Читать книгу The Marble Orchard - Alex Taylor - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

Beam could believe all of it now.

Standing beneath the sycamore tree in the warm shade as it spilled over the thick wind-loomed grass, he watched the rowed and white-clothed picnic tables steeped with dishes and casseroles—deviled eggs, meats and gravies, baskets of rolls and cornbread wedges, bowls of soup beans, fried fish and fried turkey and fried deer tenderloin, the tables curving up the slight hill and beyond it to disappear into the old tobacco barn gone unroofed and useless these many decades before reemerging out the barn’s rear door, the entire dinner swarmed by gnats and black flies that appeared like frenzied dust against the white haze of the sky—and he could believe what he’d heard rumored for years but had never thought possible: that he was not a Sheetmire because some other blood yet howled fast and hot within him.

He stood with his mother and father. No one had spoken to them since they arrived in the family truck, a rusted two-tone beige and olive green GMC his father called Old Dog. Now they waited beside the pickup, Clem stroking the worn bed panel and brooding while Derna leaned against the passenger door, her arms folded over her breasts. Beam held quiet, one sneaker propped against the truck’s slick front tire, staring out at the line of kin as they moved down the row of tables to fill their plates, each Sheetmire a mirrored replica of the others: squat and neckless head with the flat broad cheeks and full lips and bald unbearded chin that suggested a few errant drops of Cherokee or possibly Chickasaw blood. The eyes, sharp and mystical, showed the squinty wrinkles of those given to hard grim laughter and the teeth, once unleashed, were jarringly white. The women were plain, but not dowdy, and they wore calm Sunday dresses of mute blue or floral print, their handbags riding the crook of their elbows when not in the care of their husbands, who were sedate and loyal in all weathers, men suited to the slow sweaty work of the land and who tried to love the quiet patient women they’d wed, and there stood in their eyes the circumspect gaze common to all survivors of trouble.

Not a one resembled Beam. He saw that plainly. All mirrors showed him the same gaunt face with its sleep-hollowed eyes and the thick blonde hair whorled about his head like a broken hay bale. At nineteen, he’d grown to a height of well above six feet. Straight and thin as a lodgepole pine, he seemed an odd and unlikely child of the stocky and swart Clem who, but for his dingy and unkempt appearance, would fit easily into the line of Sheetmires now feeding at the tables. He more closely favored his mother, Derna. Though she wasn’t tall, she owned the same lean cheeks as Beam, the same drowsy eyes. Her form, though slack and softened by age, still gave rumor to her past beauty, the dress fitted snug and shapely about her hips.

“It’d be something nice for one of them to say hello or ask us how we were doing,” she said. She leaned hard against the truck. Its drab double-tone paint flaked off onto her brown dress and the bondo drummed hollowly when she shifted her weight, though she was still a slight woman. Her black hair appeared scorched and blazed with gray and almost like burned foil as she smoked a menthol cigarette, her white vinyl purse crouched in the grass between her scuffed black slippers like an attack pup she’d sic on anyone fool enough to spit a cross word her way.

“Who was it called and invited us anyhow?” Clem asked. He’d turned away from the potluck and leaned against the truck’s bed panel, facing a glen of green that led into locust trees before it rose into older hardwoods.

“Alton invited us,” said Derna. “I told you that already.”

Clem picked a napkin-covered dish of fried chicken livers out of the truck bed. “Well, it don’t matter,” he said. “I’m going ahead and getting in line and not waiting for them to talk to me.”

He walked to the tables and settled the dish of livers amidst the rest of the spread and then retreated to the end of the line, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his blue cotton Dickies. A few of the Sheetmire women gave him curious stares, but he only nodded and smiled at them in return.

“I guess he’s right.” Derna sighed and dropped her cigarette in the grass, wiping a slipper over it. “We got invited. Might as well go ahead and eat.”

Beam gave a tiny shake of his head. “I’m not going to,” he said.

“Come along now. It’s all right.”

“No. I don’t want to. You go on.”

“It ain’t no way to be, just standing there sulking.”

“I ain’t hungry. You go ahead. Just leave me alone here.”

“You ain’t hungry?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“How is that true? What have you had to eat today?”

“I had a Snickers bar this morning.”

“A Snickers bar.”

“Yeah.”

“That won’t do you. Come on over here and get a plate.”

Again, Beam shook his head. He watched the slide of faces moving along the table to fill their plates, their soft features licked with afternoon sunlight and glossed with sweat, all of them apparently nothing of his kind, and a cold nausea seeped into his guts.

“I just want to stand here a minute,” he said, wiping his lips on the back of his wrist.

Derna gawked at him. “What?” she asked. “Do you think they’re going to eat you?”

“No. I don’t think that. I just want to stand here for a spell.”

Derna scratched the dry chalky skin on her elbows. “Well, all right, Beam. I won’t make you eat. Just stand here and sulk all you want to. But don’t start your bitching on the way home because you didn’t get a plate when you had the chance.”

She walked away toward the tables, the wind gusting up and roving through her hair and the folds of her brown dress, the sycamore’s shade jarring loose and withery over the grass so that she strode through flexing light and flexing dim. Beam watched her fall in line. Taking her plate, filling it with stewed tomatoes and macaroni, nodding and small talking with some of the folk. Her cheeks rouged with cheap dollar-store makeup and her hosiery striped with runners, the late sun whetting her shadow so that it fell sharply in the grass, her own body in its worn wash-faded dress like the last recovered remnant of a time gone to legend as she moved through the throng of gibbering kin. He saw her shapeliness. What others had named “her lustful ways.” The slouch of hip, the drip of painted mouth. Even into late middle-age she maintained it.

Beam looked away from her and let his eyes stray over the strangers once more. For years, he’d imagined the stories his folks told him about the Sheetmires—how they turned clannish and tribed up into mere flickers of the old, original blood—as straight lies. Now he remembered how few uncles and aunts had ever come around to visit. How he knew perhaps two cousins well enough to speak to in a county where most kept an acre of memory reserved for family lines. He’d heard a few tales. The stories were mostly grim and unfinished—the drunken ravings of distant grandfathers and the misering of tiny bit-lipped women. He knew a few ghosts as they lurched through his dreams before being swallowed back into the catacombs of forgetting. Beyond this, he figured himself mostly unmoored from history. As hardly any relatives visited, he often wondered if any blood flowed through him at all.

He’d asked his folks about it many times. Standing on the failing porch, his father Clem propped in a peeling rocker and his mother Derna drifting in the swing, the river below smelling muddy and sour as the wind cut over the trees like a currycomb, he’d taken to wondering large thoughts about blood.

“Hell, they’re just uppity,” his father spat, suckling an unlit cigarillo. “Don’t like to associate with folks who run a ferryboat for a living. That’s all there is to it.”

So it was the ferry then. His father had operated it for the past quarter century, toting people and cars back and forth across the Gasping River for long hours and short pay. The boat had a two-car capacity and a small tug motored by a Cummins diesel engine scuttled it across the waters. It rode on a pulley and cable system, the steel hawsers strung over the river keeping it in place against the current. The fare was five dollars. In past years the traffic had been steady, but these times were leaner. What patrons there were came down the Gasping River Trace from the town of Micadoo, which lay due west of the river. These were travelers bound eastward into bottoms sown with corn and soybeans and then the higher country of hills and limestone bluffs. A few fishing villages survived upstream in rickety shantworks, but little brought travel this way anymore other than the occasional fit of slow wandering, the Sunday drive or the visit to an elderly relative. But for the small salary the state paid him to keep the ferry open, Clem would have been sore put to survive. He had his ways, though. Rumors of drunks who rode the ferry at night and awoke slumped over the wheel of their car in some distant field without a dollar in their wallet and a knot swelling on the crown of their skull snaked up from the black boggy woods. Most chocked it up to dumb overindulgence and drove home, happy the maiming had been negligible. Those who returned to the ferry to question its pilot were dismissed with a smile and an offhand joke.

“Why sure,” Clem would say, “you rode up here sauced to the gills. I’m surprised to see you again. Thought sure I’d be reading your obituary by now.”

So maybe that was the reason the rest of the Sheetmires kept their distance. More than the scorched stink of diesel buried in Clem’s clothes, it was the legend of his violence that made them wary.

“I take it you ain’t eating.”

The voice startled Beam. He turned. His cousin Alton stood propped against the pickup’s tailgate twisting a toothpick between his lips.

“I ain’t hungry,” said Beam.

Alton shrugged and lifted the tailgate down. “Suit yourself,” he said, settling himself onto the rough metal. He wore khaki trousers and polished loafers and a collared short sleeve yellow shirt, though his chin was barbed with thin bright-black whiskers and he kept glancing down at himself as if surprised and somewhat disgusted by his current state of dress.

“I’m glad y’all could make it anyhow,” he said, his voice a deep baritone. “Even if all you’re going to do is sit over here by Old Dog and not take one bite of the blackberry cobbler I fixed.”

“You didn’t fix no blackberry cobbler,” said Beam.

“The hell I didn’t. Baked on it all morning. You better go get a piece.”

“You didn’t fix no cobbler.”

Alton craned his neck and looked at Beam. His jaw hung open, the toothpick balanced on his bottom lip. “Shit. What kind of feller you think I am? You think I got so little sense I just go around telling lies about cobblers?”

“That sounds about like what I think.”

Beam looked past the picnic tables, but felt Alton come sidling along the edge of the pickup. A bright and piney stink of cologne wafted off him.

“Hey, there’s something else I got,” he said. “Follow me on up to the cemetery and I’ll show you.”

Beam turned to him. Alton’s cheeks were dried and blazed with pale dust from his job hauling rock for the crusher out at Dundee, and his skin seemed to always keep a ghostly film of powder. He was married, a father of two small daughters, and he’d grown paunchy.

“What have you done? Stole a car?” Beam asked.

Alton waved at the air. “Just follow me and you’ll see what it is.”

He paced away from the potluck and on through the thorny locusts and then up into the beginning hardwoods, red oak and scaly bark hickory that cast a cool murk over the ground.

Beam followed him. Up into the trees, he found loblolly pines grew here as well, the earth carpeted with their soft brown straw, the air honeyed with their sap, and he heard the clatter and talk of the potluck fading to distant drowned murmur as he followed Alton deeper into the woods.

The cemetery sat on a side of the hill in what had once been a clearing. Sapling cedar and dogwood grew amid the stones now, and the tangled grounds were ferny and sown with jagged weeds and an undercover of nitric green moss. The markers were crumbling, the names faded, and lichen spread over the broken marble and granite that appeared as fissured bone in the stark light pouring through the trees.

“What is it you got up here?” Beam asked.

Alton smirked and put a finger to his lips, shushing him. Then he strode off down one of the cemetery rows, the weeds sighing against his legs. At the edge of the cemetery, near what had been a wire fence, he squatted over a midden of soiled plastic lilies and Styrofoam saddles. Briefly, he dug through the refuse and then produced a tall vinegar bottle of green glass corked with a wad of sandpaper. A clear liquid jostled inside. “Come take you a pull of this, Beam,” he said. He dug the sandpaper cork out and lifted the bottle. A long chain of bubbles flickered up. When he finished, he gasped.

Beam went to him and immediately smelled the fumey sweetness of alcohol.

“What kind is it?” he asked.

“Honeysuckle.” Alton handed him the bottle. “Go ahead and take a yank on it.”

Beam held the bottle under his nose. It smelled nothing like honeysuckle. It smelled like pure grain swill and it made his eyes water.

“You know I can’t have that,” he said. He tried to hand the bottle back but Alton stepped away grinning.

“Oh, go ahead. It won’t hurt to just have a taste,” he said.

Beam stared at the bottle. It wasn’t his age or even deep Protestant guilt that kept him glued to sobriety. Though Clem had taken to prayer of late and was often seen reading in the Bible, his folks were not churchy and he’d been to but a handful of services his entire life. It was his affliction, a mild form of narcolepsy, that made him leery of drink. Without warning, a sudden sleep could come upon him, and he would drop as if felled by an ax. The doctors had told him that with such a disease the right level of drunkenness could kill him, and that it might take hardly more than a shot of whisky or half a six pack of lukewarm Coors to do the job. Beam suspected this was largely bluff, though. He’d been drunk a few times and had survived.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“Don Eddy Ramsey. Makes it himself. You should see his cellar. He’s got three refrigerators full of those little bottles.”

Beam shook the container and the alcohol beaded against the glass. In one motion, he slung the bottle up and took a long healthy pull and then gasped when he finished. The liquor reached its fire far down into him and left a taste almost like warm iron on his tongue, and he felt his head steady and lighten until he could no longer hear the picnic in the glen below.

“How’s that grab you?” Alton asked. He took the bottle from Beam and grinned.

“It drinks pretty good, don’t it?”

Alton took another sip and then passed the bottle back to Beam and they spent perhaps a half hour that way, trading drinks and remarking on the bald hurt inside the liquor, the burn and scald of it tempered with only the slightest hint of honeysuckle. They talked and drank until finally Alton declared he was hungry.

“I need a wedge of cornbread to soak up all this whisky I’m drowning in,” he said.

Beam remained silent. He drank deeply again, the bottle lifted to his lips as if he were bugling a reveille to the cemetery dead, the liquor pounding loud and brassy between his ears.

“Hey, Beam,” said Alton. “Maybe you shouldn’t take so much of that stuff. It’s pretty stout.”

Beam slung the bottle from his mouth and grimaced at his cousin. He leaned against a crumbling headstone to steady himself. Then he put a finger to his lips.

“Ssshh,” he said.

Alton jerked the bottle away from Beam and stoppered it with the wad of sandpaper. He replaced it in the mound of cast away flowers and saddles, then covered it with an arrangement of red and mildewed nylon chrysanthemums.

“Look,” Alton said, turning to Beam, “you’re just going to have stay up here until you get sober enough to come back down again and that’s all there is to it.”

“I ain’t sitting up here,” Beam said, shaking his head.

“If you go down there they’ll smell the liquor on you.”

“I don’t give a goddamn. They don’t like the smell they should just hold their noses.”

Beam stood up from the headstone and walked down the row toward the potluck, but he had to stop and spell himself against another grave marker as Alton came trotting up behind.

“See, you can’t even hardly walk right,” he said. “You just need to sit here and rest a spell.”

Beam looked off through the trees and his head swam. “Maybe you’re right,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, I am,” said Alton. “You wait right here and I’ll go down and get you some water and bring it up to you, okay?”

“All right. That’d be fine.”

“Now don’t move. Just stay put right there.”

Alton walked out of the cemetery, through the sunlight and on into the shady trees until the sound of his footsteps was covered by the quake and jostle of the heat.

Beam braced himself against the gravestone. It crumbled some in his hands and he wiped his fingers against his jeans and then closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The blood throttled through him. His tongue had gone dry and brittle and felt swollen, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the trash heap where Alton had hidden the bottle.

A blue jay screamed somewhere in the pines.

Beam woke to full night, not knowing where he was. The ground under him felt soft and damp with moss. He rolled onto his back and then lifted himself onto his elbows, his head wobbling loose and ugly. The drink gurgled back into his throat and he spat raw bile and then wiped his mouth and remembered.

At one corner of the cemetery burned a low campfire. Two men were seated before it on feed buckets. They smoked cigarettes and shared a bottle. Each wore a patchy beard and cradled a rifle in his lap. Far off in the darkness, a pair of foxhounds bayed. When Beam staggered into the hem of firelight, the men looked up at him.

“Where’s the homecoming?” Beam asked.

“You mean the Sheetmire homecoming?” the larger of the two men said.

Beam nodded.

The man who’d spoken scratched at his black whiskers and lit a cigarette. “You’re a mite late if that’s what you come here for.”

Beam wiped the dirt from his arms and then pressed his palms against his eyes. “I must have fell asleep.”

The larger man grunted and adjusted himself atop his feed bucket. He wore a tan hunting jacket and stone-washed blue jeans, his great belly propped on his lap, and his eyes glinted lucent and tiny like bits of feldspar. The other man seated beside him wore faded Carhartt coveralls the color of grocer’s paper. He picked up a stick of kindling and began poking at the coals in the fire.

“Are you a Sheetmire?” he asked.

Beam stroked the back of his neck. Looking through the night at the paling of trees faintly illuminated in the firelight before they faded into blank darkness, he recalled the line of faces at the potluck stretched in a cambered row beside the tables like a procession funereal and gaunt.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a Sheetmire.”

“Which one?”

“I’m Beam Sheetmire. Clem and Derna’s boy.”

Both men nodded at this. The large one threw his cigarette into the fire and leaned over and lifted a bottle of Old Grandad out of the dust and uncapped it and took two short pulls before screwing the cap on and settling the bottle in the dust again.

“I believe I know them,” he said, a bit breathless from the whisky. “There’s a lot of Sheetmires around and it’s hard to keep track of all the different bunches. I don’t even mess with keeping up no more. Now, it used to be a lot of the older folks was good at that kind of thing. Kept it all written down in the front of their Bibles. Didn’t just write it down, though. They studied on it. Got it down like an oath they had to say. My Uncle Esker could talk the name of ever half-aunt and cousin on back to when they first left England. Shit. Ought to heard him talk in the night by the fire. It was like hearing the roll get called up yonder. I never could do that. Course I never tried awful hard. Just couldn’t see the point, I guess. All those folks were dead and gone long before I ever come to be.”

“There was a spot where even the old folks lost track though, wasn’t there?” said the smaller man.

“There was. Even Uncle Esker couldn’t recollect much past two hundred years. That’s nothing. A drop is all. And I’m not sure I’d want to go on past that even if I could.”

“I might,” said the other man. “I might like to know past what them old folks knew and could tell.”

“Well, I don’t see any kind of good it’d do you or them.”

The smaller man rested his chin against his chest and watched the fire. “Well, maybe not,” he said. “I still might like to know it anyway.”

Beam squatted in the dirt. His head felt warped from the liquor Alton had given him and now he felt a bit dizzy from sleep. He didn’t want to hear the talk of family names or bloodlines, and his guts churned a bit from the memory of all the families at the potluck gawking at him in mute surprise as if he were a guest unexpected and unwelcome.

He sat on his haunches and listened to the men talk of things distant and long forgotten. They seemed to speak with the pulse and rhythm of his own blood as it wandered lost and vagrant inside him and he recalled the faces of the Sheetmires at the potluck again, and heard the dogs hunting in the far wilds beyond the fire. He could see it: the long slick hounds flaming in the pines as they sought the red fox, the great billows of their lungs roaring, their hearts booming like the drum of the wind as it beat against the trees. He could see it all. The drop of paws in the dirt. The fox’s burnished eyes like fine tumble-shined stones flared with cold light. He could see it, and a rush of air surrounded him so that he felt he sat in the doorway of a tomb, the gust swifting in from the trees to chill him until he shivered and clutched at his knees.

“Get up closer to the fire here,” said the large man.

Beam scooted forward and the heat grazed his arms.

“Said you fell asleep?”

Beam nodded. “I guess I did.”

“How you plan on getting home?”

Beam picked at the dirt between his sneakers. He hadn’t considered this and now it dawned on him the way Alton had abandoned him in the cemetery. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Walk I guess.”

“That’d be quite a hike.”

Beam picked a chunk of bark from the ground and tossed it into the fire. “Maybe y’all could give me a ride.”

The larger man stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hunting jacket. “I guess we might could,” he said, turning to the smaller man. “Let’s run this boy home and by the time we get back maybe the dogs will have come in.”

The other man bobbed his head in agreement. “That sounds good,” he said. He stood up from his bucket, holding his rifle in the crook of his arm. He smiled at Beam. “Truck’s down this way,” he said, and then moved out through the cemetery.

The larger man stood up and hoisted his rifle over his shoulder. “Come on. It ain’t no trouble for us to give you a ride.”

Beam stood and dusted himself off and then hitched at his jeans. The large man looked him up and down.

“This old boney ground here don’t make much of a bed, does it?” he said.

Beam shook his head. “No, sir.”

“I aim to have them throw a mattress down before I get in the grave. Maybe even a nice quilt or blanket.”

Beam looked at the man. He expected to see a grin, but the man was stern and serious, his lips a pale seam in his black whiskers.

“I wouldn’t want to think about it,” Beam said.

The man snorted and pulled at the rifle strap on his shoulder. “Reckon nobody does,” he said.