Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read online

She shifted her body to face me.

  “Nothing like coming back home, right?”

  “You’re from Lattimore?” I asked.

  “No, but this county. Lawndale. You know where that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “But our buddy in the truck used to live in Lattimore, so we’re having a Cleveland County reunion tonight, assuming you aren’t just visiting.”

  “I live here.”

  “Still in high school?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be a senior.”

  “We used to kick your asses in football,” she said. “That was supposed to be a big deal.”

  I pulled in the paddle when we reached the pond’s center. The rod lay beside me, but I didn’t pick it up. The lantern was still on, but we didn’t really need it. The moon laid a silvery skim of light on the water.

  “When you get back to Charlotte, will you call the police?”

  “No, they wouldn’t do anything. The bastard will pay though. He left more than his damn jacket on that blanket.”

  The woman took a wallet from the jacket, opened it to show no bills were inside.

  “He got paid today so what he didn’t spend on that whiskey is in my pocket now. He’ll wake up tomorrow thinking a hangover is the worst thing he’ll have to deal with, but he will soon learn different.”

  “What if he believes you took it?”

  “I’ll make myself scarce awhile. That’s easy to do in a town big as Charlotte. Anyway, he’ll be back living here before long.”

  “He tell you that?”

  The woman smiled.

  “He doesn’t need to. Haven’t you heard of women’s intuition? Plus, he’s always talking about this place. Badmouthing it a lot, but it’s got its hooks in him. No, he’ll move back, probably work at the mill, and he’ll still be here when they pack the dirt over his coffin.”

  She’d paused and looked at me.

  “What about you? Already got your job lined up after high school?”

  “I’m going to college.”

  “College,” she said, studying me closely. “I’d not have thought that. You’ve got the look of someone who’d stick around here.”

  Wallace waves from the opposite bank and makes his way around the pond. His pants and tennis shoes are daubed with mud. Wallace works mostly indoors, so the July sun has reddened his face and unsleeved arms. He nods at the valve.

  “Damn thing’s clogged up twice, but it’s getting there.”

  The pond is a red-clay bowl, one-third full. In what was once the shallows, rusty beer cans and Styrofoam bait containers have emerged along with a ball cap and a flip-flop. Farther in, Christmas trees submerged for years are now visible, the black branches threaded with red-and-white bobbers and bream hooks, plastic worms and bass plugs, including a six-inch Rapala that I risk the slick mud to pull free. Its hooks are so rusty one breaks off.

  “Let me see,” Wallace says, and examines the lure.

  “I used to fish with one like this,” I tell him, “same size and model.”

  “Probably one of yours then,” Wallace says, and offers the lure as if to confirm my ownership. “You want any of these others?”

  “No, I don’t even want that one.”

  “I’ll take them then,” Wallace says, lifting a yellow Jitterbug from a limb. “I hear people collect old plugs nowadays. They might be worth a few dollars, add to the hundred I’m getting to do this. These days I need every bit of money I can get.”

  We move under the big white oak and sit in its shade, watch the pond’s slow contraction. More things emerge—a rod and reel, a metal bait bucket, more lures and hooks and bobbers. There are swirls in the water now, fish vainly searching for the upper levels of their world. A large bass leaps near the valve.

  Wallace nods at a burlap sack.

  “The bluegill will flush down that drain, but it looks like I’ll get some good-sized fish to fry up.”

  We watch the water, soon a steady dimpling on the surface. Another bass flails upward, shimmers green and silver in the afternoon sun.

  “Angie said Rose is trying to get loans so she can go to your alma mater next year,” Wallace says.

  “It’s an alma mater only if you graduate,” I reply.

  Wallace picks up a stick, scrapes some mud off his shoes. He starts to speak, then hesitates, finally does speak.

  “I always admired your taking responsibility like that. Coming back here, I mean.” Wallace shakes his head. “We sure live in a different time. Hell, nowadays there’s women who don’t know or care who their baby’s father is, much less expect him to marry her. And the men, they’re worse. They act like it’s nothing to them, don’t even want to be a part of their own child’s life.”

  When I don’t reply, Wallace checks his watch.

  “This is taking longer than I figured. I’m going to the café. I haven’t had lunch. Want me to bring you back something?”

  “A Coke would be nice,” I say.

  As Wallace drives away, I think of the woman letting her right hand brush the water as I rowed the jon-boat toward shore.

  “It feels warm,” she said, “warmer than the air. I bet you could slip in and sink and it would feel cozy as a warm blanket.”

  “The bottom’s cold,” I answered.

  “If you got that deep,” she said, “it wouldn’t matter anyway, would it?”

  After we got out, the woman asked whose boat it was. I told her I didn’t know and started to knot the rope to the white oak.

  “Leave it untied then,” she said. “I may take it back out.”

  “I don’t think you should do that,” I told her. “The boat could overturn or something.”

  “I won’t overturn the boat,” the woman said, and pulled a ten-dollar bill from her skirt pocket. “Here’s something for taking me out. This too,” she said, taking the jacket off. “It’s a nice one and he’s not getting it back. It looks like a good fit.”

  “I’d better not,” I said, and picked up my fishing equipment and the lantern. I looked at her. “When he comes back, you’re not afraid he’ll do something else? I mean, I can call the police.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t do that. Like I said, he needs a driver, so he’ll make nice. You go on home.”

  And so I did, and once there, did not call the police or tell my parents. I had trouble sleeping that night, but the next day at work, as the hours passed, I assured myself that if anything really bad had happened everyone in Lattimore would have known.

  I went back to the pond, for the last time, that evening after work. The nylon rope was missing but the paddle lay under the front seat. As I got in, I lifted the paddle and found a ten-dollar bill beneath it. I rowed out to the center and tied on the Rapala and threw it at the pond’s far bank.

  As darkness descended, what had seemed certain earlier seemed less so. When a cast landed in some brush, I cranked the reel fast, hoping to avoid snagging the Rapala, but that also caused the lure to go deeper. The rod bowed and I was hung. Any other time, I’d have rowed to the snag and leaned over the gunwale, let my hand follow the line into the water to find the lure and free the hook. Instead, I tightened the line and gave a hard jerk. The lure stayed where it was.

  For a minute I sat there. Something thrashed in the reeds, probably a bass or muskrat. Then the water was still. Moonlight brightened, as if trying to probe the dark water. I took out my pocketknife, cut the line, then rowed to shore and beached the boat. That night I dreamed that I’d let my hand follow the line until my fingers were tangled in hair.

  Wallace’s truck comes back down the dirt road. He hands me my Coke and opens a white bag containing his drink and hamburger. We sit under the tree.

  “It’s draining good now,” he says.

  The fish not inhaled by the drain are more visible, fins sharking the surface. A catfish that easily weighs five pounds wallows onto the bank as if hoping for some sudden evolution. Wallace quickly finishes his hamburger
. He takes the burlap sack and walks into what’s left of the pond. He hooks a finger through the catfish’s gills and drops it into the sack.

  In another half hour what thinning water remains boils with bass and catfish. More fish beach themselves and Wallace gathers them like fallen fruit, the sack punching and writhing in his grasp.

  “You come over tonight,” he says to me. “There’ll be plenty.”

  As evening comes, more snags emerge, fewer lures. A whiskey bottle and another bait bucket, some cans that probably rolled and drifted into the pond’s deep center. Then I see the cinder block, with what looks like a withered arm draped over it. Wallace continues to gather more fish, including a blue cat that will go ten pounds, its whiskers long as nightcrawlers. I walk onto the red slanting mud, moving slowly so I won’t slip. I stop when I stand only a fishing rod’s length from the cinder block.

  “What do you see?” Walter asks.

  I wait for the water to give me an answer, and before long it does. Not an arm but a leather jacket sleeve, tied to the block by a fray of blue nylon. I step into the water and loosen the jacket from the concrete, and as I do I remember the ten-dollar bill left in the boat, her assumption that I’d be the one to find it.

  I feel something in the jacket’s right pocket and pull out a withered billfold. Inside are two silted shreds of thin plastic, a driver’s license, some other card now indiscernible. No bills.

  I stand in the pond’s center and toss the billfold’s remnants into the drain. I drop the jacket and step back as Wallace gills the last fish abandoned by the water. Wallace knots the sack and lifts it. The veins in his bicep and forearm ridge up as he does so.

  “That’s at least fifty pounds’ worth,” he says, and sets the sack down. “Let me clear this drain one more time. Then I’m going home to cook these up.”

  Wallace leans over the drain and claws away the clumps of mud and wood. The remaining water gurgles down the pipe.

  “I hate to see this pond go,” he says. “I guess the older you get, the less you like any kind of change.”

  Wallace lifts the sack of fish and pulls it over his shoulder. We walk out of the pond as dusk comes on.

  “You going to come over later?” he asks.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Another time then,” Wallace says. “Need a ride up to your mom’s house?”

  “No,” I answer. “I’ll walk it.”

  After Wallace drives off, I sit on the bank. Shadows deepen where the water was, making it appear that the pond has refilled. After a while I get up. By the time I’m over the barbed-wire fence, I can look back and no longer tell what was and what is.

  A SERVANT of HISTORY

  A servant of history. Since accepting his employ with the English Folk Dance and Ballad Society, that was how Wilson thought of himself and, in truth, a rather daring servant. He was no university don mumbling Gradgrindian facts facts facts in a lecture hall’s chalky air, but a man venturing among the New World’s Calibans. On the ship that brought him from London, Wilson explained to fellow passengers how ballads lost to time in Britain might yet survive in America’s Appalachian Mountains. Several young ladies were suitably impressed and expressed concern for his safety. One male passenger, an uncouth Georgian, had acted more amused than impressed, noting that Wilson’s “duds” befit a dancing master more than an adventurer.

  After departing the train station and securing his belongings at the Blue Ridge Inn, Wilson walked Sylva’s main thoroughfare. The promise of the village’s bucolic name was not immediately evident. Cabins and tepees, cattle drives and saloons, were notably absent. Instead, actual houses, most prosperous looking, lined the village’s periphery. On the square itself, a marble statue commemorated the Great War. Shingles advertised a dentist, a doctor, and a lawyer, even a confectioner. The men he passed wore no holsters filled with “shooting irons,” the women no boots and breeches. Automobiles outnumbered horses. It had all been immensely disappointing. Until now.

  The old man was hitching his horse and wagon to a post as Wilson approached. He did not wear buckskin, but his long gray beard and tattered overalls, hobnailed boots, and straw hat bespoke a true rustic. The old man spurted a stream of tobacco juice as an initial greeting, then spoke in a brogue so thick Wilson asked twice for the words to be repeated. Wilson haltingly conveyed his employer’s purpose.

  “England,” the rustic said. “It’s war you hell from?”

  “Pardon?” Wilson asked, and the old man repeated himself.

  “Ah,” Wilson said. “Where do I hail from?”

  The rustic nodded.

  “Indeed, sir, I do come from England. As I say, I am in search of British ballads. Many of the old songs that have vanished in my country may yet be found here. But as a visitor to your region, I have little inkling who might possess them. The innkeeper suggested an older resident, such as yourself, might aid me.”

  Wilson paused, searching the hirsute face for a sign of interest, or even comprehension. He had been warned at the interview that the expedition would be challenging, especially for a young gentleman fresh out of university, one, though this was only implied, whose transcript reflected few scholarly aspirations. In truth, Wilson had been the Society’s third choice, employed only when the first decided to make his fortune in India and the second staggered out of a pub and into the path of a trolley.

  “Of course, aside from my gratitude, I have leave to pay a fair wage for assistance in locating such ballads.”

  The old man spat again.

  “How much?”

  “Three dollars a day.”

  “I’ll scratch you up some tunes for that,” the rustic answered, and nodded at the wagon, “but not cheer. We’ll have to hove it a ways.”

  “And when might we set out?” Wilson asked.

  “Come noon tomorrow. You baddin at the inn?”

  “Badding?”

  “Yes, baddin,” the old man said. “Sleepin.”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll pick you up thar then,” the rustic said, and resumed hitching his horse.

  “May I ask your name, sir,” Wilson said. “Mine is James Wilson.”

  “I a go ba rafe,” the old man answered.

  They left Sylva at twelve the next day, Wilson’s valise settled in the wagon bed, he himself on the buckboard beside Iago Barafe. They passed handsome farms with fine houses, but as they ventured farther into the mountains, the dwellings became smaller, sometimes aslant and often unpainted. To Wilson’s delight, he saw his first cabin, then several more. They turned off the “pike,” as Barafe called it, and onto a wayfare of trampled weeds and dirt. As the elevation rose, the October air cooled. The mountains leaned closer and granite outcrops broke through stands of trees.

  The remoteness evoked an older era, and Wilson supposed that it was as much the landscape as the inhabitants that allowed Albion’s music to survive here. He thought again of his university dons, each monotoned lecture like a Lethean submerging from which he retained just enough to earn his degree. Now, however, he, James Wilson, would show them that history was more than their ossified blather. It was outside libraries and lecture halls and alive in the world, passed down one tongue to another by the humble folk. Why even his guide, obviously illiterate, had a name retained from Elizabethan drama.

  A red-and-black serpent slithered across the path, disappeared into a rocky crevice.

  “Poisonous, I assume,” Wilson said.

  “Naw,” Barafe answered, “nothin but a meek snake.”

  Soon after, they splashed across a brook.

  “We’re on McDawnell land now,” the older man said.

  “McDowell?” Wilson asked.

  “I reckon you kin say it that way,” Barafe answered.

  “The family is from Scotland, I presume,” Wilson said, “but long ago.”

  “They been up here many a yar,” the old man said, “and it’s a passel of them. The ones we’re going to see, they got their great-granny ye
t alive. She’s nigh a century old but got a mind sharp as a new-hone axe. She’ll know yer tunes and anything else you want. But they can be a techy lot, if they taken a dislikin to you.”

  “If my being from England makes them uncomfortable,” Wilson proclaimed, “that is easily rectified. My father is indeed English and I have lived in England all my life, but my mother was born in Scotland.”

  Barafe nodded and shook the reins.

  “It ain’t far to the glen now,” he said.

  The wagon crested a last hill and Wilson saw not a dilapidated cabin but a white farmhouse with glass windows and a roof shiny as fresh-minted sterling. Yet within the seemingly modern dwelling, he reminded himself, a near centenarian awaited. A fallow field lay to the left of the house, and a barn on the right. Deeper in the glen, cattle and horses wandered an open pasture, their sides branded with an M. A man who looked to be in his fifties came out on the porch and watched them approach. He wore overalls and a chambray shirt but no sidearm.

  “That’s Luther,” Barafe said.

  “I presumed we might be greeted with a show of weaponry.”

  “They’d not do that less you given them particular cause,” Barafe answered. “They keep the old ways and we’re their guests.”

  When they were in the yard, Barafe secured the brake and they climbed off the buckboard and ascended the steps. The two rustics greeted each other familiarly, though their host addressed his elder as “Rafe.” Wilson stepped forward.

  “James Wilson,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Good to meet you, James,” the other replied. “Call me Luther.”

  Their host took Wilson’s valise and opened the door, then stood back so the guests might enter first and warm themselves in front of the corbelled hearth. The parlor slowly revealed itself. A carriage clock was on the mantel, beside it a row of books that included the expected family bible but also a thick tome entitled Clans of Scotland.

  More of the room emerged. A framed daguerreotype of a white-bearded patriarch dominated one wall, on the opposite, a red-and-black tartan, its bottom edge singed. Two ladder-back chairs were on one side of the hearth and on the other a large Windsor chair plushly lined in red velvet.