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Acts
of Love on Indigo Road: New and Selected Stories
Excerpt
The
Land You Claim
Sometimes,
the most dangerous land to claim is that of your fathers,
so we came down out of the Tennessee mountains, quickly
crossing the valleys, running from the wide-open sky.
We wore our eyes on our knees in the deep grass, low
and open, the sky pressing around us, drooping and draped
like a sheet shook fresh from the sun, softened by a
good green wind. It rushed down among the trees into
this little clearing after us. Now I sit on the porch
of my cabin and wait in the shadow on my skin for that
big hissing to shake the cedar limbs and rattle the
bushes like a flock of passing blackbirds.
Here above the rising lake, I watch the wind come down
to drink, brushing a circle in the water like a horse
nosing aside the bits of leaves, twigs, loosened plants
tugged and washed free of their moorings, sudsing these
waters brown. Why is the water dark, little Carolyn
asked, black like rusty blood? Is it the bodies they
left behind?
I know. Now I see she does too. I went down to the hollow
before they came. Alone I took the mules and pulled
the gravestones up the hill. Pushed them into the quarry
hole at night when no one would be watching. The turquoise
water as dead as those slabs took them with a splash,
a gulp, a disappearance into its bottomlessness. One
hundred and fifty feet of rope never reached bottom.
Now I know. In the cave on this side of the hill, deep
inside, there is ice frozen in blue and lavender puddles.
This flooding is for the lake, they said, you'll finally
have electricity. Progress, they announced, like a second
coming would hike itself up and tiptoe on the roofs
of houses and barns, arms wide open, bright electrical
eyes flashing welcome, welcome. I know better. Last
winter was cold, that bitter cold that snaps things
in two when you touch them. The hoe blade when I tried
to chop the ice out of the trough for the mules and
cow. It took till March for the blade to thaw loose
of the chunk I chopped out with the ax. That ax is a
true metal, brought down from the mountains, carried
into Kentucky and then up here into the Missouri Ozarks
where we could breathe again. We don't thrive without
hills, and the effort it takes. Kidwells go to ruin
on the plains, we've always known that. Little Carolyn
could chase the oak leaf shadows all afternoon, or have
lunch in the little graveyard below before I pulled
the stones down. Talking with the spirits, she had the
nearly perfect companionship of the dead. When she found
what I'd done, the tears filled her eyes and she turned
from me. I'd as soon she struck me. I couldn't explain
it was to save them. No Kidwell ever thrived out of
the hills.
Because the men came for the cemeteries. It was the
decent thing to do, people over in Lynn Creek kept saying
as the mules hauled and the men lifted and the soaked,
rotting wood fell apart in their arms, sloshing bones,
half-eaten flesh, and wild matted hair to the ground.
I didn't know Carolyn was gone that day I drove us to
town in the wagon for supplies. The shelves in Tibbets's
store were already getting bare as people moved out.
They'd left the dead for the last as if that were the
final say. Without them, the town, the land didn't exist
anymore. They gave it over that easy to the water. I
tore down the notice at the foot of my road and nobody
ever came to replace it.
The candy sticks in Tibbets's were fly-specked, the
potatoes sprouted with tired little red eyes, and the
flour had dark specks of weevils, but I took it all.
And the last hundred-gallon drum of kerosene. Stopping
at the creek I washed the candy for her, scrubbed it
clean so the red and white stripes shown again and the
smell of peppermint stayed on my fingertips for days.
I thought she was at the schoolyard playing on the swing
like she would other times, but she wasn't. Nobody to
speak of on the main road. Half the folks already gone,
relocating on the money they were offered. Seemed odd,
the empty stores and houses not bothering to close their
doors, board up their windows. A stray dog sniffing
up the peeling blue steps across the way with nobody
there to stop him. I watched as he pushed his ornery
brown head through the small hole in the screen door
and looked around. I'd half a mind to throw something
at him when I noticed a commotion from the cemetery
beside the Methodist church there at the end of the
road. I walked, the wet sticks of candy clutched in
my hand, past the mules tied in front of the store drowsing
in the hot sun, bothering only to flick a big ear at
a fly, or wrinkle a shoulder.
Her mouth was open, her face red struggling for breath
that as soon as it could would find just the right howling
note. You could see it there, trapped in her bulging
little chest as she watched the corpse burst out and
splash putrefaction onto the men who turned away as
if they'd been sprayed with lye. I threw the candy down,
clapped one hand over her mouth, and scooped her up
with the other. Put her in amongst the supplies, her
head resting on the gunny sack of half-sprouted potatoes
as I jerked the mules awake, whipped them trotting past
the cemetery and on up the road. Don't know if she watched
the whole time, but I'd like to think she didn't, to
think I saved her that at least.
That's when I made up my mind. The dead belong where
they are. After little Carolyn'd gone home again, I
went and pulled down the stones as I said. Some of the
graves were sunk, you know, but I didn't fill them in.
They had their own reasons for things. I had mine. Nobody
could know how Carolyn would turn out, years later,
in the sandhills of Nebraska. Like I said, Kidwells
need shelter from the sky.
They never came for our cemetery. I heard that one of
the men took the stones from any empty graves they found
and laid them in his yard for a path, the writing side
down. Another took three and made steps to his porch.
I have nothing to say to these men.
They never came and the rest left. A month later I went
down to the town and it was empty. Big bob wire fence
blocking the road it took but a minute to clip through.
I carry my ax and nippers with me these days. They were
so busy putting up notices and fences, never occurred
to them to ask who they were keeping out. I never went
in but a few places. Jarman's was too empty. A blank
form waiting to be put to use, even the thin layer of
dust on the window sills seemed a contrivance. She'd
cleaned before she left. Dogs hadn't bothered with this
place. Copeland's was half full of broken furniture,
cracked dishes, shredded curtains and clothes that were
rags. I picked through and found a pair of good thick
woolen trousers with a burst knee I could use. And a
couple of mason jars without their lids. A nice chipped
china bowl with little blue flowers and an old doll
with a cracked face Carolyn could use for play. I half
wished she was there to help me, but she was in school
again and only sent down to her great-uncle when she
was getting so in her mother's hair.
At Tibbets's store, I found two half-melted white candles,
an old box of matches, a rusty pie tin I could clean
up, and a short length of chain nailed to its heavy
wooden spool. Tibbets probably got tired of loading
stuff by then, or the boys he'd hired. Back deep on
a shelf behind the counter I found five shotgun shells.
At the feed store, I shoveled up as much loose shelled
corn as I could find and contrived to fill two gunny
sacks. My corn patch was gone before I got it in, and
the mules needed more than the grass hay I could give
them this winter. The hay meadow was soaked, water to
the tips day before yesterday. Something wasteful about
not taking in the hay of a summer. Even if you're leaving,
it seems wrong.
The Methodist church was missing its bell and stained
glass window they'd saved so long for. And the crosses,
both outside and in when I stepped onto the good oak
plank floor my people had helped lay seventy-five years
before. They'd picked up the pews, gold maple and who
could blame them, and the altar of course, and the choir
benches. The windows were open for some reason, and
I went around and closed them carefully, not wanting
to look down at the rain-spoiled floor. Then I noticed
the sparrows flying in confused circles, landing on
the beams where their nests dripped grass and string,
and taking off again. I opened the windows. In some
way the emptiness still held a feeling that made my
bowels contract, and I turned and walked out again.
That church and I had a history we never spoke of, but
stopping in the road to look back, I wondered if she
had.
She was just a girl, and I still a boy, but we were
first cousins and therein was the wrongness of it. We
splashed in Lynn Creek, we watched the soldiers go off
and come back, and one day we noticed each other and
the rest of the days were breathless with wishing heat.
That summer I chopped at weeds so hard my hands broke
new blisters on the hoe's bloody handle, and still I
didn't feel them until she wiped the blood off and wrapped
each one in the scarf she tore in half before she let
me touch her. Then my hands slid in their silk gloves,
and my fingertips cracked with work and dirt caught
at the thin skin of her breasts where I could see the
blue veins just beneath the blue-white surface. I hadn't
realized she was so delicately alive until that moment
and it made me suddenly careful and clumsy, the way
you have to be when you lift a newborn kitten with its
mewling eyes shut. Her nipples were little pebbles I
took in my mouth and sucked for the way they quenched
my thirst, and her belly this strong place I pushed
my hand down. Not here, she whispered. We met in the
field behind her mother's house, her father dead from
the war, and his mother moved in to help teach school
and music. There was a thick plank back door to the
church and she knew where the key was on top of the
frame. We held hands bumping up the three narrow dark
stairs and burst out into the colored moonlight flooding
the carpet in front of the altar. Groaning, I pulled
her to me and down. I lived for years on the body's
memory, her hands where only mine had been before. At
dawn we looked up to see the feet of the crucified Christ
above us dripping blood frozen in gold painted lead,
and there must have been something about it that cursed
us. Though I didn't realize it at the time, of course.
I finished with the town that day, pulling what I could
from its emptiness, leaving the houses like ghosts with
vacant looks on their faces, the water inching its way
down the road toward them. Within two months their glass
windows caught the restless shimmer of rising water
and I could hear the moaning as swelling wood burst
nails, then the joints crying loose, and the heavy grunt
as mud caved in the basements. For days and weeks now
it has been like watching a whole fleet of boats going
down as houses tremble and tip or simply sink.
The animals have begun to flee too, those that can.
Those that can't drift along the edges on their backs,
thick swollen chunks with legs that stick up to the
sky, like something obscene. Wild pigs, deer, a stray
cow, coyotes, dogs, cats, once in a while a mule or
horse. All things big enough to get out of the way,
but somehow stranded in the midst of their dreaming
on a disappearing island. At night I begin to see their
struggles in my dreams, their panic as the water spreads
so far there is no longer anyplace to swim toward and
they give up, their legs straightening, bodies sinking
until the eyes close and the tip of the nose blows at
the water one last time and lets go.
Little Carolyn never visits anymore. No one does. So
I sit on the porch and watch the snakes as they begin
to rise up the hill. Their migration is slow, their
expressions bewildered as they slither, stop, look around,
tasting the air with their tongues, and slowly shiver
forward another foot or two, sliding under the leaves
and fallen branches like soldiers moving on a key position
held by the enemy. But I never think of them as the
enemy, though they come forward like men on their elbows,
inching their bodies in long spasms. Sometimes I catch
a glimpse of a green tree snake when the dogwood branch
suddenly startles into motion. I don't mind how their
rustle adds another tone to the water swelling inch
by inch up the hill behind them.
How living things talk even afterwards, gurgling and
whispering beneath the surface, swallowing other sounds
of birds in the brush, pigs and deer, while the trees
seem to cease as if they've been shot through the heart
and stand there propped up in some punishing effigy.
It reminds me of the way first the Union soldiers, then
the guerrillas, propped the enemy dead against fence
posts in the hay meadow below us, strung their arms
in wide embrace, the slack jaws gaping with flies laying
eggs which hatched by late afternoon in the rich moist
soil of the tongue. The eyes solid as boiled eggs fed
blowflies and beetles until the crows came curious as
aunts walking gingerly along the fence wire and boards
up onto the hand, a peck to try the flesh of the arm,
to clean the beak with two quick swipes like a carving
knife on the back of a china plate, then on up the woolen
sleeve to the shoulder to peer at the head flung back
in a permanent stare at the white hot sky, to look closer
and closer, black oily head jerking from side to side
as it neared the eye and finally gave it that first
tentative stab, jerking back as the flies clouded up,
cocking the head toward the commotion above as the turkey
vultures rode down the air and settled on the tree limbs
and ground. They made short work of it, the face flesh,
tugging the cords of sinew from the neck, the chest
entered through the dark dried holes, tearing the flesh
ragged until in the days to come the shirt and pants
slowly emptied, as if the flesh had itself turned liquid
and seeped out and away. First time I saw the bones
stained pink and fleshy, I stopped looking, turned my
face away toward the hill, the quarry where the granite
was cut and sheered like hard loaves of old bread.
That was when I began my work. The other stonecutters
gone. My older brother and father. Into the hills of
Kentucky, joined up, then shot and floated facedown
in the river for miles until someone pulled them out
and sent their effects home. I put up their stones and
then my mother's, joining the others who came down out
of the Tennessee mountains. After that, the soldiers
from the fence, my younger brother the day he shot at
a passing patrol from the woods, and finally my cousin's
husband the day he came to find me and make me stop.
I don't know how high the water will come. How long
I'll wait. There's the mules to think of and the cow.
My hunting dog's been gone for two years now, but with
all the game driven up here from the lake, I don't need
her. I don't want to take any more of life than I have
to. Not even then when Carolyn's grandmother and I could
not stop. As useless as trying to put this water back.
All a person can do in the face of such force is try
to save something small, something that can be carried
into a future such as this one has turned out. I saw
that as soon as the sun came up that morning in the
church, helping her dress, my rough hands leaving slivers
of blood on her blue cotton skirt. And later after she
married him, and again after I buried him below here
with the others. See, I cannot unclaim these people.
I am a man with nothing to show for himself but this,
and only the dead to bear witness to what acts of love
can do to the world. Thus I cannot join them down in
the hollow, and I cannot leave them behind. She would
not have it. Sometimes, you see, the most dangerous
land to claim is your own.
Stiller's Pond
Look,
I just want to tell you what it's like out there, what
the wind and the river do. How still. How I am walking
by the pond in Stiller's cow pasture. It was January,
like now, and twenty below zero, before the light comes
up. I can't sleep. I want to be somewhere.
The pond is frozen into these little waves the wind
puts there, starched on the top. The kids won't be skating
there anyway, not since a long time ago. The pond doesn't
have to freeze sheet clean, because none of us would
ever be skating there again. As if it knew, the pond
always froze in peculiar shapes, as if someone was still
under there trying to get out.
If you stood over those places where the water bobbed
dark, speckled with stuff churning up from the bottom,
you'd think you could see a face pressed and distorted
against that little skim of ice, like something from
dinner your mom put plastic over and plopped in the
fridge, until later when you looked, it was unfamiliar
again through the moisture-beaded wrap. At one end the
cattails stood at attention, still as boys in ROTC,
backs swayed in a pose you knew they'd never be able
to walk out of, and little tatters of dried leaves waved
like flags from the stalks. Around them lay the litter
of last summer.
It was in those left, standing the way they are now,
that they found her, hair tangled around. They had to
chop part of it off to get her out. That's what the
adults told us, and if that quick thaw hadn't come up,
it would've been April before she was noticed. He was
a different matter, bobbing like a cork in the hole
that stayed over the spring. Still, it was hard to tell
the difference between him and the water at a distance;
you couldn't really get very close. But the thaw sent
him skimming over the edge so that his tuber-white face
rose up like a signal at sea, and someone finally saw
it. I suppose it was lucky that the thaw came-and the
kids. Though they knew they wouldn't be skating with
the ice that way, they came down to the pond as always,
just to fool around. Throw rocks. Build a fire. They
weren't permitted to build fires anywhere else. But
somehow, it was OK if you had a legitimate winter excuse
like skating. Sledding was marginal, but skating was
OK for fire building. Being kids, they figured the permission
was for location rather than activity, so they went
to Stiller's pond whenever the arson rose up in their
hearts.
To this day, I can't look at those cattails without
thinking of the way they told the little ones to pull
the dried leaves and stalks for kindling-and the confusion
they must have felt when the lady's hair wouldn't let
go of them. She was face up, too, like she was sleeping
in bed at home, watching the stars through her little
attic window before nodding off. She'd seen a lot more
since then, every night anchored there like a boat,
her arms treading water gently like oars holding her
steady. And the hard part was when they finally dragged
her in, men in hip boots with hay hooks and ropes so
they could get a grip on her, her eyes plucked out by
the turtles, removed with the skill of surgeons so the
lids fell gracefully, sunken over the holes.
Surprised they had left the rest of her, the men said,
knowing the winter hunger of turtles drifting sleepily
to the surface for oxygen before they dropped back like
stones to the bottom mud. And strange, how the water
had filled in the scars on her face, softened the bones
until she became sweet and round and beautiful to the
men, who recognized her only from the long blonde hair-and
from the broken front teeth. And I think that was what
bothered them the most-that she came out of the water
better than she went in, that they were able to see
her firsthand the way he must have, in his heart, when
he would meet her at Stiller's pond after her parents
were long asleep, and after her sisters and brothers
were long asleep, and after the cows were long settled
and the pigs and the horses heavy in sleep from their
day's work, even the poultry sleeping on one leg in
the roosts, as passive as camels in the dark stench
of the henhouse.
And old man Stiller, refusing to help pull her out,
refusing the use of his team, his wagon, his ropes,
refusing the use of his blankets to wrap her in, and
finally refusing her body in his house, even in his
barn, where she might have lain like an animal in a
stall until the fires softened the ground enough to
dig even a shallow hole for her. And the mother, as
hard as the father, and the children staring out the
windows like portholes at the distant ocean of events
they couldn't begin to understand. Incurious as the
buildings that held them, they never asked, even later,
for the grave of their sister. And only the fact that
the children weren't allowed to come again to the pond
to skate or build their fires ever served notice to
them that their sister had floated like a log for a
month in their cow pond, had been dragged out like a
burlap bag of drowned cats behind Rofer's buggy horse
and been wrapped in his wife's quilt, never to be used
again, and stayed wrapped like that until put in a homemade
box with the dull nickel nails winking out of the mismatched
corners, and been dropped with a clattering bang into
the shallow hole of frozen dirt and covered once more
into darkness, only to resurface in May, when the ground
heaved her up again, like the pond before it, as if
something in her must have the light of day, the light
of night, and been buried once more, a final time, with
huge stones placed on the coffin to hold it down the
nine feet they had dug to be certain this time the body,
holding its quilt around it like a cape, would not wriggle
its way back into their lives.
Grandmother told the children that she was coming back
for her eyes. Parents told the children to ignore what
Granny said, she was just trying to scare them. But
they told the children never to skate on Stiller's pond
again, never. And the one time they tried-and each of
them did-they got whipped, hard enough to make an impression.
So when they became our parents, they told us never
to go to Stiller's pond, as it was still called, and
we got whipped hard enough to make the same impression.
At least we never skated there. That was as specific
as they had made it, and we were specific in our obedience.
What we did was spend summer afternoons there, hooking
turtles and dragging them up on shore, turning them
over with sticks, because some of them were snappers
and we couldn't tell which, so they all got treated
to our punishment-beaten and prodded with sticks the
big ones could snap in two. We would watch, thrilled
at the sight of the pointed beak, which we knew had
plucked an eyeball out of its socket with the ease of
pulling a grape from the arbor vines. Though some insisted
their parents had told them to look on the bellies of
the old turtles to find which ones had taken her eyes
because we would find their image there still, we never
found such a thing and soon enough stopped believing
we would discover a transparent hole where she could
look out, still trying to see things she shouldn't.
But for a while it had worked, and I remember our fear
when we turned each turtle over onto its back, the claws
waving helplessly in the paddling feet as we took turns
checking the underside. The younger children, overcome,
would go screaming and crashing through the cattails
and weeds up the banks until we told them it was all
right.
The Stiller children moved away, died, fought in wars,
and came home. Always someone survived to work the farm,
though in the community heart, they were stained with
this memory. They followed a pattern, too, the old ones
would hint, only to be shushed by the parents. The darker
gleam of interest would lead us aside one time, finally
when we were old enough, and the rest of the story would
follow. How when they dragged the man out, unlike the
Stiller girl, he had been eaten at, like a piece of
suet hung on a tree for birds. There were peck marks
all over the front of his face and body, the clothes
ripped to threads on the front, intact on the back.
This was what they discovered when they rolled him over.
The whiteness that had revealed him was the remaining
uneaten chunk of cheek and the milk-white bone, polished
by the silky bodies of small fish swimming in and out
of the face. The men, in particular, couldn't stand
this story, because everything, the old women would
insist and look long and hard at the boys, everything
was chewed on. And when they were finished with that,
the turtles turned him over and gnawed on the rest.
That was bad enough, but the worst part was that no
one could identify him. Stiller wouldn't come near him,
and rumors had it that both the hired man and the oldest
boy had disappeared that night. Mrs. Stiller never spoke
a word about it. She might have identified the rags
left on the body at least, but no-so he was buried in
another shallow grave next to the girl's, only he didn't
come up in the spring. In fact, by the time they began
digging the hole to proper depth in May, the box had
sunk another two feet and filled with water. When they
tried to move it, the seams burst and the thing fell
apart in their hands. Inside there was even less of
the man than before. Almost a skeleton, the men told
people. As if he couldn't wait. That was handy though,
because when they made a new box, they could make it
half the regular size, just dump the bones in, and save
a lot of work digging the deeper hole, too.
As I'm walking out here by Stiller's pond, I remember
the old mystery and fear that always mingled in the
air around the place. Now, of course, I understand that
it was not knowing-the obscenity of the two missing
men-that made it impossible for our parents and grandparents
to tell us the truth, and therefore, to let us continue
at Stiller's pond. The other man was never heard from
again, whichever he was. Maybe he was at the bottom
of Stiller's pond, weighted with the heavy sleeping
bodies of turtles. During the summer, the cows still
walk in their ritual paths to the pond, still muddy
the edges, plowing the ground with their hooves, leaving
pocks that freeze in uneven holes to trip small feet
in winter. The cattails still grow at that one end,
waving graceful and lithe as women. Sometimes I almost
imagine I see the hair they chopped off so many years
ago to pull her out, still woven like a basket to trap
the silvery fish that lurk in the cool, dark shallows
we can't quite reach when we hunt here as children.
And out in the middle there's the tree limb that broke
off long ago, and then the tree itself dropped to the
ground and was sawed up and hauled away, leaving only
the limb humped up like a sea serpent, dark and sinewy,
along whose length ride the turtles that rise like ancient
people from ancient sleep every spring and crawl up
the back of the limb to sun, their necks stretching
the tenderness where the skin is paper-thin and throbbing
with a heart that once fed on the eyes of a woman who
tried to cross the pond one winter.
As I start across the pond under the sliver of moon
that lies like a knife in the night sky, I remember
the last thing our grandmothers told us, the last whispered
secret that leaked out of those lips withered by year
after year of disappointment and concealment: They weren't
wearing skates. And that's why, they always declared
with malicious joy, you can't go there-ever, you hear-ever.
Thus sealing forever in our hearts the desire for the
place, a desire that can never be satisfied, a desire
we give to our children for Stiller's pond.
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