At the Scent of Water (16 page)

After an unfruitful hour he rose up to leave. The fish weren’t biting. He’d known they wouldn’t be, for it was midafternoon, and the sun and the water were warm. Besides, the drought had probably dried up the blue holes, those places where the springs fed the creek where the trout liked to congregate. He pulled in his line and made his way toward the road. He paused at the fork in the trail and hesitated just a moment before tucking his paraphernalia down in the brush and heading up the path. He climbed for twenty minutes or so, through the lush foliage.

His breath came in short puffs, his lungs and legs burning. He slowed down to catch his breath, taking the opportunity to look at the flowering bushes and clumps of wild flowers. He wouldn’t be surprised if this was the most beautiful place on earth. He glanced to the side. There was an old cabin over there under the pines. It was rickety, falling down, hard to tell from the landscape around it. He and Ricky used to come up here when they were kids. They’d scrounged around and found a few things. A wagon wheel, a rusted spade, an old iron kettle turned to rust. It made him sad now to think that something once so proud and beautiful had been reduced to dust and ruin.

He pushed on. There used to be a spot up here just past the swimming hole where the creek widened out. The church had held baptisms here, his grandmother had said, before they built the indoor baptistry.

There it was. He approached the bank and stood for a moment surveying the wide pool behind the natural dam and the short splashing falls beneath it. The water was very low, and he could barely imagine it as it had been. He stared and tried to anyway, seeing past it to the scene as it would have looked a hundred years ago, the banks covered with clean white sheets and covered dishes.

The women would have been up before dawn, cooking, the men doing their chores. The children would have been loaded into the back of a wagon, most likely, for these were poor people and few had automobiles. Once they arrived here, there would have been singing and laughing, and he could almost hear the hymns and gospel songs he’d grown up with as background music: “Kneel at the Cross,” “The Wayfaring Pilgrim,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” He looked around him at the stand of pines and could imagine them there having their dinner on the ground, clumped in groups talking, murmuring, children running between them, and then he could picture them making their way to the banks, one or two who had made a decision stepping down into the cold clean water and coming up pure and faultless. He felt a surge of longing. He turned away, and the scene disappeared.

Fifteen

By the time they landed in Asheville, Annie was beginning to realize the rashness of her actions. What was she doing here? she asked herself as she shuffled off with her oversized purse slung over her shoulder. She walked slowly to the baggage claim and stood silently. Elijah retrieved her suitcase for her and carried it with his own to the car rental counter.

“There you go,” he said, setting it down beside her. “It’s been a real pleasure meeting you.”

“Thank you,” she replied. She shook his hand. “I enjoyed meeting you, as well.”

“I’m sure our paths will cross again.” Elijah gave her a slight smile, then with a final courtly nod he walked away.

She noticed he had a slight limp, a hitch in his walk. He looked alone and somehow a little forsaken, and she realized she had been too absorbed in herself to wonder about him. How had he received that injury? What had he actually done in Africa? What was he going to do here? Where, exactly, was he going, and how was he going to get there? She didn’t know because she hadn’t asked. She watched him merge into the crowd of travelers and felt a pang of regret. She knew she would not be seeing him again, no matter what he had said. He was a nice man, someone who could have been a friend in another life, but then that was just the way things were. People came. And they went.

“I can help the next person in line.”

She turned back to the counter at the sound of the voice, dug out her credit card, and rented a car. She followed the rental agent’s instructions, found her small Geo Metro, and followed the signs to exit the airport, but as she passed by the drop-off area, she saw a familiar form. It was Elijah, standing beside the Greyhound bus stop. She was just going to pull to the curb to offer him a ride when a car pulled in before her. Elijah greeted the driver, put his suitcase in the trunk, and climbed into the passenger side. She watched them for a moment, but they were soon lost in the surging stream of traffic.

There was no rain. That was the first thing she noticed, the first thing that was different from where she had come. And it was hot, though it would be cooler up in the mountains. The mountains. Just thinking about them caused her pulse to quicken. For now that she had allowed herself to think about home, to actually come this close, it was like an aching in her bones. She had heard her father say once that no one who really belongs to the mountains ever leaves them. “You’ll come back,” he had promised her, and she remembered his words now.

She exited the airport and entered the highway. She drove around a little hill, and boom—there they were, the bumpy line of blue haze rising up at the horizon. Pisgah National Forest was to the west. The Smokies to the northeast and the Blue Ridge to the north. She was surrounded on three sides by mountains and tucked in around their feet were the farms, hollows, and tree-covered hills she remembered. She drove, soaking it all in.

The asphalt sparkled with mica. The concrete was white with streaks of red dirt. Every now and then she saw a mobile home or a tidy spread set in an achingly beautiful nest of dogwoods and rhododendron. Hills rose up on both sides of the road, as if someone had cut a slice through them. She passed a Southern Convenience Express store advertising Krispy Kreme doughnuts, furniture outlets, fabric outlets, a stand of pine trees draped with kudzu vines, oaks with last year’s brown leaves rippling in the breeze, a white-steepled church. She crossed over the French Broad River. It was muddy, sluggish, and very low.

As she turned onto the Billy Graham Freeway and thought of Elijah again, she felt another jolt of compassion for him. How strange it must be to come back to your hometown after forty-five years away. If she felt like an expatriate, how must he feel? What was he thinking about the crowds? The traffic? The noise? The relentless assault on the senses?

She passed a white farmhouse with a rusted metal water tank surrounded by fields of cabbage and corn and, farther back, pine thickets and apple orchards. She wondered how the drought was affecting them, wondered whether the farmers were allowed to irrigate or if they would lose this year’s crop as they had last year’s and the year’s before. As she passed the first Waffle House, she smiled and had a sudden image of sticky tables, red, yellow, and blue plastic menus with the cheerful pictures of delicious food, and she thought of her papa. How he breakfasted there before he made his hospital rounds.

She passed the Mountain Livestock and Cattle Sales, gazed at the muddy river bottom that should have been rushing water, clumps of tall grass, graceful oaks. A BellSouth truck passed her going the other way, and the driver lifted his hand in greeting. The Gospel Truth Holiness Tabernacle was having a revival tonight and the rest of the week, she saw. Someone had left a rusted tractor beside the road. She glimpsed the lovely soft blossoms of laurel and rhododendron. She drank in the sights like a draught of cold water.

Asheville was a beautiful city, almost glowing in the evening light. She drove slowly, suddenly not anxious to go home now that she was close. She followed the sign for historic downtown and inspected the progress that had taken place. It was thriving and full of tourists. She made a swing past Thomas Wolfe’s boardinghouse before she circled back around and found Highway 19 and headed toward Maggie Valley, Waynesville, Silver Falls, and Gilead Springs.

She arrived at Gilead Springs around five, drove slowly past the Victorian houses, the funeral home with the rockers on the porch. Turning onto Main Street, she passed the courthouse, the visitor’s center, the small clinic, and she smiled, thinking of Ricky Truelove. He was in there, seeing patients, or perhaps at the small hospital, greeting Gilead Springs’ newest resident. She passed the John Deere store on the edge of town, strategically positioned directly across the road from the Massey Ferguson dealer. She smiled and drove by the old brick railway depot, now the First National Bank and Trust.

The
Peacock Crossing
sign beside the road told her the Jemisons still kept peafowl. Soon the houses were spaced farther apart, and instead of Victorians there were old white farmhouses, clapboard, with screened porches and fenced fields, a few new brick ranch houses, a few tidy boxes of brick, all with wide sweeping lawns. Signs invited visitors to follow winding roads to cabins and bed-and-breakfasts. After a bit the blacktop gave way to gravel. Oaks leaned over the roads, and pines stayed just a step behind them, already lush, wild, almost meeting in the middle, anxious to take back their land. Turn your back on things, and they reverted to wildness. Take your eyes away for a second, and all traces where you had been would be gone.

She passed Sam’s parents’ home, felt a lurch of pain at the sight of the familiar red mailbox with the rooster painted on. The ridges rose and fell, and then she was there at her father’s house.

She parked the car at the bottom of the hill, for she knew that how you get to a place is as important as the place itself. She got out and walked slowly up the hill.

Brushing her hand across the branches of the laurels, she passed the sheep pasture, and amazingly, a few familiar faces greeted her. They were her own sheep, and she was surprised they were still alive. Sam must have given them to Diane after she had left.

“Hey there, Gussy,” she said. “Sweet Thing! Come here.”

They looked up, trotted toward her, and nuzzled her hand.

My sheep hear my voice,
Someone whispered.

She withdrew her hand, almost in fright, but Gussy and Sweet Thing only stared back at her with black marble eyes, their silly bald faces wearing perpetually puzzled expressions.

She walked on, stopping briefly when she reached the lookout. The valley spread itself out before her. The creek dribbled where it once had splashed down over ancient rocks. A few cows stood in clumps in the lower pasture. She could see her stepmother’s corn and cabbage fields.

Glancing toward the house, she noticed Papa’s car was gone, but that did not surprise her. The small office he had built adjacent to their home was only where he stored his charts and equipment. Oh, a few patients came every day, but mostly he went to them. She believed it was part of the allure his profession held for him, that wandering all over the countryside.

She stood quietly, making no sound to give away her presence, and as she came closer, she saw Diane on the porch, spinning in the late afternoon sun. She was a little plumper, but then she’d always liked her biscuits and jelly. She’d cut her hair to shoulder length, but it was still mostly brown with a little touch of gray around her face. She wore dungarees, a short-sleeved chambray shirt, a man’s watch, her work boots, still caked with mud, and Annie guessed that she had been in the midst of some other job when the wheel had lured her.

Fate intervened. Whip, their border collie sheep dog, came bounding up from the pasture and spotted her. He barked and streaked toward her, all four feet leaving the ground in a flurry of greeting. She petted him and allowed his sloppy kisses. When she looked up, Diane was looking her way, shading her eyes against the setting sun. After a moment Annie saw a slow smile spread over her face.

“Well,” Diane said, her full face breaking into a smile. “Look what the cat drug in.”

“Yep,” Annie said, and that was that. Even if she had wanted more, the Dalton women, whether so by birth or marriage, were not silly or prone to meaningless chatter.

“You picked a fine time to come back,” Diane said, and Annie hoped that was the only mention her stepmother would make of her affairs.

“I’m not staying long,” Annie said, her voice sounding harder than she had meant it to.

“Stay as long as you want,” Diane replied. She gave Annie an appraising look but said nothing, asked no questions, and that was more than fine with Annie. She would have enough questions to answer. Whether Diane was silent out of respect for her privacy or because she simply didn’t care to involve herself in her affairs, Annie was grateful.

She sat down on the step and focused her mind on the spinning, watched Diane draft out the fluffy cotton-candy wool into yarn. Her hands moved skillfully, and Annie remembered the satisfaction of seeing the thick hank of sheep’s wool become something usable and strong. She pressed everything else out of her mind. They were too many and too hard for her. She couldn’t think about them now.

“Your papa’s due home soon,” Diane said, turning away from the wheel and letting the yarn go slack. “I need to start supper.”

“Don’t let me keep you.”

Diane shrugged and gave Annie a shrewd look. “I need to get this roving spun. It’s a special order, and I ought to have it finished by tomorrow. Care to lend a hand?”

An attempt at sly cunning and a complete failure, as were any attempts either of them had ever made at subtlety. Annie knew Diane had seen the longing in her eyes as she watched her at the wheel. She was being kind.

“I could give it a try,” she said. “I suppose I remember how.”

“Come on, then,” Diane invited, and before Annie could respond, she’d turned to go inside and was unlacing her boots. “Don’t forget to take your shoes off before you come in. I’ve got new carpet, and I don’t want it dirtied.” Two clumps as her own boots hit the porch. Then she was gone.

Annie climbed the porch steps, sat down, picked up the roving, and put her foot on the treadle. She pressed. The wheel slowly turned. Whip settled at her feet, thumped his tail up and down once in contentment, then rested his head on his paws. She put her mind aside and watched as the sun set over the ridge, casting a rosy glow on the hills and valleys. She turned her eyes back to the carded fleece. She picked out a small piece of hay, drafted the wool back and allowed the twist to advance to her hand, watching it change from wool to yarn. She pulled and twisted, her fingers remembering. She spun, her feet and hands finding an easy rhythm.