Mr. Tall (8 page)

When Mr. Tall stepped onto the porch the next afternoon, Plutina pulled open the door and extended the pie toward him so suddenly that he flinched a little. “Slow down, now,” he said.

“Here's your pie,” she said. “I didn't have a clove, but I did have a little cinnamon in the kitchen. I hope it's fit to eat.”

Mr. Tall took the pie from her and stared down at it a long time. With one hand he touched the bib pocket of his overalls. “What do I owe you?” he asked.

“Mr. Tall,” she said. “Don't be silly. You don't owe me a thing.”

He looked down at the pie again. “Well, I thank you.”

“You're very welcome.”

“All right. I best get on, then.”

“Don't rush off,” she said.

“I got to get back.”

“Well, come see us.”

He touched the brim of his hat with his finger. Plutina watched him start across the yard. “Mr. Tall,” she called after him, feeling as she spoke, yet unable to keep herself from speaking, that she was about to misstep in the dark and fall a long way. “I'm sorry your wife and little baby fell in the river.”

Mr. Tall stopped and stiffened in his tracks. His shoulders widened. He stood up straighter. He seemed to grow several inches before he whirled on her. “What did you just say?” he asked.

“Mr. Tall, I—”

“What did you just say?”

“Please don't be mad at me.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I don't think I'm nobody, Mr. Tall, I really don't.”

“Don't you ever talk to me like that again.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Tall. I didn't mean to. I just wanted to make you feel better, is all.”

He gaped at her. “Feel better?” he said. He stepped toward her. “You want to make me feel better?”

Plutina covered her mouth with her hands.

He closed his eyes and threw the pie toward the house, where it splatted in the yard. “You think I feel better now? Tell me.”

“Please stop, Mr. Tall.”

He took another step. “Let me look at your titties. How about that?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Show me them ripe little titties you're so proud of. That ought to make me feel better.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Tall. Please no.”

“You know how long it's been since I even
seen
a titty?”

“Mr. Tall, I think I'm going to be sick.”

“I hope you are. I hope you're sick enough to die.”

Plutina stepped to the edge of the porch and vomited half an apple pie into the yard. She dropped to her knees and held on to a post while she retched.

“And I hope your baby dies,” he said. “I hope it dies before I get back to the house.”

Plutina closed her eyes. If he wanted to kill her, well, that would be all right. She had made herself worthy of the curse. She listened to him pant in the yard, and waited for him to tromp toward her. Then she listened to him stride away.

Before she had a chance to start crying a rock thwacked into the wall near the door and clattered onto the porch. Plutina thought, Mr. Tall is throwing rocks at me. She opened her eyes and sat up. Mr. Tall stood near the road, his face gone white as his shirt. His right arm was cocked behind his ear, his fist clutching another stone to throw. He raised his left arm and pointed a long, shaking finger at her. “They didn't fall!” he shouted. “You hear me? They didn't fall!” He chunked the second rock, which sailed all the way over the house.

Plutina climbed to her feet. Mr. Tall had cursed her, and cursed her baby, and she halfway expected him to come back after while and shoot her, but she did not want him, or anybody, throwing rocks at her. That was just too much. She stomped down the steps and wagged her finger at him. She cried, “You better stop throwing rocks at my house if you know what's good for you!” She cast around for a rock of her own to throw.

“Nobody fell!” he yelled. “She jumped! Do you hear me? She grabbed up that baby and jumped!”

Plutina stopped where she stood. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

Her right hand fluttered upward and lit on her belly. As her eyes filled with tears Mr. Tall grew wavery as a haint.

“Oh, Mr. Tolliver,” she said, “I am so sorry.”

He stared at her for a moment long enough to hold a lifetime, then nodded once and turned toward the road. She knew even then that she would never speak to him again. She would leave him to his laborious grief; he would never utter her name. As she watched him walk out of sight a worry wakened inside her and buzzed like a fly in a jar.

F
IELDIN WAS UNDER
round-the-clock hospice care, and the jagged, liquid rasp of his breathing made it almost impossible for Rose to think about anything other than his vain search for oxygen. Unable to sleep, she put on his old down jacket and stepped onto the back porch, closing the door quietly behind her. It was about two thirty in the morning, the world silvered and silent with frost. The orchard glittered in the harsh light of a near-full moon. The gnarled old apple trees seemed on the verge of movement, as if she had caught them marching in formation toward App Mountain, whose black shoulders sloped suddenly upward just beyond the last row of trees. Had she been in a more peaceful mood, she might have fetched her sketchbook and made notes about the shadows for painting later. Instead, she stared at the mountain and wondered, as she often did, if Wayne Lee Cowan was still alive. Wayne Lee had worked for Rose and Fieldin a few times as a sullen and not particularly industrious day laborer, a fact that chilled Rose every time she thought of it. The previous summer he had set off a bomb outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham, killing eleven people. After the bombing he'd driven back here, parked his truck on a Forest Service fire road and disappeared into these mountains. Nobody, at least nobody who was talking, had laid eyes on him since.

Rose had lived on the farm for twenty-five years, and had stood on this porch and studied this orchard and this mountain countless times. But something about the view tonight puzzled her, although the puzzlement didn't immediately register as such. She actually noticed that her brow was furrowed before she understood why. The moment that the unease she felt formed itself into a conscious thought—Wayne Lee—a figure separated itself from the shadow of one of the trees and strode quickly through the orchard toward the mountain. The figure was large and broad-shouldered, long-armed and stooped. Some kind of silver stripe ran the length of its back. Until it turned to look over its shoulder at her, Rose didn't fully appreciate that the figure not only wasn't Wayne Lee Cowan but wasn't even human.

When she ran back inside to tell the hospice volunteer sitting with Fieldin what she had seen, she found the woman removing the oxygen tube from his nose. As Rose stood in the doorway and stared, thinking, Bigfoot, I just saw Bigfoot, she realized that the house was extraordinarily quiet. Fieldin had stopped breathing.

In 1975, when Rose turned twenty, married Fieldin Kohler, and moved to the farm, Argyle, the nearest town, had seemed to be as close as one could get to the end of the earth and still have access to a grocery store. That was why Fieldin had bought it. He had been Rose's painting teacher at the small state college in Georgia onto whose campus she had wandered after graduating from high school. He was an emaciated praying mantis of a man who stuffed the legs of his paint-spattered chinos into knee-high fringed moccasins. He pulled his thinning gray hair back into a greasy ponytail, and wore vaguely piratical linen blouses whose sleeves billowed when he waved his arms. In class, he paced and chain-smoked while ranting about the soullessness of American art, and routinely offered beer and gas money to any student who would drive to Pennsylvania and
personally
shoot Andrew Wyeth.

Rose's father had been an Air Force intelligence officer who came home each night prohibited by federal law from talking about what he had done during the day. Her mother was a perfectly coiffed and made-up alcoholic with even more stringent standards of secrecy. Rose was an only child and Fieldin was the first adult who ever really told her anything. What he told her, though, was that her breasts alone would have made Gauguin swear off Tahitian maidens forever, and that he would gladly cut off his right hand and never make art again if she would allow him to paint her nude just once. She went to bed with him during their first “sitting.” His apartment was squalid. The only painting in the place was a self-portrait, done in the style of van Gogh, through which Fieldin had stuck his foot during a particularly virulent fit of self-loathing. On the ceiling above his bed he had meticulously copied out a long passage from Rimbaud, in French, and he became almost inconsolable when she told him that she couldn't read it. Later, when he went out to wander the streets alone, weeping with joy over how
ancient
her soul was, she got dressed and cleaned his apartment. By the time she realized that Fieldin had been a caricature when she met him, a by-the-book cutout of the lecherous college professor, they'd been married for years and his health was already beginning to fail. Once he became sick, holding him accountable for seducing the girl she'd been at eighteen—he'd been forty-three—struck her as an unnecessary act of retribution. That girl had found Fieldin Kohler terribly romantic.

She often thought with great tenderness about the administrators and counselors and professors who had taken turns trying to talk her out of leaving school and marrying Fieldin. The truth was that she had enjoyed the desperate quality of their attention. She had felt as if she were standing on a high, narrow ledge while they shouted at her not to jump. Until then, no one had ever cared whether she jumped or not, and she was afraid that if she climbed down off the ledge they would stop noticing her at all. So she jumped. Fieldin stormed into the dean's office and quit in the middle of the fall term of her junior year, two days before the board of trustees was due to fire him. The morning they left for North Carolina, two campus police officers prevented him from entering her dormitory. He stood on the lawn outside her window, pretending to struggle with the cops, and screamed, “What have you fascists done with Rose?” The girls on her hallway silently watched her walk to the elevator. Everything she owned in the world fit into two suitcases and a duffel bag. She might have gone with her parents rather than Fieldin that morning, had her parents shown up. Their anger, however, had hardened into ultimatum, and the ultimatums into silence. Rose and Fieldin stopped for lunch in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and got married while they were there.

They moved into the farmhouse in November, during the last pale, generous days of a prolonged Indian summer. A few yellow leaves still clung to the upper branches of the apple trees, like decorations from a party she had missed. At dusk, deer came down from the mountain and tottered around unsteadily on their hind legs, as if experimenting with a new mode of locomotion, eating from the twisted branches all of the withered apples they could reach. Late at night, raccoons climbed the trees and quarreled over the fruit left behind by the deer. From the bedroom she could hear the losers falling out of the trees and thudding onto the ground.

The house was a disaster. No one had lived in it for years, and when Fieldin carried her across the threshold it had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Fieldin told her that the modern world was overrated and that they were going to live closer to the earth, the way the Cherokee had before the white man destroyed their way of life and made them forget who the Great Spirit had intended them to be. He lost patience with living close to the earth, however, as soon as the weather turned cold. The only heat in the place came from an antique woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the front room. The first frigid morning, Fieldin went up the mountain with an ax and came home less than an hour later, without any firewood, crying and cursing, blaming her for having got him into this mess. He dropped the ax at her feet and told her to go and cut wood if she was cold. By sundown she had managed to chop up and drag enough deadfall into the yard to get them through the night, blistering both her hands in the process. The next morning, she took to town the credit card that her father had given her to use in case of emergency and purchased a chainsaw. (Later, when her father received the bill, he canceled the card.)

Their only neighbors were Charlie and Plutina Shires, an older couple of indeterminate age—they might have been sixty or they might have been eighty—whose small farm was the only other place in the valley. Rose had already smelled the wood smoke from their kitchen chimney, and noticed with admiration the carefully corded stacks of wood that Charlie had laid in beside his barn, so on the way home from town she stopped and introduced herself and asked him to show her how to work the chainsaw. Plutina insisted that she come in and eat a late breakfast of cold biscuits and molasses. Plutina's blue eyes were hugely magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses, and she sat and blinked, without saying anything, or missing anything, as Rose told her about Fieldin.

Charlie appeared in the woodlot the next morning, bearing his own saw and pulling a trailer behind his tractor. He was a wizened little man who chewed on the stub of an unlit cigar, forcing his right eye into a perpetual squint. He never said three words when he could get by with two, and wouldn't waste two if he could make his point without speaking. That day, without drawing attention to the fact that he was teaching her, he showed Rose how to notch a tree to make it fall in the direction she wanted, how to keep the chain from binding and bucking, how to trim branches safely by cutting away from her legs, how to stack wood on the trailer so that it wouldn't roll off. On the way back down the hollow, he taught her how to drive the tractor. Because she had been cutting wood in a pair of saddle oxfords, the only remotely warm shoes she owned, the next morning he showed up with a pair of tall green rubber boots that he said were too small for him. The boots were brand-new, but it was the mud he had rubbed on them, in an earnest attempt not to embarrass her, that made her cry.

Charlie managed to keep an eye on their woodpile without seeming to, and took to parking his tractor in their woodlot and walking home over the ridge when he thought the pile was getting low. The only way to get his tractor to their woodlot was to drive it through their yard. He never looked at the house as he drove past, but if Rose was outside he greeted her by lifting his index finger from the steering wheel—which was about as ebullient as she ever knew him to be. If Fieldin was outside, Charlie just stared straight ahead. For his part, Fieldin pretended that the clattering tractor, as well as the old guy perched atop it, was invisible. He spent his days that first winter drinking coffee at the diner in Argyle and reading detective novels at the library. One Saturday morning in February, Charlie drove into the yard with a plow attached to the tractor and asked if she didn't reckon it was time to bust up the garden spot.

Rose knew that Fieldin's family had money. She just didn't know how much
he
had. Afraid that he would soon announce that they had run out of cash and couldn't buy food, she planted an immense garden, with the idea of selling whatever produce they didn't eat. She knew nothing about gardening, of course, so she learned how to do it by helping Plutina and Charlie. She planted the same vegetables they planted, though in larger quantities, and hoed and fertilized and sprayed and dusted exactly as they did. To her great joy and amazement, her garden flourished. When Fieldin had the house wired for electricity, she was able to convince him that it would be in his best interest to buy her the largest chest-model freezer offered in the Sears catalogue.

Spring inched in an uneven line up the mountain and didn't reach the ridgetop until the first week of May. When the weather warmed up for good, Fieldin set up his studio in the loft of the barn. While Rose worked in the garden, she could see him through the loft door, usually smoking and staring at a blank canvas propped on his easel. Occasionally, she'd catch him watching her. Cutting firewood and working in the garden had caused her shoulders to broaden and her waist to shrink. She developed the kind of muscles in her arms and legs that she had previously seen only on the boys who played football in high school. Her normally straight, mostly brown hair curled wildly and lightened in the sun. On the days when she knew that Charlie and Plutina had gone into town and wouldn't be dropping by, she stripped off her overalls—another gift from Charlie—and worked in the garden wearing just her underwear and the green rubber boots.

The single painting of Fieldin's that she hung after he died was a gouache of her hoeing string beans. She occupied only a small portion on the upper right quadrant of the canvas, although the converging lines of the bean rows led the viewer's eye to the spot where she worked. Behind her, the mountain was dotted with the white of blooming dogwoods. In the painting, she wore only the green boots—artistic license, she supposed, and just like Fieldin—but her breasts were discreetly concealed behind her arm. She found the painting hidden in his studio when she went to clean it out.

It was during those first years that Fieldin adopted the Trail of Tears as his great subject. He wore a leather headband and, occasionally, a loincloth over his jeans. The town of Cherokee was less than an hour away, and he began driving there once or twice a week, sometimes staying overnight. He often came home in a foul mood because most of the Cherokee he encountered either wanted nothing to do with him or laughed at him outright. Their derision, however, never lessened his sincere, rather simplistic admiration of them as an oppressed yet spiritual people. He obsessively painted large, melodramatic canvases of weeping Cherokee slogging westward through the snow, watched from barren ridges by faceless white soldiers. The Indians were always marching toward a large stone pyramid that loomed in the distance. Because he couldn't find a gallery in Asheville that would show his paintings, Fieldin doggedly carted them to festivals and county fairs all over western North Carolina without ever managing to sell one—although he did, in a somewhat mysterious act of generosity, give one to Charlie and Plutina. Rose couldn't tell whether their neighbors actually liked the painting, but they hung it in their living room, where it shared the wall above the couch with a print, cut from a calendar, of Jesus praying in the moonlight while a storm raged behind him.