The World Made Straight Read online

  Travis Shelton is seventeen the summer he wanders onto a neighbor’s property in the woods, discovers a grove of marijuana large enough to make him some serious money, and steps into the jaws of a bear trap. After hours passing in and out of consciousness, Travis is discovered by Carlton Toomey, the wise and vicious farmer who set the trap to protect his plants, and Travis’s confrontation with the subtle evils within his rural world has begun.

  Before long, Travis has moved out of his parents’ home to live with Leonard Shuler, a onetime schoolteacher who lost his job and custody of his daughter years ago, when he was framed by a vindictive student. Now Leonard lives with his dogs and his sometime girlfriend in a run-down trailer outside town, deals a few drugs, and studies journals from the Civil War. Travis becomes his student, of sorts, and the fate of these two outsiders becomes increasingly entwined as the community’s terrible past and corrupt present bear down on each of them from every direction, leading to a violent reckoning—not only with Toomey but with the legacy of the Civil War massacre that, even after a century, continues to divide an Appalachian community.

  Vivid, harrowing yet ultimately hopeful, The World Made Straight offers a powerful exploration of the painful conflict between the bonds of home and the desire for independence.

  ALSO BY RON RASH

  NOVELS

  One Foot in Eden

  Saints at the River

  SHORT FICTION

  The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth

  Casualties

  POETRY

  Eureka Mill

  Among the Believers

  Raising the Dead

  THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT

  THE

  WORLD

  MADE

  STRAIGHT

  RON RASH

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  Henry Holt® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  A version of chapter one appeared in a slightly different form in

  The Kenyan Review and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.

  Copyright © 2006 by Ron Rash

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rash, Ron, date.

  The world made straight / Ron Rash.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7866-4

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-7866-5

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—

  Influence—Fiction. 3. Marijuana industry—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Fiction.

  5. Male friendship—Fiction. 6. North Carolina—Fiction. 7. Massacres—Fiction.

  8. Violence—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.A698W67 2006

  813′.54—dc22 2005050304

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and

  premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First Edition 2006

  Designed by Kelly S. Too

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For my son, James

  But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness,

  and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and

  more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen,

  it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay,

  the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as

  it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to

  mankind.

  Moby-Dick

  PART ONE

  August 5, 1850

  A.M.

  Lansford Hawkins, age 48.

  Complaint: Fevered, headache.

  Diagnosis: Coriza. Consulted Wood’s Theory and Practice of

  Medicine.

  Treatment: Dover’s Powder. At patient’s insistence cupped

  sixteen ounces of blood from left arm to remove morbific

  matter. Rest in bed two days.

  Fee: Fifty cents. Paid in cash.

  Clementine Crockett, age 58.

  Complaint: Locked bowels.

  Diagnosis: Same.

  Treatment: Blue mass.

  Fee: Fifty cents. Paid with twenty pounds flour.

  P.M.

  Summoned to Shelton Farm.

  Maggie Shelton, age 25.

  Complaint: Uterine bleeding. Seventh month with child.

  Diagnosis: Physical exertings inducing early labor. Consulted

  Meigs’s Females and Their Diseases.

  Treatment: Tincture valerian to relieve spasmodic tendency. Bed

  rest for week. No field work until month after child born. Black

  haw tea twice daily to lessen bleeding. Bloodstone for same

  though dubious of effectingness.

  Fee: Two dollars. Paid with venison, two dozen eggs delivered

  next time in town.

  ONE

  Travis came upon the marijuana plants while fishing Caney Creek. It was a Saturday, the first week of August, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning he’d had the rest of the day for himself. He’d changed into his fishing clothes and driven three miles of dirt road to the French Broad. Travis drove fast, the rod and reel clattering in the truck bed, red dust rising in his wake. The Marlin .22 slid on its makeshift gun rack with each hard curve. He had the windows down, and if the radio worked he would have had it blasting. The truck was a ’66 Ford, battered from a dozen years of farm use. Travis had paid a neighbor five hundred dollars for it three months earlier.

  He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon light slanted over Divide Mountain and tinged the water the deep gold of curing tobacco. A fish leaped in the shallows, but Travis’s spinning rod was broken down and even if it hadn’t been he wouldn’t have bothered to cast. Nothing swam in the French Broad he could sell, only hatchery-bred rainbows and browns, some smallmouth, and catfish. The old men who fished the river stayed in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Travis liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn’t go.

  In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the rod still in two pieces. There were trout in this lower section, browns and rainbows that had worked their way up from the river, but Old Man Jenkins would not buy them. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the creek’s deepest pool. This was the place where everyone else turned back, but Travis waded through waist-high water to reach the waterfall’s right side. Then he began climbing, the rod clasped in his left palm as his fingers used juts and fissures for leverage and resting places.

  When he got to the top he fitted the rod sections together and threaded monofilament through the guides. He was about to tie on the silver Panther Martin spinner when a tapping began above him. Travis spotted the yellowhammer thirty feet up in the hickory and immediately wished he had his .22 with him. He scanned the woods for a dead tree or old fence post where the bird’s nest might be. A flytier in Marshall paid two dollars if you brought him a yellowhammer or wood duck, a nickel for a single good feather, and Travis needed every dollar and nickel he could get if he was going to get his truck insurance paid this month.

  The only fish this far up were what fishing books and magazines called brook trout, though Travis had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them a name other than speckled trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and
paid Travis fifty cents apiece no matter how small. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.

  Mountain laurel slapped his face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing rocks there was no other way around. Water was the only path now. Travis thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled. The old man had told him never to fish places like this alone, because a broken leg or rattlesnake bite could get a body graveyard dead before someone found you. That was about the only kind of talk he’d ever heard from the old man, Travis thought as he tested his knot, always being put down about something—how fast he drove, who he hung out with. Nothing but a bother from the day he was born. Puny and sickly as a baby and nothing but trouble since. That’s what his father had said to his junior high principal, like it was Travis’s fault he wasn’t stout as his daddy, and like the old man hadn’t raised all sorts of hell when he himself was young.

  The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a washtub. Travis flicked the spinner into the front of each pool and reeled soon as it hit the surface, the spinner moving through the water like a slow bright bullet. In every third or fourth pool a small orange-finned trout came flopping onto the bank, treble hook snagged in its mouth. Travis slapped the speckleds’ heads against a rock and felt the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike brown and rainbows, speckleds would hit twice, sometimes even three times. Old Man Jenkins had said when he was a boy most every stream in Madison County was thick as gnats with speckleds, but they’d been too easy caught and soon fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.

  EIGHT TROUT WEIGHTED THE BACK OF HIS FISHING VEST WHEN Travis passed the NO TRESPASSING sign nailed aslant a pin oak tree. The sign was as scabbed with rust as the decade-old car tag nailed on his family’s barn, and he paid it no more heed now than when he’d first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Carlton Toomey once used his thumb to gouge a man’s eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man’s face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Travis’s daddy had witnessed before he’d got right with the Lord. But Travis had heard other things. About how Carlton Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard-drinking to hold steady jobs. Travis’s daddy claimed the Toomeys poached bears on national forest land. They cut off the paws and gutted out the gallbladders because folks in China paid good money to make potions from them. The Toomeys left the meat to rot, too sorry even to cut a few hams off the bears’ flanks. Anybody that trifling wouldn’t bother walking the hundred yards between farmhouse and creek to watch for trespassers.

  Travis waded on upstream, going farther than he’d ever been before. He caught more speckleds, and soon seven dollars’ worth bulged the back of his fishing vest. Enough money for gas and to help pay his insurance, and though it wasn’t near the money he’d been making at Pay-Lo bagging groceries, at least he could do this alone, not fussed at by some old hag of a store manager with nothing better to do than watch his every move, then fire him just because he was late a few times.

  He came to where the creek forked and it was there he saw a sudden high greening a few yards above him on the left. He stepped from the water and climbed the bank to make sure it was what he thought. The plants were staked like tomatoes and set in rows like tobacco or corn. They were worth money, a lot of money, because Travis knew how much his friend Shank paid for an ounce of good pot and this wasn’t ounces but pounds.

  He heard something behind him and turned, ready to drop the rod and reel and make a run for it. On the other side of the creek a gray squirrel scrambled up the thick bark of a black-jack oak. Travis told himself there was no reason to get all feather-legged, that nobody would have seen him coming up the creek.

  He let his eyes scan what lay beyond the plants. A woodshed concealed the marijuana from anyone at the farmhouse or the dirt drive that petered out at the porch steps. Animal hides stalled mid-climb on the shed’s graying boards. Coon and fox, in the center a bear, their limbs spread as though even in death they were still trying to escape. Nailed up there like a warning, Travis thought.

  He looked past the shed and didn’t see anything moving, not even a cow or chicken. Nothing but some open ground and then a stand of tulip poplar. He rubbed a pot leaf between his finger and thumb, and it felt like money, a lot more money than he’d ever make at a grocery store. He looked around one more time before taking out his pocketknife and cutting down five plants. The stalks had a twiney toughness like rope.

  That was the easy part. Dragging them a mile down the creek was a chore, especially while trying to keep the leaves and buds from being stripped off. When he got to the river he hid the marijuana in the underbrush and walked the trail to make sure no one was fishing. Then he carried the plants to the road edge, stashed them in the gully, and got the truck.

  When the last plants lay in the truck bed, he wiped his face with his hand. Blood and sweat wet his palm. Travis looked in the side mirror and saw a thin red line where mountain laurel had slapped his cheek. The cut made him look tougher, more dangerous, and he wished it had slashed him deeper, enough to leave a scar. He dumped his catch into the ditch, the trout stiff and glaze-eyed. He wouldn’t be delivering Old Man Jenkins any speckleds this evening.

  Travis drove home with the plants hidden under willow branches and feed sacks. He planned to stay only long enough to get a shower and put on clean clothes, but as he was about to leave his father stopped him.

  “We haven’t ate yet.”

  “I’ll get something in town,” Travis replied.

  “No. Your momma’s fixing supper right now, and she’s got the table set for three.”

  “I ain’t got time. Shank’s expecting me.”

  “You’ll make time, boy,” his father said. “Else you and that truck can stay in for the evening.”

  IT WAS SIX-THIRTY BEFORE TRAVIS TURNED INTO THE ABANdoned Gulf station and parked window to window beside Shank’s Plymouth Wildebeast.

  “You won’t believe what I got in the back of this truck.”

  Shank grinned.

  “It’s not the old prune-faced bitch that fired you, is it?”

  “No, this here is worth something. Get out and I’ll show you.”

  They walked around to the truck bed and Shank peered in.

  “I didn’t know there to be a big market for willow branches and feed sacks.”

  Travis looked around to see if anyone was watching, then pulled back enough of a sack so Travis could see some leaves.

  “I got five of them,” Travis said.

  “Holy shit. Where’d that come from?”

  “Found it when I was fishing.”

  Travis pulled the sack back over the plant.

  “Reckon I better start doing my fishing with you,” Shank said. “It’s for sure I been going to the wrong places.” Shank leaned against the tailgate. “What are you going to do with it? I know you ain’t about to smoke it yourself.”

  “Sell it, if I can figure out who’ll buy it.”

  “I bet Leonard Shuler would,” Shank said. “Probably give you good money for it too.”

  “He don’t know me though. I’m not one of his potheads like you.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to go and get you all introduced,” Shank said. “Let me lock my car and me and you will go pay him a visit.”

  “How about we go over to Dink Shackleford’s first and get some beer.”

  “Leonard’s got beer,” Shank said, “and his ain’t piss-warm like what we got last time at Dink’s.”

  They drove out of Marshall, following 25 North. A pink, dreamy glow tinged the air. Rose-light evenings, Travis’s mother had called them. The carburetor coughed and gasped as the pickup struggled up High Rock Ridge. Travis figured soon enough he’d have money for a carburetor kit, maybe even get the whole damn engine rebuilt.

  “You’re in for a treat, mee
ting Leonard,” Shank said. “There’s not another like him, leastways in this county.”

  “Wasn’t he a teacher somewhere up north?”

  “Yeah, but they kicked his ass out.”

  “What for,” Travis asked, “taking money during homeroom for dope instead of lunch?”

  Shank laughed.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him, but the way I heard it he shot some fellow.”

  “Kill him?”

  “No, but he wasn’t trying to. If he had that man would have been dead before he hit the ground.”

  “I heard tell he’s a good shot.”

  “He’s way beyond good,” Shank said. “He can hit a chigger’s ass with that pistol of his.”

  After a mile they turned off the blacktop and onto a dirt road. On both sides what had once been pasture sprouted with scrub pine and broom sedge. They passed a deserted farmhouse, and the road withered to no better than a logger’s skid trail. Trees thickened, a few silver-trunked river birch like slats of caught light among the darker hardwoods. The land made a deep seesaw and the woods opened into a small meadow, at the center a battered green and white trailer, its back windows painted black. Parked beside the trailer was a Buick LeSabre, front fender crumpled, rusty tailpipe held in place with a clothes hanger. Two large big-shouldered dogs scrambled out from under the trailer, barking furiously, brindle hair hackled behind their necks.

  “Those damn dogs are Plott hounds,” Travis said, rolling his window up higher.

  Shank laughed.

  “They’re all bark and bristle,” Shank said. “Them two wouldn’t fight a tomcat, much less a bear.”

  The trailer door opened and a man wearing nothing but a frayed pair of khaki shorts stepped out, his brown eyes blinking like some creature unused to light. He yelled at the dogs and they slunk back under the trailer.

  The man was no taller than Travis. Blond, stringy hair touched his shoulders, something not quite a beard and not quite stubble on his face. Older than Travis had figured, at least in his mid-thirties. But it was more than the creases in the brow that told Travis this. It was the way the man’s shoulders drooped and arms hung—like taut, invisible ropes were attached to both his wrists and pulling toward the ground.