A Land More Kind Than Home Read online

  THIRTEEN

  BUT I WASN’T GOING TO TELL THE SHERIFF ANY OF THAT story because it had no bearing on whatever truth he needed to find. The story he wanted was the story of Christopher inside that church, and that was a story I just couldn’t give him. But if he’d have taken the time, I could’ve told the sheriff about the very moment Christopher’s story started, and maybe from there he could have followed it to see how it changed Ben and Julie, how it changed their marriage, and how they ended up where they were.

  On the night he was born I laid there in my bed and listened for that noise again, that same noise that sounded like a voice coming from somewhere inside the house. I held my breath and bent my ear, and just when I was ready to blame it on fancy I heard it just as plain as day.

  “Who’s there?” I called out and waited. I heard that wind driving outside and the patter of that snow against the windows, and then a little voice was signaling me from the front door. I could barely hear it over the wind and the snow, but when I was sure I’d heard it I popped up out of the bed, and how dark that night was with me shuffling across the floor and turning on the switch on the lamp and the light filling up the bedroom and part of the hall.

  I stepped into the front room in my bare feet and my gown, and I called out, “Who is it?”

  “Lord have mercy, Addie, it’s me,” the little voice behind the door said. “Now open this door before I’m froze solid.”

  I recognized that voice, and I opened the door and the wind just about knocked me down, and here came the snow blowing in with it. Gerty Norman was out there standing in her dead husband’s waders with one of her son’s work coats swallowing her up. I could barely see her eyes peeking out from where she’d wrapped a scarf tight around her face and pulled a man’s winter cap down low on her head.

  “Is that you, Gerty?” I asked.

  “Who in the world do you think it is?” she said through her scarf. She stomped right past me on her way inside the house with that snow falling off the tread of them heavy waders.

  “What would make you want to walk down here in this weather at this time of night?” I asked her. She was slow getting that scarf unwound from over her mouth, and I could see that her cheeks were bright red apples against her face. Her eyes were teary from the cold. When she finally unwound that scarf and took off her cap, her body gave her a good shiver.

  “It’s Julie Hall,” she said. “It’s time, and Ben’s truck can’t get her down the mountain. They tried calling Doc Winthrop, but they couldn’t get ahold of him. They tried calling you too, but I reckon your phone’s out with this weather.”

  “Winthrop’s probably drunk and laying up in the bed by now,” I told her. “There ain’t no way that man’s heading up Gunter Mountain tonight. Not in this snow.”

  “Ben asked if you might could see her through, at least until this weather lets up and they can get down the mountain to the hospital. I told him I’d come down here and ask you, but I let him know it’s pretty nasty down here too.”

  Don’t you know I stood there and watched those little red apples disappear from her cheeks and listened to the wind whipping that snow around while I thought about how warm my bed in the next room was.

  “Ronnie might can get you up there,” she said. “His truck’s got them big old tires on it, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he could drive you clear up that mountain.”

  I can say I thought about it awfully hard. “I reckon I’ll go,” I finally said. “Just let me get me some clothes on.” I turned to go back toward the bedroom and she followed me, and then she walked into the kitchen and went right up to the stove and took those heavy mittens off and held out her hands to warm them. I’d fed the fire before I went to bed, and when she opened the grate I could see them flames just a-hissing and popping in there. I stopped and looked back at her.

  “Watch yourself in them waders,” I said. “That rubber will melt on both you and my floors too.” I knew she was frozen through and couldn’t rightly feel how hot that fire was on her.

  “I know,” she said, but she sure didn’t back away from it.

  “Gerty!” I said. She muttered something under her breath about being scolded and made a fuss of stepping back just to rile me.

  I went into the bedroom and put on my wool stockings and pulled on two sweaters over my gown. My heavy coat was hanging on the bedpost, and I pulled that on too. I found my gloves and boots and my hat and carried them into the kitchen so I could sit down and put them on at the table. When I walked back in the kitchen, there was Gerty right up against that stove again. I decided that if she wanted to set herself on fire, why, I’d just go ahead and let her.

  WE OPENED THE DOOR AND STEPPED OUTSIDE, AND THAT WIND almost knocked me over again and the snow was just blowing around all over the place. Me and Gerty set out trudging the half mile up the road to her house. It was a climb, I can tell you that. And here we were, two old women out in the snow holding on to each other for dear life and slipping and sliding right along like little kids on roller skates.

  “Lord, Gerty,” I said, “how’d you make it down this hill by yourself?”

  “I just done it,” she said.

  “You think Ronnie can get up that mountain in this mess?”

  “I’m sure he can.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I ain’t woke him yet.”

  Well, I just about laid down and died right there. I stopped right in my tracks, but Gerty just kept on walking. I hollered after her. “You’re telling me I’m climbing up this hill to get in a truck that you don’t even know can get up Gunter, with a driver that ain’t even woke yet?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” she hollered back.

  “Why didn’t you wake him up and ask him if his truck could make it?”

  She stopped then and turned around. I could barely see her through the snow.

  “Because you know you’re heading up that mountain anyways,” she said. I knew she had herself a point there, so I didn’t say nothing else about it.

  Ronnie had his truck pulled into his daddy’s old garage by the house, and I told Gerty I’d be in there waiting on her to get Ronnie out of bed. I bet I sat there ten minutes. I thought I’d be frostbit for sure before that boy got out there with the key to turn that engine over and get that heater running. I saw the light come on in his room, and I pictured Gerty in the house standing by his bed.

  “Get up now, Ronnie,” she was probably saying, real soft. She babied that boy, much more than I would’ve if I’d had any of my own. “Get up, Ronnie. Miss Lyle’s out there getting frostbitten and might be dead before your feet hit the floor.” That’s what I would have told him, but like I said, he weren’t mine.

  But here he came after a while. I turned my head and saw him stumbling out to the garage through the snow like the walking dead. A big boy, bigger than his daddy was for sure. He had on his coveralls and had pulled his coat over them. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and when he opened the door and got into the truck the snow stuck in his hair like popcorn.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” I said once he got settled.

  “Hey, Miss Lyle,” he said, like a man more dead than alive.

  BUT GOOD LORD, IF THAT WEREN’T A DRIVE. THAT BOY WHITE-knuckled at the steering wheel and me praying to all the angels in Heaven that we wouldn’t skid off the road into the creek or the woods or somebody’s yard. Anybody who saw us from their windows would have thought we were a couple of daredevil kids out tempting Mother Nature.

  That whole drive I sat there looking out at those heavy snowflakes pounding the windshield and thought about Ben and Julie up there in that house all by themselves with their first baby on the way. I never knew Julie’s people, and Ben’s mama had run off years ago and I can’t say I remember her too well. Those kids had them only one daddy between the two of them and him a sorry, disappeared drunk at that.

  Julie was just a beautiful girl with that curly blond hair and that fair skin. It’s a h
ard thing to come across skin that fair up in these parts with folks spending so much time working outdoors. But hers was as fair as a baby’s, and I figured Ben never let her turn her hand over back then because he loved her so much. He was a good boy, hadn’t taken to drinking yet and didn’t have quite that same meanness running through him like his daddy did. His daddy was just an awfully mean man. After his wife had run off, I figure whatever meanness he’d had left over he took out on Ben; but they shared their ways just the same.

  The worst beating I ever heard of Ben’s daddy putting on him was after one of them women down in Hot Springs called him up and told him Ben had been down there to see her. I ain’t saying that I hold with that kind of women, but you can’t help knowing who you know and hearing what you hear. How she knew how to get ahold of Jimmy Hall to tell him about his own son I can’t say, but I figure it’s pretty easy to hit upon. Ben was still in high school then and a good-sized boy, a football-playing boy. He even played him a year or two up at Western Carolina. But none of that kept his daddy from working him over for holding with folks like Miss Lillian down in Hot Springs. You’d have thought his daddy hadn’t never heard of a boy doing such a thing, but all the folks I know around here thought better than that. They knew Jimmy Hall had always known plenty about those types of women.

  It wasn’t too long after the sheriff’s boy died while working with Jimmy Hall that he dropped off into nothing and left Ben all alone. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to Ben. He tried to be a different man than his daddy, and I can tell you that’s good enough for some of these boys up here, but it wasn’t for Ben. He wanted to be a good man, a good Christian man. I just think his blood was set against him.

  Maybe Ben thought he could run from it, and maybe that’s why he took his family off that mountain not long after Christopher was born. Maybe he gave up Gunter for the valleys closer to the French Broad to escape a past that had already marked him with his daddy’s closed fist and a strong taste for whiskey.

  A few years after Christopher was born and before they had Jess, Ben and Julie moved into a little house with an outdoor privy that had been built down in the holler by a man named Tupelo Gant. Mr. Gant was a childless man who’d built that little place for him and his young wife just a few years after they’d gotten married, and he lived in that house and on that land for years and years and ran him a good little farm. But before he even knew it’d happened, he woke up one morning and saw that he was too old and stubborn to work that burley against the state, and he up and sold that house and the land and took his wife to live in one of them ugly old trailers that were popping up like toadstools all over this county.

  When he found that land for sale, Ben moved his wife and his new baby boy off that mountain and out of his childhood home and down closer to the river. Maybe he took leaving his home once and for all as a sign that he was moving back to a time when it was custom to wear a heavy coat and carry you a light to the outhouse in the snow, when it was just a normal thing to be able to walk to work because work was across the yard and in the barn and down in the field. It was expected that men’s hands would be good and calloused by reins and shovels and the hands of other men whose lives they knew by the tough skin of their handshakes. Looking back on all that myself, I don’t see anything romantic about none of it. I like my inside privy and my washing machine, but some of these young folks are different, and they want times to be hard so they can prove something. Who they want to prove it to I just can’t say, but I reckon Ben was one of these young folks, and he believed that he and his family could find themselves a simpler life. Or maybe he was forced off that mountain to this bottomland by his family’s history and a fear of its reckoning. It could have been just about anything that made him do it, and I can’t say for sure just what it was.

  THE ROAD UP GUNTER MOUNTAIN IS A PAVED BLACKTOP, BUT IT didn’t used to be nothing but mud and a little bit of gravel. It was all paved at that time and it still is as far as I know. But Lord if that boy’s truck didn’t struggle with his tires sliding around in the snow like we were driving on glass, and me sitting there worrying about him carrying that thing clear off the mountain.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to make it up, Ronnie,” I kept saying, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He was hunched down over that wheel and talking to that truck under his breath like he could make it believe otherwise.

  “We ain’t going to make it, Ronnie,” I finally said. “You’re just going to have to stop and let me out. I reckon I’ll have to walk it.”

  He just sat there and stared out at them big old snowflakes filling up his headlights.

  “My ma will kill me if I let you walk up the mountain in this,” he said. “I bet that snow’s more than a foot deep up here.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything else to do,” I said. “No,” I told him, “I think I’m going to have to walk it. You head on home and go back to bed, and I’ll call over to the house when it’s done. I’ll just meet you right here.”

  “My ma’s going to kill me,” he said.

  “Well, that’s between y’all,” I said and opened the door. “There ain’t nothing else for me to do but walk if I’m getting up there tonight. You drive safe getting home. I’ll give you a call in a little while.”

  I closed his door and set off up the mountain in all that blinding snow.

  I was trudging up that road when I remembered Gerty telling me that Ben had tried to call Doc Winthrop to come up here and see about Julie and the baby, and I almost had to laugh out loud when I pictured it. That old coot was probably ten years older than me, and I reckon he’d been drunk just about his whole life. Even though I was raised by my great-aunt, a woman who was a healer if there ever was one, I never had no plans for myself to fall into doctoring folks whenever they took ill or got hurt, but it’s a good thing I started when I did because old Winthrop sure wasn’t any kind of help a person could set store in. There weren’t any ambulances or nothing out here until the hospital came, and what they call a country doctor was about all folks had. Even after all that new stuff came, folks were just as likely to call me or Winthrop or somebody else to help them deliver a baby, set a broken arm, or put a stitch or two in a bad cut.

  Just like when Collie Avery took that fall from the top beam of his daddy’s barn when they were hanging burley. It must’ve been a good forty feet straight down. Folks there figured he’d probably broken his back, and I reckon they were right scared to even move him. His daddy called up Doc Winthrop and asked him to come out. He said, “We ain’t going to move him until you get here. Hurry, though, he’s in some awfully bad pain.”

  Winthrop said he’d be right out, but if those folks didn’t wait just about all day with that boy laying there on the floor of that barn going in and out of consciousness from all that pain he was in. His daddy finally got ahold of me, and I went out there to see about him.

  “I don’t know where that old bastard Winthrop is,” that boy’s daddy said when I got there.

  That boy of his hadn’t broken his back, I knew that for sure. But that fall did crack his pelvis in two, and he spent a good month at a hospital in Asheville trying to heal it up, and I’ll declare he still walks with a limp that’ll make you grit your teeth. I don’t know if I ever seen nobody in the kind of pain that boy was in after that fall.

  And don’t you know I found out what had happened to Doc Winthrop when one of that boy’s brothers was driving me home that evening. We were going across the bridge over Laurel Creek out there in Summey, and if I didn’t look down off the bank and see that old buzzard’s truck drove clean off the road into the water.

  “Go ahead and pull over up here,” I said to that boy.

  He parked on the side of the road, and me and him shimmied down that bank and waded a piece out into the water. We looked in there and seen Winthrop sitting behind that steering wheel just a-snoring like he was at home in bed. You could smell that shine on him or whatever it was he
’d took to drinking that day.

  “Wake up, Winthrop!” I hollered at him. “You done drove your dang truck off the bridge.” He opened his eyes real slow, and then he blinked a couple of times and sat up straight and looked around.

  “Well, I reckon I did,” he said.

  He left it there too. It’s a new bridge there now, but if you drive down through Summey and cross over the Laurel and look down over the side you’ll see that truck. There’s branches hanging over it now and it’s almost covered in moss, but I can tell you it’s there. He’s been dead for years, but his truck’s still just sitting there. And I can tell you if you drive down that way and cross that bridge and look over the side you’ll see it.

  BEN WAS AS WHITE AS A SHEET WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR, AND HE looked to be just about scared out of his mind. “Who drove you up?” he asked.

  “Gerty’s boy, Ronnie, couldn’t make it all the way,” I said. “I walked most of it.”

  “I hate to make you do that,” he said, “but I’m glad you’re here.”

  “She in the bedroom?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Her contractions are giving her fits. I ain’t been able to help her at all.” I’d decided to leave my coat on for the time being, and I went over and stood by the fireplace and held out my hands.

  “How far apart are they?” I asked.

  “How far apart are what?”

  “Her contractions,” I said.

  “Good Lord, Miss Lyle,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t even think to check.”

  I turned back and faced the fire and felt that cold leaving my hands and my face. “Well, you go ahead and put on a pot of boiling water,” I told him. “Go on and toss some scissors in there and find some string and some towels or whatever you got to clean with. We might be having ourselves a long night.”