Goshen Road Read online

  Praise for GOSHEN ROAD

  by Bonnie Proudfoot

  “Goshen Road is rich with life and characters who command our attention. These beautiful intertwined stories introduce a wise and wonderful voice.”

  —Gail Galloway Adams, author of The Purchase of Order

  “Goshen Road is a rich, multigenerational tale exploring women’s expanding roles in a rural environment. The women are afforded few opportunities here, and they often settle for much less than they deserve, but they are resourceful and ultimately as resilient and reliable as the untamable land.”

  —Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly

  “Bonnie Proudfoot writes the kind of book that means something, a book that carries weight in a way that only serious fiction can. Her words delight and move, but they do much more than that. She interrogates the truth of the people and place of Appalachia. Her debut should be savored by those who admire timeless fiction.”

  —Charles Dodd White, author of In The House of Wilderness

  “It takes no more than the opening sentence of Goshen Road to bring vividly to life the ruggedly forested mountains of West Virginia and the resolute people who make their lives among them. Told alternately through the voices of a family, Proudfoot does not merely allow readers to witness her characters’ lives, but brings us among them as visitors. Her characters are not the ‘other,’ an archetype that is the bane of Appalachian Literature; they are not the meth addicts or oxycontin dealers that pollute so much of what is written about our region today. The community of Goshen Road is economically depressed, but it is not damned by impoverishment; its citizens do not suffer from ‘learned helplessness.’ They care for family and community and in their lives evoke the heroics of everyday struggle.”

  —Chris Holbrook, author of Upheaval: Stories

  “Goshen Road is like a detailed and lovely landscape painting, with much to draw—and keep—us in. With a fine attunement to the ironies of human behavior, Proudfoot treats her characters with dignity, honors their complexity, and renders them with poetry.”

  —Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables

  “Bonnie Proudfoot’s novel-in-stories unerringly drills down to the bedrock of human relationships. How do we love? How do we make a living? Proudfoot never bewails her characters’ choices, but rather acknowledges their failures while admiring their dreams and creative, intelligent loyalty to each other and their West Virginia home.”

  —Meredith Sue Willis, author of Their Houses and Out of the Mountains

  GOSHEN ROAD

  GOSHEN ROAD

  A NOVEL

  Bonnie Proudfoot

  SWALLOW PRESS

  OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

  ATHENS, OHIO

  Swallow Press

  An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  ohioswallow.com

  © 2020 by Bonnie Proudfoot

  All rights reserved

  To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

  Printed in the United States of America

  Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Proudfoot, Bonnie, 1954- author.

  Title: Goshen Road : a novel / Bonnie Proudfoot.

  Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019041147 | ISBN 9780804012225 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780804012232 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780804041072 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Working class families--West Virginia--Fiction. | Appalachian Region--Fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3616.R68 G67 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041147

  To my mother, my aunt, my grandmothers, my children

  And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen and thou shall be near unto me, thou and thy children’s children, and thy flocks and thy herds and all that thou hast.

  —Gen. 45:10

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  1. Snagged (1967)

  2. Somebody to Love (1967)

  3. In a Flash (1967)

  4. Birthday (1969)

  5. Jackson Childs (1970)

  6. The Goshen Road (1971–75)

  7. Mr. Clutch (1977)

  8. Gun Season (1979)

  9. Sunday Run (1982)

  10. Gary Brewster (1984)

  11. Canning Peaches (1985)

  12. Not to Touch the Earth (1990)

  13. The White Shawl (1992)

  14. Saving Jasmine (1992)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the West Virginia Department of Culture and History for their support of this project, and to Gail Adams, Susan Sailor, Ethel Morgan Smith, Cathy Hankla, Jeanne Larsen, and others whose guidance, vision, and enthusiasm never failed to propel this forward. Thanks, too, to Sharon Hatfield, Deni Naffziger, Reneé Williams, and especially Daniel Canterbury, generous readers, and to Samara Rafert and Rick Huard and the editors and staff at Swallow Press. Earlier forms of “Canning Peaches” and “Gun Season” appeared in Kestrel. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people, events, or places is purely coincidental and not intended to be taken as accurate historical depiction.

  ONE

  SNAGGED (1967)

  THOUGH HE WAS ONLY SEVENTEEN, LUX CRANFIELD knew some things about how to get along in life. He knew how to file and clean a horse’s hoof, so he could ride his dappled gray mare for hours on gas pipeline roads and ridgetop trails without needing to call a blacksmith to have her shod. He knew how to scan the fields to judge where deer bedded down for the night, how to note dimples in the soft dark earth for fresh tracks, how to search saplings for ragged marks where bucks scraped the bark with their antlers, and how to crouch down behind a giant chestnut stump, remain perfectly still, and wait for dawn, so he could take a silent shot with his compound bow, then track it, bleed it out, gut it, and get it home before the local game warden left his driveway to go to work.

  Some things came naturally to Lux and some he had to work at. He’d worked hard to learn how to throw a fastball to catch the inside corner of the strike zone, sinking as it sailed by the knees of a batter. He’d practiced this, just as he’d practiced downshifting his Jeep into second gear with his left hand while letting go of the steering wheel, resting his right hand on the knee of a girl next to him, not lugging the engine or spilling an open can of Iron City. He’d learned how to drop a towering red oak by sawing a deep wedge across its base at the correct height and angle, then how to slice down into the wedge, so that the weight of the tree shifted gradually and gravity took over, trunk and crown falling where he wanted it to, downhill toward the skidder.

  Lux knew he had a knack for some things and he had good aim, and that these skills had gotten him the job of his dreams, cutting timber for A-1 Lumber, but if that didn’t work out, he could beat the draft by enlisting in the U.S. Army or the West Virginia National Guard and take a couple of years to figure out his next steps. This decision would be his to make in August, his eighteenth birthday, and he was keeping it to himself. But on an early spring morning in April 1967, after his left eye was cut open by a locust snag, Lux began to think his backup plan was no longer an option, and that he had to give serious thought to the course his life should take.

  It couldn’t have been a better morning to be out cutting timber. Dense, cool fog kept away the glare of the rising sun. On the forest floor, fer
ns and wildflowers had begun to leaf out. On the steep hillside, the ground was firm enough for good footing under his steel-toe boots, not slick or soggy like during the March thaw. Lux was out by daybreak as part of a five-man crew, clearing scrub timber that lay between County Road 57 and a stand of second-growth red oak on the steep side of North Fork, when a dead locust limb high above his head dropped out of a tangle of vines, bounced off his hard hat, and slammed into the left-hand side of his face, knocking him off his feet and pinning him on the ground. He came to hearing the scream of saws above his ears and the shouts of men working to get him out from under that mess.

  On the hour-long drive to the Fairchance ER, with the left side of his face wrapped in his blood-soaked shirt, after realizing that this was not just a bad dream or something happening to some other guy, and after moving each joint and swelling finger to reassure himself that no bones were broken, Lux realized that some might call him screwed and some might call him lucky, but more likely what his mother had told him for the whole of her short life was correct, the Lord was keeping an eye on him. He’d been called to account, and he did not want to come up wanting. He had to quit running wild and staying out half the night, get more of a grip on his life, and settle down with someone calm and steady, the right girl who would keep him on the right track.

  In the last straightaway before town, Lux knew who that girl should be. He sat up for a moment to catch his breath and clear his throbbing head in the passenger seat of Alan Ray’s speeding Bronco. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, brushed dirt and sawdust from around his good eye, and in the fierce, slanting light of the morning sun he saw Dessie Price leaning forward beside her golden retriever while she waited for the school bus at the end of her driveway. “Will you look at that?” Alan Ray called out, waving his A-1 cap at Dessie from the driver’s seat, and Lux turned and squinted as Dessie waved back. He could swear she was smiling right at him. For two days in the hospital, through a haze of painkillers, as the doctors worked to try to save his eye, Lux held on to the memory like a secret keepsake: Dessie’s sudden smile, her long blond hair, and her red sweater flashing by like a bright spark against the long pale green shimmer of her father’s hayfield.

  ON A warm spring afternoon a couple of weeks after the accident, when most of the swelling was gone from his face, Lux stopped by the high school. Below his rolled shirtsleeves his forearms were scarred and scraped, and purple traces of bruises could be seen along his left cheek and under the brim of his A-1 cap. He wore new black Levi’s, a new pair of black cowboy boots, a plaid flannel shirt, and over his left eye a black eyepatch partially concealed a wad of gauze bandages. Thick black hair curled out from around his ears and below the rim of his cap. After the last bell, Dessie Price and a few school friends gathered around him for the details.

  “How’d it happen, Lux?” asked Billie Price, Dessie’s ninth-grade sister. Her dark hair hung around her neck, and she shook her bangs out of her dark eyes as she looked up at him.

  “Well, I can’t say exactly, but I’ll tell you what I think happened,” Lux said, scratching the back of his neck, which had begun to sweat. “It felt like the woods was waiting, like it was set up like a damn trap, and I was the one who sprung it,” he said without a trace of a smile. This would be repeated around the schoolyard and beyond, he knew. He pulled back his shoulders, cleared his throat, stretched his long fingers out, cracking each of his knuckles.

  It was right before sunrise when he’d gotten to work, he said, and as the dawn broke he finished sharpening the chain on his saw. The crew spread out in the woods to start cutting. He was downhill, clearing a path for the skidder through an overgrown patch of woods and vines that had been clear-cut years earlier. “It was a nasty setup from the get-go,” he said. “I wanted to take down this one elm first off, so I could see what I was getting into. Set down the lunch pail, took a few steps uphill, and ripped into the tree.” He shook his head slowly, pulled down the brim of his cap. “Something didn’t feel right, the tree was half dead, but I didn’t pay it any mind. ’Bout halfway through the first cut, the damn elm started to shift and fall, way too soon, and that limb slammed down from above, dragging greenbrier, grapevine, Virginia creeper, you name it. Never heard it coming, with the saw so loud.”

  He cleared his throat. As he spoke, the small group of students gazed at him, scanning the bruises on his face and arms, the eyepatch. Lux was six feet tall, and the boots made him feel like he was a head taller than the others. Usually height had given him an edge, but today it made him feel distant, more like an outsider, and suddenly the intensity caught him off guard. Talking about it made it more real.

  “Damn snag,” Lux said, brushing his forearm over the eyepatch. “A locust branch, maybe twenty feet off the ground, twenty, thirty feet long. It must have hung up there for years.” He took off his cap and rubbed at a shaved spot on his scalp, above his left temple. “It knocked me flat on my ass, jabbed into my eye and done my face up pretty bad. A stroke of luck I had that hard hat on. That thing is in pieces, and Doc won’t say nothin’ yet about my eye.”

  He took a breath, turned his head toward his blind side, and noticed Tim Sutton, the varsity shortstop, a former teammate and a steady guy.

  “Who found you? Did Alan Ray know you were down?” asked Tim.

  “Alan Ray? Alan Ray was halfway up the hill already,” Lux said, nodding slowly. “One minute I was sawing, the next I was pinned on my back, my saw ten foot down the hill. I can’t rightly say who got to me first. Took them boys a half hour, more maybe, to cut me out, and that’s when Alan Ray got busy on the bleeding. I owe all of them guys.” His face turned in the direction of Dessie Price.

  Dessie’s blue eyes were the level of his chin, focused intently on his good eye. He wondered whether she knew that he was in the red Bronco as it sped past her that morning. He wondered if he’d dreamed her smile, her return wave. She seemed to be visualizing each moment as he related it. “That’s what Dad says,” Dessie said. Then she blinked at few times and brightened up a bit. “So, what happened to your pa’s shell box from the war? Isn’t that what you carry for your lunch pail?” she asked with a bit of a grin.

  His good eye settled on a small dimple in her chin. How many other times had he noticed that dimple over the last few years? Now, though, she was taller, her neck slimmer and longer, her hair curled around her collarbones. The school bus behind her, as yellow as if it had just rolled out of a crayon box, revved up its engine and pumped clouds of diesel exhaust into the air. Lux scratched at a scab on his forearm, set his A-1 cap back onto his head. “Oh, shoot. That damn shell box,” Lux said, smiling back at her. “I been meaning to go back for that. I’ll bring it around the house if I can find it,” he said.

  “I CAME by to show this to y’uns,” Lux told Bertram Price early that evening. Bertram was on the front porch of the white clapboard two-story farmhouse, sitting back in a sagging plaid recliner and listening to the Pirates game through the crackle of a transistor radio. He completely filled the La-Z-Boy. His legs had worn grooves into the raised footrest, and his thick fingers dwarfed a beer can. Cigarette smoke curled out from a dark green glass ashtray on a milk crate beside him.

  Lux stood on the bottom step, eye-level to Bertram’s heavy scuffed work boots, the soles caked with clumps of reddish clay from walking the pipelines for Pennzoil. Lux had always liked the look of Bertram, his sonic boom of a voice, the odd bump in his nose where he’d broken it in the service, and he liked the way the tall man carried himself, the way people took him at his word. Bertram spoke his mind, whether or not you wanted to hear what he had to say. He’d been a play-by-the-rules kind of coach, a leader, and a no-nonsense competitor. He’d earned Lux’s trust by standing up for fair play and for the players on his team. Back when Lux was brought on as a pitcher, he knew how to hurl the ball fast and in the strike zone, and he’d thought that was all he’d need. But Bertram had taken him under his wing, teaching him how to size up a batter,
drilling him on curveballs, change-ups, sinking fastballs. “Don’t throw your arm out the first inning,” Bertram advised. “Let ’em chase your bad ones. Keep your best pitch in your pocket, Ace, and play that card later in the game, when they ain’t expecting it.” These tips took Lux and the Harriers to the state semifinals, only the second time in the history of Fairchance High.

  Lux knew that showing up at a man’s house was not the same as showing up for practice. He also knew that coaches, parents, teachers, all elders, needed to be handled just right. He’d have to get a feel for things. Sooner or later too, he’d have to deal with his pa, who’d mixed it up with Bertram one night three years earlier at the AmVets about a gas well right-of-way. Lux hoped there were no bad feelings toward the Cranfield family remaining on Bertram’s side. His pa, on the other hand, still swore a blue streak whenever anyone mentioned Pennzoil, Bertram Price, or even the AmVets.

  Lux shifted around. His good eye squinted at Bertram’s round face. He held out what was left of the green World War 2 army-issued shell box. The handle was ripped clear off one of the steel hinges, the square metal top was crushed down into the bottom like a ten-ton coal car had driven over it.

  “Bring that up here, Lux, let’s take a gander. Look at that thing! Made it all the way to Europe and back, and it gets done-in half a mile from home,” Bertram said, shaking his head and looking Lux over. “I can still see the letters. U.S. Army. Must be infantry. Them poor grunt SOBs.” He winked at Lux, who’d seated himself on the top porch stair. Standing up felt wrong, like he would be looking down on his old coach.

  Bertram leaned forward, pulled the lever that slammed down the foot of the recliner, and turned toward the screen door. “Hey, Billie, you back there? If you can hear me, fetch us a beer,” Bertram called. “After all, any boy that’s been slapped across the face by a widow-maker and lived to tell the tale can have a man’s drink, right, Ace?” The noise startled a small flock of red chickens scratching on the side of the house in a freshly planted flower bed.