One Foot in Eden (24 page)

‘I’ve been cutting cabbage,’ I said. ‘I’m taking a little break before I finish up.’

‘What’s your name?’

For a second I paused, not sure what my name was. ‘Isaac,’ I said, leaving it at that.

‘Well, you’re trespassing.’

He said it in a pissed-off way.

‘You all said we had till tomorrow.’

‘That’s changed. Some old woman getting evicted set herself on fire. That kind of thing is bad public relations, and we’re not going to risk something else like that. We’ve got enough problems dealing with the archaeologists and bird watchers. Everybody’s out of this valley today.’

‘What does Sheriff Alexander say?’

‘It’s not up to him to say a damn thing. All he’s done is get in our way. It was him that talked us into letting you people stay long as you have.’

He nodded up at the dam.

‘But none of that matters anymore. It doesn’t matter how many Indian mounds are here or what flowers or bugs or birds. If you found chunks of gold big as baseballs it wouldn’t matter now. That dam’s built, and the gates are closed. It doesn’t matter if you’re living or dead. You don’t belong here anymore. Every last one of you hillbillies is going to be flushed out of this valley like shit down a commode.’

You’re wrong about that, I thought, at least about the dead, because I’d stumbled across graves while rabbit hunting. There’d be nothing more than a clearing in the woods and a few creek stones with whatever name had been scratched on it long gone. Nobody had dug up those graves. Nobody had dug up the grave at the head of Wolf Creek either, a grave with no marker, a grave some people claimed held a witch.

A coon hunter had found her dead in the woods when I was eight. Daddy and a couple of other men buried her in the woods behind her house. They’d built a coffin out of cedar wood, because cedar won’t rot. They hadn’t done it to keep the dirt and water out. They’d done it to keep her in.

I saw no reason to tell Sherman Jameson any of this though.

I turned and started walking back to what was left of the farm. I waited for his hand to reach out and grab my shoulder again but it didn’t. Which was a good thing for him. If he had I would have laid him flat on his back.

‘Don’t come back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If you do you’ll be arrested.’

I didn’t look back but I could feel the dam looming behind me as if it cast a shadow over the whole valley. I stepped over a crumbling stone fence. The Gold Star jabbed my leg through the denim. The water hadn’t risen fast enough, I thought. It should have come like a flood and washed us all out so quick there wouldn’t have been time for secrets that had been long hid in this valley to be revealed, secrets that should have been buried under this lake forever. Because it was like the last few hours I had been trying to walk away from the truth I saw in my own eyes but the truth had been trailing me like a bloodhound. Now it had a hold on me and wouldn’t let go.

When I got back to the house, I sat on the steps. My sandwich was in a paper bag on the porch, but I had no appetite. The farm seemed different from when I’d left it in the morning, like the earth had somehow moved under it and shifted everything—fields, barn, shed, and house—a few yards from where things had been before.

Maybe this wasn’t ever your home, I told myself. Maybe somewhere else is your real home. Maybe your real father isn’t dead, just the part about him being murdered by people who raised you a lie. Or maybe it is all a lie. One second I believed one thing, and the next I believed just the opposite.

I didn’t move from those steps till they drove up.

‘Why ain’t you finished?’ he asked.

‘I got tired.’

He looked put out with me.

‘Sheriff Alexander’s done set up a roadblock. He says we can’t come back tomorrow.’

He looked at the rows of uncut cabbage.

‘Damn, son, that’s a sure ten dollars we could have used.’

‘Billy,’ Momma said, and she said it sharp.

His voice softened.

‘The sheriff said you was there when Mrs. Winchester got burned.’

‘Yes, I was there,’ I said, not meeting his eyes.

‘I’m sorry you were,’ Daddy said. ‘I reckon seeing such would take the starch out of most anyone. Don’t you fret none about that cabbage, son. I shouldn’t have spoke ever a thing about it.’

‘We better get going,’ Momma said. ‘Sheriff Alexander told us not to tarry.’

We got in the truck but he didn’t crank the engine. He and Momma stared through the glass at the farm. For the last time, I suddenly realized. Any other day I would have tried to say something make them feel better.

But not this day.

‘It’s a pretty place,’ Momma said. ‘I don’t notion I knew how pretty till these last few days.’

‘But it won’t be much longer,’ he said, but in a soft way.

‘That’s the worst thing,’ Momma said. ‘Even if I never laid eyes on this valley again, there’d be a comfort in knowing it would stay the way I’d always known it, not buried under a lake.’

They stared a while out the window, maybe trying to freeze it in their minds so they’d never forget.

‘We best be going,’ he finally said. ‘There’s nothing for us here anymore.’

The truck bumped down the drive. Momma kept looking back, even when we got on the road. It was like she expected the farm to disappear the second she took her eyes off it.

We passed Mrs. Winchester’s mailbox. The ground where the house had been looked like someone had spread a black quilt over it. All that was left was the brick chimney and tin roof. That and a few wisps of smoke. I could feel Momma and him tense as we passed by. I wondered if Sheriff Alexander had told them Mrs. Winchester had talked to me.

The road curved away from the river. The sun had fallen behind Sassafras Mountain, and the woods were shadowy. The air had a chill to it.

‘There’ll come a hard frost tonight,’ he said.

He said it without thinking, talking more to himself than to Momma and me, because it was a natural thing for him to take notice of, natural as smelling rain coming or spotting blue mold on a tobacco leaf. He’d been a mill worker for months but a farmer for decades.

‘What on earth,’ Momma said as the road straightened out, because two police cars and a white Carolina Power truck were parked in Travis Alexander’s front yard.

The sheriff stood on the front porch, his deputy and the Carolina Power man I’d seen earlier that afternoon beside him. Travis Alexander stood on the porch too, his hands clasped in front of him like a man praying. He wasn’t talking to God though. He was cussing, some of his words shouted at the engineer but most at his brother as Sheriff Alexander put his hand on Travis’s arm and helped him down the steps and into the back seat of the patrol car.

‘Lord help us,’ Momma said. ‘What awful thing more can happen in this valley.’

I didn’t change into my pajamas that night, just took off my boots and laid down on my bed in my jeans and denim work shirt. I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much sleeping. Instead I’d be thinking, searching for the words I’d speak come morning, words that would have to be chose careful to get me to the truth of what I had to know.

But I had all night. I wanted a little time before I searched for those words. I turned on the radio, because sometimes music can take you out of yourself when you’re bothered. I found some good music—Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater—but it might just as well have been dentist chair music for all the attention my mind paid to it.

I cut off the radio and stared at the ceiling. I didn’t want to close my eyes, because I knew soon as I did I’d see Mrs. Winchester sitting on the floor, flames rising from her lap like something she was cradling.

After a while I cut off the light. An ambulance wailed out on the by-pass. Someone across the street slammed a front door, a car passed a few yards from my window. All town noises none of us had gotten used to.

‘We’ll rent a few months and then get us a place out in the country,’ he’d said after we moved in.

‘It can’t be soon enough for me,’ Momma had said. ‘I don’t see how anyone gets any sleep with such racket all hours of the night.’

I started putting words together in my mind and then erasing them. It was like I was doing a crossword. Every word had to fit in a certain place. But they didn’t fit, no matter how many times I scrambled them up. She’d lied to me almost eighteen years, so she was good at it. The words I wanted would hit Momma so fast and hard her face couldn’t help but show the truth right then and there.

The newspaper thumped on the driveway across the street before I knew what I was going to do. It was a simple thing, so simple I shouldn’t have taken a whole night to figure it out. I wouldn’t even need words, at least not at first.

I slept then, maybe just a few minutes, maybe an hour, but when I woke I smelled coffee.

For a few moments it was like I’d completely forgotten yesterday— Daddy and Momma were who they’d always been, Mrs. Winchester was alive and whatever secrets she had she kept to herself. Then I felt the Gold Star pricking my skin like a briar. I got out of bed and laced up my boots. I took the Gold Star from my pocket and closed my hand over it. I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen.

Momma was putting the milk in the refrigerator. I waited for her to turn around. When she did I opened my palm.

I’d done the right thing, because her face told me more than any words. She pressed her back against the refrigerator, almost like I held a spider or snake in my hand.

‘Mrs. Winchester gave it to me,’ I said. ‘She told me you know where my father is. Where is he, Momma?’

‘Oh, God,’ Momma said. She sagged like I’d punched her in the stomach. She put her hands over her face like she was trying to hide what part of her she could.

‘Tell me, Momma,’ I said. Then I said the thing I didn’t believe. ‘She says you killed him, Momma.’

‘Your momma didn’t kill him. I did.’

He stood in the doorway, bare-chested, shaving cream covering his face like a fake beard.

‘Don’t say it, Billy,’ Momma said.

‘Where is he buried?’

The words came from me, but it was like they came from another person’s mouth, somebody I didn’t know any better than I knew the two strangers listening to those words. This is a dream. It has to be. Open your eyes, I told myself.

But my eyes were already open.

‘That old woman told you a passel of lies,’ Momma said, like my ears hadn’t just heard him say it was all true. ‘We don’t know nothing of what she told you. She was a crazy old woman. She was liable to tell you most anything.’

‘Where is he buried?’ I said again, but I wasn’t looking at Momma anymore. I was staring at the man who stood in the doorway.

‘A lie will always find you out,’ he’d once told me years ago.

Whether he believed it then I reckoned he believed it now. He looked me dead in the eyes. Whatever he was going to say would be the truth.

‘The side of Licklog facing the river. Next to a big ash tree.’

‘She told me I couldn’t let that water cover him up,’ I said, the words still like someone else’s words. Maybe they always would be, I thought, because maybe the person I had been no longer existed.

‘She lied,’ Momma whispered.

‘He ain’t going to stay down in that valley and be covered up,’ I said, still looking at him. ‘You’re going to show me where he is.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

‘Don’t, Billy,’ Momma said. She was crying now. Then she looked at me. ‘Don’t believe it, son,’ she said. ‘Don’t believe it even if it’s true.’

She reached her arms out to me, but I stepped away.

‘Don’t go back there,’ she said. ‘Let that lake cover it all up, son—the good and the bad.’

‘He can’t do that, Amy,’ he said.

‘Put the shovels in the truck,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll get dressed and be out there in a minute.’

It was strange how he said it, so calm and matter-of-fact, like we were going to go dig up some redworms for fishing. Maybe he’s trying to trick me, I thought. Maybe he’s going to go out the back door and disappear. How could you know what a stranger might do?

Except he wasn’t a stranger, and telling myself he was didn’t change things a whit. I knew him, even now, knew him well enough to know he wasn’t going to run.

I stood there and waited. He came out of the bedroom dressed in his farming clothes, the clothes Momma had put in the bottom drawer once he’d started work at the mill. He’d wiped off the shaving cream. I could see his face, and despite all that had happened it was a face I knew.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

He looked at Momma.

‘You staying here?’

‘No,’ Momma said. ‘I’m going.’

It seemed like I was one of the astronauts walking on the moon. Each step I took seemed in slow motion. It was like everything I had ever known, even how to walk, was uncertain now. I got two shovels and threw them in the back of the truck with the cabbage sacks I hadn’t filled. They came out in a minute, her pulling on a sweater while he locked the door.

‘Give me the keys,’ I said. ‘I’m driving.’

He did what I told him. I cranked the engine and drove out of Seneca, making one more trip back to Jocassee than I’d planned.