Those Who Went Remain There Still (2 page)

When the war broke out and Kentucky was asked to choose sides, we went both ways on both sides of the church rows, but it mostly broke down by family lines. The Manders sent eleven sons, brothers, and cousins up to the Union. They got seven of them back. The Coys sent thirteen sons, brothers, and cousins to the Confederacy. They got back four.

One of the ones who came back was my daddy, Everett Coy. He married Mona Manny in 1870 and I happened along nine months and three days after. They named me Meshack, and I didn’t know until I was a grown man how they’d spelled it wrong. Momma said she’d heard it in church and thought it sounded nice. Daddy never said anything about it, ‘cause he died when he got kicked in the head by a horse, and I was just ten. Neither one of them, Momma or Daddy, could read or write hardly, and I don’t hold that against them and I’m not saying they were stupid. I’m just saying there was no one there to teach them, so they didn’t know.

That’s how it worked there, in the bluegrass hills. You learned how to live close to the land because you weren’t close to much else.

There weren’t many people except those you were related to, and probably fighting with. There weren’t many towns closer than several days away, and once you got there you’d need money to do anything.

Well, we didn’t have any money. So we made just about everything for ourselves. Oh, sometimes we traded for something—mostly we swapped homebrewed alcohol for staples like cloth, nails, and seed. But mostly, if we couldn’t make it ourselves we went without it.

***

That went for books, same as the rest of it. We only had one school, and it wasn’t open half the year, and sometimes it wasn’t open that much—depending on the teacher. Our preacher could read, and if you gave him the right kind of moonshine he might teach you a few letters, but he was a cold old fellow who shouted at us about love. He beat us with words of kindness. He kicked us with commands that we should be gentle and patient.

Most of us didn’t like him much. But my momma would go, every Sunday. She would sit there with my little sister, Winnter, and they would rest themselves on those wood-slat pews so hard you could’ve cracked nuts on them. I don’t know what they learned there, that they liked it enough to go back every week. By the time I was old enough to listen good, I was old enough to work—so I worked, and I didn’t get any other education until I left.

***

I would’ve left when Daddy died, if I’d been able. Momma told me then how I was the man of the house, me being oldest. She explained how I had new responsibilities, with her getting old and a baby sister to love after. Momma wasn’t twenty-five when that happened.

She was younger then than I was when I went back.

I’d like to tell you how that gives me some perspective, and how I’m more understanding about why she did the things she did, but that’d be a lie. I understood well enough then that she was crazy, and I could see in Winnter—in the way her eyes went wild sometimes, and the way she would laugh and cry or hug or hit for no real reason—I could see something mad was in the family. And I spent half my life praying, “Not me, too. Whatever it was, don’t let me have caught it too.”

***

For a long time, I thought there might be hope for Winnter. I thought if nothing else, maybe she’d marry good. She was real pretty, with hair that copper-brown color you see on birds, and those eyes that were blue and speckled gold. She was too thin, but we were all too thin from not eating right, or enough. She couldn’t read or write, but most of us couldn’t either, so it weren’t no strike against her.

But she could make a rhubarb pie that would make Jesus himself crawl down from the cross to lick his fingers. And she could sew real fine—she could mend up anything, and if there was cloth enough, she could make up her own dresses and they were as good as anything you’d see in a city catalog.

And like I said, she was awful pretty.

It didn’t matter, though. The older she got the more she behaved like Momma. I tried to guide her some, because she was my responsibility and because I loved her. I wanted her to understand that
just because she lived with Momma, and just because she looked like her, she didn’t have to
be
her. She didn’t have to turn into the lonely, crazy old spinster who hates the whole world—Mander,
Coy, and everybody else, too. I tried to tell her there were other
laces and other families, other spots where she could go and get more for herself.

I told her, “There’s a whole world outside of Leitchfield. There’s a whole bunch of other states, outside of Kentucky. There’s a whole bunch of other people you could grow up and marry, and not a one of them has to be from anyplace you’ve ever heard of.”

But she turned farther and farther inward. She wandered around by herself a lot, and she quit talking much to anyone except Momma. As Winnter got older she and Momma started to fight more and more, and that was the toughest thing to watch because I couldn’t interfere and if I got between them, they’d both turn on me.

They were too much alike, that’s what everybody said. Two cats in a wet sack, the pair of them.

And then, Winnter left.

***

It didn’t surprise me as much as it should have, but usually when she talked she was just talking, and she didn’t mean anything. She made threats and promises like little prayers, and eventually no one listened—not even me. I shouldn’t say I didn’t care anymore, because I did care. But I do have to say that I’d quit listening.

She said, “It’s calling me again,” and I gave her the same warning I always gave. She probably knew it by heart.

I said, “Nothing’s calling you, Winnter. Nothing’s waiting for you out there in that cave.”

She didn’t look at me, because she didn’t need to. She had her answer handy. “Why, because it’s not far enough away?”

It was no secret, how I wanted to leave. It was no secret either, how far I meant to go. So I told her, “If you just give me another year, I’ll take you out of here with me. We can start someplace else. You can marry someone you’ve never seen before, since you don’t like the look of anyone you know.”

“And you can do the same?” I’m telling you, she wasn’t dumb.

“Sure, I’d like to do the same,” I admitted. “There’s nothing here I want, and nothing here that’s good. It’s just a place to stay ignorant and work hard and starve. And I’m sick of it.”

“You don’t know where you’ll go, do you?”

 “Haven’t made up my mind.”

Winnter turned to me then, and stared at me hard—in that way where I swear, she saw right past me and was watching something else. “That’s ’cause whatever’s calling you, it’s so far away you can hardly hear it. This isn’t like that, not for me. I hear it clear, because it’s close. I’m going to leave this place as sure as you will, but I’m not going with you, and I’m not going far.”

Then she turned and walked off, back into the crackerbox house with the floors that creaked if you breathed on them.

Two days later, she hiked out to Heaster Junior’s back acres and vanished inside the old cave we all called the Witch’s Pit. Best as anyone knows, she died there. But no one ever found her. No one ever went very far to look for her though. And that’s not an accusation. I’m not blaming anybody.

I didn’t go in there either. As far as we knew, she was the only one who ever did.

***

Anyway, once she was gone it was just me and Momma. That arrangement lasted all of a week before I ran off too.

I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t have anything else holding me there in that miserable place, that poor, furious place where everyone’s angry at everyone else, and no one feels like anyone can get away. Maybe that’s why they’re all so mad—Mander, Coy, and everyone else. Everybody just feels trapped.

It’s no excuse, I don’t think. You don’t shoot each other and
swear at each other and steal each other’s property for a reason like that. If you’re all that unhappy, buck up and leave. I did it, and I was hardly more than a boy. It wasn’t easy, and I’m not saying it was; but it was easier than living that way—stuck and surrounded in a blighted valley filled with enemies.

***

I packed up what little I owned and I hiked up north to Louisville. I hopped a train, at first hiding like a stowaway, and later working my way along the lines by shoveling coal and unloading freight.

So it was north, first. For awhile I worked in Chicago. And then I went west, and I finally ran out of steam in Iowa. There, I worked on another man’s farm for a couple of years…and in time, I scraped up enough money for a home of my own and a wife of my own.

I married Sarah and we made a place together. We made four children together too, in just six years—and there was a fifth to come that day when I opened my front door, there in Ames, Iowa, on property that belonged to me and no other man. We were three months short of another peaceful Coy being born into a land of hard work and reward, not angry relatives who killed one another over scraps.

We were only weeks away from another welcome addition, not another unplanned burden, when I found Titus Mander standing on my stoop with his hat in his hands.

We just looked at each other for a few seconds. It took me that long to recognize him.

By then, it’d been ten years since I’d seen him and he was grown up like I was. Two men, not two boys who’d once tried to strangle each other over an apple. He stood quiet-like and patient on my porch. I had a field behind him, and it was almost ready for harvesting so the corn was high and bright, beautiful green. The pale, butter-white tops of silk swayed in the wind, and Titus held himself real still and let me look at him.

He looked different. His hair was darker. He wasn’t all skin and bones like last time I’d seen him, and he was wearing clothes that were plain, but clean. He’d gotten taller, but he still wasn’t as tall as me.

“Titus.” I said, and it wasn’t a question—except for how I wondered what he was doing there. I knew who he was.

“Meshack.” He knew who I was, too. Of course he did. He’d come looking for me, or that’s what I had to figure.

“What are you doing here, Titus?” I used his name again because it made me feel more like I was in control, which was silly. We were on my property, on my own land that I worked with my own two hands. This was my house, my front stair—and behind me I had my wife, and my children. I don’t know why the very sight of him made me so nervous. He wasn’t armed that I could see, and he didn’t look like he was angry about anything.

He twisted the brim of a hat in his hands. “Meshack, I’m not here for trouble,” he said, like he knew he needed to assure me. It must be true what they say about old habits and how hard they are to lay aside. But I appreciated how hard he was trying, so I was willing to try too.

“If you don’t bring any, there won’t be any,” I told him, and I meant it.

He exhaled. “That’s fair,” he said. “And that’s part of why I’m here. Things might be changing.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, it took him almost a whole century to do it, but Heaster Wharton Junior’s finally died. If he split all that property up right, then everything might settle down, but there’s something funny with the will.”

I scratched at the side of my head and wrestled with whether or not I should invite him inside. “I don’t understand. Why would news like that bring you all the way out here, to me?”

“Because your momma’s named in the papers, but since she’s gone, that means some of Heaster’s leavings might go to you. At least, you need to be there while we sort it all out.”

“She’s gone?” I hadn’t known.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and the words made him uncomfortable. He shifted on his feet and pinched harder at his hat. “I didn’t mean to break it to you. I figured you’d heard.”

“I hadn’t,” I said. “How’d she go?”

“Don’t know. I heard they just found her in that old house you used to live in, and she’d been gone awhile. Maybe she’d been sick. But it was a couple of years ago. And they didn’t call you home
for it?”

“Nobody sent for me.” I wasn’t sure what to say, because I wasn’t sure how I felt. I was trying to sort it out while I was standing there talking to him. Was I sad about it? Angry that no one’d told me? None of that sounded right.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“It’s no fault of yours.”

He loosened his grip on his hat and said, “I appreciate you saying so. Listen, there’s a train leaving in the morning. I’m going to be on it, and I’m here inviting you to come with me. Things are different now, for some of us. After you left, some of the rest of us took off too. I was one of them. I got out. And now I’ve got to go home, and I think you’ve got to go home too.”

I leaned against the doorframe, still trying to tell myself I didn’t really feel relieved to know my mother had been called home to Jesus, or to whoever else would have her. But I couldn’t convince myself, and I was leaving a man standing on my porch, wondering if I was going to punch him or invite him in for supper.

“Well then,” I said, standing back a foot or two and giving him room. “I guess you’d better come on inside.”

III

Lily Dale, NY–1899

It was an anniversary of sorts. Twenty years ago we founded this great experiment, and my, how it had grown. Our community blossomed so beautifully. Our ranks had swollen. Our town increased in wisdom and stature, and our reputation for education and spiritual assistance reached around the world, and back.

As I strolled down those prettily trimmed streets with their electrically lit walkways, I was proud—very proud—to have been part of its making. We built up lovely, warm, and comfortable homes for ourselves and our visitors. We advertised the means in which we wished to help; every street pointed to a medium, to an advisor, to a specialist in the cards or healing.

I tapped my cane along the white railed fences as I walked. I waved and smiled at my neighbors, and I looked forward to the summer camp meetings. We could expect guests by the thousands.

I could not help but smile, and I thought, “Truly this is a great land, where the old ways of superstition and religious intolerance can be shunted aside, and room can be made for the evolution of belief. Truly the way we pray is a science, too, and it ought to be investigated as such. For there is a heaven above us, and it is bustling with life, although we here below might not know it while we wear these mortal shells.”