Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read online

  My father was eager that I share his new hobby. He gave me demonstrations on how to use the scuba apparatus. At supper he spoke excitedly of water’s other side. He often wore his diving equipment around the house, once opening the door to a startled paperboy while wearing a mask and fins. My mother was reluctant to let me participate, but she acquiesced when I promised not to go into the reservoir’s deep heart, where a diver had drowned the previous summer. So on Saturday afternoons she read paperbacks on the screened porch and cast nervous glances toward the lake as my father and I shared the diving equipment. When my turn came, I fell backwards off the dock and into the lake, watching a rushing away sky as I hit the water and sank, air bubbles rising above my head like thoughts in a comic strip.

  I could never see more than a few yards, but that was enough. Arm-long catfish swam into view sudden as a nightmare, their blunt, whiskered faces rooting the bottom. Snapping turtles big as hubcaps walked the lake floor, their hand-grenade heads ready to bite off a careless finger. I found what no longer lived down there as well: fish suspended like kites, monofilament trailing from their mouths to line-wrapped snags below; drowned litters of kittens and puppies; once an out-of-season deer, a gash on its head where the antlers had been. On the reservoir’s floor even the familiar startled. Gaudy bass plugs hung on limbs and stumps like Christmas ornaments; branches snapped off like black icicles; a refrigerator yawned open like an unsprung trap.

  Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden. By August I’d joined my mother on the porch, playing board games and drinking iced tea as my father disappeared off the dock towards mysteries I no longer wished to fathom.

  On one of these August afternoons after he’d finished diving, my father decided to drive out to the highway and buy ice so we could churn ice cream. “Come with me, Joel,” he said. “I might need some help.”

  Once we turned onto the blacktop my father passed two convenience stores before pulling in to what had once been a gas station. Now only a weedy cement island remained, the pumps long uprooted. HOLCOMBE’S STORE, nothing more, appeared on a rusting black-and-white sign above the door. REDWORMS AND MINNERS FOR SALE was scrawled eye level on a second sign made of cardboard.

  We stepped inside, adjusting our eyes to what little light filtered through the dusty windows. A radio played gospel music. Canned goods and paper plates, toilet paper and boxes of cereal lined the shelves. A man about my father’s age sat behind the counter, black hair combed slick across his scalp, a mole above his right eyebrow the size and color of a tarnished penny. The man stood up from his chair and smiled, his two front teeth chipped and discolored.

  “Why hi, Brother Hampton,” he said warmly in a thick mountain accent. “What brings you up this way?”

  “Spending Saturday on the lake,” my father said, then nodded toward me. “This is my son, Joel.”

  “Carl Holcombe,” the man said, extending his hand. I felt the calluses on his palm, the wedding ring worn on his right hand.

  “We’re going to make ice cream,” my father said. “I was hoping you had some ice.”

  “Wish I could help you but I weren’t selling enough to keep the truck coming by,” Mr. Holcombe said.

  “How about some worms then?”

  “That I can help you with.” Mr. Holcombe came around the counter, walking with a slight limp as he made his way to the back of the store.

  “How many boxes?” he asked, opening a refrigerator.

  “Four,” my father said.

  My father laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. Mr. Holcombe rang up the sale.

  “See you at church tomorrow?” Mr. Holcombe asked, dropping coins into my father’s hand. My father nodded.

  I tried not to stare at the mole as Mr. Holcombe filled my hands with the cardboard containers.

  “Your daddy,” he said to me, “is a godly man, but I suspect you already know that.”

  He closed the cash register and walked with us to the entrance.

  “I hope you all catch something,” he said, holding the tattered screen door open.

  “Why did you buy the worms?” I asked my father as we drove off.

  “Because he needs the money,” my father said. “We’ll let them go in the garden.

  “Mr. Holcombe’s a friend of yours?” I asked, wondering if my father would note the surprise in my voice.

  “Yes,” my father said. “He’s also my pastor.”

  The following Wednesday my father left to attend his midweek church service. I’d already asked my mother if I could borrow the Buick that evening, so when he departed so did I, following the Fairlane through town. At the stoplight I too turned right onto Highway Ten. Since the previous Saturday I’d been perplexed as to what could compel my father, a man with a university education, to drive a good half-hour to hear a preacher who, if his spelling and grammar were any indication, probably hadn’t finished high school.

  Outside of town it began to rain. I turned on the Buick’s windshield wipers and headlights. Soon hills became mountains, red clay darkened to black dirt. I swallowed to relieve the ear pressure from the change in altitude as the last ranch-style brick house, the last broad, manicured lawn, vanished from my rear-view mirror. Stands of oaks and dogwoods crowded the roadsides. Gaps in the woods revealed the green rise of corn and tobacco, pastures framed by rusty barbed wire fences. Occasionally I passed a prosperous looking two-story farmhouse, but most homes were trailers or four-room A frames, often with pickups, cars, and appliances rusting in the side yards, scrawny beagles and blue-ticks chained under trees.

  The rain quit so I cut off the windshield wipers, let the Fairlane get farther ahead of me. I came over a rise and the Fairlane had already disappeared around a curve. I sped up, afraid I’d lost my father, but coming out of the curve I saw his car stopped in the road a hundred yards ahead, the turn signal on though our Buick was the closest car behind him. My father turned onto a dirt road and I followed, still keeping my distance though I wondered if it were really necessary. He slowed in front of a cinder-block building no bigger than a woodshed, pulling into a makeshift parking lot where our ancient Fairlane looked no older than the dozen other cars and trucks. I eased off the road on a rise above the church and watched my father walk hurriedly toward the building. A white cross was nailed above the door he entered.

  I could hear an out-of-tune piano, a chorus of voices rising from the open door and windows into the August evening, merging with the songs of crickets and cicadas. I waited half an hour before I got out of the Buick and walked down the road to the church. At the front door I paused, then stepped into a foyer small and dark as a closet. A half-open door led to the main room. The singing stopped, replaced by a single voice.

  I peered into a thick-shadowed room whose only light came from a single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Holcombe stood in front of three rows of metal chairs where the congregation sat. At his feet lay a wooden box that looked like an infant’s coffin. Holes had been bored in its lid. Mr. Holcombe wore no coat or tie, just a white, short-sleeved shirt, brown slacks, and scuffed black loafers. His arm oustretched, he waved a bible as if fanning an invisible flame.

  “The word of the Lord,” he said, then opened the bible to a page marked by a paper scrap. “‘And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them,’” Mr. Holcombe read. He closed the bible and went down on one knee in front of the wooden box, his head bowed, like an athlete resting on the sidelines. “Whoever is afflicted, come forward,” he said. “Lord, if it is your will, let us be the instrument of thy healing grace.”

  “Amen,” the congregation said as my father left the last row and kneeled beside Mr. Holcombe. Without a word the congregation rose and gathered around my father. An old woman, gray hair reaching her hips, opened a bottle and dabbed a thick, clear liquid on my father’s brow. The other members laid their
hands on his head and shoulders.

  “Oh, Lord,” shouted Mr. Holcombe, raising the bible in his hand. “Grant this child of God continued victories over his affliction. Let not his heart be troubled. Let him know your abiding presence.”

  The old woman with the long hair began speaking feverishly in a language I couldn’t understand, her hands straining upward as if she were attempting to haul heaven down into their midst.

  “Praise God, praise God,” a man in a plaid shirt shouted as he did a spastic dance around the others.

  My father began speaking the strange, fervent language of the old woman. The congregation removed their hands as my father rocked his torso back and forth, sounds I could not translate pouring from his mouth.

  Mr. Holcombe, still kneeling beside my father, unclasped the wooden box. The room suddenly became silent, then a whirring sound like a dry gourd being shaken. At first I did not realize where the noise came from, but when Mr. Holcombe dipped his hand and forearm into the box the sound increased. Something was in there, something alive and, I knew even before seeing it, dangerous.

  Mr. Holcombe’s forearm rose out of the box, a timber rattlesnake coiled around his wrist like a thick, black vine. The reptile’s head rose inches above Mr. Holcombe’s open palm, its split tongue probing the air like a sensor.

  I turned away, stepped out of the foyer and into the parking lot. My eyes slowly adjusted to being outside of the church’s dense shadows. I stood there until the scraping of chairs signaled the congregation’s return to their seats. They sang a hymn, and then Mr. Holcombe slowly read a long passage from the book of Mark.

  I walked back to the Buick. Halfway there, I saw the headlights were on. I tried the battery five times and gave up, dragging the jumper cables from the trunk and opening the hood in hopes someone might stop and help me. No cars or trucks passed, however, and in a few minutes people came out of the church, some pausing to speak but most going straight to their vehicles. I sat in the car and waited as I saw our Fairlane leave the parking lot.

  My father pulled off the road in front of the Buick, hood to hood as though he already knew the problem. I stepped out of the car.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer his question, but I gave the simplest answer.

  “The battery’s dead,” I said, holding up the jumper cables as if to validate my words.

  He opened the Fairlane’s hood. We clamped the cables to the batteries, then got back in and cranked the engines. My father unhooked the cables and came around to the Buick’s passenger side. He dropped the jumper cables on the floorboard and sat down beside me. Both engines were running, the cars aimed at each other like a wreck about to happen.

  “Why did you follow me?” my father asked, looking out the window. There was no anger in his voice, just curiosity.

  “To find out why you come here.”

  “Do you know now?”

  “No.”

  The last two cars left the church. The drivers slowed as they passed, but my father waved them on.

  “Dr. Morris says I’ve got too much salt in my brain, a chemical imbalance,” my father said. “It’s an easy problem for him with an easy solution, so many milligrams of Elavil, so many volts of electricity. But I can’t believe it’s that simple.”

  Perhaps it was the hum of the engines, my father looking out the window as he spoke, but I felt as though we were traveling although the landscape did not change. It was like I could feel the earth’s slow revolution as August’s strange, pink glow tinted the evening’s last light.

  My father shut his eyes for a moment. He’d aged in the last year, his hair gray at the edges, his brow lined.

  “Your mother believes the holy rollers got me too young, that they raised me to see the world only the way they see it. But she’s wrong about that. There was a time I could understand everything from a single atom to the whole universe with a blackboard and piece of chalk, and it was as beautiful as any hymn the way it all came together.”

  My father nodded toward the church, barely visible now in the gloaming.

  “You met Carl Holcombe. His wife and five-year-old daughter got killed eleven years ago in a car wreck, a wreck that was Carl’s fault because he was driving too fast. Carl says there are whole weeks he can’t remember he was so drunk, nights he put a gun barrel under his chin and held it there an hour. There was nothing in this world to sustain him, so he had to look somewhere else. I’ve had to do the same.”

  Though the cars still idled, we sat there in silence a few more minutes, long enough to see the night’s first fireflies sparking like matches in the woods. My father’s face was submerged in shadows when he spoke again.

  “What I’m trying to say is that some solutions aren’t crystal-clear. Sometimes you have to search for them in places where only the heart can go.”

  “I still don’t think I understand,” I said.

  “I hope you never do,” my father said softly, “but from what the doctors at Broughton told me there’s a chance you will.”

  My father leaned over, switched on the Buick’s headlights.

  “We need to get home,” he said. “Your mother will be worried about us.”

  The pill bottles remained unopened the rest of the summer, and there were no more attempts to cauterize my father’s despair with electricity. Which is not to say my father was a happy man. His was not a religion of bliss but one that allowed him to rise from his bed on each of those summer mornings and face two classes of hormone-ravaged adolescents, to lead those students toward solutions he himself no longer found adequate. I did not tell my mother what I had seen that Wednesday evening, or what I refused to see. I have never told her.

  My father died that September, on an afternoon when the first reds and yellows flared in the maples and poplars. We’d driven up to the lake house that morning. My father graded tests until early afternoon. When he’d finished he went inside and put on his diving gear, then crossed the brief swath of grass to the water–moving slow and deliberate on the land, like an aquatic creature returning to its natural element. Once on the dock he turned toward the lake house, raised a palm, and fell forever from us.

  My mother and I sat on the porch playing Risk and drinking tea. When my father hadn’t resurfaced after a reasonable time, my mother cast frequent glances toward the water.

  “It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” I said more than once. But in a few more minutes half an hour had passed, and my father still had not risen.

  I ran down to the lake while my mother dialed the county’s EMS unit. I dove into the murky water around the dock, finding nothing on the bottom but silt. I dove until the rescue squad arrived, though I dove without hope. I was seventeen years old. I didn’t know what else to do.

  The rest of the afternoon was a loud confusion of divers and boats, rescue squad members and gawkers. The sheriff showed up and, almost at dusk, the coroner, a young man dressed in khakis and a blue cotton shirt.

  “Nitrogen narcosis, sometimes called rapture of the deep,” the coroner said, conversant in the language of death despite his youth. “A lot of people wouldn’t think a reservoir would be deep enough to cause that, but this one is.” He and the sheriff stood with my mother and me on the screened porch, cups of coffee in their hands. “If you go down too far you can take in too much nitrogen. It causes a chemical imbalance, an intoxicating effect.” The coroner looked out toward the reservoir. “It can happen to the most experienced diver.”

  The coroner talked to us a few more minutes before he and the sheriff stepped off the screened porch, leaving behind empty coffee cups, no doubt hoping what inevitable calamity would reunite them might wait until after a night’s sleep.

  Once he had no further say in the matter, my father was again a Presbyterian. His funeral service was held at Cliffside Presbyterian, his burial in the church’s cemetery. Mr. Holcombe and several of his congregation attended. They sat in the back, the men wearing short-sleeve s
hirts and ties, the women cotton dresses that reached their ankles. After the burial they awkwardly shook my hand and my mother’s before departing. I’ve never seen any of them since.

  In my less generous moments I perceive my mother’s insistence on Presbyterian last rites as mean-spirited, a last rebuke to my father’s Pentecostal reconversion. But who can really know another’s heart? Perhaps it was merely her Scots-Irish practicality, less trouble for everyone to hold the rites in Cliffside instead of twenty miles away in the mountains.

  After my father’s death my mother refused to go back to the lake house, but I did and occasionally still do. I sit out on the screened porch as the night starts its slow glide across the lake. It’s a quiet time, the skiers and most of the fishermen gone home, the echoing trombone of frogs not yet in full volume. I listen to sounds unheard any other time—the soft slap of water against the dock, a muskrat in the cattails.

  I sometimes think of my father down in that murky water as his lungs surrendered. I think of what the coroner told me that night on the porch, that the divers found the mask in the silt beside him. “Probably didn’t even know he was doing it,” the coroner said matter-of-factly. “People do strange things like that all the time when they’re dying.”

  The coroner is probably right. But sometimes as I sit on the porch with darkness settling around me, it is easy to imagine that my father pulling off the mask was something more—a gesture of astonishment at what he drifted toward.

  The NIGHT the NEW JESUS FELL to EARTH

  The day after it happened, and Cliffside’s new Jesus and my old husband was in the county hospital in fair but stable condition, Preacher Thompson, claiming it was all his fault, offered his resignation to the board of deacons. But he wasn’t to blame. He’d only been here a couple of months, fresh out of preacher’s college, and had probably never had to deal with a snake like Larry Rudisell before. A man or a woman, as I’ve found out the hard way, usually has to get bit by a snake before they start watching out for them.