Only Love Can Break Your Heart (11 page)

Leigh looked up at the wooden slats of the ceiling and the hatch to the hayloft.

“I thought you were out at the lake,” I said.

“I wasn’t feeling well,” she said, still studying the ceiling. “Charles understood.”

“Oh,” I stammered.

Her eyes dropped from the hatch back to me.

“Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

“On horseback?” I asked.

“In the car.”

“I’m not finished with my work,” I said.

“Yes, you are,” Leigh replied.

She grasped my elbow and pulled me toward the door.

“Come on,” she said.

As we walked out of the barn, I glanced back, wondering what Patricia was thinking as I left with Leigh. When we reached the car, I opened the passenger side door and slipped into the seat with the resignation of a condemned man.

9

IN HIGH SCHOOL,
Leigh drove a Volkswagen Dasher with a tan interior and a four-speed manual transmission. I remember once seeing her work the stick and level her feet up and down on the clutch and gas pedals while simultaneously lighting a cigarette and balancing a beer between her knees. But the Dasher had been replaced by her father’s old BMW.

I listened to the quiet hum of the engine as Leigh steered the car along the rolling hills out toward the intersection with the highway that led up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. As she drove, she studied the road with a strained, purse-lipped concentration that suggested she was working up to some sort of big speech. It was all at once comfortingly familiar and unbearably weird.

When we reached the end of Boone’s Ferry, she began.

“I have a real weakness, you see, Rocky?” she said. “I have a terrible time letting go of the past. Every time I think of even the slightest, most insignificant mistakes I’ve made, the shame hurts so badly I can hardly bear it. Can you understand that, Rocky?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I’m not going to be that way anymore,” she said. “On Saturday, I’m marrying Charles. After that, I’m going to file the past away and forget it ever happened. So if you’re going to know any of it, you’re going to have to hear it now.”

She paused for a breath and smoothed her hair behind her ears, keeping one hand on the wheel. In my mind, I tried to replace this staid, proper-looking woman in the cocktail dress and pearls with the old Leigh, sunny and lithe, her hair hanging long and free well below the shoulders of her Mickey Mouse baseball shirt with the navy-blue three-quarter-length sleeves.

“Paul,” she said with a sigh. “He could have made a fool of so many girls. But he did it to me. And what a fool I was. A stupid little girl. But I loved him. What girl wouldn’t? Daddy could just tell that Paul was going to ruin me. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

I did. Paul hadn’t just done it to Leigh. He did it to the Old Man and me too.

“Before that day the two of you showed up in Charlottesville,” Leigh said, “I was almost ready to break it off with him. It wasn’t Barton, or any other boy. I can’t deny that getting attention from boys who were so different from Paul got me thinking about what else might be out there, but really I felt like sooner or later Paul was going to be the one to leave
me
behind. I was just preparing for that.”

She touched my knee.

“You were such a precious little boy, Rocky,” she said. “You used to look at Paul like he was floating two feet off the ground. Do you remember that?”

“I remember,” I said.

A smile flickered across her face.

“I knew as soon as I saw you together that something was wrong,” she said. “Your mother would never in a million years have let Paul take you any farther than Pearsall’s Drugstore.”

By then, Leigh had driven out past the foothills toward the mountains, brilliant with fall color. I stared out the window at the peaks above the glistening James River as I listened to Leigh recount what took place in the days before I last saw my brother.

Someone in Akron had called the college, and an associate dean was appointed to notify Paul about his mother’s death. When Paul called home, he discovered that the Old Man already knew; in fact, he had already cut a check to pay for the funeral arrangements. When Paul offered to drive over so they could go up to Ohio together, the Old Man told him that he wasn’t going and that Paul shouldn’t feel he had to go either.

“It seemed horrible and ugly at the time that your father would say something like that,” Leigh said. “But I understand now what he felt like. When it hurts so much to remember that you just want to forget.”

I thought about Anne and wondered what she was like when she met the Old Man. She must once have been someone worthy of his love.

Paul didn’t bother to call Leigh, or Rayner, or anyone else. He went to Ohio alone. No one came to the service save for an elderly aunt and a cousin he’d never met. After burying his mother, Paul went to a lonely, forlorn Morrison’s Cafeteria with these people he’d never met before in his life. Paul told Leigh he thought they had only shown up because they figured they’d get a free lunch out of it—which they did: Paul paid the tab at the register.

I thought of Paul with these two strangers at a corner table in a noisy room filled with the scent of Salisbury steaks drying up under heat lamps next to the little molded Jell-O cups and plastic ramekins filled with chalky chocolate pudding. After they’d eaten, the three of them lit up together. According to Leigh, smoking that cigarette was as close as they came to anything resembling a family moment. I imagined Paul flipping that Zippo of his and holding it out for those two old women to lean over and tip their Pall Malls into the flame.

When they were finished and had run out of things to say to each other, Paul stood up and hugged both of them because it was less awkward than shaking their hands. After that, he drove straight to Spencerville, stopping only for gas, on his way to me.

“He was out of his mind, you see?” Leigh said, a tremor edging into her voice. “But I don’t think he wanted to hurt you. I think he thought you needed to be saved.”

“From what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I could believe a word she was saying. But I wanted to hear it all. Truth or fiction, I needed a story.

“From ugliness,” she said. “From your father. From Spencerville.”

She shook her head and let out a bitter sigh.

“You have no idea how ready I am to put this town in the rearview mirror and never look back,” she said.

“You won’t stay away forever,” I said.

“Watch me,” she said. “You’ll leave too, when you have the chance.”

“If you hate it so much,” I said, “why’d you come back to begin with?”

“Rocky,” she said, “the story isn’t over.”

She reached back between us to her purse, which sat on the floor behind the console. She fumbled for an orange prescription bottle. With a trembling hand, she shook one of the pills into her mouth and swallowed it dry.

The way Leigh remembered it, we were all going to go out west and start over, like Robert Redford in
Jeremiah Johnson
.

“I told Paul he was too upset and that he needed to calm down and think about what he was doing,” Leigh said. “I told him how sorry I was about his mother but that he needed to take you back home right away.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said you’d be better off dead.”

Better off dead
. Was that what Paul had in mind, I wondered, when he took me up on that bluff and started plying me with beer and cigarettes?

“If I’d thought for a second that he would hurt you, I would have come with him, like he asked,” she said. “But I told him that I couldn’t leave, because I had a midterm. Can you believe that?”

After we left, Leigh went into Maury Hall with her study buddy Barton and sat down to take her test. She tried to answer the questions, but all she could think about was Paul—how alone he must have felt—and me, so young and small and trusting, utterly oblivious to what Paul was going through. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she walked out, stepping over a confused Barton as she made her way to the aisle. She went straight to the house and sat on the porch chain-smoking, waiting for the phone to ring.

In the early morning hours, Paul returned. He told her what he had done and that he was leaving right then; she could either come along or say good-bye to him forever.

“He was so broken,” she said. “I couldn’t let him leave alone. Besides, I’d never walked out on a test before. In the moment, running away seemed easier than explaining that decision to my father.”

Within a few hours, they were off, heading west with the rising sun at their backs. Paul had pawned what was left of his mother’s jewelry, so he had enough money to keep them going for a while, drifting from campground to campground.

Somewhere along the way, they heard about a commune nestled into a little green alpine valley outside Taos, New Mexico, called New Nazareth. The people there weren’t normal hippies. They were Christians—“Jesus freaks,” they called themselves.

“I thought Paul just wanted to gawk at the Bible thumpers,” Leigh said. “I figured, why not? Paul was going to do what he wanted regardless of what I had to say about it.”

In New Nazareth, there were no crusty hippies sleeping in tepees or dilapidated dome houses. Maybe forty or fifty people lived there full-time, but on any given day there might be two hundred people or more hanging around. They all looked like hippies, but there was something different about the blissed-out expressions on their faces. It wasn’t just acid and pot, as it turned out. Their trip was something else entirely.

The New Nazarenes greeted Paul and Leigh with predictable warmth—“brother” and “sister” and so forth—and led them down to a large tin-roofed building with a covered porch at the center of the commune’s grounds. “You’ve got to meet Stephen,” they said. Who was Stephen?

“He’s the prophet, brother,” they said.

Almost as soon as they said it, a springy, reedy man with a beard down to his chest and a mass of kinky black curls appeared at the head of the stairs to the meeting hall. While Leigh and the New Nazarenes looked on, the bearded man approached Paul, his mouth parted in a toothy smile. Without saying a word, he put his hands on Paul’s shoulders and pulled him into a tight embrace.

Then—as Leigh told it—the New Nazarenes all fell into a hush. A few of the women dropped to their knees in postures of prayer. At first, Paul just stood there, his face buried in the soft fabric of the man’s shirt. He tried to pull away, but the man held him steady and whispered something in his ear. Paul started to struggle, but he couldn’t break free of the man’s grasp. His arms and knees went limp; he started to collapse, but the man held him up. Paul’s shoulders started to shake. He cried out in wild, animal sounds. Still holding him, the man sank to the ground and held Paul there as he wept. He whispered something else to him, and within seconds, they were both laughing. Moments later, the whole crowd was weeping and laughing along with them.

This, Leigh said, was Stephen Prophet.

“Later, I asked Paul what Stephen had said to him,” Leigh said. “It was a passage of scripture, from Psalm 55: ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and the storm.’ Stephen told him, ‘Your mother has found peace and rest. This is your place of shelter. Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you.’ That was all it took. Paul was a disciple after then.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“It seemed like a miracle at the time,” Leigh said. “For years, I’ve been asking myself how Stephen could have known those things.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” I said. “Maybe you’re misremembering.”

She reached for her purse. I thought she might take another pill from the bottle I assumed contained some sort of antianxiety medication for frail little southern girls, to help them survive the ordeal of getting married. Instead she removed a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.

“I thought you quit smoking,” I said.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“Not at all,” I said. In some peculiar way, seeing her smoke again made her more recognizable to me.

She lit up and cracked the window.

“So,” Leigh said, “we became Jesus freaks.”

I couldn’t quite fathom Paul according to the image Leigh described. Without reservation, he threw himself into life at New Nazareth, joining in on building projects and farm work and singing with the house band, which would perform Christianized country rock at evening services in the meeting hall. Leigh joined in with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, taking a place among the women, who cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children.

“I didn’t know what to think about it all,” Leigh said. “At first I was just happy to see Paul so committed to something. Everyone was so nice to us. I’d never been around people like that before. They were all so . . . joyful. So different from anything I’d ever experienced before. All my friends at home and at school were so cynical about everything. And my father—well, you know my father.”

I nodded.

“It seemed like a lovely little utopia,” Leigh said.

Along with the meeting hall, there were bunkhouses and a handful of adobes already built for family homes, with others in the works. A mile or so up into the hills, a natural spring fed a blue alpine lake. The New Nazarenes had built an aqueduct from the spring, so there was fresh water for bathing and cleaning, along with a well pump drawn from an underground river.

In New Nazareth, there were just enough rules to make the place feel like a legitimate church community, and just enough freedom to keep everyone happy and confident that they were part of something more beautiful and redeeming than the corrupted world of their parents. Aside from communion wine, booze was frowned on, but pot and psychedelics were, according to Stephen, “A-OK with JC.” Free love was practiced, well, freely. It was like a summer camp with drugs and coed bunks.

All the anger and bitterness went out of Paul. He was unburdened, ecstatic with the rapture of redemption. Before long, Paul was leading prayers and giving testimonials at evening worship.

Gradually, Leigh felt her initial happiness for Paul being overtaken by quiet resentment. Back home in Spencerville, she was the exceptional one with all the talent and expectations. Paul was the slacker who wasn’t supposed to be good enough for her. In New Nazareth, she was just Paul’s girlfriend.

Furthermore, while Leigh had yet to join in on the whole “free love” thing, Paul had become—in Leigh’s words—“pretty popular” with the girls.

“Were you OK with that?” I asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “But who was I to stop him? For everyone else, that part of life was as normal as evening worship. There was no guilt about it, and no sneaking around. I didn’t want to be a square.”

One night after worship, Stephen Prophet took Leigh for a long walk in the orchard. Desperate as she was to be special, she gushed to him about all the traumas of her own life: her mother’s ordeal with cancer, her father’s relentless pressures, the guilt she felt about running away and leaving him alone. When she was finished, Stephen smiled and asked her if she wanted to be baptized. She said yes. After he held her hands and prayed, he laid her down in the grass and took off her clothes.