The Cove (9 page)
“I'll fetch it for you,” Laurel told him, and went inside.
“I've not seen a fife like that one,” Slidell said when she returned with the flute. “Mind if I have a gander?”
She handed it to him. Slidell let the flute balance in his palm, measuring the weight as he read the words etched on it. Slidell whistled softly and handed the flute back.
“Pure silver and made in Paris. Good thing it was there instead of Vienna. If it had been, Sergeant Feith would claim you're bunging spy notes in it.”
The men began “Shady Grove.” Walter listened to the first verse and then raised the flute to his mouth. He entered the song so smoothly that Laurel wouldn't have known he was playing except his fingers moved and lips rounded. It wasn't so much a soaring sound but something on the song's surface, like a water strider crossing a creek pool.
“You two are going down a trail I can't follow,” Boyce soon said, and raised his hands palms up as if surrendering.
Ansel quit singing as Walter and Slidell played on. The guitar and flute tightly wove their sounds and then untangled them, did that several times until Slidell shook his head and the guitar's strings stilled. Walter played on for a few more notes. When it was over, the only sound was the fyce grinding the bone.
“That's the damndest thing I ever heard,” Boyce finally said. “It makes me want to turn this dulcimer into a ball swatter.”
“You two ought to haul that down to Asheville,” Ansel added. “They's folks will pay cash money for music handsome as that.”
“There's a blessingness in the having heard it,” Laurel said, touching Walter's forearm and leaving it there for a few moments.
“More Walter than me,” Slidell said. “I was the caboose dragged along by the engine.”
They played on, Slidell drinking alone now.
“Be careful, Slidell,” Hank warned. “That stuff's going to light up your head like a stick of dynamite.”
“It's same as snake poison,” Slidell replied. “Keep getting bit and it don't hurt you near as bad.”
Darkness filled the cove now but for the lantern's yellow smudge. Boyce looked toward the notch and laid the dulcimer back in its case.
“Time to go,” he said to his brother, who nodded and stood.
“Just a couple more songs,” Slidell said, but the brothers stepped off the porch.
Slidell put up his guitar and rose as well, wavering as he stood. He lifted the jug, tilted it but nothing sloshed.
“Ah, me,” Slidell sighed. “Nary a thing left but a skullbuster come morning.”
The three men mounted their horses and went up the trail, the lantern's glow quickly vanishing.
“Time for bed,” Hank said, “at least for me.”
Walter was about to rise and go inside as well, but Laurel let her hand settle on his forearm.
“Thank you for playing your flute.”
She searched for something more to say, but the words had been held inside too long. They would be heard by a man she didn't know, a man who even if he understood what she was trying to say, could not tell her so.
“I guess we'd best go on in,” Laurel said. “I know you're tired.”
It was Walter who rose first, but not before he'd settled his hand over hers a few moments, as though he had some inkling, Laurel thought, of what had been left unspoken.
W
here we going now, sir?” Wilber, the younger brother, asked.
Chauncey pointed to a building with wide steps and marble pillars.
“Is there another professor there we need to question, sir?” Jack asked.
“No, we just need to find which German books the library has.”
“Do we have to write down all their names too?” Wilber whined.
“If you boys want to be dismissed, just say so and I'll take you home,” Chauncey answered. “It's not something Paul Clayton would do but maybe you boys haven't got the soldier spirit like Paul.”
“We got it, sir,” Jack said, glaring at Wilber.
“All right then,” Chauncey said, “but we need to go by the automobile first.”
“That professor was shaking like a wet hound,” Jack said as they walked across the campus. “He ought to be too, especially after he admitted his ownself he talked to them Germans with no one else around who understood them.”
“I bet they got him to sneak secret messages back to Kaiser Wilhelm,” Wilber said. “He could of hid them in that metal thing on his head.”
“He'll not do it no more though,” Jack said. “We sure set that professor straight. He won't be going back for no more visits. I bet he won't stir farther than he can throw his own shadow.”
Chauncey couldn't help but let a smile lift the corners of his mouth. Professor Mayer had been scared. There was no doubt about that. Sweat had popped out on the old fool's brow even before claiming he'd gone to Hot Springs in the first place only because he'd been asked to read some of the Germans' letters. But Chauncey had outslicked him there, asking why he'd kept going back to socialize with a bunch of Huns. The professor's eyes had teared up and he'd started blubbering that it was a chance to practice his German. All the while the professor had the hearing machine clamped to his head, wires running this way and that and him fidgeting with the dial, which made him look even more ridiculous.
When they got to the Model T, Chauncey handed Jack the ledger and fountain pen and took off his belt and holster.
“Why are you doing that, sir?” Wilber asked.
“Because there's mostly women in libraries and real soldiers respect women. Seeing a pistol might give them the vapors.”
As they walked toward the entrance, he thought of how his mother had wanted him to go to college. Chauncey, like his daddy, had argued he'd learn more about banking by being in one instead of a dusty classroom. Besides, he had never cottoned to school much, especially recess when other boys called him chicken when he wouldn't roughhouse. He hadn't been chicken. It was just that, unlike them, Chauncey had nice store-bought clothes he didn't want ruined.
When they came to the building that housed the library, Chauncey paused to study the letters chiseled above the thick oak doors. Latin or Greek, he knew, and thought how even during a war English wasn't good enough for the college. Chauncey nodded at the boys and the three of them went through the foyer and into the library wing. On the wall was a painting of an old man who didn't look that much different from Professor Mayer, though he didn't have the hearing gimcrack on his head. In front of the bookshelves were wooden desks and chairs. Some were occupied by students, their books and tablets splayed out before them as they slowly turned pages or dipped their pens into ink wells and wrote. The main desk was to the right. They moved to the room's center, the boys wide eyed at the tall ceilings and row after row of filled shelves. A male student came to the front desk with a book, an audible click as the librarian stamped the inside cover. It wasn't Miss Yount but a student assistant. A pretty young woman, another reason to be glad Miss Yount wasn't there. As the male student passed them on his way out, he didn't meet Chauncey's eyes. Too embarrassed, Chauncey knew, because he was hiding out at a college when real men were fighting a war. Chauncey looked beyond the tables and chairs to where books were lined up row after row as if poised for an attack.
“Come on,” he told the boys.
As they passed the front desk, Chauncey saw that the student librarian was even prettier than he'd first thought, rosy cheeks and eyes a deep blue. Her perfume smelled like roses. She smiled at him and he was tempted to smile back but a serious demeanor was more appropriate. Still, Chauncey had obviously made a good impression. He'd come back some other time, without the boys. They went into the stacks and began checking book spines. He went through five shelves before he found letters that weren't English, but the books were in languages other than German. They've hidden them, he thought, but there were more foreign books on the next shelf. He found one that looked promising and compared it with the book confiscated from Professor Mayer. Chauncey studied the page in the library book first.
Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher
verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
Then he looked at the professor's book.
Widerspreche ich mich?
Na gut . . . ich widerspreche mich
Ich bin geraümig . . . ich enthalte Massen.
It was like deciphering a secret code as he searched for similar words. He looked farther down the pages and found one match and then another and then a third. He handed the library book to Jack and then others until both boys had their arms full.
“Take them over to an empty table,” Chauncey said.
There were thirty-seven. Chauncey opened his ledger and took out the fountain pen he'd used at the savings and loan. Customers noticed the pen's gold cap and gold bands but, more important, they saw how solid and sturdy the pen was, and by extension the institution itself. When Chauncey wrote up a payment or a loan, he didn't have to keep dipping the pen in an inkwell like a chicken pecking corn. His words flowed with a steady assurance. He wrote
Mars Hill Library
on the ledger's second page, skipped a line, and began copying book titles. The language looked sinister, especially the two dots that resembled a rattlesnake bite. The words could mean anything.
He peeked over at the front desk. The pretty student was still there but now Miss Yount had joined her. It seemed the old hag had been around Mars Hill forever and everyone kowtowed to her. She had a sharp tongue and no qualms about using it on anyone from a sassy child to Preacher Wilkenson. Miss Yount was tall too, especially with her hair balled up on her head. Jack handed him the last book and he wrote down the title. The table was covered with books and Chauncey thought how he'd be doing a service for Mars Hill and the whole country if he took a match and dropped it on them. Old and dusty as they were, they'd burn quick as that Hun zeppelin did in New Jersey. As he closed the ledger, Chauncey glimpsed his letter to Governor Bickett. He reminded himself to mail it before he took Traveler out for an afternoon gallop.
“We've done important work today,” Chauncey said and capped the fountain pen. “Maybe it's not so exciting but lots of times that's the way it is in the army. Even at the front you spend more of your time waiting than shooting or bayoneting the enemy.”
They were walking toward the door when Miss Yount came around her desk and blocked their departure.
“What are you doing?”
Chauncey didn't like Miss Yount being so close. She smelled of horehound and talc and her hair hovered over him like a cannonball. The steel-rimmed glasses made her eyes big and bulgy.
“I was checking for books that might be written to aid the enemy.”
“Did you find any?” Miss Yount asked. “If so, I'll need to take them out of fiction and poetry and shelve them in the rhetoric section.”
Chauncey glanced over at the front desk and saw the young librarian listened.
“I won't know until I send the titles to Washington,” Chauncey answered, putting some barb in his voice too.
“Be that as it may,” Miss Yount said, “you aren't leaving this library until those books are shelved and in the right order.”
Chauncey met her eyes, knowing she expected him to cower like some snotty-nosed brat or lackey at the general store. He kept his eyes right on hers and didn't blink.
“I am not a student, Miss Yount. I am a soldier.”
“A soldier,” she said. “Then why aren't you in Europe?”
Chauncey knew his face reddened but he wasn't going to look down or to the side or anywhere else besides into her ugly old gogglified eyes.
“These boys need to go home,” he said. “They have their evening chores to do.”
“You won't need them,” Miss Yount answered.
Chauncey thought about stepping around her but he knew she'd block him and that would only make it worse. He noticed the student librarian still smiled, but it wasn't a nice smile like earlier.
“Go outside and wait for me,” he told the boys. “I need to talk to Miss Yount alone.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, his voice sullen.
Chauncey waited for the boys to get through the door.
“I'd not normally do this, but I will this time.”
He didn't look at the student librarian as he passed the main desk. Chauncey thought about whistling to show putting the books back didn't bother him one whit. But as he placed the books on the shelf, a better idea came to him. He turned so Miss Yount couldn't see and took out his fountain pen. On the first page of a book, he wrote
Miss Yount is a Hun loving . . .
Chauncey paused. It was a word he had heard only a couple of times and never seen spelled. Either way, she'll know what it means, he figured, and wrote
kunt.
He set the book back and wedged Professor Mayer's book onto the shelf as well.
Chauncey paused as he passed the front desk.
“A student wrote something real nasty about you in one of the German books, Miss Yount,” he said, loud enough that everyone from the pretty student to the old fogey in the painting heard it.
The boys waited on the steps. They stood when Chauncey came out but there was a slouching insolence to their posture.
“Are we going to get to go home now?” Jack asked.
“Are we going to get to go home now,
sir
,” Chauncey said sharply.
A
misty drizzle fell all morning. Fog tendriled out of the woods, slow wisps merging and unfurling across the cove floor. As the day wore on, the fog thickened. The hammer's steady taps sounded farther and farther away. When Laurel walked to the springhouse to get milk, Hank and Walter were immersed in the whiteness. All she could see was the scarecrow, its arms raised above the swirling fog as if in rising water. She had clothed it in the tattered shirt and pants Walter had worn into the cove. The hammering stopped, probably to measure the strands for the next section, but as Laurel stared at the scarecrow she had the sensation that time had somehow unwoven and it was again last fall. Hank was still in Europe and Walter was nothing more than a figment her loneliness had fleshed out from a cross of wood and tattered cloth. Laurel thought of the silver flute, how she had held it in her hand, solid beyond any dream. The hammering began again but once back at the cabin she opened the case and pressed two fingers firm against the silver. But it won't be here tomorrow, she thought.
Laurel fetched a jar of blackberries from the larder and cinnamon and sugar from her tins rack, made a pie, and placed it in the oven. The washtub was on the porch so she carried it to her room, poured in water from the kettle and the well. She undressed and scrunched herself into the tub. Like always, bathing was a soothing thing, so she lingered a minute, felt the water drip off her hair and down her back, took in the clean clear smell of the soap on her skin. After Laurel toweled herself dry, she got the blue-and-white gingham dress from the closet, its broad shoulders widened to help conceal the purple stain. She'd sewn the dress last fall for the night she and Jubel were to meet at the Ledfords' barn. She tied the blue ribbon in her hair and sweetened her skin and breath with lilac and licorice root, rubbed cardinal flower petals on her neck though it seemed not to have had much of an effect.
Laurel turned to the mirror and it was like seeing herself for the first time in ever so long, because she was looking at her whole self, not just her face or hair but each part of her, slowly making her way down to her waist. With the birth stain covered, she could almost believe someone might find her pretty. She looked in the mirror a few more moments and then took the tub to the porch and emptied it, came back inside and finished making supper.
After a while she heard Hank and Walter on the porch and brought them towels. They took off their boots and unhitched their overalls to the waist, sharing a bucket of water thickened with Borax, then used Hank's pocket comb to roach back their soggy hair. They stood by the hearth barefoot, patting water off their faces.
“Damn if don't feel like I've been bobbing in water all day,” Hank said. “A drizzle like that damps a man deeper than a hard rain for sure, but we got that upper section finished.”
Hank threw a handful of kindling in the hearth and the fire leaped up as if startled.
“It's a drearisome day like this that makes a fellow appreciate coming in to a warm fire and warm food,” Hank said. “And look at sister there, all spangled out in a pretty dress. There's worser ends to a man's day, don't you reckon, Walter?”
Laurel's face flushed, though she reckoned she should be used to it. Hank had been saying things like that the last two days, giving all sorts of compliments to her in front of Walter, everything from Laurel's sewing to how bonny her hair was. Then last night, Hank had gone to bed early, leaving her and Walter alone on the porch. Needing Walter's help so bad he'd even try to play Cupid to get him to stay on. Yet maybe it was more than just that, Laurel thought. Maybe Hank wanted for her what he had with Carolyn, and figured a man like Walter might be the best chance of her ever having it.
She set the bread basket on the table and she and the men sat down. As they ate, Laurel heard the ticking of Hank's pocket watch, something she'd hardly made notice of before. But she heard it now, couldn't make herself not hear it as Hank talked about all the farm improvements left to do. Every second was one less Walter would be here.
“I wish you weren't going,” Hank said as Laurel served dessert. “It's nice having steady help. If you could stay on a couple more months, we could get that pasture fenced and the well dug. I'll even raise your pay to a dollar fifty a day. Plus I bet Laurel would keep making these pies. She never makes them when it's just me around.”
Laurel blushed.
“I've made plenty of pies for you.”
“None this good though,” Hank said, holding up a piece on a fork.
“So you think we could change your mind?” Hank asked.
Walter smiled slightly but shook his head.
“I was afraid of that,” Hank said. “I guess life in New York is a little more lively than being in the back of beyond.”
“Would you play your flute for us tonight?” Laurel asked as they rose from the table. “We'll not likely hear such pretty music in this cove again.”
“That would be nice,” Hank agreed.
They went out on the porch and she sat beside Walter. He raised the flute to his lips. At first Laurel thought he was just practicing, because the same few notes he started with kept repeating with just the smallest changes. Then it became clear that it was a song, the loneliest sort of song because the notes changed so little, like one bird calling and waiting for another to answer. It was as lonely a sound as she'd ever heard. Walter took the flute from his lips, held it before him as if to show that, once freed from his breath, the flute was silent as he was. Laurel lifted a kerchief from her dress pocket and dabbed her eyes. Hank too seemed stirred by the song. A sadness came over his face and he lowered his eyes. Walter shut the flute inside the case.
“If everyone could make sounds that beautiful, we'd never want to speak,” Laurel said. “We could just call to each other, let each other know we weren't alone.”
“That's a pretty thought, sister,” Hank said, “but I expect there'd still be plenty who'd rather use that silver to bash each other's heads in.”
Hank rose from the railing and stretched his arms.
“It seems you've decided, but if you change your mind, we'd love to have you stay on, even if it's just another week.”
“You could stay longer,” Laurel said after Hank went inside, “but I guess you need to get back to New York. Are there people waiting for you, besides the people you play music with? I mean like some kinfolks, or a sweetheart?”
Walter shook his head.
“I was always of a mind to leave here,” Laurel said. “My teacher Miss Calicut claimed I had enough smarts to go off somewhere like Asheville or Raleigh and be a teacher or secretary or most anything I'd want. But Daddy was sick and I didn't have a choice but to stay. It's like I've never had a single choice in my life. Most people get at least a few choices, don't they?”
Walter nodded. Even though Hank had gone inside, it was like she could still hear the watch mark each passing moment.
“It'd be nice if you could talk but it's ever so good just to have someone listen. What you say with your head nods is enough.” Laurel's voice softened. “I'd not ever want more.”
Brashy words, she told herself, but at least you'll have your say. You'll not look back when he's gone and wonder if there was the least chance you could have swayed him. If he gets up and goes inside right now, doesn't listen to one word more, it'll still be better than not having said it.
“They's folks who won't set foot in this cove. They think nothing good can happen here. I'd come to believe them. But you came here, and that's been good. There's been some good in it for you too, hasn't there?”
When Walter nodded, Laurel left her chair. She stood in front of him and reached for his hands.
“Will you hold me for a minute? That way it'll help me remember you were real, because once you leave it'll be too easy to believe you weren't.”
Laurel trembled as she placed her head against his chest, her arms tight around his waist. She stayed that way, feeling the sound of his heartbeat. He raised a hand and settled it on her shoulder. She lifted her lips, not sure if he'd let her kiss him. But he did, his lips meeting hers. Then he freed his hand from her shoulder and stepped back. Laurel led the way to his door with the lantern. Let it be enough, Laurel told herself. There's been times you'd not believe you could have even this much.
