The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (15 page)

Many people are confused about hillbilly vampires. They think: A hillbilly vampire should look like

George Jones in a cape

Or Ricky Skaggs with fangs

Or Lyle Lovett, period. They think

the hillbilly part comes first

the feeder, not the fed upon They do not understand that this is another

outside industry

Come down to the hills in the dark

For raw material.

—AMY TIPTON GRAY,

"The Hillbilly Vampire'

Winter settled into the Tennessee mountains in mid-January, fulfilling the dread that had lingered in people's minds since the October leaf fall. Winter's coming, people would say each autumn, looking for signs from nature to tell them how bad it would get: thick-furred squirrels, or crickets in the chimney, or hoot owls calling in late autumn. Christmas weather was seldom below freezing, but when the new year dawned, you'd best have your firewood stacked to the beams of the woodshed, and your pantry stocked, because the freeze was coming, sweeping down off the mountains like a bird of prey. The hawk is flying low, people said. That meant it was cold, with a bitter wind driving the chill into the bone. The snow would come later, sometimes not until March.

Laura Bruce had always hated the cold. Flagging temperatures seemed to leaden her brain, and made her body curl in upon itself with an irresistible desire for sleep. Cold made an invisible wall between the house and the outside world, so that every attempt to venture past the threshold was a small skirmish to be endured. 233

Now she felt that Will Bruce's small, warm house had itself become a womb and that she was dead in it. She was numbed by winter into a state of half-dreaming, so that the days passed in a blur, and whether she woke at all was of no consequence. She would look at her scrubbed, colorless face in the mirror, and at the shapeless body, beneath sweatshirt and sweater, and she felt no sense of connection with that reflected being. Laura Bruce was ready for a long siege against the cold, and the stagnant coldness within her body, and she wasn't coming out until spring.

Dr. Jessup's pronouncement, declaring the end of her pregnancy, had come two weeks ago. The hospital confirmed it with bureaucratic solemnity and offers of tranquilizers. She refused the drugs. Winter was sedative enough. She had gone home to the empty house—the empty woman to the empty house—and shut the cold behind her. She ate when she remembered to and tried to believe the doctor's verdict enough to shed tears overit, but although intellectually she accepted the medical evidence, emotionally she was numb to its effect. It might be happening to someone else, for all she felt. The child was, after all, still there, still a part of her. He had not been taken away from her—yet.

She had told no one, least of all Will, whose complaints were all of airless heat and insects. His battles were against boredom, discomfort, and the threat of his own faith by the indifference around him. He made his plight sound very important; or rather, he made it clear that his 234

difficulties constituted a deep crisis in himself. To her, the complaints, so carefully enumerated in his letters, seemed melodramatic and trivial. They were always listed first, before any afterthoughts of endearments for her. Sometimes Laura, in her newfound coldness, thought her husband sounded like a spoiled child who is not enjoying his outing. What struck her most was his naive innocence in the magnitude of his suffering, as if things could not be worse. She wished she could exchange her solitary death-watch for the luxury of theological bickering in the bright sunshine with people who were alive. She would not tell him how it was at home, the child's death, because she sensed that whatever sympathy he proffered would be insignificant compared to the fact that he would add this grievance of vicarious loss to his other woes, and that she would become yet another of his burdens, spiritual merit badges in his quest for holy martyrdom.

She found an old copy of Andersen's fairy tales on the bookshelf in the back bedroom and began to read them, wanting nothing more challenging to stir her thoughts. After a few pleasantly inconsequential stories, she began to read "The Snow Queen," and there she found messages and symbolism that she sought but never found in the Christian gospel. She saw herself not as Gerda, the loyal little girl who braves cold and danger to rescue her kidnapped friend, but as the Snow Queen, a being of cold itself.

Little Kay, with the splinter of troll-glass 235

stuck in his heart, hitches his sled to the Snow Queen's sleigh and is carried away to her palace of ice at the top of the world. In his fright at being captured by this beautiful but inhuman creature, Kay tries to pray, but he finds that instead of the Lord's Prayer, he can only remember the multiplication tables. That was Will Bruce, Laura thought. Stuck through the heart with his captain's bars, he tries to pray, but can only utter the articles of army regulations.

The Snow Queen wraps Kay in her ermine robe, and kisses him twice. But she tells him that he must have no more kisses from her, for if he does, he will freeze to death in her embrace. At the top of the world, she sets him down on the ice floor of her palace and tells him to try to spell Eternity with shards of icicles. If he succeeds, the Snow Queen tells him, she will give him "the whole world and a new pair of skates." Laura wondered how Will was doing, trying to spell Eternity with grains of sand. She was past making the effort. The petty demands of the congregation and the polite convention of writing cheering letters to her man-at-arms seemed strange and remote to her now, like quaint customs remembered from a guidebook to a place she had never been. Now she would have solitude, and a spiritual hibernation, before she could wake up to any other concerns but this. She must sit in the chill of the empty house and wait for her own "thawing," the stillbirth. It would be weeks, Jessup had warned her; perhaps months. That one fact, and the 236

weight of it inside her, was all that she could manage right now. Everything else would have to go on without her.

Laura closed the book before she got to the part of the story where Gerda rescued Kay from the Snow Queen's palace with her tears. That chapter wasn't relevant. It was going to be winter for a long while yet, and she was its sovereign, the Snow Queen, with a human child trapped inside the ice palace of her womb who would never be able to spell Eternity.

Tavy Annis smiled to reassure the young girl behind the counter. Her stricken expression suggested that she thought he had come to die in her reception room. His face was the white color of skin under a Band-Aid, and his gray suit seemed to hang on bones. She glanced at Taw standing resolutely beside him as if to inquire what he meant by allowing this specter to be out and about, but Taw refused to be deferred to by a clerk; it was his friend's crusade. He went back to studying the rainbow-trout picture on the office calendar.

"Is this the place that does chemical analysis?" Tavy asked. "Our county extension agent said for us to try you." The gold-lettered sign on the door said Carter Biological Testing Services, but the reception room might have been a doctor's office, with its plastic tree and its old copies of Field & Stream.

"Yes, sir," said the blond in an eggshell drawl. She still looked bewildered by her visitors. "We do environmental testing of water 237

sources. Y'all got a well that the water don't taste right?"

Taw set a paper bag on the counter in front of her, and removed from it a mason jar of murky water. "We need you to tell us what's in this."

She sighed. "Sir, we can do that for you, but we'll need more information first. Is this water sample from a well or one of the springs on your farm?"

Tavy's eyes narrowed. "Why do you need to know where it's from to tell us what's in it?"

The clerk sighed again, but it was from the enormity of her task, explaining all this technical complexity to two old men. She tried again. "See, there's a lot of things you can analyze for, and each chemical that you suspect requires a separate test. If you include pesticides, there are more than four hundred chemicals we could test for in a water sample, and each one of those tests costs somewhere between thirty and one hundred dollars. I don't think you want to spend half a million dollars finding out what's in your jar there, so I'm trying to help you narrow it down."

"Maybe she's already run a sample like this, Tavy," Taw suggested. "It would be cheaper to buy a copy of somebody else's test results."

Tavy shrugged. "Well, we ain't got half a million dollars, that's for dang sure. Okay, ma'am, this here jar is full of Little Dove River water. Now can you all offhand tell me what it's likely to contain, say, about fifty bucks' worth?"

She beamed at them, because they had now 238

become somebody else's problem. "Let me call Mr. Carlsen, our lab manager. He might be able to help you. Wait right here."

When she had disappeared through the large metal door that led to the lab, Taw turned to Tavy and whistled softly. "Half a million dollars to run a water sample! No wonder these factories get away with murder. Nobody can afford the evidence!"

"The government can," grunted Tavy. A vague feeling of discomfort told him that his medication was beginning to wear off. He glanced at his watch, wondering how long he could afford to stay and talk.

Jerry Carlsen, a short young man with a crew cut and glasses, wore the chemist's badge of authority: a white lab coat. He introduced himself, insisted on shaking hands and repeating their names, and ushered them into a pine-paneled conference room adjoining the front office. Tavy brought along his mason jar of river water. He set it on the long conference table in front of him, and stared into it as he listened. Put the pain in the water. Put the pain in the water.

Carlsen intertwined his fingers, and settled back to listen. "I understand you gentlemen have a water sample from the Little Dove River that you want analyzed."

"Look," said Taw. "My friend here lives on the Little Dove River, and he's dying of cancer. We just want to know what's in the water."

"I see." He wondered what he ought to say to that. People were not Jerry Carlsen's strong 239

suit. He was much more at home in his lab with clever, uncomplaining machines, where the intricacies of emotion and conversational subterfuge were not required. There was an honesty in science that was lacking in human contacts. Carlsen waited.

"We don't have a lot of money," Tavy explained. "And we're not a big company like most of your customers probably are. We're just regular folks with a problem. Somebody has poisoned our river."

Carlsen fidgeted in his chair. "I guess Doreen told you how expensive those tests are. High-priced equipment. . . specialized help . . . Water testing is more complicated than people realize. But I think I might be able to help you without violating any privileged information. You're not the first people to want an analysis of that river. One client made a deal with us: We gave him a fifty percent price break on the testing he wanted, and in return he authorized us to sell copies of the results to interested parties. Now those tests will not give you identical readings you'd get from the sample in your jar here, because the river flow changes from day to day and the sampling site won't be the same, but the results of that test will give you a general idea of what chemicals are in the river."

"Fair enough," said Taw. "How much for a copy of their test?"

"A hundred dollars," Carlsen said. "But you'll be getting at least a thousand dollars' worth of water testing, and it will cover all the hazardous substances that you'd be concerned with." 240

"It's a deal on one condition," said Tavy. "When you give us the test results, you sit down with us and explain what all those figures mean."

"Sure, I can do that," said Carlsen. "If you'll write me a check, I'll go and get you a copy of the Little Dove analysis. Some coffee, too, if you'd like some."

"Depends," said Taw. "Where do you get your water?"

Ten minutes later, Carlsen was back with a manila folder balanced atop a stack of books. Behind him trailed Doreen carrying three white mugs on a plastic tray. With a nervous smile, she set them down on the conference table and hurried away to answer a ringing telephone.

"Okay," said Carlsen, settling down amid his fortress of books. "Here's your copy of the report. Now I'll show you what it means." He held up several gray-and-white paperbacks. "This set of books is the 1990 Code of Federal Regulations."

"Haven't you got an up-to-date one?"

"We're expecting the 1991 one any day now, but this thing is put out by the government, so it's not exactly efficient. You generally get an edition halfway through the next year. However, these regulations will not change. Okay, now, if you're interested in the Little Dove, what we need to check on is the Effluent Discharge into Surface Water for paper mills. That's your concern, isn't it? Titan Paper?"

Behind his coffee mug, Tavy nodded. "What's it say?"

"This thing is a bitch to use," grumbled Carlsen, flipping through pages. "There are so many volumes, and you have to keep switching from one to the other. Typical government document, written in lawyerspeak, of course. It lists the allowable limits for certain chemicals in parts per million. Then we should look up each chemical separately for further regulations. Basically, on this page there's a list of controlled chemicals for paper mills and what amounts they are permitted to discharge into surface water—that is, the river. I can photocopy this page for you, if you like."

"Thank you," said Tavy. "I'll add it to my collection."

"No problem," said Carlsen. "Now we want to look at the report results to see what chemicals we found in the river and in what amounts they appear. This sample was taken at the Tennessee line, so we assume that all this stuff we're finding came from North Carolina sources. Where did you get your water sample?"

"Under the railroad bridge in Wake County," said Tavy. "Near my house."

"You're farther away from the source, then, so the concentrations in your sample will be lower than the ones listed in this report. I guess that's some consolation."