She laughed at herself, giddy already, and with a deep thirst starting that water would not reach, as though her throat were turned to lint. A fever in her could rise high and fast, and aspirin not stop it, she knew for a fact, it was the way she was made; her kids the same, her son deaf in his left ear ever after from a fever. But anyway she had to get to work; if it got worse later maybe she would go and ask for a healing. There was an outreach tonight at the Bypass Inn, they would all be there. She hadn’t heard of them lowering fevers by putting on hands but why couldn’t it do that. Supposed to cure cancer and insanity.
She remembered how her grandfather told her he had nearly died of a fever once as a babe, how they had wrapped him in a quilt and taken him up the mountain to a little cabin; and an old woman there had taken out a stone, a madstone she called it, and said it was taken from the belly of a deer. And she rubbed the madstone all over him and there: the fever passed.
She was a witch, her grandfather said. I seen her later and I struggled with her. I know.
“Bobby.”
“Yes darlin.”
“Bobby I’m hungry.”
“Okay hon.” After he went deaf he couldn’t ever talk right either; he said bobby and boon for mommy and moon. Odd that Bobby was her name anyway. She had never called her grandfather anything but Floyd after she was grown. Because she was no blood of his.
She went on working on her toes. Why it mattered she couldn’t say, her feet would be unseen within white sneakers all night. It did matter. She sat on the floor, resting her heel on a fat Mopar catalogue left behind by Lars when he departed; she put the filter of a cigarette butt between her big toe and the next toe. Then another filter between the next two toes, and the next two.
“Bobby.”
“Soon as Mommy’s done, sweetheart,” Bobby said to the boy, who lay on the coverless mattress that took up much of the floor. “Get you a cookie. But you gotta wait.”
She undid the long-handled brush of the little wine-red bottle and, tongue between her teeth, spread a careful first coat over the big toenail. So rich it always seemed to her, thicker than blood, gleaming on the brush with the shine that it promised to impart. She wished it would stay this way, so liquid and bright, never grow hard and dull.
This too always carried her back, by a straighter path, to when she was a kid. A bottle of cheap polish at the dime store in Bondieu cost a quarter or so. In July she’d catch fireflies in a fruit jar, and paint her broken and dirty nails with the thick paint, and before it was dry take out one of the green-glowing bugs (already fading in the jar) and press it onto the gummy nail, and then the next, and the next, and they would be trapped there; and she would go out into the night with them attached to her, and miraculously they would come alive again and brighten, turning on and off in patterns like electric bulbs in signs. Glow, glowbugs, glow. In the pines a million others turning on and off too. Hard part was cleaning them off her fingers. Smear of their glow-stuff on the oilcloth of the table, still greenish for a time.
Temperature going up. She moved her eyeballs in her head and felt the pain.
If she went in to the hospital they would probably send her home anyway but she didn’t want to call in sick, she had done that too often lately when she wasn’t sick and they knew she wasn’t sick: and besides, she was afraid of the long night that lay between her and dawn.
Bobby always signed up for nights at certain seasons of the year, times when she wanted to be awake all night; Christmas and the days after, the end of June and of October. Her grandpap had known the names of those nights, how to find them in the almanac; he located them just as much though by another, inward sense, and she had that one as he did. On those days she made sure it was her duty to get up from sleep as the sun faded from the sky, get in her car and head for work on the empty side of the road, her fellow humans filling the opposite side, rolling toward their dinners and their beds. She was comforted by the willed reversal of day and night, liked watching the hours of deep darkness, which should be passing unwitnessed, go by one by one on the big clocks while she and her colleagues busied themselves in the bright halls and artificial day. Safe, awake.
Sometimes, though, those nights came upon her unawares, only revealing themselves to be what they were when they had covered her, like nights of fever, what is this? What’s at my back? And when she was taken that way she did things that she couldn’t always remember afterward, or couldn’t always tell if she had done them or dreamed them.
So on this night she dressed and made up her face, clipped her ID badge to her smock, dropped her son off to the baby-sitter, with a sack of jelly sandwiches and cookies and the sucker that was forever in his mouth if nothing else was, and drove downtown toward Route 6 and the hospital.
Route 6 was one of the roads Kentucky families used to know, one of the ways they took coming out of the Cumberlands, where Bobby was born. Men from Pike and Floyd and Harlan and Clay counties headed north to Ohio to make tires and steel or to Detroit and Flint to build Chevies and Oldses, or west to the mills of Hammond and Gary and East Chicago. If they went east they followed the Little Sandy River up to the Ohio and across Pennsylvania on the turnpike, up through the Delaware Water Gap by Route 6 and on to the city of Conurbana, which had been a city of mills once, where firearms and bicycles and cardboard boxes were made, hospital hardware, candy, golf clubs, adhesives, children’s games with famous names the newcomers had never heard. She had used to dream of Route 6 long before she took it herself, pregnant and fleeing; dreamed of it, long, winding, leading out of the broken woods into the blue distance, a glitter of lights, unresolvable, at its end.
Actually that road, the old road, was now called 6A when it came close to Conurbana. Route 6 had become the new four-lane bypass around the city, carrying long-distance travellers in a wide disdainful curve around so that they need not become entangled in the shabby outskirts and warehouse districts. The new way had created a new strip, on a larger scale than the old one, lots where the new cars and not the used were sold, where the bright big signs of the national franchises were, and the windowless low concrete buildings like bunkers on wide landscaped lots, some of them factories where who was making what, others nightclubs or motels. Nabco. Tuff-hold. Pendaflex. Chilly Willies. Bypass Inn.
She only touched new 6 for a mile or two before returning to old 6A, following the way she had first gone to the hospital, the only way she knew; like a squirrel who knows only one way back to its hole, or a piglet to its momma, she had learned what she needed to know and just got quicker at it. On this night of fever she didn’t think about it, and found herself back on 6A, the dark unpopulated strip, unaware of the turns she had taken and for a moment unsure which way on it she was travelling, toward downtown or outward toward the scrabbly orchards and lumberyards. Before she could draw herself fully back down to this place and this night she saw the Tempest ahead, off the shoulder, canting a little downward toward the ditch.
It was there. It proceeded toward her (she rather toward it, but she felt motionless). A white Tempest, sleek as ice; its red ragtop up, as it had been. Her headlights swept it as she came upon it, it altered rapidly in their shifting light. It was there, there, though she had abandoned it in the mountains a hundred miles and more away: still there.
Then she was past it. She didn’t slow. She looked though in her rearview mirror, unable not to; and saw him, him too, beside the car, turning her way as though he could see—far behind her though he already was—right into her eyes by way of the little mirror she looked into. Eyes like the eyes they all had when they looked at her, asking or answering a question she did not know how to answer, never would; a question she herself was.
So I did get him, she thought. She looked ahead, at the road, then back at the mirror, but it had gone black, winked out like a light. By damn I did get him, and he’s dead.
Night sped around her. She wouldn’t stop or turn, no way she would.
She could remember it as though the heavy
gun had burned the flesh and the bones of her hand, and those burns hadn’t healed: how after she had ordered him out of the car, his own car, after she had slid over to the driver’s seat to take the wheel, after she had shifted to Drive, she had lifted the gun and, as though it had desired this of itself and made her do it, had flung her hand toward where he stood pleading by the road’s edge, and looking away had fired; and at the same moment pressed her foot down on the gas and leapt ahead, lights still unlit.
And when she fired she had hit him and killed him. Tony, no Tommy. Ted.
She hadn’t looked back then to see, she had thought she had probably hit him but she hadn’t been sure. She knew now. She had killed him and she didn’t even remember his right name, could not ask his forgiveness for that night, could not speak to his shade and say I was crazy, crazy, crazy, please in Jesus’s name forgive me.
For a long time she had believed that for the kind she was there was no forgiveness. She thought, at other times, that for the kind she was there was no sin. She thought that her kind went unmentioned in the Gospels, were not warned or welcomed there, that the Word was not spoken to her.
Floyd Shaftoe her grandpap had believed in the Word: had used to sit for hours in his chair with his parents’ big brown Bible in his lap as though reading it, his eyes often elsewhere. He had no truck with any church, though; no truck with his neighbors either, lived alone on his father’s old worn-out hill farm with just her and a succession of half-wild dogs that she believed he understood, or at least cared for, more than he ever did for her.
Her grandpap had known what kind she was. So he always said. For—he said—he was of a like though opposed or opposite kind. He had used to wonder aloud how it could have come to be that his granddaughter could have a share in that other life he also led, because (he told her, when she was too young to know what he was talking about but not too young to remember and ponder) she was no blood of his. The woman who was the mother of her mother was already carrying that girl-child when Floyd married her, and it wasn’t by him; he never did lie with her as husband to wife.
And yet surely there was a reason he had been drawn to her, a reason he had taken her in and given of himself to her for as long as she stayed.
Where was she, Bobby asked, this woman, her grandmother?
Dead. Had bad blood or some weakness. He had met her in a hunky town in Clay County, he told Bobby. She wasn’t bohunk herself. But that said nothing about who the father was of the child she carried, Bobby’s mother. Who grew up to be another like her, and had gone off to Detroit fast as she could go and there got herself with child—that was Bobby, yes Bobby was herself a woods-colt, a come-by-chance child. And she came back to Hogback just long enough to leave Bobby with Floyd. Floyd pretended to have never known the man’s name, or no longer to remember it.
So there was no knowing now what blood was in her.
You’re of that kind he’d say to her, when she flouted him, when she lied to him so brazenly he had to know, when she lay out all night in the pines and wouldn’t come when he called; and though he had legally adopted her, was her father therefore as well as her grandfather, though she slept in his bed until she was ten, she never believed he loved her: used to catch him now and then looking at her as though there was a deep enmity fixed between them, deeper than any commandment to love or honor could reach.
When she was twelve she left his house up on Hogback Mountain for good, and walked to Clay County in search of her mother, who maybe had people there. She never found her, but people took her in, as they always would, drawn somehow to help her, to melt the hard thing they saw in her pale eyes, the reserve in her tight-drawn mouth. They got little good of their kindness. That was her nature too—so her grandpap said—and she had been content to believe that then, though she was not content to believe it anymore.
There was a church being built up on a mountain there—foolish, people said, to build it so far from the valley and the folks who might come there; but the minister, who had preached in backyards and dwelling houses long enough, had a call to build it there, a real churchhouse. He was one who took her in. She helped him and his young wife: she minded the other young children while the woman, her stomach big, sewed curtains and cloths for the church on a pedal machine; she sang in it too when it was done and prayed and shouted with the others. And because he really had a true call, and because people heard about the call and came to see a man crazy or blessed enough to build a church where no people were, he filled his new church on Sundays and revival nights for a whole summer.
The preacher said she had a hungry for God, that’s why she had found her way to his church. She knew she had a hungry, but God would not satisfy it. In their daylong meetings and nightlong revivals, God was invited, awaited, solicited to appear among them or to send his power in, and in it came almost every time, manifested in someone, sometimes in many, the preacher laboring over each one, his shirt drenched in sweat, or himself slain in the spirit and falling to his knees to gabble and prophesy, tears flowing down his cheeks. She never. He worried over her, that she never got a blessing as others did, but she told him that to see others get a blessing—to catch them as they staggered, seized; keep them from falling into the hot stove or hitting their heads—that was a blessing too: and he said well yes it was. And pondered her.
Open your hearts, he cried to them in the church, where the velvet tapestry of Christ’s sharing at the Last Supper hung on the wall. Hearts, he cried, hearts is where God dwells in this world, the only place he can dwell. Open your hearts and let the power of God pass in and out. But her heart could only open to let things in; within that small secret box they disappeared. Nothing ever came out.
She never did get a blessing, but at that church-house, on the fullmoon night after she first found herself bleeding (stanch it with a warsh-rag, honey, the preacher’s wife told her, we’ll go down to the store tomorrow), she left her bed when all were asleep, and went out and up the track to the church-house. And she had not gone very far up that way before she saw that there were folks at the shut door waiting to go in. When she came closer she saw that she knew them: they were people of this church, a family that had recently gone all together in their truck off a gullied mountain road in the dark into the holler below and been killed, mother son and grandma. And she saw there was another woman there too, an old woman lately taken up in Christ, who looked at the child coming up the path, patient, curious, or perhaps wondering: has she come to unlock the door for us?
But she could not help them: she wanted to say so but could not, wanted to say something to their faces, strange patient asking faces like the faces in old tintypes shut up in their carved cases, dead faces, as these were. I can’t help you I can’t. And she knew (though she did not dare to turn her head to see) that others were coming up the path to the church behind her, a great number, she alone alive among them.
She couldn’t remember later on how she had returned to her own bed, where she found herself next morning. Probably she had taken the way she would later learn she must go: not back but farther forward into that land, until she came once again to her own door or window.
She asked the preacher: Where are the dead now? And he answered that they were in heaven if they had been saved, and in the other place if they had not been saved; and their bodies were in the earth, to be lifted up on the Last Day and made whole, to be joined again with their souls. He said he thought often about that meeting—about the soul’s long wait, none knew how long it would be, though surely it might not be much longer now; and the reunion with the newmade body, the joy. He studied her to see if he had answered the question she had asked him, and must have seen in her face that he had not; but she asked no more.
Four more times she saw them in that year, almost able to know before she lay down to sleep the nights on which she would walk out, but unable, when she was abroad and going up the trail toward the church or down toward the river, to remember what she was about, asking Why am I he
re, who’s called me, until she began to see them. She told no one; could not even bring herself to give news of those she saw to the ones they had left behind.
On the night of midsummer, shortest of the year, while the preacher and his wife coupled with suppressed cries in the next bedroom (preaching made him eager and loving in all ways, she had learned that) she lay long awake, afraid to sleep, knowing that if she did she would go down into that land; and when dark was deep she arose, packed her clothes silently in a sack, took from the tin box all the money that had been collected in the church that evening, and slipped barefoot from the house. She didn’t know where she would go. She had heard that up the mountain, far from towns and off the roads, there lived people whose gospel was more perfect even than the preacher’s with whom she had stayed. They had no church at all, only their own bodies, wherein they kept the truths they knew. It was told they ate no flesh; and when they decided that their time here below was done, they ceased to eat at all, until they died. She thought about them as she stood in the darkness at the end of the path, and it was as though she could see them and hear their voices. It could be that she ought now to go and see if she could find them, and ask them about herself, learn whether in their more perfect gospel she was known about; or prove to herself that after all they didn’t exist.
She had to have something to do. From where she stood, where the path met the road, she could go up, or she could go back down, toward the valley of the No Name River, to her father’s house: she could ask him too, where the dead were, whether the more-perfects were real and could be found. Mock him if he didn’t know. She was walking down along the road, though not having actually decided, when dawn came. A car pulled up alongside her. It was a sedan whose back end had been cut away to make a truck bed, and in it was a refrigerator, tied down with straw rope. She wondered why it is that people cart refrigerators around the world so much, and the thought made her laugh just as the driver (a lean lined man, but not old, with a cigarette burned down almost to his fingers) looked out at her. He slowed, and kept on looking out at her, and kept pace beside her for a long ways, until she stopped; then so did he.