Alma rolled down her window as they eased by. Cold winter air shot into the cab, and along with it the loud, powerful voice of a woman singing “Wayfaring Stranger.” Clay couldn’t count the times he had heard Easter sing this same song, and in the same lonesome, mesmerizing way. Many times when he hadn’t gone to church, he had sat in the creek across from Free Creek Pentecostal just to hear her sing. It seemed as if every church he knew of let voices creep through their walls and spread outside.
“Let’s pull in there,” she said. “Do you care to?”
He backed up and pulled into the church. There was nowhere to park, so he just rolled right up to the porch, blocking cars in. Nobody would be out for a while, anyway.
Alma scooted across the seat and put her arm through his. She spread his coat out over her lap and sat as close to him as she could. Clay left the truck idling so that the heater would pump out its steady stream, but the January air slid into the car and settled on their faces. They sat very quietly and listened to the woman sing.
I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger
traveling through this world of woe.
There’ll be no sickness, toil, or danger
in that bright land to which I go.
The woman’s voice carried out on the tight air so boldly and clearly that it seemed she was singing from all around them. Clay was sure that his goose bumps were from the singing and not the cold air that was streaming into the truck. Alma lay her head on Clay’s shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to the music. They had never sat so close to each other, and Clay was embarrassed at the erection he felt instantly at such a small thing as her sitting beside him. He could smell her good, clean scent and feel her soft hair against his cheek.
“I wish that people would accept a fiddle in church,” she said when the singing had stopped. “Can you imagine how good a voice like that and a fiddle would sound together?”
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to create something that beautiful—to be able to sing in such a way, or play the fiddle like you do. It’s like your own little moment of complete creation. That must be the best kind of satisfaction. The kind you can taste.”
Alma looked at him without smiling. “God awmighty, Clay. Sometimes when you talk, it’s like words falling out of a book.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he just kissed her. He wrapped his arms around her so tightly that he could hear the bones in her back popping. He was aware of everything: the preaching that had started inside the church, the cold, dry air, the crinkling of her leather coat. He ate at her mouth, sucking her lips and running his tongue over her straight teeth. She put her hands up into his hair and then held them over his cold ears.
When they stopped kissing, he felt words pushing at the back of his teeth, fighting to get out. “You know I’ve done went crazy over you, don’t you?”
She sat back against the seat and looked at the church. “I know it, but you shouldn’t be. I’m afraid this is all a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because I know that Denzel will never let me have this,” she said.
“After he gives you your divorce, they ain’t a damn thing he can do about it.”
“That man will never let me be happy. I know him like a book. If he ever does sign for the divorce, he’ll never let me have no peace.”
“That’s foolish talk,” Clay said.
“No, Denzel is crazy. I swear, Clay, it’s untelling what he’d do if he knowed I was in this truck with you. I stay scared to death of him.”
Inside the church, the preacher was screaming out about the wrath of God and pounding his fist on the podium. People yelled out “Amen, brother!” and “Hallalujer!” Clay and Alma sat listening to them for a long time without saying a word.
Finally, Clay said, “Well, what’s the deal?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Do you care for me, or not?”
Alma started crying.
Clay should have seen right then what was going to happen, but then again, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He was never going to let go of this.
CAKE HAD NEVER gone more than two weekends without having his best friend by his side at parties or at the Hilltop Club. He started to drink more and hung out in the parking lot, sharing a joint with some girl he had coaxed outside or with Frankie the doorman. He would grow angry when people jokingly said, “Clay’s plumb quit you, hain’t he?” but he never would say anything against Clay, although he felt abandoned and betrayed.
On Saturday night at a party, Cake was half-naked with Janine Collins, a girl who had been trying to lure him her way for months now. She was very drunk and managed to get her blouse and bra off more quickly than Cake thought possible. As she slowly unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off him, he realized that he couldn’t contain himself any longer. He wrestled Janine around on the bed, trying to get her off him, but she thought he was playing with her. She giggled, her mouth capped over his, and pressed her warm breasts against his bare chest. Finally, he pushed her off and onto the floor. She pulled the sheets off the bed to cover herself and screamed “Bastard!” over and over while he pulled on his Levi’s. He left the room, slamming the door. He carried his shirt in his hand and slipped on his leather coat as he rushed down the hall. Everyone was in the living room partying and dancing. Only one or two people noticed him leaving, and they called out to him. He did not pause long enough to say good-bye.
He drove away with his foot pressing the pedal all the way to the floor, grinding gears all the way up the winding road. He put in a CCR tape and managed the steering wheel while he smoked a joint.
The pot was harsh and he could feel it burning his throat. It tasted sweet in his mouth, though, and he loved the smell of it. He wet his fingers so as to stop the fire from burning in jagged little strips around the tip and nearly ran off the road, so he put the joint in the ashtray to burn out. There was no traffic at all, and he sped around the curvy road holding on tightly to the steering wheel. His palms were sweating profusely, as they always did when he smoked pot, and he was well aware that he could easily drive off one of the curves and hurtle into the Black Banks River.
He slid into Clay’s driveway and nearly sideswiped Clay’s truck. He ran up the stairs two steps at a time and was surprised to find the door locked. It never had been before. He beat on the door so hard that the glass rattled in the panes.
“Cake,” Clay said, sleepy-eyed, standing in the door in his underwear. “What in the world you doing?”
“I come to see what in the hell your problem is—” Cake pushed Clay aside and made his way into the living room, which was well lit by the slants of moonlight falling through the windows and the open door. Alma lay on the couch, motionless, acting as if she were asleep, although Cake was sure his knocking had woken her up. Cake stopped when he saw her bathed in silver. “What the hell?”
“C’mon, brother, let’s go out on the porch. You want me to make you some coffee?”
“Shit no.” Cake walked backward across the living room, studying Alma, then slipped out the door like a breeze.
Clay grabbed his Levi’s off the living room floor and shook his legs down into them once he got out onto the porch.
Cake pulled a pint of Jim Beam out of his inside coat pocket and took a long gulp. He sucked in a huge breath of night air and shook the bottle in front of Clay’s face. “Remember this? Or have you forgot Kentucky straight?”
“Cake, this is stupid.”
“No, stupid is sleeping with a married woman.”
“She’s sleeping on the couch.”
“Well, I don’t see why.”
“I can’t talk about this with you and you drunk.” Clay took the pack of cigarettes out of Cake’s front pocket and lit one. Cake grabbed the pack roughly from his hand.
“You just piss me off, Clay. It’s always been me and you, everywhere we’d go. Go everwhere together.” His words came out in a drunken mumble that
Clay had to string together. “Now it’s just me. I never thought you’d act like this over a woman.”
“Cake, I call you every day. You was just over here the other night—I cooked your big ass supper.”
“I never lay eyes on you on the weekend, though—”
“You have to give me a chance to adjust to all this, then me and you can get out every once in a while—”
“No, by God. I ain’t got nobody else but you, Clay. Not a damn person. We’re tight, buddy, we’re just like brothers, and then all at once, we just ain’t no more. I got nobody else in this world. And you know that, man, you know that.”
Cake’s eyes were full of tears.
“I’m sorry, but you have to let me have this,” Clay said after a while. He stood naked to the waist, shivering in the cold, with his hands buried under his arms.
“Shit, man, I’m drunk.” Cake smoked his cigarette thoughtfully and seemed to be choosing his words before he said them, although they came out blurred and broken up, anyway. “I think you’re being a asshole, Clay. Don’t change for nobody. If you have to change for somebody, then you don’t need em.”
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same damn thing ever Saturday. There’s too much to see in this life to see it drunk. Can’t you understand that I want this?”
Cake sat nodding his head but not accepting it, thinking to himself, It’s not good enough. Finally he stood and steadied himself by the porch railing, then strolled across the porch without a word.
Clay went toward him quickly and grabbed his shoulders. “You ain’t leaving here drunk. You ain’t able to drive all the way back to Free Creek.”
“Let go of me.” He shoved Clay away. They had never struck each other in their lives, and Cake still couldn’t bring himself to hit Clay, although he wanted to.
“Come on in here and lay down, now. You know the law would get you before you even got through town.”
“I don’t care. I drove up here and I can drive back. I’m leaving,” Cake said, and shoved Clay across the porch. Clay hit the wall but managed to keep himself from sliding down onto the floor.
“Go on, then, by God!” Clay yelled, and his voice boomed out over the river.
Cake started down the stairs, knowing that Clay wouldn’t let him leave there drunk.
Clay stood at the top of the steps, his hands out at his sides, as if admitting defeat. “Come on, Cake. Don’t leave here like this.”
Cake stopped. He turned and made his way back up the stairs. When he got to the door, he unscrewed the lid from the bourbon, took the last of it, and then threw the bottle in a high arc. It flew over the porch railing and fell silently through the trees. With a strange little smile on his face, he tucked one side of his shirt in and made his way through the door. In the living room, he stomped his booted feet on the floor and yelled, “It’s five o’clock in the morning, sister!” and then laughed wildly all the way to the bed, where he went to sleep without saying another word.
Clay pulled off Cake’s boots and pants and lay there with him for a few minutes, making sure he was asleep. After a while, he went back to the couch to lie down beside Alma. But he lay awake all night, watching shadows on the ceiling.
11
CLAY DREADED GOING through his mother’s box the way some people dreaded sitting with a family that had just suffered a death: he was afraid he wouldn’t know what to say once he got there. He had put it in the center of his coffee table and it sat there patiently until he finally got enough nerve to open it.
He sat on the couch and stared at the box for so long that the paper flowers pasted to its lid began to spin around. He imagined that he could smell their aromas all mixed up in the air above the box. He feared being sucked into the old Bible box like a leaf being drawn into a vacuum, ripped back to a past that he could never return from. He had been chain-smoking since coming home from work and he watched the box uneasily, waiting for it to run out of patience and simply fold the lid back itself.
Inside, he found many small, trivial things that he had no way of comprehending: a dried and crumbling corsage, a quarter with a .22 bullet hole right through Washington’s head, a napkin with a faded phone number written in pencil. He found an old, bone-handled Case knife that he supposed had belonged to his great-uncle who had been killed in World War II, a lid from a bottle of whiskey that he figured was from his mother’s first drunken night, and a cigar that maybe someone had handed out when he was born. There was a small, carved box full of ticket stubs, and on the back of each one she had written the movie it had come from: Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, True Grit, The Last Picture Show.
There was an I LIKE IKE campaign button, which he imagined she had worn proudly as she walked the clean, polished halls of her high school, and a piece of construction paper with WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS IN VIETNAM written in large, Magic Marker letters. He thought that maybe she had grown weary of the war news and had written out the Vietnam placard herself; he could see her taping it up in the front window while she thought about his daddy. There were various news clippings: the JFK assassination, the Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. He pictured her sitting on the floor, cutting out the clippings to put up for him. He figured that she had probably longed to go west and stand in protest with the Native Americans during their long siege of the island.
She had lived through so much history. He could see that, now that he was able to look back on her life. His mind rattled off events that she must have been aware of, and he pictured her reactions to every situation. He saw her standing beneath the night sky, watching for the hydrogen bombs she feared might fall at any minute, turning the solid mountains into ash that would drift away with the wind. Years later, she stood under the same sky and watched the moon, wondering if men were really walking on it. He was sure she had cried about Kent State, danced to the Doors, and gone to the drive-in to see The Godfather.
He dug deeper. A worn copy of Peyton Place, a few Life magazines tied together with a ribbon. A guitar pick. There was a map of Cherokee, North Carolina, and a handful of photographs showing his mother and Lolie in bathing suits, standing on the beach at Blackhawk Lake.
He studied these pictures a long time. He wondered what the air was like that day, whether their hot skin smelled of coconut tanning lotion or perhaps baby oil. He looked at his mother’s eyes, then at the cigarette in her hand, the bracelet on her wrist, the careful way she had applied her lipstick. The way her arm rested on Lolie’s shoulder. Had he stood in that same spot, down on the lake? Had she gotten drunk that day and closed her eyes and smelled the water-scent that only the lake possessed, the way he so often did?
He found an envelope full of fine, auburn hair wrapped in a net. A poem that looked as if it had been ripped from a Reader’s Digest—“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. A brass Zippo with 1970 engraved on the front. Autumn leaves pressed in wax paper, a red Gideons Bible, Clay’s first walking shoes. Wrapped up carefully in a piece of toilet paper was a feather from a redbird, as new and shiny as it must have been the day his mother plucked it off the forest floor while roaming the great mountain. In a square white box that might have held a cool corsage, he found a collection of seashells, and he felt their cold solidity, running his fingers over the rough spots and horns at their edges, wondering where in the world his mother had gotten them. He found her senior class pin, a book of matches from Eaton’s Pizza Parlor in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. Two record albums, in their original sleeves: Pearl, by Janis Joplin, and Neil Young’s Harvest.
He tried to remember her voice, singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” Frustrated when his memory would not serve him, he picked up Harvest and turned the album over to read the names of the songs. He saw that the title of one, “Old Man,” was completely circled in broken red ink. He got up with cracking knees and put the album on his turntable. The sound was grainy, but the record did not skip, and soon the melancholy guitar filled the room. In the song, a son was talking to his father, bu
t to Clay it was as if his mother spoke through the record player.
The words, the pluck of the banjo, the swell of guitars, were all speaking to him, trying to tell him something. He stood over the record player, wondering if she had circled this song so that he might play it someday and try to interpret exactly what she meant. The song ended, and he lifted the needle and put it on its hook.
He thought now he could remember her. He could see her sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire, or standing at the sink peeling potatoes. She put him on her hip and danced around the house when Melanie came on the radio to sing “Brand New Key.” He could recall watching her ironing clothes, sprinkling water from a Dr Pepper bottle. She always kept her fingernails painted. They were a deep, dark red and always reminded him of the color a rose takes on before it dies. He was taken back to a morning when he had stood on the porch and watched her walking down the holler road, dragging her purse on the ground behind her while she cried. They were mixed-up images and scents and tastes, as hard to comprehend as a thousand photographs scattered across the floor.
He saw a velvet jewelry box lying in the box and figured it had once held her wedding band. He clicked the box open and found the Saint Christopher medallion that his father had worn. He gathered it up, and its fine, small links glided snakily over his fingers. The medallion rested square in the center of his palm. The silver chain and the medal—cold against his warm hand—sent sensations, imagined or not, shooting up into his arms. He held it close to his face, as if he might breathe in the scent of his father from the metal. SAINT CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US, it read, the words in a circle around a man packing a child on his back.
He dialed Information and asked for a listing for Bradley Stamper in Laurel County. He could hear the operator scanning her computer, then her dry, bored voice. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have no listing under that name.”
“Well, just give me a listing for every Stamper you have in the county,” he said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling loudly into the telephone.