“Why in the world would you want to leave here? Why spend all that money on rent, and you just starting out in life? Don’t make no sense. Is it one of us you running from?” she asked.
“I’m not running from nobody,” he said. “I just want to see some more of the world.”
Gabe laughed heartily, slapping the table. “I got news for you, buddy,” he piped in. “Living on the other side of that little town ain’t seeing nothing.”
“That ain’t what I mean.” Clay wanted to see what it would be like to be on his own, but he also felt like there were too many ghosts there. Still, he couldn’t have told them this. His family was one that didn’t leave one another. They did everything together, warm in the knowledge that kin was nearby. Gabe and Easter were both torn all to pieces, and he was only moving ten miles away.
“A family should live right together,” Easter said. She was being unusually hard-shelled about this, as she had always encouraged him to think for himself. “It ain’t right.”
“What if I was moving plumb across the country, or going into the service?”
“Army’s different,” Gabe told him. “Your people know you off doing for your country.”
“Well, I need to do this. It’s just for a little while.”
Clay’s house was so close to the water’s edge that when the river rose in spring, the stilts under the porch stood right in the water. He liked the splash of the river and the night things that gathered there: katydids and crickets, frogs and cicadas. At night the smell of the river overtook his house. It smelled of everything it had passed on its way to him. It smelled of homes with families in them; of girls that sat in stiff chairs, painting their toenails and dreaming of far-off places; of boys who skipped rocks on the river’s surface to break up moonlight. The river at night carried the scent of untamed mountains and long, cool fields where dew settled first and sunlight hit last in the mornings.
Clay pulled off his muddy boots and placed them beside the mat. On the porch, he slipped down his jeans and stood in his underwear a minute, stretching with bones popping. The air was momentarily cool against his bare skin. He ran his hand over his tight chest and felt the grit of coal dust on his palm.
He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and stepped into the shower, using the hottest water he could stand. He let the water sting the top of his head while he drank the beer down. He crushed the can with one hand and sat it on the edge of the tub, then watched coal dust gather and disappear down the silver drain. He washed slowly, feeling the hot water open up his skin. He closed his eyes and let the water pound his face, tap at his eyelids. It was his birthday, and that always set him to thinking far too much.
EASTER RAN THE can opener around the top of the salmon can, drained it in a steady stream down the sink, cracked an egg, splashed it out across the fish, crushed up crackers in her pink hands, and cut up a whole onion, all in a matter of seconds. She mashed it all together with her hands, smoothing it and moving it around until she had a round patty that sizzled and popped when she slid it into the skillet full of hot grease. Steam rose as she took the lid off the potatoes. She moved the spatula under them fast, flipped them over, and replaced the lid.
Easter did everything quickly. She moved her arms fast and forcibly. When she wiped off a counter, she pushed down on the rag with her full strength.
She had devoted all of her time to her home since she finally quit her job at the school lunchroom last year. Sometimes, Easter walked slowly from room to room in her house, admiring what all she had. She ran her hands over the furniture, stroked a photograph, folded her arms and studied her home. Her granny used to say, “We’ve always been poor as Job’s turkey and most likely always will be.” Easter was amazed at how well they had all done for themselves.
Easter didn’t like to leave her house, even to go into town. On Saturday night, she and El went to Black Banks to shop and always stopped at the Root Beer Stand for a foot-long and a peanut butter milkshake. Besides that, she hardly went anywhere but church. Easter was the lead singer there, and her voice was known throughout the county. People drove from all over to gather at the Free Creek Pentecostal Church on Saturday nights, when they had all-night singings. On Sunday nights, sinners that lived near the church sat out on their porches in the evening just so they could hear her voice float down the valley to them.
She had gotten up at daylight this morning and cooked El a big breakfast before he left for the road again. He was a truck driver for Appalachian Freight, gone for five-day stretches. As soon as he had lit out, she had lit into the house, cleaning it even though it didn’t need it. Then she started in on Clay’s favorite meal for his birthday.
Sometimes Easter looked at Clay and felt like lying down on her bed and crying her eyes out. He was just like his mother, up and down. Some of that was not good, in Easter’s eyes. Anneth had been wild, maybe the wildest woman in Crow County, Kentucky. Easter could remember how people went on about Anneth, how she would sometimes come in at three or four o’clock in the morning, smelling of liquor, a cigarette always ruining her pretty hand.
Even when they were teenagers, still living at home with their granny, Easter would sometimes be awakened by the rumblings of cars pulling down into the holler. Anneth would stumble out of the car, singing a Brenda Lee song at the top of her lungs, and then stop halfway across the yard as the car made its way back out of Free Creek.
She’d yell, “Easter! Get up! Come out here and look at the moon. Ever-damn-body get up and look!”
Easter ran out to her, clad in her long flannel nightgown. Anneth pulled her up into her arms, holding her so tight that Easter feared she’d break her bones. She grabbed Easter’s chin roughly and directed her face skyward. She whispered with sweet whiskey breath: “Look at it, Easter. I love a little slice of a moon, don’t you? They way better than a full one.”
“Let’s go in, Anneth. You’ve woke the whole holler up.”
Anneth laughed. “We ought to stay out here all night and study that,” she said, staring at the sliver of moon. “That’s church to me.”
Anneth just liked to have a big time all of the time. Easter had always been the good girl, but she had never been jealous of Anneth. She had never gotten distraught when all the pretty boys went after her sister, never mad when Anneth refused to go to church.
Anneth used to beg her to have more fun, but Easter would say things like, “Just watching you is enough for me.”
Anneth would fall back, her dress cool and thin against her milky thighs. “Easter, I don’t want you to die and go to Heaven without having a little fun. The Lord forgives all things, honey. Live, sister!”
Easter had lived out her own sin through her sister, because God knows Anneth did enough of it for the both of them. She often asked herself how she could have been a Christian and condoned such actions. She loved it when Anneth threw back her head in laughter, letting all of her teeth show, her eyes clamped shut, hand pounding her red knees.
It didn’t shock Easter when they came and told her that Anneth was dead. She was the only one Anneth never could surprise, despite how different they were. She had known that Anneth would not die naturally—somebody had to take a life like that. A person so full of life couldn’t just up and die; a life like that had to be taken by force.
Anneth came to Easter sometimes, but Easter had told no one of this. One would think a spirit would come in quiet and solemn, but Anneth was the same in death as she had been in life. She came to Easter laughing, leaned up against a wall with her arms crossed and her bangs hanging down in her eyes. A lusty, ancient laugh, an open-book smile. She studied Easter, and her eyes grew misty with tears.
The first time Anneth came to her, not long after her death, she did speak. Easter was praying in the living room, something she did when the notion struck her. In the middle of her prayer, she sensed someone was standing behind her. When she turned, there was Anneth, smiling. Anneth said, “Live, girl.”
Easter j
umped up and ran toward her, knowing that she could not touch her, knowing that Anneth wasn’t even real but was something that she was meant to see. Anneth said it again and Easter felt herself growing angry.
She yelled out, “This is the way I like my life, Anneth!” She closed her eyes, asking the Lord to take this image from her eyes. “This is too much. I don’t have the strength for it. Take her.”
Easter had seen spirits and known things since she was a little child. The Bible spoke against fortune-telling, but she could not deny what she saw in her dreams, what she sometimes witnessed right in her own house. She had lived with the spirits alone, telling no one of their company. When she was a child, they would come walking toward her in the corn. She caught glimpses of them dancing in the treetops. She had been forewarned of floods, deaths, births, and had never told anyone outright. Still, little hints proved to people that she had the sight, and they all respected her for it without mentioning it to her face.
Easter had been expecting Anneth lately. She hadn’t come in a while, and Easter thought that it was about time.
• • •
AS CLAY SPED down the crooked highway toward Free Creek, it was like he was driving back in time. If there had been mile markers on the side of the road, they would have clicked off the years instead of the miles: 1994 … 1982 … 1974. He slowed, turned right, and pulled down into Free Creek. He sang along with Dwight Yoakam and tried not to pay attention to the homesickness swirling around in his belly. He smashed out his cigarette in the full ashtray and sprayed a little cologne onto his neck so that Easter wouldn’t be able to smell the tobacco. The truck bucked like a wild horse as it bounced across the old bridge set up on the huge boulders that lined the creek.
Free Creek was a narrow holler, really nothing more than an etched, packed-dirt road with a shallow white-water creek on one side and a row of houses on the other. On each side rose a great mountain, so steep and tall that when someone stood in the middle of the holler, they couldn’t see to the top of either one. There were only about fifteen houses up there, and everybody knew everybody else. When Clay was little, newscasters boasted that the War on Poverty was being waged in those very mountains, but if the government had fought any battles close to Free Creek, no one in the holler heard the guns.
Clay drove slowly down the holler, silent in summer heat, and looked on Free Creek like it was a picture. When he thought about Free Creek, he always thought of long, cool evenings when you could hear the silver sound of men playing horseshoes and the redundant bounce of the boys playing basketball down on the road. The women hung out clothes, swatted children on the hind end, canned kraut in the shade. People worked in their gardens until dusk, played rummy on the porch, shouted out that supper was ready. The men worked all day and often came in drunk. The women sometimes threw their husband’s clothes into the yard. There might be a fistfight or the firing of a pistol into the mountainside.
Nobody was out this evening, though. Clay cruised by the houses sitting close to the road, which were sealed up tight against the summer evening. It was supper time, and nobody was outside. Far up on the mountain, two trailers sat side by side with all the windows open and box fans in their open doorways. That was how every house had survived when Clay was little, but now almost everybody had an air conditioner.
He pulled into Easter’s short driveway, which was actually two sandy ditches amid the sparse grass. The house was built on the last little slope of the mountain, so that in a hard rain all the gravel washed out to the road. He sat in his truck for a long moment, studying the little house.
WMTG was blasting out of the radio sitting above the sink when he went in the back door. The Mosley Family was singing “Meeting in the Air” and Easter was singing along as loud as she could, patting her foot, and washing dishes. It was a fast gospel song, and she moved her hips around to the beat. He watched her, then surveyed the kitchen. The stove was crowded with steaming cookers and skillets.
He couldn’t come to this house without remembering his mother’s wake and funeral. There had been plenty of food then, too. Hams had been carved, potato salad and fried corn had been dipped out. There had been chicken dumplings and baked beans that were served warm, pork chops and fried chicken that were eaten cold and greasy, coconut cakes fit for a baby shower, and pies made from apple preserves usually saved for Christmas. All of those smells had not overtaken that of the casket in Easter’s living room. It had been bought at the funeral home, made from fresh cedar. The smell had settled on people’s clothes and crept into their mouths.
One woman had said that it was a shame Anneth had died in the winter, instead of summer, when so many good things could have been prepared right out of the garden. One of his mother’s cousins had told how Anneth liked to walk out into the garden and pluck a tomato right from the vine. “She’d eat it while it was still warm from the sun, see,” the woman had said. “She’d let the juice run right down her chin.”
Clay stood now in Easter’s kitchen and looked into the living room. He could almost see all of the people who had crowded in there that night. They had sat up all night with the body. When it was very late, the women had busied themselves with putting up the food. Outside, the men had stood around a rusted drum barrel—alive with a fire that sent up columns of sparks—and covertly passed around a pint of bourbon.
He had asked Easter to carry him to the casket so he could kiss his mother before going to bed. When she pulled back the net and bent over the casket, his mother’s face had been shrouded in lavender shadows that made her high cheekbones more prominent, her stillness more noticeable. She had always been in motion, even while she slept. He had looked at her a long time, knowing that she was dead. He had known.
Easter had leaned over so he might reach her, and Clay kissed his mother on the cheek. Her skin had been so cold, like a piece of stone taken from a cliffside. When he had finally pulled away, he had buried his face in Easter’s neck, sure that his lips were blue.
“Lord God,” he said, announcing himself. “You’ve cooked enough for an army.”
Easter looked over her shoulder and smiled, then lowered the volume on the radio. “It’s bout time you got up here. Only way I can get you up here anymore is to cook you a big supper.” She rinsed the last dish and wiped her hands.
“I been working double shifts and laying round the house. Been too hot to do much.” Clay watched her move around the kitchen as she loaded a plate full of food. The long hair she had worn in a bun during his childhood was gone. Even though she was a Pentecostal, Easter decided long ago that her hair wasn’t going to get her into Heaven, so she went and got a shoulder-length permanent. She was still a pretty woman with big-boned hands and dark eyes. Clay hadn’t seen her in a pair of pants or shorts his whole life.
“Cake stayed with me three nights this week,” Clay said. “Can’t do much when he’s up the house. I called you bout ever night, though.”
Easter laughed. “I know you got your own life. What’s Cake doing staying up your house? Him and Harold into it again?”
“Why yeah. Them two stay into it.”
“I guess you still laying at that club, too,” she said. “Partying and carrying on.”
“Ah, not as much as I used to,” he said, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, fiddling with his change.
“Well, good,” she said. “I hope that’s the truth.”
Easter ripped off a piece of foil and covered a plate of food, then handed it out to Clay. He knew it was for his uncle.
“Here, take this to Gabe. He’s got a big crew over there gambling, so I know he won’t come eat with us. Tell Dreama to come on before it gets cold.”
Clay opened the back door to his uncle’s double-wide, and the cold indoor air rushed out. Gabe sat at the table with two men, a bottle of Jim Beam and the deck of cards between them. The air conditioner sat in the dining room window, ruffling the short hair of the men, and Don Williams sang softly from the stereo. Gabe shuffled
the deck of cards several times before Clay crossed the kitchen and set down his plate.
“Hidy, stranger. I’ve bout forgot what you looked like,” Gabe said.
“I was here a week ago.”
“Too long,” Gabe said. “But it’s been bout too hot to get out.”
“That’s the damn truth,” one of the men offered. The other one said, “You’re exactly right.”
“Boys, if I’d knowed you all was over here, I’d brought you all a plate, too,” Clay lied.
“Hell, Clay, we fixing to get drunk. Have too much food in your belly and it’ll eat your liquor up. You going out tonight?”
“Naw, we’ll probably go up the Hilltop tomorrow night, though.”
Gabe dealt the cards, and the men stared at their hands. There was a long silence before Gabe said, “Your birthday today, ain’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Look there,” Gabe said, and nodded to the edge of the table, where a small leather holster lay.
Clay picked it up and reached in to find a little pistol.
Gabe grinned. “Happy birthday, then.”
Clay ran his fingers down the warm handle, stroking the cold silver of the barrel. Even if he didn’t set much store by hunting, he loved guns. He loved their cool solidity in his hand. “I been dead for a pearl-handled pistol,” he said. “It’s a twenty-two, hain’t it?”
“Yeah. Snub-nose. That was your granddaddy’s. I took it to the gun shop and had that new handle put on it, though. Don’t go packing it in no honky-tonk just cause it’s little. Little gun like that’ll get a man kilt.”
The men laughed drunkenly.
Gabe wanted to get back to his card game. “Go on, now, buddy.”
Clay held the gun on his palm for a long time. He turned it over and over again without saying a word.