Blue Highways (8 page)

5. Noel Jones near Franklinville, North Carolina

“These the old curin’ barns where they dried the ’bacca. Haven’t been used in years, but you can still smell the ’bacca inside.” We walked over to one. “Look here. That hearth cover’s a Model T hood the blacksmith’s touched up with his hammer. Nobody ever heard of junk then. Junk’s a modrun invention.” We went in the low doorway. Poles that women once strung tobacco on were still in place under the roof.

Jones explained the curing: to “fix the color,” leaves hung from cross poles for three days and nights as heat from the fire cured the burley. Skill in getting a good color could mean the difference between loss and profit. In his boyhood he had stayed up all night with the men tending the hearths. “They told stories the night long. Mostly true stories and mostly how troubles come in a thousand shapes.”

We walked down the wooded hillside to Sandy Creek Reservoir. “Here musta been your granddaddy’s mill. Before the dam, you could walk the length of the crick and hardly see the sun, trees grew so heavy. Animals too. Bobcats, foxes, weasels, deer, wood ducks. Good soil along the crick bottom. That’s why Indians took to it. Had all they needed—water, meat, berries, protection.”

“It’s a big reservoir for such a little town.”

“Got dry a few summers back—a real drouth—and the old town reservoir below where the dam is now almost run dry. Some people got scared. But I heard said too—couldn’t tell you the truth of it—that there’s some awantin’ new industry in here. Mills don’t produce like they did. Randolph Mills used to spin raw cotton into cloth. All we do today is finish cloth. Bleach, nap, and print patterns on cotton flannel mostly. We’re printers now.”

He sat on a rock and stared out over the flat, silent water to a bulldozed hill. “I’m not atakin’ sides, I’m just atellin’ you, but there’s people who say there was plenty of water in that old reservoir. They say, ‘Who needs a bigger reservoir?’”

“New industry means more people to buy clothes and open savings accounts.”

“I mind my own business.” He looked toward the dam. “Already a crack in the spillway. Cain’t seem to get it fixed. I wouldn’t say how long this crick’ll stay drowned.” He got up. “Good fishin’ along Sandy. Wasn’t lunkers in it, but it was cool in here and the water moved. Now you cain’t put as much as a fishin’ line from the bank in that lake legally. No swimmin’, no nothin’. It’s a watchin’ lake because that’s about all you can do with it.”

We walked back up the slope into the woods. Halfway, Jones stopped and edged his shoe into a small depression. “Dried up now, but this used to be a spring where women came to boil their wash clothes in iron pots. One time a woman was here, they say, abeatin’ a rug clean with a stick. Had her daughter along. The little girl disappeared, but the woman just figured she was aplayin’ hide and seek. The mother was athumpin’ her rug when it commenced aturnin’ red. She got vexed with the child for hidin’ raspberries in the rug. She opened it to wash away the stain and her little girl rolled out. Child was hid in the rug. Woman run off through the woods acryin’, ‘I bludgeoned my baby! I beat my baby dead!’ Next night she come out here to a big oak and hung herself with a bedsheet. That sheet, they say, blowed in the trees until it rotted away. Terrified many a man acomin’ through at night.”

On the road back, Jones pointed out the trail to start with. “Grave’s yonder, dead ahead, but the hills and water is in the way. Woods gets terrible heavy over that first rise, and if you follow the reservoir around, you’ll be in water or mud most the way. The grave sits out on a little tip of land about seven feet above the water line.”

“I’ll try through the woods. Get that molar fixed.”

“Gonna have to see a tooth dentist. Stop by tomorrow if you make it. Best you wait ’til mornin’, or you’ll be wipin’ shadows all the way.”

B
UT
I didn’t wait until morning. The smell in the pines was sweet, the spring peepers sang, and the trail over the first hill was easy. Whippoorwills ceaselessly cut sharp calls against the early dark, and a screech owl shivered the night. Then the trail disappeared in wiry brush. I began imagining flared nostrils and eyed, coiled things. Trying to step over whatever lay waiting, I took longer strides. Suddenly the woods went silent as if something had muffled it. I kept thinking about turning back, but the sense that the grave was just over the next hill drew me in deeper. Springs trickled to the lake and turned bosky coves to mud and filled the air with a rank, pungent odor. I had to walk around the water, then around the mud—three hundred yards to cross a twenty-foot inlet. Something heavy and running from me mashed off through the brush.

When I was a boy, my mother would try to show the reality of danger by making up newspaper headlines that described the outcome of foolhardy activity. I could hear her: R
EMAINS OF
L
ONE
H
IKER
F
OUND
. She would give details from the story: “… only the canteen was not eaten.”

Common sense said to turn back, but the old sense in the blood was stronger. I compromised: one more cove. It wasn’t there. On the ridge above the last cove I went sprawling over something hard. Concrete. Had the grave been open, I’d have fallen into it.

A brass plate indicated that the original grave lay just beyond the shoreline. “Who knows the fate of his bones?” Sir Thomas Browne asked. Whatever was left of the old miller, whatever the red soil and grave robbers and town commissioners had missed, was now under ten feet of Sandy Creek. Even this far back in the fastness, the twentieth century had found him out. Now, the citizens drank from his grave.

I sat so long, the sky cleared and showed all of the moonrise. I tried to imagine the incident here, tried to see the seditious old miller as he lay bleeding to death on the white Piedmont flint, and I wondered whether he knew he was dying for something greater than himself.

The smooth, dark water reflected stars as brilliant points of light—a mirror couldn’t have shown a crisper image. I went down to it and washed away the thicket and sweaty dust. In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave.

I
SAW
better under the moonlight, and the passage back seemed as long but not so hard. Big grunts from bullfrogs directed me along the shore until I came out of the dark trees to Ghost Dancing. I drove to a clearing by the dam. Ten-thirty. I hadn’t eaten, and now I was too tired to do anything but crawl into the sleeping bag.

At the moment of sleep, I heard something, something moving in the near woods, then into the clearing toward the truck. A slow stepping. I couldn’t remember whether I’d locked all the doors. But it wasn’t the steps that bothered me; it was the slowness of them, the deliberate coming. It came on. Then it started to lurk.

I lay perfectly still, wondering whether I’d set the emergency brake and hoping Ford Motor Company hadn’t skimped on a millimeter of steel wall. I had the sense that something was crouching outside, near my head. A soft brushing along the truck—a hand, a body—then an impacted silence. It moved again, and I tried to tell how many legs were stepping away.

There was a rational explanation for whatever it was, but I didn’t have the nerve to find it. Instead, I started thinking about a hanged woman with a sheet around her neck who goes looking for her dead baby. I imagined a bleeding miller hunting the men who put a musket ball in him or the ones who drowned his grave.

There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t. Midnight. I forced myself out of the ball I’d curled into, afraid as I did my toes would touch something that didn’t belong inside. The bullfrogs, squatting in the cold water, went at it again. It sounded as though they were talking about the good old days of the swift, shallow creek. They said, “How deep?” “Knee deep.” “How deep?” Again and again.

At three o’clock I sat bolt upright. I had no idea where I was, but I had just heard a yelp, and the walls of the Ghost pulsed blood red. I looked out the back window into a pair of ruby, oscillating eyes. Someone yelled. I clambered out barefoot, wearing only skivvies, and hobbled gingerly to the squadcar. “What’s wrong?”

In a Carolina cadence, the deputy said, “Ain’t no sleepin’ up here.”

“That’s what I’m finding out.”

A fleck of yellow paint from a pencil stub stuck to his lip and bobbed up and down as he talked. “We close the dam area at sundown.”

“I’ll be gone in the morning.” He stared at me. “I guess I could get dressed and leave now.” He said nothing. “Just drove in from Missouri, though, and this bad leg I got in the U.S. Navy starts acting up if I don’t rest it. Hurt it fighting Communism.”

“What’s your name?”

I started to say Standing Bull. Some Indians believe that to give your name is to put yourself in a stranger’s power. But because he already might have run a license check, I told the truth. He pronounced the first name as “Wim.”

“Wim, I’ve logged your machine in. Maybe you’re innocent, but just bein’ near the dam makes you suspect if anything happens tonight.”

“Happens? What do you mean happens?”

“Been trouble around the dam. Things rollin’ into the reservoir, gas drums knocked over. Always happens after dark.”

“I heard something about midnight—don’t know what.”

He looked a moment as if to assess. “Garrantee one thing, Wim. This boy wouldn’t sleep up here mongst the whangdoodles withouten his peace of mind.”

“Peace of mind?”

“Peace of mind.” He tapped a thumb on the butt of his pistol. “Go ahead on and stay tonight. I’d sure secure those doors though.”

Before I fell asleep again, I remembered the red men who walked backwards and brushed out their tracks so no dead soul could follow.

W
HEN
I opened the side door of my rig, it was there, all over the place—in the trees, on the ground, over the water. Sunlight. In Chapel Hill I’d seen a bumper sticker:
IF GOD ISN’T A TARHEEL, WHY IS THE SKY CAROLINA BLUE
? From a tall elm, a mockingbird knocked out a manic of quodlibets. I took towel and soap and went down to Sandy Creek below the dam and knelt on a flat rock slanting into the water and washed. You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad. In the truck I laid out a breakfast of bread, cheese, raisins, and tomato juice.

Then to the road. I bought supplies at Siler City, where the grocery sold twenty-two kinds of chewing tobacco: Blood Hound, Brown’s Mule, Red Coon, Red Horse, Red Fox, Red Juice, Black Maria, Big Man, Cannonball, Bull’s Eye (“Hits the Spot”); also fifteen brands of snuff in three sizes, the largest big enough to give the whole county a snort.

Highway 421 dropped out of the Piedmont hills onto the broad coastal plain where the pines were taller, the soil tan rather than orange, and black men rode tractors around and around square fields of tobacco and cotton as they plowed wavelets into the earth. At the center of many fields were small, fenced cemeteries under a big pine. All day farmers circled the acres, the white tombstones an axis for their planters, while tree roots reached into eye sockets and ribcages in the old boxes below.

Near Dunn, North Carolina, I pulled up at a cemetery to eat lunch in the warm air. Last names on the markers were Smith and Barefoot and Bumpass. All around, the buds, no more than tiny fists, were beginning to break the tight bindings and unclench. A woman of age and size, her white legs blue-veined like Italian marble columns, stooped to trowel a circle of sprouts growing in the hollow center of a large oak dead from heart rot.

I thought about “whangdoodles” in the night, about how they too were gifts of the road in their rupture of order, their break of throttling security; they were a challenge to step out and shake one’s own skeleton at the world.

Highway 13 took me across fields lying flat as a flounder, broken only by broad squares of pine. Unpainted sharecropper cabins were slipping off their blocks, and, although brick veneer bungalows had replaced some, to the side of even the new houses collard patches remained. Tar-papered and asphalt-shingled curing barns, each with a propane tank to give heat for drying tobacco, were all about the fields, and bleached signs on barns near the road advertised flour or fertilizer or a long-dead cotton buyer. Acre after acre. Only the pines kept bright-leaf tobacco fields from sweeping like waves all the way to the coast.

Along the highway, generations of feet had worn narrow depressions in the shoulders. Walking the paths were women and children, everyone carrying something: a woman a child, a child a bag of sugar. An old black man in suitcoat and overalls, his spine straight, pedaled a rattle of a bicycle, a bunch of bananas in the handlebar basket. The walkers paused to talk with men who bent like wickets to the hacking of briars out of the culverts. I heard voices and laughter, and sometimes people waved. Whitman saw it:

At Greenville, I stopped for the night on the campus of East Carolina University. Out of the west, with suddenness, a nimbo-stratus cloudbank like a precipice obscured the sun, and a ferocious wind pulled the fine sandy soil into a corrosive blast. Then the wind ceased, raindrops pelted the sand back into place, the temperature dropped from eighty degrees to sixty-five, the clouds blew on toward the sea, and the low sun shone again. The whole demonstration lasted twenty minutes.

That evening I bought a hot shower in a dormitory. It cost a dollar contribution and a thirty-minute
I FOUND IT
bumper-sticker talk intended to drive the infidel from my red heart and bring me safely unto the Great White Bosom. Take the land, take the old ways, Christian soldiers, but please, goddamnit, leave me my soul.