Читать книгу Drifting South - Charles Davis, Charles Davis B. - Страница 9

Chapter 5

It was early morning now, and as orange colors started taking over the sky and the bus made its way through the bottom end of the Shenandoah Valley, I kept wondering again like I’d had a thousand times if Uncle Ray was following his own nature that terrible evening.

Uncle Ray had always told me that the time would probably come when I might need to fight for my life or run for my life, and I’d have to choose quick and wise or I might never leave those mountains whether I wanted to or not. That was the sort of thing that made me think of the choice he made that day so long ago. I remembered how he told me once that I wasn’t born with two feet to just stand on and get killed.

And he told me that cowardice was a much misunderstood thing by most—those of the weaker stock. The same bunch who may talk loud around like weak ears, but stand to the side and become quiet men and steer clear of actual situations where they may have to come face-to-face with such a thing.

As the bus headed south toward Roanoke and then Shawsville, I couldn’t think of a single lesson of Uncle Ray’s that didn’t come in handy at some time or another. Looking around at the children keeping their mommas awake and having a time of things on that bus at such an early hour, I wondered if most boys from other places got lessons on fighting and running so young, and do so much of it, like boys in Shady Hollow did. I reckoned they probably didn’t.

When the bus neared Christiansburg and started having a hard time going up those rugged old mountains, I felt like I was home already and I wished I had a window that would roll down so I could smell it. It’s hard to describe such a feeling that I had that early June morning as the sun was just starting to blaze up the hills and ridges. It was one of those full, peaceful feelings that comes so seldom and sits way deep down inside a person. It made me hopeful, like there was more going on than just another day had come. I wondered if maybe my long spell of bad luck had finally come to an end.

My anger wasn’t gone from me, I knew that, but it was being stilled the closer I got to home. I’d never figured that would happen, but I was starting to feel good and young again in ways you only get when it comes natural like it was doing.

I knew I couldn’t ever get back the years I’d lost and that fact still set in a fiery bad place in me like it always had, but now it looked to me that maybe some answers and a sunny day or two were ahead of me. I didn’t feel like I was just taking a breath to take another one maybe, to only then be able to take another one. It felt real good inside is what I’m saying, and that was a new thing for me. I didn’t feel so dead inside anymore. I felt alive in all ways, many of them I’d forgotten that I even could or ever had felt before. My stop was coming up soon, and I’d never been so dang anxious about anything.

I kept wondering what I’d say after being gone for so long, if Ma still had my old fiddle and other things I’d known as a boy, what I’d holler walking into Hoke’s, and especially, all of the things I needed to say and ask Ma and my brothers when I first saw them after we’d had a chance to fellowship and get to know one another again, if I could do that without facing the most serious of things with them first. Truth was I didn’t know what I’d do or how I’d act when I stepped foot there. As loud as the things were inside me, the years had grown me silent on the outside and I might not be able to say nothing.

I’d been either worried about or had been mad at Ma for a long time. But the closer I got to her, I just wanted to see her and hoped to find some peace between us somehow because I needed to feel something like that in a terrible way. I wondered about her for a long time on that trip and then somewhere on the road, my thoughts went to my brothers and where the winds may have taken them.

I thought about each one of them, and was curious to find out if they’d stayed in Shady, and how many of them now had families of their own, and if over time they’d left to find their own places and fortunes somewhere else, which I figured they all did.

I hoped luck had been good to them because, besides being my brothers, they were a good bunch of boys even if none of them ever came to visit me. I’d missed each of them more than they’d ever know, and I tried to figure like I’d done countless times what they’d aged to look like and such things because the last time I had seen them, most were just half-grown or less.

We were the closest of close growing up, sharing that one bedroom and generally one mattress, unless one or more were too young and slept in a bureau drawer or a pasteboard box beside Ma’s bed.

I was the oldest, and then there was Milton, James, Bernard, Franklin, Theodore and little Virgil. We were all kinds of different colors but we all carried the same last name Ma had, which was Purdue. Her first name was Rebecca, even though almost everybody in Shady called her Violet, which was her working name. Her closest friends called her Becca, which is the name I guessed she favored most to be called. Ma didn’t carry a middle name back then that I knew of.

Me, Frank and little Virgil were white-looking, mostly. Jimmy was shaded just like Ma, Milton was a red-brown color and Bernie was dark with slanted eyes. But Teddy was the one who stuck out the most from the rest of us, like the time when Ma let a photographer pay for her services with a sit-down photo of us. Teddy had green eyes, blond-red wiry hair and skin dark as a midnight with no moon. It was a black-and-white photo, but you could sense the different colors on him if you studied the picture where it hung in our living room.

Me and my brothers didn’t look much like brothers but we got along as brothers do, beating the tar out of each other one minute but not letting no one else put a hand on any of us the next. Local folks called us the Mutt Gang, and we didn’t look for trouble much, just mischief, but few boys or even grown men dared cross us after wronging us once.

Little Virgil was the only one of us who ever had a real dad in Shady because for some reason, a short feller with a small round curly head named Arthur Hoskins decided to face up to his responsibility about it.

I was so young then that my memory of Arthur Hoskins was fuzzy but I remember Ma wanting to get married quick to Arthur before he tried to get away. Arthur couldn’t go to the outhouse or take a walk by himself for a week before the nuptials without a man hired by the elders keeping an eye on him if Ma wasn’t around.

She told us that she’d finally found a decent man who could tolerate children and her occupation, so her and Arthur up and got hitched one hot Saturday afternoon under a walnut tree beside the Big Walker River. They even hauled in a real preacher from Abington on the back of a hay truck to do the ceremony. Ma insisted on a legal wedding.

Everybody in Shady Hollow went to it dressed up in the finest they owned as we all stood on the grassy riverbank.

Once it was over and dark set in, there was general high living and raucous behavior of all sorts. The elders paid for all of it.

But that short loud feller Ma had got hitched to got himself shot outside of McCauley’s Pavilion just before little Virgil was even crawling. Got shot square in the face. By a woman. Ma found out later that her dead husband was married to about a dozen other women besides her. One of them tracked him to Shady Hollow and killed him over it because he’d taken a good bit of her fortunes before he left.

The elders questioned Ma afterward over and over why a true professional con man like Arthur Hoskins, whose trade turned out to be robbing wealthy women, would want to marry a whore in Shady Hollow who didn’t have nothing but a bunch of hungry young’uns. Arthur’s other wives were all rich or within spitting distance of it. Ma kept telling the elders that she didn’t know, maybe Arthur just felt love for her and little Virgil.

They never bought into her explanation, I don’t think. Even grieving over her dead husband, Ma was summoned to a lot of elder meetings that year. Looking back, I believe that’s why they started getting suspicious of her.

Anyway, growing up, me and my brothers never called any man Dad or Papa or anything like that, but Ma told us to call some of the men who spent time around our second-floor apartment our “uncles,” so we did.

We had lots of uncles in Shady Hollow, and they came and went like leaves ride the river current.

They’d be there for a spell, giving Ma as much money as she could talk out of them and they’d eat her good Southern cooking and bounce a baby on a knee. They shared her bed, too, when she wasn’t working or when one of us wasn’t in it sick, and then one day we’d wake up and all sight and smell of them would be gone.

We’d stand quiet in our three-room apartment, looking out an open window, feeling the chill, watching theway the curtain would blow in and out. Ma had a cowbell nailed above the squeaky door to our apartment to keep better track of us. I guess that’s why they always left out a window—to keep from ringing that bell, same as we did when we’d sneak out.

Ma would shut the window tight all of a sudden and tell us that Uncle Pete or Uncle Shelby or Uncle Carl or Uncle whoever wasn’t bringing back breakfast because he wasn’t coming back. And that’s the last time any of us could speak their name as Ma would go to making grits on top of the coal stove.

She always made grits when we lost an uncle, not sure why because Ma hated grits and I was never fond of them, either. But we’d salt and pepper them and put butter or cheese in them and sit and eat quiet. Times were gonna be hard for a while. Grits signaled such times and we ate a lot of them between uncles.

Uncle Ray was my favorite uncle out of all of them.

Ma had told me the first day he moved in with us that he wasn’t my real uncle when I asked her, which meant he wasn’t my real father. But he could have been one to one of my brothers I guess—even though he didn’t look like none of us that I could see, except Teddy, because Teddy sort of looked like everybody.

Uncle Ray was getting a head start on being an old man in those times. But when he was younger, he’d went to a big college in Connecticut learning to be a doctor, Ma said. He got in some bad trouble not being able to pay off gambling and schooling debts to a bunch of serious fellers in New York City. Uncle Ray took off and I don’t know if he was ever a real doctor. But he could cut and stitch like no one else and he doctored in Shady whenever needed, even if he had to leave a card game to do it. And even if he was winning big or losing big, which he was admired for by some and not for by some others. I figured, too, sometimes that was the reason why Uncle Ray tended to be such a poor gambler.

He’d taught Ma and a couple of other gals to be his nurses for whenever he needed help, and he always told me that Ma was the best of all of them and it was a shame she never got an education. I remember both of them going off together in a rush at all times of the day or night once summoned for help from somebody, most usually for a woman in trouble. I guess I can best say that as far as making a living, Ma tended to the wants of men and the needs of women, all who came to Shady for such different reasons.

But before they worked together as doctor and nurse, it was clear from the first day Uncle Ray stepped foot in Shady that he liked Ma, because he was her best-paying customer. He doted on her more than most men ever did, buying her fancy garments or a hat or even flowers, stuff he didn’t need to buy because he always paid his turn with her in advance. I guess he just wanted to spend more money on her.

I didn’t think back then that Ma deep-down loved Uncle Ray like some folks you see do in movies. He didn’t love her in that way, either, but she seemed to care for him in a more than tolerable way. He stuck around long enough even when he wasn’t forced to, to show me how to do things like use that razor and how to load and shoot a gun—by not paying mind to what’s going on around you or the stirrings in you at that moment, but to just keep eyeballing the front sight and make sure it stayed in the middle of what you wanted to hit, and then keep squeezing that trigger nice and slow no matter if your hands were shaking because they were gonna be shaking if someone was shooting back at you.

“Nice and slow,” he said over and over.

I must have squeezed the trigger on his empty wheel gun a hundred or more times in Ma’s apartment as he’d lay a dime on the barrel. He told me I could keep the dime when I aimed in and squeezed the trigger and the dime was still balancing.

I eventually got to keep that ten cents, and got to pocket about a dollar’s worth more change over the weeks as we’d keep practicing. One day when we walked to the edge of Shady, he finally gave me a real bullet to put in his gun.

I hit an old chicken-pecked pie tin from thirty paces away that he’d hung from a locust tree branch.

Dead center.

He took his revolver from me and said, “You don’t need any more shooting lessons.”

The gun bucked up and backward and I brought it down to squeeze the trigger again, but when I did Mr. Charles was flat on his back in the middle of Main Street. His hat had fallen off, and looking at his thin white hair laying in the muddy street, I now knew for certain that it was him. Ma was crying hysterical and she ran over and kicked the pistol out of his hand even though he wasn’t moving.

I looked down at Uncle Ray and he wasn’t moving, either. Not even his quick eyes, which were wide-open, staring at the sky.

Then Amanda Lynn screamed to the top of her lungs.

I’d just fallen down, almost like my legs were yanked out from under me. I believe it was her scream that helped me to get my head back together and shake off whatever had gotten hold of me. I came to and then stood so I could get a good look at her to make sure she hadn’t got shot, too. When I did, I could hardly stand up so I looked down at myself, wondering if I’d been shot. I didn’t see blood coming out of me anywhere, and I looked back at Amanda Lynn. She had both hands up to her face, still screaming, and when I went to touch her, she put her arms around herself and backed away from me all of a sudden like I was something bad she didn’t want to be near.

I just stood there shaking. Everything had happened so fast that I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I wasn’t even sure what I’d done until I felt a heavy weight in my left hand. I looked down at the revolver and dropped it into the dirt and felt even more dizzy when I saw smoke drift out of the barrel. I was sure I was gonna fall over so I went down to both knees as a foul taste came up in my throat. I saw Ma was now laying across Uncle Ray.

Some kind of wailing I’d never heard before came from inside her, then she looked around scared to death and ran a couple of steps over to me. Ma grabbed Uncle Ray’s gun and it seemed like she didn’t know what to do with it, but needed to keep it as she kept looking at the crowds. She finally eased it into a robe pocket just before she pulled me up gentle and looked me over. It looked like she wanted to say something but couldn’t get nothing out. Then she looked again at all of the faces staring at us. There wasn’t a sound in Shady Hollow but for the sounds of our breathing.

Ma turned back to me and then looked over Amanda Lynn while trying to take in quick deep breaths. Then she pointed at an old Chevrolet sitting about twenty yards from us in a weedy field between Goldie’s Pawn and the old burned-down horse livery.

“Take. Take. That car. Now.”

The way Ma couldn’t talk right made me shake even more than I was doing. Then I wondered if maybe she was talking right but I just wasn’t hearing things right. I looked over my shoulder at Amanda Lynn and she flew toward me and grabbed me around the waist from behind. I could feel her shaking, too.

“Why’d Mr. Charles—” I started to ask Amanda Lynn.

Ma got right up close to my face and talked in a rush like her mouth worked right again but she was still all out of breath. “There may be more of them here and they’re gonna try to kill you. You have to leave. Now!”

I stared at Ma and then pulled Amanda Lynn around where I could see her. Her eyes looked wide as quart jars. She’d quit screaming but her face had gone a sick-looking shade and she didn’t even look like the girl she just was a minute or two before. “Why’d he do such a thing? Why’d he—?” I asked her.

She couldn’t speak so I tried to read her wide eyes, but I’d never seen them like that and couldn’t make a word out of them. I couldn’t tell nothing about her except she was terrified.

I turned back to Ma when Ma said, “She can’t go.”

I got all choked up and fought back the bad tastes in my throat and my eyes filled up with water. “What’s happening, Ma?”

Ma turned from me and kept scanning the crowds. She turned back. “You have to go. Right now, Ben. Right now.”

“It just don’t make no—”

Ma grabbed my hands and barely got out, “They found us and more will come. You have to go!”

“We been hiding from somebody?”

She peered down and then stared straight into my eyes as best she could even though it looked like she was falling apart. “I’ve been hiding you,” she said.

“From who?”

“I have to get your brothers.”

“I ain’t leaving without you all.”

She squeezed my wrists hard. “You’re gonna do exactly what I say.”

“But why do I have to… What ain’t you saying?”

Ma shook her head and the far edges of her eyebrows sunk down like there were lead sinkers tied to them. Then all of us turned to look when we heard men yelling coming from down the street. Their voices broke the dead quiet of the crowds.

Ma turned back to me. “I’ll find you and explain things. I’ll find you when—”

“I can’t leave—”

“We all may be in danger. You have to—”

“Can’t the elders protect us?”

“Not from this,” she said.

As I was trying to make sense of what she’d just said, we all noticed how the people were starting to mill closer to us. Ma pulled out a roll of money from her bosom, shoved it as far down into my back pocket as it would go, and then grabbed my hand and put a car key in my palm with her fingers cold and wet as a drip from an icicle.

She turned me toward the old rusted-out Chevrolet. It didn’t have any plates on it. “Take it,” she said, pushing me toward the car.

“Whose is it?”

“Take it!”

Ma started pushing and pulling me harder and I figured it was her customer’s as Ma and Uncle Ray didn’t have a car.

I had Amanda Lynn’s hand in mine and was pulling her with me. Ma stopped and grabbed both of our arms and jerked us apart.

All of a sudden a shotgun blast came from a block away that made us jump and sent my heart racing even more. People were trying to run but it looked like none of them knew which direction to head. I just stared at Ma because I didn’t know what to do.

She grabbed me hard by the arm and with her other hand, she pulled the revolver out of her robe, holding it by the very end of the checkered grip. It was then that I noted the blood on it. Ma looked as scared of that gun as she did at whatever frightened her in the crowd. She tried to hand it to me but I wouldn’t take it. She finally pushed the barrel of it way down into my front pant’s pocket. It was clear to me that she thought I was gonna need that gun again. I was so scared at that point that I didn’t think I could even hold on to it, and I didn’t never ever want to have to fire a gun again. That made me scared even worse. Ma giving me that gun had told me whatever was happening wasn’t over.

Another shotgun blast echoed off the buildings and mountains and this time it sounded closer.

“Go!” Ma started pulling me again to the car as we all started running with our heads way down in our shoulders.

I had Amanda Lynn in one hand again and the car key in the other. I was all tensed up and it felt like my legs were so heavy that I was trying to run upstream through rapids.

“Go to where?” I yelled.

“Head toward the mines. Don’t tell nobody your real name. And don’t come back until I find you. I’ll find you. You can’t ever come back here unless I tell you it’s safe. Not ever.”

“Ma…”

We were almost to the car when I stopped. All of us were trembling from the head down to the ground.

Ma grabbed me hard by both shoulders and stood up as tall as she could, then she kissed my cheek real fast and put an arm around Amanda Lynn, who now didn’t even look like she was breathing.

“I’ll make sure she gets home. I’ll take care of her. You know I’ll take care of her. Now go!”

“But why was he looking to just kill—”

I was looking at Amanda Lynn, begging for some answer, for her to just say something, and then at Ma, when another blast came. This time I found out that the yelling and the gunshots had come from three elders who were trying to part the crowds. Elder Bertrand Puckett had stuck his shotgun straight up in the air and fired it. The other two elders were carrying their double-barrels at the ready.

I looked over at Uncle Ray still laying there in a heap with his legs tangled up underneath him. His eyes were still wide-open, the front of his white shirt was red and the dirt around him had turned into a dark maroon color.

Ma let go of Amanda Lynn, then half dragged and half pushed me the last few feet to the car, flung open the door and I jumped in it or I’d of fell into it with Ma pushing me so hard. “I’ll find you, baby,” she said. “I promise I’ll find you. Don’t get off the dirt roads.”

She slammed the door.

I looked at Amanda Lynn, dropped the key on the floorboard, found it and then couldn’t hardly get it into the ignition with my fingers not working. So Ma grabbed the key back from me, fired that car up and started yelling “go” over and over and over, as I just held on to the steering wheel.

“Get out of that car!” Elder Warren Ratcliffe ordered. He’d taken cover behind the corner of Steiner’s Fine Men’s Clothier and had his shotgun pointed right at my head. Ma ran and put herself between him and me, waving her hands in the air and screaming for nobody to shoot because it was her boy in that car.

She then turned back toward me, pleading with her eyes for me to get out of there.

My leg was barely able to hold in the clutch as I jammed the shift straight up the column into Reverse and spun the car around until it was in the road. That’s when Ma grabbed Amanda Lynn’s hand and they ran nearer the elders as she begged them again not to shoot.

I watched in the rearview mirror as Amanda Lynn pulled away from Ma and ran back toward me before she fell in the street right where we’d just stood. She went to her knees and screamed my name as the elders kept ordering me to get out of the car as they slowly circled Amanda Lynn and Ma, waving away the crowds with their shotguns when they weren’t pointed at me.

I started crying like I hadn’t cried since I was a little kid, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I did what Ma said. I slumped down in the seat, popped the clutch and stomped the gas pedal to the floor, praying those elders weren’t gonna shoot. I never let my foot off until I’d climbed the first hill that led out of Shady Hollow.

I wasn’t planning on running all the way to the coal towns just over the border in West Virginia like Ma’d said. I was just gonna go far enough where I couldn’t hear Amanda Lynn’s screaming or Ma’s yelling no more. I pulled the revolver out of my pocket and laid it on the seat beside me because the long barrel was pushing into my leg and the butt of it was jammed into my stomach, making me sit almost sideways. I then sat up straight once I was out of the elders’ shotgun range and I drove that old car as hard as it would go up the steep hill out of Shady, and almost tore the bottom out of it bouncing over ruts.