Chaneysville Incident (49 page)

I did not want to go. I did not want to go at all. I would rather have sat in the cabin, sipping toddies, listening to Judith’s snoring, even looking at those damned cards. But there was nothing in the cards for me; I knew that now. And I had gone to every other place on the map, visited the caves and the hollows and the hideouts, all of it. There was only one place left. Only once chance left for me to understand. If there was a chance at all.

I shifted the pack to make it ride more easily, and fumbled in the pocket of Bill’s field jacket for the flask. I took a sip, keeping it small; the whiskey in the flask and in the bottle in the pack was going to have to last… I figured quickly. A forty-five-mile round trip, at maybe three miles an hour, allow for rest and delay due to the snowfall… Call it twenty hours, perhaps twenty-two. I realized that I should have brought another bottle. But I would not go back; I might wake Judith. And I was wasting time thinking about it; I shifted the pack again and started down.

I stopped when I got as far as Moses Washington’s house. I don’t know why I stopped. But while I stood there I wondered, for the first time, if she knew the truth about what he had done. Probably not. Probably it was the kind of thing that she would work at not knowing, or at least, at not believing. Just as I had. But then I realized that it made no difference what she knew, because for a dozen years she had lived with a man who was so crazy that one day he was going to walk twenty-two miles just to find a nice spot in which to blow his brains out, and so preoccupied as not only to do it, but not to care enough about the effect of it on his wife—and his children—to try and make it look like an accident; a man who showed her no mercy. And then I thought of Judith, waking in the morning to find me gone.

And so I climbed up onto Moses Washington’s porch and opened the door of Moses Washington’s house, and stepped inside, shivering a little, trying to be silent.

But the house was not silent. The darkness echoed with electronic static scratchings and the raspy sound of an announcer’s voice; she was listening to the radio, some all-night call-in show from Boston or Detroit. The sound of it grew louder as climbed the stairs, made my way through dark familiar rooms: “My grandfather got off a boat from the old country, Dan, and he was discriminated, but he worked hard and he made his way, and I think anybody can do the same thing.” I went and stood at the doorway of her bedroom, looking at the mound her body made beneath the handmade quilts. “…hard work is the American way, even if you are discriminated…”

“John?” she said.

“…don’t like it, just go back where they came from. My grandfather had to fight to get here, and they didn’t have to do a thing…”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know if that’s quite the way to look at it.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, Dan, that’s the way I look at it. I think if they took the welfare money and bought boats…”

“How can you listen to that garbage?” I said.

She reached out and turned the radio off. “I don’t really listen to it,” she said. “It just keeps me company.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What do you want to know?” she said again.

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want to know anything.”

“You always want to know something,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. The radio scratched in the darkness. She reached out again and turned it off.

“Why did you marry him, anyway?” I said.

“I wanted to have children,” she said. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact, as if she had expected the question.

“There were lots of men.”

“No,” she said. “There weren’t any. Not here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We were allies,” she said. “We didn’t want the same things, but what we each wanted was close enough…. I wanted children, he wanted sons. He wanted two sons. He said that at the very beginning. I said I hoped he knew you couldn’t always control that kind of thing. He said he could. He had read and studied a lot of books and the Laws of the Old Testament, and he said that if we lived the way the children of Israel lived, then we would have sons. So we did. Part of the month he would sleep in the other room. And we had sons. And after your brother was born, that was the end of…that part of things. Because he had what he wanted, and I had what I wanted….”

“Didn’t you ever want anything else?”

“You mean love?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Yes,” she said. “I wanted it. I suppose you could say I didn’t get it. Moses didn’t love the way most people would think a man should love…. I don’t know. I had what he gave me. Maybe it was love, maybe it wasn’t.”

“Was it worth it?” I said.

She didn’t say anything. But suddenly I could hear her breathing, there in the darkness.

“Was it?” I said. “Was it worth it?”

I heard her move then, heard the bedsprings creak as she reached out and turned the radio back on. I heard it hum as the tubes warmed.

I turned away from her then, and went into the powder room, wondering if what I was doing was the right thing, or even a kind thing; if Moses Washington’s way had not been better; if she had not, when they came to tell her that her life with him was a finished incident, breathed, somewhere inside her, a tiny sigh of relief. I stood there in the smell of hair pomade and stale perfume and wondered. But then the radio began to crackle again, and some insane insomniac began to chatter about the salvation of God, and I took the keys down and slipped them into my pocket and quietly went away.

W
E CAME SLAMMING DOWN OFF THE HILL,
the tires half rolling, half sliding over the snow, giving me a minimum of control. I wasn’t steering, I was aiming, but that didn’t worry me—I had learned to take a car off the Hill long before my mother had found the money to buy snow tires—but Judith, sitting rigid in the right-hand seat and watching Railroad Street come flying up towards us, was frightened. “Shouldn’t you slow down?” she said.

I didn’t answer her; I was running out of Hill. I had time to flick the headlights and hit the horn, just in case there was somebody on Railroad Street, and then we went diving down into the hollow at the base of the Hill, the speedometer reading thirty-five. The rise beyond the dip killed some of the speed, but the wall of the warehouse on the other side of the road came roaring up at twenty-five, and I heard Judith say something, but I was too busy to listen, too busy hitting the clutch and holding it down and jamming the transmission into second, and then stabbing at the brakes once, hard, and cranking the wheel around to the left. The rear end kicked out, and I flicked the wheel just a little. The rear end came around then, and straightened out, perfectly square, and I had traction and control, and drove on, steadily, sedately.

“Jesus,” Judith said.

“It’s the only way,” I said.

We came rolling up towards Richard Street. I made the turn at twenty, let the speed climb a little more, and then we were going up the grade into the center of town and I kept the engine speed constant while the wheel speed fell off. We coasted to a stop at the traffic light, and there I had to make my first decision. There were two ways to go: east, out towards the Narrows and then turning south on state highway 326, through Charlesville and Beegleton and Rainsburg; or due south into Cumberland Valley, through Burning Bush to Patience and then east from there to Rainsburg. The first route was likely to be unplowed; the second would be clear as far as Patience, but then I would have to climb Evitts Mountain on a road that might be plowed and might not. I thought about it for a minute, sitting at the traffic light wishing I were on foot. The mountains angled away to the northeast. The wind had not yet kicked around to come out of the west. The western slopes should be fairly free of drifts, and warmer, so less icy. It wasn’t much of a theory, but otherwise the decision was a toss-up, so when the light changed I took us south, up the long incline on Richard Street and down into the valley beside Shobers Run. The road was twisting for a mile or more, but the turns were gentle, the rises and falls small.

“It’s lovely,” she said.

It was. There was no wind in that valley; it was protected by a curious configuration of the mountains: they pinched down into a narrow pass, creating almost a box, really. And so the air was still and clear. The headlights reached out and tapped the snow and sent back golden sparkles that added to the silver thrown up by the moonlight. But far above us the clouds were fleeing north across the sky, propelled by a wind so strong it tore them apart as much as it pushed them, and I knew that half a mile farther on, where we would come out of the lee of the mountain, the wind would be driving up the cove.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked over at her.

She had turned her head back and was staring out the windshield. Her face was calm, composed, and contented, her profile sharp and distinct against the background of the moonlit snow.

Her face changed then, but not into a smile: her eyes widened in fear, and I realized that I should have been watching the road. I spun back. We had been coming down an incline towards a turn, and I had let the speed get away from me, and ahead of us loomed the outline of a square solid building, its near corner only a few feet from the edge of the road. It wasn’t as dangerous as it looked; I just shifted back to second and steered the car around it.

“That’s a dumb place to put a building,” she said.

“Actually, it’s a dumb place to put a road; the building was there first. On the other hand, there wasn’t any other place to put the road; all that over there was water.”

“What…?”

“It’s an old mill,” I said. “Built by”—I let the cards flip in my mind—“Dr. John Anderson, around the turn of the century. All that out there was the mill pond.”

She shook her head. “I know you said this place was backward, but they were using water power in 1900?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I meant the turn of the nineteenth century.”

“It’s still standing?”

“They built to last. There were mills all over the place, and a lot of them still stand. Or parts of them do.”

“Still…” she said. But I couldn’t listen to her; another turn was coming up, the first of the bad ones, close above the creek and cambered wrong, which is what happens when you try to build a highway over a route best suited to horses. I got the speed down with some careful braking, and came around it with enough speed to straighten out. I heard Judith gasp, but it wouldn’t be the road this time.

“The Springs Hotel,” I said. I turned and looked. It was a sight. A long, creamy edifice, with a columned, two-storied central section and long, pavilioned wings reaching out on either side. The snow on the lawn was smooth and unblemished, and the moonlight danced on the facade.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“And old,” I said. “A hundred and seventy years or so. Built by Dr. Anderson”—I stopped to think, letting the cards flip—“in 1806. Just a few years after Vincenz Priessnitz invented the sponge bath, the wet sheet pack, and the douche, and started cleaning up in Austria with mineral water spas. The fashion came across the Atlantic. Along about 1804, a mechanic… nobody knows his name, so maybe it’s just a story, but anyway, he was fishing right over here and started drinking the water, and before long his rheumatism was cured and the sores on his legs were gone. So Anderson built his hotel, and a couple of years later he bought more land, with three more springs on it, and the word got around. For a while this was the most prestigious resort in America, the vacation spot of millionaires and Presidents. Local people made plenty, and they stopped complaining about hard water.”

A right angle was coming then, and I got the speed up and started to bring us around the turn.

“I don’t—” she said, but the wind hit us then, and pushed us into a little skid. I started to correct, but then I saw what was going to happen, and I let the rear end come around until the wind caught the left side of the car and slammed it back into line. I relaxed then; from there on until the climb over the pass into Cumberland Valley it was going to be easy. Judith twisted around in her seat, looking back to get a last glimpse of the Springs. “Quite a sight,” she said. “When did it close down?”

“It didn’t,” I said. “It’s just shut for the winter. Opens the end of April.”

I felt her tense. “I see,” she said. “Just one of those little things about this place you didn’t tell me, right?”

“It’s just an old hotel,” I said. “How am I supposed to know you’d be interested in an old hotel?”

“One that looks like that? I… Oh, never mind. Tell me now. What’s it like inside?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been inside.”

I heard her twisting around again, and I knew she was staring at me.

“I’ve never been inside,” I said again. “I wouldn’t set foot in the damned place.”

We were up the incline now, and I made the turn that put the Springs out of sight. The road ran straight then, at a slight upgrade, across the face of the mountain. The trees were tall on either side, their branches arching over us, blocking out the moon. I shifted back up into third gear and let the speed climb.

“John,” she said. There was an edge on her voice.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “It’ll keep my mind off your driving.”

I thought about it, not wanting to, hoping the facts would elude me, but they didn’t, they came springing into my mind, names and dates as clear and sharp as india ink on red card stock. “Buchanan,” I said. “James. Born 1791. Graduated Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1809. Elected to Congress 1821. Appointed minister to Russia 1832. Elected senator—this was back in the days when the senators were elected by the state legislature—1834. Stayed in the Senate for eleven years, and then went to work as secretary of state under Polk. Buchanan messed up foreign relations for a few years, hewing to the expansionist line. He presided over the acquisition of Oregon and the annexation of Texas, which got us into the Mexican War, much to the delight of the Southerners, who had visions of turning the entire Southwest into slave territory. They won the war but lost the political battle, because Zachary Taylor became a hero in the Mexican War and ran for the Presidency as a Whig, and won, which put Buchanan out on his ear. But Taylor died of typhoid fever. Millard Fillmore couldn’t hold the Whigs together, and lost out in 1852, but the Democrats managed to compromise on Franklin Pierce, who was a war hero and soft on slavery, and he was elected. He made Jefferson Davis secretary of war, and he made Buchanan minister to Great Britain. At the same time, the minister to France was a man named John Young Mason, a Virginian, and the minister to Spain was a French-born immigrant who had gotten to be a big-time Louisiana Democrat, a man named Pierre Soulé. Now, the way it worked out, the Southerners were hamstrung by laws that controlled the expansion of slavery into the North and West, but nobody had ever said much of anything about the South. They thought they were going to make out well after the Mexican War, but all they got was Texas. So they set their sights on Cuba. The first thing they did was to try and steal it, and they sent seven hundred and fifty Mexican War veterans under a man named Narciso Lopez on a little expedition. That was in”—I had to think for a while—“1848. That didn’t work. It didn’t work when they tried it again in 1850. When they tried it again in 1851, they came close; they actually got a foothold on the island. But Lopez was captured and killed. So they got Pierce to make noises about annexing Cuba in his inaugural address, trying to stir up favorable public opinion, and tried to promote a war over a customs hassle involving a cargo ship called the
Black Warrior
, which had violated some regulation and was being held in Havana harbor. But the North refused to go to war over a six-thousand-dollar fine. So then they got Pierce to get Soulé to try and buy Cuba. But Soulé had really screwed up pushing the
Black Warrior
thing, had actually issued an ultimatum on behalf of the U.S. government that nobody in the State Department had authorized, and the Spanish wouldn’t listen; they didn’t want to sell Cuba, anyway. So Pierce told Soulé to get together with Mason and Buchanan, and they held a conference in Ostend, Belgium, and came up with a document called the Ostend Manifesto, which was a pretty obvious suggestion that if Spain wouldn’t sell Cuba, the U.S. government ought to go and take it. That got nowhere; the secretary of state was no great liberal but at least he wasn’t a fool, and he repudiated the document as soon as the news leaked out. But it didn’t hurt Buchanan any; it kept him in good with his Southern buddies, and with their help, and the help of some of his Northern buddies who were just as bad—in between ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘Dixie,’ Stephen Foster wrote Buchanan’s campaign song—he got the Democratic nomination for President, and because the liberals couldn’t decide between Fremont and Fillmore, and because of some shenanigans about the Dred Scott Decision, which his Southern buddies on the Supreme Court held up announcing until after the election because they were afraid if they did it beforehand half the country would vote Republican, he managed to get elected President. First Pennsylvanian ever elected President. And the last one, too; people do learn from their mistakes, if the mistakes are bad enough. And Buchanan was bad enough. If you went looking for a worse President you could find one, I suppose, but you’d look awful hard to do it. Maybe Nixon. But then, Nixon never really came close to destroying the country, and he had six years; Buchanan just about did destroy it, and he managed in four. He started out by appointing a crony to every job he could find. He made a man named Bowman, who had been the editor of one of the local papers, the
Gazette
, for a long time—”