The World Made Straight Read online

  PART TWO

  EIGHT

  That morning when his principal, Dennis Anderson, and the sheriff’s deputy came to the classroom door, Leonard believed something terrible had happened to Emily. He was so exhausted and depressed that his mind could summon forth no other reason. A month had passed since the separation. Each afternoon he drove across town to a run-down apartment complex that rented by the week. His landlord was a laconic Cambodian immigrant who demanded payment in cash, the neighbors grizzled drunks whose lives Leonard suspected were fast-forwards of his own. Sleep came only if he drank enough to spiral into darkness, and he always woke an hour or two before daylight. What dreams he had were garish and violent, more like fevered hallucinations.

  When the principal motioned him to come into the hallway, Leonard had been unable to move from behind his desk. An image from the worst of his nightmares—Emily prostrate in a hospital bed, a sinister array of tubes embedded in her flesh—seized his mind with the certainty of prophecy.

  Dennis Anderson motioned again, spoke his name aloud as students shifted in their seats and began whispering. Finally the sheriff’s deputy came into the classroom and took him by the arm. As the deputy led him out, Leonard looked at his class and saw curiosity and concern. Except for Robert Tidwell, one of the students he’d given a zero to for cheating. Robert slouched in his seat, legs sprawled before him, smirking.

  “They found marijuana in your car,” the principal said.

  “So nothing is wrong with Emily?” Leonard asked.

  “No,” Anderson replied. “This is about you.”

  “I have to handcuff him,” the deputy said.

  “I know,” the principal replied, “but let’s wait until we’re outside.”

  For a few moments all he felt was relief, even as they walked to the patrol car. The officer recited Leonard’s rights, then removed handcuffs from his belt and motioned for him to hold his hands out. The steel made an audible click as it secured his wrists.

  “I’ll let Kera know what’s happened as soon as the class period ends,” Anderson said. “Do you want her to come to the station now?”

  “No. Tell her to come after school and not to bring Emily.”

  The deputy took his arm and opened the rear door.

  “Watch your head,” he said, and guided Leonard into the backseat. Leonard looked up at Anderson.

  “Robert Tidwell did this. He’s getting me back for giving him a zero.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “The way he was acting in class just now.”

  “I’ll check into it,” the principal said. “But that’s not much to go on.”

  As they pulled out of the lot, Leonard watched Anderson walk rapidly toward the school’s main entrance. He wondered if the principal would confront Tidwell directly or wait until the boy’s father had been informed.

  After they searched and fingerprinted him, took his belt, and confiscated the contents of his pockets, the deputy led Leonard to a vacant holding cell, its one piece of furniture a sagging urine-soaked cot. On the wall outside, a clock’s hands moved beneath wire mesh, even time imprisoned here. It was fourth period, his European history class. If he were at school, he’d be talking about the French Revolution. Trying to sound coherent, make it to the last bell so he could go back to the apartment and drink. Leonard lay down on the cot and closed his eyes and did not open them again until he heard footsteps approaching his cell. Following the deputy were his principal and Dr. Trevor, superintendent of the DeKalb County schools.

  “We need to talk to you,” Dr. Trevor said as the deputy unlocked the cell door. As Leonard stepped out, the clock showed he’d slept two hours. They took him into a room in the building’s basement where four metal chairs surrounded a battered oak table. The deputy did not sit down but stood by the door.

  “I talked to Robert and his father,” Anderson said. “Robert says it’s you who have it out for him. Mr. Tidwell believes his son, and he’s talking about bringing in a lawyer.”

  “It’s your word against his,” Dr. Trevor added, “and that’s a bad situation for all involved.”

  “What makes it bad is that Tidwell’s father is on county council. Right?” Leonard said.

  “I’d be careful making an accusation like that,” Dr. Trevor said.

  “Look,” Anderson interjected. “This is a hard time for you because of your and Kera’s separation. I understand that. Which is why I’ve cut you some slack lately. I’ve seen you come in late and leave early, and I’ve not written you up. Students have complained that your teaching’s not what it was before the separation. Mrs. Robertson smelled alcohol on your breath last week.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with that marijuana being in my car,” Leonard said. “And I’ve never come to school drunk.”

  “We didn’t say you had,” Dr. Trevor replied, “but there is a track record that you haven’t been very professional lately. If I were on a jury, I’d see a pattern of behavior that would make me believe it was your marijuana. To be quite honest, I’d find that more feasible than Robert Tidwell putting it there.”

  Trevor and Anderson playing good cop/bad cop was almost amusing. Leonard looked down at the table as he yawned. Initials and profanity scarred the surface, the letters childlike in their rigid lines and angles. Leonard wondered what a prisoner could have used to etch into the wood. Or were the notchings made by bored policemen? He wanted to fold his arms on the desk and lay his head down. The two hours in the cell had been his first sober sleep in a month, but it seemed only to have made him more tired, as if reminding his body of what he’d lacked for so long.

  “We’ve talked to Sheriff Petrie and Judge Stoneman and believe we’ve got a solution that will work best for everyone,” Anderson said. When Leonard said nothing the principal continued. “He’s agreed that if you plead guilty to a charge of simple possession, you will get a small fine and probation. No trial. Nothing dragged out. We can do it this afternoon. The paperwork is already done.”

  “What about my job?”

  “You’ll lose it,” Dr. Trevor said. “That’s state law. But if you go to trial and lose you could do jail time.”

  “If there’s a trial the publicity is going to make it harder for Kera as well,” Anderson said, and nodded for the deputy to bring in the paperwork. “Believe me, Leonard, this is best for everyone.”

  Leonard had just gotten his car keys and wallet back from the deputy when Kera met him in the courthouse foyer.

  “I saw Anderson and Dr. Trevor in the parking lot. Did they bail you out?”

  “No, I don’t need bail,” Leonard said. The keys and wallet were in his pocket but the belt looped around his fist like a rein. He thought about putting the belt on but doing so felt somehow inappropriate.

  “So they got the charges dropped,” Kera said, her words more confirmation than question. Kera looked so relieved it appeared she might actually hug him. Leonard looked around the large room, which was silent except for their voices. Several benches lined the walls but only one had an occupant, a man in a dark suit who did not bother to hide his interest in their conversation.

  “Let’s go outside,” Leonard said, their footsteps echoing hollowly as they crossed the foyer and passed through the heavy main doors. They stood between the entrance’s two marble pillars. Though it was almost April, a crusty gray snow lingered on curbs and in corners. The cold whitened their breath. Kera wore a heavy wool overcoat and she pulled the flaps up, hands tucked in her pockets. She stood close to him, closer than she’d been in a month. For a few moments Leonard did not speak. He wanted her to stay this close. He smelled the lotion she’d rubbed on her skin that morning, smelled traces of her shampoo.

  “I took a plea bargain,” he finally said.

  “Having it in your car,” Kera said, shaking her head slowly, exasperation in her voice. “How could you have been that stupid, Leonard?”

  “I’ve never smoked pot in my life. You know that.”


  “Then how did it get there? How could that have possibly happened?”

  “Robert Tidwell. Paying me back for the zero I gave him.”

  “Then why in God’s name did you plead guilty?” Kera said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Anderson said it would be best for everyone if I did.”

  Kera took two short steps backward, pressed her back against a marble pillar. Her knees bent slightly, as if she wanted to push the pillar to create more space between them.

  “How could you do this? Did Anderson and Trevor tell you this will cost you your job? Did they tell you you’ll never get another teaching position with a drug charge?”

  “I’ll find other work.” Leonard paused, was about to step closer but her eyes warned him not to. “If it had gone to trial it could have been a lot worse.”

  “No, this is worse,” Kera said. “Even if you were convicted you’d have at least fought it. You wouldn’t have just let it happen.”

  The man who’d been sitting on the bench came out the door. He looked at Leonard’s face circumspectly as he passed between them. Kera watched the man as he walked across the greenway, past the monument on which the names of the county’s war dead were chiseled. “You know, I thought we might try again. Start this weekend with dinner at the farmhouse. Try because of Emily.”

  She turned her head and met his eyes. “Convicted drug offenders lose more than their jobs. But you didn’t think about that. Or did you?” she added after a moment, her words slow, deliberate, spoken as much to herself as to Leonard.

  “I was so tired. I couldn’t think straight.”

  Kera did not appear to hear him.

  “God, you had to know what could be lost. You knew, and you did it anyway.”

  “I love Emily more than I’ve ever loved anyone,” Leonard said. “You know that.”

  “I do know,” Kera said. “And that’s why I can’t comprehend your letting this happen.”

  For a few moments neither of them spoke.

  “I suppose I should be grateful,” Kera finally said, “because everything I do is easy now. All I have to think about are Emily and me. But one thing I’d really like to know, Leonard. It doesn’t matter, not anymore, but I’d just like to know. Why are you unable to do anything you might be held accountable for? Are you that weak, that afraid? Which is what I’ve wanted to believe, because I can forgive that. Is it that you like being able to blame other people when things go wrong because it somehow makes you feel better about yourself?”

  Kera grasped the coat’s lapels and pinched them tight against her neck. A small woman, her straight dark hair cut short, she looked waiflike in the thick coat.

  “Or is it just selfishness,” she continued, “that you want to be left alone and never have to worry about anyone but yourself. If that’s what it is, you’ve gotten your wish, because as soon as the school term is over I’m resigning and going back to Charlotte. Emily and I will live with Mom and Dad until I find a place. The lease on the farmhouse is for a year, so you can move in when we move out. Just think, Leonard. For three months you don’t have to decide where to live. I’ve taken care of it for you.”

  LEONARD RAISED THE CUP TO HIS MOUTH AND SIPPED. A FUSS came from the woods, not a gray squirrel’s saucy bark but the more insistent chirruping of a smaller red squirrel, what his mother called a boomer. Enough leaves had fallen to see the Smokies, their dark peaks jagging into the blue sky. Crisp weather always made the mountains appear more defined, as if created with scissors and construction paper. Landscape as destiny. Leonard had carried that phrase in his head for years, though he could not remember the context or where it came from. But he knew what it meant here, the sense of being closed in, of human limitation. So different from the Midwest, where the possible sprawled bright and endless in every direction. He wondered if people in the Himalayas and Andes were affected similarly. Did they live in the passive voice, as if their lives were not really happening but instead were memories, fixed and immutable? Even die that way, as his Grandfather Shuler had, refusing to go to the doctor when his arm burned with pain and his face grayed to the color of cold ashes. The old man kept working in his tobacco field until the afternoon Leonard’s grandmother found him face down between two rows, hoe resolutely clutched in his hand.

  A certain comfort in living like that, Leonard believed, the universe’s machinery set up to run oblivious to any human tinkering. You could lose your career, your marriage, and your child and accept that it couldn’t have been otherwise. You could sell beer to underage kids at an Illinois convenience store to pay child support checks and a farmhouse’s yearlong lease. You could return to Madison County and sell pills and pot as well as alcohol. Keep doing it even when the child support checks you sent weren’t being cashed. If a kid you’d sold to slammed into a tree or telephone pole, it wasn’t your fault. The kid would have gotten the beer or drugs from someone else.

  Inside the trailer, Travis stirred. In a few moments Leonard heard the boy’s feet pad toward the bathroom, then the sound of the shower. It was Saturday, and Travis didn’t have to work until afternoon. Leonard calculated the time in Australia. Emily would probably be in bed by now, maybe listening to the radio or reading, maybe already asleep. His last three letters had come back with NO FORWARDING ADDRESS stamped across them. Sent into a void, same as the phone calls he couldn’t stop making on nights he drank too much.

  The sun continued its slow haul over the eastern mountains. For a few minutes Leonard watched light slide across the pasture, a wide bright wave that sparked the frosted grass. He’d always liked this time of year, the world seeming to shed its old skin the way a snake did, everything original and vivid, stronger pulsed. Not only what your eyes saw but also the clang of a cowbell, the smell of wood smoke, the cold-iron feel of a cattle gate. Landscape as destiny, but beauty in that landscape as well.

  When Leonard’s father died, his mother had sold the farm and gone to live with Leonard’s sister in south Florida. She’d never gotten used to the heat and congestion in a place where nothing but concrete and brick rose around her, the only foliage palmettos his mother claimed were more like stunted telephone poles than real trees. She’d quit eating, become listless, and died after six months. Died of homesickness, Leonard believed, though he knew that could be mere sentimentality on his part. Even in the mountains, his mother had endured what she called “dark spells.” She’d stayed in bed for days at a time, left the bedroom only to whip Leonard and his sister for playing too loudly. She’d given him more than a sense of wonder. Those dark spells had been her legacy as well.

  He went inside and lifted Handel’s Messiah from his record crate and pulled the first disk from its cardboard sleeve. He set it on the turntable and poured himself a second cup of coffee.

  “Damn, Leonard,” Travis said when he came into the front room. “You need to get some albums by someone who’s still alive.”

  Travis poured his cereal and sat down with Leonard at the kitchen table.

  “How’d you start listening to that stuff anyway?” Travis asked. “You sure didn’t hear it on a radio or jukebox.”

  “My Music Appreciation professor in college,” Leonard said, pausing to sip his coffee. “He’d lost a leg and half a hand during D-Day. I figured if a man who’d been through World War Two found classical music important I should at least give it a chance.”

  “Did he talk in class about what happened during the war?”

  “No,” Leonard said, “at least not directly.”

  Travis ate his cereal as Leonard listened to “For Unto Us a Child Is Born,” the choral voices tentative as though afraid to speak this truth—God come to the world as child. These uncertain voices were the direct opposite of the bombast at the symphony’s conclusion. That was the wonder of it, Leonard knew, the balance of the thing, everything countered, not just balanced but reconciled as the tenor voices resonated below the ethereal sopranos. Even the words proclaimed an order, the croo
kedness of the world made straight. It was, Leonard recognized, such a magnificent order as to demand devotion, the same kind of devotion his mother had shown as she embraced the world from her porch steps.

  In the last class meeting they had listened to the overture of the Messiah. Professor Heddon sat in the corner and raised his mangled right hand as the music began. Three fingers and half a palm slowly waved back and forth, a calm stroking motion, as if the music were something to be coaxed from the vinyl. When the record ended Professor Heddon stood before the class and said his final words, holding his right hand up, what remained of his palm open as though to absolve them. There is beauty in this world, he told them, more beauty than any of us can fathom, and we must not ever forget this.

  “Got something to show you,” Travis said when he’d finished eating. He handed Leonard a black book thick as a family Bible. “Found it in the library.”

  The book smelled of decades steeped on a library’s back shelf, an odor that always reminded Leonard of the fishy smell of a pond or slow-moving river. The title on the spine had been rubbed away, so Leonard turned to the cover page: The Civil War in North Carolina printed in stark black letters.

  “It’s got five pages just on Shelton Laurel,” Travis said. “I sat down in the library and read it then and there, but I figured you’d want to see it.”

  The pastoral symphony’s last notes ended and the needle lifted and set down on its armrest with a dull click. Travis seemed to be waiting for him to turn the pages, begin reading, but Leonard left the book open to the title page.