We are silent until finally he says, “Well, I’m gonna head on back. I’m takin my momma out to lunch. I try to do that once a month.”
“That’s a good thing.”
We walk silently back down the trail to Fink’s Hollow. He smiles at the sight of the old truck and puts his hand on the hood as if to draw out more memories from that magical time in our lives. Finally he sticks out his hand and I take it. “It’s good seein you, Kevin. I jus wish it was for better reasons.”
“Yeah, it was good to see you, too. And thanks for coming out to the hollow. I appreciate it.”
He nods, then says, “Next time you’re in town, give me a call. I’ll be in my new place by then. You can come over or somethin.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” I say. “I’ll definitely do that.”
He turns and walks off toward Giggins Hoo. I follow the road out of the hollow and back to town.
Medgar is alive with activity now, with the mines heaving and the prison nearing capacity. I drive through the west side to Main Street. The place is a puzzle with familiar pieces cut to a new picture, for all the old Main Street stores are gone. Dempsey’s closed in 2001 after a Food Lion opened at the old urinal-mint factory. It is now an antique store. Miss Janey’s shut that same year after Miss Janey suffered a stroke and lost the use of her right arm. It’s a quilt shop.
Smith’s is long gone, out of business soon after 2003. It reopened as a 7-Eleven. The movie theater is a movie theater again, offering first-run films. Bank of America took over the Monongahela Bank and Trust in 2005, people two deep at the ATM.
A McDonald’s gilds the corner of Watford and Main. The coming of the arches was a bitter blow for Hank Biddle, and he sold out soon after to an Indian family who turned the place into a Sizzler franchise.
Perhaps the most jarring casualty on Main Street is Hivey’s Farm Supply. Shortly after the new century, a modern farm store opened in the Walmart complex in Glassville, and Hivey’s business dropped precipitously. Bump Hivey finally closed the store on Christmas Eve 2006 and moved his family to Johnson City. The place idled for eight years until it reopened four months ago as an overpriced coffee shop.
I push through the front door, half expecting Jesper Jensen, Bobby Clinch, and Grubby Mitchell to be sipping Venti Skinny Lattes at the back by the plastic woodstove built into the coffee bean display.
Unfortunately, Jesper died of a heart attack in 1999 during a round of Auction Pinochle with Lo Gilvens, who went undefeated in ten straight games. With Jesper gone, the loafing at Hivey’s just wasn’t the same and the group gradually disbanded. Bobby took over booth six at Sizzler, and Grubby drifted through make-work, then down to Florida after Mayna passed.
Several young couples are at tables by the coffee-shop window, reading the Saturday paper. Two people in line at the counter face smiling baristas. I take away a black coffee and walk around the corner to the alley on Green Street.
Although the signs out front have been swapped out, the alley and the attending memories remain as before—I try to shift them toward the positive; toward Paul happening upon a flat-tired Paitsel or wearing level-five hazmat gear to a gutter cleaning; toward the hair ribbon and the rifle-shot slap. But they drift back to the beating and the boy and the curious paradox of it all. I’ve thought about it often in the years since that first summer in Medgar, and I’m no closer to understanding how evil can be both numbingly complex and so astonishingly simple at once. I linger a while longer, then go back to the truck and drive up Watford.
I turn onto Chisold and Pops’ old house comes into view. Wise and experienced next to the new houses crocusing the neighborhood. A crowd is gathered on the porch. An elderly man sits in the old green wicker chair. In the heat I think for a moment that it is Pops, but as I come closer I see it’s Chester Skill. Mom is next to him, holding a pitcher of iced tea and pouring it into passing half-empty glasses.
Audy Rae comes out the front door with a tray of brownies, and several of the children line up reverently for one before escaping into the yard, the way a puppy jiggers off with a treat. The new neighbors are there, mostly young couples.
I park and walk into the yard, pausing by the big hickory to watch Pops’ old and new friends chat, drink tea, sip sour mash, and tell stories about his life. Kate takes the iced tea pitcher from Mom and goes into the house to refill it. Chester tells about the time Pops drove Sarah Winthorpe’s father’s car into the reservoir in Lexington because he was too proud to admit to her that he didn’t know how to drive. Several people throw their heads back in laughter. Paitsel tells of the turkeys and toys Pops delivered secretly every Christmas. Most nod their heads, smiling sadly.
Sarah sidles to Mom’s legs and raises her arms to be picked up. Mom bends and sweeps her from the porch. She sees me standing by the hickory and wiggles back to the floor.
“Daddy!” she squeals and bounds the steps toward me, her chestnut hair giving itself to the sun.
The last of friends leave the porch and I pile the old camping gear in the back of Pops’ truck, kiss Kate and Sarah, then head through town to Jukes Hollow Road.
I park at the huge rocks by the entrance and stand next to Ahab, running my hand along its cool, dark length. As I do, an image comes to me of a boy striding up Jukes Hollow Road, leather-bound book tucked under his arm, walking stick pushing off the hardpack. He passes me, passes through me, running his hand along Ahab in the exact path of mine.
I follow him on the road to the half circle of cabins, each busy with activity—folks working a cornfield, others hauling wood. A thin woman, aged beyond her years, is sweeping off the cabin porch with a home-tied broom. “Arthur, don’t you be readin til chores.”
“Done em,” he says and races off to the waterfall before she can protest.
I walk down the hill, across the creek to the wounded ground where Pops has been laid. It was spade and shovel work since Tingley’s couldn’t get a backhoe across the creek, and they packed it as best they could, spreading excess in the woods, then scattering flowers over the bruised earth.
I notice stray chickweed around my grandmother’s headstone and kneel to pull it. I take two steps back and look at them together. Side by side, as if sleeping in on Saturday morning.
SARAH WINTHORPE PEEBLES ARTHUR BRADLEY PEEBLES
BORN APRIL 19, 1920 BORN JANUARY 3, 1919
DIED IN LABOR
DECEMBER 1, 1949 DIED JULY 3, 2014
A VOICE LESS LOUD, THROUGH ITS JOYS AND FEARS THAN THE TWO HEARTS BEATING EACH TO EACH
I let the chickweed fall from my hand to follow the wind.
I walk over to the waterfall, to my grandparents’ picnic spot under the magnolia, and sit on the bench as evening comes, just listening to his voice in the action of the water. I reach into the pack and pull out a half bottle of Clinch Mountain sour mash and a glass with SWP etched fancy into it. A light pour and spinning ice as I contemplate the man who shaped my life so expertly. I raise the glass and tip it toward him. “You know, if Hannibal had used mountain goats instead of elephants, he might’ve conquered Rome.”
I stay on the bench by the picnic spot, feeling the mash and the memories and the last of the afternoon air as it is pushed out by the settling night. After a while I walk up to the cabin, light the kerosene lamp, and follow the flickering yellow into Pops’ childhood room. Up onto the top bunk and under my old sleeping bag—the attic smell of the bedroll mixing with the faint scent of wood pulled from the ancient pine along with a century of living that resides there. They are a comfort as I drift off with Pops and Buzzy and that singular summer when we left the coverings of boy behind.
The next morning I wake with the cabin still jacketed in dark and stay there listening to the old sounds from his youth. After a while I climb down and walk out to the porch as morning breaks over the hollow. I stand on the hill by the cabin side, looking out at the creek, the field, the rocks, the waterfall, and the fresh scar in the graveyard.
I see in my mind how it must have looked when Pops was a boy. The rocky soil and sometimes sun yielding the best corn it could. I go back to the porch and linger, imagining a morning coffee gathering of weather predictors, crop forecasters, and coal pundits. I push open the front door and walk inside, feeling the history of the place rush to me. I amble through the kitchen to the doorway of the big bedroom, my footsteps submitting closed-museum echoes in the morning still.
The bed is mattressed and quilted now, and the boys have run from their room to their parents’ bed and dove under the covers, kicking each other and pushing for position until their father tells them to quit. There’s a chill this morning, so they lay together under the warm quilts, three boys in the middle, the parents touching feet to feet in an unspoken embrace. They have a full day of work before them, she to the morning milking, then a day in the corn rows, picking the early ears before the crows; he to the Hogsback seam.
But it’s Saturday. So they lie together five minutes more, just touching feet, floating on the quiet as the boys drift back off. Finally, she slips out of bed and into the kitchen to fire the stove for the beginnings of breakfast.