A Land More Kind Than Home (19 page)

My grandpa reached out his hand and patted mine through the sheet. “Good night,” he said. He started to stand up.

“Where've you been?” I asked him.

He stood up straight and looked down at me. “Out on the porch,” he said.

“I mean, where've you been all this time?” I said. “How come me and Stump ain't never seen you before?” I knew Mama would get mad at me for asking him that, but she wasn't there so I went ahead and asked him anyway. He sat down real slow and stared at the bedroom door like he was waiting for somebody else to walk through it. He sighed, and I could tell he didn't want to have to answer a question like that.

“Well,” he said, “if you've really got to know, I've been all over the place. I spent a couple years driving a rig up and down the coast, hung drywall for a while, worked in a mill up in PA.”

“What's PA?” I asked him.

“Pennsylvania,” he said.

“But why have you been gone so long?”

“I just have,” he said. “I just went away.”

“Why?”

He sat there quiet like he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next, and then I saw his head turn like he was looking at me over his shoulder. “Because sometimes we do things we can't take back, and we need to go away and leave folks alone and let them forget us for a while.”

“What did you do?”

“Lots of things,” he said. Then he said, “Do you always ask this many questions?”

“No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

He turned around so he could see me better. “Where I've been don't matter as much as me being here now,” he said.

I looked away from him toward the window. I thought about how during the daytime I could see my daddy's tobacco fields all the way up to the road from here. I kept looking at the window, but I knew my grandpa was staring at me.

“Maybe sometime I'll take you up to my place,” he said. “Show you where I was raised up. We'll go up to the old cabin where I was born and where your daddy grew up. Maybe we'll scout the top field for arrowheads. You think you might want to do that?”

“Sure,” I said, and then I thought about how much Stump liked to find him some arrowheads too so we could sit them on the shelves with the rocks we'd already found. “I wish my brother could go.”

“Me too, buddy,” he said. “I hate that he can't. But you know what you can do?”

“What?”

“You can keep his memory,” he said. “That's the best way to hold on to folks. My mama and daddy have been gone so long that I can't hardly picture them, and I have to remember my memories and hope they're true. Maybe I'll see them again someday and they'll be just how I remember them; maybe not, but I like to think so.”

“You mean in Heaven?”

“Yes,” he said. “In Heaven.”

I laid there and thought about seeing Stump in Heaven, and then I remembered what Joe Bill had said about Stump not being able to sing or talk or nothing. “Do you think Stump will be able to talk when he gets to Heaven?” I asked him.

“Of course he will,” he said. “We'll all be able to talk.” He pulled the sheet up around me. “And we'll all be able to understand each other.” He stood up again, and then he bent down to the bed and made a show of tucking the sheet tight all around me. He walked over and put his hand on the doorknob and stepped into the hallway.

“You want this door open or closed?” he asked.

“Closed,” I said.

I
LAID IN BED IN THE DARK AND LISTENED TO THE SOUNDS OF THE
crickets outside and the little noises of the house settling itself to sleep. That's what Mama used to say at night when I heard something that scared me.

“That's just the sound of the house getting settled,” she'd say. “It's getting comfortable so it can go to sleep too.”

I saw that the kitchen light still burned under my door, and I listened as my grandpa opened and closed the cabinets and the drawers like he was still looking for something. I heard him open the door and go into Mama and Daddy's room too. I turned away from the door and away from Stump's side of the bed and looked out the window.

There was just a little bit of breeze out there, and I could feel it coming in on my face and I could see it moving the branches on the tree outside the window and I could hear it playing on the wind chimes. If it had been daylight, I could've looked out at the field and seen the tops of the burley swaying back and forth. There were still some lightning bugs out there, and I watched their lights wink off and on while they floated through the yard. My eyes got heavy, and before I knew it I was drifting off to sleep again, and when I looked up I was sitting at the dining room table back at Miss Lyle's house. I didn't think there was anybody else there but me.

I heard the screen door slam shut, and I wondered if it was somebody coming inside the house or if it was just somebody stepping out onto the porch. I sat at the table just as still as I could, and I listened hard and soon I heard somebody's footsteps crunching in the gravel. It sounded like they were walking away from the house and down the driveway toward the road, and I wondered where they were going. I wondered if it was Daddy leaving Miss Lyle's to go to the hospital or if it was the sheriff leaving Stump on the bed with Mama, or maybe it was Miss Lyle stepping outside to wipe the blood off those men's faces. I couldn't hear the footsteps anymore, but I knew they hadn't stopped but had just kept on walking until they were so far down the road that I couldn't hear them anymore. I wanted to push back my chair and open my eyes, but I was so sleepy that I couldn't hardly get myself to wake up.

I pushed the sheet off me and rolled over toward the window to try and see where the footsteps in my dream had gone. It had gotten foggy outside, but there was a little bit of soft light coming from the moon and shining down on the field. The way it looked made me think I might still be dreaming. There wasn't nobody out there that I could see. It was just my daddy's field and the moon and the noise of those crickets chirping and the sound of the breeze rustling the leaves and blowing on the wind chimes hanging on the tree outside the window. My daddy's tobacco swayed back and forth in the wind, and I stared out at the field until my eyes got heavy and I felt them going back to sleep. But just before I got them closed again I saw a light burning in the field, and I saw something moving way out in the burley. I tried to open my eyes all the way to get a better look, but I was so sleepy that I could just barely see the light from the lamp at my grandpa's feet where he stood out in the middle of the field under the moon. He had a burley knife in his hand, and he was sticking my daddy's tobacco.

T
HE BEST
I
CAN REMEMBER
, I'
D HAD
J
IMMY
H
ALL IN
handcuffs three times before my son died: twice for slapping his wife around and once for being drunk and disorderly at the high school football game. I couldn't ever get his wife to press charges on him after I'd come all the way up there to Gunter Mountain to get him off her, and at the football game he didn't do anything but bust out his own teeth falling down the steps up in the bleachers. He was a real piece of shit, and even though he'd come back to Madison County to find his oldest grandson dead, I had a hard time feeling the least bit sorry for him. But I felt different about Ben.

Seeing them together, still father and son, an old man and a young man after all these years, made it hard to believe that I'd once tried to protect Ben Hall from his daddy. It was even harder to believe after he'd made some kind of name for himself on the football field up in Cullowhee, harder still when I thought about my son, Jeff, lying dead on the side of the road back in Madison. I never figured I'd have to protect my own boy from Jimmy Hall too, and I guess there's no way I could've known. But still, when I get to thinking about it, there are times when I want to be pissed at Jeff and pissed at those boys for not having the balls or the sense enough to complain about him showing up to work like that, but then I catch myself.
Slow down
, I think.
You ain't got nobody to be pissed at but yourself for letting Jeff go with him. You knew better than all the rest of them
. And that's true, and I know it. I knew better than that. But for some reason I didn't stop Jeff. I trusted Jimmy Hall with my son when I wouldn't even trust him with his own. And then I get to thinking,
This one's on you, Clem
.
You ain't got nobody else to blame but yourself
.

I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it. It's like putting on a pair of heavy waders and stepping out to midriver where the fishing's best. Those waders will fill with water if you get too deep, and if you're stupid enough to stay out there a while there ain't a damn thing you can do to keep from being pulled under. I think about that sometimes when I recall the sound of my secretary's voice coming across the CB. In my mind it feels like I'm hearing her from deep under the water, something about an explosion on the lines outside of town. I'm right there, listening just below the surface of that water, wondering why this is something I have to hear.

“Is it Jeff?” I asked her.

“I don't know,” she said. “They don't know who it is. They can't tell.”

“Jesus, Eileen, is it?”

“I don't know,” she said again.

“I'm headed that way.”

“Bill's going to meet you there,” she said.

Eileen didn't even have to say it, because something told me that it was Jeff. I threw on my siren and drove as fast as I could through the snow down Highway 25/70, and on the whole drive over I couldn't keep from thinking about how unfair it would be if it was Jeff. But since then I've learned to just go ahead and take fairness out of the equation. If you do, things stand the chance of making a whole lot more sense.

S
OMEBODY HAD MOVED HIM OUT OF THE ROAD BY THE TIME
I
GOT
there and left his body at the edge of the woods. Bill Owens was standing by him when I pulled up. When he heard my car he turned around, and I sat there behind the wheel and watched his mouth twitch like he was trying to think of the words that could tell me. But I reckon he couldn't find them, so he just took off his gloves and lowered his eyes and pointed out there toward the tree line.

I sat there for just a second longer and watched the snow come down and light on the branches. It was quiet, seems like snow always makes it quiet and it seems like I'm always surprised by that. I knew that when I opened the car door things would change forever, and I reckon it took some building up to it for me to go ahead and do it. I stepped out and walked toward Owens, but I stopped when my eyes hit on what lay under that rhododendron thicket. They'd draped a blue sheet over him, and it was flecked white where the snow had managed to drift down through the branches. The sheet didn't quite cover all of him, and I could see his work boots, and when I looked closer I could see his toes where the rubber soles had burned away. They steamed against that cold air. Me and Owens stood there together in silence and listened to the sound of steam hissing under that sheet.

“You sure?” I asked

“I am,” Owens said. He raised his hand like he was going to touch me on the shoulder, and I can't rightly remember if he did or not. But I remember the sound of his hand dropping to his side when he couldn't think of what to say next. There wasn't anything for him to say, and I knew it. Not a thing he could've done but just stand there with me. He looked down the road, and when he did I turned and saw where a group of boys had huddled up around the ambulance. We were too far away to hear what they were saying, and it seemed like the snow swallowed their voices. It was coming down in big, heavy flakes and making everything white. It couldn't have been no more than fifteen degrees.

“I should ask those boys some questions,” he said. He lowered his head and walked down the road. When he was gone my stomach lurched, and I figured I was about to empty my gut right there on the roadside. I squatted down and picked up a couple handfuls of snow and rubbed it all over my face to keep from getting sick. I could hear footsteps crunching in the snow behind me.