The Rosewood Casket (11 page)

She had been married to Robert Lee now for thirty years and then some, and she didn’t honestly feel that their union was all that much more sanctified than that of Charles and his redhead. People either loved each other or they didn’t, and you couldn’t legislate feelings, though sometimes she surely did wish you could.

Rudy was no help on that score, either. He declined to discuss Robert Lee or to listen to Lilah’s thoughts on the matter, even when she had tried, a time or two, to disguise them as prayers. Rudy once said, “What man has joined together, let no god put asunder,” and that had been his final word on the subject. Rudy wasn’t interested in Robert Lee, or in politics, wars, air pollution, or much of anything as far as Lilah could tell. Maybe there were other angels handling those things. Rudy’s mission was Lilah, and he was never tempted to stray from that purpose. “Just don’t get all depressed on me, Lilah child,” he would often tell her. “Because despair is a sin. And, let me tell you, it’s just as boring as ditch water to watch, too, honey.”

So she stayed busy and tried to be a good person, and she made up her mind to take care of her husband, in case he didn’t have an angel of his own. Robert Lee was a good man, and there had been a time when he was young that he had been happier—pleased to have a steady job in the big city, though he couldn’t actually bring himself to live there. So they had settled in Batavia, not far from Hillbilly Highway, as the Cincinnatians called Rt. 32, on account of so many mountain people traveled back and forth that way, needing the work in the city, but wishing every minute that they could go home to the mountains. Robert Lee didn’t go home much, especially after he met her at the church mixer and they started courting serious. He seemed to quit the mountains cold turkey, like someone hooked on a killing drug, and if he ever longed for home in the springtime, when the Tennessee hills were ablaze with white flowers while Cincinnati was still gray with asphalt and steel, he didn’t let on. He had told her once that living in the mountains was living poor, and Robert Lee was flat out determined to outrun, outwork, and outlive
poor.

He had been so proud of their first new car and their mortgaged-to-the-rain-gutters brick house with carport. He wasn’t a handsome man, even at twenty-four, but he had been kind, in a hang-back sort of way, as if he just expected people to take against him right off the bat. Not used to a city full of strangers, Lilah thought back then. He’ll come around. But being in car sales hadn’t helped his people-shyness any. Years of contempt from suspicious customers had driven him so deep inside himself that not even Lilah could reach him any more. Now he was past fifty, the beginning of knowing that a lot of your dreams are just flat
never
coming true, and the bitterness of that, coupled with his fear that being poor would catch up with him in his old age, in spite of all his efforts to outdistance it, had just curdled any joy or sorrow he might have felt about anything. He would not be comforted. All Lilah could do was love him as best she could. For Robert, it was not enough, but it seemed to be all he could expect to receive in this world of tribulation.

She knelt on the cold oak floor beside the bed and began her nightly devotions, a ritual she kept unchanged since childhood, beginning: “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed I lie upon. Four posters round my bed; four angels round my head…” It was the rote prayer of her Baptist girlhood, but she never really felt that she was praying unless she began with those hastily spoken syllables. She would pray for guidance for Robert Lee. Rudy always said that worrying was spinning your wheels in neutral, but praying was third gear.

The others had gone to bed, but Clayt couldn’t sleep. He was still sitting in the circle of light cast by the brass table lamp, rereading his father’s scrawled testament, as if it would rearrange itself if he stared at it long enough. What a fool thing he was asking of them: to be cooped up together, building a coffin, for well nigh onto a week, when he knew full well the four of them hadn’t done much more than pass the time of day since they were teenagers.

“Are you really Daniel Boone?” said a tiny voice from the hall doorway.

In spite of himself, Clayt nearly jumped a foot, and his heart pounded through his sweatshirt like a trip-hammer. A little girl in a long white nightgown stood in the doorway, watching him with old and solemn eyes. Her fair hair was tousled from sleep, and she was clutching a stuffed animal in her arms. Then he remembered this was the daughter of Charlie’s girlfriend. He couldn’t recall her name.

“What are you doing up, little one?” he asked her, keeping his voice low. “Don’t you know it’s past midnight?”

She came forward, not as shy as he expected a small child to be, and peered up into his face. “Are you Daniel Boone?”

“Oh, you must have heard the grown-ups talking about me this afternoon.” Clayt patted the sofa cushion beside him, motioning for her to sit down. “Well, no, the truth is I am not Daniel Boone. Old Daniel has been dead since 1820—that’s about a hundred and seventy-five years. I just pretend to be him sometimes, with a costume and all.”

“Why?”

“Well, because he used to live around these parts, and he loved the land, same as I do. He was the most famous pioneer there ever was. And because I think children here should learn about him when they’re young, so when they hear all that hillbilly nonsense about mountain people later in life, they’ll have words inside themselves to fight it with.” He was talking more to himself than to her. Then he smiled. “You know, you standing there with that stuffed camel in your arms puts me in mind of a Daniel Boone story right now.”

She perched on the edge of the sofa, and looked up at him with solemn gray eyes, too old for her face. “Okay. Tell me.”

“Now this story happened when Daniel was a young man, not yet twenty, living over in North Carolina near the forks of the Yadkin River. He was courting Miss Rebecca Bryan in those days, and one night he went out hunting in the woods with her father, Mr. Jim Bryan, who had a log cabin and a little farm there on the river. They were going out hunting painters—mountain lions, you’d probably call them.”

The child nodded. “I seen pictures.”

“The mountain lions were bold that year, carrying off a newborn calf or a lamb, without a by-your-leave. And they hunted at night.

“So Daniel and Mr. Jim Bryan got their long rifles and a pan of hot, glowing wood coals, and they went out hunting painters. Now the reason for the wood coals was this: a cat’s eyes will glow in the dark if there’s the least little bit of light to be reflected in them. So the hunters would hold up those glowing coals, and the light would shine in the mountain lion’s eyes, and then the hunter would shoot—bang!—right between those two glowing circles of eyes, and he’d kill that lion.

“Well, they bagged quite a few that night, and they were headed home in the dark, with the big cats’ bodies slung across the packhorse for skinning later, when they got almost back to the cabin, and here was another pair of green eyes shining up ahead of them in the trees. Before you could say ‘painter,’ Daniel Boone had slung that rifle up on his shoulder, and blam! He shot right straight at those glowing eyes.

“And then he heard the crying. He and Mr. Bryan went running through the thickets, following the sound of that crying, and what do you think they found?”

Kayla shook her head. She was hugging the toy camel as she listened. Clayt reached out and touched the furry head of the toy. “You holding your friend there is what reminded me of the story,” he told her. “What Daniel found in the clearing was pretty, dark-haired Rebecca Bryan herself, hugging the dead body of her pet kitten, but she wasn’t hurt at all, thank goodness. Daniel would have taken it hard if he’d harmed Rebecca, because he was already thinking about making her his wife. What he shot wasn’t a mountain lion at all, you see. Just a little old house cat, with its eyes shining in the darkness.

“Rebecca cried all the way home, and Daniel had to do a lot of apologizing to get himself out of that mess. But I guess he got her to forgive him, because not two years later, she did marry Daniel, and the two of them had a lot of children and a lot of adventures in the fifty-seven years they were together.”

“Is that long?” asked the girl.

“I bet it could seem so,” said Clayt. “But I like to think they were happy.” He smiled at her solemn expression. “Now, miss, I’ve answered a passel of your questions, and told you a bedtime story to boot, so the least you owe me is a ready answer to a question of mine. How come you to be up at this hour? Mountain lion under the bed?”

She laughed, and shook her head.

“You’re not scared, are you, sleeping in a strange house?”

“Nope. I’m not particular where I sleep. Why? Is this place haunted?”

Clayt shrugged. “When we were real little, my brother Dwayne used to swear he saw a little girl walking around upstairs sometimes, but I don’t think I ever believed him. Until tonight,” he said, smiling. “You’re not her, are you?”

“No, ’cause ghosts don’t eat, and I’m hungry.”

Clayt hesitated. Storytelling was the extent of his child care skills. “You want me to get your mamma for you?”

“She’s asleep with Charlie, and their door is locked. I’m not supposed to wake ’em up. Can’t you fix food?”

“Well—I guess I could.” Clayt roused himself from the sofa, stifling a yawn and stretching. “If you’re not too awful hard to please. I might even join you. What’d you say your name was, again?”

“Kayla Louise Johnson. And if you’re not Daniel Boone, what do I call you?”

“Why, I reckon I’m your Uncle Clayt, Miss Johnson. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“And that’s your job? Playact being Daniel Boone?”

He escorted her to the kitchen. “Oh, I do a lot of things. I can guide a raft through the white water of the Nolichucky River, and I can tell birds from the sound they make, and I can track a deer through the woods and take his picture without him ever knowing I’m there. I guess if Daniel Boone were around these days, he’d be doing pretty much what I’m doing. Trying to keep out of a necktie and an office.”

“How come y’all don’t sing with Charlie?”

“Well, sometimes we do. Or we used to. Sitting around on the porch of an evening.”

Kayla shook her head. “No. I mean like the Statler Brothers. I met them. They sing together for a living.”

“Well, Kayla, I’ll tell you: Charlie is the best guitar player in the family, but that’s not all there is to it. The truth is that he’s the only one who could put up with being famous. The rest of us either don’t care to work that hard, or we don’t have the charm to travel all the time and smile at strangers day in and day out. Not even for Charlie’s money.”

The kitchen was lit by a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling on a thick wire. Clayt groped for it in the darkness and switched it on. “You’re not scared of the dark,” he said approvingly to the child.

“No. Mama likes me to be brave about things, so I put up with them, and pretty soon they don’t bother me anymore. Is there any milk?”

“I got a quart, for folks to put in coffee, but I don’t suppose anybody’d object to you finishing it off.” He took the carton out of the refrigerator and set it on the table in front of her. “The clean glasses are over there in the dish drainer. Get you one. Now, what would you like to go with that? Peanut butter sandwich? Cookies?”

“Cheese eggs,” said Kayla, pouring the milk with intense concentration and great care.

Clayt stared at her. “Say what?”

“I guess cooking isn’t one of your many jobs, Clayt.” He noticed that she had omitted the word “uncle.” Come to think of it, she didn’t call Charlie “uncle” either. Clayt wondered if Kayla and her mother would become a permanent addition to the family or if this was just another one of Charles Martin’s phases. “You take some eggs and put ’em in a frying pan with butter,” Kayla was saying. “And you grate some cheese. White cheese is the best, but any old kind will work. And you stir them up together until the cheese melts and the eggs stop being runny. It’s not hard. I can do the stirring, but I’m not allowed to mess with the stove.”

“Butter, cheese, and eggs. Okay. What about milk?”

Kayla shook her head. “Not unless you’re short on money, and the eggs have to last you till payday. Then you add milk to make them go farther. If you’re really strapped, you can use powdered milk, but that tastes yucky. We haven’t had to do that in a long time.” Kayla added kindly, “I can eat it, though, if that’s all there is.”

“No, ma’am,” said Clayt, keeping his voice expressionless. He hauled the gray egg carton out of the refrigerator. “You can have all the eggs and cheese you want, cooked to your specifications.” He would give her the whole half dozen, and drive to the convenience store when it opened at six to restock the larder for the family’s breakfast.

*   *   *

Frank Whitescarver’s wife called his home office “the War Room” because it reminded her of Churchill’s headquarters in World War II, which she had seen once on a five-day tour of London. The trip to Europe had been organized by a local travel agent, and she went with three retired schoolteachers and a couple of lawyers’ wives, whose husbands couldn’t take time off to go, either. When she got back, every dish in the house was dirty, and the bedroom was ankle-deep in newspapers, but Frank had sold four houses and a tract of timbered mountain land to some couple who wanted a nice site for a retirement home. “You spend it, Betty Lou, and I’ll keep on making it,” he would tell her, smiling.

“The War Room,” Frank’s pine-paneled den, had an old kitchen table for a desk, a black-and-white television for watching football games, and a fax machine so that he could be in touch with anybody, anywhere, right from home. One whole wall of the compact basement room was covered with maps of the northeast Tennessee counties. They were survey maps, drawn on a large scale, with circular lines for hills and markings indicating every creek and farm pond, and every single road, even dirt ones that were hardly more than cow paths. Betty Lou couldn’t make much sense of them herself, and, truth to tell, she wasn’t all that interested, but Frank was captivated by them. He could spend hours staring at the little pushpins and squiggles on those maps, just the way some people could look out of a picture window at a beautiful view and never tire of it.