The Lost Saints of Tennessee (4 page)

“Listen, I love you, okay?” This is a compromise. This is the only thing Rosie needs to know.

She yells at me not to hang up. Tucker waits with his head out the truck window, panting like he's about to pass out. After I give him some water, we head east again. The Smokies rise up outside the truck's windows by sunset. The last time I saw the mountains was with Jacklynn on our honeymoon. It was October and wide bands of red, green, and yellow cut across the mountains. Jacklynn was twenty-two and I was twenty-three. Happiness loomed large.

As darkness falls, I stop in Pigeon Forge at a motel done up to look like a real log cabin, though it's actually logs painted on vinyl siding. The nightly room rate is half my daily take-home, so I go for the weekly rate, figuring I'll have a kind of a vacation before doing what I've come here to do.

The McDonald's around the corner provides dinner. I eat in front of my room's TV. Every five minutes the top of the set requires a whack to make the picture come in clear. The static is a friendly background buzz while I try to fall asleep, but the sheets scratch my skin and headlights from cars on the main road keep sweeping through the thin curtains. My daughters wouldn't mind. They like having at least one light on when they go to bed. When Honora and Louisa were small, Jackie was in charge of baths and teeth and hair brushing. My job was to tuck each daughter in the way she liked it. Lou wanted the covers pulled all the way up to the chin but she always left one leg on top, in case she needed to escape.
You never know, Daddy, monsters could come
. In the glow of the pink-shaded lamp that sat on the nightstand between their beds, I read to them. The titles changed from
Goodnight Moon
to
Cat in the Hat
to
Little House on the Prairie.
Lights out,
I'd say.
Just one more, Daddy. Please. Last one,
I'd say.

Tucker lies on the floor by the bed, already snoring after finishing off the burger and fries.

The far-off sound of a train's whistle echoes over the droning of the air conditioner. I close my eyes and listen, hear the whistle get closer and closer until the train must be heading straight for the room. It takes me back to Clayton. To Carter and me waiting every Tuesday night for the five-thirty freight train from Memphis to whistle through town so we could race across the tracks before heading home to dinner.

Five

1948

My mother had no great hopes for my sisters, knew their futures promised little difference from her own, even suspected that their girlhoods might prove the high-water mark of their lives. Not so for her boys. When my brother and I had landed in her arms on a clear October night, she thanked God. Two sons. Two children with chances to get out of Clayton. Go to college. Wrestle from the world every­thing we might want.

Only two years after our birth, measles swept through Clayton, taking Mother's dream with it. Vi, Daisy, Carter, and I got it, the rubeola vaccine still nearly two decades away. But only my brother almost died. His fever climbed so high he went into convulsions; then encephalitis swelled his still-forming brain, pushing him into a coma for two weeks. When Carter pulled through, neither our parents nor the doctors worried much about the possibility of permanent brain ­damage—my parents because they didn't question the miracle of their son's survival and the doctors because they had little knowledge about long-term effects.

The first night Mother told me I was different from Carter, she must have been convinced it was the only way to salvage her dream for us, knowing that the greatest chance for its success now rested with me.

The sound of my sisters' murmurings, soft secrets shared
among
the three of them, carried out through the open window to
the front porch step where Mother and I sat trying to get cool after the day's heat. She smoked her last Lucky Strike of the day and drank iced tea laced with more sugar than I could stand. Sugar and a fair bit of vodka. The number 36 train barreled through the Clayton crossing, rattling panes of glass in the ­living-room windows and announcing bedtime. As stars pierced the dark velvet of the Tennessee sky, Mother leaned down to me, her mouth brushing my ear. When she spoke, the noise of the words was no louder than that of a water moccasin gliding past me in Shelby Creek.

“You see those lights up in the sky, Ezekiel? You see the brightest one?” she said. “That, my boy, is you. Don't let anybody tell you different. You're one of the chosen ones. God will strengthen you. That's what your name means.”

This was new information. Up until then, I had known
two things about the origin of my name—Mother heard it on
one of her favorite radio shows—
The Shadow—
and somewhere in the middle of the Bible was a section with
Ezekiel
on it.

I turned to stare up at her. She was the prettiest mother in Clayton; everybody said so. And when she smiled wide, when the smiling reached all the way into the deepest blue of her eyes, I got this feeling like everything was going to be okay.

Tonight she did not smile wide. Instead, her eyes glowed with a far-off light that made me uneasy. I liked the idea of being the brightest star, but what about Carter? Wasn't he one of the chosen ones, too?

A small amount of tea lingered in Mother's glass. Her
voice grew louder. I sneaked a glance in Carter's direction to make sure he wasn't close by, because I sensed that whatever Mother was going to say next, he shouldn't hear.

“You're different, Ezekiel. You're not like your brother, sweetheart. Not like our poor Carter.”

There were a few things I'd begun to notice about my
brother by this point—how he still didn't know his ABCs and I had been reading since I was four. How he didn't talk much. Sometimes he stared right through me, looking off into a place no one else could see. Ever since we'd taken him to the Memphis doctor earlier that summer, Mother never stopped smoking. No
one told Carter and me what the doctor said. When I asked,
Mother said not to worry about it. So I didn't. At least not much. It would be a few more months before she would share the doctor's prognosis with me. I don't think she ever told Carter.

In the fading light, Carter handed a socket wrench to our father as he changed the spark plugs under the hood of the 1945 Chevy half ton. My brother's nearly seven-year-old frame already stretched two inches taller than mine.
Older and taller,
he'd say to me. Older by ten minutes.

The play-by-play of the Cleveland/St. Louis Browns game came over the radio in Daddy's Ford. A hit crackled toward us as Kenny Keltner knocked another one out of the park with guys on second and third. Daddy stopped hammering long enough to listen as all three runners scored.

“You wait and see, boys,” he told us, “Cleveland's going all the way this year.”

It was the most he'd said about baseball since Babe Ruth died. Daddy had sworn he wouldn't listen to any more baseball that year, as a memorial to Babe. He broke down when Cleveland started winning.

“You realize that—” When Mother started a sentence with “you realize,” it never led to anything good. “—I am missing the
Prince Albert Show
on WSM. Mr. Hank Williams is probably singing right this minute and here we are listening to a bunch of nothing about men running around a triangle.”

Daddy kept right on hammering. I held my breath. If he was tired and grumpy, he'd look at her mean and say something like,
Don't you carry on tonight.
If he was tired and happy, he'd let it slide.

“It's a diamond, Lillian. Not a triangle.” He sat down heavily on the old oak stump, letting the hammer fall to the ground. “What we should be listening to is the news, to see what that fool Strom Thurmond is up to.”

Daddy coughed and spit a big one into the dirt, talked about how Thurmond ran out of the Democratic National Convention with his States' Rights Party and how they were going to get people to vote for them.

“If President Truman loses, does anybody think Thomas Dewey and the Republicans are going to care if I've got a job or not?”

“I care, Daddy,” Carter said. Our father held out an arm and my brother walked into it, easy as you please. Carter had the same barrel chest, brown eyes, and square jaw as our father. I had Mother's slight build, light coloring, and the unmistakable Parker family dimples—one in each cheek and one in the chin—which earned me years of school-yard teasing.

Daddy pushed Carter off with a pat and went back to
hammering. My brother walked up the steps and plopped down next to me, our legs almost touching.

“Sure is hot still,” he said.

I nodded. Neither of us wanted to go to bed yet. It was cooler outside.

Mother threw us a glance that said bedtime was only a minute away. She kept staring at us until she looked like she was going to cry. Then she got up all quick, knocking over her glass, and ran inside the house. The tea glass tumbled down one stair, then the next, and the next, until it landed in the dirt and spun around. Daddy didn't even look up.

I didn't know for sure what made her upset that night but it was an easy guess it had something to do with the fact that life—in this case, plans for Carter—was not working out. Again.

Six

1985

Tucker and I walk the streets of Pigeon Forge every morning and every night for six days, stopping in shops where most of the “genuine” souvenirs are made in China instead of Tennessee. We eat at McDonald's so much the girl on the drive-through morning shift starts recognizing my voice.

Through the speaker, she says, “Good morning, darlin'. Sausage biscuit, hash browns, and coffee for you?”

She winks at me as she hands over the food. I put her age at somewhere over fifteen and under twenty. Her lips are full and buried beneath layers of lipstick; she is pretty in a hard kind of way. On Thursday morning, I feel disappointed when a stranger takes the order.

At a downtown fudge shop, I buy a postcard from the three-for-a-dollar rack that I have no intention of mailing to anyone. What would I write?
Greetings from the Town of my Suicide!
The scene on the front shows a farm surrounded by the Smokies. I stare at the picture until it conjures another farm, in Virginia this time, surrounded by another set of blue-tinted mountains. Cousin Georgia and her husband, Osborne, and me around the dinner table, sharing stories of our day together. My room overlooking the apple orchard. A whole world opening up to me at the University of Virginia. And then it all disappeared. I slip the postcard into the back pocket of my jeans.

By the time we reach the six-foot-tall wood bears flanking the Logland Inn office, I know tonight is the night. The money is about to run out and my nerve will float away the
more Big Macs and beer I consume. Tucker limps into the
hotel room behind me and I wonder if he knows something, if he can smell the decision on me. Tonight will be another kind of leaving day.

Calling Jackie is the responsible thing to do. To hear her voice one last time and to say, without really saying it, why I need to do what I'm about to do. As soon as I say hello, she starts yelling. When I try to explain how I had to get out of Clayton, she cuts me off.

“Please, Ezekiel. We all need to get out. But you've got a family here. You've got a job here. At least you
had
a job here.”

She says my sisters are going out of their minds worrying. When I ask to speak to the girls she says they're busy with homework.

“Put them on the phone, Jackie.”

“No.”

The line goes dead.

Son of a bitch.
It's pointless to call back. On principal, Jackie won't give in. Even if I said,
Hey, you tightly wound ­nothing-is-ever-good-enough ex-wife, put my daughters on the phone, because after tonight I'll never be able to speak to them again,
she would probably assume I had been drinking and hang up again.

Guilt makes me dial my sister Violet's number. Instead of yelling, she begins to cry.

“Jesus, Vi, I'm sorry. God, don't cry. I'm fine. Really. I'm fine.”

She takes a big breath, blows her nose. “Are you fine? When are you coming home?”

“I don't know.”

“Is this because of the reunion, Zeke?” Forty-six now, her voice still has the breathy, childlike quality it did when she was a girl.

The motel manager fixed the TV in my room this morning, looking the other way when he spotted the dog's water bowl next to the door. An old episode of
Gunsmoke
fills the screen. Watching it is more appealing than talking to Violet.

Silence stretches between us.

“I need to ask you something.”

“I got to go, Vi.”

“Hold on. Please. I'm so worried about you. Is this about Carter? Because if it is, you need to talk to somebody, sweetheart. And there's something you should know about Mother. I took her to the doctor this week and she didn't want me to tell you but—”

I cut her off. “Tell Daisy I'm okay. Love to everybody.”

When Carter drowned the month before our thirty-third
birthday, Violet and Daisy were all over me about getting my feelings out, talking it through, letting them help me. Little Rosie was the only one who said anything that made sense. After my brother's dark brown coffin was lowered into the earth, she pulled me aside and said,
I don't understand how there can be you without him or me without both of you.

And this is precisely my point—how can there be me without him?

The bottles are lined up at attention like miniature orange-­
colored soldiers along the sink. The notes are stacked next to the phone on the bedside table. Jackie's is first. I copied a passage from
Huckleberry Finn,
the one I've been rereading every day since coming to Pigeon Forge, about going out in the woods and hearing the sound a ghost makes when it has something to say but can't communicate it. The ghost can't go peacefully to its grave until it's understood, so every night it wanders around grieving.

I pray Jackie won't burn Honora's and Louisa's notes in anger. Not that I would blame her, but the girls will need to see them. My daughters are the most beautiful proof of my ever having breathed.

Tucker's last meal consists of chicken-fried steak and French fries from the diner next door. The dog can smell the food and his tail thuds in happy anticipation. I open the pills and sprinkle their contents on top like parmesan cheese. If I've timed everything right, we should both lose consciousness at the same time. But the truth is I've got no idea what I'm doing. Drugs have never been my thing. Alcohol, on the other hand, I have some experience with. It seems logical that I've got to get the dog set before I start downing the pills because what if I pass out too quickly? We're in this together. The two of us.

The dog looks up at me with brown eyes, runny from some Smoky Mountain tree pollen. After Carter died, Tucker waited by the front door every night for a year. The dog would begin to whine, pawing at the door, as it grew darker outside. We had to be careful because if someone came in, Tucker would bolt out, convinced
he
could find Carter if no one else could.

“Listen, old man,” I say, sitting on the floor next to him, “you're about to have a great dinner and then you're going to get sleepy. When we both wake up we'll be somewhere else. If things work out, we might even see Carter.”

Tucker's ears prick up at the sound of Carter's name. He pokes his nose against the bowl, impatient for food.

“Hang on. We should take a moment before we start all this, don't you think?”

He bumps the bowl again. I grab him by the collar and heave him over to the bed so that we are both facing it. The swirling pattern on the avocado green bedspread makes me dizzy. Praying is something I do once a year, maybe twice. The dog's tail thuds against the carpet dotted with cigarette burns. He thinks this is a game.

Someone walks into the room next door and turns on the TV. Suitcases are dragged across the carpet. The door slams.

“Dear God,” I begin, stopping right away because Tucker walks over to the window and moves the curtain back with his nose to get a look at who is making the racket.

“Don't worry about it,” I say, pulling him back over to the bed. I start the prayer again.

“What we're about to do is not going to make you happy. It's one of your big rules not to do this. But it's the only thing left to do. And if anyone needs to burn in hell for all eternity, take me, not the dog. He hates to be hot and this is not his idea.”

The dog yawns.

“Help my girls and Jackie understand why I needed to do this.” I am asking God to explain something I can't.

Tucker pants next to me, mouth hanging wide open, and the smell of his breath is so foul I cover my nose.

“Old man, if there is a heaven, there is no way in hell God's going to let you in smelling like that.”

I put the food bowl on the ground and Tucker devours the entire meal within two minutes, nearly choking as he takes huge mouthfuls, saliva studding the gray of his muzzle like diamonds.

“Jesus, Tucker.”
Slow the hell down, man.

Now it's my turn. The first twenty pills go down okay. I swallow them in groups of five, broken up with sips of Coke. Coke seemed better than Budweiser, though I consumed two of those before dinner. The whole thing is so easy. No wonder people do this.

The gag reflex kicks in on the second twenty. I keep
­trying—closing my eyes and swallowing as hard as I can, rubbing my throat with one hand like I do when I'm trying to force a heartworm dose down Tucker's trap. Another five go down. But just barely. Tuckers watches from the floor, his head resting on his paws, content with the bulging contents of his belly. His eyes float down and then spring awake when I gag. He is annoyed.

Another five minutes and every single pill ends up in the toilet, shriveled indigo-colored capsules floating among chunks of hamburger. The whole thing looks so disgusting I heave again.

Two more bottles remain on the sink. Twenty pills. Two hundred milligrams short of what I need to do the job. If I take them I'll probably only end up with some kind of side effect like irreversible erectile dysfunction.

Tucker groans softly on the floor next to me. The dog. The dog has done this better than me. He has managed to keep the crap down. The dog is going to die.