The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (4 page)

That’s what I remember of my life before the cave.

My childhood came and went. Like a long courtship, with wildflowers, honeycakes for breakfast, running, running, running along ledges only one step away from clouds, like you could just throw yourself out and they would catch you in the quilting of it. That’s what I recall. Then the little heart shapes of sun and shadow flickering over his face. So handsome. And Burke a gentle, lumbering man who’s standing in the creek to his knees, offering to carry me over like a town girl; but I jump, scramble up the bank without slipping once, and find the opening on my own right next to a mountain laurel. Because I’ve been in woods and caves all my life.

When I grab the branch, pink petals come twirling like snowflakes, and he’s quietly behind me saying, “That air blowing in your face, it found its way from underground.” He knows that he must stay calm and quiet because I might startle like a colt and then their trip would have been in vain. So Burke’s voice is sleepy and slow, light enough that it nearly floats away. “What they call a breathing cave. My brother’s trapped down there, but it ain’t like you imagine. It won’t be like climbing down into no grave, Rachel Ann, and I won’t let nothing smother you. It’ll breathe out like this for fifteen, twenty minutes, then, after a spell, breathe in. You can feel it the whole time. I seen it suck in a dragonfly this morning and then let it back out not even wrinkling the wings.”

“It’s cold,” I say.

“It’s fresh and clean too, like running water.”

“It’s cold as the grave, and there’s a man down there, ain’t that right?”

“It’s constant fifty-one degrees,” he says. “Lee told me hisself. Same temperature year-round. Fifty-one in July. Fifty-one in January.”

“Either way you could die.”

“It ain’t like you imagine,” he insists. “Nothing ever is.”

And talks me in by degrees. He carries the blanket and the lantern. I take the paper sack and the longbar from the Model T’s toolbox. Near the entrance it’s sand and gravel like a railroad tunnel, then shale farther back, and finally smooth limestone sloping off in three directions. Burke picks the middle passage that still gets some light from the entrance, but pretty soon he’s bending over and shuffling like an old man, and in another minute he is crawling. Then, after a while, I am crawling too. Just scrunching and twisting for years until it’s not fun at all and my hands begin to look like theirs, my elbows raw, and I am not fourteen years old, and I am not a mountain girl anymore. Until he finally stops, saying, “Why don’t you scoot on past me while I light the lantern.”

And for a moment we are like man and wife.

In the yellow kerosene light I can see the outcropping that’s blocked their way and the dirt piles where they’ve tried to dig around it, but there is no hole, only dust and leavings. Because I am little, I can still sit with my back against the wall and see Burke, who’s struggling on his side now, shoulders almost touching floor and ceiling at the same time. He’s panting when he puts his face down low into the dirt and shouts under the outcropping, “Lee! Lee, we brung somebody. Gonna pry you loose. Got a blanket for you. Can you hear me? Lee! It’s me Burke.”

But there is no answer, only a blank black oval underneath the outcropping where you would never think to look. After two days of patient chipping they have made it twelve inches wide. I can feel the sharp-toothed edges with my hand, and suddenly I cannot breathe for thinking about it. I cannot move at all. My mind wants to run away
into another place, but I can still feel his hands on my hips, even today, right now, his lover’s caress and patient insistence, and then I am through.

I go tumbling down, down like rotten tree limbs under a load of snow, at first only sagging over the edge and then crashing down through rocks and slippery soil until I collide with the very thing that I have imagined. It is soft and wet and full of frightening strength, the hands crawling over my face as I gasp and fight. I’m touching him in a different place every time I push away, and we are tangled together until finally I can relax and back away upslope, while he moans.

“I got him,” I whisper to the cave, “I did it, I’m through, I got him,” water dripping into water somewhere in the darkness. I’m shaking with cold and fear and effort, shouting, “I got him!” back toward his brother on the other side. The words come out in a jumble, get caught on an inrushing current, and echo. “Pass me that sack, no, the blanket. No. Wait. Pass me that lantern first.”

It comes through sideways, and I have to relight, but I am slow and steady now. This is not my first cave, my first corpse. It’s not my first dark night of day, because I am a mountain girl. I know sunshine and storms. Both my mamma and daddy by the age of nine. And now Lee Bender who is fish-belly white, caught between two boulders. A weak and wasted version of his brother on the other side, he squints and twists away from the light that burns right through the crook of his arm and sets fire to his brain; and I know in that first glance that Lee Bender will die because he has become a part of the cave. I turn the lantern low out of pity. Then from out the shadow his dry voice is rasping, “Who is it?”

And I’m yelling back, “He’s okay! He’s moving around some.”

“Who are you?” Like I am a ghost.

“Rachel Ann Starns from over about Flint Ridge. I come to give you this.” And hand him the paper sack.

Lee Bender’s arms are free. They are long and thin like spider legs and come dribbling dust so fine that it glistens, slowly, slowly, until
he can reach up to where I am reaching down. He takes the sack but cannot unroll the top and tears it open the way a crayfish would tear. And picks at the pieces. Inside it is a crust of cornbread, which he crumbles and lifts to his mouth with fingers gone straight and stiff with cold. And there is a jar half full of buttermilk, which he takes in sips. “You don’t know how thankful I am for this, Rachel Ann Starns. God’s gonna bless you real good.”

“He’s eating it!” I yell back, and then scramble up to take the blanket that Burke has passed through the hole.

But even the good you do.

It makes me cry sometimes. There is loose rock all around, and I have kicked down several big ones, sent sand and gravel sliding, and buried him to his chest. I’ve made his mouth go small and round, gulping at the air like a fish flopping, but it’s done with such slow finality that it takes my breath even now. And I am paralyzed again. But it is what happens in a cave. You are caught. Through the billowing dust you see him pull one arm out of the muck, patiently digging the other one loose handful by handful. You watch as he starts picking away the rocks one by one, delicately, dropping them away into the darkness where they give back no sound at all.

From far away I can hear the trapped man saying, “It ain’t the boulders holding me. It ain’t the riprap. They’s just one tiny little rock. Broke off when I was climbing out this crawl space and must have fell just right. Cause when I jerked my leg—,” he pauses, almost embarrassed I believe, “—hit just clicked into place. Like the closing of a door. It don’t even hurt.”

So I cover his shoulders with the blanket and brush the filth from his hair and caress his forehead to take away the pain because I already know there is that much in the touch of a woman’s hand.

Then just before Burke pulls me through, his brother comes alive to me, saying, “Don’t worry, Rachel Ann Starns. You an angel of God. This ain’t such a bad place, you know that now. Tell ’em. With this blanket, little food, Lee Bender can stay down here a month if he has
to. I’m not in any pain. You tell ’em that. Tell my brothers I’m not in any pain, just a mite uncomfortable. I been a caver all my life. Been stuck before too. My brothers’ll get me out and my daddy, and, besides, lift up your eyes and look.”

I have already passed through the lantern, but we no longer need the light. I see it hovering over me, as clear as a cloud against a mountain sky, glistening white, as ripply smooth as melted wax. At the top it curves into a half circle, all the rest just flowing away to one side and down so that it looks like a lace window curtain blown sideways in a breeze. You would never think anything made in stone could be this delicate. All along, left to right, it just drips away in creamy folds that have the overlapping delicacy of feathers. “Like an angel’s wing,” I say.

“That’s what it is,” whispers Lee Bender. Laying his head down on the blanket that I had brought him and closing his eyes in sleep.

Outside, the holler has changed.

I don’t know how they got there so fast. It may have been a telephone somewhere, or the cars. But like magic they are there, twenty or thirty of them when we come out. Helpers helping us down the embankment. Women with baskets of food. Men, relatives I reckon, with their sleeves rolled up, coats hanging from tree limbs. Silent sad-eyed children among the galax and ferns. They are all staring at us like we just clawed our way up from another world. And I am staring back at them in the hush of it all, not realizing that I have taken his hand, and someone behind us is murmuring, like in a dream, “I thought you said hit was a girl.”

And there is a flatbed truck now piled with wheelbarrows, rope, shovels, picks. A man handing them down one at a time. I can see where they’ve brought it down the holler, a green furrow of branches and saplings all bent in the same direction like a fish trap. Straddling the creek. Backed up to the opening as near as they could get it. And farther upstream, between the ruts, men are harnessing two mules, tying
heavy ropes to the traces like they come to pull stumps. And somebody is trying to shush a pack of hounds that think it’s time to hunt.

Burke speaks to his daddy in low urgent tones. “She done good. Got through and all. Next thing is maybe get some fellas in there with cold chisels, widen that hole.”

He nods, fumbling with his pocket watch. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what’s next to do. I just want him outta there.” Then closes the cover with a snap, like he could stop time if he clicked fast enough and buried it deep enough in his pocket. But it is on a chain, and the chain is hooked to his overalls.

Across the creek in a ragged clearing is a man whose voice draws stragglers in ones and twos. It is a child’s voice, tinny and distant, and it is a child’s body except for the face, where time and pain have done their work. He stands upon a stump, both arms raised to the sky, both hands clamped upon a ragged black book, piping in that high radio voice, “You know, Lord God, that this world is rotton and corrup’. Undergirt with treachery. And that the earth that abideth forever will claim any who will not lift up their eyes, amen. Surely and purely it is set forth as a sign among us, and so we pray this afternoon for your fallen servant Lee, ask that you smite the rock and stay the hand and restore him once again to the love a his family, amen. Bring forth a miracle as in the days of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen.”

“What’s going on here?” says Burke.

“Name of Reverent Josephus Harwell,” says Asa. “He come with Thomas and Louisa, I reckon. Took up in that clearing as soon’s he got here midafternoon. Been gospel slinging ever since. Say one time he was with the carnival till he got saved.”

“He ain’t no bigger’n her. Whyn’t you send him down?”

The wind smothers the answer, driving the preacher’s words higher and whipping his hair to one side till his words come back to earth as a chant. “They ain’t nobody here can take a man out of the ground nor loose the grip a Satan. They’s only one way to get lifted up, and we going to pray for Lee Bender and Brother Lucas and his family, yes
we are, until there’s enough God in this holler to split open the earth and lay a golden staircase all the way down to that poor boy. We gonna bless every man that goes into that hillside, every shovel, pickax, every inch of rope, every woman that brung food, every neighbor who brung hope. We gonna bless every mule and wagon that comes down that road and every free breath of air we take. Because why? Because the earth under our feet is a empty shell, amen.”

“Fine,” Burke manages. “Just pray it don’t rain first. And that you can find me two men with hammers and chisels.”

“We can’t have that kind of talk, Burke.” Lucas seems like a man who’s come back from a far place. “I don’t care how tired and wore out you are.”

“Look, it ain’t the devil that’s got hold of him. It’s a rock. That’s all.”

After a time they made a half circle before the stump, and a few of the men who’d been unloading tools drifted across the creek and took up with the women and children. Someone began a low moaning of a tune that followed exactly the preacher’s incantation. A family just arriving went straight to the gathering without even looking once toward the cave. And after a time Lucas Bender and the twins crossed the creek and sat, hands folded in desperate prayer.

We stay behind.

Burke says again, “You done good an’ I thank you. I don’t reckon we can get you home before dark, but you welcome to stay with one of the families. People say you practically live in the woods anyhow.”

“I live with my aunts.”

“You don’t live in the woods with the animals?”

“I been to school.”

“I been to school too,” he says, “but they didn’t teach climbing and caving when I went.”

“I can read. I know the medieval ages, the Bible, and the Roman empire. I can sew and cook and—”

“I don’t mean nothing by it, Rachel Ann Starns. You done good. One of these days …, why, one of these days, I’m gonna bring you flowers. Right now I’m just tired. That’s all.” He hands me his pocket-knife. “Here. S’all I have that’s worth anything. Why don’t you whittle us up a house, some furniture. Some supper.” Then he collapses on the fern bank, propping himself on one elbow and taking short sips from a mason jar that he passes back and forth with a fat, unshaven man who guards his basket with suspicious care. After a time Burke closes his eyes like he’s listening to music and says, “Whatta you reckon, Solly?”

The bootlegger scratches his stubble. “I think maybe this is the last place on earth that God ain’t got around to yet. What’s your brother doing out here anyhow?”