Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (41 page)

One morning he was looking up when my halved face appeared at his door. He saluted me sharply.

“Petty Officer Hampton reports no men overboard, sir,” he said to me.

“Well, at least he’s got his sense of humor back,” my mother said when I reported the incident.

In mid-June my father announced at Sunday breakfast he was no longer a Presbyterian. Instead of sitting with us on the polished-oak pews of Cliffside Presbyterian, he would be driving up to Cleveland County’s mountainous northern corner to attend a Pentecostal church.

“It’s something I’ve got to do,” my father said.

My mother laid her napkin on the table, looked at my father as if he’d just informed us he was defecting to Cuba.

“We need to talk, Paul,” she said. “Alone.”

My parents disappeared behind a closed bedroom door. I could hear my father’s voice, moderate and reassuring, or at least attempting to be. My mother’s voice, in contrast, was tense and troubled. They talked an hour, then dressed for church. I was unsure who’d prevailed until my father came out of the bedroom wearing not a suit but a shirt and tie. He cranked our decade-old Ford Fairlane and headed north into the mountains, as he would Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, my mother and I drove our newer Buick LeSabre in the opposite direction, down toward Broad River to Cliffside Presbyterian.

I was not made privy to what kind of understanding, if any, my parents had reached about his change in church affiliation, but it was obvious as well as inevitable that my mother found this religious transmutation troubling. A lifelong Presbyterian, she distrusted religious fervor, especially for a man in such a tenuous mental state, but I suspect she also felt something akin to betrayal—a rejection of much of the life his marriage to her had made possible.

My mother had been baptized in Cliffside’s Presbyterian church, but my father, who’d grown up in the high mountains of Watauga County, had been Pentecostal before their marriage. His conversion signaled a social as well as religious transformation, a sign of upward mobility from hardscrabble Appalachian beginnings, for in this Scots-Irish community where Episcopalians were rare as Eskimos, he worshipped with the Brahmins of the county’s Protestant hierarchy.

My father had appeared a dutiful convert, teaching Sunday school, helping prepare the men’s breakfasts, even serving a term as an elder, but he’d been a subversive convert as well. On Sunday mornings he entertained me with caustic remarks about the propriety of the services and Presbyterians’ inability to sing anything remotely resembling a “joyful noise.” When the choir rose to sing, my father winked at me, pretended to stuff plugs in his ears. My mother looked straight ahead at such times, trying to ignore my father’s shenanigans, but her lips always tightened.

“That wafer might as well be a burnt marshmallow for all the passion it evokes in that crowd,” my father said one Sunday as we drove home. “If Jesus Christ and his disciples marched in during a service, the ushers would tell them to have a seat, that the congregation would be glad to hear what they had to say as soon as the monthly business meeting was over.”

My mother glared at my father but addressed her words to the backseat where I sat.

“Just because a service is orderly and dignified doesn’t mean it isn’t heartfelt,” she said. “Don’t trust people who make a spectacle of what that believe, Joel. Too often it’s just a show, a way of drawing attention to themselves.”

As we entered summer, our lives took on a guarded normality. My father taught a six-week summer school session. My mother resumed, after a two-month absence, her part-time job as a bookkeeper for my Uncle Brad’s construction firm. I worked for my uncle as well, driving nails and pouring concrete. My uncle also gave us free reign of the lake house he’d bought years earlier when he’d had the time to use it, so on Saturday mornings we drove up Highway Ten to spend the day at South Mountain Reservoir, where cool mountain breezes and teeth-chattering water might revive us after a week of wilting piedmont humidity. No doubt my mother packed up food and swim suits each Saturday in hopes the lake might be beneficial for my father after a week of remedial teaching in an un-airconditioned classroom.

My father was eager that I share his new hobby. He gave me demonstrations on how to use the scuba apparatus. At supper he spoke excitedly of water’s other side. He often wore his diving equipment around the house, once opening the door to a startled paperboy while wearing a mask and fins. My mother was reluctant to let me participate, but she acquiesced when I promised not to go into the reservoir’s deep heart, where a diver had drowned the previous summer. So on Saturday afternoons she read paperbacks on the screened porch and cast nervous glances toward the lake as my father and I shared the diving equipment. When my turn came, I fell backwards off the dock and into the lake, watching a rushing away sky as I hit the water and sank, air bubbles rising above my head like thoughts in a comic strip.

I could never see more than a few yards, but that was enough. Arm-long catfish swam into view sudden as a nightmare, their blunt, whiskered faces rooting the bottom. Snapping turtles big as hubcaps walked the lake floor, their hand-grenade heads ready to bite off a careless finger. I found what no longer lived down there as well: fish suspended like kites, monofilament trailing from their mouths to line-wrapped snags below; drowned litters of kittens and puppies; once an out-of-season deer, a gash on its head where the antlers had been. On the reservoir’s floor even the familiar startled. Gaudy bass plugs hung on limbs and stumps like Christmas ornaments; branches snapped off like black icicles; a refrigerator yawned open like an unsprung trap.

Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden. By August I’d joined my mother on the porch, playing board games and drinking iced tea as my father disappeared off the dock towards mysteries I no longer wished to fathom.

On one of these August afternoons after he’d finished diving, my father decided to drive out to the highway and buy ice so we could churn ice cream. “Come with me, Joel,” he said. “I might need some help.”

Once we turned onto the blacktop my father passed two convenience stores before pulling in to what had once been a gas station. Now only a weedy cement island remained, the pumps long uprooted.
HOLCOMBE’S STORE
, nothing more, appeared on a rusting black-and-white sign above the door.
REDWORMS AND MINNERS FOR SALE
was scrawled eye level on a second sign made of cardboard.

We stepped inside, adjusting our eyes to what little light filtered through the dusty windows. A radio played gospel music. Canned goods and paper plates, toilet paper and boxes of cereal lined the shelves. A man about my father’s age sat behind the counter, black hair combed slick across his scalp, a mole above his right eyebrow the size and color of a tarnished penny. The man stood up from his chair and smiled, his two front teeth chipped and discolored.

“Why hi, Brother Hampton,” he said warmly in a thick mountain accent. “What brings you up this way?”

“Spending Saturday on the lake,” my father said, then nodded toward me. “This is my son, Joel.”

“Carl Holcombe,” the man said, extending his hand. I felt the calluses on his palm, the wedding ring worn on his right hand.

“We’re going to make ice cream,” my father said. “I was hoping you had some ice.”

“Wish I could help you but I weren’t selling enough to keep the truck coming by,” Mr. Holcombe said.

“How about some worms then?”

“That I can help you with.” Mr. Holcombe came around the counter, walking with a slight limp as he made his way to the back of the store.

“How many boxes?” he asked, opening a refrigerator.

“Four,” my father said.

My father laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. Mr. Holcombe rang up the sale.

“See you at church tomorrow?” Mr. Holcombe asked, dropping coins into my father’s hand. My father nodded.

I tried not to stare at the mole as Mr. Holcombe filled my hands with the cardboard containers.

“Your daddy,” he said to me, “is a godly man, but I suspect you already know that.”

He closed the cash register and walked with us to the entrance.

“I hope you all catch something,” he said, holding the tattered screen door open.

“Why did you buy the worms?” I asked my father as we drove off.

“Because he needs the money,” my father said. “We’ll let them go in the garden.

“Mr. Holcombe’s a friend of yours?” I asked, wondering if my father would note the surprise in my voice.

“Yes,” my father said. “He’s also my pastor.”

The following Wednesday my father left to attend his midweek church service. I’d already asked my mother if I could borrow the Buick that evening, so when he departed so did I, following the Fairlane through town. At the stoplight I too turned right onto Highway Ten. Since the previous Saturday I’d been perplexed as to what could compel my father, a man with a university education, to drive a good half-hour to hear a preacher who, if his spelling and grammar were any indication, probably hadn’t finished high school.

Outside of town it began to rain. I turned on the Buick’s windshield wipers and headlights. Soon hills became mountains, red clay darkened to black dirt. I swallowed to relieve the ear pressure from the change in altitude as the last ranch-style brick house, the last broad, manicured lawn, vanished from my rear-view mirror. Stands of oaks and dogwoods crowded the roadsides. Gaps in the woods revealed the green rise of corn and tobacco, pastures framed by rusty barbed wire fences. Occasionally I passed a prosperous looking two-story farmhouse, but most homes were trailers or four-room A frames, often with pickups, cars, and appliances rusting in the side yards, scrawny beagles and blue-ticks chained under trees.

The rain quit so I cut off the windshield wipers, let the Fairlane get farther ahead of me. I came over a rise and the Fairlane had already disappeared around a curve. I sped up, afraid I’d lost my father, but coming out of the curve I saw his car stopped in the road a hundred yards ahead, the turn signal on though our Buick was the closest car behind him. My father turned onto a dirt road and I followed, still keeping my distance though I wondered if it were really necessary. He slowed in front of a cinder-block building no bigger than a woodshed, pulling into a makeshift parking lot where our ancient Fairlane looked no older than the dozen other cars and trucks. I eased off the road on a rise above the church and watched my father walk hurriedly toward the building. A white cross was nailed above the door he entered.

I could hear an out-of-tune piano, a chorus of voices rising from the open door and windows into the August evening, merging with the songs of crickets and cicadas. I waited half an hour before I got out of the Buick and walked down the road to the church. At the front door I paused, then stepped into a foyer small and dark as a closet. A half-open door led to the main room. The singing stopped, replaced by a single voice.

I peered into a thick-shadowed room whose only light came from a single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Holcombe stood in front of three rows of metal chairs where the congregation sat. At his feet lay a wooden box that looked like an infant’s coffin. Holes had been bored in its lid. Mr. Holcombe wore no coat or tie, just a white, short-sleeved shirt, brown slacks, and scuffed black loafers. His arm oustretched, he waved a bible as if fanning an invisible flame.

“The word of the Lord,” he said, then opened the bible to a page marked by a paper scrap. “‘And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them,’” Mr. Holcombe read. He closed the bible and went down on one knee in front of the wooden box, his head bowed, like an athlete resting on the sidelines. “Whoever is afflicted, come forward,” he said. “Lord, if it is your will, let us be the instrument of thy healing grace.”

“Amen,” the congregation said as my father left the last row and kneeled beside Mr. Holcombe. Without a word the congregation rose and gathered around my father. An old woman, gray hair reaching her hips, opened a bottle and dabbed a thick, clear liquid on my father’s brow. The other members laid their hands on his head and shoulders.

“Oh, Lord,” shouted Mr. Holcombe, raising the bible in his hand. “Grant this child of God continued victories over his affliction. Let not his heart be troubled. Let him know your abiding presence.”

The old woman with the long hair began speaking feverishly in a language I couldn’t understand, her hands straining upward as if she were attempting to haul heaven down into their midst.

“Praise God, praise God,” a man in a plaid shirt shouted as he did a spastic dance around the others.

My father began speaking the strange, fervent language of the old woman. The congregation removed their hands as my father rocked his torso back and forth, sounds I could not translate pouring from his mouth.

Mr. Holcombe, still kneeling beside my father, unclasped the wooden box. The room suddenly became silent, then a whirring sound like a dry gourd being shaken. At first I did not realize where the noise came from, but when Mr. Holcombe dipped his hand and forearm into the box the sound increased. Something was in there, something alive and, I knew even before seeing it, dangerous.

Mr. Holcombe’s forearm rose out of the box, a timber rattlesnake coiled around his wrist like a thick, black vine. The reptile’s head rose inches above Mr. Holcombe’s open palm, its split tongue probing the air like a sensor.

I turned away, stepped out of the foyer and into the parking lot. My eyes slowly adjusted to being outside of the church’s dense shadows. I stood there until the scraping of chairs signaled the congregation’s return to their seats. They sang a hymn, and then Mr. Holcombe slowly read a long passage from the book of Mark.

I walked back to the Buick. Halfway there, I saw the headlights were on. I tried the battery five times and gave up, dragging the jumper cables from the trunk and opening the hood in hopes someone might stop and help me. No cars or trucks passed, however, and in a few minutes people came out of the church, some pausing to speak but most going straight to their vehicles. I sat in the car and waited as I saw our Fairlane leave the parking lot.