Goshen Road Page 5

  “Mother,” Dessie said after she could no longer keep silent. “We’re going into town. We are going to have something to eat. Then we are going to come right back home.”

  Rose sighed, her voice hushed. “May it be Your Will,” she said, and reluctantly released her hold. She peered above her glasses into her Dessie’s eyes. “Stand up now. Let’s see that skirt. You know that the Lord has given mothers eyes to follow their daughters wherever they choose to go.”

  Dessie stood, swirled around, and Billie could see her tummy suck in, letting the skirt’s hem fall as low as possible. “That’s a pretty blouse,” Rose said. “Right proper.”

  When she had her back to her mother and only Billie could see, Dessie rolled her eyes at the ceiling. Billie tried not to laugh. “May the heavenly Father protect us all,” Rose said. She walked Dessie onto the porch, offering her cheek for a good-bye kiss. Then, she added, “Be home before 11.”

  “We will,” Dessie called, dashing down the porch stairs, not turning around.

  FOR ONE last brief second, Billie wondered what would happen if she just skipped on down there, following her sister to the Jeep, and in a friendly way flat out asked them all if she could come along. But it was clear as day that she should not do that. Dessie did not invite her to go. And Rose could start in all over again.

  Oh well, welcome back to boring. Billie crossed the living room, peeked into the kitchen. Supper was still not ready to set out. Since Rose was unable to see her, Billie searched the swan ashtray, pulled out a medium-sized Lucky, and headed back upstairs.

  From the window in Dessie’s part of the bedroom, Billie watched Lux ease down the hood of the Jeep, wipe the grease off his hands, and help Dessie up into the passenger seat. Alan Ray sat in the back, a bottle of Coke in one hand, a cigarette in the other, his long legs in green army fatigues stretched out across the whole backseat. Bertram stood on the footbridge watching, his hands idly tapping a pack of Luckies to settle the tobacco. The Jeep turned and splashed across the creek, climbing onto the main road. Black exhaust smoke hung in the air, the rumble and sputter of the engine mixed with the twang of pedal-steel guitars. And then only the wide, wet tire tracks remained.

  Billie found the apron, trying to remember where she’d left the needle, thread, and pins. They were half hidden under Dessie’s quilt. She’d have to find Rose’s sewing box, finish hemming the apron, set the pocket, and then show it to her teacher for grading, so she could bring it home to surprise Rose. The idea came to Billie that since she already had a pattern, she could start another apron as an engagement present for Dessie in green fabric, with some pretty stitching. She could cut out a heart-shaped pocket to make it special.

  Though she’d been living in this house for her entire life, sitting on the foot of Dessie’s bed, her sister’s half of the bedroom suddenly seemed different. It felt like the scenery in a school play, everything almost like real life, but instead, props rolled into place, waiting for the actors. Billie pictured the original room without a dividing wall. Big. Big enough that she could push both beds together and have one double bed. What if she could have that whole closet, which was very likely as big as a model’s closet? Billie looked down at the Seventeen magazine on the desk, the model’s big oval eyes, her smile wide and friendly. I’m a model, the model said, sort of telepathically. “I’m an actress,” Billie answered back. “Would you like my autograph?” Yes, please, the model answered. Billie took a pen and wrote her signature, Beverlee Ellen Price, diagonally across the cover of the magazine, making sure to place a large swirl for each of the capital letters, so they hooked together in a sort of alphabet chain.

  She switched Dessie’s radio back on. “Next up,” the announcer was saying, “‘Light My Fire.’” Billie hurried to close the door, so she could make the radio louder. If Rose heard what she was listening to, she would be horrified. Of all the bands out there, Rose despised The Doors the most, declaring Jim Morrison a demon who’d made a pact with Satan for the souls of girls, although no one explained to Billie how that could be possible.

  If only Dessie was there, they could sing along. Dessie could hit the high notes, and she’d take the lower ones. They’d be the performers as well as the audience. Now though, Dessie was further and further out of reach, like the moon, but circling a whole different planet, some different world she could barely glimpse with the naked eye, planet Lux, with his Jeep and his country music. Country boys, Billie thought. Who even cares about being popular with those guys? There are other guys out there. The Jim Morrison type—wild, enticing, too handsome, too shocking—or maybe the kind of guys in Seventeen, clean-shaven guys who wore polo shirts, who had sports cars, not Jeeps. Billie sat down on the top of Dessie’s desk, opened up the window a bit wider, checked to see if anyone could be watching, and lit up the half-size Lucky.

  Across the yard, she could see her father’s shape as he walked toward the barn in the twilight. He would clean up the tools, sweep the workshop, come back to the house, and be ready to eat. If she stayed upstairs too long, Rose would come looking for her. Soon, after another puff or two on the cigarette, another chance to practice her smoke rings, soon, when this song was over, she would turn off the radio, wash her face, rinse her mouth, and head downstairs to help set out whatever Rose had cooked up for an ordinary Saturday night supper to the tune of the Family Gospel Quartet.

  But not yet. Billie reached for the piece of mirror that Dessie had set on the desk. Her head tipped back, her dark hair settled along her neck, and she parted her lips ever so slightly, rehearsing her most mysterious smile. Her outstretched hand with the cigarette swayed to the music, back and forth in the chilly air. the last few beats of the organ and guitar, the final chords of the number one song in America. The music swirled and drifted like the warm strands of smoke, like those wraith-like, almost O’s in the cool evening air, out toward the vast universe, toward the distant planets, then gone.

  THREE

  IN A FLASH (1967)

  Ten

  Saturday the twentieth of May, 1967, the morning so hot the sweat drains down my spine, I sit back against the driver’s seat, Dessie riding shotgun, and off we go, heading up a logging road to the summit of Chestnut Ridge, stopping after we crest the ridgetop. A field of hay waves in the breeze, spring green, tassels shining, the morning sun above us, not a cloud in the sky and not a soul in sight.

  My arm across her shoulder, her arm across my waist, our bodies fitting together, we make our way across the long narrow ridgetop field. From the far edge of the field, a trail weaves through pine-woods. The forest floor slopes down on the right as well as the left. The trail narrows, the trees turn scrawny, finally the woods give over to sky, the hillside drops off on both sides of the path, the soil changes to flat stepping stones of crumbling shale.

  We stand at the edge of a windswept cliff. A couple hundred feet below, Decker’s Creek shimmers in the sunlight. A red-tailed hawk soars overhead, then swoops a wide circle toward the tree canopy beneath us in the valley.

  Nine

  Alan Ray sits at the AmVets, holding America’s best, a PBR. He is smoking his last Marlboro. The crumpled pack and his last three dollars are on the bar.

  He stares at me like I’m off my nut. “Y’already lost an eye, now you want to cut your balls off, too? Go ahead, then,” he says. “Just don’t let me find out you dropped down on one knee and begged for it.” Then he says, “What the hell, it’s your life. Hey, I’ll buy. Drink up while you still can.”

  Eight

  My mother counted her babes like the months of the year, the ones she had and soon after lost. In January, Peter, in February, Ruth, in March, Mark, in April, April, named after the month she was born and the month she died. All laid out, little graves, fieldstones in a row up the hill, a gate of saplings wired together by Pa, some plastic flowers that bloom forever. Then I came along, the one who lived, the one who sucked her teeth right out of her mouth, as she used to say. She loved us equal, those who li
ved for only a day or two, those who lived a year, and me, walking on the shoulders of the other four. She called me Luther. She said it sounded holy.

  After me, two more gone, Simon, Eliza, and then the stones were laid side by side for her and the one who did not receive a name.

  Seven

  Bertram stands beside his workbench in the barn. He and I puzzle over how to get the carburetor off the International Harvester, in the hopes that we can replace the fouled intake manifold and get the old SOB to keep running once it starts.

  He cracks a grin, tells me, “You can’t have just her hand, Ace, you got to take the whole package.”

  Later, with Bertram at my side, Rose sits on the piano bench. A narrow silver cross made from hand-hewn framing nails is mounted on the wall on a pine plaque.

  Her gray owl eyes meet mine. She says, “There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things, Luther.” Then she says, “Do you mean to be a proper Christian husband to Dorothy? Will you be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and will you take the Lord into your life as your Savior?”

  Six

  As a boy, I used to race to keep up with my mother. I used to watch the backs of her legs, her straight-seamed stockings knotted at the knees as she knelt in the church pew, the tied bow of an apron behind her waist as her Sunday heels clacked from room to room on our milled pine floor, swirls of dust in shafts of light.

  As I grew older, both she and Pa began to change. Her fingers shriveled like bent twigs. His steel-gray eyes narrowed to slits, as if the light of day would scar them. Her slim face sagged, deep grooves chiseled her brow, hollows dug into her cheeks. His beard grew white in shapeless strands. Bit by bit, the knotted cord that held her slight form together began to fray.

  One night a month before she passed, Pa took the cast-iron pan to her when she served supper too cold, and I laid into him. By that time I was almost fourteen, as strong as he was, a head taller and sober. I knocked him flat and drug him into the Ford to sleep it off, locking the house door against him. I cleaned the floor, wiped the walls, set her down with a cool washrag on her brow. From then on, I slept with a baseball bat under my bed, although I was not afraid.

  The day I first felt fear, the day the pounding in my chest began, was the day I lost my compass and began spinning free. It was the day my loving mother died.

  Five

  We take it all in. She holds my hand tightly, a little out of breath, but pleased to stand beside me. I could tell by her broad smile, the excitement in her eyes. She would be the one to take me forward into life. I could no more stop than I could stop my own birth, than I could stop the locust limb that took my eye, than I could keep my mother’s spirit in her body, than I could stop loving this sweet girl.

  I reach for it all. I say, “Des, what if we wanted to get us some land?”

  She shakes her head like she was trying to get the sense of my words. I feel bold to even try. I feel scared to get it wrong. I feel the weight of each beat of my cowardly heart.

  She looks up at me. She says, “Lux, what in the world are you going on about? Do you mean like a business? Like we buy us a little farm somewhere?”

  I know what I have to do. I have to say the words, to make it real. Under the bluest of all skies, in the brightest light of high noon, and the spirit of my mother with me at all times, I look at Dessie. “Well, I suppose, we would probably have to get married then,” I say, stepping back up the trail a good yard or so, to give her room, not because I wanted to, but because the words push me, they drive a space between us, a space as solid as my fear.

  She is quiet. The breeze holds off. The air is still, the only sound the drum of a woodpecker on a hollow tree behind us. “Lux, you did just say what I thought you said?” she asks.

  Four

  No one knows for sure what took my mother’s mortal soul. They think her heart gave out. She laid herself down in the middle of the day, pulled up the quilt, and passed from this earth on the tenth of September, 1964, while Pa was on the porch in his rocking chair, swigging from a bottle, and I was at school, too far away to hear if she cried out for help.

  That fall, Pa slept on the porch in his rocker, swore he wasn’t asleep when I tried to wake him to come to bed. When the moon was right and he was well, he and I went coon hunting, a momentary truce, us halfway up some logging road or setting out the night beneath that hit ’n’ miss gas well, drinking and waiting for the hounds to bay and the chase to begin. He’d run on about fighting in France and Italy. Though he would never admit it, the more time we spent together, the more I knew that he wanted me to take on his place, make his untended acres produce once more, take him on too, prove to him that he could trust me, keep him from himself, agree with him that everyone was trying to get the better of him. I never knew what would set off the stick of dynamite buried in his gut, but I knew it had a short fuse.

  My mother would tell me that she passed from this earth into the arms of her Savior. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s for the best. She would tell me that when I find my Savior, there I will find her. I know she left when she could no longer stay, that she did everything she could. I failed her, but she did not fail me.

  Three

  On the prettiest day of the prettiest month, under the bluest sky, my sweet, beautiful blue-eyed girl says, “Yes.” There is no other sound like this, not even the sound of a perfect strike, the way it hits the glove of the catcher. Her one word, “Yes.” I have pitched a no-hitter. I have hit grand slam homeruns, the ball soaring over the stands and into the junkyard beyond the centerfield fence, kids scrambling, the ball bouncing off the roofs of rusted-out sedans, but I have never known this feeling before or since. She looks at me, she gets quiet. My chest pounds. Maybe she will change her mind, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “Lux, we have to do it right, marry in a church.”

  My Dessie, whose mind is clear and steers my heart. “I will do it,” I said, the pounding in my chest the sound of the gears of my heart reaching for the gears of her heart, I swear it.

  I will stare into the eyes of my Pa, and I will set this before him, one man to another. My best girl, I have nothing to be afraid of with you by my side.

  Two

  I reach into my shirt pocket. I have a treasure. It is a perfect soft gray bird point, an arrowhead, chip-flaked and as sharp as it was five hundred years ago. I braided a buckskin cord into the notches at the base of the point.

  I tell her, I was a boy, walking behind my mother on the ridge trail, on the way to pick wild blackberries. I saw it among the broken rocks at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I bent, picked it up, raced to catch up.

  Dessie places my gift over her lovely head. This ancient gray point against her skin, resting in the hollow of her neck.

  Mother, you came to me, tugged at the hair on the crown of my head, you guided my hands as I braided this cord.

  One

  My name is Luther, but only on my paycheck, my hunting license, my birth certificate, and in my mother’s mouth, as it will be on my baptism certificate and my marriage license. My name is Lux.

  Things can change. I know that to be true. I have been spinning free, a wheel with not a cog to hold it; then, in a flash, I am a part of a great machine, spinning like a gear that drives another gear and so on, until the world is put right.

  They will take me to the river and they will wash me clean from sin. My mother who art in heaven, hallowed be her name, she called me Luther. I will be saved for you, Mother, saved for you, my Dessie, the light I carry in my heart.

  My girl and I stand together. The world is wide open, the world is new, for our new life together.

  In a flash, things can change. I know that my eye was the price I paid. I once was blind. I could say that it was like watching my old life slip through my fingers. Now I can see. It feels like reaching for a second chance.

  My hair will be so short that my head will feel naked. My shoes will be so tight that I will barely feel the
earth beneath me. Water will stream over my forehead, it will seep under my eyepatch, and it will fill the socket of my eye. It will remind me.

  FOUR

  BIRTHDAY (1969)

  TWO YEARS AND TWO MONTHS AFTER HE GOT MARRIED, Lux traded his eight-year-old dappled gray, half-Arab mare Calamity Jane to his friend Alan Ray. In return, Lux got Alan Ray’s .30-06 Remington 700 rifle and a German scope, and to sweeten the deal, Alan Ray added a rebuilt Gravely rototiller. Alan Ray had hinted that if he proposed to Billie, CJ would make a dandy engagement present. That’s when they shook hands on it.

  Lux felt like he should have been happier about the trade, even though for the past couple of years he’d felt like he owed something to Alan Ray for his quick thinking after the logging accident. This trade could even things out. Alan Ray would be getting an even-tempered, well-trained mare. CJ was sure-footed on trails, and unlike some horses she never tried to unseat her rider by galloping under low-hanging branches or balking at fallen logs across the trail.

  Alan Ray was happy as a boy on Christmas morning. He’d also offered to buy CJ’s colt Dakota for five hundred dollars outright, but Lux refused. Now that Dakota was old enough to be ridden, everything should have worked out differently, the mare would be for Dessie and the young stallion for him, the two of them riding together, so the colt could learn from the mare’s example. But that plan fizzled after Lissy was born. Whenever Lux mentioned riding together, Dessie declined, giving one excuse or another. She might’ve let her sister or mother babysit, Lux thought, but Dessie held back, reluctant to ask for any kind of favor.

  Then, once she found out she was expecting for a second time, Dessie wouldn’t even enter the paddock to help feed or brush down either of the horses. She said she’d heard a story about a girl in Reader who’d been kicked in the belly by a mule and lost her baby, and she wasn’t about to go taking any foolish chances. Lux had the good sense to know a good horse, and he almost told Dessie how silly that seemed. But an inner voice told him to let it go, that women who were expecting might have some kind of protective instinct, not quite rational but worth heeding. He thought back to his mother, living through so much hope and loss. How much did she know about the life inside her, even the one that eventually took her?