Fat Lightning (6 page)

She's read a history of Mosby County that she found while browsing in Monacan's cramped library, half the size of Sam's father's drugstore, only open 10 to 4, Monday through Friday. From reading this book, Nancy's main impression of Old Monacan, where Lot lives, is that it is prone to have a disaster every 100 years.

In 1678, it was the Indians massacring the Huguenots, killing dozens and scattering the rest before the militia came back to kill every Indian found in a 10-mile radius.

In 1773, a flood destroyed most of the town, persuading the settlers to rebuild farther back from the river.

In 1879, a fire burned up four blocks; it was already losing dominance to the new town on the main road, two miles away.

Nancy likes the permanent feel of Monacan itself. There are sidewalks old enough to be cracking from maple and willow roots coming up underneath, and the houses in the town's six residential blocks are all solidly brick and well-shaded, so that she can pretend she's back in the tamer streets of Richmond if she doesn't look to the ends of these streets where corn and tobacco back up to side yards.

Nancy and Sam are watching TV, enjoying the hour or so between the time Wade goes down and they themselves do the same, when the old doorbell gives a muted ring.

“Well, hey, Aunt Aileen,” Nancy hears Sam say, and she knows their short evening break is over. She switches off the TV.

“Now, don't turn that thing off on my account,” Aileen says. “I can't stay anyhow.”

But Nancy does get her to stay. Aileen talks about Grace's hiatal hernia and Holly's daughter Zoe, who doesn't visit enough, and finally works her way around to the business she came for, in the roundabout way Nancy has noticed is a trademark of Sam's family. Either they just blurt it out, or they dance around it so long you wish they would just blurt it out.

Finally, she says, “Sam, I think Lot might be losing his mind.”

“Well, how can you tell, Aunt Aileen?” Sam says. Nancy laughs, thinking Sam's making a joke, then sees that this is an inappropriate response.

So, Aileen tells them about the barn door, where Lot showed her the image of Jesus.

“He says it's there every day, right before sunset,” Aileen says. “I don't know who's going to look after him if he loses his mind. I can't bear the thought of having to lock him up.”

“Aw, Aunt Aileen, he'll be OK. He's always been excitable,” Sam says. “He'll outlive us all.” This last is the first part of a family joke of sorts. The unspoken punch line is, “He'll aggravate the rest of us to death first.”

“The worst part,” she says, “is that, when I looked at that barn, and looked where he told me to, it was like I could see Jesus on the cross. Do you reckon I'm losing my mind, too?”

“It's like clouds,” Nancy says, and from the looks both of them give her, she immediately feels she's cut in on a private conversation. “You know, you look up at a cloud and you can see just about anything you want to see.”

She's embarrassed and then infuriated when not only Aileen but also Sam stare at her as if SHE's lost her mind.

“I'll make some coffee,” she says.

Later, in bed, Sam tells her that Aileen said she saw the image two weeks ago, but that she didn't want to tell anybody because she was afraid people would think the whole family was crazy.

“We're going out there tomorrow evening,” Sam says. “You promised Uncle Lot you'd let him see Wade anyhow.”

“When?”

“Christmas. Two years ago.”

“Before he was born? You remember plenty when you want to. You couldn't remember the times we lay in the grass at Byrd Park and made up stories about clouds, though, could you?”

Sam does a quarter-turn to face her in the dark. “There wasn't any sense in changing the subject, was there?”

Nancy doesn't say anything, but she realizes, lying in the dark, that she is more angry with Sam about this than about his moving them to Monacan.

She's been lying on her side, away from Sam, for perhaps five minutes, too upset to sleep, when she hears a small voice:

“Am I being lamb-blasted?”

She tries to stay mad at him, but the memory makes her start giggling.

“Goddammit, Sam, let me stay mad,” she says, rolling over and punching him in the ribs.

“Just don't lamb-blast me,” he says, pulling the pillow over his head with both hands in anticipation of the attack that usually leads to some rather fierce love-making.

When they were not yet married and were renting an apartment on a not-yet-gentrified street in the Fan, they had a landlord who lived in the unit above theirs and fought constantly with his wife.

Once, after Sam and Nancy had spent a sleepless hour listening to a dish-throwing argument that began when Mr. Loughery came in around 2 a.m. one Sunday, they ran into their landlord on their way to brunch.

He was sitting on the front stoop, staring at a similar stoop across the street. He had on what appeared to be the same clothes he'd worn when he tried to slip home unnoticed a few hours earlier. He hadn't shaved, and his hands were locked behind his head, seemingly to keep it from falling off and rolling down the steps into the street.

Mr. Loughery looked up at them with bloodshot eyes.

“She fwowed me out,” he said. Mr. Loughery usually pronounced “th” sounds as “f,” and his “r's” sometimes sounded like “w's.”

“I'm fwew wif her,” he said. “She's all the time lamb-blasting me.”

For years, Sam could defuse any argument by accusing Nancy of “lamb-blasting” him, and she realizes now that he hasn't used their old code word in six months at least, that what arguments they have show a disturbing tendency not to dissipate but to harden into cold little lumps, out of sight but only out of mind until the next disagreement. Sam, who was always quiet, just seems to pull the flaps of his tent closed now rather than deal with unpleasantness.

Nancy, lying now facing her husband, who's fallen into a post-coital sleep and is snoring lightly, misses the humor.

The next day is a Wednesday. Sam is home by 6:10; he hasn't failed yet to mention how he can walk from his father's drugstore, soon to be his, more quickly than he could drive from the DrugLand to their home in Richmond.

Nancy has made spaghetti. They eat, with Nancy mashing up little bits for Wade, and then, as they are finishing dinner, Aileen pulls into the circular drive.

“Is it really necessary for me to go?” Nancy asks.

“I think his feelings would be hurt if you didn't bring Wade along.”

“Well, you take him then. Your uncle doesn't care about seeing me.”

Sam gives her his hurt look, and she sighs, then goes to get a wet cloth to wipe off Wade's sauce-encrusted face while Sam answers the front door.

On the way over, nobody says much. The land from Route 17 to Old Monacan has a gouged-out appearance. The Jeters have sold off trees on much of their property, and the bare patches expose a clay so red it makes Nancy uneasy, a red that can be detected on a moonlit night. She's noticed it in the clothes of workmen in the area, a dark stain that doesn't seem to ever go away. But as they come around the curve that marks the boundary between Jeter's land and the old Chastain property, the old oaks, sycamores and willows are preserved. The rest of the family would prefer that Lot did sell some of his timber, but he's made it clear to them that not one limb of his mother's and father's trees will be hauled off by the lumber men as long as he lives.

It's 7:30 by the time they get there, and the sun is almost low enough to shine beneath the branches of the sycamore west of the barn. It seems to be a deeper orange here than in the city, Nancy thinks, probably because of the smoke from the sawdust pile. She will forever associate this place with a smoldering, almost-ignited scent. The sky's few clouds are turning pink, and a jet contrail forms a straight line high above them.

Sam parks the car beside Lot's trailer and goes around to open the front passenger door for Aileen while Nancy helps Wade out of the car seat. Lot himself comes walking toward them, from the barn. He's not alone. Behind him, keeping a distance, are two boys who seem to be about 14 years old.

“You all like to have missed it,” he says. “Come on.”

They walk back toward the barn, which Sam has told Nancy is built over the ruins of an early settler's abandoned home. The sun is hitting the barn straight on now; in 15 minutes it will disappear.

“The one with the red hair is a Jeter,” Lot says to his visitors. “The other one is a Basset.”

Wade has his head on Nancy's shoulder, with his thumb in his mouth, ready to go to sleep, when Lot notices him.

“Come here, boy,” he says with an unpracticed mock roughness that Wade misinterprets. He starts to cry when Lot tries to hold him.

“I reckon he's just backward, is all,” Lot says and turns away.

By now, everyone is looking at the barn, no one saying a word. Finally, Lot starts pointing out where the arms and legs, even the nails, are.

“Up there, see the crown of thorns?” he says, pointing several slats up from eye level.

Sam and Nancy both have to admit to themselves, later, that it is an amazing likeness of Jesus on the cross. Somehow, the mold and aging have given the boards a design. And, unlike the clouds, it doesn't seem to change.

“That's amazing, Uncle Lot,” Sam says.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Aileen says, and Nancy shakes her head. Lot has a proud, proprietary look.

The two boys have been helping Lot clear his garden.

“Granddaddy'd beat me good if he knew I come over here,” the red-headed one, the Jeter, says. The other boy, who has deeply tanned skin and sandy hair, says nothing, but he can't keep his eyes off the side of the barn, staring for five minutes after it's impossible to see anything in the fading light.

“Do you reckon we're all crazy?” Aileen asks no one in particular.

“They thought Jesus was crazy, too,” Lot says.

By now, they're walking back toward the trailer, past the side of the big house. The Jeter boy has headed off through the woods home, but the Basset is staying, hanging back a few steps.

“He's got him a tent over there,” Lot motions with his head toward the river to their left. “He's from French Crossing, and his folks don't give him much showing, so sometimes he just wades across, or takes the jonboat if the water's high. Don't hurt nothing.”

Lot speaks to Nancy individually for the first time since they got there.

“I don't reckon you all got anything like this back in Richmond,” he says.

“I don't guess so,” she says. She's tired by now of carrying Wade. Sam takes the child from her.

“He looks kind of like Daddy,” Lot says, and everybody nods their heads. “Wish you all would of come before he got so cranky.”

Nancy looks at Sam, who wills her not to snap back at the old man. They talk awhile, then decline Lot's invitation to come inside. By 9:30, they're back in Monacan, which seems like a city to Nancy after Old Monacan. Aileen doesn't come in. Before she drives off, she asks, “Do you reckon we ought to tell anybody about this, Sam?” and Sam shrugs his shoulders. “Don't suppose it'd hurt anything, Aunt Aileen.”

Nancy puts Wade to bed. She still doesn't know what to think about what they've seen, but she wonders if there isn't a short story, or even another novel—one that won't return—in her husband's uncle. If, she thinks to herself, anybody could stand to be around him long enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Steed Jackson, the editor of the Herald, hears about Lot's barn and comes out with his camera one weekday afternoon in early June. The image doesn't photograph well at all, but the Herald story alerts everyone in the county who hasn't heard about it yet by word of mouth. The Times-Dispatch sends a reporter out from Richmond, and they do a story on it that is read all over the state. Then The Associated Press picks it up and does a rewrite referring to the people in and around Monacan as “folks.” Lot begins getting calls from radio and TV stations in other states.

Soon, the road that goes through Simon Jeter's barn, the road that can go for days without any traffic, is congested. People coming and going on the rut trail beyond the barn have to take to the fields to avoid colliding with each other. By mid-June, it is not unusual for 100 people to be standing at the barn by 8 p.m., waiting for the sun's rays to hit the right spot.

“There! I can see his feet!” one old man might say. “There's the crown of thorns!” a woman holding a Bible might add, pointing with her free hand. Slowly, the crowd verbally puts together the puzzle on the side of Lot's barn, a low murmur and occasional shout breaking the silence. They stand and watch until the sun's last light has faded, then they silently go back to their cars, which are parked all around the old Chastain house and down the rut road that goes by Lot's trailer.

Lot himself usually stands back from the crowd, accepting the occasional compliment from shy pilgrims as his rightful due.

“The Lord is trying to tell us something,” he might say, and two or three people in the background will murmur, “Amen.” He's still surprised that, for the first time in his life, people seem to move closer when he starts expressing his opinions rather than try to find an exit. Most of the people aren't from around Monacan. The locals all saw it the first two weeks after Aileen spread the word. Other than occasional family members and the Basset boy, most of the people who come now are from other parts of the county, and some come from as far away as Richmond or Lynchburg. He's surprised that Sam's wife has come back twice. He always gets her name mixed up, because she looks a little like Holly used to. He doesn't trust her, and he suspects that she's laughing at him behind his back, but he always tries to be sociable.