The barrowfields, p.22
The Barrowfields, page 22
Nightmares of the wicked mansion on the hill began to wake me time and again. In my dreams I could see it high in the shadow of the mountain beneath a sky of smoke and smoldering ash, hiding in wait behind rows of diseased black trees, their pestilential branches dividing the mist and protruding this way and that to their capillaried, palsied ends. I dreamed of finding dozens of gaping shovel-dug holes in the yard with gnarled tree roots reaching into them like grasping, ravenous hands. The earth would tilt and roll and push me toward them. I was going home again.
“What’s a seven-letter word meaning to renounce or give up?” Story twiddled a pencil and bit on the eraser.
“Forsake.”
“Very good. Only a few more. Author of The Stranger. Five letters. I know this, but I can’t remember it to save my life. I want to say Camel—”
“Camus.”
“You’re so good.”
“My father made me do crossword puzzles with him when I was a kid in exchange for dry cereal and basic sustenance items. They get repetitive after a while.”
“I’ll let you finish this one.” She tossed the paper into my lap and slid the pencil behind my ear. “Okay, darling. The time has come.”
“Don’t leave.”
“I have to. I told my folks I’d be home for dinner. I’m going to be late as it is. I need to get home and finish packing.”
Story knelt down and kissed Buller on the forehead. He seemed forlorn.
“Will you call me when you get home?”
“I will.”
“I hate this time of the day,” I said. “I feel it every single day.”
She kissed me and held me close and I drank in the fragrance of her hair and the warmth and softness of her body. Then she was gone, and I gathered up what my life had become and set out west to the home I had left so many years before.
Living in a city, it’s easy to forget about the night sky. The stars become like forgotten childhood friends. Only far away from city lights are the stars truly visible, where on a dark, clear night you can see that the heavens have a nearly infinite depth. It is no mere canopy above us. As a child in the mountains I was captivated by the night sky. In my pajamas, I’d roll up the green army blanket Mother kept down at the end of the hall in the linen closet and try to sneak outside to lie on the grass beneath the trees to track the mathematical revolutions of the stars around the spinning earth. Looking east from the great house on Ben Hennom, the wheeling stars and wandering planets would rise like fireflies from the timeless gray shoulders of the Morning Mountain.
As a boy, lying outside under a starlit summer sky, I viewed the firmament of distant suns with hope and warmth and optimism. As I grew older, I frequently turned to the sky for comfort, and being reminded of my slight significance within the context of the vast and enigmatic universe, I was comforted. Driving back to Old Buckram for the first time in more than seven years, returning home again, I looked out my car window and up through the windshield at the black sky full of stars once more, and I did feel some measure of much-needed comfort—but it was a lonely comfort, nonetheless.
At a crest in the Blue Ridge, when Old Buckram is still more than ten miles distant to the north, a narrow plateau appears between the mountains, flat and wide like an antediluvian riverbed. The locals call it Chilblain’s Gap, but I doubt the name has ever appeared on a map. At a crossroads there you’ll find a flashing yellow light, a small gas station, and nothing more. My whole life in tow and Buller stuffed into the back of the Arthur Radley with no room to spare, I stopped to buy a six-pack of beer.
The gas station had dirty windows, and a dim light shone out onto the pavement through frosted lettering that was no longer legible. Rusted cans and other trash lay in the weeds behind the station and caught the fluorescent glow from the rusted awning over the pumps. Inside, behind the counter, was a pleasant gray-haired woman with rolls of fat hanging pendulously over her belt. A quantity of thin black hair ran over her lip and around her chin, pausing only to avoid an erumpent growth on her cheek the size and hue of a Buffalo-head nickel. She had on a gaudy trinket for a wedding ring and I thought of her poor husband, likely a much smaller man than she, and wondered if he’d ever come close to smothering in the crook of her arm. She was reading a housekeeping magazine and said “Howdy” to me when I walked in.
I went to the beer cooler and passed three men, all of them older, sitting in a booth next to the window smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. One had an enormous inflated stomach that stuck out and threatened the edge of the table. His weight showed in his arms and in his face and in his ankles. A wooden cane carved from a tree limb, knots included, was hooked over his leg. He worked at his teeth with a toothpick and then put it back into his shirt pocket for later. Perhaps this was the clerk’s husband, there to keep an eye on her lest she stray.
Beside him was a man who was almost comically small next to the first man. Imagine a starched white shirt on a metal hanger with a head balanced on top. Although he must have been sixty-eight or seventy, this second man had a childlike face and the aspect of a twelve-year-old boy, if the twelve-year-old boy had been a chicken. The third man wore snakeskin cowboy boots and tight blue jeans and had a neatly trimmed mustache that covered his lip but didn’t quite reach all the way to his nose. All of them wore trucker caps of cloth and mesh, and the small man’s hat looked peculiar and oversized perched so high on his little head.
You could tell they had spent many a night in this gas station, talking and socializing with anyone who came in. They became quiet when I entered and I could feel them watch me walk by. As I went back toward the counter, one of them nodded his head at me. I smiled politely and paused to exchange a brief pleasantry, as is the custom in the mountains.
“Evenin’, gentlemen.”
Without looking at me, the larger man said, “None of them ’round here.” They all laughed and I laughed with them.
“Son,” the larger man said, “you’ve got it made.”
“You think?” I said.
“See that boy there,” the larger man continued like I was no longer standing in front of him, “he’s got it made.”
“He does have it made,” said the smaller man. “He’s a good-lookin’ young man. Here it is a Saturday night and he’s a’taking home some cold beer to drink. Prob’ly got him a girl at home, too.” They laughed again and flicked at their cigarettes and the wooden cane twirled about.
“I wish I did,” I said. “Tonight, it’s just me and the beer.”
Quick as a flash, the larger man said, “That boy just told my whole life story!” and this precipitated another burst of friendly, raucous laughter.
“Are you Henry’s boy?” said the man with the mustache, looking up at me with one eye. “He looks just like his daddy, don’t he, Cetus? Son, you sure have grown up in a hurry.”
“Oh, yes,” said Cetus, the larger man, as if he were not quite sure what to say, just like when you ask about someone only to hear they’ve died. “Son, I knew your daddy pretty well, back when he was working as a lawyer in town,” he said. “A good man. There’s no doubt about it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man with the mustache. “He sure helped a lot of people who needed help.”
The three men got quiet for a moment as they thought back on it all and I took the opportunity to leave. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better get on home. Come with me and have a beer.”
“Naw, we best stay here,” said Cetus. “Good night, son. Be safe.”
“Night, gentlemen.”
“Say,” Cetus called to me before I could walk away.
“Sir?”
“Don’t you have a little sister? Where’s she now?”
“I do,” I said. “She and my mother are living in Charlotte. They’re doing well.”
I walked back to the beer cooler and exchanged my now-warm six-pack for a colder twelve-pack of the same beer. As I went to the counter to pay, I heard Cetus say, “I know where he gets that taste for beer. Comes by it honest.”
—
From the crossroads at Chilblain’s Gap to the first traffic light in Old Buckram, the miles are dark and quiet. Other than the occasional billboard (BLEVINS LUMBER CO., 200 MAIN ST., OLD BUCKRAM), there are few objective indications that you are approaching anything resembling a center of commerce.
About a mile out of town coming in from the southwest, the road widens and begins a steady incline up a long hill with pastures on either side of the road. From the top of the hill, for the first time the few town lights can be seen shining in the broad valley below. On clear nights an observant traveler will notice that much of the sky to the east above the town is cloaked in a darkness that is deeper than the dark of the sky. This immense shadow is the Morning Mountain, whose sloping shoulders rise nearly five thousand feet on the east side of the valley to defend the town from starlight and the early-morning sun. On this night, a timid white moon rose to meet me as I crossed the top of the hill, then fell again to hide behind the mountain as I made my way down into town.
There is a fear that accompanies returning to a place that holds many of your life’s memories, especially if years pass between leaving and returning. For fast-moving, progressive towns and cities, the fear is that the place will have changed in your absence; that it will have gone on without you; that it will have left you behind. This reminds us too sharply that time and life continue unabated in our absence—that our impact on any place and the people who reside there is ephemeral.
For small towns, there is an opposite fear: that the town hasn’t changed. That it’s just the same as you left it—that the streets and the stores and the people, and the sadness and the loneliness, are the same; that it will always be the same, with you fading slowly away, insignificant, as the town stolidly but unchangingly persists.
After my protracted absence, the faintly lit Main Street showed no evidence of change, but everything had aged. I saw nothing new; nothing that would make the town new to me. The old Chevrolet place on the corner of Catawba Road and Main Street was still there, its sign a faded blue and silver, almost unreadable now. The pastel murals of old bluegrass bands and blue mountain vistas that were added to the brick facades of some of the original town buildings as part of the town “renewal” when I was a child had become even more faded. Ace Hardware, with its wooden floors and aromatic dusty seed bins, appeared to have closed.
There were no cars in town. No stores or restaurants were open. The few traffic lights flashed yellow to no one. The sidewalks were unswept and uninviting. Many of the storefronts were empty with cheap For Rent signs hanging crookedly in the windows. The shops that remained going concerns were small operations destined for failure, all with scant wares in shabby window displays.
I had no old friends in town, and my suspicion at the time was that I was not likely to make any new ones. When you return to a place that offers more narrow horizons than the place you left, you will forever be alien to that place. You have changed; you are no longer the same person you once were.
There was little prosperity to speak of in Old Buckram during the years of my childhood, and this was not a change from how it was before. I don’t believe anyone ever moved there with the expectation of finding great success, although some tree farmers made a modest living, but nothing like you’d expect. Most people who lived there had been born there, and most were content simply living out their lives without recognizable ambition.
On Sunday morning, if you were out driving, you’d see women riding to church with their husbands, their attire dark and modest—for her, a somber dress covering the knees, heavy nylon stockings bunched at the ankles and the shoes, maybe a simple necklace of faux pearls. For him, the same suit every Sunday: a black coat and cuffed pants, frayed and threadbare around the heels; a white shirt, now yellowing; a thin black tie not quite reaching the belt buckle. Faces expressionless and impassive, appearing to live in the complete absence of curiosity and displaying no evident longing for anything beyond their day-to-day existence and exhibiting no amusement or pain of life. After church they’d return home, relatives would visit, and they’d all sit or stand in the dining room and eat green beans, country ham, and cold biscuits with overly full mouths and tall glasses of milk, nobody ever saying very much. Mostly they’d talk about being poor and those who had died, always shaking their heads in resignation, but carrying on despite losing the grim battle against life and time.
In the morning, you hear the incessant crowing of the rooster from a far valley. You walk along the lonely dirt road beside a cheap barbed-wire fence, uneven and holding knots of mane or tail, the sticky milkweed in the ditch, the Queen Anne’s lace growing there in the long grass and clover, and beside the road there is a catalpa tree, and a crab apple, and a black locust that is older than you are.
In the evening, darkness sets early on the land as the sun falls behind the mountains and the beginnings of a raw wind come up out of the earth. The sound of the last passing cars fades into nothingness, and the creek behind the house is left to run like an hourglass in the cold. And when autumn is subsumed by winter and the sky is white from morning until night, and the first snow falls from the pale white sky, life and hope retreat.
There is a sadness—a colorlessness—that lives in the far northwestern mountains—in Old Buckram. There is a stillness that exists nowhere else in the world among the places I have been. It’s always there, lurking just beyond the invented clamor and tumult of the day. Yet this stillness is not one of quiet comfort. It is not the drowsy calm that descends when the earth turns away from the sun and all living things find shelter and warmth and sleep. No, it is not this. It is a stillness of disquiet. It is a terrifying midday silence of nothingness and desolation.
From any place in the mountains, you will see the white mist rising and churning above the valleys; the rows upon geometrically perfect rows of Christmas trees lining the hillsides; the once-green mountains in the foreground fading to shades of blue in the magnificent distance. You will see leafless trees tremble in the invisible winter wind. You will smell the wood-smoke from so many distant fires. You will see the rutted roadways and dead grass in all the yards, and a murder of crows in search of food in a lifeless field. But all this you will see in stillness.
You are alone in this place. Anyone who has lived through more than one winter here knows it all too well. I don’t know why I ever went back. I know now that one can never leave a place completely.
—
I pulled onto a backstreet out of the lights of town and opened a beer that thankfully was still fairly cold. I drove west on Avernus Road back up toward old Ben Hennom, past Lambert Holler and the Sunoco station, and past the Harless valley where the dirty piebald cows waded in the grassy creek and looked out stupidly with muddy faces at passing cars. I drove by the severe-looking Eusebius Baptist Church, with its flat gravel parking lot and the rusted single-wide trailer in the field just behind the church, apparently uninhabited for years. Just beyond the church the road narrowed and turned to dirt and gravel as I expected. From there it wasn’t far to the driveway I hadn’t seen since leaving for college.
I pulled up to the gate at the bottom of Ben Hennom at 10:45 P.M. and looked with very real trepidation at the narrow gravel road that disappeared up the hill into the darkness. I got out of the car and examined the gate in the headlights and found it was locked with a heavy chain and padlock. There wasn’t room on either side of it to drive around, so I got Buller out of the back of the car and together we began the long climb up with the help of a rather sad flashlight whose batteries were fading by the second. In the dappling moonlight I saw the vanguard of black trees behind the fence and the shadow of the brooding, diabolical house behind them, and a chill ran through me, warning me not to approach. My mind briefly entertained the preposterous fantasy that the house was alive and that it hated me with all its soul; that it would kill me were I to return home and reclaim possession of it. Up the hill we went.
The driveway was washed out and overgrown with weeds. The dogwoods running up either side must have been hit by some kind of blight or parasite, for there were no leaves on the trees. It had the appearance of a long-dead orchard. There were no streetlights and no house lights anywhere close. The darkness was nearly complete save for a faint halo of town light that came from behind. Here and there I saw the house hiding in the dark like a great squatting skeleton. I felt sure someone had figured out it had been sitting vacant and that I would either find someone living there or evidence of animal sacrifices, or both.
It had not occurred to me to call ahead and have the electricity turned on. Brilliant. A pane of glass in the back door had been broken, but the door remained locked and appeared secure. My old key worked just as it always had and we were inside.
As soon as Buller and I set foot inside the gray-tiled foyer, I thought about the family that had lived there before us. I’d been in the house for fifteen years before I finally learned their horrific fate. Father told the grisly tale to his law partner, Charlie, and Charlie’s wife, Sarah, late one Saturday night. I was in my room with the door open when the house fell quiet. I overheard Father say: “Yes, they died right here in the house.” I went to the railing to listen.
“That’s awful,” said Sarah. “And didn’t they have children?”
“There were three girls,” said Father. “Mary, Tebah, and Abigail. Biblical names.”
[MOTHER: “You know their names?”]
“What happened?” asked Charlie. “I’m not sure I want to know. I’m assuming it wasn’t natural.”
[MOTHER: “You never told me their names.”]
“The parents—they died from gunshot wounds to the head,” said Father.
[FATHER TO MOTHER: “I found a picture with their names written on the back. I’ll show you.”]
“Were they murdered or did they commit suicide?”
