Heading Out to Wonderful (2 page)

As he wrote, he would start to remember what it had been like, growing up where he grew, the people who were his people, and other people he met along the way, and he would note down things, finding as he wrote a kind of simple eloquence, always referring to his friends only by their initials, just so, when he got old, he would have some way of looking back on the days that were passing, the places he’d been. He’d done it since he was a boy, when his fascination with the world was greater than it was when he came to town, and even though the passage of his life didn’t interest him nearly as much now that it was happening as it had when it was all just waiting to begin, he still kept at it, out of habit. Sometimes, in reading back, he would come across a set of initials he’d written down, and not be able to place the person, the face, or the reference.

Keeping the diaries was his way of judging how far he stood from what he considered to be goodness, as he understood the term, and most nights he would add a little plus or minus next to whatever he’d written, just to gauge the distance, his recorded moral compass. There were eleven of these diaries in a box in the truck, numbered by year. He was working on his twelfth.

Then he knelt by the truck with the singing of the crickets loud in the dark and the murmur of the night moths like a fluttering in the heart, and he said his prayers, even though he knew deep down he had lost his faith somewhere along the way. He prayed for his family, he prayed the bright hopes of his childhood would return to him. He prayed that things would finally turn out better, and that this would be the place he could feel at home.

HE BOUGHT A LOAF
of white bread at the store, and some sliced baloney and peanut butter and jelly and a carton of Cokes, and he ate sandwiches out by the river, keeping the drinks cool in the dark flowing water.

Every day of the first week he walked the streets of the town, seemingly without purpose or direction. He nodded hello to everybody he passed, politely, but he didn’t talk to a soul. He just looked with a quiet, even stare at the shops: from the dry goods store down to the barber shop with its striped pole twirling endlessly. He looked closely at every house, at the neat picket fences and gardens. He looked at the faces of the people of the town, as they in turn looked at him, and he pictured these faces as he lay in the dark out by the river, just thinking about whether or not these were people he would like to know.

Some days, he got in his truck and drove aimlessly around the back roads of the county, his suitcases on the seat beside him. He would stop and look out at the mountains, across the farm fields now gray-gold with the end of summer heat and drought, the second-cutting hay all done, the golden stubble sticking straight out of brown dirt. He just watched the land. He looked at the county from every angle.

Everything he did was noticed. What was he looking for, they wondered all over town. What was he looking at?

They were waiting. They were waiting for him to do something, and until he made the first move, nobody would hold out a hand to shake, or give anything back to his gentle stare.

He was the scarecrow in the garden.

After one week, Charlie Beale started doing things. He got up with the first light, a sliver of moon still in the sky, and shaved in the rearview mirror of his truck. He put on a clean white shirt, and he went and sat with Russell Hostetter at the breakfast table and arranged to buy the fifty acres of river land out where his truck was parked.

He paid him one thousand dollars in cash.

“Planning to build?” Russell asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Charlie. “It’s just peaceful. I just want a quiet place.”

“Well, it’s pretty peaceful out there,” said Russell. “I got to tell you,” he said, eyeing the stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, “that land ain’t good for much except peace and quiet.”

“That’s all I want.”

“Flood plain.”

“I’m not building out there.”

They shook hands and Charlie said he’d arrange to have the survey done and the deed recorded. Then Russell went back to his breakfast and Charlie got into his truck, the leather seats already warm from the morning sun, and just drove and sat by the river, his land and river now, until it was late morning. He took off his shirt to let the sun warm his skin.

He felt complete peace, watching the water flowing by, knowing that wherever he put his foot, the land under his shoe belonged to him. When the water rose, if the water rose, and sooner or later it would, it would flood his land.

At the beginning of his second week in town, he got out his knives and sharpened them again, then drove into town and parked outside Will Haislett’s butcher shop. Stores were already shutting for lunch, shopkeepers going home to their dinner.

He got out, locking the truck, and walked over to the entrance and pulled open the door handle that said
GWALTNEY’S HAM,
and stepped inside. The bell over the door jangled. There was a small boy standing in the middle of the store, shorts, T-shirt, bare feet on the sawdust floor. Charlie Beale didn’t see anybody else, just the child, his blond hair cut close to the skull, almost glowing in a shaft of light from the street, the glare from a passing car’s windshield, motes floating in the brilliant air around his still and golden head.

They stood silently, a grown man and a small boy. Everything stopped for a second except the buzzing of the flies, the tiny bits of dust floating in the air, the man suddenly awkward, drawing lines with his foot in the sawdust on the floor, the child freezing him with an intent stare, as though he were seeing through Charlie and into some other landscape, as though Charlie weren’t there. A tiny slice of time in a small town a long time ago.

“I’m Charlie Beale.”

“Beebo” was all the child answered, shaking his head, looking past Charlie, into that other landscape, dead serious.

“I know who you are,” said a voice from the back of the shop, as the heavy door to the meat locker swung open. “Everybody knows who you are. Nobody knows what you want, but ain’t a soul in this whole town don’t know your name is Charlie Beale. Not since the day you bought Russell’s land. We know your name, we know what you paid for it. Question is, what do you intend to do with it? Why are you here? That’s the question, Mister Beale.”

“I’m a butcher, Mr. Haislett. A good one. I’m looking to work. That’s all I want. Just a job.”

“You see a big crowd here? You see a lot of people just standing around waiting to be served with nobody to wait on them? Cause if that’s what you see, you got a world better eyes than I do.”

“A good butcher. I have experience all over the place. There isn’t anything I don’t know.”

The boy never took his eyes off Charlie, just shuffled over to the white-haired man and held on to his pants leg.

“Hell’s bells, son. I’m a good butcher and I run a nice clean shop, and people come and they go and nobody complains and I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years, ever since I was just out of the army, learned everything from my father who learned it from his father.”

The little boy laughed. “Beebo,” he said, delighted. “Beebo. Beebo.” His father looked down, rubbed his head.

“This here, Mr. Beale, this here is Sam Haislett. He is my son and he is five years old and he is the light of my life. Shake hands with Mr. Beale, boy.”

“Beebo!” The boy laughed again, then stepped forward and held out his hand, watched as it disappeared in Charlie’s broad palm. “Pleased to meet you, Sam. It’s a real pleasure. Call me Charlie.”

“I’m going to call you Beebo, sir. Okay?”

“Whatever suits you, son. Whatever you think best.”

Sam returned to stand by his father’s leg. Will picked up a butcher knife, wiped it down with a clean cloth.

“I’ll work for free.”

“Free work is worth exactly what you pay for it.”

“I’ll work for free for one month. Then you’ll decide what you want to do. If you still want me around. I’m worth it, you’ll see.”

“Why would you do a fool thing like that?”

“I mean to settle down here, Mr. Haislett. I’ve seen enough of the world. I just want my own little corner of it. A place to feel at home again.”

“And where’s home?”

“Nowhere, now. Came from up north. Born out in Ohio.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“You know the story. Came back from the war. Daddy dead. Mama moved in with relations. Family scattered. So I went traveling. Saw the country, looking for I don’t know what. Yes, I do. Something wonderful, I guess. Someplace special. I saw Brownsburg. I’ve been here thinking hard on it for a week.”

“Let me tell you something, son. When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand-new penny, but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go. Brownsburg ain’t heaven, by any means. But it’s perfectly fine. It’s all right.”

“I mean to stay. I’ve got nobody and nowhere I want to be. I need something to do with my days.”

“And money don’t mean nothin’?”

“Like I said, sir, I have nobody. I have what’s in my suitcases. I mean to find a house, make a place to lay my head and all that takes money and it takes work, and butchering is what I know.”

“Slaughtering?”

“Everything. I can slaughter a cow so fast she looks as peaceful as if she died in her sleep. They say it makes the meat sweeter, more tender when the animal goes quickly and peacefully.”

“Hell. I don’t know. Tell you what. It’s almost dinner time. Go in there and get some of that beef and cut us off some steaks and come home to eat with us. My wife Alma’s smarter than me. She’s a schoolteacher. She’ll know what to do. I’ll call her now.”

Charlie stepped into the cool of the meat locker, listening to Will speak in hushed tones on the wall telephone. He picked a side of beef and swung it out and onto the butcher block without even getting his shirt dirty. He opened up the leather pouch holding his knives and laid them out one by one on the counter.

“I’ve got my own knives.”

“That I can see.”

“From Germany.”

He picked out a knife, tested the blade against the side of his thumb.

“T-bones? Sirloin? Tenderloin?

“T-bone. Pan steaks. You know.”

“Bone in?”

“Yes. But thin.”

“How many?”

“Four.”

Using a knife and then a hacksaw for the chine, Charlie cut four steaks, pulled on the roll of white paper over his head, tore off a square and wrapped up the steaks as neatly as a Christmas package.

“That’ll do?”

“That’ll do fine. Let’s go eat. We’ll ask my wife what to do about you. She’ll know. She knows everything.”

They stepped into the day, now hot, and Will carefully locked the door behind him.

All around them, in the hot stillness of Brownsburg at noon, people were sitting down to their dinner. They walked along Main Street. It was the kind of town that had only one of everything it had, and a lot of things it didn’t have at all. They didn’t talk.

They stopped in front of a tall Victorian house, neat as a pin, with zinnias growing around the steps that led up to a high porch, gingerbread trim fretted and heavy with wisteria vines, the blooms long gone. The buzz of summer noonday flies; the smell of hot black tar about to bubble. The house was a sturdy building where a family lived out its life, its loves, its sorrows, its small everyday inconsistencies and mundanities. All of it Charlie Beale breathed in as though it were the sweet heavy musk of a night blooming flower.

Will Haislett opened the door, and Charlie Beale stepped into the dark warm hall. With his first breath, he could tell that everything in the house was clean, clean all the time, the tables dusted, the glasses in the cupboards clear and spotless, the sheets on the beds taut and smelling of bleach and fresh air. It was like nothing he remembered, had nothing to do with his own reckless childhood, but it was somehow as familiar as his own skin, like something he had known was there his whole life but had never tasted or smelled.

A home, something Charlie didn’t have, shelter and kindness to every living soul who slept there, bonded by blood, and every friend and stranger who passed through its doors. It was in a constant state of readiness, a readiness to welcome.

In those days, there were no antiques. There were just new things and old things, things brought from the home place, things cared for through the years, through the rough-and-tumble of life, things bought when the marriage was new, things bought for a lifetime.

The furniture in the sitting room where Will Haislett led Charlie was mostly old, covered now by summer slipcovers of chintz and linen, made by Lula Hall, who knew every piece so well by now she didn’t even have to measure when called on to make covers for the sofa or the big, comfortable chairs.

Will didn’t offer Charlie a seat, and they stood awkwardly, five-year-old Sam holding on to his father’s leg, the face the same in man and boy, the same blue eyes. Charlie could smell things cooking, good rich fresh things, could sense a bustle going on somewhere in the house, even though everything where they stood was perfectly still.