Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Page 37

  And I very well might have died, if my father had not been able to act in a focused manner. He ran out into the carport in his underwear, took my trembling hands and asked what had happened. I pointed to the snake coiled on the concrete floor.

  “It’s a coral,” I whimpered, and showed him the bite mark.

  My mother was at the doorway in her nightgown, asking my father in a frantic voice what was the matter, though a part of her already knew.

  “He’s been bitten,” my father said, walking rapidly towards my mother.

  “I’ve got to call the hospital, tell them they need to get antivenom rushed here from Charlotte.”

  My father was now on the carport steps. He turned to my mother.

  “Get him to the hospital. Quick. I’ll get over there fast as I can.”

  My father brushed by my mother, who had not moved, only stood there looking at me. He brought her the car keys. “Go,” he shouted, urging her out the door.

  My mother saw the coral snake coiled on the concrete between us, but she did not hesitate. She stepped right over it and caught me as I collapsed in her arms.

  The sound of rain pelting the windows woke me. I opened my eyes to whiteness, the unadorned walls of Cleveland County Hospital. My father and mother were sitting in metal chairs placed beside my bed. Their heads were bowed, and at first I thought they were asleep, but when I stirred they looked up, offered weary smiles.

  Three days later I was released, and in a week I was feeling healthy enough to help my father fill my Uncle Earl’s pickup truck with my snake collection. We first drove down to Broad River, taking the bumpy dirt road that followed the river until we were several miles from the nearest house. We opened the cages, watched the contents slither away.

  Then we drove back towards home, stopping a mile from Cliffside at the town dump. My father backed the truck up to the edge of the landfill and we lowered the tailgate. We threw the snake-and-alcohol-filled jars out of the truck, watched them shatter against the ground, and knew they would soon be buried forever under tons of other things people no longer wanted.

  As for Badeye, I ignored his offers of free snowcones. My parents ignored his apologies. After several attempts at reconciliation failed, Badeye stopped slowing down as he approached our house, even sped up a little as his truck glided past into the twilight.

  That October Badeye left Cliffside. When he pulled into Heddon’s Gulf station, his possessions piled into the back of his truck, and Charlie Heddon asked him where he was moving to Badeye only shrugged his shoulders and muttered, “Somewhere different.” No one ever saw him again.

  I remember my mother staring out the kitchen window that autumn as the dogwood tree began to shed its leaves. It would not be until years later that I would understand how wonderful those falling leaves made her feel, for they signaled summer’s end and the coming of cold weather, the first frost that would banish snakes (including the coral snake that we never found), as well as Badeye and his snowcones. But I also remember the first bite of my first snowcone that June evening when Badeye suddenly appeared on our street. Nothing else has ever tasted so good.

  LOVE and PAIN in the NEW SOUTH

  Darlene walks through the open sliding door dragging two trees’ worth of divorce papers. Lord, she is beautiful, even as she harps on me about keeping the door open while the air conditioner is running in the other room. Darlene and her lawyer are setting me up where I won’t have an extra dime for the next five hundred years, and she’s telling me I need to watch my power bill. I follow her into the den, wishing I had a pair of blinders like they put on mules. Seeing her again after two months is killing me. It’s like trying to give up smoking and someone putting a lighted cigarette in your hand.

  I look out the window and see Carl Blowmeyer in his backyard, barbecuing what looks like a large dog and staring this way. Blowmeyer is one of many northern retirees who have moved down here to live cheaper and to educate southerners about how to drive on snow. The one or two times each year the white stuff falls, Blowmeyer stands on main street with a Mr. Microphone and tells drivers what they’re doing wrong.

  Spring and summer mornings he’s out in the yard with his lawn-mower, Weed Eater, and electric hedge clippers.

  Blowmeyer’s grass is cut shorter than most golf course greens. He crawls around his yard on hands and knees to find wild onions and crabgrass. Now Blowmeyer is stretching his neck to see over the hedge, wanting to watch every minute of the soap opera next door. His shorter, grub-white wife stands on a lawn chair. They love my pain.

  Darlene pushes empty Dos Equis bottles to the edge of the coffee table so she can spread out the divorce papers. She looks at the bottles and shakes her head. Darlene’s never had a drink in her life, and she used to punish me for my weakness by buying the cheapest beer she could find.

  “That beer is six dollars a six pack,” she says.

  “I bought it to help out the Mexicans,” I say. “They’re in bad shape down there.”

  “Read and sign,” she says. “Stanley’s expecting me back at nine.”

  I read. She will get the house, the car, and most of the five thousand in the bank. As far as I can tell, I get the pickup and all the food in the refrigerator.

  I finish reading but I don’t look up. I’m thinking about the day we got married and how she looked right into my eyes and swore all that stuff about for better or for worse and for richer or for poorer. And now all those words, all those promises, have come to this.

  “I loved you,” I say. “I think I might still. I didn’t mean to kill the monkey. I’d swear on a bible I didn’t.” Once I start talking I can’t stop. I sound like the worst drunk you ever sat next to in a bar.

  I am a little drunk. If I’d been sober as a cow I’d have said the same thing—except I wouldn’t have said it.

  “I wanted a child,” Darlene says. “You wouldn’t give me a child. You gave me a monkey and then you killed it.”

  “Couldn’t,” I say. “Couldn’t. The doctors said it happens sometimes. It’s nothing a man can help.”

  “Stanley says you could help it. He says you didn’t want a child, so your mind told your body to kill all those sperm. It’s psychological, something you wouldn’t understand. And then you killed Little Napoleon. Stanley says Little Napoleon was our symbolic child, and you killed him because you hated him. Stanley knows what he’s talking about. His minor at Auburn was psychology.”

  I pick up the pen and begin to sign. I’m too much of a Baptist not to believe I’m guilty, even when I’m not exactly sure what I’m guilty of. Darlene is at least partly right. I had hated the monkey. Buying it had been a big mistake, but things had gotten so tense by then I felt I had nothing to lose. She had said she needed something else to love, something more than me. I couldn’t give her a child, so I drove to Asheville. A spider monkey was the closest thing I could find.

  She had loved the monkey, and at first even loved me again. It was the Indian summer of our marriage. We were like a family. Every Friday after supper we would go to Greene’s Cafe and eat banana splits, then drive over to Shelby and play putt-putt, just like any other family. I tried my best. I even went with Darlene and Little Napoleon to Stanley’s office for his shots and checkups. But the monkey hated me from the very beginning. At night if I got up to go to the bathroom, it would wait till I started making water, then come flying out of the darkness, grab a calf, and draw blood. It got so bad I just stayed in bed and held it. Now I have chronic bladder problems.

  Yes, I hated the little bastard, but I didn’t kill it on purpose. How could I know it had crawled into the washing machine when I went to the pantry to get the Tide. It was probably hiding in the bottom, waiting for me to stick my hand in so it could bite me again.

  The marriage was as good as over by the rinse cycle. Darlene took the corpse to Stanley’s office. He is part owner of the pet cemetery, so he arranged the funeral service and the burial. I wasn’t allowed to attend. Then Darlene started what
she called “grief therapy” with Stanley, the only veterinarian/psychologist in western North Carolina. After the first week Darlene became a vegetarian. “Animals have souls,” she had said. “To eat one is a barbaric act.”

  “What about plants?” I had asked. “If animals have souls, why not plants? Where do you draw the line?”

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stanley told me you’d say,” she had said.

  Three weeks later she moved in with Stanley.

  I finish signing the papers. “As soon as this divorce is final,” Darlene says, “Stanley and I are getting married.” She gathers the papers together.

  “It’s not too late to give us another try,” I say.

  “Yes, it is,” she says, already bored with the conversation.

  “I tried to make you happy. I gave up the farm. I wore a tie and worked with jerks so we could afford this house.”

  “The farm was going broke,” Darlene says. “You would have been bankrupt in another two years. You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “I quit chewing tobacco and started listening to public radio. I increased my vocabulary. I tried not to act like a redneck.”

  “And failed,” she says.

  “I tried to give you a baby. I suffered indignities. I filled Dixie cups with semen in strange doctors’ offices.”

  “I suffered indignities too,” Darlene says. “And it wasn’t even my problem.”

  “I loved you,” I say and there’s enough truth in that to make her look away, at least for a moment.

  “I’ll prove it,’’ I say. “I’ll change. I’ll quit drinking, become a vegetarian.”

  “You can’t change enough,” she says, taking the documents off the coffee table.

  “I’ll be friendly to the neighbors. Invite them over to eat salads. I’ll make the salads myself.”

  “Not enough,” Darlene says, standing up.

  “I’ll buy you a new monkey and I will love it.”

  “Not enough,” she says, walking out of the den. “No other monkey could ever replace Little Napoleon.”

  “I’ll walk over hot coals. I’ll watch whales.”

  “Not enough,” she says from the kitchen.

  I hear her car engine and remember one other thing. I hurry through the kitchen. I’m almost outside when I smash against nothing. Then the whole world shatters around me. I fall out on the pavement. Pieces of glass cover my body. I’m bleeding in a hundred places.

  Darlene’s headlights are shining on me. I slowly stand up, pulling glass from my skin. Darlene rolls down her window and shouts over the engine. “Not enough,” she says, and drives off.

  Blowmeyer runs over with a barbecue fork in his hand, the albino gasping to keep up.

  “She shot him,” he tells his wife. “Five or six times.” Blowmeyer is so excited he has spilled barbecue sauce on his pants.

  “Go get the movie camera, Lorraine,” he tells his wife. “And call the rescue squad.”

  The albino disappears. I ignore Blowmeyer. I lie down on the grass, close my eyes and feel pain cut through the alcohol and the nest of spiders scrambling around inside my head, that other kind of pain, the worst kind.

  I don’t open my eyes until I hear the rescue squad wail into the driveway, almost hitting Blowmeyer, who is filming it all.

  “Save me a copy,” I tell Blowmeyer as the attendants take my arms and walk me to the back of the ambulance. “I’m OK,” I keep telling them, wanting to believe it. ‘‘I’m fine.”

  SHILOH

  Benjamin Miller awoke beneath a shroud of white petals, several of which lay like soft coins over his eyes. The ground trembled vaguely now, the cannon and mortars wheeled elsewhere. He did not hear the explosions, only felt them. All he heard was a ringing in his left ear. Benjamin rested with his eyes closed a while longer, made slight movements to assay what had struck him to the ground, how bad it was. He turned his right boot in and out and then his left, felt no pain or absence of foot or leg, arms and hands the same. He moved a hand over his groin and stomach and chest, felt no spill of intestines or stoved-in ribs. Only his head was injured, the hair on one side matted with blood. He touched the wound, gauged its width. In one place the skin unpursed and his finger slid slickly over smooth bone. Smooth, not cracked. He patted the rest of his head, then nose, jaw, and teeth and found all where they should be.

  Benjamin brushed the petals from his eyes and found himself staring into a jaybird-blue sky. He knew where he was, remembered thinking how pert the peach trees looked as his regiment approached the orchard. He’d even notioned to take some seeds back with him to Watauga County. No farmer he knew had grown peaches there, probably too cold, but if anyone could, it would be Emma. Lilies and roses, cherry and apple trees, raspberry bushes—everything Emma put into the earth found life at its appointed time, as if even plants responded to her gentleness. Old Jacob Story, their one near neighbor, listened when Emma said the moon’s horns were turned wrong to seed a corn field, or not to plant peas before daffodils bloomed. I’ve farmed near sixty year, Jacob said, but I’ll cover nary an acorn until Emma allows it’s the time.

  Benjamin raised himself to one knee, then stood. More petals fell, puddled the ground white around him. The ringing in his ear increased and the world leaned left. On the edge of his vision a gold tinge. Benjamin blinked, hoping the world might realign, but the tilt and gold tinge remained. Because my head’s been knocked off plumb, he told himself, and there ain’t no tonic but to lean with it. He looked around, shifted his eyes to bead the world before moving his head. He found himself standing alone amid the fallen, friend and foe entangled like logs in a splash dam. A few yet moved but most did not. Some surely made sounds—death rattles, moans, prayers, curses, or pleas. His deafness was a blessing. Two faces Benjamin knew well, recognized three others by hair and girth. All dead. His musket and cap lay side by side as if posed for a tintype. He left them where they lay. The canteen was still strapped to his shoulder and the haversack tied to his back.

  He staggered from the orchard, passing trees stripped of every blossom, others branchless, some mere stumps. If an enemy soldier yet lingered, Benjamin was an easy target. But no shot came. He made his way into a small wood and came to a creek, the banks narrow and the current quick. He remembered the old belief and pondered his waking in the orchard, the pall of white petals. The throbbing in his head increased. He took a deep breath and felt it lift his lungs. No dead man need do that, he told himself, but waited a few moments before swinging his boot forward. The water let him cross over. Benjamin took off the haversack and sat with his back against an oak tree. He laid an open palm on the ground. Only the slightest vibration, like thunder murmuring after a storm.

  His throat was raw from smoke and thirst so he drank what water the canteen held. Benjamin probed the wound again, tried to recall a raised musket butt, a Minie ball glancing his skull. Nothing came. What he remembered was charging into the orchard with Dobbins and Wray beside him. Keep your lines, a lieutenant shouted but amid the like trees and smoke all direction was lost. Men blundered into each other, shooting and stabbing all who came near. Lead filled the air like slant hail. One man climbed into a peach tree’s highest branches, hunched there crying with hands over ears. Benjamin’s last memory was of Wray clutching his arm for a moment, then letting Benjamin go and falling.

  I give both sides their best chance to kill me, Benjamin told himself. They’ll not portion another. He went to the creek and used his handkerchief and water to clean the wound as best he could. He refilled the canteen and went back to the oak. Corn dodgers and jerky were in the haversack but instead of eating he took the letter from his shirt pocket, unfolded it.

  My dearest husband,

  I rite you this mourning from the home that I pray soon you return to. I have sown the fields for our crops, wich you say I am good at. Now I must pray the signs hold true. May your hands and mine together reap what Ive sown. What news I have of others you may wish to here. The
youngest Watson boy run off to fight with his brothers. Widow Canipe died of the flux and Jess Albrights baby died last week of putrid fever. Theys a red cross on his cabin door so even the others are sore afflicted. Joe Vickers was killed in Virginia. But that is more than plenty sad tidings. Your Father has been a heep of good to me, helping plow the fields and fixing fences. Folks say in town that this war will last not a year. I pray so if not sooner. For I feel all ways night and day the lonely in my heart and will ever so until you are with me again. I go now to town to mail this letter, dearest husband, nowing that this paper I hold you will hold to.

  Your loving wife always

  Emma

  Benjamin refolded the letter but kept it in his hand as his eyes closed. He and Emma had grown up on adjoining farms, like brother and sister, playing leap frog and red rover together, walking to the school and church, sharing chores. He’d been a feisty boy and one day when he was twelve, he found a corn snake in the barn. Something wrong inside him wanted to scare Emma with it. She’d fallen while running away, scraping her knees and elbow. He had flung the snake into the weeds and gone to her, shut-mouth with shame. As Emma wiped tears off her face, he’d offered his hand to help her up, not expecting her to take it. But she did. He had helped her to the creek, taken his handkerchief, and gingerly wiped the dirt from the knees and elbow. They did not speak the whole time, nor mention it afterward, but that night by his bed Benjamin had prayed that God would seine all meanness forever out of him so he might be worthy of her.

  He must have passed out, because when he awoke the ground no longer trembled. The ringing in his ears had lessened, as had the world’s slant. The letter still lay in his hand. He placed it in the pocket closest to his heart and then shed coat and belt and all other allegiance to anyone but himself. He listened for a few moments, heard nothing but a redbird, then rose and walked through the shallow wood and into a pasture, below it a farmhouse and a wagon road. The dwelling appeared deserted, its occupants fled or hidden. When Benjamin got to the road, he looked up to gauge direction. An orange sun burned low on the tree line. Buzzards circled the battlefield. Some appeared to enter the sun, then spiral down blackly as if turned to ash. He followed the road east, not knowing where he headed, only what he left behind.