The Marble Orchard (2 page)

“Why sure,” Clem would say, “you rode up here sauced to the
gills. I’m surprised to see you again. Thought sure I’d be reading your obituary by now.”

So maybe that was the reason the rest of the Sheetmires kept their distance. More than the scorched stink of diesel buried in Clem’s clothes, it was the legend of his violence that made them wary.

“I take it you ain’t eating.”

The voice startled Beam. He turned. His cousin Alton stood propped against the pickup’s tailgate twisting a toothpick between his lips.

“I ain’t hungry,” said Beam.

Alton shrugged and lifted the tailgate down. “Suit yourself,” he said, settling himself onto the rough metal. He wore khaki trousers and polished loafers and a collared short sleeve yellow shirt, though his chin was barbed with thin bright-black whiskers and he kept glancing down at himself as if surprised and somewhat disgusted by his current state of dress.

“I’m glad y’all could make it anyhow,” he said, his voice a deep baritone. “Even if all you’re going to do is sit over here by Old Dog and not take one bite of the blackberry cobbler I fixed.”

“You didn’t fix no blackberry cobbler,” said Beam.

“The hell I didn’t. Baked on it all morning. You better go get a piece.”

“You didn’t fix no cobbler.”

Alton craned his neck and looked at Beam. His jaw hung open, the toothpick balanced on his bottom lip. “Shit. What kind of feller you think I am? You think I got so little sense I just go around telling lies about cobblers?”

“That sounds about like what I think.”

Beam looked past the picnic tables, but felt Alton come sidling along the edge of the pickup. A bright and piney stink of cologne wafted off him.

“Hey, there’s something else I got,” he said. “Follow me on up to the cemetery and I’ll show you.”

Beam turned to him. Alton’s cheeks were dried and blazed with pale dust from his job hauling rock for the crusher out at Dundee, and his skin seemed to always keep a ghostly film of powder. He was married, a father of two small daughters, and he’d grown paunchy.

“What have you done? Stole a car?” Beam asked.

Alton waved at the air. “Just follow me and you’ll see what it is.”

He paced away from the potluck and on through the thorny locusts and then up into the beginning hardwoods, red oak and scaly bark hickory that cast a cool murk over the ground.

Beam followed him. Up into the trees, he found loblolly pines grew here as well, the earth carpeted with their soft brown straw, the air honeyed with their sap, and he heard the clatter and talk of the potluck fading to distant drowned murmur as he followed Alton deeper into the woods.

The cemetery sat on a side of the hill in what had once been a clearing. Sapling cedar and dogwood grew amid the stones now, and the tangled grounds were ferny and sown with jagged weeds and an undercover of nitric green moss. The markers were crumbling, the names faded, and lichen spread over the broken marble and granite that appeared as fissured bone in the stark light pouring through the trees.

“What is it you got up here?” Beam asked.

Alton smirked and put a finger to his lips, shushing him. Then he strode off down one of the cemetery rows, the weeds sighing against his legs. At the edge of the cemetery, near what had been a wire fence, he squatted over a midden of soiled plastic lilies and Styrofoam saddles. Briefly, he dug through the refuse and then produced a tall vinegar bottle of green glass corked with a wad of sandpaper. A clear liquid jostled inside. “Come take you a pull of this, Beam,” he said. He dug the sandpaper cork out and lifted the bottle. A long chain of bubbles flickered up. When he finished, he gasped.

Beam went to him and immediately smelled the fumey sweetness of alcohol.

“What kind is it?” he asked.

“Honeysuckle.” Alton handed him the bottle. “Go ahead and take a yank on it.”

Beam held the bottle under his nose. It smelled nothing like honeysuckle. It smelled like pure grain swill and it made his eyes water.

“You know I can’t have that,” he said. He tried to hand the bottle back but Alton stepped away grinning.

“Oh, go ahead. It won’t hurt to just have a taste,” he said.

Beam stared at the bottle. It wasn’t his age or even deep Protestant guilt that kept him glued to sobriety. Though Clem had taken to prayer of late and was often seen reading in the Bible, his folks were not churchy and he’d been to but a handful of services his entire life. It was his affliction, a mild form of narcolepsy, that made him leery of drink. Without warning, a sudden sleep could come upon him, and he would drop as if felled by an ax. The doctors had told him that with such a disease the right level of drunkenness could kill him, and that it might take hardly more than a shot of whisky or half a six pack of lukewarm Coors to do the job. Beam suspected this was largely bluff, though. He’d been drunk a few times and had survived.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“Don Eddy Ramsey. Makes it himself. You should see his cellar. He’s got three refrigerators full of those little bottles.”

Beam shook the container and the alcohol beaded against the glass. In one motion, he slung the bottle up and took a long healthy pull and then gasped when he finished. The liquor reached its fire far down into him and left a taste almost like warm iron on his tongue, and he felt his head steady and lighten until he could no longer hear the picnic in the glen below.

“How’s that grab you?” Alton asked. He took the bottle from Beam and grinned.

“It drinks pretty good, don’t it?”

Alton took another sip and then passed the bottle back to Beam and they spent perhaps a half hour that way, trading drinks and remarking on the bald hurt inside the liquor, the burn and scald of it tempered with only the slightest hint of honeysuckle. They talked and drank until finally Alton declared he was hungry.

“I need a wedge of cornbread to soak up all this whisky I’m drowning in,” he said.

Beam remained silent. He drank deeply again, the bottle lifted to his lips as if he were bugling a reveille to the cemetery dead, the liquor pounding loud and brassy between his ears.

“Hey, Beam,” said Alton. “Maybe you shouldn’t take so much of that stuff. It’s pretty stout.”

Beam slung the bottle from his mouth and grimaced at his cousin. He leaned against a crumbling headstone to steady himself. Then he put a finger to his lips.

“Ssshh,” he said.

Alton jerked the bottle away from Beam and stoppered it with the wad of sandpaper. He replaced it in the mound of cast away flowers and saddles, then covered it with an arrangement of red and mildewed nylon chrysanthemums.

“Look,” Alton said, turning to Beam, “you’re just going to have stay up here until you get sober enough to come back down again and that’s all there is to it.”

“I ain’t sitting up here,” Beam said, shaking his head.

“If you go down there they’ll smell the liquor on you.”

“I don’t give a goddamn. They don’t like the smell they should just hold their noses.”

Beam stood up from the headstone and walked down the row toward the potluck, but he had to stop and spell himself against another grave marker as Alton came trotting up behind.

“See, you can’t even hardly walk right,” he said. “You just need to sit here and rest a spell.”

Beam looked off through the trees and his head swam.
“Maybe you’re right,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, I am,” said Alton. “You wait right here and I’ll go down and get you some water and bring it up to you, okay?”

“All right. That’d be fine.”

“Now don’t move. Just stay put right there.”

Alton walked out of the cemetery, through the sunlight and on into the shady trees until the sound of his footsteps was covered by the quake and jostle of the heat.

Beam braced himself against the gravestone. It crumbled some in his hands and he wiped his fingers against his jeans and then closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The blood throttled through him. His tongue had gone dry and brittle and felt swollen, but when he opened his eyes, he saw the trash heap where Alton had hidden the bottle.

A blue jay screamed somewhere in the pines.

Beam woke to full night, not knowing where he was. The ground under him felt soft and damp with moss. He rolled onto his back and then lifted himself onto his elbows, his head wobbling loose and ugly. The drink gurgled back into his throat and he spat raw bile and then wiped his mouth and remembered.

At one corner of the cemetery burned a low campfire. Two men were seated before it on feed buckets. They smoked cigarettes and shared a bottle. Each wore a patchy beard and cradled a rifle in his lap. Far off in the darkness, a pair of foxhounds bayed. When Beam staggered into the hem of firelight, the men looked up at him.

“Where’s the homecoming?” Beam asked.

“You mean the Sheetmire homecoming?” the larger of the two men said.

Beam nodded.

The man who’d spoken scratched at his black whiskers and lit a cigarette. “You’re a mite late if that’s what you come here for.”

Beam wiped the dirt from his arms and then pressed his
palms against his eyes. “I must have fell asleep.”

The larger man grunted and adjusted himself atop his feed bucket. He wore a tan hunting jacket and stone-washed blue jeans, his great belly propped on his lap, and his eyes glinted lucent and tiny like bits of feldspar. The other man seated beside him wore faded Carhartt coveralls the color of grocer’s paper. He picked up a stick of kindling and began poking at the coals in the fire.

“Are you a Sheetmire?” he asked.

Beam stroked the back of his neck. Looking through the night at the paling of trees faintly illuminated in the firelight before they faded into blank darkness, he recalled the line of faces at the potluck stretched in a cambered row beside the tables like a procession funereal and gaunt.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a Sheetmire.”

“Which one?”

“I’m Beam Sheetmire. Clem and Derna’s boy.”

Both men nodded at this. The large one threw his cigarette into the fire and leaned over and lifted a bottle of Old Grandad out of the dust and uncapped it and took two short pulls before screwing the cap on and settling the bottle in the dust again.

“I believe I know them,” he said, a bit breathless from the whisky. “There’s a lot of Sheetmires around and it’s hard to keep track of all the different bunches. I don’t even mess with keeping up no more. Now, it used to be a lot of the older folks was good at that kind of thing. Kept it all written down in the front of their Bibles. Didn’t just write it down, though. They studied on it. Got it down like an oath they had to say. My Uncle Esker could talk the name of ever half-aunt and cousin on back to when they first left England. Shit. Ought to heard him talk in the night by the fire. It was like hearing the roll get called up yonder. I never could do that. Course I never tried awful hard. Just couldn’t see the point, I guess. All those folks were dead and gone long before I ever come to be.”

“There was a spot where even the old folks lost track though, wasn’t there?” said the smaller man.

“There was. Even Uncle Esker couldn’t recollect much past two hundred years. That’s nothing. A drop is all. And I’m not sure I’d want to go on past that even if I could.”

“I might,” said the other man. “I might like to know past what them old folks knew and could tell.”

“Well, I don’t see any kind of good it’d do you or them.”

The smaller man rested his chin against his chest and watched the fire. “Well, maybe not,” he said. “I still might like to know it anyway.”

Beam squatted in the dirt. His head felt warped from the liquor Alton had given him and now he felt a bit dizzy from sleep. He didn’t want to hear the talk of family names or bloodlines, and his guts churned a bit from the memory of all the families at the potluck gawking at him in mute surprise as if he were a guest unexpected and unwelcome.

He sat on his haunches and listened to the men talk of things distant and long forgotten. They seemed to speak with the pulse and rhythm of his own blood as it wandered lost and vagrant inside him and he recalled the faces of the Sheetmires at the potluck again, and heard the dogs hunting in the far wilds beyond the fire. He could see it: the long slick hounds flaming in the pines as they sought the red fox, the great billows of their lungs roaring, their hearts booming like the drum of the wind as it beat against the trees. He could see it all. The drop of paws in the dirt. The fox’s burnished eyes like fine tumble-shined stones flared with cold light. He could see it, and a rush of air surrounded him so that he felt he sat in the doorway of a tomb, the gust swifting in from the trees to chill him until he shivered and clutched at his knees.

“Get up closer to the fire here,” said the large man.

Beam scooted forward and the heat grazed his arms.

“Said you fell asleep?”

Beam nodded. “I guess I did.”

“How you plan on getting home?”

Beam picked at the dirt between his sneakers. He hadn’t considered this and now it dawned on him the way Alton had abandoned him in the cemetery. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Walk I guess.”