The Lost Saints of Tennessee (20 page)

“The souls of Earl and Jed Smith are marked now,” he said. “Marked with the stain of your brother's blood. God will not let that go unpunished.”

“Sir, with respect, I won't let that go unpunished. Would you? If it was your brother? Would you walk away like nothing had happened?”

“Son, I would like to think I would leave it in the hands of the Lord. But to be truthful, I don't know.”

The preacher pulled gloves over his hands. “You go on inside and enjoy dinner with your family. I'll be praying for you. You do the same.”

When I left the house the next morning, Mother told me not to do anything stupid. I walked right past her without a word. Daddy followed me outside and reminded me of the agreement he had worked out with Mr. Smith.

“Don't be foolish, Zeke. Think of your sister. There's more than just you and Carter in all this.”

I kept walking. Tommy Jackson was home from UT on Christmas break and I headed up the road to his house. He stood on the porch, glancing back into the house every so often. Keeping an eye out for his dad, who was probably still sleeping off last night's whiskey.

“Heard about your brother,” Tommy said. “You're not going back to Virginia, are you?”

It was a relief to not have to explain it to him.

“How's UT? Heard you had a good season,” I said.

“Zeke, cut the crap. What are we going to do about those boys?”

Tommy looked at me for a long moment before walking back into the house. When he came out, a baseball bat rested over his shoulder. In high school I had had little reason to fight after Carter stayed home, but not Tommy. In the yearbook he was voted Most Likely to Win a Fight. His temper flared in a heartbeat, the result of his father beating the breath out of him on a regular basis.

“Come on,” he said, stepping off the porch with a smile. “This could be fun.”

• • •

We found the Smith boys minding their father's still up in the hills past Chickasaw Lake. Earl said he'd been waiting for me, figured I'd come back. The sight of UT's starting linebacker next to me unnerved them a bit. Nobody messed with Tommy.

Earl kept right on smoking a cigarette, watching us. I knew he was the one to start something with Carter. Jed went along with whatever Earl did.

“Tommy and I need to have a talk with you two.”

Rosie had told me the whole story the night before. How Earl thought Carter was me at first and started saying things like
W
hat's the college boy doing home?
When Jed told him it wasn't Ezekiel, it was the dumb one, Earl got a look on his face like he'd won the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. And then he started swinging.

Tommy and I had a plan—he'd take Jed and I'd take
Earl.
Jed looked all scared, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Tommy and Earl. Everything was going the way it was supposed to until Jed reached behind the still and pulled out a shotgun. Pointed it right at me, his eyes settled all of sudden. We didn't think about either of them having a gun, which, in retrospect, was not good planning. The blood pumping through my heart stopped in that moment, waiting.

Tommy dropped the bat and pulled a switchblade from his back pocket, grabbing Earl around the throat before Jed knew what was happening, before I knew what was happening. The bright winter sun danced off the blade.

“Go ahead, Jed. Shoot me,” I said. “But old Tommy here is going to have to slit your brother's throat if you do. Why don't you put the gun down?”

Jed hesitated, looking from his brother to me, his finger still wrapped around the trigger.

“Do it!” Earl yelled. A trickle of blood appeared below the blade at his throat as Tommy exerted pressure.

Jed put the gun on the ground in front of him, stepping back. I picked it up and heaved it into the lake. The splash echoed up to us.

No one moved until Earl jammed his elbow into
­Tommy's stomach, making him drop the knife. Tommy lunged for it, sending the knife skidding across the ground. Jed made a move for it, and I threw myself at him. I gave every punch I had. Out of the corner of my eye Tommy and Earl wrestled on the ground.

Jed clocked me across the face with a fierce right hook,
laying me flat. Things went dark for a second. My hand felt
something round beneath it. The bat. Nothing felt as good as
swinging at Jed, seeing his skin break open, and hearing
his breath stop when I landed a hit in his gut. Each time the wood connected, I said a different kind of prayer.
That one is for Carter's eye. This one is for Carter's arm. This for Carter's head. This is for taking Virginia away from me.
The anger spilled through me and it was hard to tell what I was angrier about. What had been done to my brother. Or what had been done to me.

Earl called out for his brother. Jed and I both looked over to see Tommy holding a flailing Earl over the side of the hill. Tommy wore a big grin. Then he let go. Earl screamed the whole thirty feet down to the water.

“Come on, Zeke. Let's go before he finds the shotgun and comes after us.”

“Not yet.”

Jed was on his knees before us, blood pouring down his face from a smashed nose. Fear clouded his eyes. I raised the bat.

“Please,” he whispered.

My brother must have said the same word to him; my sister begged them to stop. They didn't.

It would be so easy to bring the bat down against Jed's head and feel the splitting of bones reverberate up the handle. Tommy caught my eye.

“Not worth it, Zeke.”

My hands gripped the bat tighter. The knowledge that it would feel good to kill Jed surprised me. The world would not miss Jed Smith. Living provided more opportunities to hurt others the way he had hurt Carter.

My brother's words pumped through my mind. “I been missing you,” he had said. Through the blaze of adrenaline, the prospect of leaving Carter behind again, for jail this time, loomed.

The bat dropped from my hands, falling to the ground with a final muffled noise.

There were weeks after the fight when memories of it would intrude, reminding me that whatever violence lurked in the Smith brothers also lay somewhere inside me. It was not a thought I wanted to take out in the light of day and examine, so instead I threw myself into preparing the shed for Carter and me. Despite the cold, my father and I spent the month of January getting it ready, stopping only when forced by the winter rains. We ran plumbing, then electricity. Made a bedroom and a kitchen, though you could barely turn around in it. When he was having a good day, Carter would come out back and help, too. By February, we finished. Carter and I moved into the shed on February 15, 1961. I wrote the date on the wall behind the stove. My brother wrote “me and ­Zeke's house” next to it.

In March I sent a letter to Cousin Georgia. Mother must have phoned her so they would know not to expect me back for spring semester. Putting down in words all that had happened wasn't possible, so I gave her the short version. Georgia wrote back and suggested that I go to Freed-Hardeman for a while, just to keep up my studies until I could come back to UVA.

Maybe Carter would get better and be able to be on his own eventually, but it seemed unlikely. His face would never look right again—the long gash down the right side became a thick ropy cord of scar tissue and his eye remained clouded over.

It was dumb, but I felt that if I couldn't go to UVA, I didn't want to go to any college.

Aunt Charlotte's husband got me a job at the Dover
ele­vator plant in Mabry. I worked forty, fifty, sometimes sixty hours a week. Life fell into a routine. Work. Come home and be with Carter. Sleep. Get up and do it again. There was no time to remember Lacey Farms and the university.

Jackie started dropping by the shed at night. At first she brought over hamburgers from Gillbey's in Mabry or a basket of fried chicken, saying she was worried we would never eat anything but pork and beans. Then she'd call me at work and ask me what I'd like to eat that night and come over and cook it on the tiny one-burner stove. Mother fed us, too, leaving cakes of corn bread and plates of ham on the workbench that served as our dining table. Carter ate dinner at the house sometimes. But I didn't. I still couldn't be in the same room as Mother.

I saved almost every penny I made. The plan was to buy a house someday. And a ring for Jackie.

My brother got better. His body healed, though he never remembered what happened the day of the attack. But he was changed. He didn't like to go beyond the house much. If we went to the store, little kids would stare at him, their eyes wide looking at the big scar on his face and his funny eye. The lake was as far as Carter would go.

While I worked, he stayed in the shed playing cards or visited Mother or wandered over to Violet's house across the street. On the weekends, we went fishing. Carter would pack us breakfast and lunch. We sat on the shady side of the lake and cast our lines, watching the wind play over the water, not saying much of anything. I got him to laugh by doing stupid stuff like pretending to swallow a bait worm.

One afternoon after catching three dinners' worth of fish, Carter put his arm around my shoulder. This surprised me. Since the attack, he didn't like to touch people or be touched. He seemed afraid that everybody might hurt him, even the ones who loved him.

“Zeke,” he said, “you're the best brother.”

The only sound around us was the lapping of water against the shoreline.

Thirty-Four

1985

“Ezekiel Cooper, you have been keeping a few too many things to yourself.”

Cousin Georgia finds me by the lake stacking downed
branches. A week has passed since the date with Elle, and Georgia wants details. Not much to tell. We've both maintained radio silence.

“Your sister Daisy just phoned. You didn't tell me it was your birthday last week, and you also forgot to tell me your mother has cancer. Daisy said the surgery's been moved up to tomorrow.”

The growing pile of branches feels like an accomplishment. By next week, most of them should be cleared. The wet smell of the rotting wood has become comforting. All I want to do is keep stacking, keep working, keep pushing thoughts of Carter, Mother, and Elle away.

I set the last branch to the side, pulling off my work gloves. The cold bites at my fingers. A covey of quail flashes through the pine trees—five or six babies speed off after their mother, forming a wide triangle formation as they trail across the grass.

“Surgery's tomorrow?”

She nods.

Tomorrow I was planning to go over to Elle's and
apologize. In an act of pure optimism a few days ago, Tucker and I took a ride over to the Feed and Fuel and used a credit card to purchase a pair of black Durango cowboy boots. The sales girl talked me into buying boot polish, and I shined up the boots with an old washcloth, leaving my room smelling like a Memphis shoe-shine stand. The idea was to wear them over to Elle's house, admit what an ass I had been, and give her flowers. Since our “date,” loneliness had found me again, accompanied by a stronger feeling of seriously missing Elle. She made me nervous and on edge in a good sort of way. Whenever she and I had any physical contact, even if it was just her arm accidentally brushing against my own, my body reacted like a
thousand nerve endings had been stripped down and
laid bare.

“I've got things to do here, Georgia. I should probably stick around. Mother will be all right. She's tough.”

Georgia's expression clouds. “You can leave and come back, you know.” She wears a white blouse, and the bony part of her shoulder socket is a round knob pressing against the thin material. The morning chill doesn't seem to bother her.

“Now, I'll not tell you what to do, Ezekiel. It's not my place,” she says.

I brace myself, knowing she isn't finished. In and out of the oak trees above us, a scrub jay squawks and chases a cardinal, whose feathers shine like garnets.

“Your mother and your sisters, not to mention your
chil
dren, are probably out of their minds with worry about this
surgery, son. Lillian is a strong woman. You're right about that. But she needs her family around her.
All
of you.”

I recall Mother as she looked the last time I saw her, seated on top of the stairs in the flowered housedress that hung too big on her, watching me leave Clayton, not knowing where I was headed or why. She had looked old, a word I'd never used to describe her before. In family pictures she could pass for Violet's and Daisy's older sister. Growing up, shopkeepers would say things like
Mrs. Cooper, you must have had those babies when you weren't even a teenager!
But that leaving day, she appeared old and defeated, as if she suspected the empty space between us would never be bridged.

“I'll think about it, Georgia. I promise.”

The response is a cross between a throat clearing and a snort. She turns to go, then stops.

“Elle called.” Georgia says. “She'll be over at ten this morning for a lesson. That's in fifteen minutes, so you'd better get a move on.”

The boots crunch my toes all up, but they look good. At six minutes after ten, I make it to the stables. Elle says nothing, only points at her watch.

“Sorry.”

“I've got another lesson at eleven-thirty.”

She is dressed in jeans and a jacket. The jeans are just tight enough to outline the round curve of her ass. There is nothing and everything to say.

“Listen—” I begin.

“Listen—” she says.

I hold up a hand, certain I should go first. “I'm sorry, Elle. I shouldn't have left like that. I don't talk about my brother much.”

“Maybe you should.”

Now she sounds like Jackie.

Elle busies herself with tacking up Diamond, an indication that she is either nervous or can't stand the sight of me. Does she regret the other night? Maybe it was too much too soon. It didn't feel too soon. I want to kiss her, but she leads Diamond into the ring.

After adjusting the stirrups, she slowly turns to face me. She pulls a silver wrapper from a jacket pocket, unwraps it, and pops a chocolate into her mouth, watching me while she chews. That is one lucky piece of candy.

A small gold horseshoe pendant rests in the dip between her collarbones. It occurs to me that it would give me pleasure to buy her a beautiful bracelet or necklace and see her wear it.

“I'm sorry, too,” Elle says. “About everything.”

I frown.

“Okay, not
everything.
The being together part I'm not
sorry about. At least I think I'm not sorry about it. It always
seems to get complicated, doesn't it? Maybe we could try
again?”

Diamond stamps a hoof, anxious for the lesson to start. I haul myself into the saddle.

“Exactly which part should we try again?” The question comes from the relative safety of Diamond's back.

Elle doesn't answer, but she laughs and I know we're okay.

The lesson drill is familiar now—mount, circle around for a bit, get the feel of the horse again.

“Let the reins go and put your hands behind your back,” Elle commands from the ring's center.

“Are you crazy?”

I do it anyway.

“You need to learn balance. Hang on with your legs. Squeeze him a little bit with your thighs. That's it.”

I perform this feat for a few minutes, scared with every forward lope that I'll be kissing the dirt. Next Elle says to close my eyes.

“Close my eyes?”

“Just do it.”

I shake my head. “You must think I'm a dumber redneck than I look if you think I'm going to be blind while sitting on top of a horse.”

She gets Diamond to hold up and marches over, her cheeks flushed. When she asks for the reins, I oblige. Diamond doesn't put up a fight, either, when she begins to lead him around the ring.

“You want to know why I want you to close your eyes?”

“Doesn't matter,” I shrug. “I'm not doing it.”

The horse stops abruptly. Elle is no longer walking.
“Look, Zeke, you've been riding for what? A week? I'm the teacher here. Let me teach.”

When I don't move, she hands the reins back. “Suit
yourself.”

Diamond turns to watch her walk out of the ring
.

“Wait,” I say.

She keeps walking.

“Okay. I'll do it.”

This will be the stupidest thing I have done to impress a girl, beating by a landslide the time in eighth grade when I was madly in love with Irene McNally. We had homeroom together, and every morning I hid her books in the classroom before the first bell rang so she would talk to me. We would laugh and I would give her back the books until one day she stepped out of the room before the bell to go to her locker. Before she got back in class, I was called to the school office and forgot to return her books. She couldn't find them or the homework and notes for a test she had folded into her textbook. That was the end of that.

Elle takes her time returning to the ring. “This is about learning to trust yourself and the horse. You shut your eyes so you can feel—the motion of the horse, your body's response to it. When your eyes are open, the visual overrides the intuitive. To be a good rider, you need to be able to feel the horse and anticipate his movements as much as you need to be scanning the road ahead for trouble spots.”

This seems similar to fishing. After a day of not catching a thing, I'd take the line out, put on some fresh bait, close my eyes, say a little prayer, and then cast away. Half the time, a nibble would come in less than thirty minutes.

Elle waits with arms folded across her chest. Diamond paws the ground with his foreleg.

“What do I get if I do it?”

“I'll make you a deal,” she says.

This sounds promising.

“I'll let you hold the reins.”

“Not good enough.”

“What do you want?”

“A kiss.”

Pause.

“Agreed.”

Off we go. Diamond walks along until Elle clicks him up to a light trot. It's not so bad. The horse is solid beneath me, taking us where we need to go.

“Good job,” Elle says. “You look great up there.”

If she keeps it up, I'll stand on the damn horse with my eyes closed.

“Just let him lead you, Zeke. He knows where to go. Now try to post with his trot. Up down up down up down. That's it!”

The world narrows to Diamond's smooth movements and the rich sound of Elle's voice. The terror of hurtling out of control settles. A little. Diamond knows what he's doing. Diamond's a pro.

“Pull back on the reins a little,” she says. “Gently. Not too hard. He's itching to canter.”

Her words don't register until too late. Diamond
is
itching to canter and so he does. My eyes fly open and I jerk hard on the reins. Too hard. The horse stops instantly but I don't. As much as I try to regain balance, the force of momentum sends me into a slow, gradual tumble that lands me in the dirt next to Diamond. He turns an elegant long nose toward me with a look that says,
What are you doing down there, partner?

“Well, hell.”

Elle puts a hand over her mouth to disguise the grin spreading across her face. I get up, brushing the dirt off my pants, flexing my legs and arms to see if all parts are intact.

“Good thing you had those new boots on.”

The comment deserves ignoring.

“Didn't you know that the first time you ride in a new pair of boots you're supposed to fall? It's practically guaranteed. I've told them to put it on the sales slips over at the Feed and Fuel, but they won't do it.”

“Do you make fun of all your students when they fall?”

“Of course not,” she says. “It's very unprofessional.”

It takes her a moment to compose herself. She walks over and brushes dirt from the back of my shirt. “Most falls only hurt your ego.”

I focus on getting Diamond's saddle off. The buckle jams. I wrestle with it, muttering a few curse words.

“Haven't you ever heard of getting right back up on a horse after you fall off?”

With a final wrench, the buckle comes free and I haul the saddle into the tack room.

“Don't you think you should try? It'll make it a lot harder the next time you get up on him if you don't.”

“Seeing as I'm going to be on a plane back to Tennessee today, I'll take a rain check.”

So, I'm going.

“You're leaving?” She takes Diamond's brush from my hand. “Why?”

At the western boundary of the Lacey property, the Blue Ridge foothills look as if they are aflame, so intense are the trees' autumnal shades of orange and crimson. Before sunset, I will be up in the air over those hills. The vacation, it seems, is over.

“My mother is sick. Lung cancer. She's having surgery tomorrow. Everybody's pretty worried about her.”

“Oh. That's terrible.” She frowns. “I'm sorry.”

She throws the brush into a bucket next to Diamond's stall. “I'll miss you.”

I walk over and pull her around to face me. “I earned this.”

The kiss lasts half a minute but contains a promise.

With my arms still wrapped around her, I say, “I don't know how long I'll be gone. But I'll miss you, too. I don't want you to forget the night we spent together.”

She smiles.

“Okay. Forget the part where I walk out, but remember everything up until then. Can you do that? I'm not sure where you and I are headed, but I'd like to see how it turns out. You won't forget or disappear or something?”

The sound of desperation is beginning to creep in, so I stop.

“Diamond and I will be here, Zeke.”

“It's not the horse I'm worried about.”

She pulls me into the shadows of the stable and we make out like seventeen-year-old virgins, leading me to believe that she may be the last thing I need to be worrying over.