Heading Out to Wonderful

  “Out! Out at first!” Sam yelled, and threw the ball over his head, so high he could barely see it, and felt the wonder as Charlie ran forward and caught the falling ball, catching Sam up in his arms at the same time, swinging him around, racing for home, a graceful, continuing motion that landed Sam in the truck, the ball in his mitt in his lap, and Jackie beside him, the truck gunning to life, a Lucky lit, the radio back on, country songs now, the high twang of the mountains, the lonely fiddle and chattering banjo.

  On the road, Charlie drove faster than ever, until they rounded the corner and there was her house, and she was still on the porch, and even Sam could tell from her face that she was sad, like her dog had just been run over. A flowered housecoat was open at the knees, her feet bare even in December, barely twenty-one years old and alone in her grief, but Charlie drove on past, looking, swiveling his head, drove about fifty yards past the house, then slammed on the brakes, throwing the boy and the dog against the dash, the ball rolling onto the floor. He stopped and backed up as fast as he had gone by, and then he just sat and the two of them, Charlie and Sylvan, just stared at each other for a minute.

  Then Charlie threw his Lucky Strike out the open window, and turned to Sam. “I’ll be back in a minute. There’s something I have to do. Be a good boy, Sam. Take care of Jackie.” He touched the boy on the head, and looked in his eyes, and kissed him for only the second time, this time on his head. He tousled the boy’s hair and then he was out of the truck and through the gate and up the hill, roaring her name, walking fast, head down. He had one hand up, but Sam couldn’t tell whether he was waving hello to the woman whose name he called out or good-bye to him. Charlie and Sylvan met, and stood staring at each other without a word, then she abruptly turned and he followed her into the house.

  On the radio, Doc Watson was singing, “Go with me little Omie, and away we will go, we’ll go and get married and no one will know.” Then Sam heard the first noise, her scream, the first of seven that afternoon, and he got out of the truck, Jackie at his heels, and he ran up to the yard, and stood in front of the house, and listened, trying to tell where the noises came from, first downstairs, then upstairs. They were terrible noises, Charlie bellowing, Sylvan’s screams punctuating the roar, the clatter of breaking dishes and chairs, everything upside down.

  Hadn’t they been singing just a minute before, Charlie and Sam? Hadn’t Charlie swiveled in the air like a boy, and kissed him on his head where his hair still felt warm?

  These were not the noises they usually made. Sam was frightened, and thought of climbing the porch steps and looking through the window, but he was too afraid. Whatever was happening was only between the two of them, and he didn’t want to see it, was frightened to know what it was.

  They were in the attic now, he could tell from the noise, and everything was ripping and turning over and breaking. And then it was quiet for about ten minutes, not a sound, then back down the stairs with more noise, and Sam backed away, backed away from what he knew was coming toward him, seeking air, a witness, and he didn’t want to be a witness, didn’t want to know what had been happening. He usually did, he usually did want to know what happened, to know what things meant, their secret reason for being, but this thing he wanted to back away from and not have the knowing, not have the memory that would be in his head forever. Then there was another long period of silence, another ten, fifteen minutes, no sound except Charlie barking short, blunt orders, and those were even more frightening.

  But it started again, the screams, her name bellowed, the name Charlie hadn’t said once since that day, not even spoken to her except that once, in court, and that so low that it couldn’t be heard—but it was, by the twins, they heard and they told.

  Then Sylvan came out of the door, and Sam knew what it was.

  Sylvan came out of the door, and across her chest like a constellation of red stars were seven stab wounds, blood everywhere, seeping and spurting, a savage show of blood across the gaudy flowers of her country housedress and then she fell dead, her last scream ending in a lowing, keening sigh that came only at the end, as she fell on her face, down the steps, sliding, bouncing until she lay dead, half on the steps, her face in the yard, the blood flowing downhill to drip from the stairs and pool in the yard around her face, Charlie following after, the knife in one hand, bloodied, in the other a manila envelope, also crimson, everything red and slick with blood.

  Charlie stepped over Sylvan’s body, looking down, seeing what he had done, making Sam afraid for a minute that he was going to bend over and carve her up. But he straightened and howled one last time, a howl of grief at the ending of things, of everything, then he just looked and walked to where Sam stood, crying now. “Beebo. Beebo,” the boy said, almost in a whisper, a pleading for it to stop, for it not to have happened, because he understood what had happened, didn’t even have to be grown to be familiar with the sharp steel smell of dying.

  Charlie stood above the boy, the boy he had brought back from the dead, and he dropped the envelope on the ground and reached out to place his hand on the boy’s head.

  His hand is covered with blood, and now there is blood in the boy’s hair as well, and there are scratches on Charlie’s face, and there is fear in Charlie’s eyes, the fear of the animal in the second before the trigger is pulled, before the buckling of the knees, the toppling, the meat of his beautiful body going rotten with the fear, but in Charlie’s eyes, it is not there for a second, it is there for an eternity, bright, his eyes filmed with blood and tears as he looks out of the vast sea of blood and regret into which he has launched himself, and the envelope lies on the ground, and the knife in Charlie’s hand is slick with blood, the crimson sheen on steel. Charlie touches the boy’s face, and hair, and speaks in a voice that he has used once before, in the courtroom where he pleaded for mercy from a woman who had betrayed him, and he speaks and he says, “Remember this, Sam. Remember. Take up that envelope and don’t lose it ever. It’s yours. It’s what I’m giving to you for your birthday every year for years and years. Try to be a good boy. Please don’t forget me,” as though Sam would or ever could anyway. And then Charlie lifts his head and he looks at the late afternoon sky, and now it’s time for services for the dead war dead in town, and the bells start to toll, one bell for each soul lost, and Charlie puts his hand beneath his own chin and stretches his neck back and takes the knife and slits his throat cleanly and deftly and deeply from ear to ear, and the bells are tolling and the radio in the truck is still playing, “Go down go down you Knoxville girl with the dark and roving eye,” and the bells are ringing and the bombs eight years before are raining down again on the innocent boys and his mother and father are kneeling on the bench now, far away, not here to tell him what to do, far away in prayer but, if he had known, both thinking of him, of their own child engulfed in Japanese flames, and Charlie falls almost immediately, his head just barely still attached to his neck, and he falls on the boy, the weight and smell of him, the blood, the laundry soap of his shirt, sprayed now with the blood from his neck, the boy sprayed, too, and trapped under the weight of Charlie’s body and the gush of his blood, until he can wiggle free, until he can stand, Jackie already nosing in the blood of the man who had fed him all those mornings and evenings, Jackie skittish, knowing something is wrong, and looking to the boy for guidance, for a command, and then the boy says, “Get, Jackie,” screams it, “Get. Away!” and Jackie backs off, looking up at Sam with those eyes, those eyes that say what, What is happening, what am I to do?

  Sam snatches up the envelope and runs, the truck still idling in the road, useless because he doesn’t know how to drive, his feet don’t even touch the pedals, and so he runs along the road, a mile from town, a long way for a boy, followed by the dog whose nose is dipped in the blood of his master, “Go down go down you Knoxville girl,” and Sam knows a shortcut, and so he takes it, the envelope clutched to his heart sticky with Charlie’s blood, his present, Charlie had said, but he doesn’t know what it i
s, just that he is not to lose it and he is to remember, not even to tell maybe but to remember, and what is he to do with one more secret?, knowing that he will tell because he has to, because he doesn’t understand and somebody is going to have to explain it to him.

  Sam is running now off the road and into the woods, which are filled with autumn’s thicket, and he loses a shoe in the brambles, but he runs on anyway, scratched by blackberry and raspberry and scrub pine. He is crying, truly scared, but racing toward the only place he knows and the only people who will take him in, Jackie at his heels.

  The bells aren’t ringing any more when they reach the town and Sam races home and sits on his own porch. He is howling hysterically and his legs are covered with cuts and scratches and his face, too, and there is blood in his hair, and when his mother sees him, hears him and then sees him, she thinks that an accident has happened, that the truck lies mangled somewhere in a ditch with Charlie and beef strewn over the road and Sam can’t speak, can’t tell where it hurts or what happened, can only howl, the dog howling, now, too, and the neighbors gathering at the end of the walk, their own prayers put away for the night, and where is his baseball mitt that Charlie gave him for his birthday and his mother is asking where it hurts, feeling his thin arms and legs to see if anything is broken, asking if there was an accident, and Sam shaking his head no, no, no again, no nothing had happened but Charlie is hurt, he is hurt real bad, and they wouldn’t have believed him except that there is no Charlie and there is blood everywhere on the boy, and something, something must have happened, and so they get in the car, and Sam, howling, points the way, the headlights on now, until they come to Charlie’s truck in front of her house, the radio still playing in the idling truck, and they see it for themselves, the young girl, the handsome man, face down and dead, and then it is official, the only crime that ever happened in Brownsburg, Virginia is over, is done, the ballad ended, the string broken, the last note played. Yes, yes, yes, Jackie’s real gone. Jackie is a real gone guy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  IT TOOK FOUR hours to bury him. In the end, there was only the brother to do it. The preachers had railed about sin and hellfire, and said that anybody who touched or went near Charlie Beale’s body would go to hell as surely as he was bound there. Will would have helped, he offered, but, at the last, the brother knew that it was something he had to do alone, was something that he had, without knowing it, come all this way to get done.

  Sylvan had been swept up at once, headlights ringing her dead body with men in uniform circling in the dark, while Boaty Glass sat on his porch, mute and unmoving, watching as the dead body of his wife was first examined by the coroner and then carted off to Kenneth Harrison’s to be made ready for the funeral. When the coroner told him that Sylvan was pregnant when she died, not a muscle in his face twitched. He figured he knew whose child it was, figured everybody knew as well, but he just didn’t care any more.

  He was going to bury her in some old housecoat he found in the closet, but then that nigger woman showed up with some getup she’d made for her, never worn. It was ludicrous, but it might as well be that as anything else. But no shoes. She might as well go out of this world like the barefooted hillbilly she was, he figured.

  Boaty wanted her buried the next day, no viewing of her body, mangled anyway, her face bruised from the fall on the stairs, and he wanted her shut in the ground and out of his life by nightfall the next day. He wanted her put down in the town cemetery, but nowhere near his family, and since her own people were not buried there—god, where were they buried?, some field out in Arnold’s Valley somewhere—she was to be put off to the side, alone, to spend eternity apart, away from her betters. He didn’t go down there in the dark to pick a spot. He just didn’t care.

  He didn’t intend to hang around her grave anyway, ever, so it didn’t matter to him. Any free spot would do.

  Charlie’s body, they left out all night. First frost. Not even anybody to watch over him, who was there? Alma, in bed, grieving; Will, sitting by his boy Sam, who was mad with night terrors, Will saying what he could, doing what he could think of, but nothing worked, the terrors wouldn’t be ameliorated by touch or word or prayer; Jackie, jumping at every sound, the scent of blood still in his nostrils; the whole town, worked up, sad but somehow thrilled, touched with the enormity of the tragedy that had happened right there in their own backyard; Ned, drunk and weeping as he would weep for pretty much the rest of his life. Even the coroner wouldn’t touch him. Defiled, the ministers said. Damned.

  The preachers reminded their flocks in hastily called prayer meetings that Sylvan was murdered and, in the eyes of God, an innocent victim, and so she could be buried in sacred ground. Charlie was both a murderer and a suicide, two things that made him both damned to hell and inadmissible in the town cemetery. No, he wouldn’t be buried with the holy and the heaven-bound, and no faithful person would touch him without risking following him to the fire. The women believed, and the men at least listened, and did as they were told.

  So there was only Ned, and nobody was sure except him that he could do it by himself. Some things you just know how to do, even if you don’t know you know it. How to bury your own flesh and blood is one of those things. And Ned was a carpenter, so he knew it not just in his heart but to the board foot and the last nail.

  He went down to the lumberyard and ordered what he was going to need. Charlie Austin got it all together and just gave it to him, free, no charge, at least he could do that, no threat of hellfire in giving away some of his stock to this helpless boy whose grief was like an anvil dragging him down. The boy drove back to the house and got the only suit Charlie owned, the one he’d worn in court. He got it out of the armoire Alma had picked out at a country estate sale the year before, when everything was just starting, before anything really had begun, when everything was empty rooms and full hearts and bright hopes and a limitless future, and he pulled out the black tie, the only one, and he wrapped these things in a clean quilt from the bed and got back into the truck and didn’t remember until halfway out there that there were some good shoes, too, and there should have been socks, and maybe even some underwear, this was what his own brother was going to wear until time ran out, but he wasn’t going to go back, not now, not until it was done. He drove up to the house and got out to unlatch the gate and bounced the truck over the cowcatcher, then got out to latch the gate again, carefully—even though Boaty hadn’t kept cattle for years, there was nothing to get out, get away—and that done, he was alone with it, ready and not ready for the task and the grief that confronted him now, naked in the face in the cold late morning.

  And it staggered him, buckled his knees to the ground, wracked him with the sobs of a child. Things you cannot bear are borne; the breath comes into your body on its own. Things don’t stop. They just don’t.

  First he built some sawhorses, then he started to measure and cut the boards. He warmed up in the sawing, and he took off his jacket and worked in his shirtsleeves. Last night’s liquor began to run from his skin, mixed with the tears that wouldn’t stop coming. He built a plain pine box, bigger than his brother’s body, because in his mind his brother was bigger than he was in life, and he stopped when he heard the bells start to ring, signaling the start of that other funeral, and he could picture it, just for a minute, the dutiful town dutifully lining up to pay their respects, not even so much to her as to Boaty, to Harrison Boatwright Glass, the preacher saying what Boaty told him to say and nobody believed, the men imagining the coupling of the two of them even in death, the women trying to picture, inside the box, the dress they’d heard about; the men had told them, when they came back in the dark to supper, about the dress that Claudie had held in her hands, the dress that Sylvan Glass would wear, barefoot, when she got to the gates of Heaven.

  As the boards came together, the beat of hammer on nail, the procession moved from the church to the cemetery, Boaty walking alone, behind the hearse, and in the graveyard, the words were said, an
d Sylvan Glass, aged twenty-one, went into the ground forever.

  When the box was built, Ned stripped his brother naked and tried to wash him as best he could with water drawn from the spring in an old bucket he found there, with bits of an old blanket he found in the back of the truck. Even he could see the beauty of that body, the grace, the correctness of the way everything met everything else. He washed the body, and there was nothing gentle about it, not even the sounds of the brother weeping, not even the silence of death in the body of Charlie Beale, not even that—even in that there was a roughness and rage at the doing of things that were not wished but had to be done anyway—and the brother then dried him off with the blanket, and dressed him awkwardly in the shirt and suit, and tried to tie the tie around his neck, but the tears would not stop, they would not stop, and so he gave up, and wrapped the black wool tie around the slash of his brother’s throat, hoping it would be all right. His body was wracked with sobs for the man he barely knew except in his blood, but loved because of that. He cried for what they might have been to one another, for things that were not able to be saved, not any more, for crimes of his own that his brother didn’t even know about, for the crimes of his brother that were already famous and would not die with him.

  He hoisted his brother by the shoulders, the heavy suit, the light but still body of the man, the bare feet, and he tried to get him in the box straight, and then he realized that his brother’s eyes were still open and he tried, but they would not close, and he had no pennies, and so, as he nailed the boards above him one by one, Charlie Beale would stare into the approaching darkness with the same look of startled fear, the fear of the animal before the trigger is pulled, forever and ever amen.

  The sun was getting long over the mountains to the west, and he dragged the box to the truck and he somehow got it into the flatbed, and he drove to town, and as he drove through it, the people of the town, home from the funeral of a woman they had not loved, shut their curtains and their blinds and their shutters on the body of a man they had loved, lest the spirit come into their house and dwell among them, still living, still asking in its gentle way for their forgiveness, which they could give, but not now, not tonight, could not under orders from the men in the pulpits.