Chaneysville Incident (3 page)

Three and a half hours later my bus was boring up a moonlit slab of highway, the snarl of the exhaust bouncing off the walls of rock that towered on either side of the road. Except for the bus, the Turnpike was empty; four barren lanes, the concrete white like adhesive tape applied to the wounds the machines had slashed into the mountains. The bus moved swiftly, slamming on the downgrades, swaying on the turns. The driver was good and he knew the road; we were ahead of schedule, and long ago we had reached the point where the hills were familiar to me, even with just the moonlight to see by. Not that I needed to see them; I, too, knew the road, could pinpoint my location by the sways and the bumps. I knew that in a minute the driver would downshift and we would crawl up a long hill, and the road would be straight as an arrow from bottom to top, then twist away suddenly to the right. I knew that at the crest, just before the twist, there would be a massive gray boulder with names and dates scrawled on it, a cheap monument to the local consciousness:
DAVID LOVES ANNIE
;
CLASS OF
’61;
MARGO AND DANNY
;
BEAT THE BISONS
;
DEEP IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT
;
SCALP THE WARRIORS
;
NIXON THIS TIME.
After that the road would twist and turn and rise and fall like a wounded snake for eighteen miles, and then I would be there, or as close as this bus would take me.

And so I settled myself in my seat and took another pull on my flask and looked out the window at the mountainsides black with pine, and thought about how strange home is: a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run; about how strange it feels to be going back to that place and, even if you do not like it, even if you hate it, to get a tiny flush of excitement when you reach the point where you can look out the window and know, without thinking, where you are; when the bends in the road have meaning, and every hill a name.

A truck swung around the turn ahead of us, its running lights dancing briefly in the darkness, the sound of its diesel penetrating the bus, audible over the rumble of the bus engine, and I thought of the nights when I would lie in bed, listening to the trucks on the ’pike grinding on the grades, bellowing like disgruntled beasts, and promise myself that someday I would go where they were going: away. Bill had done that too, had lain and listened to the trucks. He had told me—but not until years later—how he had lain there, night after night, chanting softly the names of far-off cities to the eerie accompaniment of the whine of truck tires. I had done the same, in my own way: I would start with the next town to the east or the west along the ’pike and move on, saying the names of the exits one by one, as if I were moving by them. Once I even reached New Jersey before I fell asleep. And I remembered thinking, when Bill told me of his game and I told him of mine, that his was so much better; that he had visited and revisited Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Peking, while I was struggling to get out of the state. Later, I had wondered if it would be that way all our lives, he flying from place to place while I crawled, making local stops. I had watched with some curiosity to see if it would work out that way, and to some extent it had; he flew to Vietnam and never came back, and while I had taken a few leaps, I had ended up in Philadelphia. And now I was coming back, passing little towns, knowing their improbable names—Bloserville, Heberlig, Dry Run, Burnt Cabins, Wells Tannery, Defiance, Claylick, Plum Run, Buffalo Mills, Dott. The bus was an express, nonstop between Philly and Pittsburgh, but I was making local stops.

The truck vanished behind us, leaving an afterimage on my eyes, and the bus rolled down into a valley and across a bridge. The stream below it was called Brush Creek, and this time of year it would be low. The logs would stick out from the banks and gouge gurgling hollows in the sluggish water. Half a mile upstream, near the hulk of a dead hickory, was the place where, surprising no one so much as myself, I had caught my first catfish. Old Jack had helped me bait the hook, had shown me how to get the fish off it. And then he had taken his knife and shown me how to scale the fish and gut it, and we had built a fire and fried the fish in bacon grease in a black iron skillet he had packed along. It was a lot of trouble to go to and it could not have been much of a meal for him—it wasn’t much of a fish—but he said there was something special about a boy’s first catfish, no matter how small it was.

Then the bus was moving along the southern slope of a mountain—raw rock on one side, empty space on the other. I was almost there. I emptied the flask, capped it, put it in my pocket. I pulled my pack towards me, tightened the laces, checked the knots. Then I stood up and made my way towards the front. Five minutes later I stood by the side of the road, shivering in the sharp, clear mountain cold, and watched as the bus roared away into the darkness. And then I began to walk.

In the pink and eerie light of false dawn I stood and looked up at it: an array of houses spread out along four streets called, starting at the lowermost, Railroad, Union, Lincoln, and Grant, connected at the eastern end by a slightly larger one grandly and ridiculously named Vondersmith Avenue. The streets were only vaguely parallel; the houses were not much better. They were oddly shaped, so tall and thin that it seemed their foundations were too small to support their height and, more often than not, leaning dangerously to confirm the impression. Most were of wood, and had often been patched, with corrugated metal and plywood and tar paper. Paths led from their back doors to yards where clotheslines sagged. Smoke rose from their rough brick chimneys and drifted down the slope, bringing to me the odor not of fuel oil but of kerosene and pine wood and coal and, mingled with it, the faint effluvium of outhouses. At the center of it all stood a small church made of whitewashed logs. That was it. The place locally termed Niggers Nob and Boogie Bend and Spade Hollow and, more officially, since the appellation came from a former town engineer, Jigtown: the Hill.

I shrugged to resettle the pack on my shoulders and started up, thinking, as I did so, about the countless times I had made that climb, happy to be doing it, knowing it was the final effort before food, or drink, or bed, or just refuge from whatever it was that I needed to hide from. More than once I had reached the foot of the Hill on the dead run, pursued by white boys from the town, shouting names and curses; I would make the climb imagining that all the house windows were eyes staring at me; that they knew, somehow, that that day someone had called me a name or threatened me, and I had done nothing besides close my eyes and ears, trying to pretend it was not happening.

But now I was a man, and the windows were only windows; the only effect they had was to make me wonder what was happening behind them. At one time I would have known with virtual certainty. Behind the windows of that house, the one with the siding of red shingle molded to look like brick, Joseph “Uncle Bunk” Clay would have been shaving, the muscles of his arms looking strong and youthful, his dark brown skin smooth and tight against the pure white of his athletic shirt. The steam would have been rising from the enamel basin before him as he wiped vestiges of white lather from his face with a creamy towel, and he would move with surprising agility for his fifty-odd years as he began to put on his bellboy’s uniform. Aunt Emma Hawley would have been making sour milk biscuits. She had been making them exactly the same way every morning for forty years; Mr. Hawley insisted on having his breakfast biscuits. That was the weather-beaten house at the far end of Railroad Street, the one with the low shed next to it, in which three generations of Hawleys had tended store, one of the few places in the world where you could still buy a bottle of Moxie. A little way up the slope would have been the meticulously tended home of Aunt Lydia Pettigrew. Behind its shining clean windows Aunt Lydia would have been tenderly feeding the most bloodthirsty pack of mongrels north of Meridian, Mississippi. Aunt Lydia had kept the dogs since the state had taken her last two foster children, Daniel and Francis, away from her, and she was the only person who could come near those dogs without being torn to bits, for good reason—she had spoiled them by feeding them nothing but ground round steak, with Almond Joy candy bars for dessert. At the very bottom of the Hill, and way off to the left, two little girls would have been playing in front of a ramshackle house. The girls, Cara and Mara, and the house belonged to Miss Linda Jamison. It sat where it sat to spare visitors the necessity of climbing the Hill, of venturing any farther onto it than necessary. Inside it, Miss Linda would have been sleeping, exhausted from her night of entertaining a few “good friends” from the town. At the top of the Hill was the house Moses Washington had built. Behind its windows no one would have been stirring; Moses Washington had left his wife and children “comfortable,” which meant that his wife could support the family on the money she made as a lawyer’s secretary, and did not have to get up before seven. And on the far side of the Hill, where, quite literally, the sun didn’t shine, and where the houses—only one now—had no windows, Old Jack Crawley would have been “doing his mornings” in the old battered outhouse down the slope from the spring where he drew his water.

I knew nothing about the Hill any longer, I had made it my business not to know. But now suddenly, inexplicably, I was curious, and so I thought for a moment, pulling half-remembered facts from the back of my mind—scraps of information—and made extrapolations. Uncle Bunk, his arms permanently bowed from sixty years of suitcases, trunks, train cases, hatboxes, golf bags, et cetera, now spent his hours playing checkers by the stove. There was usually no one there for him to play with, so he moved for both sides. Aunt Emma Hawley still made biscuits. She had seen no need to stop making them when Mr. Hawley died, and so she kept on making them and fed them to the chickens—she couldn’t stand sour milk biscuits. The gleaming white paint and meticulously applied green trim on Aunt Lydia’s house was flaking and spotted, for Aunt Lydia was no longer around to hire the workmen for shrewdly low wages and watch them like a hawk; she had been found lying on her spotless kitchen floor surrounded by her sleek murderous mongrels, who steadfastly protected her even after she had been dead for two days—from malnutrition. Miss Linda Jamison’s house looked little different, but now it was just a hulk. She and her girls had moved to better quarters a few blocks from the center of town; Miss Linda’s “good friends” had grown too old to walk so far, and their sons, who were “good friends” of Miss Linda’s girls, did not like to walk at all, and the cars were…conspicuous. There would be fewer sleepers in Moses Washington’s fieldstone house; the sons had gone away. And Old Jack Crawley was sick.

I reached the top and stood looking at Moses Washington’s house. The walls were rock-and-mortar. The style of masonry was uneven, the lower, earliest-laid courses being of dressed stone, the upper two thirds or three fourths being of fieldstone. Despite the fact that all the stones were more or less triangular—the rocks in the lower courses having been trimmed to that shape, the ones in the upper courses having been, apparently, selected for it—the change in style from ashlar to rubble was apparent and abrupt and, in fact, quite ugly. The question of why the mason had changed styles had never been answered—my own early theory, that Moses Washington had wanted triangular rocks (the why of that being still another question) and it had been quicker and easier to find them than to cut them, proved erroneous—for the simple reason that the mason had been Moses Washington himself, and no one had ever been able to figure out why Moses Washington did anything; no one even knew where and when he had learned masonry. And given the ugliness of the house, one could say he never had.

Certainly he had laid his own ideas on top of any formal knowledge he might have possessed. The mortar, for example, was cooked limestone, the sort of cementing agent that Henri Christophe of Haiti had used to build the famed Citadel. But where Christophe was rumored to have thickened his mortar with the blood of goats, Moses Washington had used portland cement—although it was rumored, too, that the bones of more than one of Moses Washington’s enemies might be discovered beneath the foundation.

The dressed stone had come from the foundation of the house itself. The rest of it had been dug out of the foundations of houses that lurked in the underbrush on the far side of the Hill, hauled over by Moses Washington and Jack Crawley and Uncle Josh “Snakebelly” White during one of the most murderous Augusts the County had ever seen. It would have been sensible to wait for cooler weather, but Moses Washington had a schedule, and the schedule said move the stone in August, so he had. That was how Moses Washington was. The only times he had backed off from anything was in order to get up speed. Laws local, state, federal, military, and possibly international had not stopped him, threats of incarceration and/or bodily harm had not stopped him; the weather was not about to. Jack Crawley and Josh White had helped him because they had always helped him. The three of them had run together for forty years, hunting and fishing and drinking and generally scandalizing the County. They had run together through—or perhaps “over” is a better word—Prohibition, and neither the Volstead Act nor the relative fortune that Moses Washington had made because of it changed anything. They had run together through the Depression, and that just made them worse; some of the market for Moses Washington’s home brew dried up, and the three of them were forced to consume large quantities in order to keep the prices from falling due to oversupply. They had done a heroic job. When World War II had begun they had tried to enlist together, even though Josh White, the youngest of them, was fifty. They still tell the story on the Hill about how the three of them had stormed the old Espy House, drunk as lords, demanding to be signed up, threatening to take the place apart if they weren’t. Uncle Josh and Old Jack actually did tear the place up, scattering files and file clerks, until they passed out. Moses Washington, seeming suddenly sober, had waited until the dust had settled, and then had taken the director of enlistment aside and spoken to him for a while, and nobody knows exactly what was said, but the next time anyone heard of Moses Washington he was a noncommissioned officer in the Army of the United States, and the next time they heard of him he was in Italy, and then they heard no more until he came back from the war with medals and ribbons bearing witness to his valor and discharge papers certifying his total insanity. This, it was rumored, was because he had tried to shoot one of the white Southern officers that were invariably placed in charge of black combat units. It was a rumor that nobody believed, since the last time Moses Washington missed something he was aiming at was a matter not of record but of legend, and it was widely suspected that the charge of attempted murder was really the result of the workings of Moses Washington’s bizarre sense of humor. But as the days following his return from the war passed, it became evident that he was, if not actually crazy, certainly
changed.
He did not go back to his work, which, for as long as most people could remember, had been supplying the half of the County that drank with corn liquor. He gave that up, and he gave up drinking whiskey himself. He gave up cards. And he more or less gave up hunting—he still went out, but he went without a gun; no one, as usual, knew why, and no one was fool enough to ask.