Taking Lottie Home

  Across the aisle, he saw a man and a woman and a girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Farm people, Ben thought. They wore washed-thin Sunday clothing, with an after-rain scent of lye soap that was suspended faintly in the train car. The man and woman sat statue-erect, motionless, a glazed expression in their unblinking eyes. Ben knew it was the first time they had been on a train. Could tell by the way they sat, by the way they did not seem to breathe, as though the great speed of the train had siphoned the air from their lungs. The girl was not afraid. She wiggled restlessly in her seat and gazed in wonder at the illusion of the moving countryside.

  He thought of Lottie.

  So long ago.

  So long ago.

  The girl in the aisle across from him laughed sharply, suddenly, her face glowing. Her head turned against the motion of the train, and she watched wide-eyed as something remarkable, or humorous, disappeared from sight. Her parents did not move.

  There would be a thirty-minute stop at the Athens depot for adding freight, the conductor announced. It was all right to get off the train, he conceded, but anybody wandering too far away would be left if he didn’t pay attention to the time.

  Ben saw the man and woman across from him glance at one another in confusion.

  “Let’s get off,” the girl said.

  “We’re not there yet,” the man said gruffly. “Best to stay put to we get there.”

  “Where you headed?” Ben asked.

  The man looked at him suspiciously.

  “I’m going up into Kentucky,” Ben said.

  “We going as far as Chattanooga,” the man answered. Ben recognized the faint trace of an accent—German, he thought.

  “That’s a pretty long way to go,” Ben replied. “Where’d you get on?”

  “Down to Augusta,” the man said. “We come from down near there.”

  Ben stood. “Well, I think I’ll stretch my legs a minute. Don’t like getting too cramped on one of these things. Makes it feel a little funny trying to walk on the ground again, after you been on a train a long time. A little like having sea legs.” He tipped his fingers to his hat and left the train.

  There were many people in the Athens depot. Passengers and well-wishers, businessmen, train workers. The noise of voices rode over the hiss of steam. A small commissary sold coffee and cakes, and Ben pressed himself in the line of buyers, bought a coffee and a cake, and found an out-of-the-way place to have his refreshments and still be close to the train.

  The talk around him was lively.

  Spirited debate over the vote to ratify a federal income tax.

  Men in awe of Barney Oldfield driving a Blitzen Benz more than one hundred and thirty miles an hour at Daytona Beach.

  Matching stories about seeing the rooster tail of Halley’s Comet.

  Declarations of surprise over the recent parade in Athens by the Colored Knights of Pythias, a spectacle unlike anything ever witnessed by the city’s citizenry.

  Laughs spewing up from a knot of men talking in whispers, and Ben knowing that a traveling salesman’s joke had been told.

  It was talk that Ben never heard in Jericho. In Jericho—especially in Ledford’s Dry Goods—conversations were guarded, and as repetitious as a parrot’s jabbering.

  He saw the man and woman and young girl exit the train. The man stepped tentatively onto the platform, stood for a moment, tested the weight of his body on the wood flooring, then took a careful, comical step, his face furrowed in worry. Ben smiled. He knew he had frightened the man into believing it would be impossible to walk on firm ground after riding in a train. He turned his face. He did not want the man to see him, to see the smile. It would be embarrassing to the man.

  On the wall of the depot, Ben saw a poster promoting the reelection of Martin Wade to the state senate. The pen-and-ink drawing of Martin Wade showed the face of a darkly serious man, a brooding man. His mother had said to Ben, “If the train stops long enough in Athens, you should try to see Martin and Christine Wade, or call them on their telephone. Maybe they could tell you how to get in touch with Milo in Boston.”

  Ben did not want to see the Wades, or to talk with them.

  The Wades were like occasional memories—distant and vague. Ben had always been uncomfortable in their presence, and from the pieced-together gossip that had wandered into Ledford’s Dry Goods over the past six years, Martin Wade had changed since being elected a state senator. “I could have told you,” the people said as they accused Martin Wade of an arrogance that many people in Jericho had always suspected. Or said they had. Ben had learned from working in Ledford’s that many people had the gift of knowing when the knowing was obvious and safe enough to say aloud.

  He heard the call for the train.

  The man and the woman and the young girl rushed back across the platform of the depot, the man pushing the woman and the girl in front of him like someone guiding a cart or a wheelbarrow.

  Ben smiled again. He liked the man and the woman and the girl. They were not arrogant. They were merely going to Chattanooga, Tennessee, probably on a mission that involved family. A simple trip, yet it would be one of the most unforgettable experiences of their lives.

  It was like the trip he had taken from Augusta, on the night that he met Lottie Barton.

  Ben stepped into the train, found his seat, nodded to the man. The man returned the nod, then set himself rigid, waiting for the train to move.

  Between Athens and Atlanta, Ben wrote two letters—one to his mother, one to Sally. Both warned that, once in Boston, he might find himself too busy to write. In the letter to his mother, he told of the man and the woman and the young girl. In the letter to Sally, he confessed that he missed her and that he believed they needed to do some serious planning for the future when he returned to Jericho.

  I’m almost tempted to get off in Atlanta and catch the next train home, he wrote. He added, But I’ve come this far and I guess I need to go the rest of the way, so I’ll just mail this letter instead.

  He did not tell her the rest of the way was no farther than ten miles across the state line dividing Tennessee and Kentucky.

  TEN

  BEIMER, KENTUCKY, WAS in a wide, cleared-out valley between two mountain ranges. A narrow, quick-rushing stream called Long Rock River cut in wiggles through the middle of the valley. The railroad followed the riverbed, though not in wiggles. Seen from the window of the train, the water of Long Rock River ran silver over gray and had the look of water cold as dripping ice. Years later, when he told of first seeing the river, Ben would vow he could see foot-long fish leaping up and over the water’s spew, their flesh-colored bodies flashing like shooting stars. It was a tale doubted by those who heard it.

  Beimer, itself, was not a town. It was a place, a train stop. It had a small depot, a water tank, and a one-room store that was located across a wide dirt road from the depot.

  The store did not have a posted name.

  “Don’t need one,” said the man who sat on an empty nail keg near the front door of the store. “Only store around here, almost to Bowling Green, I reckon. Everybody just calls it the store.”

  “Just wondered,” Ben said. “Didn’t see a sign.”

  The man was lanky and thin, his shoulders narrow and up-pointed, like a buzzard’s wings when the buzzard is on the ground. He wore overalls and a dingy cloth shirt buttoned at his throat and work shoes with dry, cracked soles. A felt hat was pulled oddly low on his head, touching his ears. His hair was dark and long. A beard grew wild over his face, but could not cover the wrinkles that eroded his cheeks. Thick eyebrows nested over his eyes. He had a smile that seemed friendly enough. No teeth. None up front, at least. To Ben, he favored a caricature of Abraham Lincoln.

  “Don’t see many folks getting off the train here,” the man said. He laughed a quaint, giggly laugh. “You the first this whole year, I reckon. Old man Clifford Cooley’s boy come last Christmas. Come all the way from Atlanta, by God. Him and his wife and kids. Three of them. Boys, I r
eckon. They was so blame covered up against the cold, I was hard up to tell. By God, they didn’t stay no longer than they had to. Couple of days later, they was back on that train, going back to Atlanta. Reckon they’d had all they wanted off old man Cooley.”

  The man again laughed his giggly laugh and covered his toothless grin with the back of one hand. He added, “Old man Cooley’s not got the sense God put in a pile of dried-up cow shit.”

  Ben acknowledged the man’s description of Clifford Cooley with an accommodating nod.

  “You got folks up here?” asked the man.

  “No sir,” Ben said.

  “Who you be?” The question was easy, not threatening.

  “My name’s Ben Phelps, sir,” Ben told him. “I’m from down east of Atlanta.”

  “Well, God-o-mighty,” the man whispered in awe. “That’s a piece away. Yes, it is. A piece away.” He extended his hand to Ben. “Name’s Henry Quick. My daddy was Gurney Quick. I run this store.”

  “Yes sir, I guessed so,” Ben said.

  “Who you up here to see, Ben Phelps?” Henry asked.

  “I’m looking for Foster Lanier,” Ben answered.

  Henry Quick’s head jerked up in surprise. His small, nut-colored eyes fanned open. “Well, by God,” he exclaimed. “Foster. By God. Foster. You not one of them baseball fellows, are you?”

  “Sir?”

  “One of them baseball fellows, come to try to get Foster to play some more,” Henry said. “Foster’s not got but one leg. Can’t hardly walk no more, even with them crutches he got for hisself. Used to be, they was baseball fellows in here all the time, looking for him, not knowing he’s not got but one leg.”

  “No sir,” Ben said. “I’m not looking for him to play ball. We’re just friends. We used to play ball together.”

  The news excited Henry Quick. “Well, by God. That right? Me and Foster played some when we was just young’uns. I wadn’t much, but Foster, he was something to behold, I tell you.” He looked at Ben with admiration. “And you played with him? Don’t look like you old enough.”

  “Last year he played,” Ben said. “It wadn’t for long. Just a few weeks.”

  “By God,” Henry said again. “What you come to see him about?”

  “He sent me a letter,” Ben replied. “Just thought I’d pay him a call.”

  Henry wagged his head gravely. He said, “Foster’s not doing too good.” He looked at Ben. “You know his woman?”

  “Lottie?” Ben said. “Yes sir, I’ve met her.”

  “She sure is a pretty thing.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “She comes in sometimes when they need something. Brings her boy in with her. They got a old buggy and a horse that’s not fit to feed.”

  “She been in lately?” asked Ben.

  Henry cocked his head in thought, stroked the beard that dangled below his chin. “Can’t say that I seen her in a week or two. But it’s a pretty good way up to their place. Two, three mile, I reckon. Maybe more.”

  “You guess you could tell me how to get there?” Ben said.

  “Guess so,” Henry answered. “Not hard to find.” He pointed south. “You go on down the road there for about a half mile, down to where they’s a little knoll covered up with rocks about the size of a shoe box. My daddy used to say it was where some Indians was buried, but nobody ever dug up no bones that I know about.”

  Henry laughed, rocked back on the nail keg. “Anyways, they’s a little wagon-track road going up in the hills. You follow that, you gone come to where Foster lives. Got him a little log cabin up there. Pretty sight. Reckon it’s pretty as any place you’ll find around here. Used to be, leastways. Not been up there in close to a year, myself. Me’n some others that live hereabout went up there and cut up a stack of stovewood, and I guess we’ll be going back before too much longer, before winter sets in. All that land back up there used to belong to the Laniers. Foster’s sold off some of it, I hear, and I expect that’s right. Don’t know how they’d make out otherwise.”

  Ben shifted his suitcase in his hand and glanced inside the store. “You think of anything they might be needing, since I’m going up there?”

  Henry’s laugh turned to a cackle. He stood, unfolding a body that was well over six feet tall. His head seemed to bob between his up-pointed shoulders.

  “Can’t carry much if you walking around with that valise,” Henry advised, “but I’d guess they could use some chicory coffee, and, knowing Foster, he’d be happy over a bottle of good makings.”

  “You got some?” Ben asked.

  Henry cackled again. Cackled like a man who has been told a new and surprising joke. “Son, you in Kentucky,” he said.

  FINDING THE KNOLL covered in shoe-box-size rock was easy. The tale of an Indian burial ground was most likely true, Ben reasoned. He had read of such rituals from stories of archaeologists—how Indians, for some reason no one really understood, made little mountains for burial grounds. Carried the dirt, handful by handful, or vessel by vessel, from one place to another, tamping it down to make it look like just another hill. Yet, if you dug into those hills you would find pottery and arrowheads and tomahawks and clay dolls and beads. Anything Indians used. And bones. You would find bones of Indians dead hundreds of years. It awed Ben that archaeologists could take a bone fragment and say that it was the remains of a warrior or an old woman or a baby. And from his reading, it seemed to Ben that what the archaeologists really wanted to find was the burying place of a chief. A chief’s grave would be so full of treasure they would have to dig it out with their fingertips, or with spoons, or with brushes.

  He would have enjoyed being an archaeologist, Ben thought. Finding things that had been buried for hundreds of years. Bones and beads and flint knives and maybe gold bracelets or onyx and amethyst stones washed up from the creek beds. Sweeping the dirt off the grave of an Indian chief had to be better than sweeping the dirt from the floor of Ledford’s Dry Goods.

  The wagon-track road was grass-and-weed-covered. Not often traveled by anyone other than Lottie driving the buggy, Ben guessed. The road had the look of trying to disappear, or to heal itself of the wounds of travel from years back. Only the thin, hard-packed tracks of the buggy’s wheels left marks.

  Watch for snakes, Ben thought. Timber rattlers probably. He had never been to the Kentucky mountains, but the look of the land in the long-shadow hour of the day made him think of timber rattlers. Maybe hiding in the ruts of buggy tracks, colored like the dirt, like leaf rot.

  The train from Chattanooga had been delayed five hours. A late-afternoon wind blew across the valley and skated up the green-needled backs of hemlock and pine and red cedar, a racing, yowling, playing wind, and the feel of it and the sound of it pushed a chill through Ben’s body. Must get cold in the mountains at night, he thought. Even in summer, it must get cold.

  He stopped his walk beside a stream that nudged close to the road, its water lashing at an outcropping of gray, flat rock wedged solidly into the creek bank. He judged that he was better than halfway up the wagon road from the Indian mound. If Henry Quick had the wits to run a store, he would not be too far off on his estimate about the distance to Foster’s home. Another mile should do it, Ben reasoned. Soon, he hoped. The climb had taken energy, and he could feel an ache in his chest and a tenderness in his throat, and he wondered if the summer cold he had had a few weeks earlier was making a return.

  He cupped water from the creek in the palm of his hand and drank from it. The water was cold and tasted of moss and, curiously, cinnamon. Whiskey-making water, Foster would call it. Ben wondered if the jar of whiskey that he carried with him, the jar bought from Henry Quick, had been made from the same water, and if it tasted of moss and cinnamon.

  A crow cawed from the top of a pine. Another answered from nearby, hidden by limbs.

  Ben inhaled slowly, taking the air deep into his lungs. Clean. Cool. Not thick with humidity. A scent of woodsmoke, he thought. Maybe from Foster’s cabin. Or maybe i
t was not woodsmoke, but the scent of the woods damp with water from rain or from seepage puddling into shallow pockets of springs. Still, he was close to the cabin. He could sense it.

  THE CABIN WAS in a clearing on a shoulder of land that bulged up from the road and curved into the side of the mountain. A stand of hemlock, large at the base, sky-tall, surrounded the cabin at the edge of the clearing.

  From the road, with the sun’s slant crossing its roof in a bright ribbon through the dense trees, Ben thought the cabin looked like a painting he had seen on the cover of a magazine. A string of smoke rose from a chimney, waved ghostly in the air—smoke arms and smoke legs swimming out of the string—and Ben believed it was the woodsmoke he had smelled, or thought he had smelled. Smoke arms and smoke legs slithering over the mountains, becoming invisible, leaving only their scent.

  A small barn was behind the house, a rail fence disappearing into the woods, into a growth of rhododendron and sassafras. The fence was draped with bushes of climbing red roses, heavy-flowered, their petals the color of blood. A horse, back-bowed, thin, a scabbed coat, stood listlessly near the fence.

  Ben slowed his walk. He had risked his job because Foster had summoned him, and now, on the yard road to the cabin where Foster lived, Ben was unsure he had made the right decision. Foster and Lottie shared part of his life that he could never share with his mother, or with Sally, or with anyone. They knew the secret of his hit against Baby Cotwell. They knew of his night in the tent with Lottie. They knew of his weakness and his shame. Maybe he had been wrong in answering Lottie’s letter.

  He was at the cabin. It was too late to turn back, to undo what he had done.

  The door to the cabin opened and Lottie stepped onto the porch. She had not changed, Ben thought. Thinner, perhaps, but still girl-pretty. A small boy moved like a shadow from the cabin and ducked behind her, clutching to the dull cotton dress she wore. The boy had a wreath of blond hair.

  “Hello, Ben Phelps,” Lottie said softly. She smiled. A smile of gladness, of relief.