Heading Out to Wonderful (12 page)

“Crazy name,” he said. “Calling a dog after a nigger. Make a good hunting dog, though.”

“Not going to hunt him, sir. Not this dog.” Charlie looked up from cutting.

“Better not let him near a chicken coop, then. Those beagles get a taste of blood, they never stop. Got to hunt ’em or shoot ’em.”

After he left, as he was writing Boaty’s purchases in his book, Will said, “Boaty don’t much care for pets. He’s already got a pet.”

“What’s that?” Charlie asked.

“That wife of his.”

So the little thing was done, and Charlie started on the big thing. The county was six hundred square miles, and criss-crossed with two-lane blacktop that went mostly from nowhere to nowhere, often deadending in desolation and wilderness.

Every Sunday afternoon, he got into his truck with his suitcase and his dog, and he drove. The roads were narrow and winding, not always paved, and he looked at everything in the whole county, even though he didn’t know what he was looking for. He just knew he’d know it when he saw it.

He drove out to Goshen Pass, along the Maury River, and past, to the town of Goshen, where the train came through. He ate his lunch at Cozy Corners, the diner where you could buy beer on Sundays. Charlie didn’t buy beer, but he ate ham and biscuits, and flirted with the waitresses, girls who’d never been anywhere in their whole lives, even though the train came through every day on its way to Staunton and beyond, places they dreamed about in their girlish way, New York or Chicago, big cities where girls just like them worked in offices and wore lipstick and smoked on the street. But they knew they’d never get to any of these places, and they thought, well, maybe that’s just as well.

He drove to Lexington, the county seat, and Natural Bridge, with its old hotel where famous people had come to stay and rock on the porch in the cool evenings, and Collierstown, where the best beef came from. In all of these towns, he never even got out of his truck.

More times than not, he would find himself at the end of the day driving by Boaty Glass’s house, looking, always hoping to see her in the yard, and once he did, and he slowed the car down, and rolled down the window, but then he couldn’t think of anything to say to her. She turned her whole body to follow him, putting those green eyes on him, and maybe she heard him and maybe she didn’t when he finally said a shy “Hey” and gave a small wave that she didn’t return and then he drove on. I’m here, he wanted to say, would have said if his throat hadn’t gone dry at the sight of her. I’m here. I’m the one.

It was the beauty of the land that enraptured him, and he drove until it was dark and there was hardly any traffic on the road any more, talking to Jackie Robinson, telling him about the sights, the sparkling river, the stacks of timber in Goshen waiting for the train to come and take them off to all those places the girls would never go. Every now and then he stopped the truck by the side of the road and he got out. Maybe a field of goldenrod caught his eye, or a carpet of yellow swaying in the breeze, a stand of pines or maples, or a little spring where the water was sweet enough to drink.

He went to the old hotel where the auction had been, the remnants of which now filled his own house, and he liked the way it looked, abandoned and melancholy but still proud, something built in the days of a war that was over a half century before he was born, a war that changed everything, a war that people still talked about as though it were still happening at that very minute. Once he even broke into the hotel and wandered the empty halls and imagined the generals and their wives who had come to escape the heat in Richmond or Louisiana, the military posture relaxing just a little in the cool night air, and the long skirts of the ladies, coming and going.

The countryside just stole his heart at every turn of the road. It just broke him down and put him back together. It was wild and it was gentle. It was a comfort to his soul. Sweet Virginia.

AFTER A FEW WEEKS,
he had learned to separate the land he liked from the land that truly grabbed hold of his heart, and when he saw something that made his heart beat in a certain way, he would get out, climb through the barbed wire fence, or hike up the hillside, and he would feel the sun on his face and the wind would lift his hair from his forehead, and Jackie Robinson would sniff the air, or run around in circles, or chase wild turkeys, and Charlie would just know that he had to have it.

Sometimes he would take off his clothes and just lie down with the dog in the field or the forest, and sleep for ten minutes with a peace in his heart he had never known.

Buying those places he wanted wasn’t hard. There was so much land, and it wasn’t worth much.

In the diary he always brought with him, he would write down carefully the location, the county road number, the specifics of what he had seen. Sometimes there would be a farmhouse in view, and he would knock on the door and find out if he had the right owner, and they would agree on a price. Sometimes it was ten acres. Sometimes it was a hundred, once five hundred.

He never paid less than eighteen dollars an acre, and he never paid more than thirty. He gave a good, honest price, and he never left an owner feeling cheated. When the price was agreed, he went to his truck, opened his suitcase, carefully counted out the money and paid every farmer in cash. “The only money that counts,” he’d always say, “is cash money.”

He wrote it all down in his book, sometimes drawing a crude map, or a sketch of what it was about that particular piece of land that made it so special to him. There was always something in a piece of land that cracked his heart wide open.

On Monday mornings, when business got slow after the morning rush, he went to Bobby Hostetter, the lawyer, and they made it all legal. The owners came in, in their town clothes still smelling of strong laundry soap and the hot iron, and the papers were drawn up and left to be registered at the county courthouse, in Lexington.

He asked Will one day, “Who owns the most land in town?”

“Never thought about it. But it’s got to be Boaty Glass. You could look it up.”

Everybody knew he was doing it. Land sales were published in the Rockbridge Gazette: the acreage, the sale price, the seller, the buyer. People talked about it in quiet voices on Wednesday evenings as they sat on their porches, reading the paper. But nobody talked about it to Charlie. He was a stranger, and strangers do funny things, and he saw something, they figured, in the county land they never gave much thought to.

Charlie Beale had his reasons, but he kept them to himself, the way he did everything else. There was a reason, though, and he knew it in his heart. A reason to build an empire, to make an impression. The reason had a name, and that name, ever since that first day in the butcher shop when she walked into his life in a white linen dress, the reason his travels almost always took him by her house, that name was Sylvan Glass.

CHAPTER TWELVE

H
E HEARD HER
name everywhere. He heard it in the rustle of the trees outside his bedroom window while he slept. He heard it in the ripples of the creeks on his land, in the swish of his tires on the asphalt. He felt it as a sweetness on his skin, a freshness of the air he breathed, a blessing in the sheets that wrapped around his body at night.

Sylvan. He had never had a conversation with her, had heard her child’s voice only once. Now he couldn’t think of any other thing, and every time he thought about her, it was like a punch in the gut.

He had taken such pleasure in so many things. The shifting of the weather, always unpredictable but expected in the valley, the way the valley fell into scented darkness like the underside of a leaf, mossy, then rose to shimmering morning light, like being born over and over and over again. The easy talk of men about sports or hunting dogs or their troubles at home, the pop of a fastball landing in a glove’s weathered palm, all these things he thought had been enough. Enough to fill his heart.

Now the only thing that distracted him from Sylvan was Sam Haislett. Wherever Charlie went, Jackie Robinson went with him, and wherever Jackie went, Sam went. His endless chatter was like the song of a bird, “Beebo, Beebo,” and Sam knew far more than he could express, about Prince Valiant and his adventures, which he followed every day in the paper, about baseball, and the gun he was going to get when he was ten, a lifetime away and right around the corner all at once, in his mind, so his thoughts ran away with him sometimes. Charlie reined him in, then egged him on to more and more talk. Sometimes he couldn’t think of a word, and Charlie helped him out. Sometimes he had so many thoughts going at once he rattled on like a runaway train, and Charlie had to get him back on track.

Sam was the only one besides Will and Alma who didn’t treat him like a foreigner, who just took him as he came. It touched Charlie’s heart, the way the boy would reach out to take his hand when they crossed a creek, or climbed a steep slope. It charmed him, the way the boy called him Beebo, no matter how often he told Sam his name.

Charlie had never much seen the charm of children, he had thought it was continuance he sought when he dreamed of his child, not companionship. Charlie had been one of those boys for whom childhood was a kind of prison in which he only longed to be grown, to be a man, but Sam was starting to change his mind. Because Charlie had been a prisoner of his own childhood, he had never really stopped being a child himself. He found he could talk to Sam easily, and tell him everything about where he’d been and the people he’d known, knowing Sam would never pass on the information. He told him that everything he was telling him was private, just between them, and he made sure Sam knew what that word meant.

Childhood is the most dangerous place of all and no one gets past it unscarred. In Charlie’s heart there grew a need not to be one of the scars in Sam’s life, to help and not to wound this boy.

And Sam, in return, told Charlie everything. He told him about Will and Alma, about baseball stars and places he wanted to see, all the things he’d learned about while his father was reading him the paper.

Maybe because Charlie was younger than Will, and boyish, or closer to his own size, but Sam found he could tell Charlie things he wouldn’t tell his mother and father, mostly about how he felt about things. Will was always interested in what Sam was doing, but it never occurred to him to ask how he felt, as long as he seemed to be happy, and he did, and he was. Everything seemed new to him, every day, all the time.

When it got into late September, it got to be butchering time. The pigs were getting heavy without getting so overfed their kidneys were lost in fat, the lambs were poised in that delicate stage between being sheep and turning into mutton, and the flies had begun to die off in the cooler valley nights.

Every Wednesday, Charlie drove out to the slaughterhouse to pick up the week’s meat, and Sam went with him, as he had always done with Will, even when he was barely able to walk. It never frightened him; he knew what it was, he just didn’t seem to pay it much attention. He never saw the actual killing or skinning, never saw the living animal, just the great sides of meat hung up in the cold locker, so maybe he hadn’t made the connection yet between the meat he saw and the animals that grazed in the pastures.

As they drove on Wednesday afternoons, Sam would point out to Charlie every house they passed, and tell him the names of the families who lived there, the Hostetters, the Ploggers, the Willards, the Mutispaughs, the names that popped up all over the county, the names of the women who came every morning to buy the meat for the day. He knew all the names, and the names of their dogs, and he recited them all, every time, as though Charlie had never heard of these people.

On the first trip to the slaughterhouse, Sam pointed at a big white farmhouse on a rise just outside of town, that house Charlie already knew so well, her house, its massive solidity and squareness softened by the gingerbread fretwork that hung from its wide, full porch, and he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Glass.” He said it like “Miz,” the way all the people talked. Charlie slowed the truck down, as he had done so many times before, looking for her, and then he drove on about his business.

On the way home, he slowed the truck down just a little more. There was a blonde woman standing on the porch, in a flowered housedress, common as any in town, but light, blowing open just slightly in the breeze. This time, her eyes didn’t follow him as he drove past, and he didn’t wave.

“That’s Miz Glass,” said Sam, and Charlie just nodded without saying a word. But that night, after closing up the shop, he bought a box of Crayons at the general store, and, lying in bed, he filled three pages of his diary, writing her name over and over until he had used up all twenty-four colors in the box.

After one trip to the slaughterhouse, Charlie told Will he wasn’t happy with the way the local men cut up the meat, that it wasn’t efficient, wasn’t focused on separating the good from the less good, and he said he knew how to do it better, and Will told him to give it a try. After that, Charlie took his knives with him, and the trips took most of the afternoon, as Charlie first cut the corpses down the middle with a hacksaw, and then carefully went to work separating out the various cuts of meat.

He also had a problem with the fact that he didn’t think Will was hanging the beef long enough. Will resisted, saying it had always been good enough, but Charlie persisted and he gave in, so Charlie turned down the temperature in the locker a few degrees, and they aged it for ten more days, a full sixteen, before they started selling it. The day came when they started selling it to customers, and all the women, black and white, and even Boaty Glass, said it was a miracle, that they’d never tasted such good beef in their whole lives.