In Search of Eden (41 page)

And even though he was drinking hot coffee and the kerosene heater at his feet breathed out warm air, Joseph felt the hairs on his neck stand on end.

chapter
41

T
he room was absolutely silent except for the pelting of the rain on the window as she began to speak.

“It was back in the forties when I first met him. He was a little boy. His real name was Beck. Beck Maddux. Now that I think on it, he wasn't an especially evil child. He just had a, well, I don't know, like a blank spot where most of us know right from wrong. He could've been a handsome child if it weren't for those eyes. He was towheaded, just real white blond hair on him, so white it looked like cotton. But those eyes were the palest blue and just like a piece of glass, but there wasn't anything behind them. It was like looking into a doll's eyes. There was no life back of them.

“His home was bad, but so was some others that turned out preachers and good men. I guess it's just no telling what makes one do one way and another do another. I was schoolteacher down at Thurmond in those days. I boarded with the Anse Holt family. They were decent people, because my daddy came himself and saw to it before he would leave me. But I had the school there at Thurmond and would teach there five days a week, and on the weekends my daddy would drive over from Hinton and carry me home.

“That boy, Beck, was a smart child. He knew how to read and could do his sums, but he wouldn't work for nothing. Just stared out the window most of the time. I sent a note home to his parents telling them he wasn't doing his work, and his daddy came and met me after school. He said he was sorry, and then right in front of my eyes he pulled off his belt and whipped that child bloody. I hollered for him to stop, and cried and took on, but he didn't even change expression. He was just like a machine.
Whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp.
And the strangest thing was, I looked down at Beck, and he wasn't changing expression either. That child's face was frozen into a mask, and from that day on no matter what Beck did, I never told his parents. Maybe I should have, but I didn't.

“I saw him do some things that frightened me, just chilled me down to my bones. I saw him take a dog once . . .” She paused and looked at their faces, then shook her head. “Well, eventually he grew up and went to work in the mines. His daddy died of the black lung, and for a while it looked like Beck might be going to turn out all right. I guess he didn't have much energy left for fighting and fussing after a day below ground. I saw him one day down at the company store, and he spoke to me real sweet. He said ‘Miss White'—that was my name before I married—he said, ‘Miss White, you was one of the only people in my life that's been good to me, and I want you to know I appreciate it.' I cried about that.” She was crying now, and Joseph saw Miranda reach for her hand.

“I asked myself for years after that, what could I have done? What could I have done different to help him, and I never can see what it might have been. Anyway, he went on and I got married to a supervisor down at the railroad, and we had a nice house and had four children. Buried one, but raised three, and every now and then I'd see Beck. He didn't live in town but up in the hills in the same house he'd grown up in. It's dark up there. Real dark, soul dark, if you know what I mean.” She shook her head.

“Anyway, after I'd been married a year or so, Beck went off
to the army. They sent him to Korea. He stayed gone a few years and then come back, and everybody said he'd been dishonorably discharged. They said he'd killed another soldier, but they weren't able to prove it. He went on back up to the hills, but he didn't go back to work in the mine. The coal had just about give out by then, anyway. I heard he ran liquor up there, but I don't know. After a time he took a shine to one of the miners' girls. Her name was Lois. Lois Gibson. She was a pretty thing, now. She had blond hair, too, and pink cheeks and the sweetest smile. She wasn't one of my students. Her daddy hired on after I'd quit teaching. You know, people used to move around the camps a lot. One seam would give out, and they'd go to another.

“Well, Beck took on about Lois, and it seemed like she was in love with him, too. Her daddy wouldn't have it, though. Put his foot down one night and met Beck with the shotgun. Beck said, ‘Lois, you come out here. I don't want to shoot your daddy.' And Mr. Gibson said, ‘Stay where you are, Lois. You go off with him, and I guarantee you'll wish I'd have killed you both this night.'

“Well, you know what happened. That night Beck went on home, but in the morning when her daddy went into the children's room, Lois was gone. They ran off to Beckley. Stayed gone six months or so working a mine over in Mingo County, and when they came back, she was expecting a baby.

“They went back up in the hills and hardly anybody ever saw Lois after that. Her daddy went after her, and he didn't come back, and even the law was afraid of Beck by then. They started calling him Wolf, because he had a way of knowing a person's weak spot and hurting them there and because of the way he'd get somebody off alone and hurt them.

“He and Lois had three daughters. The first one, Rebecca, drowned when she was ten. That's what they said, anyway. The second was named Noreen, and the least one was Roberta. They called her Bobbie.”

Miranda looked stunned. Her eyes were glassy. “Noreen,” she
repeated. “Noreen was my mother.” Mrs. Tallert looked shocked at first, then as Joseph watched, her face softened into sadness. After a moment she took up her story again.

“That winter Lois took influenza and died, and it was just Beck and the two little girls up in the woods. All of Lois's people had left by then. After Beck shot her daddy they'd moved to Arkansas, where they had some people. Those two little children were all alone. And that's when I knew I had to do something. My husband didn't want me to, but you know, sometimes there's things a person feels
called
to do. So the preacher's wife and I went up there together, with our husbands waiting in the car. The preacher was praying and Jimmy, my husband, had his twelve-gauge aimed out the window. But we went on up to the door, and I called out, ‘Beck, it's Miss White, your teacher.' He came to the door himself after a little bit, and I wouldn't have recognized him if it weren't for that hair and those eyes. He'd just sort of withered away from the inside. It's hard to tell it.

“He spoke to me just as nice as you please, and I asked if I could come in, and he said it was a mess right now, that he couldn't make those girls do a thing. And I said, ‘Beck, that's what I come to talk to you about. I want you to let those girls come down and go to school. The bus will pick them up down at the road in the morning and let them off in the afternoon. You ought to do it, Beck,' I said. ‘It's the right thing.' And he said, ‘You know, that's something I always did appreciate about you, Miss White. You never did act like you knew what I was like.'

“I'll never forget him saying that, but the next day the girls were there at the school. Ragged and pitiful, but they were there.

“There were some good years then, I think. Beck started letting the girls come down and go to church on Sundays. They even got to go off on trips with the young people a time or two. The only time they'd ever been out of West Virginia or even Thurmond, for that matter. The minister's wife hired Noreen and Roberta to work for her twice a week, cleaning house and taking care of her children. It was a way to give them money, you see,
without hurting anybody's pride. Things went on that way for a while.

“I believe Noreen finished seventh grade. She was such a smart girl, your mama. Just as smart as a whip, and Bobbie was, too. But one day Noreen came in with a big whelp on her face, and I asked her what was wrong, and she said she'd been taking care of her sister. After that she came in with marks and bruises nearly every week. My husband and the preacher talked to the sheriff and to the mine boss, but everybody was afraid of Wolf, and back then things were different. The women were like the man's property, and he could do whatever he pleased with them.

“Well, finally one day Noreen told the preacher's wife that she was going to have a child. The preacher's wife said, ‘Come away and live down here with us,' because we all knew whose child it was. But Noreen said she couldn't leave her little sister, because if she left he would just start in on her. ‘Bring her, too,' the preacher's wife said—Helen was her name—but Noreen said, ‘Now, Mrs. Webb, you know he'd just as soon kill us as let us go.'

“So Helen carried Noreen to see the doctor, and she was expecting, sure enough. She didn't come to school anymore after that, but the preacher's wife and I would take her things from time to time. Eggs and milk and some vegetables, when we had them. The baby was born, but it was too little and didn't live long. It was a boy and had white hair just like Wolf's.

“Shame, shame, shame. That's all she was after that. She would hold her head up real fierce, but it was shame that had her down deep. The preacher and his wife tried to help her, but something had turned hard down deep in her soul. I tried to talk to her, too, but it didn't do any good. She started slipping off from home and going down to Thurmond to the saloon there, and after a while she took up with a fellow passing through. He was a handsome thing. Name of Tommy something. Something Spanish.”

“DeSpain,” Miranda said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

“That's it.” Mrs. Tallert smiled gently. “Well, Tommy took a shine to Noreen and started waiting for her every night, and one night she didn't come to the saloon. Everybody warned him, but he said he wasn't afraid of some old hillbilly with a shotgun, and he drove his truck right up the mountain and parked it in front of the house.

“Some of the men followed him up there. I don't know if they meant to help or just watch the show. I believe the Lord had His hand on them that day, because Wolf had taken sick and was a-laying in the bed, or I'm sure he would have shot that young fellow. Some say one of the girls put something in his food, but I don't know about that. Anyway, Tommy went in there and saw the bruises on Noreen's face, and they said that little Bobbie was crying and begging him not to kill her daddy. They said that was the only thing that saved Beck. Said Tommy DeSpain had his pistol out and was ready to shoot him. But in the end, he just took those two girls with the clothes on their backs and left.

“I never saw them again. Neither did Helen, far as I know. She's gone now, too. She had the sugar diabetes real bad.

“Anyway, that's the story of Wolf. He died right after those girls left. He was walking across the trestle down there by town one night, drunk, and he fell and killed himself. I reckon he fell, anyway,” she said.

The silence filled the room again. Joseph looked down. At some point he had reached for Miranda's hand, and their fingers were now laced tightly together.

chapter
42

M
iranda was stunned. She was beyond tears. She sat in the silence after Mrs. Tallert finished telling the story. After a moment the old woman spoke again.

“I could draw you a map if you want to go up there where Lois and Rebecca and the baby are buried. Beck's cabin was just down the hollow from there. It burned down a few years back, but you can still see the chimney.”

Miranda recoiled but forced herself to not run away from the pain this time. She felt as if she had to be a witness to what had happened to her mother. She nodded mutely. Joseph looked concerned. Mrs. Tallert gave him simple directions, and he nodded and thanked her.

Miranda had come with other questions, but they had been buried under this avalanche of evil. Right now she could not think. She thanked Mrs. Tallert and stood up but was surprised when the old lady held up a warning finger.

“I've got three things to say to you, child, before you leave.”

What more could there be? Miranda steeled herself, nodded, and sat back down.

“You can't hear a story like that and stay right in your mind
unless you know these things,” she said. “So listen to me.”

Miranda recognized the faint shadow of the schoolmarm at the Thurmond school.

“The first is, there's none righteous. Not one. Every one of us could have been a Beck Maddux if it weren't for the grace of God. Some might look better on the outside, but every one of us follows in Adam's footsteps one way or another.”

Miranda nodded mutely.

“The second is, Ezekiel eighteen says God doesn't hold the child responsible for the sins of the parents. Or the grandparents.

“And the last thing is this. Jesus was kin to the prostitute, Rahab. He pardoned the thief on the cross, and what does Paul say about the murderers and adulterers and thieves? He says, ‘Such were some of you, but you were washed.' Don't take on about this,” she warned, giving Miranda a look that was both stern and compassionate. “When you see those graves, remember . . . that's your history, not your future.”

She stood up and walked them to the door with much trembling and shuffling. Her granddaughter fussed, but she insisted, standing on the porch until they walked away.

They got into the car, and Joseph backed out to the main road. He stopped, then turned and faced her. “Do you really want to go up to the cabin?” he asked.

Miranda looked out the window. It was getting dark. Maybe she could come back another time, and suddenly she wanted to leave, to be out of here. But it was odd, for it was just as if someone kind and strong took her hand then, someone bigger than Joseph, and told her she should look, and she knew it would be all right. She nodded. “I do,” she said.

He didn't argue but shifted, executed a quick turn, and headed up the winding road. They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes; then he turned in where Mrs. Tallert had told him. The road ended shortly afterward. They got out, and after a moment Miranda saw the chimney. It was red brick, now burned black and covered with kudzu. It was dark up here, the trees
dripping rain. She walked around the ruins but got no feelings at all other than sadness this time. After a moment she and Joseph walked a ways uphill and found the three graves. They were marked with piles of stones, one large, two small. Miranda stared for a minute, and suddenly her mother's bitterness seemed amazing in its smallness. What was not understandable was how she had been able to function at all. How she had given herself to a man—to any man. How she had managed to keep a child fed and clothed. Suddenly she was remembering the presents under the tree instead of the speed with which the decorations had been put away. She had an overwhelming sense of gratitude to her mother, who had certainly given more than she'd received.