Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (14 page)

In 1969 Brown's Ridge damn near went. Joe Guy's father saw the development going on in the rest of the county and made up his mind to sell. He found someone in Clarksville who would buy his herd of Holsteins, mapped out roads, and even had sewer lines put into the front field. The caps are still out there; sometimes I trip over them when Greenup and I walk at sunset, or Joe Guy's mower catches a blade and from my bedroom I hear the scrape of metal against metal. In the spring of that year, Joe Guy's father stood at the edge of the field with a notary public, a man from a development company, and blueprints for two-and three-bedroom brick ranch houses spread out on the hood of his Cadillac. He was all set to sign the final papers when he had a heart attack and dropped right where he stood, into the ditch on the side of the road. The pen fell out of his hand. The man from the development company said it was as if he had been struck by lightning.
Almost like an act of God,
he would tell people for the rest of his life
.
The farm and all the land, as drawn up in the will, went to the sole heir, Joe Guy, and Joe refused to sell. He bought the cows back from the man in Clarksville
and put them right back out in the pasture, kept on farming for the next thirty years. But now Joe is older than his father was when he dropped into the weeds that day, and he's got visions of Florida dancing in his eyes, clean fingernails, sleeping late.

 

Some days, if either of us has some money, the Musician and I get lunch down at the Meat ‘n' Three. Lacy pours our coffee and sings along to the country video station on the TV. She holds her check pad up to her mouth and whispers not to order the fish.
The cat done licked it,
she says. The Musician eats fried chicken with okra, cottage cheese, pinto beans. I eat cornbread and a biscuit and take my rainbow of pills. Lacy is young enough to be the Musician's daughter, my granddaughter. She wears a wide black belt low on her hips, jeans, bright blue eye shadow. She's got the body of a 1950s movie star. The Musician watches her carefully as she moves around the room. Most days, she'll sit down with us while we eat, stealing a French fry or a potato chip from the Musician's plate, snapping her fluorescent gum. But these days the place is packed with developers up from Nashville, spreading out topo maps on the tables and picking the pork out of their turnip greens. Joe Guy comes in with a pretty lady in panty hose and a suit. They sit at the counter and go over a brochure of computer-generated images of big brick houses.
We're going to call it Apple Orchard Acres,
she tells him, and he rubs his hands together and nods. Lacy brings
his sweet tea and asks if he's heard from Joe Jr. He only smiles and winks at her. His brand-new F-350 is parked outside the restaurant, the engine ticking.
Wouldn't you do it, too?
the Musician asks, when he sees me looking.
Wouldn't you do the same, for a couple million dollars?
What would I do with two million dollars? Buy back the land. Save it for the coyote, the heron, the possum, the bobcat, the kestrel, the broad-winged hawk.

 

Since my stroke, this is what I have come to know: The path to enlightenment is free of all desire. The doctors say it is something to do with a drop in my testosterone levels, but I feel it is something greater. I look at the world with a new, pure love. The graders rumble down the Pike and pull into Joe Guy's front fields, laying down the roads. There are three phases of development planned, 188 houses total, with talk of a golf course. The smaller farmers in town, when they hear about it, start to reassess their mortgages, talk to their wives. Dave doesn't want me and the Musician to get left behind at the Second Coming. He prays for us to find Jesus. But I don't need to.
I've found love without him,
I say. I look for other answers, other explanations. I read whatever I can get my hands on. Every mammal on earth, I've read, from mouse to man to mammoth, goes through roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. When I tell this to Dave, he says,
If that's not proof of God, then I sure as hell don't know what is.

We dig up a mule shoe, six square-headed nails, a milking pail, a barrette. We find an old Maytag washer, rusted parts all tumbled down the hillside like spilled guts. I have a certain respect for folks who chucked their garbage out their back door. When I was lying unconscious in the hospital, the Musician came into my house and cleaned out as much junk as he could, the boxes of old syringes, the rank buckets of piss. When I relearned how to talk, the first thing I said was,
Thank you.
Jesse James and a member of his posse, a man named Bill Ryan, alias Tom Hill, drank beer and ate tinned oysters at the saloon that once stood on the site of the Minute Mart, which keeps its security lights on all day and all night, too. We stop to buy Cokes and cellophane-wrapped miniature chess pies, which keep us going until midnight. The kids who hang out there whisper when we come in. I hear them say
, There goes one crazy motherfucker,
and it's hard to tell whether they're talking about Dave with his apocalypse eyes, the Musician with his filthy jeans and busted boots, or me with my shaking hands, my slurred speech.

People driving down the Pike stop in front of my house to take pictures of the historical marker, and they cross the yard to look at the well, which Jesse James supposedly dug. I watch and wonder what they would say if they could see inside. Stacks of magazines from the eighties, old food, stuff even the Musician was too scared to touch when he cleaned the place out, a smell of piss hanging on the shades, which I keep drawn tight. Members of the Nashville ladies' garden club come and tend the outside of the house, watering the
rosebushes, trimming back the boxwood. Greenup Bird puts his paws on the windowsill and barks his head off at them. But I don't mind all the people. I remind myself that, though I've almost paid off the mortgage, this house doesn't really belong to me. I am no more than a squatter, only passing through. A few years ago, the ladies put a pine log wishing well on top of Jesse James's deep dank well, a hanging basket full of fake flowers, like something out of a miniature golf course. Dave gets some work somewhere south of the city and leaves, promising the Musician that he'll give us a call on his cell if he hears from Jesse. The Musician comes down the road and knocks on the door, looking for clues. Frank's house burned in 1909, but the Musician reasons that maybe he left something at Jesse's place, a hint, a tiny bag of gold.
Think we could get down that well?
he asks. He eyes the living room fireplace suspiciously and runs his finger along the mortar.
Do you really think we'll find it?
I ask him. He straightens up, pushes his hand through his wild long hair. He looks more serious than I've seen him in years.
For future generations. We need to find it,
he says.
What the hell are you talking about?
He looks at me.
I'm going to be a father
, he says, grinning like a sphinx.
I'm forty-nine years old. I've never even dreamed of this.

 

At the start of October, Dave returns, unannounced, to sleep on the Musician's floor. In the middle of the night he gets word from Jesse that he hasn't been remembering correctly.
Frank didn't put it up on the ridge,
Dave reports to us.
He buried it in one of the fields near his house.
The farm that Frank rented was sprawling, hundreds of acres along the creek. It took him days to plow, even with a team of good mules, even with a half-dozen hired hands. We abandon the ridgeline and come down into the valley. We start out from east to west with no regard for fences, property lines,
NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING
signs. We dig wherever Dave or the metal detector tells us to: In farmers' fields, in people's backyards. We dig up shale and limestone filled with crinoid fragments and brachiopods, the fossilized skeletons of creatures who inhabited Brown's Ridge 500 million years ago, when we all would have been standing at the bottom of a shallow salty sea. We scare up a half-clothed teenage couple who spook out of the paw-paw like deer. I find an arrowhead, perfectly fluted. When the white man first came, the Indians would lure him into the woods by imitating animal sounds: at night, a fox or an owl; during the day, a squirrel, horse bells. Kaspar Brown was stalking what he believed to be a rutting buck the day that he was ambushed on the steepest part of the ridge.

Joe Guy stands in the gold light of his back field in late October, shading his eyes with one hand. The cows, some of them descendants of his father's herd, the ones he bought back in 1969, have all been trucked to Alabama. A bobcat that he has watched all its life will spend a few weeks cowering under the construction foreman's trailer until it streaks out of the pasture and into the hills. The sadness I feel when I
see the backhoes moving in is much bigger than me. It seems to shadow the land with heavy wings. At the Meat ‘n' Three, Lacy leans over the toilet in the back and throws up before her breakfast shift, holding her hair at the nape of her neck. Joe Guy comes in for one last breakfast, trying to fill a creeping emptiness.
At least the house will stay in the family,
he mutters, hunched at the counter over his coffee and eggs.
Joe Jr.'s coming back for it, you know.
When Lacy hears this she pauses, her heart pounding and full of new hope, stooped over the bleach bucket with a dripping rag.

 

B. J. Woodson and J. D. Howard used to ride their horses down the Pike and across the river on Saturdays, taking the Hyde's River Ferry and kicking up dust. Just across the Cumberland, in a floodplain at the bend of the river, was the racetrack where they used to spend their hours, Frank always anxious to get back to the farm, Jesse always convincing him to stay longer. The flat alluvial deposits of the land, the silt and fine-grained sand, made it an ideal place to run horses. Seventy years later, it made it the obvious spot to build the Cumberland County airport, and when they built the run-ways they dug up hundreds of horseshoes and coins. When the airport moved out to the interstate in the eighties, the floodplain became the MetroCenter Mall: a movie theater, vast parking lots, elaborate fountains. Since it went bankrupt a few years ago it's been all but abandoned, save for one former shoe store at the back, facing the river, that has been
converted to the State Democratic Headquarters: Some interns and a couple of laptops, without even a prayer. You can see it from the top of the ridge, this white elephant, and if you know how to look you can see the palimpsest of the land clearly, the story written on top of story written on top of rubble and bone.

Sometimes I don't know where Dave gets it from. He takes things he hears here and there and cobbles them all together into one unified theory of Armageddon. He pushes his greasy black hair from his face, rolls a joint, takes Isaiah from his pocket.
The earth is utterly broken down,
he reads
. The earth is moved exceedingly. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled. It shall reel to and fro like a drunkard.
If this is true, we ask him, why is he bothering to dig for buried treasure?
If we strike it rich,
he says,
I can buy my girl a Greyhound ticket out from Cali. Get a fuck before the end of the world.
The Musician rolls his eyes behind Dave's back. We have spent long hours debating the existence of this girl. If you spend enough time with Dave, it is hard to keep track of what is true. I do know this: I haven't believed in God since the 1960s. These days I'm not sure what I believe in at all, save the law of the conservation of matter, which means everything is made of what came before: the shrapnel of the big bang runs through my veins, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the cells of the bones and shit of every man, woman, or cockroach that walked this earth before me.

 

Years ago we held huge parties up at the Musician's cabin. We'd roast a pig, plug in the amps, invite loads of music industry people who would drive up from the city, get trashed out of their skulls, and wake up in the morning next to a stranger on the cabin floor. Back then there was no Minute Mart, and people brought beer and liquor in huge metal coolers, not to mention sheets of acid, coke, all the heroin you could ask for. The Musician slept with second-rate country singers and girls just off the bus from Huntsville or Tuscaloosa who were headed for Music Row. I would lock myself in the bathroom with a producer or two and try to slip free of my mind. When my veins started to fall apart, I shot up between my toes. After the stroke, I realized that the world is much bigger than I'd ever before imagined, and that it will close up seamlessly on my absence, like water over a sinking stone. This is the most important thing I know. Walking with Greenup Bird one morning along the creek, I saw him shove his nose into a tangle of thorns. He pulled it out, looked up at me with a startled face, then opened his mouth, and a tiny sparrow flew out from between his teeth and disappeared into the trees.

 

November comes, and the woods get gray. The leaves crumple into fists. On his good days, the Musician is talking in ten-year plans, stocks, mutual funds.
When we find the treasure,
he says,
first thing I'm doing is getting a mutual fund.
On his bad days, he leaves the metal detector hanging on a hook
near the door and drinks himself to sleep in the cabin. Dave's friend's cousin gave him a quart jar of peach-flavored moonshine, and he passed it on to the Musician. Dave quit drinking when he found religion, and he knows I won't touch the stuff now. The Musician will do anything that's handed to him. The moonshine is colored with Kool-Aid and he wakes up on his couch with pink drool stains like fangs at the corners of his mouth. Late one night, Joe Guy Jr. comes back to Brown's Ridge. He drives down the Pike in a new Ford truck, just like his father's, and brings a tape measure to plan how he will furnish the big house, which is already in a choppy sea of broken ground. Lacy wakes up when she hears the distant sound of the truck's big engine and knows, deep in her blood, that it is him. The Musician, when he hears about Joe Jr.'s return the next morning at the Minute Mart, doesn't yet have any reason to think twice about it.