The Cypress House (30 page)

    He loved
work. Physical labor. It was a strange thing, maybe, but he loved the ache in
his muscles at the end of a day, loved the sweat that coursed from his pores,
loved the sound of a saw and the feel of a hammer, the clean crack of a
well-struck nail.

    So
many men wandered this country now, looking for so simple a thing as work. It
was a bizarre notion when you stopped to think about it, and Arlen figured it
was a birth pang of a new world. So much had happened to cause this Depression,
so many things he understood and more that he did not, but in the end they all
captured a simple idea: you couldn't depend solely on yourself anymore. Not in
the way men once had. You could have skill and strength and desire, but you had
to find someone who needed to utilize those things. Was a time when, if you
knew how to work metal, you'd set up a blacksmith shop and make enough to
support your family. Now, if you knew how to work metal, you'd likely need a
job in a factory where the needs of not a town but a state, a nation, a world,
had to be met. It was all about size now: the big ran the world on the sweat of
the small, and if the big faltered for any reason, the small were the first to
go.

    The
funny damn thing was, Arlen had no desire to be among those in charge. That was
the goal, supposedly, the ordained American Dream, to rise from the ranks of
the small and become a colossus.

    It
wasn't in him, though. The bigger your role, the more people you impacted with
your decisions. He didn't want to have to make those sorts of decisions. All he
wanted to do was work. If his day ended when the last nail was driven, it had
been a good day. It had been a damned good day.

    Or at
least it usually was. For once, the standard satisfaction stayed away from him
when he gathered his tools and walked back up the trail to the Cypress House.
He'd worked, yes, done the pure labor of a man who was small in the eyes of the
world but content in his own heart, and even that hadn't been enough today.
Today, he'd felt the weight of decision upon him.

    It
was the right decision, he knew. It was right.

    But,
oh, how he'd hated to make it.

    The
days passed with surprising speed and silence. Solomon Wade didn't come by, nor
did Tolliver, nor anyone else except Thomas Barrett, the delivery man. When he
arrived at the end of the week, Arlen asked if they could make a run for some
more lumber.

    "You're
not sending the boy this time? I enjoyed him."

    "He's
gone."

    Barrett's
freckled face split into a curious frown. "For good?"

    "That's
right."

    "Strange.
He told me he intended to stay. What put him back on the road?"

    "I
can't speak for him," Arlen said shortly.

    "Well,
it's a shame. This is a tough place for a lad like that to be on the road
alone. Did he have any money?"

    "Let's
go get that wood," Arlen said.

    They
went out to the paved road and then south toward High Town. It had been silent
since they left, and though Arlen didn't feel much like talking, he also didn't
want to seem ungracious, so he asked after the name of the town as a means of
conversation.

    "Where
I'm from, the place would be called Flat Town," he said. "Nary a hill
in sight from what I saw."

    "Where
are you from?"

    "West
Virginia."

    Barrett
nodded. "Well, it's plenty different terrain than that. High Town might
not look much different to an outsider, but it's one of the few places around here
that's always been clear of flooding. So, it's High Town — and Dry Town."

    They
turned east at the center of town, and Arlen twisted his head to look back at
the jail as they passed. Tolliver's car was parked in front.

    "Didn't
you say you ran for sheriff?" Arlen asked.

    "That's
right. Al Tolliver beat me fair and square," Barrett said dryly.

    "You
had any policing experience? Or just wanted a piece of it?"

    Barrett
flicked his eyes over and then back to the road. "No policing. Did my time
in the Army and then came back home. I like my home. I didn't like the people
who were taking control of it. That ain't changed."

    "There
anybody around here that could actually make those boys answer for
something?"

    "If
there is somebody," Barrett said, "I ain't found him yet."

    Arlen
nodded, and they were quiet again for a time, riding with the windows down and
the hot air pushing into their faces. The forest had given way to swampy stump
fields now, and Arlen looked out across the litter of slashed timber and felt a
pang, remembering the way forests of his boyhood had fallen. He'd been at
Arlington National Cemetery once after the war, and the first thought he'd had,
staring over the columns of stone markers, was of the clear-cut woods that climbed
the hills behind his home. They were both fields of death, filled with
inadequate reminders of what had been.

    "They
cut a lot of timber out here," he said.

    "Yes,
they did. Sawmill was not far from here. I worked there for three years. Used to
hear the band saw in my sleep."

    "When
it went under, the town went with it, is what Rebecca told me."

    "That's
right. There were two thousand people in this town not five years ago. Ain't
but a few hundred left, and a lot of stumps. You take a canoe out through the
swamps not far from here, and you'll find stumps nine, ten feet around. Some
big boys, they were. The wood lasts, too. Cypress is damn strong."

    "It
makes the finest coffins," Arlen said. "How in the hell do you know a
thing like that?" "My father told me," Arlen said. "He paid
a lot of mind to such things."

    The
memory lingered. Long after he and Barrett had returned with the lumber and
carried it down to the dock, Arlen was thinking of his father. He could see the
dark eyes above the thick beard, hear the deep, easy voice. He could see the
big hands wrapped around a plane or a piece of sandpaper, smoothing the grain
of someone's final home. He spent time on coffins that few would, treated each
pauper's grave as if it were a rich man's tomb. Even in the summer of the
fever, when twenty-nine died in eleven days, he'd taken care with his coffins.
Arlen could remember him working through the night that summer, the summer his
mother had died. Arlen had been twelve at the time, and she'd gone slow and
suffering and with her hand in Isaac's, who'd looked his son in the eye and
told him to have no fear, the earthly being mattered not in the end.

    That
was twenty-five years ago.

    He
sorted and stacked the lumber and tried to push it all from his mind, but it
would not stay at bay, and that evening when he sat on the porch with Rebecca,
he said, "I reckon I'm ready to tell you the story."

    She
studied him for a moment and then said, "Why? What changed?"

    He
thought on that while he slipped a cigarette out and lit it. Nothing had
changed. Everything had changed. It wasn't the sort of thing he could pin down;
the world had shifted on him in a way he didn't fully understand. It had an
awful lot to do with her, he knew that much.

    "It's
just time to tell the tale," he said. The tale he had not told anyone,
ever.

    She
didn't answer. Sat with her hands folded in her lap and waited. He smoked the
cigarette down a little bit and watched the waves, and then he told her about
the day his father died.

    It
was five years after Arlen's mother had passed. Isaac had taken to spending
more time in his shop, particularly at night, when visitors were unlikely. The
shop was located beneath the room where Arlen slept, and the sounds drifted up,
barely muffled by the thin floor that separated them. He'd long known the
sounds of the tools on the wood—his father's paying job, other than a bit of
small-time farming, was as a furniture maker — and sometimes Arlen could also
hear Isaac humming to himself or occasionally speaking bits of German, his
mother tongue. The conversations, however, were a new twist.

    At
first Arlen had thought his father was talking to himself. The words were
soft-spoken, and initially it was just background noise, mumbling of which he
did not take much heed. It was only after it had persisted for a time that he
began to pay attention, and the phrase he heard uttered again and again raised
a prickle across his spine.

    
Tell
me,
Isaac Wagner would say.
Tell me
. The more he listened, the more
evident it became that his father was trying to speak to the dead. Not only
that — he believed he was. The words that left his mouth were parts of an
exchange.

    The
conversations had gone on for many weeks before Arlen chanced a trip down to
the shop to see for himself. What awaited him was chilling: Isaac spoke with
his hands on the corpses. Stood above them and placed his palms flat on their
chests or on either side of their heads. When he'd talked himself out, he
removed his hands and returned to work and fell silent. Always he was silent
unless he had his hands pressed against their dead flesh.

    He
was a different man outside of the shop as well — both with Arlen and with the
townspeople. Moody and unpredictable, given to perplexing statements and a
constant tendency to dismiss the worries of the living.

    It
was a few months before Arlen could admit that his father was truly losing his
mind.

    Rumors
swirled through the town but avoided a troublesome pitch until a teary-eyed man
came to the shop with a child's toy in his hand, prepared to ask that it be
buried with his wife, and found Isaac in his now-customary pose, standing above
the body with his hands on the dead woman's head like a preacher offering a
blessing. The sight had rankled the grieving husband, and while no more than a
heated exchange of words took place — with Isaac taking no steps to pacify the
man, simply saying that he'd talk aloud in his shop if he was so inclined, to
whomever he liked — it added coal to the fires of suspicion already smoldering
throughout the town.

    What
did you do with a father who was insane? The question haunted Arlen through his
days and kept him awake through his nights. It was just the two of them now;
there was no other family in the town. Isaac had led the way to this place, and
Arlen's mother had been unable to conceive after giving birth to her first and
only child. No confidant existed. He listened to his father speak to the dead
and thought of what might happen if he sought help for him, if he told anyone
in town the truth, and he decided that it would be better to keep silent. There
was no harm being done. It was strange, certainly, unsettling and troubling,
but it wasn't harmful. He promised himself that if it ever became so, something
would have to be done.

    It
was a day on the fringe of winter when Joy Main died. Three nights of frost had
been followed by a final gasp of Indian summer that burned out behind a cold
wind, and no one in the town had passed in six weeks. Isaac was making
furniture instead of coffins, and Arlen had been allowed to slip into something
close to a peaceful state. At night his sleep was uninterrupted by voices from
below, and the dark rings around his father's eyes had lessened, his strange
remarks becoming fewer. Then they brought Joy Main's body to the shop.

    The
Mains were the power family in town. Edwin's father had been a surveyor — and a
damn shrewd man. He asked for, and received, acreage instead of wages, and he
had a fine eye for land, acquiring large parcels along the New River and
through the gorges that bordered it. It was coal and timber country, beautiful
land that was soon to become rich land, and by the time Edwin was grown, the
mining boom was under way and the property he inherited made him a wealthy man.
He stayed in Fayette County and filled his father's void. He was large and pompous,
and charming when he had cause to be. At other times he was harsh and cruel,
but the townspeople seemed to believe you could expect that from your leaders.

    Joy
Hargrove was the most beautiful girl in the county, bright and clever, a gifted
piano player and blessed with a haunting, gorgeous voice that turned heads at
Sunday services. The marriage was of the arranged sort—Joy's father was vying
for purchase of a promising mine. The courtship was strongly encouraged despite
the fact that Edwin was past forty and their daughter just seventeen, and it
was only a matter of weeks before Joy Hargrove became Joy Main.