: every soul the carver had ever seen, each one remembered in all his warts and glory. As he ripped open the bag of peanuts, the circus man stepped up to the rope and began his spiel. The Zarga family had been a circus family for many generations, he said. His grandfather and his great-uncles were famous in Hungary as the Flying Zargas, a team of acrobats and jugglers. They brought their families to America when the circus man’s father was a little boy and soon were working in one of the largest circuses in the country. But the circus man’s father was different from the others, dreamy and sensitive, given to letting his attention wander during tumbling practice. Eventually he went off by himself to join a small Mexican circus where he became not an acrobat, but a clown. He had a natural talent for clowning which went beyond being funny. He learned to see behind people’s faces. Soon he could tell who smiled to cover up sorrow and who looked unhappy to hide a secret, cruel happiness. He felt sympathy for them all, and he tried to send everyone away not only laughing, but also feeling a little kinder and more hopeful about life. One spring he met a beautiful young trapeze artist, a girl with long golden braids. They fell in love, were married, and soon had two children, the circus man and his sister. They were a happy family. In his spare time, the circus man’s father brushed his wife’s hair, massaged her feet, and sang to her; and he gave up card playing in order to carve out toys for his children. At first he whittled such toys as he knew from his own boyhood, bird whistles and ball-and-cup games. But as he became more skillful, he began to turn out circus animals and performers. Then one day during a routine practice, his beautiful wife fell through a net that had been improperly laced and was killed. After his wife’s death, the elder Zarga no longer had the heart to be a clown. The knowledge that he read behind people’s faces became an

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unbearable burden. Instead, he turned desperately to his carving. All day and all night he carved, aging prematurely, ruining his eyesight. But when the day came that the circus owner had to ask them to leave, he had completed most of the Circus Zarga. He established the Big Top Cafe out of a determination to create a place where unhappiness stopped at the door, where entertainment and laughter could go on and on. The circus man raised his arm, and the lights under the tent grew brighter. The calliope music swelled, and the traveler wondered eagerly what would happen now. The peanuts were gone and he was pouring cold, sweet lemonade down his salt-parched throat. Finding that he was holding a stick wreathed in cotton candy, he tore off a piece and chewed it into a mouthful of delicious, strawberry air. The old man, whom the traveler had already forgotten, got up from his table and shuffled forward, polishing a small carved figure with a cotton rag. He slipped under the rope and moved toward the circus. A trumpet fanfare sounded. “Ladies and gentlemen,” shouted the circus man, “let the show begin!” When he looked back at the circus itself, the three rings were empty. Everybody loves the circus, he thought, everybody wants to go to the circus. He never wanted to be an actuary, a typewriter repairman, a forest ranger. He wanted to go to the circus like everybody else. Who had taught him to settle for less? Behind the tent, a parade had formed. The first elephant, led by a bare-chested man in riding pants and boots, was standing in the main entrance. The traveler craned to see around a woman in a sun hat who sat in the row in front of him. The little boy at her side bounced up and down, shouting with glee. Looking at the hundreds of flushed, eager faces around him, he wondered how he ever thought that people could be content being neither happy nor unhappy. He wanted to tell all of this to the circus man, but the circus man was standing a great distance away. Beyond him, out on the street, a wrecker was towing the traveler’s car away.

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The parade circled in front of him, elephants, dancers, clowns, plumed horses. A girl in blue-spangled tights rode one of the horses. She had long golden braids and was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He knew what was going to happen next, but he didn’t care. It was merely what he had come there for. “Oh,” he gasped in wonder at her beauty, even as he felt his tiny lungs turn to wood.

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sitting blankly by Dreama’s picture window and Talbot was reading the newspaper on the davenette, Mom suddenly said, “Here, kitty, kitty. Look, Sister, kitty.” Talbot peered over the top of the newspaper. Out on the sidewalk, a big calico cat sat licking one paw. Then it dawned on him and he threw the paper aside. “Dreama! Get in here!” Dreama appeared in the doorway, drying a highball glass with a dish towel. “What is it?” “Mom spoke. She saw that cat out there—always had eyes like a barn owl—and said kitty.” “Mom!” shouted Dreama. Mom’s hands started moving in her lap like she was shelling peas. “Dad, are you sure?” said Dreama. “Swear to God,” said Talbot, feeling hope drain away. It was no fun sleeping next to a dead person every night. For three weeks, ever since Dreama moved him and Mom off the farm, Mom had said nary a word. Now that he had time to think back, her loss of speech had probably been a gradual thing, but he had been too overwhelmed by farmwork to notice. After his dizzy spell out in the garden, it seemed like even milking was hard for him, though he would never have admitted it to anyone. In fact, when Dreama and Floyd showed up from Ohio—Charley Carruthers had slipped and phoned them from Lambert’s store—he went out and chopped O N E M O R N I N G , A S M O M WA S

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firewood for an entire morning just to show them he was still the man he’d always been. One look at Mom, though, and Dreama was bound and determined to move them. But if she thought that made them charity cases, she was sadly mistaken. As Dreama turned back to the kitchen, he took a deep breath and said, “Look here. I was thinking about bringing my push mower back from the farm. There’s no need for you to pay somebody to mow your postage stamp of a yard when I could do it. Besides, those renters you put in the house down there are too sorry to use it.” Dreama’s eyes went hooded like a snake’s. “I don’t think so.” “Why not? I pay my way, you know that. Forresters always do.” “Well, you can pay it by setting right there and watching Mom.” Talbot felt little pops going off in his head, like blood vessels bursting. “I’m no damn babysitter.” “She’s your wife, old man, not mine.” “What did you say? I can still tan your jacket, don’t matter how old you are!” he shouted, coming out of his chair. At the same time she surged toward him, and for a long moment they stood toe to toe, like two grizzlies on their hind legs. Then, for the first time in his life, Talbot took a step backward. If Dreama threw them out, what then? In a hard voice she said, “This isn’t the last brier patch over the hill we’re living in here. This is the city. You don’t need to be parading around out there in your overalls, spitting tobacco juice on your sleeve.” And you married to a man who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot. Aloud he said, “I’ll get Floyd to take me back to Kentucky to get my mower. He’ll take me.” “You’re not Floyd’s boss, I am. And don’t you never forget it,” said Dreama, and stalked out of the room. He had to give her that. If he had been holding a loaded pistol, she would still have turned her back on him. Of his three children, she was the most like him. But if anybody had told him a month ago that

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he would let himself be talked to the way she just had, he wouldn’t have believed it. He tried to go back to reading, but the words wouldn’t hold still. He needed to work. Surely there was some work he could do for his keep and Mom’s, even in a treeless subdivision of tract houses outside an industrial city in central Ohio. Work had been his whole life. He didn’t like to do anything else, and he couldn’t even imagine how you could call a life moral if there wasn’t some physical labor involved. His idea of a perfect day was to stick a chaw of tobacco in his jaw and go to hoeing, next to a friend, from morning to night. At home now, Charley Carruthers would be haying. Mom’s head had dropped forward; she was sleeping. He was on the want ads, running his eye over each and every one just to have something to do until he stopped trembling, when he heard the back door open and his son-in-law’s voice in the kitchen. Every day since Floyd got laid off, he went looking for a better job. Most of his contacts appeared to operate out of taverns. But Talbot couldn’t thoroughly dislike Floyd, there wasn’t enough to the man. When he smelled bologna frying, he went to join them. Dreama cut her eyes at him and got down another coffee cup. “Guess what. Floyd’s going to be a supervisor at Aeronica.” Congratulations stuck in his craw. “When do you start?” he growled. Floyd’s bug eyes watched the smoke curl up from his and Dreama’s cigarettes in the Gold Nugget Show Bar ashtray. “It’s not for damn sure. Got to learn that—what is it, Dream’?” Dreama flicked a speck of ash off the table with her dishcloth. “Just them old logarithms.” A light, young feeling bubbled up in Talbot’s chest. When he was schoolteaching, he had loved mathematics above all else and had pushed himself to learn more than he would ever need to know for teaching in a one-room school. He still had the certificate from the time that he, an eighth-grade graduate, had made a 96 on the math part of the West Virginia state teacher’s exam. Cal Boster himself, who

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had taught Indians out West, said Talbot could have taught math in a big high school. He said, “I’ll teach you. Let me get my books out of the trunk.” Six hours later, Talbot was hoarse. The kitchen table was littered with balled-up paper and sandwich crusts. But Floyd still didn’t know a mantissa from a hole in the ground. Dreama strode into the kitchen, her face set like iron. Ignoring Talbot, she said to Floyd, “How about you going to the store and getting me some bread and milk and cottage cheese?” Before she finished the sentence, Floyd was out of his chair. Around noon the next day he returned, eyes bloody as fertilized eggs and the pocket ripped off his shirt, without the groceries. After he staggered into the bathroom and shut the door, Dreama came at Talbot, her hair practically shooting sparks. “I hope you’re satisfied! Don’t you ever do that to him again! Floyd’s plenty smart! You set down at a crap table with him and see how far you get, mister!” Then something happened that was like one of his sudden naps. One minute Dreama was in his face. The next, he was sitting on a bench at the bus stop two blocks from the house, with sweat pouring off him like he’d been cutting corn, and no memory of how he’d gotten there. How could she act that way? Toward him, her father? Not that he gave a copper for religion, but the Good Book said honor thy father, and she’d been brought up that way. For that matter, how could she have married an ignorant pissant who was the exact opposite of him? The sun bored into the crown of his head as if focused through his old magnifying glass. Without hills to cut it down to size, the sky was too big. The bright blue burned his eyes like lemon juice. As far as he could see in both directions, the wide, straight street was as empty as the ocean. If somebody came along and told him he was a mile from the edge of the world, it wouldn’t surprise him. He took a bandanna out of his overalls pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. A thick,

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slow pulse began in his right ankle. Every day his ankles swelled more. And now, of all things, Mom had called Dreama “Sister.” The name took him back to the Depression, which had been a fine time for him. Since they raised nearly everything they needed and traded for much of the rest, the calamity had hardly touched them, except for the Detroit relatives parking on them every summer. The price of coffee sure did run them his way. In fact it had amused him that in places like New York and Chicago, men were jumping out of windows to keep from having to live the way he and his were born and raised to live. Of course cash money had always been tight in the hills, and it was even tighter then, which was how he’d gotten the extra job billcollecting out in the bushes and woods for Doc Pritchard. “The births are the worst to collect on,” the doctor warned him. “You’d be surprised how many young people are walking around not paid for.” Talbot found this to be true. One man had challenged him, “What’re you a-goin’ to do if I can’t pay? Shove the little feller back up where the sun never shines?” They paid him one way or another, though. At six-four and twoforty, he didn’t get much argument. Doc Pritchard let him keep half of whatever he collected, whether it was cash money, potatoes, apples, honey. What he usually did was look around and see what people could easiest afford to do without. But he had to be paid. One day he’d come put-putting home with a calf tied to the rear bumper of the flivver. How Mom had laughed to see that. She’d carried Norton out in his drawer-tail to pet the calf, and Norton, who was just learning to talk, had pointed at it and said solemnly, “Owl.” Now a bus turned onto Vannest and came swaying toward him. In front of him it stopped, and a heavy woman with two shopping bags stepped down. Talbot raised his hand to greet the bus driver, who in return touched a forefinger to the brim of his cap. With a frightful

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metallic hiss, the bus pulled away. The woman went into a house two doors down, and the street was empty again. Not a house in the whole subdivision had a front porch. How, Talbot wondered, would you ever get to know your neighbors if there weren’t any porches to sit on? A house without a front porch was like a bald-headed woman. The house at the head of Seven Mile, where he’d gone to collect for Pritchard, had only one window and a dirt floor. Living there would have been like living in a cave. When Talbot pulled into the yard, two raggedy children slipped out of the woods and ran their hands over the fenders, like they’d never been close to an automobile before. Though he only met the man who lived there that one time, his name was engraved on Talbot’s heart. Mom had never wanted to know it. The man had been sitting cross-legged on the ground under a shade tree, cracking hickory nuts on a large, flat rock. Next to him knelt a half-grown, wormy-looking girl picking out the nut meats. As was his custom in any dealing, Talbot didn’t come directly to the point. He accepted a dipper of water from the bucket on the porch, and they talked about crops for a little. Then he told the man he was there about the birth that had never been paid for. They’d had to get the doctor because the baby wanted to come out hind part before. An angry, hunted look came in the man’s eyes. He turned and gestured up yon hill, where Talbot made out a mound of fresh earth with a handmade cross stuck in it. “Go up there and ask why it ain’t paid for,” the man said bitterly and scrambled to his feet. With a jerk of his head, he motioned for Talbot to follow him. Banty-legged, he rocked back and forth as he walked. In the house, on a folded feed sack in a crate on the bare dirt floor, lay the tiniest baby Talbot had ever seen. Its dark cloudy eyes stared boldly up at them for all the world as if it recognized and despised them both. “We ain’t heard ary peep out of her since the childbed fever took

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her mama,” said the man dully. “She don’t hardly eat. I’m thinking she ain’t long for this world, either.” Somewhere down Vannest, a car door slammed and an engine started up. Then he saw the Chrysler back out of the driveway with Floyd at the wheel. Angling across the street to the wrong side, Floyd pulled to the curb in front of Talbot. He had changed clothes. His thinning hair had been wetted and combed straight back from his forehead, which, thought Talbot, was the closest Floyd would ever come to being a highbrow. Looking past Talbot, Floyd said, “Need to get me some cigarettes. Want to go along?” Talbot was going to say no until he remembered the full carton of Salems on top of the refrigerator. A flicker of feeling for his son-in-law stirred in him. He went around and climbed in the shotgun seat. As they drove toward the haze over downtown, Talbot stretched out his legs and thought about the time, two years after that first visit, when he’d driven back up to the house at the head of Seven Mile for a second and last time. Where the yard once was, burdock, mullein, and ragweed came up to his chest, making entrance to the house nigh impossible; but he could see the stove-in roof from the road. He could have figured that the man was the type always to move on, and always to a worse situation. When he came home, Mom was out in the yard watching for him, with Dreama on her hip. When he told her that the family had gone, she brought up her apron corner and wiped away tears of relief. Lulled by Floyd’s steady driving, he must have slept then. One minute he was plowing in the Round Bottom behind Old Sam, the mule he’d had in the thirties. The next, someone was shaking his shoulder and saying, “Dad, Dad?” The car door was ajar and Dreama leaned in, laughing. “You’re home,” she said happily. “Come on, I’ve made a fresh pot of coffee and a fruit cocktail pie.”

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Two things a Forrester couldn’t do: apologize or hold a grudge. She was one of them through and through. And he was a bigger man than to tell her different after all this time. She was already ashamed enough of where she’d come from. Swinging his stiff old legs out of the car, he thought about how he’d sold that calf to cover the banty-legged man’s debt to Doc Pritchard and about how they had called the baby “Sister” for six months, until Mom found the name “Dreama” in one of those dime novels she was always reading. “Yeah,” he said, taking hold of the door frame to pull himself upright, “I reckon I’m home.”

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swinging in the wind, nothing had moved on the street for the last fifteen minutes before the man appeared down at the end of the block. Slowly he worked his way toward me, slipping from doorway to doorway in the rainy night. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a long coat, and he kept looking behind him. I was sitting in the front window of the bus station, watching the rain and recollecting other Christmas Eves—most, like this one, spent in eastern Kentucky. A car had gone by about eight thirty, and I didn’t look for another one before closing time. There’s a Wal-Mart outside of town that gets the last-minute shopping now, plus a couple of years ago the city fathers paved over the railroad right-of-way to make a bypass of downtown, all five blocks of it. There wouldn’t be many folks riding the bus, either. I could have locked up and let people wait outside, but I had too many memories of lonely streets not to stay open till the Bluebird went through at 10:30. Rhonda, she understood I had to do it. “You’re a nurturer, Tiny, that’s why I married you,” she said. She gets stuff like that off TV talk shows—but whatever. I’m just glad she said yes all those years ago. When he got opposite the station, the man darted across the street, opened the door, and slid a glance around. “Hidy. Come on in,” I said. He looked bad. His face was that gray-white shade you get when you’re going to pass out. Lurching down the line of booths along the wall, he flung himself into the last one. EXCEPT FOR THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

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When I got myself back there he was hunched over on his elbows, staring at the tabletop. Without looking up he muttered, “Gimme something to eat.” I said, “How about some homemade pie? I got lemon meringue, butterscotch, chocolate, and apple. My wife makes them.” “Anything.” “Coffee?” “Yeah.” Time I got a piece of the butterscotch and a cup of coffee to him, he’d laid the hat aside. He hadn’t shaved or washed in a while, but with his looks he could have been a country music star. “You all by yourself tonight?” he asked, unbuttoning his coat. That’s when I saw he was carrying. For some reason I’ll never understand, seeing the gun made me sit down across from him. It was a pure instinctual thing, almost like I wanted to keep myself between him and somebody else, like I was trying to protect someone. At any rate, I don’t keep a gun at the station, only a baseball bat, and it was across the room under the counter. Heavy as I am and the way I move with this prosthesis, I’d never make it over there. “Yeah,” I said, keeping it loose, “it’s just us chickens tonight. Ordinarily my wife’d be keeping me company, but it being Christmas Eve and all, she’s got stuff to do at home. If you’re wanting a bus there’s one more at 10:30, for Huntington.” I thanked the Lord that Rhonda decided to stay home and finish a dress she was making for Kimberly. After he wolfed down the pie, he lit a cigarette, drew in a lungful of smoke, and let it out with his eyes closed, like it was medicating his soul. “You from around here?” he asked. “Carter County originally. Been here going on nineteen years, though.” He nodded. It occurred to me that he didn’t have a plan. I’d been robbed before;

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drugs have changed eastern Kentucky in a lot of ways. And with TV and all, even your teenage dopehead has some kind of a half-assed strategy. But this old boy seemed to be thinking of something else. Not that this relieved my mind exactly. The man was some kind of trouble. The only question was what kind and to who. “What happened to the couple used to run this place? Way back,” he said. “My in-laws, the Conns. You know ’em?” He gave me an up-and-down look. “Your in-laws, you say.” I said, “They retired and moved back to Big Woods six years ago. Me and Rhonda took over then. Of course, Rhonda always did make the pies here, even when she was working at Aquastream.” He closed his eyes again, ducked his head, and pressed his thumbs into his temples, massaging in little circles. He looked plumb worn out. “You got any kids?” he asked. I didn’t like bringing in my family. “I reckon I’d better wash out the coffeepot,” I said, making a move to leave. “I asked you a question,” he said, steely and low. I thought, okay, whatever sails his boat. “Kimberly’s our one and only. She just turned twenty.” His head snapped up. “Twenty.” “Yep.” I never saw a man try so hard to look casual. “When’s her birthday?” he asked. “In September.” “Got a picture of her?” I nodded. “Lemme see it.” He had unusually close-set ears. An idea started crawling up the back of my neck. All at once it seemed like I’d been waiting my whole life for this man to show up. I got out my billfold and fumbled it open to the family portrait we got done at Olan Mills for Easter. Somebody’s breath was whistling

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in their nostrils, and I actually turned my head to see who might be in the next booth before I realized it was me. He took the wallet from me and slid his thumb slowly back and forth across Rhonda’s and Kimberly’s faces. His knee started jiggling under the table, rocking the booth. “How long you been married?” “Fifteen years last October.” “So she isn’t your daughter.” “Kimmy was five when we got married. We’ve been in our house fourteen,” I said, my tongue like cotton. He studied the picture. Softly he said, “She don’t favor you.” I swallowed hard. “I met her mama when she was three, but I’m the only daddy she’s ever known. She’s my pride and joy.” The phone rang. He looked me in the eye and shook his head, giving me a big negatory. “We’ll just sit here. It’ll quit.” I said, “Look, Buddy, it’s Christmas Eve. I don’t want any trouble.” “Neither do I,” he said, lit another cigarette, and sat back, one arm along the back of the booth. But the knee was still dancing, and now he started drumming his fingers. He was trying to decide something. When the phone finally quit, he frowned. “That was somebody that expected you to be here.” I was thinking that if it was Rhonda, she’d be down in a New York minute to see what had happened to me. Which gave me something else to worry about. “Who do you think it was?” he asked, chewing his lip. “Probably somebody wanting to know if the bus is on time.” A big drop of sweat slid down my spine. I thought about our toy poodle Fifi, about the way she’d nibble Rhonda’s corn pads off while we were sleeping and Rhonda’d wake up giggling. I wondered if I’d ever hear Rhonda laugh again and feel Fifi’s cold little nose in my ear. He narrowed his eyes and squinted at the front windows. “Your daughter live here in town?” “No.” “She smart?”

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“She’s real smart. Takes after her mama.” I didn’t want to tell him any more, but it’s like I couldn’t stop myself. “Right now she’s working for 3M. She went to Berea two years, and then she wanted to go out to St. Louis and specialize in physical therapy, but we didn’t have the money to send her.” Just then I heard a car pull up to the blind side of the building. He slipped his hand inside his coat. A young couple came in. The girl was way along, maybe eight months. She was so skinny she looked like a pregnant broom handle. The boy, same spindly type, was carrying a little flowered suitcase. They sat down on the first two counter stools, put their heads together, and went to whispering. We weren’t part of their world at all. “When’s that next bus?” he asked. I told him that the Bluebird was due in ten minutes. Then, it’s like my tongue was loose at both ends and hinged in the middle. I informed him that it’s part of the last private bus line from here to Wheeling. I called up memories of riding on it as a boy going to see family in Fort Gay and of how Daddy would always buy a packet of Chiclets for us kids. Next I philosophized about the age of trains dying and now the age of buses was dying, making places like Blue Valley a secret known only to the people who live here, for we don’t figure on the national map of travel connections anymore. I was into the pluses and minuses of the local lumber industry when he snapped at me. “Is that the bus?” The rain had quit. In the distance I heard the growl of a big engine, coming this way. He must have been pretty rattled to mistake that sound for a bus. Me, I’d know the horses Earl’s got under the hood of his patrol car anywhere. “No,” I said, “it’s the police.” I got myself upright and walked to the front doors and leaned out. Nobody shot me in the back. Earl was barreling up Main Street, blowing through stoplights with his siren off. To my left, the Bluebird was struggling up Bishop Avenue from the bypass, wallowing in the wind like a whale. Everything went into slow motion. With a big oily sigh, the bus

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pulled in slaunchways to the front door. The young couple stood up and went into a movie smooch. An old lady got off the bus with a shopping bag full of presents. She waved at a pickup truck that pulled in from the other direction and stopped nose-to-nose with the bus. Earl screeched up on the other side of the bus, jumped out of the patrol car, hurdled the bumper of the pickup, swiveled around the old lady, pulled open the door, and shoved past the couple. “How’s come you didn’t answer the phone?” he yelled at me. “There was this man—” I said, not in my real voice. “Where is he?” The back booth was empty. Earl rushed to check the rest rooms. The young couple went on outside to the bus, and in a second I heard the boy yell, “My car!” just as an old red Camaro peeled around the bus and took off up the street. Earl heard it too and sprinted for his vehicle. The fellow must have gone out through the kitchen. Earl wasn’t halfway to his wheels when a black late-model Ford streaked past. The two buggy-whip antennas on the back told me it was an unmarked cop car. After the bus left, I went outside and looked up the street. What I noticed right away was what wasn’t there: there were at least two cop cars chasing the Camaro, but I didn’t hear any sirens. The rain had started again. I locked the front door and went to wash up the plate and cup the man used. That’s when I saw my wallet on the table. With everything happening, I’d forgot to get it back from him. The picture of Rhonda and Kimberly was gone. In its place lay folded ten pictures of Grover Cleveland, the first thousand-dollar bills I’d ever seen. Late the next afternoon, after we’d opened our gifts and eaten Christmas dinner out at Papaw and Mamaw’s, Rhonda and Kimberly took Danny, her new boyfriend, over to Aunt Cosby’s to show him off. I was trying to stay awake to watch the game on TV. I hadn’t slept all night and tried to call Earl twice, but nobody answered. He’s divorced and lives alone since his twins went off to the deaf school.

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Just as I was dozing off, a knock came at the door. Earl walked in and tossed his hat on top of the Lexington paper on the coffee table. From the wrinkles and smudges, he was still in yesterday’s uniform. I raised a hand. “What do you know for sure?” He set down in the other recliner kindly gingerly, like his back was bothering him again, picked his hat back up, and turned it around and around by the brim. Earl and me, we’ve run together since we were four years old. We don’t have to talk about something to be talking about it. Just him being there meant we were already discussing an item buried in the state news section of the paper, High-Speed Christmas Eve Chase Recovers Stolen Car. For a while we watched the game without talking. Then during a beer commercial Earl said, “I’ve been thinking about retiring.” “Seriously?” He fiddled with his hatband. “I’ve had a good run, met lots of people.” This is true. Down in Frankfort one time, he peed in the urinal right next to John Wayne. “I’ll get a good pension,” he said. “Was it right what the paper said?” “About what?” “That you didn’t catch the driver of the car.” Earl sighed. “Not exactly. Oh, God, not exactly. I was trying to get to him first and take him into protective custody.” “Then the other car, the black Ford—?” Earl reached in his shirt pocket, took out the photo of Rhonda and Kimberly, and handed it to me. There was a smear of rusty red across one corner. I wondered who had shot first. We looked at each other real straight. “This was something big,” I said. “You don’t want to know how big. It wouldn’t be healthy for you to know.” He sat back, gripping the armrests of his chair, eyes on the TV. “Law enforcement. Shit.”

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The Lions scored on a bootleg. Probably I’d seen the stranger at his worst. But I hadn’t gotten the feeling he was mean or evil, only scared and desperate. I wondered if he’d had time to draw his gun. After a while I said, “Do you think he came back for Rhonda?” “Rhonda? No. He had too much else on his mind last night. We think he was headed for Curranville.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn and look at me. “You know who he was?” “Not for sure,” I said, fingering the picture, “but I have an idea.” Kimberly has his coloring and the same close-set ears. “Are you going to tell Rhonda you saw him?” asked Earl. The first week we met, I asked Rhonda to marry me. She told me she was waiting for someone and that she’d never love anybody like she loved him. She told me that someday he would come back and get her and she’d live like a queen, once he got some things straightened out. It took me almost three years to convince her to marry me instead of waiting. He was the big dream, the trip to California and Vegas. I’m the small dream, the one that fixes your washer and makes your house payments. We’ve had a good life together, and we don’t talk anymore about what she said at the beginning. Most of the time I manage to believe she stopped waiting for him. But sometimes I think that maybe what’s keeping her with me is the waiting for him. If he wasn’t out there any longer for her to wait for, would she wake up and want something else? “No,” I told Earl. “I’m not saying a word to her.” We walked out to his car. Earl looked up at the gray sky. With his head slanted back, I noticed the white starting at his temples. “More rain in the forecast. Remember how it used to snow on Christmas when we was kids?” he said. “You never get snow in the Knobs on Christmas,” I said. “But sure, I remember it.” He thought for a minute, then grinned. “Yeah, I guess it’s just

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something we can’t do without thinking we grew up with. Like once upon a time, everything was perfect. Hoss, you take care.” On New Year’s Eve, I told Kimberly I had the money for her to go to St. Louis. When Rhonda asked how I came by it, I just said I worked a deal. Rhonda’s not good with money, so she just accepted it and hugged my neck. After everybody went to bed, early in the morning of the New Year, I wrote out an undated note saying that the money for college came from Rhonda’s birth daddy, who was no longer living. I sealed it in an envelope marked In the Event of My Death, Tiny Whitaker, and put it in the Gideon Bible I keep in my chest of drawers. I didn’t like taking credit for another man’s generosity, but I didn’t see any other way for the time being. Also, I figured if something happens where it would do more harm than good for them not to know, I’ll tell them. Come summer, we packed up the truck and got Kimberly moved to St. Louis. Danny, the boyfriend, stayed behind to work in Cynthiana, and pretty soon they were history. To this day Kimberly’s still in school out there, doing well and loving it. Somehow I doubt she’ll ever live close to us again, now that she’s seen the world, and I know in my heart of hearts that if it’d been my money, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to send her out there. Sometimes early of a morning when I’m opening the station and nobody else is around, I find myself thinking real hard toward that stranger, almost like I’m praying. I try real hard to get through to him, try to let him know that it took both of us to do it right. I gave her roots, he gave her wings. Damn if it didn’t snow the next Christmas.

The Long-Haired Dictionary

the hot olive oil. While the eggs set up, he put four slices of whole-wheat bread in the toaster oven, poured two glasses of orange juice, and got the butter dish and a jar of grape jam from the refrigerator. As he worked, he hummed along with the new Chopin CD his sister had sent him for his birthday. Returning to the eggs, he lifted the cooked edges with a spatula to let the uncooked portion on top run underneath. When the omelet was nearly done, he spooned on the mushrooms he had sautéed separately and gave the pan an expert, underhanded jerk to fold the omelet in half. Then he covered the pan and turned off the flame. He called, “Maggie, it’s ready.” Maggie appeared in the doorway, wearing a pair of plaid flannel pajamas. She smiled at him and tossed her head to sling her dark hair behind her shoulders. “I found these in a drawer.” “They’re yours,” said Chris. “I never wear them. Mother sent them to keep me warm in the mountains. She pictures me in a log cabin.” Maggie wrinkled her nose in her little-girl way. “Thanks, but no thanks. It wouldn’t be any fun to wear them if they were mine.” She sat down at his small kitchen table and added, “Chopin’s nocturnes always make me see silver ribbons spilling from a black velvet box.” “Nice image.” Chris brought two plates of eggs and toast to the table. He poured coffee and said, “What do you want to do today?” “I have to grade papers eventually.” “Me, too. Eventually.” C H R I S P O U R E D B E AT E N E G G S I N T O

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She took a bite of omelet. “Olive oil?” “I got it when I went to Cincinnati last week,” said Chris. Olive oil was unknown in Sarvis, Kentucky, as were cardamom, couscous, Greek olives, paté, wine, and a host of other foods Chris had taken for granted until he came to teach in the Appalachian mountains. Though, as he wrote his mother, you could get a fair goat cheese from the hippie farmers outside town. “And I taste something else,” said Maggie, rolling another bite of egg in her mouth. “The spices. I’ve tasted this blend before. They taste like . . . yes: something like the bouquet garni you can get at Fauchon’s in Paris. They used to sell it in little earthenware pots.” Grinning and shaking his head, for this time she had really outdone herself, Chris went to the cabinet and took out an unglazed container with Fauchon’s painted on the side. “You really are amazing, you know that? I picked it up last summer after my trip to Brittany.” He set the pot of spices between them and took his seat again, thinking to himself that even his cousin Pamela wouldn’t have made the connection. Oh, Maggie was sharp—and to have found her in a place like Sarvis made her even more special. He said, “You’ve saved my life this year, Maggie.” Maggie traced around the edge of the jar lid with an index finger. Her oval nails, which she painted pale pink, reminded Chris of the Jordan almonds his grandmother kept in a crystal dish on her coffee table in Greenwich. “Do you think your coming here was a mistake?” she asked. “If I hadn’t met you it would have been. You’re it—the main attraction, and all the minor ones.” “What if we’d met somewhere else? Would I have looked as good on the Champs-Elysées, or in Boston?” “Of course.” He buttered a corner of toast. “You’d look good anywhere. What are you asking?” “Nothing.” She took a sip of juice, inhaled sharply, and placed one hand flat against her stomach. “It is a bit tart. They only had the house brand,” said Chris.

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Maggie let her breath out. “Are you going to teach here next year?” “I hadn’t thought about it yet,” he lied. He had been hired for one year, with the understanding that the position could be extended if enrollment held steady. Gary McBride, the chair of humanities, had already spoken to him about remaining. But did he want to spend another year in a place where he couldn’t even listen to NPR? The hills blocked the reception. Maggie said, “Why don’t we go for a walk? We can stop by my place and I’ll change my shoes. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about something.” After breakfast, she took a shower. Washing dishes, Chris looked down on Main Street. His furnished apartment was located above the Aetna Insurance office in the dead center of town. As he wrote to his mother, “My apartment is like Sarvis itself: it’s small but it’s drab.” Sarvis was home to two lumber mills, the tiny college, and not much else. Housing was at a premium, as was level ground. Chris couldn’t figure out why anyone had settled there in the first place, though he supposed the mountain scenery could be compelling. And yet people stayed; hence the mountain inbreeding which he had heard about and which he fancied he could detect in the faces of his students. As for culture, Chris had written his cousin Pamela, culture consisted of homegrown bluegrass bands and the Sunday New York Times, which he, the only subscriber in Sarvis, received a week late by mail. Not even the college library took it. And Maggie, of course. Maggie could follow his thoughts anywhere he wanted to take them. Gary McBride, who taught the world civ courses, was also sufficiently well read, but he was often busy with his family. Main Street was empty. Soon there would be a flurry of church traffic, and then nothing again until around five P.M., when students from Graves-Harding would be going to dinner at Druthers or at the new Hardee’s on the edge of town. The college cafeteria was closed on Sunday evenings. In July, he had been assured, there would be a hardwood festival, with a craft market; nightly gospel concerts; a road race; a fiddling contest; demonstrations of old-time blacksmithing,

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dulcimer making, and weaving; and a parade featuring four high school bands and the Graves-Harding Marching Lions. But by then, Chris hoped, somehow, to be long gone. He had come to live in Sarvis, hundreds of miles from home and family, because he had gotten in over his head at U Mass. Halfway through the book he was writing on Virginia Woolf, he had discovered that he had nothing to say. Without a published book, he knew he wouldn’t get tenure. There hadn’t been time to finish another project before he was to be evaluated. Taking the job at Graves-Harding College, where teachers were assumed to be teachers rather than authors, had allowed him to save face when he resigned, though none of his friends, family, or colleagues had ever heard of the institution. Little had he known what he was getting into. The first week on the cramped, perpendicular campus, he had wanted to throw himself in front of a coal truck. According to the plaque in front of the administration building, Graves-Harding College had been founded by the Presbyterian Church in the early part of the century to provide “a beacon of hope” to the undereducated citizens of the sparsely settled mountain region. In the ensuing years, judging by the antiquated buildings and uncertain plumbing, the denomination had elected to put its money elsewhere. The gymnasium, built in 1964, was the most modern building. When the autumn rains came, eight inches of water had to be pumped out of the locker rooms. Chris’s office, in the humanities building, no longer had window screens. It had never possessed storm windows. Like many small church schools with hyphenated names that were hidden in the Appalachians—Chris had never dreamed there were so many of them until he saw the G-H basketball schedule—Graves-Harding was barely surviving. And while the students were polite, eager to learn, and possessed of a touching faith in the value of a college education, they needed remedial training for the first two years. Chris had found himself teaching the parts of speech in his survey of English literature. At night, he imagined dying in his sleep and being buried in some tilted hillside cemetery without his family ever knowing what had happened to him. Night came early

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in Sarvis, huddled as it was in the shadow of Laurel Mountain. “Sarvis is not the end of the world,” he wrote Pamela, “but you can see it from here. I write with heavy awareness of the cliché.” He had met Maggie in the meager foreign-language section of the library, where he had gone on a futile search for the writings of Sainte-Beuve. Maggie was the assistant director of the library and also taught courses in historiography and library science. She wore narrow black sweaters and skirts, loved Mahler, Wallace Stevens, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and spoke French (so he had written his mother) like a member of the Académie Française. Though she had been born somewhere in the mountains, she had not only studied in France, but for a three-month period had lived on a beach in the Yucatán. Her two degrees were from a large midwestern university. She was nothing like the dull, missionary types who made up the rest of the faculty—people who had never been out of the mountains, did not want to leave the mountains, and dressed to prove it. Maggie had an eclectic, relaxed style as well as a sense of irony. Within a week of their first date, he and she had become lovers. Given what Chris thought of as Maggie’s dual citizenship—her cosmopolitan mind coupled with her mountain origins, which she had mentioned once or twice—he had not shared with her his disdain of Sarvis. A gentleman never knowingly gives pain to another. He had learned that at his mother’s well-turned knee. For all he knew, Maggie might have brought some sensitivities forward from childhood. Maggie lived in a five-room rental house on the edge of campus with three half-wild cats, a spinet, and a collection of gangling plants she had grown from avocado pits, grapefruit seeds, walnuts, and the crown of a pineapple. Chris had whiled away many a Saturday afternoon playing duets with her on the spinet—Bach, Debussy, Beethoven. When he found out she could play, he had driven to Huntington and bought music he and his sister used to practice together. Maggie was a crackerjack sight reader. After breakfast they went to her house, and she changed into hiking boots. Then they set off up the hill behind her house.

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The cool spring day was as crisp as the pages of an uncracked book. They climbed in companionable silence, working their way across rocky, abandoned pastureland strewn with scrub cedar and multiflora rose, skirting the laurel hells. Red hawks wheeled overhead, and new grass spiked through the wintery thatch underfoot. The first gnat clouds of the year hovered over bright puddles among the rocks. Maggie led the way, her firm buttocks moving rhythmically in her tight jeans. I’m a lucky man, he thought. What if the two of them drove east together and showed up at his father’s annual birthday celebration on Block Island? How surprised his sister would be that he had found someone like Maggie in Sarvis. Pamela would smile drolly and think him quite the rogue. He had already mentioned Maggie in a letter to Pamela. “So you’ve gotten yourself a long-haired dictionary, like Benny Richmond. Smart lad,” she’d written back. Ben Richmond, a classmate of theirs at Brunswick School, had become a foreign correspondent after college and had developed a reputation for quickly learning the language of whatever country he was sent to. His linguistic facility put him far ahead of monolingual reporters in accessing local sources. “First thing, I get myself a long-haired dictionary,” he’d revealed over too many drinks at a class reunion. “The fastest place to learn a foreign language is in bed.” To Pamela’s remark, Chris had gently replied, “I’m still in the continental United States as far as I know, where a form of English is spoken, though the point is well taken. And let’s not forget that Ben Richmond is the consummate cad.” “Look yonder,” said Maggie, and pointed to a massive, downed tree trunk frilled with brilliant red lichen. “Beautiful.” She stopped walking and regarded him gravely. “Do you really think so?” “Yes, it’s lovely.” Sometimes she was so childlike in her eagerness to entertain him.

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They entered a pine wood. In the spaciousness of the grove, he moved up to walk beside her. The pine needles hushed their footfalls. Maggie said, “You told me you came to Sarvis for a change.” “That’s the short answer.” “Tell me the long one.” They walked down a slope into a cool, mossy gully and up the other side. Chris said, “There were a number of factors. I needed a fresh start but not a completely new career. After all, I’m a third-generation academic. My grandfather’s work on Hartley Coleridge has never been superseded. It’s the life I’ve always known. I’m comfortable with it.” He chuckled. “Oh, I had my rebellious period, when I wanted to be an ‘ordinary’ person—drive a truck, make furniture by hand—the whole romanticization-of-the-worker thing. My uncle put me to work for a summer in his contracting business, knocking down walls with a sledgehammer alongside various convicted felons, and that was that.” “Teaching at Graves-Harding is about as close as you want to get to being a manual laborer,” said Maggie. “That’s right.” They came out of the woods, onto a rocky promontory. Laurel Mountain was at their backs. Before them, row upon row of blue ridges stretched to the horizon like waves of a frozen ocean. In the near distance, below them, a small white church with a steeple broke the sweep of forest. Beside it lay a neatly kept cemetery within a low stone wall. Beyond the ridge upon which the church sat, a narrow column of smoke rose out of some nameless valley to dissipate against the crisp blue sky. Chris judged that Sarvis was somewhere behind them and to the left. Maggie sat down cross-legged facing the view, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled through a beatific smile. Chris sat down beside her. The warmth of the sun-baked rock on the backs of his thighs contrasted pleasantly with the chilly breeze. He resumed, “I was working on Virginia Woolf, as you know. Woolf is very tricky, and I was going through some personal problems” (his

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sister’s divorce, he supposed, was a personal problem for the whole family). “I needed a change of scenery for a while, needed to reassess my commitment to the Moderns.” “Think you’ll get back on track?” she asked. “Of course,” he said, though until that moment he would not have said so. The climb had given him an adrenaline high. Maybe he should give his manuscript another look. “After all, Sarvis isn’t a place I want to be buried in, do you? In that cemetery down there, for instance?” He laughed. “It’s nice up here, though.” “I come up here and sit a lot. It’s one of my favorite places,” said Maggie. Chris said, “Of course I don’t intend to disappoint my family. And one is reared with certain expectations for oneself, as well.” “Ending up here would be a disappointment?” “God, yes. The teaching load alone turns one into a beast of burden. You, too, of course. This isn’t a place to end one’s career.” Upon closer examination, the scene before him resolved itself into a surprising variety of color, a visual symphony of blues, greens, and purples, accented by puffs of spring white, pink, and red. The heat and brightness of the sun felt intense enough to bleach his hair. He felt a rush of feeling for good old Mother Nature, always there to backstop the moods of man. A sense of anticipation invaded him. In the years to come, he would recall his time in Sarvis with fondness. Moreover, maybe he should take another look at his dissertation on William Morris. Maybe he could salvage something there, enough for a slim monograph. Perhaps he had been wrong to stray past Morris and his circle. After all, the footnotes were magisterial—so said Pamela, who had co-curated an exhibit on the Pre-Raphaelites at the Fogg. He felt his enthusiasm for literary criticism stirring again, at long last. “Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Brady?” asked Maggie. “I don’t believe so.” He watched a log truck labor up the grade next to the church and disappear over a rise. And no one had really given Ernest Dowson his due. His first year in graduate school, he had done a substantial paper

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on Dowson. Maybe it was time for a definitive Dowson biography. Yes, as soon as he was done with Morris and Woolf. Dowson, author of the best bad poem in English literature, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” How often the refrain of the poem came to him: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. He felt as if he had wings, as if he could fling himself off the rock, catch a thermal, and glide like a hawk. “He’s buried down there.” Dowson? No, she was talking about some uncle. Maggie pointed toward the church steeple. “He and Daddy fell out over an apple orchard after Grandpa Daley died. Daddy thought Uncle Brady rooked him out of it, and they didn’t speak for fifteen years. Us kids weren’t allowed to have anything to do with Uncle Brady’s kids. Then one day Mr. Cotter that lived above us, up on Eight-Mile Creek, stopped and told us Uncle Brady had died.” She pulled up a stem of grass and chewed it. Chris eyed her sideways. An accent had crept into her speech. The accent of the region. Generally, she spoke an unaccented English. Maggie said, “They buried him pretty quick, as he had the gangrene in both legs. The day of the funeral Mama decided we were going to the service no matter what Daddy said. Anyway, he’d gone on out to the fields after breakfast, same as usual. So she fried a chicken to take and got us all dressed up, my brothers and me, and we set out over the ridge. When we walked in the church, Aunt Florence—that’s Uncle Brady’s wife—she started boo-hooing up a storm and hugged and kissed us like nothing you ever saw. Mama was so relieved, she thought they might shun us, you know. So we sat down and listened to the service and then went on out to the graveyard behind the coffin, which Uncle Brady’s boys were carrying. And there in that graveyard right down there stood Daddy, leaning on his shovel by the grave he’d just dug. He didn’t say pea turkey to anybody, nor they to him. And when the graveside service was over and Uncle Brady was laid to rest, Daddy put that shovel on his shoulder and walked home. And no more was ever said about Uncle Brady in our house. Aunt Florence

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sold that apple orchard and took the money and moved to Florida and was never heard from again.” She shook her head. “I come from hard people.” “Pea turkey?” said Chris. “What about it?” said Maggie. “Why are you speaking differently? There’s a different rhythm, a different choice of words.” “Does it bother you?” asked Maggie. “No,” he said. But it did. She sounded less well educated. Less intelligent. She said, “When I went to France, I worked really hard and I learned to speak French pretty well. My grammar teacher had been to the States, and she said I sounded like a native in French but a hillbilly in English. She laughed when she said it. I was young and insecure, and it hurt me bad. Now I wouldn’t think twice about it. I know who I am now. I’m not ashamed.” It hurt me badly, thought Chris. He said, “There’s no reason why you should be ashamed of who you are.” “I know. But then it was different. I was so hungry for culture, so hungry for acceptance by cultured people. When I got back home, I listened to the news shows on television for hours and hours and imitated the commentators until I could speak standard English.” “Up until now, that’s what you were speaking. Now you sound like the students. Like the people in town. It’s . . . quaint.” He smiled encouragingly. She gave him a straight look. “Where did you think I was from?” He squinted at her, wishing he had brought his sunglasses. “I guess I don’t know. Not precisely.” What had they talked about for all those hours, he wondered. Art, music, books, foreign travel, his family background, his childhood and adolescence, his college and graduate school careers. If her background was an important subject, as it now appeared to be, why had she not been more forthcoming?

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She said, “I wanted you to meet my family at Christmas, but you went home.” “I’d love to meet them.” “Really?” “Sure.” “How about now?” “Now?” Maggie turned and pointed to the woods that sloped away from the far side of the rock ledge. There was an opening in the trees. She said, “There’s a path we can take over there. It’s about two miles. They won’t be doing anything on Sunday.” “Your family lives that close to you?” “Yeah.” Chris said earnestly, “I do want to meet them. But we’ve already walked—what? Two or three miles? I don’t mind the distance, but by the time I get home, it’ll be pretty late. And I have all those papers to grade. How about another time?” “Oh,” she said. “Well, how about you let me know when would be a good time. If she has some warning, Mama’ll make chicken and dumplings.” “Fine,” he said. But there was never a good time, or perhaps he forgot her offer. In later years, after he left Sarvis at the end of the spring semester, Chris couldn’t recall exactly what had happened. He might never have thought of Maggie’s family again had she not, four years later, sent him a Christmas card. By then he was teaching at Fairfield Preparatory School in southern Vermont. He and Pamela had been married three years, having always known they would marry someday. A marriage of convenience, Pamela laughingly called it, since they already knew each other and, being distantly related, would not have to learn to tolerate any new in-laws. Lately he had begun to wonder if their marriage were not a bit too convenient. As Pamela had not given up her job in Boston, they saw each other only on the weekends, alternating between their respective

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domiciles unless the weather was bad, in which case each stayed home. He was thinking of taking Mother’s suggestion to get a dog. Maggie’s Christmas card bore a conventional sketch of a bright red cardinal perching on a snowy pine bough. The inside message read, Holiday Greetings. She had signed her name and had enclosed a photograph of a small blond boy sitting on the lap of some departmentstore Santa. Courtney Christopher Lawton, she had written on the back. Lawton was Maggie’s last name. They had drifted apart shortly after their spring walk; Chris had never been sure why, but afterward it had seemed inevitable, given his increasing determination to return to civilization. As he had written his sister, he had students who carried shotguns in their trucks! After turning in his final grades, he had stopped by her office in the library to say good-bye, but she had already left for the summer. Chris studied the photograph. There was no mistaking the boy’s resemblance. What was he to do? What was expected of him? Maggie, he wrote, Your communication comes as a great surprise. You might have told me. Did I not have a right to know? I offer my sincere congratulations. He put down his fountain pen, then took it up again. He is a handsome lad. The hairs of his head lifted and settled as if a wind had passed. Pamela! Mother and Father! Dr. Donovan, head of Fairfield School! Of course I will do anything in my power to help you. Just now things are a bit difficult, however, in terms of personal issues. I wonder if you know of my marriage. How, by the way, did you get my address? Fondly, Chris He wrote a check for one thousand dollars out of his money market account and enclosed it with the note. Ten days later, the check came back, torn in two. Staring at the two pieces of paper, while Pamela was cooking linguine with caper sauce not fifteen feet away, Chris broke out in a prickly sweat. Going into his study and shutting the door, he took the boy’s photograph from inside the Christmas card, which lay innocently in

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a stack of bills and correspondence under his millefiori paperweight, and taped it to the underside of his desk drawer. Then he sat back in his leather desk chair, gripping the chair arms. What should his next move be? What was Maggie’s game? He couldn’t read her intentions. Wasn’t the whole thing some kind of a trick? How was he supposed to know how to handle these mountaineers, or whatever they were called?

The Three Graces

people in Blue Valley still remember the day Professor Horace Burcham appeared in town, striding up and down residential streets and in and out of yards as if he owned them, sighting down driveways and peering over gates, whistling all the while. Mrs. LaVerne Day said you could tell right away that he was raised in the hills by how little regard he had for property lines. He reminded LaVerne of her half-Cherokee grandfather, who lamented the necessity for fences and deeds until the day he died. Burcham may well have felt a certain ownership of the ground he walked on. Blue Valley is, after all, just a wide place in the woods, and he, it turned out, was born in a log house on the Levisa Fork. Descended from early Scotch-Irish settlers, Burcham had that Celtic relationship to woodlands which is fundamentally spiritual and is quite common in eastern Kentucky, unless you own a coal mine. Horace’s daughter, Hannah, was riding on his shoulders. Though only five years old, she was already a great calf of a girl, with her dark hair in thick braids and her skin tanned walnut brown by the sun. She was not exactly an attractive child, being too large and coarse for her age, but her features and manner were entirely her handsome father’s. Dr. Burcham himself was tall and broad and stern, something like God might have looked before He went gray. The May sisters, maiden ladies who lived on Caroline Avenue, developed a crush on him that lasted for years, even though they came to like Verbena, his wife. From that first day forward, every time he passed their house, T H O U G H M A N Y Y E A R S H AV E PA S S E D ,

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the curtains in their front room would twitch as if a sparrow were caught in the folds. Burcham was looking for a house to buy. He had just been hired by Blue Valley College to replace the sainted Dr. Pratt, an aged professor of English who had dropped dead eating a dish of stewed Damson plums in the college cafeteria. He settled on the old neighborhood south of the college because, as he explained to the realtor, it had every kind of tree one would find in the surrounding forest, mature trees that had not been cleared away when the houses were built—maples of all sorts, papaw, persimmon, redbud, various oaks, dogwood, black walnut, willow, poplar, cedar, sycamore, paulownia, catalpa, sassafras, ash. To an old mountain boy, trees were as much his people as his blood kin were. Buying in one of the new, scalped-off subdivisions was unthinkable to him. That first day, he stopped and asked Mr. Quisenberry, who was out hoeing his horticulture beans, about the gnarled apple trees scattered among the homes and down along the creek that edged the neighborhood. Mr. Quisenberry was able to tell him that the children of the second wave of settlers, the ones who came down from the Ohio River instead of up from Boonesborough, had maintained an orchard just where they were standing. Dr. Burcham pronounced the apple trees a good sign, a “pre-lapsarian omen” that he should buy there. This was the way he talked; he did not wear his learning lightly. The Burchams bought what was then known as the Humphrey house and took possession in time for Dr. Burcham to put in a fall garden before the next quarter started at the college. The family appeared to settle in quickly. Verbena joined the Methodist Church and the Wednesday evening bridge club, enrolled little Hannah in piano lessons, and declared herself thrilled to be living in a place big enough to have a Dairy Queen. Prior to getting the job at Blue Valley College, Dr. Burcham had been teaching at Graves-Harding College, the small West Virginia church school where he and Verbena had met. Verbena said that on Sunday evenings, when the college cafeteria was closed, a traveler couldn’t get so much as a cheese sandwich in that

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town. She was a quiet, easygoing woman who never volunteered but always served cheerfully when asked, the kind that does the dog work of parent-teacher associations and Girl Scout cookie sales, never asking for any credit and never receiving any. Hannah’s adjustment to Blue Valley was more problematic. She acquired friends, but not close ones. Children, she solemnly told her piano teacher, weren’t “serious,” a favorite judgment of her father’s regarding Blue Valley College students. What was clear to everyone was that the child would rather spend time with her father than with anybody else in the world, and that the feeling was mutual. When he worked in his garden, she followed along with her own little rake and hoe, her hoe actually being a short-handled “sang hoe,” used for grubbing out ginseng, that he had brought from the farm he grew up on. While he prepared lectures or graded papers, she would sit on a little stool near his desk and read her own books. On the weekends, they always had some project to do together: hunting wild mustard greens, blackberries, huckleberries, butternuts, or holly in season; fishing for bream in Slate Creek; playing dominoes; reading aloud the complete works of H. Rider Haggard, which Dr. Burcham had loved as a boy. On those forest tramps, he taught her the names of all the trees. About the only activity Verbena joined them for was dominoes. She was not the same kind of player they were. While Dr. Burcham and Hannah would be locked in a death struggle, each one trying to block the board before the other one did and often passing up opportunities to score in order to prevent the other one from scoring, Verbena simply put down whatever pieces would earn her points. She won about as often as either of them, and she had to endure quite a lot of scorn for it. According to her husband, a person with no strategy had to rely on dumb luck, so Verbena shouldn’t put on any airs when she won. Sometimes neighborhood children took Verbena’s place at the domino table. Now adults, they can still attest to how conflicted Hannah was about the game she and her father loved. She couldn’t

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bear to lose and listen to his crowing. But winning meant besting her father, which made her run up to her room and fling herself sobbing on her bed. Either he had let her win, in which case the victory meant he thought she was a baby; or she had beaten him fair and square, which meant he was not all-powerful. If the latter were true, then the entire universe was on shaky footing. As soon as he got the first garden in, Dr. Burcham built Hannah a tree house in the Three Graces. These were three tall, wild cherry trees that stood in a triangular grouping in the backyard, their branches overlapping. He built the tree house so that it was supported by all three trees. He gave it a floor, a roof, a detachable ladder, and three walls, leaving the structure open on the side facing the garden except for a protective railing. Whenever she invited new friends over, Hannah gravely explained who the Three Graces were, as her father had explained his designation of them to her. Dr. Burcham lived and breathed mythology. As a boy attending oneroom schools, he had become fascinated with the stories of gods and heroes in his eclectic readers. In his lively imagination, the mountains and streams of ancient Greece and Scandinavia easily translated into the hills and creeks of Appalachia. At night, lying awake on his cornshuck mattress, he heard coon hounds baying and thought of Actaeon, who was brought down by his own dogs after the goddess Diana turned him into a stag. The rustlings of woods and creeks suggested to him the unseen movements of naiads and dryads; the lightning strikes, blows from Thor’s hammer. Dr. Burcham valued mythology because it made the spiritual immanent in the natural world he loved and because it formed a bridge between his rural upbringing and his later intellectual training. Story by story, he transmitted his knowledge to Hannah. The desert villages of the Bible that she heard about in Sunday school couldn’t hold a candle to these tales; they seemed made of Tinker Toys. At Halloween, dressed in a long nightgown of her mother’s, she frequently chose to portray Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang full-grown from the brow of Zeus, her father. Parroting her father, Hannah told her friends that the Three Graces

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were goddesses who were beautiful and good and well behaved, exactly as young ladies should be. They presided over the social arts, which meant that they were concerned with courtesy and good behavior. They would be watching how Hannah and her friends conducted themselves. But they weren’t tattletales, Hannah added earnestly. Her father had assured her of that. For a time the three goddesses entered into the make-believe world of the neighborhood children. Whenever you were touching one of the three trees, you couldn’t be tagged out in hide-and-seek. If a child was thought to be lying, he or she had to swear to the truth with one palm flat on the trunk of one of the Graces. It was inevitable, within the personal mythology of the family, that the Three Graces should also come to symbolize the Burchams themselves. Hannah broached the subject to her father while he was working in the garden one evening after supper. “Daddy, which one of us doesn’t have a coat?” she asked, pointing to the Graces. Shortly after the Burchams moved into their house, the periwinkle vine, a ground cover along the base of the house, had made the leap to the three trees. On two of the trunks, shiny leaves and blue flowers grew thickly. For whatever the reason, the trunk of the third tree remained bare. Dr. Burcham stopped mulching a bed of kale and wiped his face with his bandanna. “What’s that, Froggy?” He had dozens of pet names for her. “Well,” said Hannah, chewing on a thumbnail and looking up at him thoughtfully, “Sometimes I think the Graces could be us, because there are three of us and three of them. The ones with the flower coats could be Mama and me, because girls like flowers. But then you would be cold in the winter.” Dr. Burcham chuckled. “Or Mama and I could be the ones with the coats, as you call them, because we’re older. Maybe you aren’t old enough to have a leafy coat, the way boys aren’t old enough to have a beard.”

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Hannah frowned. “Or you and I could be the pretty ones.” “Do you think we’re prettier than Mama?” Hannah sighed with the effort of understanding what she felt. “Well, in a way. I mean, Mama’s not like us, is she? She’s different.” “How is she different?” “She doesn’t think about things the way we do. She doesn’t like what we like,” said Hannah. “She’s not serious.” “That’s right,” her father said softly, with a queer twist of displeasure to his mouth, “but don’t tell her. She’ll get her little feelings hurt. Run along and play now. Daddy’s got to finish this before dark.” Not long afterward there was a shakeup at the college, due to the machinations of the dictatorial President Radnor. Dr. Burcham, being relatively new and untarnished, emerged as chairman of the English department. This development sent him to his office early each morning and kept him there late. One evening he came home to find that he had completely forgotten to attend Hannah’s piano recital. Verbena kindly assured him that it didn’t matter, but this was not true. When he went up to tell Hannah good night, she lay curled in her blankets as tightly as hickory nut meat in the shell. She did not stir when he patted her head. Long since released from its childhood braids, her waist-length hair flared over the pillow like a cape of night and shrouded her face. Because he was a man who needed to believe he was always right, Dr. Burcham convinced himself that Hannah was indeed asleep and that his absence at her recital meant little. But Hannah valued whatever Dr. Burcham valued. On that evening, a microscopic speck of rot took hold in Hannah’s love of music. By the time she was halfway through high school, practicing the piano had gone the way of her dolls, which lay forgotten among the shoes in the bottom of her closet. Moreover, a tiny spot of decay invaded her sense of self. For an entire evening, Zeus had forgotten about Athena. This was a busy time for all the Burchams. The college came up for reaccreditation and Dr. Burcham heavily involved himself in a

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revamping of academic standards. Verbena joined the Ladies’ Auxiliary at the new hospital, accepted the thankless vice chairmanship of the Women’s Club’s annual white-elephant sale, and in the summers helped with Vacation Bible School at the church. Left to her own devices, Hannah became popular at school. She was a good student, and because her grave precocity inclined her to accept responsibility, she was often elected president of school clubs rather than secretary, the office traditionally reserved for girls. There was less time for the old pursuits then, with Dr. Burcham frequently occupied even through the weekends. Yet in some ways father and daughter grew closer. Verbena had enrolled at Graves-Harding College to find a husband; she made no bones about it. As soon as the future Dr. Burcham proposed, she stopped going to class and got a job at a drugstore across the street from the campus. In Blue Valley, more than once she was heard to say complacently, “Doc wants me to go back and finish college, but I never did like school.” Whenever the issue of learning came up, she would say firmly, “All anybody needs to be well-informed is a subscription to the Reader’s Digest.” Thus if Dr. Burcham had an intellectual matter to discuss, he took it up with Hannah. Or rather, he lectured while Hannah listened. Like a thirsty garden plant, Hannah loved to bathe in the steady rain of his words. One fall afternoon when Hannah was in high school, Dr. Burcham was striding home to dinner amid the full autumn glory of the town that calls itself the hardwood capital of the world. The hills were ablaze with ocher, orange, vermilion, and butter yellow. Inhaling deeply of the crisp air was like taking a bite out of a green apple. James Whitcomb Riley’s famous fall poem about “the frost on the pumpkin and the fodder in the shock” came to him. He passed a group of students from the Newman Club who were turning a flatbed trailer into a float for the homecoming parade. Jim Manahan, an excellent student, called out to him in Latin—“Quo vadis, Dr. Burcham?”— paying cheerful homage to the lecture on Rome he had given in his world literature class that morning. From the playing fields of the

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college came the shouts and thuds of a football scrimmage. In front of Tolliver Training, the college lab school, high school cheerleaders bounced and leaped and clapped, their girlish shrieks reminding him of birdcalls. Dr. Burcham felt triumphant and fresh. The whole school appeared to be caught up in the lift of the new semester, when all learning seemed good and necessary and touched with magic, even to the poorest students. Moreover, he had a surprise in his briefcase for Hannah. Except for books, he generally left the task of buying gifts for Hannah up to Verbena. Women knew about shopping. Some men did, too, but he did not want to be that kind of man. However, that day in the college bookstore, he had happened across the very thing. In a display of college-related gifts for children—T-shirts, booties, bibs, and pint-sized baseball uniforms sporting the Blue Valley Eagles logo—he spied a large, plush squirrel. The squirrel, as it turned out, was not for sale. It was a store prop, which, along with a scattering of plastic leaves, established the autumn theme of the exhibit. But Hannah must have it. Because of her tree house, he sometimes called her Squirrel Nutkin. In the end, the store manager let him buy it for five dollars. When he got home, Verbena was in the kitchen peeling potatoes. “Where’s Hannah?” he asked, pulling out the squirrel and making it dance along the edge of the kitchen table. “Look what I’ve found for our little squidget!” Verbena turned and studied him over the tops of her bifocals, which she was just getting used to wearing. “She’s upstairs in her room. But honey, I really don’t think she . . .” He was already making for the staircase. Hannah’s room was to the left at the far end of the upstairs hall. Smiling to himself, Dr. Burcham tiptoed toward her open door, holding the toy out in front of him. Thrusting it around the doorjamb, he made the animal jump up and down. In a squeaky voice he inquired, “Is Squirrel Nutkin in residence? I’ve come to play!” There was a creaking of bedsprings and a cough.

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“Daddy?” said Hannah. He stepped into the doorway. Hannah was sitting at her desk holding a piece of blue construction paper and a pair of scissors. Sprawled across her bed, in a welter of mimeographed pages, lay a large young man wearing jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and a high school letter jacket. The boy sat up and said in a deep voice, “Hello, Dr. Burcham.” Hannah’s eyes went to the squirrel. A look of dismay crossed her face. At that instant, the veil of childhood through which her father saw her ripped from top to bottom. Behind it sat not his little Hannah, but a tall, pale adult. “You’re busy,” he said, almost stumbling as he backed away. By the time he got down to the kitchen, his heart, gripped by an unreasoning terror, was thumping wildly. “Get them out of there,” he snapped to Verbena. She looked up from the pot into which she was slicing the potatoes. “Hannah and Roger? They’re doing a project for Student Council. Since you’ve got all those exams laid out on the dining room table, I thought they . . .” “They’re alone in her bedroom!” “It’s just the Foley boy. You know him, he used to . . .” “You stupid, stupid woman. Get them out now or I’ll break your neck,” he hissed savagely. He felt as if he were going to have a stroke. Verbena’s mouth fell open. Never before had he spoken to her that way. Never had he even hinted at having such viciousness in him. She could not move or speak. He took a threatening step toward her, thinking how like a gawking sheep she looked. After Verbena hurried away, he paced through the kitchen and dining room, a roaring noise in his ears. Shortly, he heard the steps of more than one person on the stairs. The front door opened and shut. In the street, a car engine caught. He went up to the bedroom

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and changed into his work clothes. Water ran in the bathroom, where Verbena had shut herself. Earlier, he had planned to clear off his bean patch before supper; but when he got outside he changed his mind. The tree house loomed above him like the open mouth of a cave. No longer was it the tower in which he kept his princess, guarded, in his whimsy, by three celestial nurses. Now it was a dark place, a secret place, where anything could happen. Perhaps Hannah and the Foley boy had already climbed the ladder together. From her back porch, where she was shaking out her dust mop, Mrs. LaVerne Day saw Dr. Burcham come out of his garage with a crowbar and an ax, his face a frozen thundercloud. She saw him roll his shoulders to loosen them for work and saw him spit on his hands. For a man his size, she later reported, how lightly he ran up the ladder to Hannah’s tree house. Wondering what on earth he could be doing up there, she slipped out to the middle of her yard, where she could get a better look. Splitting, groaning sounds shivered the quiet afternoon. Working like a madman, Dr. Burcham tore down Hannah’s tree house board by board. Then he chopped off the largest supporting limb of the middle tree, so that a tree house could never be built in that spot again. Finally, in the middle of the dying fall garden, he built a bonfire and burned every chip. When he came in from working that evening, he found his supper holding in the oven. Verbena sat in the living room, watching television with the lights out. Hannah came in around ten and went straight to her room. The next afternoon, the lucky LaVerne Day was at the Bon Ton Beauty Shop having her French roll combed out and repinned when Hannah walked in and asked Hazel Ramey to cut her hair. “Trim off the split ends?” asked Hazel, for Hannah had the longest, prettiest dark hair in town. “No,” said Hannah, “cut off all of it.”

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LaVerne Day never tires of telling how, when Hazel made the first cut in Hannah’s mane, a powerful scent of almond flooded the shop. “Camilla!” Hazel snapped at the shampoo girl, thinking that Camilla had gotten into the new air freshener and was spraying it around too thickly. But Camilla was picking up used towels, and besides, the air freshener turned out to be lilac scented. LaVerne Day then recognized the greeny almond aroma for what it was: the smell that sprang from the wood of a wild cherry tree when an ax was taken to it. Hannah never said a word to her father about the tree house, nor did he speak of her boyish haircut, though Verbena wept privately over both losses. At mealtimes, the family discussed impersonal subjects and pretended nothing was wrong. For a time, at least on the surface, life appeared to go on almost as before. For a time, it seemed that the bark had grown back over the two terrible wounds. But the next spring, the middle of the Three Graces did not leaf out. This was the bare tree upon which the periwinkle had never thrived and also the one whose branch Dr. Burcham had hacked off. Although he belatedly cauterized the wound with pruning seal, it continued to weep around the edges. Eventually the running sap drew boring insects into the heartwood and killed the tree. Years later, back in town for a visit, Verbena told LaVerne Day that the death of the tree was what had led to their exile from Blue Valley. “Do you mean to tell me,” said LaVerne, “that killing that tree caused Dr. Burcham’s troubles at the college?” “I don’t know what I mean. I just know that we were happy until then. It was like a crime against nature,” said Verbena. “Why, Verbena Burcham, that’s un-Christian. It’s a heathen notion,” exclaimed LaVerne. By the end of the spring quarter, Dr. Burcham too had fallen afoul of the tyrannical President Radnor. From one day to the next, his salary was docked and his upcoming sabbatical rescinded. Dr. Burcham had seen what happened to other professors who received the Radnor

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treatment. The salary cut and the lost sabbatical would be only the beginning. A month after Hannah graduated from high school, the Burchams left for a minuscule college in north Georgia, where Dr. Burcham had secured a position in the department of humanities and social sciences. Hannah never bonded with the new home. She went away to college before she could make any friends there. Verbena was the rock upon which the couple built their new life, particularly that first year, when she would come upon her husband huddled in odd corners of the house, wracked by sobs. “Get a hold of yourself. Straighten up now,” she would say quietly, and she would put her arm around his shoulders and lead him upstairs, where she would give him a dose of paregoric and put him to bed. While he slept, she would make up a plate of fried apple pies, brew a pot of coffee, and set up the checkerboard. She was surprisingly good at checkers; it was the math that flummoxed her in dominoes. And it was Verbena who encouraged Dr. Burcham to collect the folk myths of north Georgia, which led to his definitive monograph on the subject. She also taught herself to type so that she could help with the manuscript. Hannah and her husband, a cellist from Latvia whom she met in college, live in a high-rise apartment on the West Coast, where she works with the homeless. Verbena faithfully visits them twice a year, but Dr. Burcham has never found the time to do so. Whenever Hannah comes home for a visit, he is too busy to see her except at meals, during which time he delivers monologues on subjects of his choosing. On the plane back home, Hannah always gets a migraine. Nonetheless, the original connection between Hannah and her father beats on, like a living heart hidden under the floorboards of an abandoned house. For some years now, he has been in poor health. Whenever he has a difficult night, Hannah knows it by the cold sweat that breaks out all over her and by the tightness in her own chest. At these times, the only thing that calms her is a session pruning and shaping her collection of bonsai trees. She takes meticulous care of

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them, especially the grouping of three trees that she has placed on her balcony, apart from the others. In a strange bit of cultural consonance, the people who bought the Burchams’s old house in Blue Valley have turned the backyard into a Japanese garden, a thing unheard of in that part of eastern Kentucky. They had the two remaining wild cherry trees cut down and made into lumber, which they sold to LaVerne Day’s brother, a furniture maker. In the hole created when the three stumps were dug out, the new homeowners fashioned a small pond, where giant goldfish now weave among lily pads summer and winter, opening and closing their pearlescent mouths with unceasing, mindless hunger.

Monroe

WE’RE NOT TEN MILES OFF

the Interstate before we’re down

amongst the calf buckets. “Jesus Christ, Dreama, I thought you knew the way,” says Floyd, hitting the brakes and slewing the back end of the Imperial around in the muck. “And you don’t?” I snap. He knows what I’m talking about: the subject neither one of us has mentioned since the idea of this expedition came up. Sure, it’s been twenty years, but he’s visited Cousin Elvie’s before, same as I have. That trip with the coffin was the longest four hours we ever spent together. Nevertheless, here we are, fetched up dead-end in a strange barnyard in the Kentucky hills, hemmed in by rotten bales of hay, oil drums, rolls of chicken wire, a rusted-out pickup, and a hound dog that looks like Uncle Odie. Set one foot out, and you’d be knee-deep in the real old stuff. “Let’s face it,” I say. “We shouldn’t have tried to do this. We’re not family reunion people, never was never will be, though you know I never met a stranger I wouldn’t bring home and bake a cherry pie for.” Speaking of strangers, from the backseat Monroe pipes up: “If you’d just have some patience . . .” “Patience?” I say. “I’m patient as a merry widow spider. Haven’t I went to concert after concert of George Jones’s, and set there and 78

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waited and fooled around, only to have him too drunk to show? Yet I still buy his tapes.” “We better not be stuck. I’ve got my new shoes on,” says Floyd. A dominicker flaps up on the hood and gives me the beak-to-beak through the windshield. “Now we’ll have chicken tracks on us! Shoo!” I shout, rolling down my window. Floyd rolls down his, too, sets back, and lights a cigarette. I light up with him, despising every breath he takes. This bad blood between Floyd and me is new since Monroe come to live with us, and I don’t know what to do about it. Long story short: when I drove back to Ohio from Aunt Sadie’s funeral down in Blue Valley, where Mom’s people are from, Monroe stowed away in the backseat of my car. She’s Cousin Harold’s girl, sixteen years old. It should tell you something that her folks wasn’t in any hurry to get her back. After I discovered her during a rest stop, I called them from a pay phone. “You got any gold fillings in your head?” asked Cousin Harold. “Three big ones,” I said. He laughed. “Then don’t sleep with your mouth open when she’s around. We’ll send a bus ticket when you’ve had enough.” When this reunion rolls around, she’s been living with us three months, sticking close as the itch. Which I admit was my idea to start with. There’s two kinds of people born in the hills: them that stays and them that goes. I lit out young, too, so I had sympathy for any kid trying to make a break for it. Besides, anything I could do to piss off Cousin Harold was worth doing. At first everything went fine. I give her a job stocking shelves down at our business, and it was fun having somebody to go to the laundromat with. But gradually Floyd got jealous of her and me getting along so well. When Monroe and I would go to the mall or out to a movie, he’d get up to his old shenanigans down at the Eagles. One time he got higher’n a Georgia pine, forgot that he was on foot, and called the police to report our car was stolen. After I got pulled

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over on Roosevelt Boulevard, you think I didn’t give him a piece of my mind? Next, he horned in on her and my weekend time. Ordinarily, Floyd won’t have an idea once in ten years. Now all of a sudden he was full of them: where to go, what to see, how to entertain her. Pretty soon the two of them might as well be Siamese twins joined at the hip. He couldn’t do enough to please her. If Monroe wanted to see the Reds play, we saw the Reds play. If she wanted to eat at the Tropics, that’s where we eat, never mind that him and I only go there on our anniversary. Together they turned the tables on me. When she give him a card on Father’s Day that said, “To My Adopted Daddy,” it just flew all over me. I was up vacuuming and frying donuts until three o’clock in the morning to get a hold of myself. For lo these boocoo years it’s just been Floyd and Dreama, and now all of a sudden I’m treated like a redheaded stepchild. I didn’t even try to talk to him about it, as it was no use. You don’t have a conversation with Floyd; you have one at him while he watches television. Plus there was the little item of how expensive she was. Twice I missed twenty dollars out of my purse right after I’d cashed a check. No proof, but still. It really twisted my tail to think that Cousin Harold might be right about something. Furthermore, it was Monroe’s fault that we were trying to find this idiot reunion in the first place. The reunion was for Dad’s people. Floyd’s not related to a soul of the Forrester clan except through me. And Monroe is from Mom’s side of the family. She wouldn’t know anyone there. So why were the two of them so on fire to go? If I’d been home when Cousin Alice Faye called to invite us, I’d have give her a big negatory. However, by the time I found out about her phone call, Floyd and Monroe had made it up that we was going and had me down for two pies. Hearing it was a done deal, I felt like cutting Floyd’s gizzard out. With Monroe just out of earshot in the kitchen, I blazed at him, “They’re having it at Cousin Elvie’s. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? I don’t want to go there. That place defeats and defies me.” “Risa said she wants to go. She gets bored setting around here with

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us,” he came back, without taking his eyes off his bowling show on TV. Deliberately not understanding me. And calling her Risa to let me know who was boss. Well, truthfully, he called her Risa because it’s her real name. Monroe is what I started calling her for spite, after she gave Floyd that Father’s Day card. When we was kids, the ball-playing Moores was our meanest cousins. They would give everybody a nickname and beat up anybody who didn’t use it. Once they give you a name, you couldn’t get rid of it. I stuck a table fork in Jed Moore one time to make him stop calling me Jasper, but it didn’t faze him a bit. But as I told Monroe, later you realize it was all in fun. Call me anything as long as you call me for supper, that’s the attitude to take, I told her. Because I wasn’t going to stop calling her Monroe. Change a person’s name, and you put them in their place pretty good. You get under their skin every time. Be that as it may. Setting in this barnyard, we hear a screen door slam, signaling company. Floyd throws her in reverse, losing the dominicker, and we scoot backward betwixt these crookedy locustpost fences like the kind Dad used to put up. Everything’s going spick and spandy until the back wheels hit a mudhole and then rrrrp: mud all over the trunk. “That’s it. We’re going back to the motel,” I say. “Be dog if I’m going to show up at the reunion with a big skunk stripe up our butt.” And I fold my arms and check out of the conversation. But does my opinion matter? Floyd gently wheels back onto Yellowtown Road, drives to the crossroads, and starts over. Oh, yes, he knows quite a bit about getting around in the country. He wasn’t born in a suit and tie. Some of his people still say machine for automobile. Fifteen minutes later, I see the roof of Cousin Elvie’s house over the rise. So there’s no way out of it. I say, “All right, we’re going to take this place like Grant took Richmond. In two hours I’ll be ready to leave, and I don’t want to have to hunt you people down. Floyd, don’t you be disappearing

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behind the corn crib with them out-laws from Ironton and their friend Johnny Walker.” I make him park down on the road so they can’t see the mud we’ve acquired. Then I hand the sweet potato pie to Monroe and carry the peach pie myself. The house sets back of a cornfield, tobacco patch to the left, with the hill rising behind it all the way up to Greasy Ridge Chapel. In the twenty years it’s been since I was last here, the trees have doubled in height, so that I can’t see the graveyard up there, where we laid him. Elvie and Smitty have sided the house and built on a room in back of the kitchen. Otherwise everything is pretty much what I remember: the big old barn and outbuildings weathered to the gray of storm clouds; the hollyhocks around the outhouse they don’t use anymore; the tire swing; the maples in the yard, their whitewashed trunks thicker now; the lightning rods on the slate roof; the dinner bell on its post outside the kitchen door. There’s still a path past the barn to where the original homestead was. If you was to sweep back the dirt over the hearthstone out there, you could still see the blackened place where Great-Uncle Lewis caught his drawer tail afire while his mama was out milking and burnt to death, only two years old. Cousin Alice Faye comes tromping out to meet us. Pretty face, but her backside’s about three ax handles broad. I’ve not seen her since Grandpa’s funeral. Right about now it dawns on me that the reason they can hold this reunion at all, is that all the grudge-holders in the family have died off. “Why, Floyd and Dreama, it’s so good to see you, don’t you look wonderful as always,” Alice Faye says, giving my leopard-print outfit the old up-and-down. It’s the same one I wore when I went out to Tri-Star Lanes and scared the owner out of the money he owed us for floor wax and bowl cleaner. You’ve got to dress to get their respect. “And this must be Risa,” she says. “We call her Monroe,” I say. “You remember how our Moore cousins used to give everybody nicknames, don’t you? Norton was

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Manual, Randall was Pritchett, and they called me Jasper. Wasn’t you Peep-eye?” “I don’t recall. How far a drive is it for you?” says Alice Faye, like she’s got a cob up her rear. One of the few advantages of having relatives is that you can talk in shorthand about things you both already know. But Alice Faye has evidently got too fine for that. We walk up toward the house, where at one of the tables under the trees sets my cousin Freddie and his wife, Lou. Seeing him, I feel like somebody’s cracked an egg on my head and it’s running down over me, cold and slimy. With his hair turned white like it has, Freddie’s a dead ringer for Dad, who’s been gone for years. But I’m a quick recoverer. I say, “Freddie! What do you know for sure?” “Ah, it’s Dreama, isn’t it? As surely as the unlocked wheels of time roll on,” says Freddie. Truthfully, until he was blinded in that accident, he talked like everybody else. Now it’s like having Banshee’s ghost lurking around. Not, of course, that I’ve been keeping up with any of these people. Floyd chimes in, “Freddie, this is my niece Risa.” Every hair on my head stands up. Lou looks up from her knitting. She’s death on genealogy. She knows Floyd don’t have any such niece. Monroe giggles and swishes her shoulders. “Honorary niece, I guess.” I cut in, “Monroe, you tiptoe on up to the house with me and let’s find out where to set these pies.” So Floyd won’t get to show her off, see. Inside the house, there’s a bunch of cousins wadded up in the living room watching a gospel show on TV. In the kitchen poor old Elvie, looking like a turkey gobbler with that long neck, is frying chicken, and her sister Kate is wrestling ham off the bone with a big butcher knife. The food is laid out on long tables. We put our pies down, and I whisper to Monroe, “Look there: a Forrester reunion is always running out the ears with corn pudding.

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To me it looks like a dog’s bowel removal. And I know that Detroit bunch is here from the chocolate cake with green icing.” Just then a crowd of young ones comes in the side door. There’s two young fellers I don’t know, plus Uncle Emil’s grandson Chester, and Cousin Harley’s girl Kelly. Kelly’s wearing a short red dress so tight it looks sprayed on. It isn’t hard to tell which feller she’s with by how close she’s standing to him. If he was a tree, she’d be the bark. A city boy, wearing a white dress shirt and gray pleated slacks. He’s got blond hair cut short in back with two long, romantic wings in front on either side of the center part. Woo woo. Chester’s red faced and laughing like a fool. He keeps cutting his eyes at the other guy, a wormy-looking type with a ponytail. I nod, and Kelly’s beau says to us, “I have a theory about the desserts at these sorts of family reunions.” Real educated voice. “Oh?” I say. No flies on me. He slings his hair out of his eyes and says, “The pie-to-cake ratio tells one how urbanized the family has become. The more pies there are, especially double-crusted ones, the more farm-based it still is. The more cakes, the more citified.” “Come again?!” says Kelly, like she’s making a real contribution. Monroe stands up straighter, which pushes her little boobs out, and sucks in her stomach. “I’m not from around here,” she says. “I can tell,” he says, and winks. Mentally I change his name to Blondie and move it up to number one on my confidential shit list. “I’m J. Arthur Teal,” says Blondie to me, and reaches to shake my hand. Maybe it’s Be Kind to Old Bats Week. “And what little brier patch are you from?” I inquire. “Oh, I’ll have to admit to being from Cleveland. Born and raised, as they say.” Again the shit-eating smile. Chester jerks his chin at the wormy guy and says to us, “This is Frank.”

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At the sink, Kate turns to catch my eye and deadpans, “Him and Chester met in politics.” I sidle over to Kate and start silking corn to boil. Directly the young’uns all mosey out, Monroe tagging along. “Chester’s in politics? Last I heard he was living off his mama,” I say. “Politics my hind end,” says Elvie, flouring chicken parts. “And the worst part is,” says Kate, “that with Don getting killed on the motorsickle—” “Murdercycle,” puts in Elvie. “—and Dicky turning out afflicted, Chester is the absolute last chance to carry on the family name.” “But,” says Elvie, “that’s the way it is, and this family stands by its own. We think the world and all of Chester. If Frank is who he’s picked, so be it.” “How do you know he has?” I ask. “Chester’s never had no girlfriend,” says Kate darkly. “Person treats me right, I’ll treat them right, no questions asked,” I say. Out the window we see them all standing by this little red sports car. Monroe is running her hand around the rim and over the curve of one headlight like she’s polishing a baby’s head. Blondie’s got this lofty smile, like he’s just arrived directly from heaven. Kelly is popping her gum to beat sixty and picking at her nails. Chester’s pointing at the tobacco field and explaining something to Frank. “So, Dreama, what you been up to? No good?” asks Kate, just like it hasn’t been ten years. “Nice to see you, too,” I say, “though I hate your dress.” “Yeah, the kids give it to me for my birthday. They say they don’t know what to buy me. I told them, not nothing wrong with a twopound can of coffee.” I’ve always liked Kate. She don’t zig when she should be zagging. Directly Ida Mae, Bill’s wife, joins us, and before you can shake a stick, we’ve got the rest of the food fixed.

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After a while I don’t mind being there at all, setting out under the trees a-visiting with first one and then another, even if we do have to listen to Miller, Cousin Bessie’s husband. To hear him tell it, the wheels would fall off Ford Motor Company without him. Monroe’s at a table of young ones. Floyd sits down beside me, inhales two plates of food, and disappears again. As far as I’m concerned, as long as he favors Monroe over me, he can paddle his little canoe, and I’ll paddle mine. It’s when we line up for picture-taking that I feel a kind of change come over us all. Elvie wants us to group ourselves by direct descendants. Originally, there was eleven in Dad’s family, seven boys and four girls. Naturally, they’re all gone. Forresters get mad too often to live long. We’re always keeling over from heart attack or stroke. But worse, there’s descendants present of only six of the eleven, and you can feel everybody thinking the same thing: that there’s more of us underground than aboveground. When they call for descendants of Talbot Forrester, with my brother Randall long dead and my brother Norton and his family not able to be here, I’m the only little leaf left on the tree. I look around for Floyd, ready to have him stand up with me, but he’s evaporated. “Smile,” yells Denzel, one of the Ironton out-laws, and my hand flies up to shield my face like I’m a criminal, so that he has to do it over. After the pictures, even with Cousin Smitty buzzing around getting a game of horseshoes going and somebody else organizing an expedition to go down to the creek and see where them two men drowned last week, the day feels cloudy even though it’s sunny, and I’m ready to leave. “Has anybody seen Monroe and Floyd?” I holler. “Dreama,” says Freddie, “we are hemmed in by the hills of unknowing. Always were, always will be.” I keep going, looking hither and yon. But what he said makes my eyes jerk toward the hill the farm is backed up against, as hard as I’ve been trying not to look at it. Because I’ve been thinking ever since

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I knew we was coming here that I just can’t go through that again, especially not in front of everybody. What’s past is past. Now I stop in my tracks and ask myself, what kind of a person have I become that I don’t want to go up there? Have I growed armadillo hide over the years, or what? It’s funny the way you remember things. If you’d of asked me how long the path up there was, I’d of said a good quarter mile. But it’s no piece. I’m in the trees before you can say jackrabbit, and in another ten steps I see the first gravestones. Two people are up there in the clearing: Mrs. Inez Slone, who’s changing the plastic flower arrangement at the foot of her husband’s grave, and Floyd. I’m not used to seeing him like that. In our entire married life he’s never mowed a blade of grass nor pulled a weed. But there he is on his knees, with a neat little pile beside him that he’s cleared from around the stone. The ground has sunk down in front of it. Such a short little grave. Kneeling on the other side, I feel my stocking run at the knee. If I say anything, my heart will split, too, so I start weeding with him. But I’m not going to get off that easy. Directly I put my head down and let it come in waves. Floyd sets back on his heels and blows his nose. He gets out a pack of cigarettes, looks at it, and puts it back in his pocket. After a while I say, “He could have went to college by now.” “Don’t,” says Floyd, and we both look off and away. Through the trees below, I see the little red sports car peel out of Elvie and Smitty’s driveway and take off up the county road. I run my fingers over the name and dates carved on the stone. There was just Norton and Randall and me in our family, but Floyd had a bunch of brothers and sisters. Being the youngest, he was always around the kids of the older ones. To this day I don’t know how to treat children, they make me nervous. But Floyd never saw a baby he didn’t like. Kneeling there I think to myself, if any man should have been a daddy, it’s him. With that thought, I finally get the point of him liking Monroe.

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“Aye God,” says Floyd huskily, getting to his feet. He dusts off his knees, then holds out a hand to help me up. It’s the first time we’ve touched in I don’t know how long. He gives me that old steady look, the one that has got us through so many hard times. “You doing okay?” he asks. “Yeah. You?” “Yeah.” We’re hardly back in Elvie’s yard when Kelly comes stomping up to us on her three-inch heels. “Do you know where your niece is?” “She’s not our niece,” says Floyd, like he’s woken up from a dream. “She’s a mere cousin from the other side of the family,” says I. Blind Freddie’s face is swiveling back and forth like a radar dish. “I can’t find Art either, damn him, and his car is gone,” says Kelly. “Maybe he wanted to show her what he had under the hood,” says Cousin Smitty, grinning. “Oh, ha ha,” says Kelly, and stomps away. “Well, what are we going to do? I was wanting to leave,” I say to Floyd. He studies on it. “It’s a long drive home and we’ve got to go to work tomorrow.” I say, “I wouldn’t trust that Art to the front door with a quarter. On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust her that far.” “When you met me, you was sixteen. Wasn’t no chaperons around then,” says Floyd. “Let’s give her till five o’clock.” At seven P.M. we phone Cousin Harold, her dad, for advice. “Told you,” he says, and hangs up.

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a tall woman hurried along the dirt road that led up Calfkiller Creek in eastern Kentucky. A black felt hat, the brim limp and foxed with age, shaded her face from the noonday sun. The sun made her long-sleeved, black bombazine dress gleam like the blue-black carapace of a dirt dauber, a creature the woman somewhat resembled in her implacable thinness and in the quick, nervous grace with which she moved. In the windless heat of August, circles of perspiration had soaked the underarms of the dress, but the woman did not feel any discomfort or hear the shrill of the cicadas along the fence. Her thoughts were hundreds of miles away. Her name was Arizona Moser, and she had just been paid a rare compliment. That morning, during the women’s Sunday school class at Mays Chapel, the little white church at the mouth of the hollow, all the talk had been of the romance between the twice-married American woman, Wallis Warfield Simpson, and King Edward VIII of England. Even in so remote a place as Calfkiller Hollow, even among farming people to whom divorce and the monarchy were equally remote, the scandal had taken hold of the collective imagination, as it had in cities and towns all over America. The weekly lesson of the Sunday school class was to have been on sanctification; but it was all Sister Edna Hix, the teacher, could do even to mention the topic. And while the women loudly condemned the situation in England—after all, Mrs. Simpson was still married, and King Edward was head of the Church of England, whatever sort of church that was—still there was a powerful, unspoken sympathy for ONE SUNDAY IN 1936,

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the two lovers which expressed itself in the inability of the women to abandon the subject. Love—how could one argue against it? Didn’t love make the world go around? Hadn’t every one of them in her youth wished for such a passion to sweep her up and away from a dull future that was already so near she could see the warts on it? And now it was too late for these women, who had either married the nearest decent prospect in their teens or were longtime spinsters. Now they must dally vicariously through the mad loves of others, even if the hems of their thoughts did get soiled. As Sister Hix struck the opening chords of “Throw Out the Lifeline” on the old basement piano, recalling the women to the business at hand, Mrs. Mary Fields turned to Arizona and said, “In my opinion, Zonie, you resemble Mrs. Simpson a right smart.” “Why, I don’t,” said Arizona, smiling in spite of herself. “You do. That straight nose,” agreed another class member. “And the dark eyes,” said a third shrewdly. “My lands, you’ve got the same cheekbones. I seen a picture in the paper,” someone else chimed in. “Edna’s waiting on us to sing,” protested Arizona, wishing to turn the attention away from herself. But in her heart of hearts, crocuses were pushing up through snow. In wonder she looked down at her hands, at the drape of her dress along her thighs, at the way her feet sat in her thick-heeled, married-lady shoes. Could it be that she really looked like the famous Mrs. Simpson? And more: could it be that she hadn’t lost her looks after all? She had about given up on herself as a woman, farmwork ground her down so. Crossing the barnyard, she smelled the beef roast she had put in the oven before she left for church, and she hoped her daughter Caddie had remembered to stir the pot of Kentucky Wonders on top of the stove. In her midteens, Caddie had become so sullen that it was hard to depend on her. That day she had stayed home from church to suffer; her monthlies had come on the previous night. Unpinning her hat as she went, Arizona slipped in the side door of the clapboard farmhouse and went to the bedroom rather than

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deal just yet with Caddie, who no doubt was moping in the kitchen, waiting to pick a fight with the first person through the door. Her husband was lying on top of the bedcovers sound asleep, a white handkerchief spread over his face. Although he was not a churchgoer, he respected the Sabbath as a day of rest. He lay on his back in his best overalls, hands clasped over his stomach, snoring lightly. “Curtis,” said Arizona, “do you think I look like Wallis Warfield Simpson?” Curtis stopped snoring. His mouth opened and shut with a clopping sound. “Who?” She repeated it. “I never noticed.” “They say I do at church,” she reported, a giddiness rising in her chest. “The king is in favor of the working man,” said Curtis unexpectedly, and resumed snoring. In the kitchen, Caddie sat at the unset table, picking at the skin around her fingernails. Merrily, to encourage a positive answer, Arizona posed the question to her. Caddie looked her mother up and down. She wrinkled her nose. “You look like Grannie Bea,” she said. The boys, Clyde and Joe, tromped in from church then, punching each other in the upper arms. “Watch tracking that mud in,” said Arizona sharply. It was no use asking the boys, who had no imagination. In fact, she thought with sudden conviction, that was the trouble with her whole family. What would they understand or care about the “star-crossed lovers,” as Helen Lacey had called them? After dinner was over, the dishes washed and dried, and the leftovers holding in the warming oven until supper, Arizona changed into an everyday dress. Caddie had shut herself in her room. Curtis and the boys had gone over Seven Mile Ridge to play baseball in the

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regular Sunday game held by the doctrinally questionable Methodists of Laurel Creek Church. The Mosers were one of the few families in the hollow who took a daily newspaper. Curtis insisted on knowing what was going on in the world. In addition to farming, he was the schoolmaster of Elcessor School, the one-room establishment where their three children had finished the eighth grade. He also had insisted on the children continuing their education at Fetty High School, a three-mile walk up the river road. Until now, Arizona had skimmed the newspaper only for the recipes, the daily devotional, the hospital admissions, and the obituaries. Though aware of the royal romance, she had dismissed it as irrelevant to her life. Now she brought a stack of old papers from the back porch, set it on the kitchen table, and got her scissors from her sewing basket. In an hour she had extracted a small pile of clippings relating to the king and Mrs. Simpson, including two photographs of Wallis—a long shot of her walking along a city street with a female friend and a closeup of her head and shoulders. Arizona scrutinized the flat cheekbones and strong features. Mrs. Simpson stared straight into the camera with boldness and determination. Hers was the face of a woman who intended to have her way. Whether she was pretty or not was hard to decide, but she had an unchanging look about her. Arizona could not imagine her ever being younger or older than she was then. She read the clippings carefully, all about yachting vacations, Mrs. Simpson’s American relatives, her impeccable wardrobe, and her appearances in high society. The ease of such a life! marveled Arizona. The not having to boil water to do the weekly washing. For that matter, what would it be like simply to live in town like her sister Nancy did, over in Ironton, and not have to walk a country mile to buy a darning needle? But Curtis was farm born and bred, as was she. She would always live here; she had known and accepted that from the beginning. Starting up from the table, she jerked open a drawer of the side-

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board and shoved the clippings under the flowered tablecloth Curtis’s mother had given her when they married. She was weak and vain to listen to those women. She had a decent life, for which she should be thankful. From the cloudy mirror over the sideboard, a stern-faced Indian woman looked back at her. The older and more tired she got, the more the Indian came out. You couldn’t see it at all in her sisters, that little bit of Delaware blood. Arizona shook her head, and the Indian woman did the same. Arizona Moser looked like nobody anymore. She didn’t even look like herself. And yet, once upon a time, she had turned heads as often as any girl. She felt hot and short of breath. “This is pure foolishness,” she said aloud. Marching out to the woodshed she took up the hatchet and began to chop kindling, even though it was Sunday. As she worked she sang, “Throw out the lifeline, Throw out the lifeline. Someone is sinking tonight!” The next day, she was making sauerkraut when the mail carrier’s car stopped at the mailbox. I’ll not look, she promised, as to some vague audience. And then, There is no harm in looking at a newspaper. Even Preacher Hatfield quotes from it. As was usually the case, the newspaper was the only mail they received. She was standing in the road, riffling fruitlessly through the pages, when Doxie Johnson came slouching across the pasture carrying a tin lard bucket. Doxie and her family lived in a wretched little cabin down by the creek. People in the hollow called it the Brooder House because the ragged, shiftless families who lived there were always having more children. Whelping, Curtis called it. Doxie and George had seven, the youngest one still on the breast. Doxie greeted Arizona, “I was wondering if I could borry some flour just to tide us over till George gets paid. He’s helping the Forresters dig them a reservoir.” Already missing several teeth, though

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she was younger than Arizona, she sounded like she was speaking through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Come on to the house,” said Arizona, refolding the newspaper. The Johnsons were dirt poor, but they were not beggars. Sooner or later one of the older children would show up with a couple of freshkilled rabbits in payment for Arizona’s many kindnesses, for they knew how much Curtis liked fried rabbit with milk gravy. In the kitchen, as Arizona scooped flour into Doxie’s lard bucket, Doxie said happily, “George has to have his biscuits. ‘Just give me flour bread and coffee and I’m satisfied,’ he says. He don’t have to have meat every day. Oh, that reminds me.” “Do you need some coffee, too?” “If you could spare just the leetlest bit.” “Surely.” From the sideboard Arizona took out the closeup photo of Mrs. Simpson and handed it to Doxie. “Do you think I look like her?” Doxie shut one eye and squinted first at the photograph, then at Arizona. “Are you kin?” “No.” “They lord. You could be.” Warmth flooded her. She had always liked Doxie. Doxie wasn’t half stupid, even if she couldn’t read or write. “Who is she?” asked Doxie, and Arizona told her. “Hit’s a strange old world,” said Doxie, shaking her head. Every evening, after Curtis had finished with the daily paper, Arizona combed through it for more stories about the scandal. Often she read them to Doxie, who took to dropping by of an afternoon to nurse her big-headed baby and catch up on the news. “I don’t know about her,” opined Doxie one day, examining a grainy photograph of the royal paramour and the king. They were dancing at a charity ball while Ernest Simpson, Wallis’s husband, looked on. “She looks hard as nails. But now, the king —with that blond hair and all, he looks like a innocent little boy. Why, he’d get his pocket picked in a cemetery.”

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Caddie, who had come in from school and was glumly churning butter, said, “Mom, you’d look more like her if you had some finger waves around your face.” The next Sunday, the good sisters of Mays Chapel exclaimed over Arizona’s enhanced resemblance to Wallis. “I wonder if I oughtn’t to try that with my hair,” said Mildred Bocook, who, like Arizona and the others, wore her hair parted in the middle and pinned in a bun at the nape of her neck. By the following weekend, three of the women in the small congregation had waved their hair on the front and sides. Everyone agreed, however, that none but Arizona favored Wallis. About this time, Arizona received a letter from her older sister Bessie, who lived outside of Barbourville in West Virginia. Bessie was an efficient correspondent, writing only “when there was something to say.” “You will be interested to learn,” wrote Bessie, “that little Florence Lewis is working at Garrard’s in Huntington. Our neighbor Dorothy Hudson ran into her on the street and spoke with her. She is in Millinery. It seems that Edward and his second wife left Charleston and are living in Roanoke, Virginia. He is quite a success at insurance, which I suppose is no surprise. He always was a doer. Sadly, they never had children of their own. Florence is living with relatives of her late mother in Huntington.” As if walking into a pool of warm, sunlit water, Arizona let herself sink into a memory as bright and smooth as a gold coin. She and Edward are walking through a field of daisies. The path is so narrow that in order for them to walk side by side and maintain a conversation, he must take her arm; and still the flowers catch the hem of her dress on one side, as if to say, stay, stay. It is late in her nineteenth year, the year that she lived with Bessie and her husband, Mack, and taught school outside of Barbourville (never mind that it is the wrong season for daisies; the daisies are there in the memory, big as life). The five of them are walking home from church. Little

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Florence, daughter of the widowed Edward, has skipped ahead to walk with Bessie and Mack. She and her father live just up the road, so it is natural that they should all walk together. Through autumn and winter they have gone to church and back as a single family. A monarch butterfly lights on the yellow eye of a daisy. The lazy open-and-shut of its wings says stay, stay. She stoops to watch it feed, wondering a little at her interest. She has seen a thousand monarchs; but never has one seemed so worthy of close attention. When she stands up again, she and Edward are alone. The others have disappeared over a rise. Edward’s eyes burn as bright as the colors of the day. He says, “So this is the last week of school.” “Yes,” she says, breaking off a daisy and twirling it between her fingers. “You’ll be going home—on Saturday?” “Yes, I suppose.” He smooths his mustache, looks away. Then, clearing his throat, “I know you were keeping company with someone before you came here. Bessie told me.” She says nothing. A stone has closed her throat. “I find I have grown fond of you. So has Florence.” “I am fond of her,” she whispers. “Only of Florence?” Her fingers shred the daisy. She sees herself in his widower’s house, cooking, sweeping, sitting on his lap with her arms around his neck, his large, squarish hands spanning her waist, his mustache brushing her lips. She can barely see Curtis at all; he is a mere shade, a whisper of memory. But Curtis, her fiancé, has waited faithfully, writing to her every week. He knows nothing of this. Quickly, even as her mind is changing, she says, “I am promised.” There. It is done. The fire in his gaze fades to ash. His face tightens. “Well, then. I’m sorry to speak out of turn.” “You haven’t.”

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“No?” “No. It’s just—” . . . it’s too late. She doesn’t say it, but he hears it. They walk on, neither looking at the other. As Florence comes running back toward them, he says, hardly moving his lips, “I’ll never forget you.” Four times a year, Arizona traveled to Huntington, West Virginia, twenty miles away, for necessaries that couldn’t be found in Poston’s grocery at the crossroads. Generally she made the autumn trip in October and took Caddie along. Directly after breakfast on the appointed day, they would walk half a mile to the main road and catch the early bus. The bus would fill up with laborers from the hills who worked across the Ohio River in the Huntington nickel plant, the railroad yards, the foundry. At night the men came home smelling of fire and brimstone. Now, though it was only September, she knew she could not wait another month to visit Garrard’s department store and lay eyes on Florence, whom she had not seen since she left her sister’s to marry Curtis twenty years before. A lost connection restored! Obsessively her thoughts circled the idea without advancing to specifics. Of course she did not want to see Edward, even if such a thing were possible. That would be wrong—she must not even think it! But simply to exchange a word or two with his grown daughter as an old friend— what could be the harm? Wallis Simpson would do it, of that Arizona was certain. She felt the need as a fatiguing pull on her bones, like a mineral deficiency. On Saturday morning, she fixed Curtis’s favorite breakfast, fried apples and ham. “I’m going to Huntington today,” she said, pouring coffee. “You could pick up some more of those nails for the shed,” he said, spooning redeye gravy over his biscuits. “Bring us some coconut-covered marshmallows,” said Joe, who was just coming in from milking. That easily. No curiosity on their part at the variation in routine.

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No inquiry about Caddie. For she was not going to take Caddie this time. She would leave before Caddie woke up. Garrard’s was the finest store in Huntington. On the bus, it occurred to Arizona that Garrard’s must be the kind of place where Wallis shopped for her gowns. The limestone facade, featuring Greek half columns and sedate window displays; the marble urns of pink and white petunias flanking the brass-fitted double doors; the dove-gray carpet beyond; all suggested a side gate to heaven. On prior visits Arizona had gone inside, but she had never bought anything. The prices of Woolworth’s were all she could afford. From a position in Ladies’ Coats, on the other side of the escalator from the Millinery Department, she watched the young woman wait on a dowager with a fur neckpiece. Without a doubt it was she. Florence’s dark blond hair was the color of her father’s, and though her eyes were blue, not brown as his were, the bone structure of the sockets and the brows was his. The way she carried her head recalled him. Her complexion was as smooth as porcelain and lustrous with an indoor, city perfection. How pretty and competent she appeared in her little black dress! Drawn on an invisible string, Arizona moved closer, until she was at the edge of the forest of hat racks. As if enchanted, she watched Florence go to the cash register and ring up the dowager’s purchase—a black silk turban—and she watched her open a round hatbox of striped pasteboard, settle the hat in the nest of pink tissue paper within, and hand over the purchase by its satin cord. Then, as Florence looked up, searching for the next customer, for the briefest of moments her eyes met Arizona’s. With an impersonal smile, salesgirl to shopper, she turned away to answer a question from a young woman holding a navy straw boater. Heart thudding, a roaring in her ears, Arizona fled. In the street, she walked rapidly without taking in her surroundings, turning corners randomly as if to throw off pursuers. Indeed, she felt as if she had escaped a great danger, though she could not have named it. Gradually, however, the force of the shock turned into elation. Seeing

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Florence had been almost as good as speaking to her, and less risky. She had stretched out her hand and touched the past, and now she felt nineteen again. The world burst into color. It was all she could do to keep from skipping. She was in a run-down street several blocks off Third Avenue when her eye was caught by a flash of red in a window. The hat, a cloche of burgundy felt accented with a rhinestone buckle on its black grosgrain band, was one of three in the window of the Paris Hat & Notion Shoppe. Arizona looked down at her second-best dress. Except for the black bombazine that had belonged to her dead mother-in-law, she made all her dresses by hand, Curtis being unable to afford a sewing machine for her. She considered her silhouetted reflection in the shop window. Besides the poke bonnets she wore to work in the field, she owned only the black hat she was wearing: her church hat. She thought about the butter-and-egg money in her purse. She had hoped someday to accumulate enough to buy a cream separator. But hadn’t last Monday’s newspaper shown a picture of Wallis wearing a cloche? And didn’t she, Arizona Moser, deserve something for herself once in a while? Her sister Nancy owned a pearl ring. Nancy’s husband, Jake, a lineman for the telephone company in Ironton, had bought it for her, and he wasn’t nearly as smart as Curtis. For that matter, Nancy also had a telephone. Arizona could feel the last moments of her youth trickling through her fingers like sand. The hat in the window could stop time. A bell tinkled as she opened the door to the shop. By the time Curtis came in from the barn that evening, she had been home an hour and was washing a mess of kale at the sink. A skillet of souse sizzled on the woodstove, its greasy smell undergirding the seared, golden aroma of corn bread baking in the oven. He stood a long time in the doorway. She could feel his eyes on the back of her neck like cold, lead weights. Finally he said, “What on God’s green earth?”

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Drying her hands on her apron, she turned to face him. She felt large with calm, the way she had felt when she was carrying her babies. She said, “I bought a hat today.” “I’m not asking about a hat,” he said. “My hair didn’t fit underneath it.” They both looked at the scissors on the table and at the long braid of hair coiled beside them like a snake. Arizona tossed her head. It felt light as a balloon. Quoting the saleswoman in the Paris Hat Shoppe, who had given her the idea to shorten her hair to the jawline, she said, “It’s only hair. Lots of people are going to a bob nowadays.” At supper, Joe, who was not given to expressing himself on any subject, said, “Mom, it’s like someone else is wearing your clothes.” Someone else is, thought Arizona. Someone finer. For she could feel the energy of a transformation building inside her. If Wallis Simpson could rise from shabby gentility in Baltimore to win the favor of a king, couldn’t Arizona Moser have a nice hat? Caddie and Clyde said nothing, but Caddie’s eyes were liquid with betrayal. At Sunday school, Arizona’s hat stood out like a cardinal among sparrows. Many complimented her; even Helen Lacey, who could find fault with an apostle. During the church service that followed, Arizona felt the attention of the congregation upon her as steadily as the headlight of a train. This, she thought, was what a stained-glass window must feel like with the sun shining through it. Glorious! For the first time in a long while, she did not break down in tears during the service, in a weekly paroxysm of guilt mixed with gratitude at being allowed to walk the earth—a vile, sinful creature such as herself. Meanwhile in England, the situation of the king and Mrs. Simpson was growing desperate, as governmental pressure mounted for them to break off their relationship. Through the darkening afternoons of autumn, Arizona and Doxie tracked the news from Great Britain, cutting and pasting each news item into an old ledger. Arizona explained the convolutions to Doxie.

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Even if Mrs. Simpson left her second husband and obtained a divorce —not an easy matter—a divorced woman could not become queen of England. Perhaps a morganatic, or socially unequal, marriage could be arranged, wherein Mrs. Simpson would be denied the rank of queen but could still be the king’s wife. But in that case, any children they might have could not inherit the throne. Both women were shocked to learn of the tradition of royal mistress, into which Mrs. Simpson might fit nicely. In that arrangement, the king could retain his throne and she her husband. If all these possibilities proved unacceptable, then either the two lovers would have to part, or the unthinkable must come to pass: if the king wished to marry Wallis, then he must give up the throne. “Oh, that Prime Minister Baldwin!” cried Doxie one afternoon. “If I wouldn’t give him a piece of my mind!” And she thumped the bottom of the infant Corbett, who lay dozing on her shoulder. The baby did not even grunt; the Johnson children were as laconic as rocks. Curtis, who had come in with a basket of windfall apples in time to hear Doxie’s exclamation, was still laughing at suppertime. He said, “If you stood Doxie up against the barn and threatened to shoot her, I allow she couldn’t come up with the name of our governor. Yet she’s ready to skin alive the prime minister of England!” By then Arizona had made a new dress for herself from some navy worsted cloth she had been saving in the bedroom trunk. Working from pictures of Wallis, she fashioned long sleeves, a mandarin collar, a shaped bodice, and a narrow skirt, making the dress into a summary of details from Wallis’s dresses as shown in the newspapers. The day after she wore the dress to church with her burgundy hat, Arizona was hanging out washing in the side yard; Monday was always wash day. The pale fall morning was brisk, and the wet wash numbed her fingers. She was thinking about making a big platter of apple fritters for supper, when a fat arm parted two wet bedsheets to reveal her Sunday school teacher, Edna Hix, robed in a majestic rage. “Oh!” cried Arizona, shivers flying all over her.

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“Did I scare you?” asked Edna, her eyes bright as a chicken’s. “I have quick nerves. Curtis says I’m as wired as a pie-ano,” said Arizona with a forced laugh, knowing she was two months behind on her pledge to the church. “Will you come up on the porch and sit a spell?” Sister Hix stepped through the gap in the sheets and folded her arms under her great shelflike bosom. Like Arizona, she wore sturdy black lace-up shoes, a flowered feedsack apron over a cotton dress, and a much-darned wool cardigan. She said, “I’d as lief stay here.” “What brings you in this direction?” asked Arizona as pleasantly as she could, pinning up a last, red-heeled work sock. For it might be something innocuous. Edna might simply want help on the preparations for the Thanksgiving program. The breath whistled in Edna’s nostrils. She said, “Plain words is easy understood. I come here to save your soul. And I am not the only one that’s worried.” Arizona turned to look at her. “My soul?” Edna’s face squinched up like a pug dog’s. She looked like she wanted to bite somebody. “You need to get right with God.” “What are you talking about?” demanded Arizona. Then she recalled visits the church leadership had paid to other families. Such visits were serious matters. They could lead to unchurching. Her rising anger faded into uneasiness. Pointing a meaty finger, Edna cried, “Do you not see the signs in yourself? Oh, there is none so blind as those that will not see! Vanity of vanities! You, a pillar of the church. Arrayed in those garments. Chopping your hair off. Does not Paul say in First Corinthians, ‘If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her’? And consorting with the likes of Doxie Johnson, who’s living in sin.” “She is?” “She’s naught but a common-law wife,” sneered Edna. “She likes for me to read the paper to her,” Arizona faltered. “Ah, what could a woman like that care about the paper!”

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Arizona’s heart lifted. Edna didn’t understand, that was it. After all, hadn’t the entire Sunday school class been fascinated with the story? “Wait,” she said, “I’ll show you.” Hurrying inside, she returned with the ledger of clippings. Flipping pages back and forth, she eagerly laid out the chronology of the story she and Doxie had been following, from Mrs. Simpson’s modest childhood in Baltimore to her present position. “Of course,” she wound down at last, “I know that morally . . .” “ ‘Morally’!” Edna interrupted her. “What do you care for morals, you hussy? The path to hell is short and slick, as short as the hairs on your head are now. And you’ve slid further down it than I thought, a-reading such nastiness. I wonder at your man allowing it.” “It’s history,” Arizona protested. “It’s the Devil’s work. What has gotten into you, if not the Devil? Pray with me now for repentance.” Bracing one hand on a clothesline pole, Edna struggled to lower herself to her knees. A line of fire went up Arizona’s spine. “Repent what?” Edna straightened up again. Slowly and deliberately she said, “So that’s how it is. No wonder you don’t care what’s happening to your boys.” “What about my boys?” “And your man. Don’t think his absence at church hasn’t been noticed.” “The boys and I are in church every Sunday, and Caddie when she’s able. As for Curtis, what he does is his business,” countered Arizona. “We know what happens on Laurel Creek. Breaking the Sabbath with a baseball bat. They will rot in hell for that.” “I’ll not have you talk that way about my family.” “And you’ll burn beside them on the Devil’s spit. He’ll roast you to a turn,” said Edna with satisfaction. “Get out of my yard,” cried Arizona. “Oh, now we’re into it! Turning me away! I said you’d be stiffnecked, I told them! Yes, I’ll go. But you’ve not heard the last of this,” said Edna, nodding as she backed down the line of washing.

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As she watched Edna storm down the road, Arizona recollected a dream she had had as a child, in which she met a dark, goateed man walking in the woods. The man spoke kindly to her and gave her a handful of sweet, wild strawberries to eat, then went on his way, leaving a trail of smoking footprints across the pine needles. Arizona’s mother had said the man was the Devil. With each angry step Edna took, puffs of dust swirled around her ankles like smoke. Arizona pulled a flannel shirt from the laundry basket and, with shaking hands, went back to work. Edna was not acting out of charity, she argued silently, but out of her own, well-known mean streak. She was a God-fearing woman, but she never liked to see anybody happy. They had done nothing wrong. Not long after this, someone painted a Bible verse on the side of the Brooder House: “It is better to marry than to burn.” Being illiterate, Doxie and her husband were not as troubled as were Arizona and Curtis, even after the sign was read and explained to them. “Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us. Still and all, you just don’t want to think people would be so ugly to you,” said Doxie, when Curtis brought them some paint to put over the sprawling message. “Maybe if you would stop wearing the hat,” Curtis suggested to Arizona, one Sunday when she returned from church white-faced. He was sitting out under the shade trees in his old cane-bottomed chair, filing the blade of a hoe. “They did it deliberately,” Arizona raged. “Both the Laceys and the Conns walked right past our pew, though there was plenty of room to sit next to us. Look, it can’t be wrong to wear new clothes. And my dress is as modest as anybody’s.” “I’ve been studying on it,” said Curtis, testing the hoe blade on his thumb. “You’re making people think of what’s sinful, even if you yourself haven’t sinned. By your appearance, you’re saying you approve of what the king is doing. You’re attacking the institution of marriage, in a way. I mean, that’s the way they see it.”

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“Those women are hanging on every detail of the story themselves. They’re eating it up,” Arizona scoffed. “But they keep it locked up inside. They might even think you have a roving eye, a-dressing up like that.” “They know me better than that!” exclaimed Arizona. Curtis cleaned the file on a piece of burlap. He said, “What is religion for? One thing is, it keeps us from doing things we want to do even though we know they’re wrong. Most people can’t really think for themselves, and they’re afraid of what they might do on their own. They need to be told how to act, over and over. A lot of religion is about managing fear and desire. If they let you get away with cutting your hair, what’ll come next? These are people that think an innocent little baby is born into sin.” “Don’t go long-thoughted on me,” Arizona teased, for sometimes Curtis could get so serious and deep that she couldn’t understand a word. The way his face closed up made her sorry she’d said anything. “Well,” he said quietly, taking up his mattock and testing the edge, “it’s something I’ve been studying on.” She had, in fact, thought of giving up the hat. But when she wore it, or when she wore her new dress, she felt Edward’s presence as she had not felt it in years. When she walked into church looking like Wallis, she could almost feel him sitting among the congregation. Her King Edward. Couldn’t she have that little dream? In every other way, she was a good and dutiful wife. “And something else,” added Curtis. “I think me and the boys ought not to play baseball over at Laurel Creek for a while.” “But you all love it. Joe waits all week to go over there,” said Arizona, more alarmed than she let on. “You know as well as I do that the parents vote on the teacher at Elcessor,” he said. “Most of the families go to Mays Chapel. If they vote me out, it’d be hard to get another school around here. And we can’t make it with just the farm.”

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Curtis’s decision only stiffened Arizona’s resolve not to be bullied. And so she continued to wear the hat and dress. As November sleeted into December, Clyde got the pleurisy. Because the bedrooms upstairs were unheated, Arizona made a bed for him on the horsehair sofa in the front room, next to the fire. There he dozed hour after hour, waking only to eat a few mouthfuls of soup. One afternoon during a hard rain, when the very furniture seemed to be sweating, she turned on the Crosley console radio as a special treat. Generally the radio was used only when Curtis listened to Amos ’n’ Andy or to the news. That was how she heard the reedy voice of Edward VIII announcing that he was abdicating the throne of England because he could not continue to reign “without the help and support of the woman I love.” Mrs. Simpson was in the south of France, said the radio. The king— king no longer—was rumored to be leaving England momentarily. The country was in chaos. Arizona sank to the floor beside the radio. The first thought in her head was, I never meant for it to go so far. By an invisible chain that stretched across mountains and beneath the ocean, she felt bound up in the king’s decision. “Ma,” whispered Clyde from the couch. His face was flushed, his eyes glassy. Arizona felt his forehead. He was hot as a Franklin stove. “It hurts to breathe,” said Clyde, and closed his eyes. Clyde never complained. Prime Minister Baldwin was speaking, his voice harsh and crackly with static. She had never heard an Englishman speak before, and she was struck by how foreign he sounded. It was the sort of thing Curtis would already know—that people in other countries had different ways of talking. Taking a clean rag from her apron pocket, she blotted Clyde’s sweating face. His breath wheezed like a sick cat’s. Curtis was teaching at Elcessor School, a quarter of a mile away. Caddie and Joe were at Fetty High, three miles distant.

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The rain on the porch roof dinned like dried beans poured in a barrel. “Hey there, Goof,” murmured Clyde, a smile twitching his dry lips. Goof, their good-hearted coon dog, had been dead since fall before last. The radio was talking about Iodent toothpaste. Clyde struggled up on one elbow. Then, without warning, he swung his legs off the couch and lurched to his feet. With a look of surprise, he fell full-length on the floor, smashing his face. “Clyde!” Arizona shook his shoulders, but she could not rouse him. Blood trickled from one nostril. She dashed out on the porch, from where she could see the roof of Doxie’s house poking from the gully across the pasture. The pasture was a sea of mud; she would have to go around by the road to get help. A dinner bell was ringing. Then another tolled, and another, until all up and down the hollow, the alarm sounded. The creek was rising, which meant the river was, too. The road was probably already underwater. Arizona knelt by her son, whose breathing had changed to a soupy rattle. Closing her eyes so tightly that she saw sparks, she began to pray. Curtis put another log of sweet-smelling apple wood on the grate and stirred the fire with the poker. He was behind on getting wood in for the winter, but tomorrow he would cut up the box elder that had blown over up on the hill. Without Joe and Clyde to help, he would need to hire someone for the day. On the mantelpiece, the clock began to chime nine o’clock. As the last note died away, he heard Arizona’s voice in the distance. Opening the door and stepping onto the windy porch, he looked out over the dark fields to a distant blaze of light. Through the bare branches of the trees fringing the creek, Mays Chapel was just visible. Shivering, he looked toward the sound that had alerted him and made out a dark figure toiling up the road toward the house, singing as she came.

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There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel’s veins—

The hymn broke off in a scream. She had fallen again. In the crystalline night, he heard her choke back a sob. There came a scrabbling sound, as she righted herself. Then the song recommenced in the high, hysterical voice that was hers now. And sinners, plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains. I’ve been redeemed, I’ve been redeemed, I’ve been redeemed—

Hurrying through the house, he met her when she came in the kitchen door. Her coat was open, and her hands were red with the cold. Her hair, grown out to shoulder length, hung down in her face. The knees of her cotton stockings were shredded, and blood ran down both shins. Her eyes were wild and rolling. Taking a bottle of iodine from the shelf over the sink, he said, “Sit down and let me fix those knees. You need to watch where you walk.” “I was looking up at heaven.” He took a clean piece of feedsack out of the sideboard and wet it at the faucet. “What was the sermon about tonight?” he asked, for something to say. “Sin.” Kneeling before her, he unlaced and removed her muddy shoes. As he started to roll down her stockings, which were gartered above her knees, she slapped his hands away. “I’ll do it.” When the stockings were off, he dabbed at her cuts to remove the grit. Her silence massed between them like a boulder. “Did you testify?” he asked. “I did.”

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His heart swelled with anguish and rage. Brewster Fields had told him what she said at the services, about how Clyde’s pleurisy and the flood that washed out the Brooder House were due to her own wickedness; about living in an unblessed home full of vipers as a punishment for her vanity, and all this coupled with rambling, incoherent remarks about the king of England and a man named Edward Lewis, whom she had known as a girl. In Brewster’s opinion, she was right on the edge of speaking in tongues. “I’m going to put the iodine on now. I’m sorry for stinging you,” he said. “You’re not sorry for anything, you heathen,” she said, her eyes hard and depthless as black marbles. Nearly a year before, during the big rain, he had arrived below the house in Jed Short’s johnboat to find her like this, crouched over Clyde. They had gotten the doctor in time, and Clyde had survived; but the woman he had married was lost in the flood. At first he had tried reason. “We knew the rain was coming,” he had argued. “The radio said so. Why do you think I moved the cows to the upper pasture?” “The Johnsons and the Shorts nearly died because I strayed.” “Strayed from what? You’ve been a good wife and mother, you’ve been a good neighbor,” he’d said, his voice almost breaking. They and their people were not ones to express affection or approval; this was the closest he had ever come. In a toneless voice she replied, “ ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.’ ” “I’ll tell you what’s sinful. Stupidity is sinful. Look at what the Shorts and the Johnsons did after the flood. They built back in the same place. They’ll get washed out again, the fools! What happened was not your fault!” But she was not listening. The world was black and white to her now. She began to see the hand of Satan in everything he and the children did. Every act acquired a moral dimension, from milking the cows to how one held a dinner fork. Finally her merciless harangues had driven Caddie and Joe away. Joe had hitched a ride to town and joined

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the army. A week later, Caddie slipped off in the night, leaving a note pinned to her pillow. They had heard she was working in a cannery outside Portsmouth. If Clyde ever fully recovered his strength, Curtis expected him to leave as well. Now, examining the cleaned wounds, he said, “That right knee is pretty bad. You’ve opened up the cut from last week, too. I’ll put a bandage on it.” But she stood up and strode away, throwing over her shoulder, “It’s only the flesh.” Her body was losing shape, becoming doughy and bottom heavy. Resuming his seat before the fire, Curtis took up the book he had been reading. It was a copy of the state tax code, which he’d found down at Poston’s store a couple of months after the flood, in a barrel of books left over from the auction of old Lawyer Pritchard’s effects. Every night he read it until Arizona had finished her weeping prayers and had fallen asleep. Only then could he stand to lie down beside the stranger who lived in her body, the stranger who was punishing herself to destruction for sins uncommitted. The book comforted him like a mother’s hand stroking his hair. Even the most abstruse and self-serving ordinances were the product of rational thought. Somewhere people still valued that. Late in the night, when his eyes stung from hours of reading the small print, he sometimes experienced a moment when he could almost see the elegant structure of human thought hanging in the air, pure and uncontaminated by dogma and self-interest, could feel himself living inside it as in a flexible, breathing cage; and he knew that it was all that protected him from the forces of darkness. At those times he recalled how much, as a young man, he had wanted to go to college and become a lawyer or doctor; but he didn’t have any money or any idea of how to go about it, and farming was all he knew.

Briers

new car. Don Fields was waiting for them under the maples, sitting on one of Mr. Forrester’s old yard chairs. We supposed they had called Don from the town. We had seen the man before but not the woman, when the man decided to buy the old Forrester place. From the edges of the yard, we watched and waited. We like Don. Don and his family live by the bridge. Don’s granddaddy helped build the bridge. Don’s daddy was killed in the Big War. The new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell, a smell of flowers killed in moonshine. We could tell by their soft hands. They were tall and ruddy, matched like a pair of Irish setters. The man had lightning with him. We could feel it. Don knew it, too. “What’s that ye got there, a Geiger counter?” he asked. “It’s a laptop computer,” said the man. “Oh, right. My daughter has one of them. She works for the state,” said Don. “Really,” said the man, and smiled at the woman. We do not like lightning. Don showed them around. He showed them where Mr. Forrester fell in the garden. That was why the Forresters had to go live with their daughter far away. After they left, Charley Carruthers was looking after their farm, but he is not able anymore. He could not keep the renters from throwing their garbage off the back porch and using the henhouse for firewood. We do not like fire. THEY CAME IN A SHINY

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Mr. Forrester came back to visit once. He died on Charley Carruthers’s porch. Then the Forresters’ daughter, Dreama, decided to sell the farm. Long years ago, Dreama liked to come with two buckets and a jug of water and pick all morning. She did not stamp the bushes down but slipped in between the vines. She sang to herself and ate berries until the juice ran down her chin. We miss Dreama still. We like Charley and his wife. They live above the road. Charley is part Old People. When Charley digs up a ginseng plant to sell, he puts a seed down in the hole to grow a new plant. He shows respect. Don showed the new people how the cistern collects water from the roof. “Like I’m going to be drinking out of that,” said the woman. Don said, “As you know, the house has running water, too. In the thirties Mr. Forrester and his boys dug a reservoir up on the hill and ran a pipe down to the kitchen.” “Brilliant,” said the woman, turning her sharp hips this way and that like she was handling knives. Don showed them where the Forresters buried their famous hound Katie, under the lilacs. He walked them over the hillside where Norton Forrester used to grow grapes. We tolerated the Forresters for forty years. They kept the brush cut so we could breathe. But we didn’t tolerate the renters, and now we want it all back. We do not like being tolerant. Everywhere the new people stepped, there we were. “These goddamned brambles,” said the woman, ripping her sleeve loose. Don said, “They’ll take over a place if you don’t keep it cleared. That and the honeysuckle and the laurel. A place like this is a by-God backbreaker if you don’t have help.” “Oh,” said the man, “we’ll have help.” He took a deep breath and patted his chest with both hands. “Mountain air. This is so authentic.” That night they slept on the floor upstairs, in sleeping bags. “Well, what do you think so far?” asked the man. “Don’t ask,” said the woman.

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“No, this is great. You’ve got to feel it. The whole ambience is American Primitive. And besides, it’s just for one year,” said the man. “One year for me to write my book about getting away from it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia. I’m going to do for this place what Peter Mayle did for Provence. After we sell our little patch of heaven, we can live anywhere. Don Fields would be a fool not to sell, too. People are going to want to build up here. You know what the developer said.” “God, where am I going to get arugula?” wailed the woman. We bided our time. We watched him write with the lightning. We watched him visit the neighbors with his tape recorder, he called it. We watched the woman smoke and leave for town. She would stay away all day. Inch by inch, by root and tip, we walked toward the house. One day Elsie Fields brought them a cherry pie. She asked the woman, “Did Don show you Sarah’s roses?” She and the woman went out in the sloping backyard. Elsie knelt down by a rosebush and touched the heavy cream-and-pink blossoms the way she used to stroke her children’s hair when they were asleep. “Even after Sarah Forrester lost her mind, she loved her roses,” said Elsie. “This is a Seven Sisters. That one is Queen Anne. It looks like the briers are about to take them over, though. And do you know what that is, there?” She pointed to the apple tree deep in our midst. “A tree,” said the woman bitterly. “That’s a Pound Royal apple tree. You don’t hardly ever hear of Pound Royals anymore. In fact, I don’t know of another one anywhere. That one’s might’ near an antique. You ought to take care of it, cut them briers back so’s you can pick the apples. They’re mighty good eating. So are the berries, for that matter.” After Elsie left, the woman went to find her husband. He was sitting on the breezeporch, plunking on a dulcimer that he ordered from New York. The dulcimer was bright and shiny like it had been dipped in honey. The woman said, “Elsie Fields says we’ve got some kind of rare

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apple tree behind the house. But the yard is so grown up that it’s impossible to get to it. I thought you were going to have this place cleaned up.” “Listen to this,” said the man, picking out notes. They sounded like rain in a lard bucket. “You need a shave,” said the woman. “I’ve decided to grow a beard,” he said, plucking away. “Where’s the phone number of that yardman the realtor gave you?” she said. “I’ve been thinking that I’ll clear the yard myself. As part of the whole experience,” he said. Frankly, we were relieved to hear it. The next day he went to town and bought a hedge trimmer, a hand scythe, and a plastic bucket. The woman went with him and bought a small air conditioner like Burl Corbett has for his son’s asthma. The man put the air conditioner in a window. “I got the bucket so we could pick berries. You could make jelly in a big iron kettle. If we could find a kettle,” said the man. The woman just looked at him. Then she went in the cool room and shut the door. The hedge trimmer had a cord for the lightning. But when he plugged it in and brought it outside, the cord was too short to reach us. He hung the bucket on his left arm. With the scythe in his right hand, he began to cut a path to the apple tree. When he had cleared a space, he would stop to fill the bucket. Slash and pick. Slash and pick. He whistled the tune he had been trying to play. Happy as a hog in clover, he was. We closed in behind him. If he had looked back, he couldn’t have seen the path he’d made. But he never looked back. He edged down the slope, where we grew tall over him. We treated him fairly: We plucked at his clothes. We tangled around his ankles and raked his hair. Thus we spoke a warning to him: go back while you still can. But he was in a rhythm, like a man who will fish a stream to extinction for the pure joy of killing. He even forgot to pick. Slash

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slash slash he went, his eyes hot and bright. This was what he had come to the country for: to feel his blood pumping, to feel alive. He woke up Old Mother. She was sleeping at the base of the apple tree. Raising her weaving head, she looked and listened. He was working his way around the tree when her swift, dark uncoiling caught his eye. Backwards and forwards he thrashed, screaming, wreathing himself in vines, tearing his flesh on our teeth, which are as numberless as the stars. For a moment after his foot slipped off the rock ledge, we supported his weight as a bird’s nest supports a clutch of eggs. Then he fell like a man falling from the sky. The next day they found his body on the rocks along the creek. He was lying beside the bones of the last renter, a man who had loved Pound Royal apples. We have reached the back steps now. We can look in the windows. We can see the field mice playing in the breakfast dishes on the table. We can see the camel crickets eating spiders in the corners and the moths flitting in and out of the clothes the woman left behind. Hissing peacefully to herself, Old Mother lays her eggs in high grass, on a blanket of rose petals.

Man on Horseback

When I write my memoirs, I will be glad I took this time to jot down the raw material. Weary though I am! The college homecoming parade was today. Sitting astride Cavalier at the head of Main Street, waiting for the parade to start, I surveyed my domain and found it good: The sun was shining, the hills were dressed in their autumn best. Main Street was thronged with students, faculty, and townspeople. Blue-and-gold college banners flew from every light post. Merchants had painted store windows with scenes of football games and of fall harvests. And the sky! “October’s bright blue weather,” as the poet says. Surely the firmament bodied forth the true color of Beauty. I cannot help but think that if I, Fenwick Radnor, President of Blue Valley College, Rotarian of the Year, Honorary Doctor of Arts and Letters from Dry Creek College (Buzzard, Ark.), Kentucky Colonel, and Defender of the Faith, had created Blue Valley from scratch this morning, I could not have done a better job. Example of mental acuity for memoirs: A young deputy came up to see if I was ready to lead off the parade. Instantly I retrieved his name from my extensive mental file, though we had never spoken: Jim Barndollar, often assigned to campus functions. Seeing his wedding ring, I hazarded a question about his wife and was rewarded with her name, Connie, and the fact that she is expecting their first child in three weeks. This I filed away on Jim Barndollar’s card in said mental file (I wager there’s not another so vast in the entire state). NB, explain in memoirs: I remember people’s names because I love A N O T H E R E V E N I N G , A N O T H E R J O U R N A L E N T R Y.

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humanity and because I work at it. Include anecdote about when I was an aide to the Governor and sat with him at a window overlooking the entrance to his mansion before his first open house. Tick Sales, the old pol from Bowling Green, now deceased, was with us. Whenever the Governor didn’t know someone, Sales supplied the name. He must have identified two hundred in all. Later, when the Governor went downstairs to mingle, he called every stranger by name without making a single mistake. A lesson I never forgot. Delilah rode two cars behind me in Frank Lee’s gold Cadillac convertible, wearing a new feathered turban in seasonal hues. How the crowds love her. Must speak to Dean Francis about a special room in the art building for her hats, the collection to be donated when I retire. They can dismantle some of the permanent collection if necessary. There’s a sight more art in one of her Easter bonnets than in all the garbage Prof. McKinney paints, awards or no. They say his abstract art has nudes disguised in it. NB: Must do something for Frank Lee, he is loyal. [Add footnote on Lee: largest Cadillac dealership in region.] The parade began splendidly, with a boom from the ROTC cannon and much adulation from the masses. “Is it not passing brave to be a king / And ride in triumph through Persepolis?” as the poet says. (NB: in memoirs, stress my love of the classics to silence those critical of my academic record). As I lifted my new, snow-white Stetson to the people in front of the Greenbrier Apartments, a little boy cried, “Look, Mommy, a cowboy!” Cavalier and I saluted him smartly; a crowd-pleasing moment. The boy sat on the shoulders of an urbanlooking woman with blond, frizzy hair, wearing a shapeless peasant dress and no makeup. She also had a baby in a stroller. It was the Jorgensen woman, who has applied for the position in Sociology. Her husband is in Communications, a wispy theater type. In the next block, the girls at the Bon Ton Beauty Shop were all outside, some with their hair in rollers, holding up a sign, God Bless the Radnors. Delilah’s campaign for our annual Neat Hair Day on campus has brought them business. Craig Price, working the crowd for me, trotted up to report that he

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was hearing nothing but expressions of goodwill regarding Delilah and me. (NB: In memoirs, always refer to Craig as Dean Price, to increase his credibility). Noted to Price that Deputy Barndollar might be a good man in certain situations; just a feeling I have, but I’m seldom wrong about these things. Price understood immediately. Well done, my good and faithful servant, thought I, as I sent him back into the crush. Behind me the band struck up “The Washington Post March,” Cavalier pranced with excitement, and I felt—how to express it?—for just one moment, I felt that nothing on earth was impossible for me. I felt what the Deity must feel, clothed in His robes of eternity, as He overlooks His handiwork. But it was not vouchsafed to me to enjoy my triumph for long. Somehow, it never is. At the corner of Crescent and Main, in the crowd before the pizza parlor, I thought I saw the Old Man. Same straw farm hat, dark glasses, khaki work shirt and pants. Had to grasp the pommel to steady myself. Of course, it was not he, unless the dead walk. But after that, everything changed. A chill crept into the air. Looking at the crowds, so benevolent moments before, I saw only enemies. There stood Julia Bone (English Dept.) in front of Baird Drug with Miss Evelyn Banks. Julia of the wicked tongue. Last week in the faculty dining room Price overheard her say, “Of course we must give Dr. Radnor credit for the campus building program, though much of the new architecture is trite. He is indeed a bricksand-mortar man. Like Herod the Great, with whom he also shares a taste for mass executions.” She was referring to year before last, when I demanded—and got—the resignations of the four rebel professors. Which I was completely justified in doing. They tried to get a faculty vote of no confidence on me re infringement of academic freedom. In my view, most college teachers have more freedom than they know what to do with. A lawless bunch. And the humanities people are the worst. They tend to read and travel too widely, which destroys the moral center of a man. NB: In memoirs, explain whole controversy as the work of outside

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agitators sent by NEA (or some such organization). All four were hired from out of state. NB #2: Julia Bone is coming up for a sabbatical next year. Turn her down. No doubt she was standing next to Miss Banks as a reproach to me. But what do I owe Miss Banks? What has she ever done for me? People do not understand how I’ve suffered, the adversity I’ve overcome. The Old Man never came to my college graduation or when I got my master’s or the Ed.D. When I had to wear the leg brace those two years at twelve and thirteen he turned his face from me forever. The tribal instinct to shun the wounded, to cut them out of the herd. But let my brother Robbie pick up a basketball and he was right there, sitting in the top row of the gym, silently chewing his toothpick. Doting on Robbie, who broke his heart and never looked back. I wonder what the Old Man would think of him now. The Great Robbie, living on a California beach and fancying himself a musician. Still wearing his letter jacket, no doubt. “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay,” as the poet says. Meanwhile, at the parade, spotted the reporter Tom Gregory on the post office steps. They wouldn’t have sent him all the way from Louisville merely to cover our homecoming festivities, so what is he after? Could he have found out how Price acquired his degree? And yet I couldn’t have made Price a dean without an advanced degree, and I need him close at hand and rock-solid in his loyalty. Every great man has his Price, someone who not only knows where the bodies are buried, but who doesn’t mind picking up a shovel himself. Or could Gregory have gotten wind of my confidential meeting last week in the capitol? Or has he simply tapped into the groundswell of sentiment for naming the new dormitory after Miss Banks instead of Delilah, just because Miss Banks is the only surviving member of the original eight teachers who founded the normal school that became the college? Neither death nor coma will ever make me forget—or forgive—Tom Gregory’s snide article about Nice Hair Day, after Delilah worked so hard on it. The headline: “Blue Valley College Improves Outside of Head, Not Inside.”

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The only person the Old Man ever respected was Doss Martin, the county agent where I grew up. Poor Mother said that was what he wanted me to be. A lowly county agent! Unlike a college presidency, it was something he could understand. Dr. Patrick, my mentor in college, was right: the higher you go, the more intellectually lonely you will be. At least there is Delilah, Cavalier, and this journal for solace. I can’t talk to Price. For intelligence, he has only a low form of cunning. And yet we are close. He is the son I’m thankful I never had. At the IGA we paused to let the Girls Scouts collect for UNICEF, and I turned to wave at Delilah and at Mayor Crosley, the poor fool; he was riding in an antique Ford (how fitting). In doing so, I spied Randy Gum (Psych. Dept.) talking to Tom Gregory. In broad daylight. Is he stupid, or do they no longer fear, i.e., respect, me? And Gum was a friend of the fellow in English who left to go to Brown (I told everyone I fired him; otherwise the lowly state of BVC would have been too glaring in comparison with the Ivy League. And I was justified in saying it. People who leave me of their own accord leave for only one reason: disloyalty. They should expect to be repaid in kind.) NB: Send Cora Foutch to the next meeting of the so-called faculty union. Sending Price would be too obvious; they wouldn’t talk freely in front of him. Gum is one of the officers. If he’s talking to an out-of-town snooper like Gregory, they must be up to something. Fathers and sons have been much on my mind today. As we made the turn back toward the college, my eye fell on a cluster of parents and children watching the parade in front of Purdy’s Flowers. A dear little boy with blond curls reminded me of someone. Yes—the Jorgensen boy who had called me “cowboy.” Such a love should have his dear mama with him his whole childhood, reading him stories and baking him cookies. NB: See that her dossier does not go forward in the Sociology search. If only people knew how many small offices I perform such as this, to make their lives turn out as they should. Someday she will be glad she stayed home and will thank the circumstances, little realizing that within the world of this institution,

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I am the circumstances. But God knows it is a weary task to do the thinking for everyone. My eye is on the sparrow; such is Duty. Later, ace reporter Tom Gregory received a wake-up call, arranged by yours truly. During the parade, I noted his presence to Price. Apparently Price then said a word to young deputy Barndollar. The reporter was picked up for speeding as he left town and will have to pay a hefty fine for his visit to our fair city. Midnight, by the striking of the clock downstairs. Delilah is asleep. Price has long since fed Cavalier and bedded him down out at the farm. We won the football game this afternoon, probably because we had more black players. I took the lead on integration, they will have to admit that. When the demonstrations started and the sit-ins in Lexington, I went to seek counsel from Dr. Patrick—my intellectual father—driving hours through the rain alone to the western part of the state. Clearly it was only a matter of time until the stain spread into the hills, and I was not as sure of myself then as I am now. That visit was a turning point in my own confidence—an unanticipated result. Long retired, Dr. Patrick lived on the edge of my old alma mater in a little brick cottage owned by the school. His wife’s final illness had ruined him financially. Basically he was living on the charity of his former employer. His situation, both financial and personal, shocked me; I had not seen him in years. Tall and handsome, with flowing white hair and the hard, flashing eyes of a hawk, always wearing a suit and tie—that was how I had remembered him. The man who opened the door was stooped and shuffling, hair unkempt, wearing a sweater out at the elbows and an old shirt and pants spotted with food stains. Black-rimmed glasses marred his once-fine profile; one earpiece was held on with adhesive tape. The smell of the dark, cramped house— I shall never forget the way it made me pity him. With all those overflowing bookshelves and stacks of papers, the place felt like the abandoned basement of civilization: a dusty, decaying way station on the outskirts of oblivion. It smelled of failure. He never became more than a professor. But Dr. Patrick’s mind was as sharp as ever. After I had outlined my

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quandary in some detail—our enrollment figures were already down and we would lose more potential students if we integrated, there could be demonstrations with a possibility of the National Guard intervening, the Governor was playing his cards close to his vest, the faculty appeared split, local opinion was negative, I myself was outraged at the abridgment of states’ rights, etc., he said, “Fen, it’s coming. The times are changing. I do not seek to know what your personal opinion of integration is. Nor would it help you, I suspect, to know mine. What is needed here is a man of vision. And sometimes what others applaud as vision is merely the seizing of an opportunity. Come now, doesn’t that appeal to your innate pragmatism? You were always a pragmatic boy.” I saw at once that he was right. When an outcome is inevitable, get out in front on it. Lead the parade and reap the credit. Subsequently, Blue Valley College and I broke ground for everyone else. My only regret is that he never wrote to congratulate me. I can’t understand that. And I never saw him again. He died some eighteen months later, just after delivering the manuscript of his last book to the publisher— something about ethics. How it haunts me, that visit; why I know not. As if there were something else he did not tell me. I have read over what I’ve written so far tonight, and I see that I have again spoken too freely. This happens increasingly—the result of fatigue, no doubt, and the compelling need to have my say. NB: Must rigorously pick and choose what goes in the memoirs, with no help from prying eyes. And then this volume, and the others like it, will be destroyed, much as I hate to see my elegant handwriting succumb to the flames. Until then, under lock and key. NB for memoirs: Mention that, as a boy, I always got excellent marks in penmanship. Further, writing about Dr. Patrick is unwise just before bedtime. It may bring on the recurring dream again: I am trapped alone in that house of his, the doors locked, windows shuttered. The only light comes from a guttering candle on the mantel. As I reach for it, I stumble into a teetering stack of books. In the instant before the candle goes out, I glimpse the shelves of books tilting, tilting, the

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books are tumbling, I am buried in falling books, the floor gives way with the weight of them and I am falling through darkness, unable to cry out, the weight of centuries of learning crushing me— —and then, as I continue to fall, a book swims out of the chaos and opens itself in front of my eyes. Instantly I know that this book, a book I have never seen before, holds all the answers—but I cannot read it. The words are in a language I can’t understand. Salvation that close, and I cannot . . . Enough. Discipline and calm. Better to remember the football game this afternoon, where, at halftime, Cavalier and I cantered around the field to thunderous applause, the Board of Regents all sitting on the fifty-yard line and the band playing “Hail to the Conquering Eagles.” As we rounded the north end zone, I looked out at the campus skyline that I have so changed—the new dorm in the shape of Delilah’s favorite hat towering over all—and a revelation burst upon me. Last year when the tornado cut a swath through the central campus, leveling eight of the grand old trees that were present at the creation of the college, some people said it looked as if the hand of God had swept across the valley. The line of devastation is a scar upon the face of the institution, and there has been much debate about landscaping. I now see that perhaps the hand of Providence was in it, after all: this afternoon, I understood that the blank space is the perfect location for a formal garden, centered around an equestrian statue. Thus shall Cavalier and I ride into the future. No one dares laugh at a man on horseback! Private donations, only, of course. NB: How much would Frank Lee give for the vacant seat on the Board of Regents?

The Monday Club

on a Tuesday morning, a shiny maroon rental car pulled into the parking lot of the Citizens’ Bank of Blue Valley, Kentucky, and a man got out. Whistling to himself, he ran lightly up the three steps and into the bank. An old woman with a cane stood sideways between the inner and outer doors of the building, laboriously negotiating her exit. The velocity of the man’s passage caused her to drop her cane and fall back against one door; but the man did not notice. As he entered the lobby, the three female tellers looked up. The redhead, a young woman named Darlene Foutch, blushed and sat up straighter. Aware of their collective interest, the man lifted one corner of his mouth in amusement. He knew he was handsome, particularly so in the context of the life of a small-town bank teller. Ambling toward them, he glanced from one to the other as if weighing their respective merits. At the last moment, he veered to the window of the blonde. “Nancy, Nancy, we can’t go on meeting like this,” he greeted her, flashing a high-wattage smile. “Hi, Tucker,” Nancy Clay returned, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. The man opened the leather portfolio he had been carrying under one arm. On the counter he laid a deposit slip and a fat stack of cash bound by a blue rubber band. As Nancy counted the stack of large bills, he leaned on his elbows and said, “What’s the matter? You haven’t gotten your tan yet this summer.” AT F I V E M I N U T E S PA S T N I N E

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“I haven’t had time to lay out,” Nancy replied. Her hands shook ever so slightly. Noticing her hands, the man leaned closer. “I know a beach far, far away where we’d be completely alone. You could get tan all over.” “Don’t talk like that,” she said wispily, keeping her eyes on her work. “Ah, you’re breaking my heart,” said Tucker, running an index finger down her bare arm. He shook his head contemptuously at the ring on her left ring finger, a painfully modest diamond. As soon as he left the bank, Nancy propped a Closed sign against her window and hurried down a hall past the vault. At a door marked Bill McCoy, President, she knocked and heard a muffled “Come in.” Nancy stuck her head in the door. “Mr. McCoy? Tucker Sturdevant is in town. He just made a $23,000 deposit.” “In that same account?” “Yes, sir.” “Thank you, Nancy. That’s all.” At five o’clock that afternoon, Bill McCoy left the bank and drove his BMW to a small frame house on Christy Avenue. Before getting out of the car, he combed his hair and checked his teeth in the rearview mirror. Miss Evangeline Moore was in the backyard, watering her garden with a hose. Except for the merest suggestion of a dowager’s hump, it seemed to McCoy that she had not changed in the thirty years since he’d been in her third-grade class. Catching sight of him, she swung around. The arc of water from the hose swept perilously near his shoes. McCoy hopped backward and straightened his tie again. “Hello, Miss Moore. Nice veggies you got there.” The old woman stiffly walked to the side of the house and turned off the water at the spigot. Returning to the first row of the garden, she pulled a beefsteak tomato the size of a cat’s head off the vine and hefted it, remarking severely, “Veggie is a ridiculous word, a diminutive. This tomato will weigh every bit of two pounds.”

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“Yes, ma’am.” McCoy ran a finger around the inside of his collar. She could still make him feel like pudgy Billy McCoy, who had so much trouble learning division. “I’d like to talk to you about a banking matter. Sort of off the record, for the moment,” he said. “Come inside.” In her spare, spotless kitchen, Miss Moore sat him down at a white wooden table and poured glasses of chilled ginger ale for them both. McCoy, an imported beer man, had not tasted ginger ale in years and was surprised to learn they still made it. The aged gold color matched the late afternoon light in the room, and he suddenly felt afraid of how long it had been since he was a boy. “Now then,” prompted his old teacher. “Ma’am, we have a savings account for an organization called the Monday Club. I believe it’s a ladies’ social club? Seems like my grandmother belonged at one time.” “Your grandmother belonged until she died. The Monday Club is a study club, founded in 1909, when women wanted both to improve their minds and to prove to themselves that they had minds.” “Yes, ma’am. I understand Beatrice Nearing is the treasurer? The mail still goes to her. But there is a signature card for you as well.” “Beatrice has handled the account for years. But you must know she had a stroke six months ago. She’s out at Pinecrest and in very bad shape.” Miss Moore looked up from her glass. The fierce blue of her eyes jolted McCoy. “Is there a problem? You can change the mailing address to mine. We will be collecting dues next month.” He had been wrong to think she had not changed. Her wrists and hands, which he remembered as strong and supple, were now as fragile as spun glass. “How much would you say is in the account?” he inquired. “Not more than two or three hundred dollars, I would guess. We pay for a speaker each year at our spring luncheon and occasionally buy a book for the library. In former years we raised more money for charity, but many of our members simply don’t have the energy

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anymore.” She turned her glass on its cork coaster. “That time is past. There are only eight of us left, including Beatrice.” McCoy took a paper from the inside breast pocket of his suit. “Then you wouldn’t know about this recent activity on the account—all these deposits? They’ve been made since Beatrice had her stroke.” Miss Moore took a pair of reading glasses out of the table drawer and put them on. She read the printout once, twice, three times. “This is absurd. Of course there’s been a mistake. This much money—what can it mean?” “The deposits were made by Beatrice’s nephew, Tucker Sturdevant, who also is a signee. He seems to have control of Beatrice’s affairs.” “Don’t talk to me about Tucker Sturdevant. That boy has been nothing but heartache to Beatrice.” “How does he have that kind of money? I understand he lives in Cincinnati now.” Miss Moore rubbed at a water mark on the table. “Billy, if those people get a toehold in your dear grandfather’s bank, I wouldn’t like to think what could happen to it.” “What people?” “The people Tucker’s mixed up with. I’m not at liberty to say whom. Beatrice told us in strict confidence one day when she couldn’t bear it any longer. She was so afraid. We—the club members—believe that’s what brought on her stroke. He’s in very deep water.” “And you think he’s making deposits for . . . them?” “I don’t know. But twenty Tuckers wouldn’t have that much money.” Her lips tightened. “And to think that she paid his way through three years of college, only to have him dump her in a room at Pinecrest with no attached bath, no lamp, no television, no comfortable chair . . .” Placing both palms flat on the table, she pushed herself upright with such difficulty that McCoy averted his eyes. “What we need,” she finished, “is another Flood. There’s too much wickedness in the world.” As McCoy stood to go, he realized his armpits were wet. The next day and the next, he tried to think what to do with Miss

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Moore’s information. Frequently he found himself staring at the oil portrait of his grandfather on his office wall. The picture had been in the bank since he was a boy, and it was etched onto his retinas. His grandmother, who had been in the Monday Club, was growing indistinct in memory; there were no pictures of her hanging about. McCoy had taken over the presidency of the bank a year and a half before, upon the death of his father and over the silent objections of some board members who thought he was too inexperienced. This could be his first big crisis, and he wasn’t sure who his friends were. He didn’t want to screw up. As far as he could see, Tucker Sturdevant hadn’t done anything demonstrably illegal at the bank. Late Thursday afternoon, when he came back from a long business lunch, a new printout of the Monday Club account lay on his desk, along with a note from teller Darlene Foutch. At the same time that McCoy was looking over the new information, on a sparkling pink beach in the Bahamas, Tucker Sturdevant lay sunning next to a woman in a yellow bikini. Nearby, two motorboats were tied up at a small dock. Some distance away, a pallid tourist family was snorkeling along a reef. The scheme, Tucker had thought to himself earlier in the day, was foolproof. Manny had been the one who always dealt with Reo. Reo didn’t even know Tucker existed. If Reo found out about the missing money, he’d figure Manny had done the skimming and had skipped town with it. But Manny was at the bottom of the Miami River, because he had gotten too interested in Tucker’s calculations. “More oil. My shoulders are starting to burn,” he mumbled to the woman, whose name was Terri. They had met that fall in Vegas. Lying facedown, he drifted toward sleep on waves of her chatter. She knew how to keep her mouth shut when it counted, though. Suddenly she was shaking him. “Tucker, wake up. Look at that gorgeous boat. It’s coming right to us.” A yacht was bearing in toward the little dock. A very big yacht. A man in the prow was looking straight at him through binoculars.

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Although Tucker had never met Reo Clark, he recognized the bulky body and the clean-shaven head from newspaper photos. He sat up, his insides churning. He said, “Look, baby, there’s something you got to back me up on here. It’ll be okay. See, I’ve got this aunt back in Kentucky who’s off her rocker. When I got her power of attorney, I put some money in a bank account of hers. I had a crooked associate, see, and I was stashing the money there to keep him from cheating a man named Reo. That’s Reo there. I can deliver the cash at any time. One call to the bank in Blue Valley will straighten this out. One lousy phone call, and I’m in the clear.” He scrambled to his feet and raised a hand, trying to look jaunty. “Yo!” he called to the man on the yacht. This time Miss Moore received McCoy in her parlor. McCoy reflected that living room was too modern a phrase for a room that housed such antiquated furnishings, not a doily of which appeared to have been disturbed since the Truman administration. When he was seated on a horsehair sofa the color and sheen of an old eggplant, Miss Moore perched herself on a ladderback chair before him. With a head-to-toe sweep of her hand, she indicated the navy suit she was wearing and said pleasantly, “How nice to have company when I look decent. I was downtown this morning.” “I’ll say you were,” blurted McCoy. “Miss Moore, you closed the Monday Club account!” “I did. For the first time in the history of the club, we met on a Thursday—this morning, in fact. The group voted unanimously to close it.” “I have here”—McCoy whipped out a paper—“a list of the checks you had made out: sums to the African Violet Society, the county historical museum, the Girl Scouts, the Home for Little Wanderers . . .” “Those are Beatrice’s favorite charities.” “And at the end of the list, a large check made out to Pinecrest Nursing Home.”

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“To get better accommodations for Beatrice. We’ve already distributed the checks.” He stared at her. “It wasn’t your money.” “It wasn’t yours, either. Or Tucker’s.” “But Miss Moore, if these are dangerous people . . .” “Let Tucker answer to them.” “All right, maybe he can. And maybe he’ll come after you.” “What can he do to me that will bring the money back? What can he do to any of us? Break our arms, as he once broke Beatrice’s, when he was still in high school?” Her fierce eyes held him. The whites, he now saw, were veined with yellow, like the egg of some ancient reptile. “All right. But what about Tucker? What if ‘they’ go after him?” Miss Moore did not even blink. “What if they do?” McCoy coughed and pulled at an earlobe. After a while he understood that there was nothing more to say, and he went home. Although McCoy didn’t know Beatrice Nearing personally, five months later he attended her funeral. That was where, for the first and last time, he saw the seven remaining members of the Monday Club together, sitting in the front row of the funeral home chapel. More than once, he saw Miss Moore turn around and survey the sparse crowd. He knew who she was looking for; he was looking, too. But Tucker Sturdevant was never again seen in Blue Valley, or anywhere else.

Emus

best friends since kinneygarden. After he died, I decided to do something. But as he went quick, I didn’t have time to ask him. Coming home from the funeral, I thought about it and figured it was what he would have wanted, especially with his wife, Rhonda, in chemo now. Besides, I’d been keeping an eye on this deal for years. It was the case that convinced me to retire from the state police before they fired me—or worse. And even now, I can’t name some of the names. The day after we buried Tiny, I drove to Curranville alone. Before I went, I told Tiny and Rhonda’s daughter, Kimmy, about the boy. It knocked her back a step, especially coming on top of her daddy’s death, but she was agreeable to my going. Why was I doing it? Standing at Tiny’s grave, I kept thinking about my girls. They’re twins, born deaf and living in a group home, which is a good situation for them. But someday they’ll have to go out in the world, and who will be there for them to depend on? When all’s said and done, nobody cares about you like family does. They’ve got only me, and I won’t be here forever, no more than Tiny. Maybe I should have remarried and given them some brothers and sisters, but it’s too late to worry about that now. However, I saw that I could do something along that line for the boy and for Tiny’s daughter. If you’re driving from Blue Valley, Curranville’s about fifteen miles up the old Henderson Trace, in the hills above Watkins Lake. I know it pretty well, used to fish with an old boy that lived there. In fact, a T I N Y W H I TA K E R A N D M E W E R E

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lot of what I learned about the Curranville end of the case came from this old boy’s mama. The historical marker in front of the post office shows that the place used to be a real town. It was founded in 1791 at the site of an iron furnace, and people like Squire Boone and Bishop Asbury passed through in its heyday. Now the only reason people know about Curranville is because of the emu farm. About twenty years ago, a man named Jody Sample came there to live. By then the iron was long gone, along with the timber and the railroad. About the only going concern was the twelve-grade school, which the county school board threatened to close every time it met. The school was important because Jody had a six-year-old son named Ronnie. Jody and Ronnie rented in Shady Lane Estates, a trailer park down by the creek. A man named Ken Burch lived in the biggest trailer and owned the rest. Ken was rough as pig iron. Always had plenty of jingle, but nobody knew what he did for a living. His wife, Angel, had a smashed-in face and a homemade tattoo on her right shoulder that said “Love Hurts.” This Sample enrolled his son, Ronnie, in first grade and went about his business. He was on time with his bills and kept the boy in school, so nobody paid much attention to his comings and goings. They say Curranville was settled by descendants of the Scottish border bandits called the reivers. That type doesn’t ask many questions. When the boy was in second grade, his teacher, Miss Amy Irene Brown, noticed him playing by himself around town and took him under her wing. She lived in that big brick house on Tempest Avenue; came home after college to take care of her folks and teach in the little school. Her folks had been dead several years by the time she got to know Ronnie. He would stay with her when his dad had to be away for a few days on business. Jody was in sales; that was all people knew. A couple of years after Miss Amy Irene and Ronnie got acquainted, the county sheriff’s department raided Ken Burch. He kept rottweilers and was known to be armed, so they sent quite a few cars. Turned out

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he was the fence for a ring of high school thieves operating in three counties. The next day at school, Ronnie told Miss Amy Irene that his daddy hadn’t come home that evening. The boy had been by himself all night in their trailer, imagining he heard Burch’s rottweilers sniffing at the door, and he was pretty shook up. They said he was a shy boy, the kind who always hangs back when they choose up sides at recess or get in line for lunch. Jody Sample never did show up. The town did what it could to locate him, but the law there was only an elderly constable named “Sherlock” Pennington, who mainly functioned as a school crossing guard. The county sheriff’s department was no help. You didn’t have national databases then, so they ran into a brick wall pretty quick. Besides, given what I later learned about Jody, I can figure the state boys wouldn’t have told them squat. They didn’t turn up any next of kin, either. Ronnie told Miss Amy Irene that his mother died when he was four. The only clue concerning Jody’s whereabouts came from a girl who worked at the Ashland Oil station down at the crossroads. The night of Ken Burch’s arrest, she saw Jody’s truck pass the station about 5:30, on his way home. A few minutes later, he came roaring back in the other direction. She saw him pull in at the Methodist church, run inside, rush back out to his truck, and peel out going west. On some days, Ronnie attended an after-school program at the church; so people figured that Jody must have tried to pick up his son there, but it was the wrong day. Ronnie was at Cub Scouts. Evidently the police cars at the trailer park had spooked Jody too bad for him to stick around any longer. Miss Amy Irene took Ronnie in; there was nothing else to do. She wasn’t going to let the state have him. Around here we’re not big on government. I was raised that way, too, so I can understand it, even though I gave the best years of my life to the state police. Eventually Miss Amy Irene was declared his permanent foster parent. The truth is, Jody Sample wasn’t his daddy’s real name. When the

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dad’s picture came across my desk some months before his disappearance, I knew who it was immediately, though I had to go back quite a few years to make the connection. When I was a young man, the gas pipeline came through Blue Valley. They’d started building it in Texas, and the guys that worked on it were from all over. I got to know some of them down at the pool hall, and the stories they told of life on the road set me afire. I’d never been anywhere or seen anything. A boy from San Antone named Travis Lee kept ragging on me to sign up with his crew. He was always putting down eastern Kentucky. “Don’t you want to see the other side of the mountain?” he’d say. “Going to be a brier hopper all your life, living where they have to pump the sunshine in and the moonshine out? Always going to have one leg shorter than the other from walking on hillsides?” The pipeline was going all the way to Pennsylvania, and he promised we’d have great times. He was a good-looking son of a buck, a man’s man and a ladies’ man, too. When I’d bring him home for supper, my mama, God love her, would put on lipstick and rouge and cut her eyes around like a girl. So I worked on the pipeline for a summer, way up into West Virginia, and it was damn hard work. It taught me I didn’t want to be a day laborer all my life, and I eventually ended up going to the state police academy. Travis Lee and I had great times all right, but after I came back home, I never heard from him again. Not directly, that is. Of course I didn’t expect to, but still you wonder about people who have an influence on a particular time in your life and then move on. Some years later, when Tiny and me were all grown up and he had met Rhonda working at the bus station and was thinking about asking her to marry him, he came to see me down in Frankfort, to talk the whole thing over. I was already married myself then, and I remember we sat out on the deck after supper with a bottle of Heaven Hill between us while my wife washed the dishes. “I know Rhonda doesn’t love me,” he said, “but I can accept that. I love her.”

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“What makes you think she doesn’t love you?” I asked. He swirled the ice in his glass. “Look at me.” “Bullshit,” I said. “That doesn’t matter.” “You know better,” said Tiny. When we were juniors in high school, he was in a bad wreck at Hayes Crossing and had to have his right leg taken off above the knee. Since then, he’d gotten even heavier, drowning his sorrows in food. I said, “Well, look at it this way. Being an unwed mother, she’s no prize herself.” He said, “That’s just it. She’s still in love with Kimmy’s father. Says she always will be. Matter of fact, she says he’s coming back to town someday to get her. I don’t think she really believes it, but she wants to.” Tiny sighed. He was really suffering. “Do you know who it is?” “Some dude named Travis Lee. He worked on the pipeline.” He turned to me, drop-jawed. “Say, did you know him?” “No, he must have been on another crew,” I said. Because one thing I did know for sure: Travis Lee mentioned a lot of Blue Valley girls he’d messed with, mentioned them by name. He was a kiss-and-teller. But he never said anything about Rhonda Conn. I’d have bet the farm she was nothing to him, probably a one-night stand. “Tiny,” I said, “here’s my advice. If you love her and she’s willing, marry her. Don’t worry about this Travis Lee fellow ever showing up again.” Which is what Tiny did, and I can’t fault Rhonda for a thing. She was a good wife to him, and Tiny was a good father to Kimmy. Whether she ever learned to love him or not, I don’t know; but she did learn to appreciate what a good man he was. They went the distance together, which is more than I can say for me and Brenda. By the time Travis Lee’s picture turned up on my desk, Kimmy was grown up. I was on a special drug task force, and he was suspected of involvement in a different kind of pipeline, one that stretched all the way from South America. I wasn’t directly involved with Travis’s part of the case, but I kept

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an eye on it. There was something funny there. As these things go, he seemed like a small-timer. But I figured he must have some big connections, or they would have already picked him up. When I asked questions about him, I got the runaround. Once I learned about the existence of the boy, I thought I understood why Travis had located in Curranville. The boy was his weak spot, the one thing he cared about. To Travis, a man used to the wide-open spaces of the Southwest, Blue Valley was the armpit of the world. Any place farther back in the hills, such as Curranville, would seem practically invisible, a fine place to keep his son safe in, not to mention providing cover for himself. But to make it work, he’d have to have a better way to get in and out than the highway. The plane was an old Cessna 180, a high-wing tail-dragger. He hid it on an abandoned farm up on a flat about five miles from Curranville. Nobody went there; the house had burned years before, and that stretch of road had been cut off from through traffic when they straightened U.S. 60. There was an old root cellar where he stashed stuff. I found the place on my own and went all over it. Told somebody I trusted about finding it, not suspecting what I’d gotten myself into. The week before the Ken Burch arrest screwed things up, an informant told me that Lee was planning to move his base of operations. I passed along the info and thought I might be going in on the arrest when he flew in with the next shipment. Then on December 23 I was pulled off my part of the case. No explanation. Not only that, but I was to turn over my files and accept reassignment to Paducah. The same evening, while I was having a drink with a buddy, my home office was burglarized by somebody who knew what they were doing. One of the items taken from my home office was a photo of some of the governor’s people on a party boat in the Florida Keys. Travis Lee was standing at the rail, grinning and clicking glasses with the governor’s chief of staff. I was the one that told them about the boy, too. “The boy Ronnie is your ace in the hole,” I said. “Sooner or later, he’ll go back for the

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boy. Keep the boy covered, and you’ll get him that way if everything else fails.” If you want to talk to Ronnie Sample these days, you follow the signs that start about five miles out of Curranville, lead you through town, and on about three miles further to the east. School groups and clubs are welcome, say the signs. Or, of course, you could ask anybody. Since the school closed, the population’s only about 350. He was out in the lot feeding them, pouring some kind of chow into a trough from a fifty-pound sack. I parked my car on the shoulder and walked over to the fence to watch. Old habits die hard; I’d read up on emus a little before making the trip, doing research like I used to when I was on a case. You never know what you’ll need to know. The earthbound emu. They have vestigial wings, but they can’t fly. The fence was to keep them from getting in the neighboring field of rye or onto the road. He saw me and nodded. “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.” Medium build, dark hair, maybe 5'10''. His features reminded me of Travis somewhat, but the proportions were all wrong; so that what had been movie-star looks on the father added up to an average face on the son. He was eight that Christmas Eve when they tried to collar his daddy in Lexington but messed up and let him get away on foot. Because of me they knew Travis would head for Curranville to get his boy and then probably to Huntington, where the plane was impounded. It was the kind of crazy-ass thing he would do, try to get the plane back. If he made it that far, the odds were high he’d make it to the feds, turn state’s evidence, and take a lot of people down. I heard about the whole bust about twenty minutes too late. Ronnie was sleeping at Miss Amy Irene’s when they ran his daddy off the road ten miles south of Curranville in a stolen car and shot him in a cornfield like a dog, officers I knew and worked with. I got there in time to see his chest stop heaving. You can bet there’s no tombstone where they buried him. Standing at the fence, watching the young man in the feed lot, I

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wondered if he had looked out Miss Amy Irene’s window that night and felt something in the Christmas air; if he had sensed a momentary shiver in the wind and thought it was Santa Claus coming. I wondered what it felt like to live all these years waiting for your father to come home and not knowing where he was. Would it feel like trying and trying to hear something, and all the time not knowing you were deaf? Now the birds crowded around him—funny-looking things, like hassocks with claws and feathers—and commenced eating with the same bright-eyed, machinelike head action that chickens use. Wiping his hands on his jeans, Ronnie Sample came up to the fence, unaware that I knew he had spent four years in the military after high school before coming back to the only real community he’d ever known to raise earthbound birds and look after Miss Amy Irene, who, in her eighties, still lived on her own in the Tempest Avenue house. He’d never married. “They’re fascinating to watch,” he said. “Did you know that it’s the male who incubates the eggs?” I said my name and kept on talking, without any idea of how much I was going to say, except to tell him that he had a half sister named Kimberly living not thirty miles away, and that she wanted to meet him.

The Coach’s Wife

kitchen sink, working up a mess of Roma beans for supper, when an unfamiliar, late-model car grinds up the gravel road from the highway and swings into the yard next to her husband’s truck. A lean, gray-haired man gets out and looks around cautiously. He is wearing tinted glasses, and he carries a spiral notebook. A retired astronaut, she thinks. That is how she would peg him if she didn’t know. But she does know who he is, almost; the way he carries himself is familiar. Hearing about them all these years, she knows what professions they went into, all of them. Mostly they became coaches and teachers, with a sprinkling of small-business owners and state employees. The primary mission of the college, after all, was to train teachers who would carry learning back to the benighted eastern Kentucky towns from which the students came. There were no astronauts among the Boys. Drying her hands, she steps out on the side porch and pushes her glasses up on her nose to get a better focus. Susie, their old border collie, wakes from her nap under the porch swing. Regarding the man through her cataracts, Susie thumps her tail against the floorboards. “Yes, it’s another one,” she tells the dog. “Mrs. McCann?” He steps lightly and quickly to the steps, his hand out to receive hers. “Scottie Martin.” Her heart opens. She always liked Scottie, a polevaulter. “The lord. It’s been a long time.” S H E I S S TA N D I N G AT T H E

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“Yeah, I’ve got a little snow on the roof now.” Grinning, he runs a hand over his hair. Then, with awkward gallantry, “You haven’t changed.” “Of course not.” She smiles. They are still such boys. Bracing his hands on his hips, he takes a deep breath. “This is a nice place you’ve got here. Coach must really be enjoying his retirement.” Retirement my foot, she thinks, remembering their old house in town. Her flower garden, her neighbors. “Are you still in Covington?” she asks. “Still there.” His eyes rake the hills, the house, the vegetable garden. Looking for the Old Man. She says, “He’s down working in his grapes. Just go on past those fruit trees and you’ll see him.” For years they didn’t come, but now more and more of them do, as if he is a shrine. Often they want to discuss a personal problem. Why they seek him out, she does not completely understand. As far as she can tell from forty-three years of marriage, compassion is not his strong suit. In case he invites Scottie to stay for supper, she puts two extra pieces of chicken in to bake. Since his bypass surgery they have had to go more and more to baked chicken and fish; but she still slips bacon grease in the beans, otherwise they wouldn’t be fit to eat. After putting the beans on to cook, she sits down for fifteen minutes with her latest copy of Better Homes and Gardens. When she returns to the kitchen, Scottie’s car is gone. At supper, she sees that the lines in his face have relaxed. He looks ten years younger. Spooning applesauce onto his plate, he chuckles to himself. “How is Scottie?” she asks. His craggy face becomes a study in shadows. “Oh, there’s trouble with his wife—he’s had to put her away. He tells me she’s an alcoholic, has been for years. Some people get more than their share of problems. One of his boys is in jail for armed robbery, and the other has gotten

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a girl in the family way. He’s had to wash his hands of the younger one. Poor Scottie!” “Poor Scottie.” His eyes flash lightning. “Yes, poor Scottie! He’s a good boy.” “I know, I just meant . . .” Poor wife. Poor children. He brings his fist down on the table. “No one ever worked harder in practice. He had not only the will to win, but also the will to work to win. And in the conference meet at Western, when we needed two points to win the whole thing and Blaylock got spiked, by golly, I put him in the two mile—the two mile!—because there wasn’t anybody else, and he gutted it out and got sixth place for us. The two mile, and him a pole-vaulter!” Don’t criticize the Boys. She knows that. “What did he want?” she asks softly, a peace offering. A smile twitches his lips. “He wants me to coach him. He’s going to start running again; put his life back together.” “At his age?” It just slips out. His mouth purses vengefully; then he calms himself. “Yes, at his age. There are programs for older athletes: masters’ track, the Senior Olympics. Don’t you know what it says in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses?’ ” “No.” And how do you happen to know it? she wonders. He forks in a piece of chicken, chews, and swallows. “There’s a legend that after Ulysses returned from the Trojan War, he became restless and bored ruling over his little kingdom in Ithaca. He’d been a warrior, after all, and a traveler to fabulous places. A hero! And so, in old age, he gathers his grizzled old troops around him, and they set sail once more on a final voyage: ‘ . . . and though / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are . . .” His voice breaks. Shaking his head, he looks down at his plate. Until he took early retirement, she would have counted theirs a happy marriage. Now he is so angry, so wrapped up in his own thoughts, that she wonders what they ever had in common. So he is reading poetry!

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That evening while she is watching television, she hears him making phone calls in the bedroom, his voice high and excited. “Who were you talking to?” she asks when she comes to bed. All tucked in, wearing his blue-striped pajamas and reading the evening paper, he looks at her innocently over the tops of his glasses. “Oh, just some of the Boys.” The next morning she stands at the living room window, sipping coffee and watching him with dismay through her binoculars. She bought them during the fainting episodes that led up to his bypass operation. He thinks she got them to watch birds. The sun breaking over the hills gilds the long slope upon which the house is built. He is down on the abandoned farm road that forms a curving border to the western edge of their property, working with a mattock. A dark vee of sweat already stains the back of his overalls. It is barely seven A.M. What now? she wonders. There is no sense in a man of his age killing himself the way he does. What is it all for? One would think he was preparing for a nuclear disaster from the amount of produce he brings in for her to can; she could feed Coxey’s army for a year on what she has shelved in the cellar. She knows plenty of couples who take it easy now, couples who meet every morning at Hardee’s for breakfast. There is a whole club of them, and you take your own coffee mug. You all get to be friends; her friend Reba goes. But he will not do it. He will not even live in town anymore. Down on the overgrown road, he drops his mattock and reaches out to steady himself on a fence post. Heart palpitations, she suspects; he will not say. Someday she will find him dead in the garden, she knows she will. The aroma of the biscuits baking in the oven turns sharply golden, calling her back to the kitchen. When he comes in for breakfast, he says, “I want you to mail a letter to Fox when you go to town.” “To Joe? I always liked him,” she says. He eyes the piece of turkey sausage on his fork with suspicion, knowing it does not taste the way sausage used to taste. She has made some secret substitutions in his diet.

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He says, “Fox could have been an All-American. For sheer ability, I never coached anyone better. And we went about it the right way. You look at the Cuban Juantorena in the ’76 Olympics and you see what Fox could have been. Joe was a horse like Alberto. If it hadn’t been for that darned hamstring.” And he is off on a detailed account of the meet in Milwaukee where Fox suffered his career-ending injury, as if she hasn’t heard it all a hundred times. Later, while straightening up the den, she retrieves a letter that has fallen under his desk. Her eye is caught by a page of print that is folded inside the pages of handwriting. It is the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and it appears to have been torn out of a book. She reads the first lines— It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

—Is this the way he sees himself? Sees her? She spreads out the letter, which is dated two months earlier. It is from John Bumgardner, and the return address is a Masonic home in Virginia. John Bumgardner, she remembers, was a Korean War veteran who grew up in Mayking, a mining camp near Whitesburg. He came out for cross-country early in her husband’s coaching career. Going to school on the GI bill and older than his coach, he was called Gramps by the other boys, who delighted in his oddball ideas and eccentric habits. She recalled that he always wore two pairs of running shorts during a race, one over the other, in case the top pair should rip. And now, it appeared from the letter, he lived in a nursing home and was confined to a wheelchair, due to a stroke. His handwriting was as jittery as a reading from a seismograph. On the last page, he wrote, “I recollect a right smart I learned there at the college and it is a comfort to me in these long days. We don’t think of this when we are young: that knowledge might be a comfort. We do not understand how hard

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the journey will be and what tools we will need. Do you recall Dr. Cary, who taught world literature, all about old Aeneas and Beowulf and such? He taught things that wasn’t in the books, too. He said that after The Odyssey was over, in old age the hero Ulysses set out on a last voyage with his old comrades in arms . . .” She skips to the last paragraph. “An inspiring idea. I enclose a poem on same which I found in a poetry book in the library here. I don’t reckon anybody will miss it; most residents have forgotten they ever could read. I keep my spirits up however. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” After putting together a tuna casserole he can heat for his lunch, she sets out for her weekly hair appointment in town. Her day off the reservation, she calls it to herself. During the fourteen-mile drive, she listens to a tape their younger daughter sent from California for her last birthday. It is not what she would call music, but she likes it. On the tape, birdy twitters mingle with random notes of a flute. Drums call up faraway thunder that builds, then fades away like smoke. The lapping of water insinuates itself into a wistful cello line. There is no beginning, middle, or end, but only a multilayered lake of sound. She floats in it; shapes float past her at the pace of her breathing. The girls are small again. She sits with them in a grassy park on the first day of the rest of their lives, having a picnic with their Raggedy Ann dolls. For a moment her eyes fill with tears, she is so happy. After she gets her hair done and works through her list of errands, she drives to a narrow, tree-lined street just south of the college. There she parks across from a shingled, two-story house with a bay window. Her house, for many years. The new owners have removed the massive japonica bushes that grew under the front windows and have replaced them with sparse, spiky desert plants. Without the bushes the house appears naked and surprised, like a big woman caught stepping out of her bath. The house across the street, where the girls’ piano teacher lived, has become the college faculty club. Nothing stays the same; she knows that. Unscrewing the top of her thermos, she pours herself a cup of coffee

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and takes a cheese sandwich out of her purse. She has always loved this quiet, sun-dappled street. When the girls were small, she would walk them to the end of the block and see them across the boulevard to the neighborhood school. On this street she became who she is. Now nearly every house has a new owner. There is only Mrs. McCormick from the old days, and when has anyone actually seen her? Perhaps Mrs. McCormick sits dead at her kitchen table, waiting for a meter reader to glance in the window and find her. So many women outlive their husbands. She unwraps the cellophane around her carrot and celery sticks. He took early retirement because the boys had changed. When he started coaching, he built winning teams out of raw-boned country boys who often had never seen a track or cross-country meet. Boys like John Bumgardner, who came up the hard way and took nothing for granted, not even indoor plumbing. Mountain-bred boys from small towns and farms and coal camps. Northern boys looking for a way out of the Rust Belt. The kind of students the college had been founded to serve, often the first of their families to seek higher education. Boys like himself. For years, the only recruiting he needed to do was to place a notice in the college newspaper announcing the start of practice. When it became necessary to take recruiting trips, to sit in suburban living rooms and beg young men who were “weighing their options,” cocky young men who, once they enrolled, had to be watched night and day to keep them out of trouble, he lost the heart for it. When he told her he was giving up coaching, she was glad. Now they could have a normal life, she thought. Now they could go on a vacation that didn’t center around a track meet. She never dreamed he would buy a farm and revert to the life of his youth. She had grown up on a backwoods farm, too, where all her hopes had centered upon escaping to civilization. Why else had she gone to college? Some days she felt like she was living the life of her parents all over again. The girls thought she should have fought harder to stay in town. The next week Scottie Martin returns, bringing a friend. Through

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her binoculars she watches the three of them walking down on the old road, talking and gesturing. One afternoon in the week after that, she is pruning her roses when a large RV pulls into the yard. “Mrs. McCann?” The man is wearing expensive casual clothes—taupe slacks, figured polo shirt, tasseled loafers. She keeps up with the fashions through the soaps on TV. He carries much of his weight above his braided leather belt. This accentuates the length of his storklike legs. “Hello, Mrs. McCann. Do you remember me? Joe Fox?” “Joe!” Shucking off her gardening gloves, she gives him an awkward hug, bumping her nose on his shoulder. He has changed a lot since her husband’s retirement banquet ten years before; his handsome features are losing definition. Ever the charmer, he inquires after the girls and compliments her roses. Then he asks, “So I’m the first one here?” “The first one? Oh—yes. I suppose so.” He said nothing at breakfast about having guests. Is he hiding something from her, or did he forget? She rings the old-fashioned dinner bell that is mounted on a post by the back steps. In a few minutes they see him climbing the slope to the house, carrying his big two-handed scythe. His hips are stiff, and his back is bowed. Why, she thinks, he moves like an old man. After he has greeted Joe, he turns to her with a little boy’s guilty grin. His eyes are starry bright. “Some of the Boys are coming out today. Do we have anything to offer them?” She was planning to can chowchow that afternoon; the kitchen is piled with green tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, onions. But now she has new marching orders. As she is stirring up a batch of brownies more cars arrive, bringing half a dozen more former athletes. Through the open window over the sink she hears their excited voices. “Creed Chapman, you old son of a gun! You had the shortest stride in captivity!”

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“Maybe so, but I could run your butt off, Morris!” “Hey, is that Sonny? You’d have to sight by a pole to see if he was moving!” Sonny Morris, once a whippet-thin hurdler, is now stocky and bald. She taught Sonny the proper way to hold a fork. A bank of clouds moves over the sun, and a chill wind stirs the thinning hair of the Boys. In his overalls and sweat-stained fedora, her husband stands grinning among them, leaning on his scythe. As he begins to speak, they cluster around him. She is annoyed at how shabby the yard looks, with the grass unmowed and Virginia creeper taking over the fence. For three weeks he has been working down on the road and near the woods, clearing brush; neglecting everything else. She puts on a pot of coffee, makes a platter of sandwiches, and brings two bags of potato chips from the pantry. Her husband’s rising voice draws her back to the window. “ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars . . .” She goes back to the pantry for paper napkins. When she returns to the window, he is saying, “The course is just over three miles, not what we’re used to, but it will serve as a start . . .” With him in the lead, they set off down the hill, toward the road. She reaches for the binoculars on the windowsill. Well, stupid me, she thinks. Why has she not realized before now what he has been up to? He has been laying out a cross-country course. That is what all the work on the road has been about. Today he has gathered some of the Boys together to show off his handiwork. He is going to coach them again. Down on the road, Creed Chapman, once a two-miler, is jogging back and forth in little bursts, as if he can’t wait to start training. He looks anything but athletic, and she worries that he will turn an ankle. The group moves into the trees at the edge of the woods and is lost to view. She sets her binoculars on the kitchen counter and shuts the window

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against the cooling afternoon. Pouring herself a cup of coffee, she sits down at the kitchen table. The air is warm and moist with the aroma of the baking brownies. The windows are fogging over. This will be something to tell the girls when she writes her weekly letter to each of them. He loves the girls and the grandchildren, but he never writes to them; he depends on her to do that. Down on the new course, a flurry of shouts rises up, harsh and vibrant as the cawing of crows. She feels a twinge of arthritis in one knee. Winter is coming; soon they will be putting the garden to bed. And then, abruptly, she understands about the farm, and about the life he has forced on her. The farm is his true, final voyage. This collective dream of a return to athletics is only a secondary manifestation. She understands, too, why she let herself be talked into selling their home and moving. Because he needed the farm more than she needed the town. We outlive them because we are not so afraid to die. When he is gone, she will sell the farm and move into one of the nice new condominiums on the edge of town. She will sell his truck, too, and have beige carpet put down, for she will not have to worry about dirt being tracked in. She will go to Hardee’s every morning, volunteer at the resale shop, and knit for her grandchildren until the meter reader finds her. A gust rattles the windows. She removes the pan of brownies from the oven and takes the ingredients for chocolate frosting out of the cabinet. The old house creaks and groans, like an antique ship sailing over the edge of the world.

I Stand in the Doorway

Do you believe that something led you to sit down next to me on this bus? Belief comes and goes, in my experience. There was a time when I believed in everything and a time I believed in nothing. Now I believe that a person makes her own fate, just as she makes her own luck. By way of explanation, let me tell you a story. It won’t take long; I have to get off at the hospital. Incidentally, I’m a nurse. From the time I was a child, that was the only job I ever wanted. Fate? You tell me. I used to work in a small, rural clinic in the mountains, near my hometown, in the eastern part of the state of Kentucky. Five years ago, I traded up to the city hospital here. Why it took me so long to break away from the places that knew me too well, I don’t know. True, I was in bad shape from things I’d been through, things no one should have to go through at the hands of another human being. But what happened before is not my story. Just know that when I arrived in the city, inside I was more dead than alive. To an extent, that is still true. There’s a hollow space that can’t ever be filled. I soon found my true niche in the hospital routine: eleven P.M. to seven A.M., the graveyard shift. I prefer it because of the autonomy. With most of the doctors and family members gone, I can concentrate on the patients. This is real primary care: the management of pain, insomnia, the night terrors. And the halls are as peaceful as death. At first I filled in wherever needed. Then, in my fourth month, I was assigned to do a stint on the sixth floor with the neuro patients. D O Y O U B E L I E V E I N F AT E ?

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There one of my charges was a man named Howard McSwain, who lay alone in a semiprivate room, on life supports. He had taken enough sleeping pills to knock out the population of Detroit. By the time I saw him, he’d been on a ventilator for three months. He had massive brain damage, and it was clear he would never wake up. Though it went against his very wealthy sister’s beliefs to turn off the machines, she had agreed “to let nature take its course.” He was a no-code; in a crisis, no lifesaving measures were to be taken. The sister lived in Buffalo, New York, and another thing she didn’t believe in was visiting him. The only visitor he ever had was Mary Carmon. That first evening, when I looked in on Howard McSwain around midnight, a woman was sitting in a straight chair close against the bed, holding his limp hand. I said hello and went about my business. “I suppose you’re surprised to see a civilian here at this hour,” she said. “I’m pretty hard to surprise,” I said. “I can’t come in the daytime. I hope this is all right.” “If it’s all right with the charge nurse, it’s all right with me.” She cocked her head to one side like a pigeon. “I believe I’ve seen you on my bus.” “Could be.” I checked the machines. “You must live almost at the end of the line.” “Last stop but one, past the cemetery.” There are several affordable apartment buildings near the hospital, but I like putting some distance between home and work. The long bus ride is a kind of free zone where I can make the mental transition between the two. She said, “I’m Mary Carmon. I come here every night. It’s nighttime when he needs someone. During the day there’s noise and bustle to keep him company.” She caressed his sunken face with a sweet, sad look. “I believe it makes a difference to coma patients if there’s someone who cares. I don’t mean that as a criticism of the staff. It’s just that you don’t love him, and that’s what’s needed.” “If you can make him more comfortable, fine,” I said.

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That was the extent of our first exchange. But for me it’s yes or no when I meet a person. I liked Mary at once. With her dandelion cloud of fine white hair and her gentle manner, she possessed that special declining beauty that shames death. On my way to work the next night, when I saw her get on the bus I raised my hand in greeting. She sat down beside me and we fell into conversation. I had assumed that she was Howard’s wife, but this was not the case. For many years, Mary and her husband, Alonzo, had lived across the hall from the McSwains in one of those crumbling brick buildings near the university. Neither couple had children. Together they played canasta on Saturday nights, ate out after church on Sundays, and celebrated holidays. Alonzo died first, and then Howard’s wife, Estelle. For the past nine years, Mary and Howard had looked out for each other. Through summer and fall, on the bus and in the night hospital, she and I became friends. I have never had a knack for friendship, but Mary had a way of enfolding me in affectionate approval that made me feel as if nothing I could ever do or say would make her think badly of me. Though I’m generally as close-mouthed as a padlock, I told her things I’ve never told anyone. In time, I would have told her everything. She continued to talk about herself, too, but with restraint. At first I thought she was naturally reserved. But the better I got to know her, the more I felt that there was something she was holding back, a taboo subject which disturbed her deeply. I guessed that it had to do with Howard’s attempted suicide. After all, if they felt so responsible for each other, why had he tried such a thing? Had she failed him in some way? Had he failed her? She was always cheerful, and I never pitied her. But if you’re as intimate with solitude as I am, if you know both about choosing to be alone and about being alone when it’s the last thing you want, then you can hear the wind of loneliness howling around a certain few people: the truly solitary. I sensed that for all her outer tranquillity, Mary was lost in some polar region of the soul she didn’t understand. Instinctively, I wanted to give her a connection

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with someone other than Howard, who had, in effect, ceased to exist. I wanted to cushion her against the final loss of him. Of course I knew better than to get so involved. Nurses have to keep themselves separate from their patients or be pulled down every time someone either dies or recovers and moves on. I’ve never had any problem with keeping my distance, quite the contrary. But as Christmas rolled around, I began to think of inviting Mary for a meal. Moreover, I decided to give her a present. An icy winter gripped the city. Yet each evening Mary wore the same carefully preserved dark suit, pressed to a shine along the seams, and the same thin-soled pumps. No hat, gloves, boots, or coat. “Don’t you get cold?” I asked. “I don’t think about it,” she replied, and changed the subject. I began to knit her a shawl of pale blue wool which I imagined would be welcome not only at the bus stop, but in whatever small room she spent her days. I knew only that she did not live in the building where she and Howard had been neighbors. That had been torn down to make room for a university parking lot. The condemnation of the building, Mary hinted, was one of several factors leading to “Howard’s hospitalization.” Nevertheless, I put off issuing the invitation as long as I could— one is so vulnerable at the moment of offering. Finally, one December night, as our bus approached the hospital stop, I took a deep breath and asked if she would like to have Christmas Eve dinner at my apartment. Like a bone china cup held to a lamp, her face seemed to light from within. Then the light faded and she said, “I appreciate your invitation more than I can say. But I can’t accept. Not for Christmas Eve, or any other time.” The old panic of rejection seized me. “Surely you can take one night off. You need a break.” “Howard needs me more.” “Howard doesn’t know whether you’re there or not.” Splinters of pain starred her eyes.

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“You may be right, Dolores. But that really isn’t the point.” “Then I suppose I don’t get the point.” My voice was hard now. Mentally I began to beat myself up: I always tried too hard, I assumed too much, I would never understand people, and so on. Bowing her head, Mary pressed her palms together and rested her fingertips against her lips. She said, “Your friendship has made a big difference to me. But I’m in no position to form a lasting connection. I should have made that clear. This hasn’t been fair to you, and I’m sorry. But surely you can see that Howard is all that’s keeping me here. When his time is over, then mine will be, too.” “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I retorted, and turned my face to the window. When I got off at the hospital, I did not look back. That very night, I got myself transferred to another floor. Gritting my teeth and slamming equipment around, I worked straight through to the end of my shift without taking a break. The other staff steered clear of me, which only made things worse. Inside I was screaming, I want to give too much, not too little! Can’t anybody see that? Doesn’t anybody want what I have to give? I knew I was overreacting, but I couldn’t help it. Mary represented my first attempt in years to trust people. I couldn’t bear for it to go wrong. The following week, I took an earlier bus to avoid Mary and spent my breaks, once shared with her, in the cafeteria. The week of Christmas, I worked four twelve-hour shifts to blot out the holiday, then had three nights off. Late on the evening of the twenty-seventh, curled up with a mystery novel and a bottle of sherry in my third-floor apartment, with the blue shawl I had made for Mary draped around me like a hair shirt, I heard freight trains to the north and knew that the wind had shifted. Around two A.M., snowflakes patted the windows like cats’ paws. Who living among others, I asked myself, ever hears the wind shift or the first snowflake fall? I promised myself that I would never again let anyone get as close to me as Mary had. Later as I was undressing for a shower, I heard voices in the street, first on one side and then on the other, as if someone was searching

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for an address. The snow took away the footfalls, disembodied the voices. As I passed from bedroom to bathroom, the voices—a man’s and a woman’s—paused beneath my windows. I turned on the shower. Whatever they were doing didn’t concern me, I told myself, for I never had visitors. Now, of course, I know who they must have been. Fortified by my days alone, I decided to see Mary once more in order to show her how indifferent I was to her refusal. Returning to work the night of the thirtieth, I boldly took the ten-twenty bus, but Mary was not on it. On my first break I marched up to the sixth floor, confident that I could manage five minutes of pleasantries. In Howard’s bed lay another elderly man. According to the charge nurse, Howard had died two days before, in the middle of the morning. “Was anyone with him?” I asked. “He never had visitors. Anyway, he was a rutabaga.” “But Mary Carmon, his friend. Was she notified? Was she there?” “Not as far as I know.” The next week was a dream, the one in which you scream and scream and no one hears you. In the newspaper I read that Howard had been buried quickly, without services, in the Garden of Hope Cemetery. I knew the place; it was on my bus route. His meager obituary mentioned only his deceased wife and the sister. There was no Mary Carmon in the telephone book. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing her walking into his room for her usual nightly visit and finding an empty bed. Waking and sleeping, I tasted iron. I was convinced that if only I had been on duty, I could have spared her some pain. Finally I went to the public library and found the number of Howard’s sister in the Buffalo phone book. That evening I called and explained that I was trying to get in touch with Howard’s neighbor Mary. I suggested that the sister must have met or heard about her. “Yes, I knew Mary,” the sister rasped in a smoke-roughened voice, “but she’s no longer living.” “No longer living? When did she die?”

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“God, she was what pushed Howard over the edge. His tumor came back and then she found out she had cancer and only a few months to live. It was supposed to be a double suicide, you know. But Howard always did things halfway.” The graves of Mary and her husband are in a newer part of Garden of Hope. Howard is buried with his wife’s family in a section dotted with names of early settlers. I have taken flowers to both plots. She is not there. That is, I do not feel Mary’s presence in the cemetery. But I have heard from her, indirectly. As I ride into work in the evening, every so often someone will sit down beside me and ask if my name is Dolores McFann. They say they have heard of me through a friend. It might be a man or a woman, a child or an adult. They are on their way to the hospital to see a loved one who is lingering between life and death. When they explain they cannot go in the daytime, then I know for sure. Once when Mary and I were talking about my work with the terminally ill, she said, “How nice it would be, when one must at last leave the light and go into that final darkness, to look back and see a friend standing in the doorway. I believe that’s what you’re meant to do, Dolores. You’re meant to stand in that doorway. That is the good that has come out of what you have endured.” I can tell you this: when it is my time to go, I will step quickly across the threshold. No bonds of love will hold me here as they did Mary, as they have held the others she has sent to me. In the meantime, I do what I can to ease the transition. And I know something else: if you have listened this long, then fate put you beside me on this bus for a reason. I can’t help but feel that someday we will meet again.

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Terry’s hour-long visit with Mrs. Boatman, her former fourth-grade teacher, the older woman accompanied her student to the front hall of the modest ranch house. Helen opened the screen door, and they stood looking out at the street as Helen gathered herself to say good-bye. She could not tell whether Mrs. Boatman was thinking of anything or not. Since Helen’s visit two years before, Mrs. Boatman’s faculties had diminished. At first she had not recognized Helen, although the visit had been arranged by phone that morning; and she had told the same story about her cat three times. Whenever Helen passed through her hometown on a business trip, which was seldom, she always paid a call on Mrs. Boatman. This time she had been shocked at her old teacher’s deterioration. While they were talking inside, the summer sky had turned from blue to grayish white. The birds had fallen silent in the nandinas, and the air smelled of rain. In the near distance, the low, eastern Kentucky hills seemed to have drawn closer around the town like a herd of silent, blue sheep. Along the edge of the yard gurgled the branch in which Helen had paddled as a child; for until Helen and her parents had moved away from Blue Valley in her sixteenth year, they had lived in the same neighborhood as Mrs. Boatman. Now the murmuring brook provided the only sound in a world that seemed to Helen suddenly poised on the threshold of a question. Perhaps, thought Helen, she was sensing the approaching storm. And yet, wasn’t there something else hanging in the heavy, still air? Something unfinished? AT T H E E N D O F H E L E N

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Troubled, she turned to Mrs. Boatman. As their eyes met, the teacher’s filled with tears. Helen’s eyelids stung, too. Mrs. Boatman would not be alive for another visit. With a sudden, shared clarity, they both knew it. With surprising strength, Mrs. Boatman gripped Helen’s forearm, and a fierce light came into her face. “Oh, honey. Do as much as you can while you’re young. Go everywhere and see everything. It all goes so fast. And remember, I love you. I’ve loved all of my students, every one.” “We love you, too,” Helen whispered, drawing her into an awkward embrace. At that moment, with the tiny old lady a bundle of sticks in her arms, Helen knew what had been knocking around the edges of her consciousness, begging for entry. And she knew why it had come to her now. This was her last chance to ask the person most likely to remember. She had asked several classmates at reunions over the years, but none shared her memory of the babies. “Mrs. Boatman, do you remember taking us on field trips to the college science building? We saw a human skeleton, collections of insects, that sort of thing.” “Oh, yes, honey, the field trips.” Mrs. Boatman stepped back and absently clutched at the neck of her housecoat. “Do you remember that we saw some embalmed human fetuses?” Mrs. Boatman’s face went blank as a bar of soap. Helen tried again. “I seem to remember that we saw some fetuses in the science building. Babies in jars.” “Mr. Boatman and I were never blessed with a baby,” said Mrs. Boatman with a tremulous smile. “My students were my children.” “So you don’t remember them?” “I remember all of my students, every one.” Then, as if she had forgotten all about Helen, she slowly turned and shuffled down the hallway toward the den, where the television continued to blare a program about fly-fishing in the Ozarks, as it had throughout Helen’s stay.

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Helen had left her car at the motel and was on foot. Though Blue Valley had doubled in size since she moved, still it was a small town. Instead of returning to the motel, she turned east on Second Street, which led to the college. Having expected to spend more time with Mrs. Boatman, she now had an extra hour before starting for her meeting in Lexington. The babies. Had they existed? She sees them still in dreams, even after so many years. First the long perspective: a hallway with a high ceiling and a marble floor, drowned in the brown light of the past. The far end receding into misty darkness, lair of the bogeyman. A choking odor of floor wax and disinfectant. As if on oiled wheels, she moves silently down the corridor, past heavy doors of polished wood and frosted glass, past sealed wall recesses containing stuffed birds, their shoe-button eyes fixed yet frantic; dusty skeletons of small animals; faded dioramas of regional forests and savannas; maps showing the seasonal migration patterns of butterflies. Massive, freestanding cabinets come into view, crammed with more biological and botanical specimens, many preserved in jars of formaldehyde. And there they are, ranged along the top of one of these oak cabinets, in a row of graduated, screwtop jars, illustrating the developmental stages of a human embryo: the fetuses. The attached umbilical cords curling through the golden liquid make it seem as if each baby is sharing its jar with a snake. Arriving in front of the college science building, Helen saw that it had been remodeled. The original structure, with its college Gothic facade of arched doorways and crenelated battlements, stood overpowered by a vast glass and concrete cube that had been recently attached to its posterior. The back wall of the original building appeared to have been removed to blend the new with the old, and she saw that access to the upper floors, even of the old portion, must

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be gained by means of a tall glass box affixed to the outside of the building and containing a shiny metal stairway. The alterations took her aback. In grade school, Helen and her class had toiled up dim flights of marble stairs to see science exhibits on the upper floors. That much she and her classmates agreed upon. But since others could not remember seeing the babies, Helen had wondered for years if she had really seen them, or if, instead, they belonged to a myth she had picked up elsewhere and had unconsciously relocated to Blue Valley, like the “true” story of the hook-handed maniac who haunts lovers’ lanes all over America. The changes in the building made it seem less likely that she would find out the truth; and she was both relieved and disappointed. For to find out the truth, she now sensed, might be to answer other questions that troubled her: Why had she carried them, real or imagined, with her all these years? What did they mean to her? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Climbing the metal stairway in the company of several college students, she felt a giddy lift in her chest as, with every ascending step, the reality of the babies lessened. The modern glass and metal structure argued powerfully against what was probably a childish fantasy, soon to be exorcised. Until now, she had never realized what a burden they had been to her. But in five minutes she would be done with them and on her way. A ray of sunlight streamed into the transparent enclosure and spun a cocoon of gold around her. Helen did not believe in signs; nevertheless, she saw the ray of sunlight as a good omen. At the top floor, she exited the stairs and found herself standing in a broad space where the two parts of the building joined. To her left, behind plate glass, students performed experiments in state-of-the-art laboratories. To her right, the old walls of dun-colored ceramic brick stretched a short distance to end in a bank of metal office doors. No hint of the long, sorrowful corridor of her dreams. No enormous oak cabinets. No institutional odor. Her shoulders relaxed.

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Then she turned and saw a window she knew, a window that had not been disturbed by the new stairway. The window would have been at one end of the old hallway. Outside, an arching tree branch, the tip of a distant, low mountain, and the sky. The view they would have seen from their jars. All they would have known of the outside world. She felt them near. Walking along the old wall, she came to a recessed display: “Butterflies of the Amazon,” so dry and powdery that the specimens were crumbling from their pins. She had seen them before. On much smaller feet, she had stood just so before them. A heavyset, white-haired man in a lab coat exited one of the offices and came her way, slapping a clipboard against his thigh. In his other hand he carried a mug of coffee. Helen’s heart clenched like a fist. “Excuse me,” she said, stepping in front of him, “are you a professor here?” His eyes measured her as an inconsequential stranger. “Yes, I’m just on my way to class.” “I’m only in town for the day, and there’s something I want to find out about. I used to live in Blue Valley.” Falling back on small-town habits, she told him her name, the names of her parents, and the name of the street where they had lived. Coin of the realm. He smiled. “I was a student of your father’s. Stuart Shepherd.” “Really?” “Yes, in a freshman geography course. I came back here to teach after graduate school. Are your parents—?” “Yes, they’re living. They’re fine. Look, I wonder if you remember some preserved human fetuses being on display here some years ago.” Words scrolled across his pupils. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Journalist. Troublemaker. Quickly Helen said, “It’s just something I’m interested in for myself—a silly childhood memory I’m trying to run down.”

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“Yes, they were here,” Shepherd said warily. “We used to keep them on display, but nowadays that’s kind of gross.” “Where are they?” He cocked an eyebrow. “Where are they?” “Yes.” “Oh, I imagine they’re with the other pickled animals.” Helen swallowed. “Can I see them?” His jowls stiffened. “I need to get back to the lab. I just stepped out for coffee.” “Please.” Nut, his eyes said. But harmless. He sighed. “All right, I’ll see if I can round up some of them for you. Come on.” He wheeled and strode away. Them, thought Helen, trailing behind him. Them. She had always thought of the babies as aspects of a single child, stages in one diagram. As incredible as the misperception seemed to her now, it had never occurred to her that there were several, individual bodies, that there was more than one dead baby. He unlocked a door, flipped on a light, and stepped aside for her to enter. They went into a storeroom jumbled with desks, chairs, lab equipment. Shepherd threaded his way to a built-in wall cabinet of scarred wood, opened a lower door, and, setting his coffee mug on a low bookcase, began to rummage around inside the cabinet. I don’t want to do this, thought Helen wildly. This is crazy. She reached out to tap his shoulder, to ask him to stop looking. In a single motion Shepherd turned and held out to her a large glass jar. In memory, the embalming liquid had been amber; the creatures inside, wizened reptilian shadows. Here was a plump, pretty child, its eyes closed as if in sleep, rocking in a liquid as clear as vodka. Helen saw its eyelashes, its tiny fingernails, the blond hair curled on the back of its neck. A little boy. The edges of her vision began to darken.

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“How old?” she whispered. “Oh, I’d say seven months. Would you like to see another one? There are a couple more in there,” said Shepherd, nodding at the open doors. “They’re not all there?” He looked puzzled. “No. I wonder where they’ve gotten to. Must have been seven or eight of them.” “They’ve been separated?” cried Helen. Shepherd looked at the shaking hand she was holding to her forehead. Gently he said, “I’m sure they’re all, you know, I’m sure nothing has happened to them.” Sick to her stomach, Helen nodded briskly. “Yes. Well. Thank you. I appreciate your taking the time.” “No problem.” Shepherd returned the baby to the cabinet and picked up his coffee mug. In the hall, as she waited for him to relock the room, Helen thought of something. “Dr. Shepherd, where did they come from?” He shrugged. “I think a student brought the lot to school with him and then donated them to the department when he graduated. It was a long time ago.” “Oh.” She leaned against the wall, trembling. Exactly how long ago the babies had arrived in Blue Valley, she did not think about then. She finished her business trip and returned home, to her husband and children. Of her stop in Blue Valley, she mentioned only the visit to Mrs. Boatman. But the enormity of finding out that the babies had truly existed continued to ring in her mind like a single, spreading note from a gigantic bell. It was not over with the babies, after all. Just out of sight, something crouched at the misty end of the dream corridor, waiting. One evening, as she was paying bills at her desk, Helen found herself thinking about the anonymous student who had arrived at college with a clutch of fetuses among his belongings. She could hardly believe such a thing could be true. But assuming that Shepherd had been right, the

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student must have been the son of either a doctor or an undertaker, and most likely a doctor. Helen sees a man in a white coat laying aside a small, unwanted body for further study. Now if he can only get a three-month-old to complete the set. For the merest moment, the doctor dwells on the evanescent life of this child, a life never to be led. He himself will live on through his son, a son who intends to follow him into medicine. The man’s glasses and haircut are old-fashioned, as is the vaguely scientific-looking equipment around him. The scene is like something out of a black-and-white movie from the forties. The forties. Eight or ten years in the future, Helen will visit the science building with her fourth-grade class and see the babies he has collected. But why will she remember them so faithfully for so long? As an only child, she never was around babies. She never cared about babies until she had her own. And there it is. The realization floats gracefully up from the depths, breasting the surface like a drowned lily. Before she can tell herself no again, a no that has been so internalized that she has never even thought of challenging it, Helen picks up the telephone receiver and dials. Hundreds of miles away, her mother is watching television. She is glad to hear from Helen in the middle of the week; they habitually speak on the weekend. After some pleasantries, Helen says, “Do you remember telling me how often you want to ask your mother something that you never asked about when she was alive?” “Oh, heavens, yes. Sometimes I’m ready to pick up the phone before I remember that she’s gone,” says her mother. “Just this week I wanted to ask her what she put in her chicken and dressing casserole. Hers was the best I ever tasted.” “I want to ask you something. I want to ask about my brother.” “You know about that,” says her mother, her tone sliding off-kilter. Helen knows only that there was a brother who died at birth. She finds she cannot go at it directly. “Does he have a tombstone?”

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“Oh, no.” Her mother sounds scandalized. “There is no grave?” Her mother is silent. Then she says in an aggrieved voice, “They moved me out of the maternity ward immediately. I would have cast a dark cloud over the other mothers. So there I was in a private room, staring at the walls. You just feel like you don’t want to go on. I know what you’re saying. Your grandma thought we were terrible not to bury him and have a service. But we had to get past it. Your father was starting a new job. We had you to look after. You were only two. How could we . . . what if we had . . . ?” “So he was . . . ?” “Cremated.” Or not, thinks Helen, bowing her head. She cannot ask more of her mother. Already their soft voices are like iron spikes tearing at a sorrow they have shared since she was too young to feel it take up residence in her. It is the source of the unspoken taboo that has kept her from broaching the subject all these years. “How is Daddy’s garden?” she asks, making her voice light. After she hangs up the phone, Helen wanders upstairs and is surprised to find that her family is in bed and asleep. Before telephoning her mother she did not check the time. It is past midnight, and she wonders at her early-rising mother being cheerfully awake at such an hour; apparently it is a habit recently acquired. Going in her daughter’s room, she pulls the covers up around the sleeping girl’s bare shoulders. Then she enters her son’s room and lays a hand on his hair. Though his breathing changes, he does not wake. Down the street, a door opens and shuts. She tiptoes to the window. The long, residential street is quiet. Haloed in light fog, the line of streetlights recedes to a vanishing point. In her mind Helen lines them up again on top of the great cabinet in the old hallway of the science building. In the darkness, with the professors and students gone for the night,

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they whisper and giggle among themselves, this nursery class that never grew old. Her unknown brother is among them. Together the children turn their faces toward the window at the far end of the corridor and watch with sweet wonder as the moon rises into view.

Photo by Michael Palencia-Roth

About the Author

Elaine Fowler Palencia, a freelance writer and editor living in Champaign, Illinois, grew up in Kentucky and Tennessee. Her short stories have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, and other literary magazines.