It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (18 page)

I liked this mountain music. I’d started listening to it a few years before and found 1 was susceptible to its mercurial moods and colors, more so than ever since we’d moved up here to mountains of our own, where it had come to seem conjured directly out of the bristly, unyielding landscape itself, the rapid successions of pain and sweetness, tension and release, frugality and spilling richness, rising straight out of these thickly wooded crags and gloomy gullies with their sun-shot clearings and glittering, wind-riffled creeks. I would listen to it in the car as 1 drove to work, an hour down the thruway. The lucrative drudgery of my job left me with a depleted sensation, as though I’d spent the days asleep or dead, but driving there and back, I would play my Clinch Mountain Boys CDs at full volume, and as their frenzied, propulsive energies surged into me, I would bray along at the top of my lungs with Ralph Stanley on “Bright Morning Star” or “Little Birdie” or “Black Mountain Rag,” harmonizing with unabashed tunelessness, and a feeling of joy would arise in me as if a second self, full of fiery, passionate vitality, were at the point of awakening inside me.

A van drove into the yard shortly after we arrived. In it was the pig for the pig roast. As a wedding joke, their friends had arranged to have the animal delivered alive instead of dead. Two of them helped the butcher lead it from the van, roping its bucking, scarleteyed head and shit-squirting rear end and dragging it over to Rick. One of them handed him a gleaming knife.

“What’s this?”

He stared down at the animal, writhing frantically in its ropes.

Faye had appeared, dressed in a denim skirt and red cowboy boots. She looked on, smoking a cigarette with an air of neutral but attentive interest.

“You gotta do the honors, buddy,” one of the bikers said, “duty of the groom.”

There was loud laughter, a shout of “Go awn, cut his goddamn throat.”

“I’ll cut your goddamn throat,” Rick muttered. He went into the house, and there was a brief, awkward hiatus. He came back out with a shotgun. Faye turned away.

“Hey, you cain’t do that, he has to bleed to death, don’t he?” a guest said, looking at the butcher, who gave a noncommittal shrug.

Ignoring them both, Rick loaded a cartridge into the gun and fired it straight into the pig’s head, splattering himself and several others with blood and brains. This set off guffaws of laughter among the bikers, and Rick himself cracked a smile. “I’ll get the come-along,” he said. They hoisted the pig up with this device— an archaic-looking assemblage of cords and gears and wooden pulleys-—hanging it by its hind legs from a tree branch, and the butcher slit it open, spilling its innards into a bucket. Then they drove a spit through it and set it up over a halved oil drum grill, and the band, which had fallen silent during this episode, struck up again, three high voices in a blasting triad calling out: “ Weeee-ill you miss me?” followed by the single morose rumble of their thick-bearded baritone: “miss me when I’m gawwwn . .

Rick came up to us with a bottle of applejack that he claimed to have brewed himself with fruit from his grandfather’s old Prohibition orchard at the back of their lot. He insisted we take a swig from the bottle—it was pure liquid fire—then reeled away, grabbing Faye for a dance on the stone floor.

It was at this moment, watching him cavort around his bride with one hand on his hip and the other brandishing the bottle high in the air, while she stared out across the valley at the dusty emerald flank of Donell Mountain, that I registered, for the first time, the tinge of sadness in Faye’s expression, underlying the more visible cold severity.

I was away much of the following year and aside from a few fleeting glimpses didn’t see them again until the fall, when 1 ran into them at a neighbor’s party. Arshin and Leanne, the hosts, were therapists, Buddhists, members of the local “healing community”: Leanne shaven-headed like a Tibetan monk; Arshin gaunt and dark, a set of prayer beads forever clicking in his fingers. Their friends were mostly either acupuncturists or Chi Gong practitioners. Rick and Faye were standing in a corner, drinking beers with a tall man in a scuffed leather jacket and a pair of muddy work boots. The three of them looked out of place among these shoeless, tea-drinking wraiths. I went over to say hello. Rick introduced their friend as his “buddy” Schuyler. I noticed a string of numbers tattooed across the back of his neck, like a serial number. He gave a nod, then faded swiftly back into what appeared to be some immensely pleasurable private reverie. Purely to make conversation, I asked Rick if he was planning to sell firewood again this fall.

“Maybe.”

“I’d like a cord if you are.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t seem all that interested in talking. I moved away, wondering if I’d offended him by talking business at a social gathering. Schuyler and Faye left the party, but Rick stayed on, drinking steadily. At one point he started asking women to dance, even though it wasn’t that kind of party. One or two of them did, just to humor him.

The next night, at two in the morning, he started firing off his gun. The same thing happened for the next several nights. I called to ask what was going on. He answered the phone with the words “Hello, you’ve reached the Vanderbeck Hollow Cathouse and Abortion Clinic,” then hung up. A few days later I came home from the train station to find a pile of logs dumped over the lawn. It was true that I’d asked for wood, but normally we would discuss the price and the time of delivery before Rick brought it over, and he would help me stack it. I called him that evening. Without apologizing for dumping the wood, he said he wanted $120 for it.

“That’s quite a bit more than you usually charge.”

“That’s the price.”

I stacked the wood. It seemed less than a full cord, and I said so when I took the check down to Rick the next day. He was outside, talking with Faye by the stone oven he’d built in their front yard. He barely looked at me as I spoke.

“That was a full cord” was all he said, taking the check. “I measured it.”

It was only when I spoke to Arshin a few days later, as I passed him on his porch clicking his beads, that I began to understand Rick’s behavior, and it is only since I’ve spoken with a cousin of Rick’s who works at the post office that I’ve begun to piece together the sequence of events in the month that followed.

Schuyler, their companion at Arshin’s party, was not a friend of Rick’s at all, let alone his “buddy,” but an old acquaintance of Faye’s. The exact nature of their relationship was not made apparent to any of us at this time; all that was known was that he had turned up at Rick’s house, having just come out of jail, where he’d spent eighteen months for selling methamphetamine. Faye ran off with him the day after that party, leaving the four kids behind. She was gone for five nights. Those were the nights Rick fired off his gun. She came back; they had a fight, a reconciliation; then she took off again. The sequence repeated itself a third time, after which Rick told her to stay out of the house for good. She could take the children or leave them, he told her, but she had to go. At this point Faye became violently angry, throwing furniture and dishes at the walls till one of the older kids called the cops. Before they arrived, Rick chamber-locked his gun and set it outside the house. “That was so the cops would see there wasn’t no gun violence in the house,” his cousin told me. Faye had cooled down by the time they showed up. Very calmly she told them that Rick had threatened to kill her and the children and then himself. The police, obliged to take such threats seriously, carted Rick off to the Andersonville Hospital psychiatric wing for a week’s enforced observation. By the time he came out of the hospital, Faye had obtained a protection order, barring him from coming within a mile of the house.

The next few days are a mystery, obscured by conflicting reports and gaps in the record. What was known for sure was that Rick spent them at the home of a relative, a woman named Esther, whom he referred to as his “second mother,” his first having disappeared when he was small. He was distraught, drinking heavily, but also looking for work, intent on supporting his family even though he wasn’t allowed to see them. The Saturday after Thanksgiving he took a job with a landscaper who’d been hired to do tree work on a property in town. We first heard about the accident when Arshin called on Sunday to ask if we knew whether it was true that Rick had been killed the day before, hanged, up a tree. An hour later he called back to confirm the report. A heavy branch, roped to the ground to make it fall in a particular direction, had been caught by a gust and blown the wrong way, slashing the rope across Rick’s neck and chest, asphyxiating him. He was seventy feet up in the air, and the fire department couldn’t reach him with their cherry picker. They put out a call for a bucket ladder. A local contractor brought one and grappled him down. He was blue. The emergency helicopter on its way from Albany was sent back.

The funeral service was in town, at the Pinewood Memorial Home. It was already crowded when we arrived: young, old, suits, overalls, biker jackets, everyone in a state of raw grief. We signed the register and made our way inside. Loud, agitated whisperings rose and fell around us, anger glittering along with tears. Already there was a sense of different versions of Rick’s last days forming and hardening, of details being exchanged and collected, variants disputed. The two older children sat on the front bench on one side of the cKapel, fearful-looking as they had been when we first saw them, walking alone up the twilit slope of Vanderbeck Hollow. On the other side were Rick’s relatives; his father sitting rigid, hands on his knees, broad back motionless.

Faye appeared from a side room with the two little girls and slid next to the older two, glancing briefly over her shoulder at the congregation, her face stricken, though whether with grief, guilt, or terror was hard to say. Even among her four children she seemed a solitary, unconnected figure.

A minister came in and told us to rise. He read from the Bible about walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, fearing no evil. We sang a hymn, and people went up to the front to speak.

High school anecdotes were recounted; fishing stories, the time Rick was chased out of his front yard by a bear ... A tall silver-haired woman stood up. As she began speaking, I realized she was Esther, Rick’s “second mother.” She said she’d had a long conversation with Rick a few days before his death, when he was staying with her.

“In hindsight,” she continued, “
unbelievably
, I see that I have to take this conversation as the expression of Rick’s last wishes.”

With a firm look around the crowded chapel, she announced that he’d said he still loved Faye. “He told me he still hoped to have another child with her, a son.”

She paused a moment, then concluded: “Therefore, Faye, I honor you as his widow, and I love you.”

An unexpected brightening sensation passed through me at these words. I, like everyone else no doubt, had arrived at the funeral believing Rick was up that tree in a state of impaired judgment, if not outright suicidal despair, and that this was a direct result of Faye’s behavior. I still did believe this to be the case, but I was caught off my guard by the implicit plea for compassion in Esther’s speech. In spirit, if not in any specific detail, it chimed with some dim sense I had of something inadequate or incomplete in the story I had been told of Faye’s actions. I had concurred in the general verdict against her, but I must have had some faint scruple of doubt about the matter. At any rate I found myself thinking again of the expression I’d glimpsed on her face at the wedding, gazing off into the late-summer greenness of the hollow, and although I still had no more idea what it signified than I had at the time, I wondered if there was perhaps something more in the nature of a torment underlying her behavior than the purely banal selfishness and manipulation by which I had so far accounted for it.

The service ended. Whether by design or some unconscious collective assent, our departure from the chapel was conducted more formally than our arrival; a single, slow line formed, passing out by way of the casket. It was open, and there was no avoiding looking in. Ribboned envelopes were pinned to the white satin lining of the lid. “Dear Daddy,” they read, in childish handwriting. I mounted the single step, bracing myself for the encounter. There he lay, eyes closed, beard trimmed, cheeks and lips not so subtly made up, chalky hands together holding a turkey feather. I stared hard, trying to recognize in this assemblage of features my neighbor of seven years. For a moment it seemed to me I could make out a trace of the old mischievous grin that floated over him even when his luck was down, and it struck me—God knows why—as the look of someone who knows that despite everything having gone wrong with his life, at some other level everything was all right.

That was November. Knowing what I know now—what we all know now—I go back to that ghost of a grin on Rick’s face and find I must read into it a note of resignation as well as that appearance of contentment; submission to a state of affairs as implacably out of reach of human exertion as the shift of wind that took his life. And by the same token I go back to the look on Faye’s face at their wedding and find in it, beyond the general sadness, the specific expression of a person observing that after all, nothing, not even the charm of one’s own wedding day, is powerful enough to purge the past or stop its taint from spreading into the future. Whether this disposes of the “banal” in her subsequent actions, I am not sure, the situation being, in a sense, the precise essence of banality. Schuyler had been her foster brother from the time he was fifteen and she eleven. Arshin had the story from an acquaintance who used to work for the Andersonville Social Services. Over the course of several years, in a small house in the section of town known as the Depot Flats, he had—what?—“seduced” her? “Taken advantage” of her? “Raped” her? No word seems likely to fit the case, not in any useful way, which is to say any way that might account for the disparate, volatile cluster of wants, needs, aversions, and fears the experience appears to have bequeathed her: the apparent determination to put a distance, or at any rate the obstacle of another man, between herself and Schuyler, her equally apparent undiminished susceptibility to him, her cold manner, her strange power to make a man as warmly tender as Rick fall in love with her nevertheless.