Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (47 page)

“What about plants?” I had asked. “If animals have souls, why not plants? Where do you draw the line?”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing Stanley told me you’d say,” she had said.

Three weeks later she moved in with Stanley.

I finish signing the papers. “As soon as this divorce is final,” Darlene says, “Stanley and I are getting married.” She gathers the papers together.

“It’s not too late to give us another try,” I say.

“Yes, it is,” she says, already bored with the conversation.

“I tried to make you happy. I gave up the farm. I wore a tie and worked with jerks so we could afford this house.”

“The farm was going broke,” Darlene says. “You would have been bankrupt in another two years. You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I quit chewing tobacco and started listening to public radio. I increased my vocabulary. I tried not to act like a redneck.”

“And failed,” she says.

“I tried to give you a baby. I suffered indignities. I filled Dixie cups with semen in strange doctors’ offices.”

“I suffered indignities too,” Darlene says. “And it wasn’t even my problem.”

“I loved you,” I say and there’s enough truth in that to make her look away, at least for a moment.

“I’ll prove it,’’ I say. “I’ll change. I’ll quit drinking, become a vegetarian.”

“You can’t change enough,” she says, taking the documents off the coffee table.

“I’ll be friendly to the neighbors. Invite them over to eat salads. I’ll make the salads myself.”

“Not enough,” Darlene says, standing up.

“I’ll buy you a new monkey and I will love it.”

“Not enough,” she says, walking out of the den. “No other monkey could ever replace Little Napoleon.”

“I’ll walk over hot coals. I’ll watch whales.”

“Not enough,” she says from the kitchen.

I hear her car engine and remember one other thing. I hurry through the kitchen. I’m almost outside when I smash against nothing. Then the whole world shatters around me. I fall out on the pavement. Pieces of glass cover my body. I’m bleeding in a hundred places.

Darlene’s headlights are shining on me. I slowly stand up, pulling glass from my skin. Darlene rolls down her window and shouts over the engine. “Not enough,” she says, and drives off.

Blowmeyer runs over with a barbecue fork in his hand, the albino gasping to keep up.

“She shot him,” he tells his wife. “Five or six times.” Blowmeyer is so excited he has spilled barbecue sauce on his pants.

“Go get the movie camera, Lorraine,” he tells his wife. “And call the rescue squad.”

The albino disappears. I ignore Blowmeyer. I lie down on the grass, close my eyes and feel pain cut through the alcohol and the nest of spiders scrambling around inside my head, that other kind of pain, the worst kind.

I don’t open my eyes until I hear the rescue squad wail into the driveway, almost hitting Blowmeyer, who is filming it all.

“Save me a copy,” I tell Blowmeyer as the attendants take my arms and walk me to the back of the ambulance. “I’m OK,” I keep telling them, wanting to believe it. ‘‘I’m fine.”

B
enjamin Miller awoke beneath a shroud of white petals, several of which lay like soft coins over his eyes. The ground trembled vaguely now, the cannon and mortars wheeled elsewhere. He did not hear the explosions, only felt them. All he heard was a ringing in his left ear. Benjamin rested with his eyes closed a while longer, made slight movements to assay what had struck him to the ground, how bad it was. He turned his right boot in and out and then his left, felt no pain or absence of foot or leg, arms and hands the same. He moved a hand over his groin and stomach and chest, felt no spill of intestines or stoved-in ribs. Only his head was injured, the hair on one side matted with blood. He touched the wound, gauged its width. In one place the skin unpursed and his finger slid slickly over smooth bone. Smooth, not cracked. He patted the rest of his head, then nose, jaw, and teeth and found all where they should be.

Benjamin brushed the petals from his eyes and found himself staring into a jaybird-blue sky. He knew where he was, remembered thinking how pert the peach trees looked as his regiment approached the orchard. He’d even notioned to take some seeds back with him to Watauga County. No farmer he knew had grown peaches there, probably too cold, but if anyone could, it would be Emma. Lilies and roses, cherry and apple trees, raspberry bushes—everything Emma put into the earth found life at its appointed time, as if even plants responded to her gentleness. Old Jacob Story, their one near neighbor, listened when Emma said the moon’s horns were turned wrong to seed a corn field, or not to plant peas before daffodils bloomed. I’ve farmed near sixty year, Jacob said, but I’ll cover nary an acorn until Emma allows it’s the time.

Benjamin raised himself to one knee, then stood. More petals fell, puddled the ground white around him. The ringing in his ear increased and the world leaned left. On the edge of his vision a gold tinge. Benjamin blinked, hoping the world might realign, but the tilt and gold tinge remained. Because my head’s been knocked off plumb, he told himself, and there ain’t no tonic but to lean with it. He looked around, shifted his eyes to bead the world before moving his head. He found himself standing alone amid the fallen, friend and foe entangled like logs in a splash dam. A few yet moved but most did not. Some surely made sounds—death rattles, moans, prayers, curses, or pleas. His deafness was a blessing. Two faces Benjamin knew well, recognized three others by hair and girth. All dead. His musket and cap lay side by side as if posed for a tintype. He left them where they lay. The canteen was still strapped to his shoulder and the haversack tied to his back.

He staggered from the orchard, passing trees stripped of every blossom, others branchless, some mere stumps. If an enemy soldier yet lingered, Benjamin was an easy target. But no shot came. He made his way into a small wood and came to a creek, the banks narrow and the current quick. He remembered the old belief and pondered his waking in the orchard, the pall of white petals. The throbbing in his head increased. He took a deep breath and felt it lift his lungs. No dead man need do that, he told himself, but waited a few moments before swinging his boot forward. The water let him cross over. Benjamin took off the haversack and sat with his back against an oak tree. He laid an open palm on the ground. Only the slightest vibration, like thunder murmuring after a storm.

His throat was raw from smoke and thirst so he drank what water the canteen held. Benjamin probed the wound again, tried to recall a raised musket butt, a Minie ball glancing his skull. Nothing came. What he remembered was charging into the orchard with Dobbins and Wray beside him. Keep your lines, a lieutenant shouted but amid the like trees and smoke all direction was lost. Men blundered into each other, shooting and stabbing all who came near. Lead filled the air like slant hail. One man climbed into a peach tree’s highest branches, hunched there crying with hands over ears. Benjamin’s last memory was of Wray clutching his arm for a moment, then letting Benjamin go and falling.

I give both sides their best chance to kill me, Benjamin told himself. They’ll not portion another. He went to the creek and used his handkerchief and water to clean the wound as best he could. He refilled the canteen and went back to the oak. Corn dodgers and jerky were in the haversack but instead of eating he took the letter from his shirt pocket, unfolded it.

My dearest husband,

I rite you this mourning from the home that I pray soon you return to. I have sown the fields for our crops, wich you say I am good at. Now I must pray the signs hold true. May your hands and mine together reap what Ive sown. What news I have of others you may wish to here. The youngest Watson boy run off to fight with his brothers. Widow Canipe died of the flux and Jess Albrights baby died last week of putrid fever. Theys a red cross on his cabin door so even the others are sore afflicted. Joe Vickers was killed in Virginia. But that is more than plenty sad tidings. Your Father has been a heep of good to me, helping plow the fields and fixing fences. Folks say in town that this war will last not a year. I pray so if not sooner. For I feel all ways night and day the lonely in my heart and will ever so until you are with me again. I go now to town to mail this letter, dearest husband, nowing that this paper I hold you will hold to.

Your loving wife always

Emma

Benjamin refolded the letter but kept it in his hand as his eyes closed. He and Emma had grown up on adjoining farms, like brother and sister, playing leap frog and red rover together, walking to the school and church, sharing chores. He’d been a feisty boy and one day when he was twelve, he found a corn snake in the barn. Something wrong inside him wanted to scare Emma with it. She’d fallen while running away, scraping her knees and elbow. He had flung the snake into the weeds and gone to her, shut-mouth with shame. As Emma wiped tears off her face, he’d offered his hand to help her up, not expecting her to take it. But she did. He had helped her to the creek, taken his handkerchief, and gingerly wiped the dirt from the knees and elbow. They did not speak the whole time, nor mention it afterward, but that night by his bed Benjamin had prayed that God would seine all meanness forever out of him so he might be worthy of her.

He must have passed out, because when he awoke the ground no longer trembled. The ringing in his ears had lessened, as had the world’s slant. The letter still lay in his hand. He placed it in the pocket closest to his heart and then shed coat and belt and all other allegiance to anyone but himself. He listened for a few moments, heard nothing but a redbird, then rose and walked through the shallow wood and into a pasture, below it a farmhouse and a wagon road. The dwelling appeared deserted, its occupants fled or hidden. When Benjamin got to the road, he looked up to gauge direction. An orange sun burned low on the tree line. Buzzards circled the battlefield. Some appeared to enter the sun, then spiral down blackly as if turned to ash. He followed the road east, not knowing where he headed, only what he left behind.

The next day he saw an old man alone in his field. I’ve not come to rob or harm you, Benjamin said as he approached. The farmer looked doubtful until Benjamin flattened the back of Emma’s letter on a well guard, took a pencil from the haversack and asked the way to Knoxville. So you had plenty enough of that tussling, the farmer asked afterward. Benjamin answered that he had. Even with that busted head you got more sense than them still at it, the farmer said, and told Benjamin to wait a minute, came back from his root cellar with salt meat and potatoes. The old man would not have it otherwise, so Benjamin had stuffed the victuals in the haversack and gone on.

He traveled for two weeks, first north to Nashville and then following the Cumberland Turnpike east. Several times he’d hidden as Union and Confederate soldiers passed, once a whole regiment. Another time, at night, the clatter of cavalry. He’d been spotted only once. Two soldiers on horseback fired their muskets but did not leave the pike to pursue him.

One night a few miles from Knoxville, Benjamin felt Emma’s presence. Despite the afternoon heat, he’d made good time, so near dusk bedded in a meadow. When he awoke, a wet moon had peeled away the ground dark and replaced it with a silvery sheen. No breeze rustled or night bird called. No sound of water, or distant train. A stiller moment he had never known. Benjamin stepped onto the road and whispered her name. Though Emma did not answer, he knew she was very near. Then she wasn’t, and he felt a distance between them that was more than the miles yet to walk. The next morning Benjamin believed all of it, the silver light, her presence, part of a dream, until he saw his fresh boot prints in the dust.

He followed a drover’s trace into the mountains and the air quickly cooled. It was as dangerous a place as he had been. Not just soldiers traversed here but also outliers who, with no cause other than profit, took no prisoners. But the few people he met, including a pair of drovers, passed with eyes lowered. They feature me the dangerous one, Benjamin told himself. As he went higher into the mountains, dogwoods that in the lowlands had shed their white yet clutched flowers, as if time was spooling backward. The fancy pleased him.

The land leveled and somewhere unmarked he passed from Tennessee into North Carolina. Not just Carolina but Watauga County, he reminded himself. Emma was probably in the field hoeing or planting. He imagined her looking up as she wiped her brow or rubbed dirt from her hands—gazing toward the gap at this very moment, already sensing his return. Sounds eight months unheard—the chatter of boomers, a raven’s caw—he heard now. Yellow ladyslippers Emma used for tonics flowered on the trace edge. A chestnut three men couldn’t link arms around curved the path. Everything heard and everything seen was a piece of himself restored. He thought of the soldier in the peach tree. It had been as if the man was trying to climb out of hell itself. And now I have, Benjamin thought. A whole mountain range stood between him and the horror and meanness.

Late the next afternoon he spotted a church spire, soon after the backs of store fronts. Boone, the county seat where he’d been conscripted. He could be easily recognized here, so waited in the woods as the last farm wagons left town, shopkeepers locked or barred their doors. Night settled in and with it a breeze that smelled of coming rain. Only now, for the first time since he’d left them in the orchard, Benjamin pondered Dobbins and Wray. They too had been conscripted farm boys, Kentucky born. The three of them had been of like nature, quiet men who didn’t dice or drink. At night they kept their own campfire, where they spoke of their farms in such detail that the three homesteads merged into one shared memory. There were friendly disputes over the merits of brightleaf versus burley tobacco, the best way to cure a ham. On the night before the battle, they spoke quietly of crops being tended by wife and kin. I’d nary have figured to miss staring at a mule’s ass dawn to dusk, Wray said, but I surely do.

They knew from the massing of troops this was to be a battle, not a skirmish. That last morning their regiment had passed a Dunker church, beyond it a plowed field tended only by scarecrows. The braggarts and raw cobs spoke little now as the battle’s racket encircled them like a noose. Officers rode back and forth on skittish horses. Those who’d gone before them littered the ground, so many Benjamin wondered if a single man yet survived. Soon they smelled gunpowder, watched its smoke drift toward them. More bodies appeared. Dobbins picked up a dirt clod, squeezed it. Habit, Benjamin thought, as Dobbins let the grains sift through his fingers. Good soil, Wray had asked. Not the best, Dobbins had answered, but I reckon it to cover our bodies well enough.