He had walked silently on the path until he came upon a walnut tree, its limbs weary with their load. The ground below had been decorated by the nuts, and each time the slight morning breeze moved, a few more bounced onto the forest floor, like heavy rocks plopping into deep water. He quickly went about gathering them, shoving as many as he could carry into his hunting sack. When it was full, he felt the sack, the way he had patted Gabe’s so many times before, and judged them to feel the same. Gabe’s hunting sack was always pressed tight with squirrels, and when Clay smoothed his hand over it, it felt like a dozen little babies in a woman’s belly. When he and Gabe met back up, Gabe shook his head.
“Walnuts?” he said, and his tone made it clear that he would never understand his nephew. A boy was supposed to be crazy over hunting, should mark off the days until the season opened, want to lay out of school just to go on a hunt. It was the mountain way. Gabe walked on down the trail, hitching up his pants and muttering to himself.
Clay took his hands away from his face and tried to clear his nostrils of the sharp, green scent of walnuts from so long ago. He heard Gabe laugh in a forced manner.
“Talking about marrying a woman that hain’t even divorced yet,” Gabe said. “I swear, buddy, you a sight.”
EVANGELINE HAD BEEN playing solitaire. Now she took a card off the top of the deck and formed a perfectly straight line of cocaine on top of her wobbly nightstand. She rolled up a dollar bill and leaned over, snorted the coke up in one long nose-gulp. She breathed in deeply, threw her head back, and shook it madly, then took her index finger and dotted up the tiny particles she had left behind and put them on her tongue. She closed her eyes, pinched her nostrils tightly, snapped off the radio, listened to see if the water was still running, and said aloud, “What in the hell is she doing?”
Alma had been in the shower for more than ten minutes. She turned round and round beneath the showerhead, her eyes clenched tightly shut, feeling nothing but the water, hearing nothing but the steady pounding on her cold body.
Evangeline lurched down the hall. Soon she would feel the cocaine and it would wake her up, sizzling up to hit her right in the forehead. She felt awful right now, and she badly needed the rush this instant. She had to be at the club for warm-ups in thirty minutes, and the boys would be pissing and moaning if she was late. Evangeline banged and kicked at the bathroom door, mad as hell. “Alma Leigh! What in the hell are you doing? I have to get cleaned up!”
The water beat its monotone song against the tub.
“Alma? Are you all right?” Evangeline’s voice was suddenly tinged with worry. Ever since the lawyer had called and said that Denzel had signed the divorce papers, Alma had been acting crazy. She hadn’t responded at all the way Evangeline had expected. If it had been Evangeline, she would have jumped up and down, screaming, “I finally got rid of the son of a bitch!” but Alma had just hung up the phone, called Clay to tell him, and gone to the bathroom. She had been there ever since.
Evangeline kicked the door so hard that the wood cracked around the doorknob, and her toe instantly began to swell up. “Alma, what in God’s name are you doing in there?”
“Leave me alone,” came Alma’s voice, full of water.
“Shit-fire,” Evangeline muttered, and gave up.
Alma hugged her arms about herself and felt the lukewarm water beat on her face and spread its sensation all the way through her body, from the top of her head to her fingertips and down into her legs. She leaned against the tile, her hair tangled in the corners of her mouth, her eyes still clamped shut, and slid down the wall. She sat in the tub with her knees together in front of her face and gave herself to the water. It felt so good, so cleansing, that it reminded her of baptism. She could remember that sensation clearly, even though she had been very young when her father convinced her that she had been saved and that she had to go beneath the water to enter Heaven. She remembered how cold the November river had been, and the preacher’s huge hand in the small of her back. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” his rising voice announced, and then she was under the water so long that she thought he might never bring her back up. That water had felt so clean, and she had been convinced that it had been water blessed by the Lord. When she came back up to the late autumn air, she had felt so pure; she had felt sterilized from sin, bathed only in the goodness of the world. The people on the bank began singing “Down in the River to Pray,” and the presence of God had washed up onto the shores. She felt as good now, as full of spirit.
She was free.
“Free.” She said the word aloud, the water filling her mouth. She ran the word over and over in her mouth, swishing it around like mouthwash, feeling its slick texture on her tongue. It was the first time that it had come to her that she was loose from Denzel, that she could actually be rid of him. She was going to get away from him; this must be the same satisfaction, the same rush, she thought, that someone felt when they got away with the perfect crime.
It was no small thing, after all. At one point in her life, she had thought it completely impossible to ever get away from Denzel. She could remember sitting down on her own front porch as Denzel left in one of his fits, watching his truck bounce down the road as she thought to herself, There is no getting out of it now. At that time, the notion of freedom had been a dream, or even less than that: the thought had been purely ridiculous to even dream about. Sitting in water that was beginning to get cold, she wondered what had given her the strength, the gumption to actually walk out that last time, to leave and just think, To hell with it all.
She reckoned now that Denzel had been the one to give her that strength. All the times he beat her, cussed her, and talked to her with a snake’s venom in the back of his throat—that was what had made her strong. She hadn’t minded the beatings all that much, to be honest. After the first two or three, they had become a relief in a strange sort of way. After he beat her, she had had the satisfaction of not crying, and that had built up such rage in her that he must have seen it brewing right in her eyes. It had not been the beatings that had hurt her the most; it had been his constant mouth, his spirit-killing mouth. When she bought a new dress, he’d say, “No dress in the world could hide your big ass.” She had not played the fiddle while he was at home for fear of his breaking it into pieces. He said her fiddle playing sounded like “two cats hung up together.” When she mentioned going back to college, he told her, “Stupid, ignorant people ought not waste the government’s money.” When she was unable to hide her disgust at his doing a line of cocaine, he’d push her face into the powder and make her lick it up. He raked his hand across the supper table, saying that her cooking wasn’t fit to feed a hog as he stomped around in the broken dishes and steaming clumps of food. The words he spewed out were like a poison that deadened every good thing about herself.
Denzel had thought these cruel words, these put-downs and cusses, would break her. He had been wrong. “What does not kill us makes us stronger,” her mother used to say. It was one of her endless streams of clichés, and she had been right, so right. Maybe I ought to thank the son of a bitch, Alma thought.
But it was Clay who had brought her back to life. If he had pulled her drowned body from the lake and pushed air back into her lungs, it would have been no more or less, because he had saved her. He had reawakened her to something she had known so well once before, although she couldn’t really say how she had learned it. Her parents had always been so intent on having their souls saved that they forgot to appreciate anything around them, forgot to live. Now she had life and the freedom to live it.
“Are you dead?” Evangeline screamed from the other side of the bathroom door. She began knocking frantically, genuinely worried.
Alma turned off the water and leaned against the cold, hard tiles of the shower wall. “No,” she whispered. “I’m alive.”
PART TWO
FLYING BIRD
15
DARRY STOOD IN the yard with tiny feathe
rs of snow falling around him. He had knocked for ten minutes, nearly beating down the front door, but still refused to give up. Leaving, he turned around in the yard once more, staring at the windows, knowing they were watching him. He yelled to the trailer again: “Dreama! I know you’re in there. Answer the door!” Slowly, she opened the door and stepped out onto the high porch.
“What is it, Darry? There hain’t nothing you can say that’s going to change a thing.”
“Dreama, please come home.” He spoke quickly, knowing she wouldn’t give him long. “I love you, baby. I’ve loved you all of my life, as long as I can remember.”
“Shit, Darry. You make me sick.” She stroked her big belly. The baby had been kicking and squirming inside her all morning, as if it knew its daddy was on his way. “If you love me so much, why’d you go out on me? That don’t make no sense.”
“I can’t change the past, Dreama. I’ve quit that girl. I don’t know what was wrong with me.”
“My God, Darry, we’d only been married three months before you started going out on me. You expect me to forgive that?”
“That ain’t what I’m saying. Dreama—” She saw the tears welling up in his eyes but knew he wasn’t going to cry. He had cried the last time he had talked to her on the telephone, and even that hadn’t melted the ice that had formed around her heart.
“Get on out of here. You’re pathetic,” she said.
“Won’t you come for a ride with me, Dreama? Let’s talk about this.”
“No.” Her voice grew loud.
“If we could just talk awhile, alone, and go riding around—”
“Don’t come up here no more, Darry. I’ll call you when this child is born, and you can come to the hospital to see it, but I don’t want you about me no more till it comes. I hain’t having you back, not now, not ever.” She stood with her hands on her hips, her face a slice of stone. He put a knuckle into the corner of his eyes but didn’t let the tears come, and she was glad. She got no pleasure from seeing him cry; it only made her more angry.
She puffed up her voice again, hoping everyone in the whole holler would hear her. “This is your child I’m a-carrying, so we’re connected for the rest of our lives, but that’s all. That’s as far as it goes. I’ll file for divorce after the baby’s born. I don’t want it coming into this world and us not married.”
She went into the house and closed the door quietly.
Inside, Gabe was loading his pistol so quickly that some of the bullets fell from his hand and bounced across the carpet. Clay watched out the window as Darry climbed back into his truck. Gabe looked from the pistol chamber to the door and back again. Dreama waddled toward him and capped her hand around the cold metal of the barrel.
“Put that damn gun up, Daddy. You hain’t gonna use it no way.”
“I’m bout tired of you talking to me thataway, Dreama Marie,” Gabe said, standing up and hitching his pants up awkwardly. “Ever since you come back here you ain’t had no respect for me.”
“I’m a changed woman,” Dreama said in a wildly dramatic voice, shooting Clay a big-eyed look. “Liberated!”
Clay laughed into his hands.
“You talk plumb foolishness,” Gabe said.
“I’d talk about foolishness,” she said, stirring the cabbage she was frying in a cast-iron skillet. “Foolishness to me is getting a gun out to pull on the father of your unborn grandchild. That don’t make a lick of sense. And I’ve lived twenty years with you and I couldn’t count the times I’ve seen you run and load that little pistol, but there hain’t been nary time you’ve used it. Not that I’d want you to, but just the same—”
“That’s where you wrong, Dreama,” Gabe said, standing so close to her that her belly almost touched his. “When somebody fools with my baby girl, or any of my people, I’d kill them before even thinking about it.”
Clay felt blood rush to his face. He nearly blurted out, Well, why didn’t you kill the man who shot my mother? and then he thought to himself that for all he knew, Gabe had done so. Clay had never even considered what had happened to the murderer before, and realizing this, he couldn’t believe his lack of curiosity on this matter. He had been so haunted with his mother’s death that he had never even asked about her killer. But whenever he had brought up Anneth’s death to Gabe, his uncle had always looked off with blank eyes, as if he could not bear to speak of it.
“I know that, Daddy.” Dreama ran her hand down her father’s cheek.
“I would. I’d kill anybody over any of you all.” Gabe unloaded the pistol slowly, rolling the bullets around in his palm as if he appreciated their light solidity.
Clay watched him with mixed feelings and then wondered why he felt this way. Gabe had taken him in, raised him, given him clothes and food and support in almost every situation. Clay had been told plenty of times that Easter had been all set for him to move in with her when Anneth was killed, but Gabe had begged her to let Clay stay with him. He had looked her in the eye without wiping his tears away and said, “Please, let him stay with me. You can raise him, Easter, but I want him to live with me.” And Easter had not been able to refuse him.
Clay did not understand the tension that had come between him and Gabe, like black smoke that overtook everything. He didn’t know how to speak to his uncle, the only father he had ever known, and that was not right. He could not understand what had carved this great divide. He watched Gabe and felt a pang of homesickness in his gut. Gabe put his pistol back in the kitchen drawer, hitched up his pants again, sank into his recliner, and flipped on the television. Clay looked at the long lines in Gabe’s face, his strong, stubby hands, and his thinning hair.
“What happened to the man that kilt my mother?” Clay asked suddenly. His words hung in the air like breath on a winter morning.
Gabe turned his head quickly and looked at Clay’s eyes. His face grew pale. “What’s that supposed to mean? You throwing it up to me that I never kilt him?”
“No.” Clay lit a cigarette. “What you said made me think of that. I’d like to know what happened to him.”
Dreama ran a fork through the frying cabbage, looking back and forth from Clay to Gabe, who sat on opposite sides of the room. The whole dead space of the living room floor lay between them.
“I did go after him,” Gabe said finally. His eyes burned into Clay. “Soon as they come and tole us. I took my thirty-eight and I had ever intention of blowing his brains out. I went up and borrowed Harold’s truck. I don’t know why I didn’t wreck. I was flying over Buffalo Mountain and that was the awfullest snow I ever seen. I had to go right by where it happened. The law was still there, they was hooking a wrecker to Israel’s car to pull it off that mountain. Down to the foot of the mountain, I seen more law. All their cars on the side of the road, and men going down over the side of the mountain. One of the law was standing out in the road, and he stopped me. He knowed what my intentions was.”
Gabe paused for a long moment, and the house was filled with nothing but the sizzle of grease from the frying cabbage. The hinges of the oven door creaked as Dreama checked the browning corn bread, pretending she wasn’t listening.
“Glenn had wrecked. His car was over the side of the road. Drove right through the guardrail and come to rest in the deep part of the creek. He was bout a hundred foot down the creek, like he’d been running away from his truck. Facedown in the water. I wanted to kill him. Would’ve gived anything to, but I was beat to it. Law said it looked like he’d wrecked and tried to run off, but he fell through the ice on the creek. Drowned.”
“So he fell and drowned?” Clay asked.
“That’s what they said. He was dead, and that satisfied me. I just wished I’d been the one to do it.”
Dreama’s movements in the kitchen bit into the silence. Gabe and Clay were both looking at the floor. She cut up the corn bread, sliced a juicy, ripe tomato into thick wedges, took up the cabbage, and made them all plates.
“Eat, now,” she said.
/> CLAY LET HIMSELF out the back door of Gabe’s house and walked toward Easter’s. There was a full moon tonight, but the mountain behind Gabe’s was so high that it blocked out any sign of it. The top of the mountain was lit with a silver glow, and the clouds above the moon were streaks of white, liquid light. He considered the mountain and felt like climbing it. He hadn’t been up there at night in ages. He heard it calling to him, telling him that if he would go up those old paths, he might see something that would answer one of his many questions, but he turned away and went on into Easter’s yard.
He could see Easter’s shadow on the kitchen window as she washed dishes. Even through the steamed glass, he could hear her singing.
Sometimes I feel discouraged,
and think my life’s in vain.
Oh, but then the Holy Ghost
revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal my soul.
He did not watch her silhouette there, in the yellow window, but closed his eyes and savored her fine, clear voice, floating out onto the night. He missed all of this, and he knew what everything was leading to: he wanted to come home, back to Free Creek. He walked on into Easter’s, wondering why he had ever left in the first place.
EASTER SAT DOWN at the table with Clay, who was slowly eating an apple and running his tongue over each piece, thinking how everything always tasted better at her house.
“Where you and Alma going tonight?” she asked, smiling. She was crazy over Alma, now that she had met her. Alma had greatly pleased Easter by cleaning her plate and having the good sense to ask for more, when Clay had brought her up to eat the week before. Alma had refused to leave until she had helped wash the dishes and wipe down the kitchen.