Heading Out to Wonderful (4 page)

He’d laugh so hard at his own joke you could see the back of his throat and his thick, coated tongue hanging out of his mouth. A man’s man, some might have said. A buffoon, others might have called it more accurately. A fat clown.

He usually came on his way to Staunton to take care of his business. Everybody treated him with a kind of deference, as though he, like Charlie, were a stranger to them, even though they’d known him their whole lives.

“Nobody likes him,” said Will one day, after he’d gone. “Sad. Not even me. Not any more. He’s no more like the boy I knew than Eleanor Roosevelt. And it ain’t just because he’s rich. He was a nice boy, big, but not like he is now. Now he’s just plain gross. Got a hillbilly wife he wears like a ring on his little finger. Nobody else would marry him, and god knows he tried. Imagine, rich as he is, still nobody would have him. Maybe that’s what turned him so mean. He’s sharp in his dealings, don’t treat people with respect. Skinned every man who had a hide in two counties. Thinks he’s better than he is, and everybody knows exactly what he is, just a fat, rich man who’s forgotten everything he learned from his mother, who was a good Christian woman, rest her soul.

“One day we were friends. The next, he decided I wasn’t good enough for him. We’ll get together next week, he’d say, but next week never came, and finally he stopped asking, and I stopped caring.

“It’s a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don’t know any more. Or even want to know. Still, you’ve got to pretend. Make the best of it. The thing about small towns is, you live with these people, see them every day. No point in fighting. Everybody is always just there, every day, so you’ve got to make your peace. And he spends good money. Still. Sad.

“Just goes to show you that having a good name and coming from good people don’t actually make you good people yourself. I don’t know him from Adam, any more.

“And that wife of his. Just you wait. She’s a piece of work.”

They all called him Mr. Beale, the white women, and he gently told them not to, every time, until eventually they all called him Charlie, although he continued calling them by their married names, even though they asked him to stop.

Charlie was a better butcher than Will, and the women were impressed, although they didn’t say anything, so as not to hurt Will’s feelings. Charlie’s steaks looked better, trimmed with just a fine thin layer of fat at the edges, and he would tie up their roasts for them with twine, so they looked tight and neat, covering the pork roasts with neatly laid strips of bacon.

So Charlie cut the meat and charmed the ladies, one by one, but, more than charm, he treated every one, black and white, from the richest to the shoeless poorest, from dollars to dimes, with the same deference and shy kindness, and he won their hearts while Will took the money and read to Sam from the Richmond Times-Dispatch
,
read it to him cover to cover every day, even the captions on the pictures, everything from politics to sports, and how to keep your stockings from running by keeping them in the freezer.

Sam was crazy about sports, even sports he’d never seen, like tennis, and of course he liked the comics, which he could just about read for himself by now, even though he didn’t start school for another year.

He talked about Joe DiMaggio and Steve Canyon and Popeye and Harry Truman in exactly the same way, as though they were people he actually knew, as though they might all be coming to Brownsburg any day now. His special hero was Jackie Robinson, and he talked endlessly about how Jackie could hit and run and play the field, a triple threat was the phrase he used, although where he had picked it up, nobody could say for sure. There are some things boys just know.

At the end of Charlie’s first work week, on a Friday in late August, 1948, a woman walked into the shop, and that’s when the story becomes more than just another story, becomes instead a tale that’s passed down from father to son as a warning, from mother to daughter in that year when the daughter first begins to dream of romance, the kind of romance seen in the flickering light of the movie screen: The lights go down, the movie starts, the silent flicker as the frames go through the sprockets, and even the most ordinary gesture becomes extraordinary. Everything stops, and something you can’t explain begins.

The bell over the door jangled, everybody turned to see who was coming in, the way they always did. She walked silently into the butcher shop, and everybody stared at her and they didn’t turn away and start talking again, the way they usually did, and nobody, not one woman, said a word of greeting to her.

Charlie had never seen her, not once, and he thought he’d seen everybody. It was obvious she was different from the other women. She had a country face, young, probably not much more than twenty, if that. She wore a wedding band and an engagement ring, so that much was clear, but she looked as though she had stepped into the shop from another part of the world, from one of the cities Charlie had visited during his days and nights of travel.

She wore a white linen dress, it was still before Labor Day, and such things still mattered then, a white dress with an olive green belt at the trim waist, the neckline cut low with a certain sophistication and style that said she had not bought it anywhere near Brownsburg. Her lips were a crimson slash, her hair pulled up in gleaming blonde waves on top of her head, held with tortoiseshell combs studded with rhinestones. She wore dark sunglasses, a thing no other woman in the town even thought to own, and espadrilles, tied with grosgrain ribbons around her ankles, on her small feet.

Her only other jewelry was a small gold cross she wore around her neck on a delicate chain, and she carried a small green leather bag under her arm.

She walked quickly into the center of the store, and nobody said a word to her. Charlie stopped slicing the pork chops he was cutting for Helen Anderson, and wiped the blade of his knife with a clean cloth. It glinted in the light as he laid it quietly on the counter.

Will, sitting in his chair with the boy on his lap, finally broke the silence and the stillness. He greeted her softly as he stood up and put the boy down on the floor, “Morning, Sylvan. How’re you doing? How’s Boaty?”

“We’re fine,” she said. “It’s lovely. Everything’s just the same as always.”

She had a sweet, girlish voice. She couldn’t have been much more than a teenager. She didn’t sound like she was from around Brownsburg. She spoke in some faraway accent, like a princess, or an actress.

She took off her dark glasses, very slowly, bowing her head to do it, gentle, graceful. She looked up at Will briefly, nodding hello. Then she just stood, and she turned her head slowly to stare at Charlie Beale. Five seconds. Ten, maybe, no more, but it seemed forever.

His hands were on the counter. He felt the urge to do something, to wipe the butcher block, to jingle the change in his pocket, but nobody moved, and he didn’t either.

“May I help you, ma’am? Is there . . . ?”

“No. No thank you. I’m not hungry for anything.” She spoke with the sort of fake English accent Charlie had only heard in the movies, those glowing women on the screen with the sparkling hair and the black lips.

Five seconds.

“At the moment. Not hungry at the moment.”

Then she turned and headed for the door. The bell tinkled as she left, and she shielded her eyes for a brief moment in the sudden brightness of the street. She put her dark glasses back on and let herself into a black Cadillac, started the engine and drove away.

He wanted to look. You could tell he wanted to follow this woman with his eyes, a quick light came into them, but then it was out, just like that, and he went on with the next customer. He came awake like a man who’d been in a deep sleep, and was late getting where he was going. His blade sliced into a chop, the ladies began their chatter again, watching him not watch her leave.

“That woman,” Will said, “walks like a farmer.”

“How’s that?” asked Charlie.

“She walks,” said Will, waiting, “like she’s got a bale of hay on one hip and a bale of alfalfa on the other, and when she walks,” he paused for effect, “she’s rotating the crops,” and all the women laughed, even though they had heard the same old joke since they were girls, and Charlie laughed, too, although he found the joke vulgar when he thought of the way it didn’t even begin to describe the majesty and poetry of that girl’s way of walking.

As if the movie were over, everything went back into motion, the ladies chattering as though she had never been there, Charlie finishing the chops and wrapping them neatly in clean white paper he ripped from a roll over his head, his hands shaking, his whole body electric beneath his clothes, the boy and Will sitting again and playing at Cat’s Cradle, the chair creaking as the father and the son intertwined the string in more and more complex ways.

“Poor Sylvan,” said Eleanor Cooke.

“Poor Boaty Glass, you mean,” said Mary Page. “He sure got what he paid for.”

“If you lie down with the dogs, you get up with the fleas,” Eleanor said, ending it, and all the ladies nodded in agreement.

But Charlie Beale had heard her name. Sylvan Glass. She went off in his head and his heart like a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Something dazzling. Something stupendous.

Something, finally, that was wholly and mysteriously wonderful.

CHAPTER THREE

A
SHIMMERING AND A
stillness, all at once. Charlie moves across the land, humming a song, but compared to the landscape itself, he is still and mute as a rock. Compared to the animals that, unseen, surround him, moving, feeding, breeding, he is a statue.

The thousand thousand grasses, dry now in the late-summer heat, bristle like the brittle pages of a thousand ancient books being turned by invisible scholars. Every blade and leaf and rock speaking of loss and endurance, the birds settling down for another night or two before their long, familiar hegira. The landscape he walks is an endless cascade of loss and dying and coming to life again, and he feels the immense silence of the dead and the eternal pulse of the living in the soles of his feet.

He is in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on flatland by the Maury River. He is cradled in the palm of the valley as a mother holds an egg.

His quilts are spread out on the ground, sandwich eaten, the speckled tin plate washed in the river, the last light now the thinnest veil between him and the mossy blackness of the night. He hums the song he heard two days before, the old guys singing it sitting on the porch at the general store, brothers, overalls, dung-smeared boots, the brothers white-haired and bearded, a five-string and a mandolin, the same face no more than two years apart, playing and singing a song they had been singing together for years and years, singing separate lines of music that flowed together like the water around him into a single river of sound. The words come back to him, the sound of their wavering voices, infused with a belief in what they knew to be true.

Life is like a mountain railway

With an engineer so brave

You must make this run successful

From the cradle

To the grave

Watch the curves that fill the tunnels

Never falter, never fail

Keep your hands upon the throttle

And your eyes upon the rail.

It was music. It was gospel. It was their hearts’ true belief, those old men, and Charlie, listening, believed, not so much in the gospel, but in the foreverness of the thing, the music, the brothers, the valley itself, and that was more forever than any man could take into his mind.

What does he believe, he wonders now, humming and thinking the words of the song he made them sing three times until he got most of it down. He believes, at this minute, in this valley, this land he is walking on, in this water that flows nearby and through his life, the passing of afternoon into evening into night, this blackness of safety and solitude. He believes in the peace of it, the eternity.

Blessed Savior, that will guide us

’Til we reach that blissful shore

But this here, the valley of sweet Virginia, this is the blissful shore. There is no more to reach for. But, humming, he knows. He knows what he believes. He believes in the strength of muscle, the pleasures of the body, the goodness of the heart. He believes in goodness, and this is a new thing, a gift to him from the river and the land and the blue light now almost black, the ink of the sky pocked with stars. This is what the valley and its waters whisper into his ear, in this evening into night. He believes at this moment, and he will always believe it, that people are good, and that he is good among them.

Where the angels wait to join us

In God’s grace forevermore.

Now he knows the angels have joined us, have joined him, are in him. Such a surprise, after all. So many living things, snake and bird and fish and man, each working to create the whole, this brilliance of sound and silence, these voices of man and animal that flow into one voice, and that voice is the whole southern world, is this loss and this living. For what else has the land done but persist, and in the face of that, what else was there for him, for any of them, but to persist along with the soil that gave them bread and fed, as well, their hearts?