Original Sins (69 page)

“Thank you so much,” he said, handing Raymond a quarter.

They lay on the porch and waited. Ten minutes later the man in the Mercury ended up where he'd started from, looking at them. The window rolled down, and the man laughed. “That was a pretty good joke, boys.”

They faked laughs.

“How long have your people been in these parts,” he asked Raymond.

“Going on two hunnert years.”

“How did they get here?”

“They walked.”

After he drove away, they all chuckled, and Raymond was pleased with himself. It was probably just a question of time until they accepted him without hesitation. If he could get Zeke and Wash up off this porch floor and back to tilling their fields and fishing their streams, they'd be among his staunchest lieutenants.

“You know, really I admire the way yall are together,” he told them.

“Huh?” said Zeke.

“You don't realize how lucky you are up here. Under capitalism people don't have friendships, they have functions or possessions or skills that other people need.”

The three turned their heads to look at him.

“But here in Tatro Cove it's just Wash or Ben—complicated individuals you can't categorize like that, because there's nothing of material nature you need each other
for.
You can just sit back and watch each other's characters open, one petal at a time, like a sunflower in the sun.”

He looked at them, awaiting agreement. They smiled uncertainly.

“Uh, what's capitalism?” asked Wash.

“Those are good men,” Raymond said as he and Ben walked back down the highway.

“Well, I think they like you, too. But you use some pretty fancy words sometimes, Raymond.”

“That's where I need you to help me, Ben.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, I need you to tell me which words are too fancy. They're all the same to me. Can I count on you for that?”

“Well, sure, Raymond.” He seemed pleased at the notion that he might have something to offer Raymond. Raymond had to make him see that this very humility was a valuable part of the legacy of Tatro Cove.

Back at Ben's, M.G. insisted Raymond come see his new bathroom. “We just had it redid, Junior. I want you to be the first to see it!”

Raymond walked into a brightly lit, tiled cubicle. Fluffy green carpet covered the floor and the squat toilet like creeping mildew. A square sunken bathtub ordered from Lexington. Double sinks in a fake-marble Formica counter. Mirrors all over the place. M.G. flushed the toilet “Listen, Junior! It don't make a sound.”

“Well, it's really something, M.G.”

“You're not just whistling ‘Dixie,' son! I reckon it's the finest bathroom in these parts. What you think?”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Why, I bet you ain't even seen many bathrooms this grand up North!”

“No sir, I sure ain't.” Raymond's lack of enthusiasm was driving M.G. in search of greater hyperbole.

“I do believe this is just about the most luxurious room I ever did see!”

“Oh Pa, come off it,” Ben muttered in the doorway.

M.G. said in a huffy voice, “Why, I get the impression, Junior, you don't much care for it, to tell you the truth.”

Raymond sighed. “M.G., I ain't got nothing against flush toilets. I just don't necessarily believe that owning one makes you a better person than you was when you had an outhouse down the holler.”

Early the next morning Raymond went to Cor Four's barn to help him milk. Cor Four never said much, and when he did, it was in a self-conscious drawl. As he sponged udders and attached suction cups to nipples, he spoke not at all. Working alongside him, Raymond honored this silence. Probably Cor Four was communing with his cows, keeping them content and productive, like a queen bee with her workers.

At one point Cor Four chuckled.

“What's so funny?”

“Hee hee, just thinking about old Cor Three.”

“What about him?” This was wonderful stuff. Ancestors were living presences in Tatro Cove, formed part of the fabric of daily life.

“Used to hunt squirrels all the time and bile them up. Give the broth to you, no matter what ailed you. Verbena was down with the ammonia one winter, and he turns up in her roam with a bowl of that stuff. She looks up at him and says, ‘Uncle Cor, if hit was to take squirrel broth to bring me back, I'd just as soon go on home.'” He chuckled. Raymond didn't. He'd been reading up on it. There was lots to these folk remedies. Mockery of them was a tactic of the drug industry and the AMA.

“There's lots to be said for folk remedies.”

“I reckon. But give me a shot of penicillin over squirrel broth any day, boy.”

The problems here were graver than Raymond had recognized. Apparently even the older generation had fallen prey to the modern world. His work was cut out for him. But on behalf of the younger generation, he asked Cor Four what toys he'd played with as a kid.

“Toys?”

“Yeah, you know, wooden toys that your father and uncles probably carved for you from pieces of wood.”

Cor Four took a bite of Red Man tobacco and sat chewing on a milk can outside the milking parlor. “Yeah, I recollect one or two. Something we called a gee haw flimmy diddle that you made out of laurel twigs. And this thing you whirled around your head on a rawhide cord. A bull roarer. This old Cherokee Indian who lived up the next holler used to make them for us.” He laughed.

“Can you show me how to make them?” He studied Raymond. “What you wanting old-timey junk like that for anyhow?”

“For Lyla and the other little kids in the cove.”

“They got em the television now. Don't need no bull roarers.”

But that evening Raymond handed Lyla a bull roarer, a slice from a hickory limb with a cord attached. She shifted her eyes from Big Bird long enough to look at it.

“Uncle Cor made it for you,” Raymond explained. “You twirl it around your head and it makes a sound like rushing wind. The Cherokee Indians used to think they'd bring on storm clouds in a drought.”

Lyla shrugged and returned her eyes to Big Bird.

“Mind your manners,” Lyle growled from the couch. “Say ‘Thank you, Cousin Raymond.'”

“Thank you, Cousin Raymond.” She grinned, revealing several missing baby teeth, then looked back at the television.

“Well, see you,” said Raymond, heading for the door. He didn't know how to act around kids. Hadn't been around them much. Nobody in FORWARD had any. In Newland he saw Joey and Laura some. They were brats—interrupted and talked back, showed off and threw tantrums, confident their parents would be enthralled, which they generally appeared to be. Capitalism bred brats: Only the new was worthy of respect in a consumer society.

“You got nice kids,” he said to Lyle, who was seeing him out.

“You don't have to live with them.” He laughed.

“They seem to do what you tell them.”

“When they don't, I beat the shit out of them.”

Raymond chuckled. He was sure Lyle was being modest, putting down his virtues as people so often did in Tatro Cove.

The sun woke Raymond, shining on his bed as it cleared the hill across the creek. He went outside, took a leak, then picked up the bucket and went to the creek. He sniffed the air and looked at the sky, the way his cousins used to when they were kids. You tried to figure out what kind of day it was so you knew what jobs to plan. It was still such a kick planning his days, after years of having them planned for him by employers.

He pulled on his overalls and chamois shirt and built a fire in the stove to scramble some eggs. The corn needed hoeing. The fence around the graveyard needed mending. When Ben arrived, he stripped some corn for the chickens and fought with the rooster over the eggs, while Raymond milked the cow and put the milk in the springhouse. As they chopped weeds in the corn patch, Raymond glanced at Ben from time to time. The sun shone off his blonde hair like a halo. Raymond thought about him all the time now—his guilelessness, his native intelligence, his integrity, his uncomplicated enthusiasm and curiosity. Ben touched him deeply. The responsibility frightened him every now and then. The opportunity to create the spokesman he needed was staring him in the face. But what if Raymond couldn't do it right?

He chopped at the purslane and began lecturing to Ben about the myth of progress: “Under capitalism Progress actually means profits for shareholders. Progress toward some infinitely desirable but never specified and always receding goal. The term is an anesthetic that keeps workers punching that time clock ever morning. But corn just grows, it doesn't progress.” He liked the sound of that last phrase. Corn just grows, it doesn't progress. He saw himself feeding this analysis into Ben, and Ben passing it on to Zeke and Wash, and its spreading throughout the area. He himself would be like a radio transmitter.

“Uh huh,” murmured Ben, avoiding Raymond's eyes.

Back at the house they smeared some butter and honey on bread Raymond had baked the day before, and set off up the stream with Raymond's L.L. Bean fishing equipment.

“Did you ever think,” Raymond asked, “how many times Cor One must have waded up this creek with his fishing gear?”

“Naw, never did.”

“Just imagine: This whole area empty of people except a Cherokee hunting party or two. Fish jumping out of the creek at you. Everything you needed you could make or hunt. Those guys were really something.”

“I reckon.”

Failing to catch trout, they ate their bread for lunch. As they sat licking honey off their mouths, Ben said, “Junior, did you ever, you know”—he blushed—“do it to a girl?”

“You mean make love?”

Ben ducked his head, mortified.

“Sure. Every now and then.”

“Who with?”

“A couple of different women.”

“Do you have a girl now?”

He thought about Thelma, whether she qualified. “Yes, I guess. She lives near Newland. I've been … involved with her for about a year. But we're not getting along too good right now.” He'd been down to see her a few times to try to talk her into moving with Jim to Tatro Cove. He described the ever wider gap yawning between rich and poor, the fouling of the valley's air and water with wastes from the factories, the poisoning of its inhabitants, the eventual collapse of Newland, the deserted mills and factories inhabited only by hoot owls and black widow spiders.

“My goodness,” said Thelma.

“This scene down here can't last much longer, Thelma. You need to learn how to supply your essentials with your own hands.”

“Yeah, Jim'd be real good at that.”

“In a place like Tatro Cove you'd get some help with Jim. Everyone would pitch in.”

“I bet.”

“They would,” he insisted.

“Honey, I've lived in these parts all my life. I know how people flee when times get hard.”

The last time he'd gone down there, she'd given him a TV set. “I think you're lonely up there in the woods all alone,” she explained.

He tried to act pleased, but had to face up to the fact that she hadn't understood a word he'd been saying.

Ben grinned. “So
that's
where you go when you roar off in your Jeep like you're running shine!”

“You been wondering?”

“Shoot, we all been wondering. Sitting around discussing it for months. Most decided you was going to see your parents.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“You going to marry her?”

“Not if I can help it.”

He looked shocked, so Raymond added, “She's a nice girl, but she's already married.” This made it worse. “Her husband's in a wheelchair.” Ben gasped.

“Don't look at me like that, please, Ben. I mean, life is pretty complicated.”

“Doesn't it upset her husband?”

“He doesn't know.” Things were getting more sordid in Ben's eyes. “Look, she needed sex, I needed sex, so we gave it to each other. He was hurt less than if she'd left him. Probably less than if she'd told him.”

“But I mean, it's the most beautiful thing a man and a woman can do together. How can you just do it and then drive away?”

“Sometimes it's beautiful. Sometimes it ain't. It depends on the other person, your mood, the circumstances. Sometimes it's awful.” He felt as though he were raping a virgin. He remembered his shock on that church rooftop when Maria let him in on the secret that it wasn't necessarily always and forever just because you sated your hungers on each other a few times.

“I would never do that,” Ben murmured.

“Good. I hope you don't.”

“When I make love, it will be the real thing.”

“Yes, but …”

“Cheryl wants us to, but I'm not sure I want to marry her. Then I couldn't go away to college. But I'm not sure I want to go away to college.”

Raymond looked at him. “Does she want you to marry her?”

“She says not. But once we'd done it, I'd have to, wouldn't I?”

Raymond frowned, trying to remember adolescent logic.

“And what if she got pregnant?”

“You know about rubbers, don't you? You can buy them in the men's room at that Mobile station in town.”

“Yeah, but sometimes they don't work. It happened to a guy at school last month.”

“That's true. But I guess that's a chance you have to take if you want her bad enough.”

“I'm not sure I do.”

As Ben strained to sort out the ethics of premarital sex, Raymond recalled his initiation with Wayne over the stamp album. It'd been kind and uncomplicated. Especially compared to the thing with Maria. It would be useful if Ben could get this sex business out of the way, so that he could move on to really important matters concerning the perpetuation of Tatro Cove. Raymond realized he only had to turn to Ben, put his hand on the spot on Ben's thigh where the sunlight now played …