Love and Lament Page 32

  “You say there’s fifty acres in cultivation,” Mary Bet said. “And we’ve got all these woods around here. How much?”

  “With the woods on the north side,” he said, holding his hand out, the last two fingers of which were nubs, “near ’bout three hundred acres.”

  Mary Bet looked at Matthew. “Well?” she said. “Should the county put brick buildings out here?”

  “If you say they should.”

  “It’s not up to me, it’s up to the Board of Commissioners. How’re we gonna pay for it?”

  “Looks like you could sell some of this land,” Matthew said.

  “How much?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe two hundred acres.”

  Mary Bet felt a smile coming to her face. “So you were paying attention. If there’s any left over, they can buy war bonds.” The supervisor nodded, and they followed him, his mud-caked boots indicating the driest way back between ruts in the road.

  They thanked him and got in Mary Bet’s top-buggy, and on the way home she said, “He and the warden are brothers. Mr. Sam ran his own store up past Silkton, until a few years ago. He got drunk and ran over a colored boy. Crushed his skull. He went to the penitentiary for fifteen months, and had to close his shop. Now he works for the county. Does a good job. He was happy to have a second chance. I don’t know how he lost those fingers.”

  “Do you ever drink?” Matthew asked.

  “Drink? Me? What kind of a question is that? No, I don’t.” Mary Bet thought a minute as they rolled along past a stubbly, sere field of cut corn. “I use to think liquor was evil. But then I thought, how could something that happens in nature be evil? Fruits decay and ferment. And the people that drink it aren’t evil, mostly. It’s what people do who can’t resist it that’s evil.” She thought, I don’t care if he’s listening, I’m going to say what I want. “The Devil’s medicine, my mother called it. Her father was a drunkard.”

  “What about your father?”

  She glanced at the boy, high cheekbones and red skin like he was of a different race, and yet he reminded her strongly of somebody she knew well. “Reach into my handbag, will you, son? Get that round tin out. Press it open.” He opened it and held it to her, and she took a pinch for each nostril. “Help yourself, but not too much.” He took a tiny pinch, stared at it, smelled it, then sniffed it in.

  “My father’s in the asylum out at Morganton. I’m overdue for a visit. It’s a hundred and fifty miles away, but that’s no excuse. He doesn’t even know I’m sheriff. I doubt he knows we’re at war.”

  When they arrived at the Cadwallader house, Matthew nodded and then hopped out. He stood there a second, shielding his eyes with his hand, and Mary Bet felt the sun on her back, and the shadow of her wide hat sliced across the boy’s face and spread upon the patchy ground behind him. “Why are you doing all this for me?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Partly for you and partly for me, I reckon. I thought as sheriff I might be called upon to bring in a bad man, something big and heroic like that. But I can see there’s other ways of tending the law. Now listen, I have to take a trip this week, on a matter of some urgency.”

  “Is your father dying?”

  “Dying? Not that I know of. I need to see him though, and attend to some business of my late brother’s. I’ll be back in two days, and then you come over to my house and we’ll go to church.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. He turned and went inside, and Mary Bet lifted the reins and turned her buggy around and headed home.

  CHAPTER 27

  1918

  THE STEEL RAILS curved away to the east, away from the Blue Ridge and toward the gentler, rolling land of home. The sheriff stood beside the track, listening and looking, trying to re-create entire something that had happened here many years ago. That day had been cold and autumnal, much like today, the trees stark and bare, the ground high in brown grass and goldenrod, with sunbursts of yellow sneezeweed and no good path for walking except the track.

  And now the sheriff did something she’d never dreamed she would. She reached down and lifted the hem of her long black skirt and began walking right down the middle of the track. So what if her driver was up there leaning against the tin lizzie, watching her with curiosity, wondering if she were in her right mind? The crossties were a little far apart for her stride, so she had to step on the gravel in between, her heavy lace shoes alternately crunching and stepping up, crunching and stepping up. Dew beaded the late-blooming buttercups brave enough to grow in the gravel at the very edge of the track, and the tarry smell of creosote from the crossties rose in the early morning air.

  He’d been walking east, her brother. Why?

  She had never done anything so foolish, she thought, as she picked her way over the crossties. Her driver had warned her against walking down through the thickets to the track, had offered to help her, but she had to be alone here with a clear, quiet mind. If her brother had done it then she could too. What was he thinking as he walked along here? Was he thinking of her? Of his girl? Of his family, dwindled down to so few? Or was his mind clear of noise, clear of any fear or guilt or sense of responsibility to anyone on earth?

  There was nothing beyond but a few shacks, and a store that was new since then. No reason to come out here that the sheriff could see. She remembered the local police saying something about students taking walks just for exercise, but while it was true her brother was always one for long walks to think his own thoughts and see what he could with his sharp, cunning eyes, there were other places back in town he could have chosen for walking. Was he walking just to tramp along in the direction of home, though home lay a hundred and fifty miles away, the crossties like an endless ladder one could lose oneself in climbing?

  If she could figure out this one thing, perhaps all the rest would make sense. If she could find out the reason and meaning behind one tragedy, all the others might open up to her like a curse lifting at last and the sun shining through sorrow …

  She’d come at this time knowing there was a morning train—she had to know what it felt like from right here. That was more important than anything in the world she could think of.

  Could he feel it coming?

  What she didn’t care to think about was what she wanted the answer to be. Of course she wanted there to be no vibrations, though that wouldn’t explain why he had not constantly looked around to see what was coming. She scanned along the edges of the track as if there might still be something of his, some last token—a handkerchief she might recognize, or a torn piece of his sleeve, some clue to what happened here. She could see that his foot couldn’t have gotten stuck in the rails. Did he have an enemy nobody knew about? She wished she had made this journey earlier, but so many things had gotten in the way …

  … The train was coming. She saw the signal flash at the road crossing far down the track, heard the bell clang before there was any hint of a train. She looked behind her. Nothing but empty track. She fought against the urge to get off. Another step into the gravel, and then up onto the next gummy crosstie. Then onto the gravel. Again, she looked around. Nothing. She kept going, straining her ears for the terror that was coming behind her as sure as the sun. It was coming but there was no sound. She was deaf to everything around her, even the bell that must be clanging again down the track—for she could see the red light flashing. Her mind was filled with a crashing sound, as if the mountains behind her were at last crumbling and rushing in waves to the sea.

  She heard her driver yelling before she heard the train. Then as if from a long-forgotten dream came a searing, urgent whistle, the high clang of bells, and finally a shuddering rumble. And still, as she turned now and stepped off the track and into the dusty weeds, the track was empty where it curved into the side of a hill and disappeared. She could have walked on a minute or two—surely there was time, if one wanted to get up to … She looked down both sides of the track trying to find some goal—a trail le
ading up the embankment, a landmark of some sort. But one side was too steep for easy walking and the other was even more dense with Queen Anne’s lace and pinwheel sumac trees. Maybe this had not been the exact place after all.

  And then it was upon her, the steam billowing from the smokestack. The bell clanged again, and the higher bell from the crossing down the track. Sixteen years ago there would’ve been no lights and bells at the road crossing. Nothing but the striped whistle post and, facing the road, a cross.

  She stood well away from the track, weeds over her ankles, catbrier clawing her hose. The train blared past, the freight cars flashing by with a terrible scissoring sound of steel on steel. A cloud of grit and soot was stirred up along the tracks, and Mary Bet pulled her silk shawl up to cover her face. There were fifty-two cars. Then, as the train rattled on down the track, she imagined the scene sixteen years ago. The train would’ve stopped just a little way beyond where she was standing, the engineer springing out and running back to see if there was any hope of saving the young man’s life. Then the call for medical help, and shortly thereafter a small crowd of onlookers and a carriage for an impromptu ambulance. By then, of course, if she remembered the story correctly, he was gone, and they would’ve all known it. She went back up the track to the little game path she’d followed from the car. “Let’s go up the road yonder,” she told her driver.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his white eyes and yellow teeth like screams in the dark burnt blackness of his face. She didn’t know many people as black as this man—maybe Morganton had a population of people from some place known for that … you couldn’t call it a color so much as a condition. Light on his skin, she imagined, would be swallowed up like snow falling into a pond.

  “I want to see what those houses are up there,” she said, looking at him for an answer. She retied her shawl around her neck. “What are they?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head, his hair cob-webbed with gray. He moistened his oddly thin purple lips and said, “They was a roadhouse yondah.” He stopped and stared off toward the shacks, as if waiting to be invited to continue.

  “What kind of roadhouse?”

  “Young folks’d come there to drink and dance and carry on. White and colored. Man got shot there one time.”

  “What for?” the sheriff asked, her face wrinkling up. Nosing out human folly and indiscretion was not something she enjoyed doing in her spare time, especially in another county.

  “A card game, they said. But probably they was a woman in it somewhere. Always is. I been in there. Then it burned, and they closed it down.”

  “Let’s go have a look,” she said. They got in the car and the driver headed back out toward the main road, which was the only way around to the side street where the shacks stood. He pulled up beneath a spreading oak, its yellowing leaves fluttering silently.

  “I don’t reckon it’s safe to go in there,” the driver said, opening the door. “Floor’s liable to collapse.”

  Mary Bet alighted and took a look at the roadhouse. There was a wide front porch, the ends of the planks nail-sprung and curled up, some of them. The windowsills unprotected from rain sagged, all the windows appeared broken, and strips of white paint hung like scales on the clapboard, with nothing but climbing vines to hold them. Old ruined things had never appealed to her. Death and decay she cared not to dwell on; you lived with them like you lived with the turning of the seasons from one year to the next. An owl hurrooed out in the woods.

  The sheriff turned to the driver and said, “Do you remember hearing about a deaf boy getting hit on the tracks along here? A young man from the deaf-and-dumb school?”

  The man’s eyes fixed her like beams of white light, then shifted to some point in the woods as he thought. “I’ve heard about more than one deaf person getting hit on these tracks. They can’t hear the train coming, and they still walk down there, risking life and limb, just to save time. They only save time getting to heaven.”

  “This was about sixteen years ago,” Mary Bet said. She studied the man. “You said you lived not far from here, so I was a-wondering.”

  “That’s right, I live a mile by the crow, next to Muleshoe Creek.” He gazed off in that direction, pulled at his navy blue necktie. “I think I do recollect a boy around nineteen and two. Because my daddy died in nineteen and one, just after that big storm that flooded the house. And somebody was killed up here after that, or before it, I disremember exactly.”

  The sheriff nodded and then headed up the overgrown path to the ruined roadhouse. There were flat places where flagstones had lain until, she guessed, being stolen. Given time, people would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. But there were still people she could trust to act like they ought to. Some people could be fooled by those closest to them, but not she. But if that was the case, then what was she doing out here by the railroad tracks in Morganton? If she understood her own people, her own beloved brother, why was she standing on this creaking porch that could cave in any second?

  THEY WENT TO Camp Coetquidan in Brittany for artillery training, working sixteen hours a day, except Sundays. It took two weeks for the actual guns to arrive, and it became a great joke among the men that the French field artillery had done wonders, considering they had no guns. Then a shipment of brand-new French seventy-fives arrived, slim and camouflaged, and the men were eager to fire them. They were as different from the American three-inchers as an English saddle from a Western, but the men were quick to learn. Their instructor, a brisk little man named Lieutenant Gallimon, praised them in the classroom and on the target range, trotting from one gun to the next.

  Then the horses came, 1,106 in all. But they didn’t seem as strong as American horses, and the rumor was that they could not withstand the work because they were pampered, living indoors and wearing fur robes and waterproof blankets. And as the summer wore on they began contracting pneumonia and dying by the score. What made it worse was the French slat-wagon, a heavy, cumbersome affair that was forever getting stuck in the mud. The men called them horse killers. But most of the other French equipment was good.

  There were French ration carts and water carts, but the rolling kitchens were American. Leon got to know these kitchens better than he knew his own house out in the country north of Williamsboro. He had four cooks, none of them from Haw, but all of them decent men, and he was pretty sure he could have the best detail in the regiment by inspiring his cooks to outperform the other seven batteries. He had a hundred and eighty-one mouths to feed and, at least for now, two rolling kitchens to do it with. So much of army life was about numbers and time, he had quickly realized, and if you could keep ahead of the numbers in the allotted time you could manage your job reasonably well. But Leon wanted to do more than just manage. Already the men were pleased to be back on American beef and bacon, beans, and bread with jam. They were even more pleased when Leon began going out on “chow details” into the surrounding villages, and returning with French bread, eggs, cheese, vin rouge and vin blanc, cognac, and sometimes even fresh vegetables.

  When the other batteries heard about it, they began sending out their own scouting parties, and it became quite a contest among outfits to see who could procure the finest provender.

  “You know you’re ruining our men,” Captain Pugh told Leon one day.

  “I know, Captain,” Leon said, smiling, “but they love it. And you never know what we’ll be eating tomorrow.” It became a favorite phrase, and then a guiding philosophy. Feed the men well whenever you can. “You can’t live on hard bread and corn willie.”

  His best cook was a man named Corn Koonce from up in the mountains. He had a terrible weakness for the vin rouge, but Leon forgave him because he’d figured out omelets and French soups. They would sit around after dinner smoking cigarettes and telling stories, and there was always a nervousness in the air and an excitement as well, as news trickled in from the western front. It seemed to Leon that the men most outspoken about their eage
rness to get there were the most afraid. But all of them, except a very few, wanted to hurry up with the training and keep pressing forward to whatever climax or disaster awaited, because nobody knew what it was and yet they all sensed that what they were most afraid of was their own unknown nature.

  They would belch and shout after a particularly good dinner, and then the guilt would set in when somebody wondered aloud what the men in the trenches were eating. Then, since they didn’t want to imagine the trenches in great detail, they’d talk about what they’d already done. “Tell us again what you told that preacher, Leon,” somebody would say.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Leon would reply.

  “Well, I do,” Captain Pugh said, the night before they entrained for northeastern France. “I was there, so I’ll tell it. We’d heard about this little country church out east of Durham, and some of the boys wanted to go there one Sunday. When we got there, Leon said it made him feel right at home because it was just like his own church. And the preacher, a Methodist preacher if I’m not mistaken, started going on about how the army was a den of corruption and how the young men who enlisted were blinded into false patriotism.”

  “They serve a false god,” Leon imitated. “They fight overseas so they can come back ruined in mind, body, and spirit.”

  “Go on and tell it, Leon,” the captain said. The men, a dozen or so, sitting on camp stools in the officers’ tent, smoking and drinking, urged him on as well.

  “No, you’re doing fine.”

  “So Leon sat there fidgeting and stewing, and I could tell something was the matter, because I was sitting just behind him. And then I reckon he couldn’t take it any longer, and he stands up and says, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Cockerel, but I have something to say about the army and I’d be happy for anybody who cares to hear me to stick around.’ Of course, everybody, including the preacher, stayed, and Sergeant Thomas here told them that he thought patriotism was no sin atall, that it was in fact close kin to religion itself.”