The Story Keeper (21 page)

“We
farm
!”

“The farm has never been a living. You know that. All of you know that. It’s an excuse.”

Marah Diane’s nostrils flared, her skin red and moist. “Our family’s been on that land for a hundred and fifty years. We make honest money. Not like what
you
do. Follow your sinful nature, just like Mama. Well, walk out on us, same’s she did, then. There’s the door. Go on and don’t come back.” She stepped aside to allow a clear exit path.

Friday stood his ground, his growl menacing the room.

“Stop!” Coral Rebecca wailed, her voice thick with tears. “This is
my
house. And there will
not
be fightin’ in my house! You two are my sisters, and I love you both, and I don’t want us fightin’!”

I took a breath then. Marah Diane and I both did. For an instant, the blaze seemed to be under Coral Rebecca’s control. Then Marah Diane stirred the embers again. “Well, before you go waltzin’ off back to your
big-deal
job in your
big-deal
city, you oughta come down the road, since nobody’s home right now, and see how your own daddy is really livin’.”

Chapter 19

I
wonder if it’s ever possible to fully cast off twisted family bonds and move through the world without them slowly digging into the skin . . . like a puppy collar left in place too long by a neglectful owner who doesn’t care about the damage being done. The binding slowly gets tighter until it becomes inseparable from the skin.

My family’s situation was like one of those sad stories on the news. The kind you can’t fully imagine until the pictures flash on the screen. Things were worse than I’d ever thought they could be.

The old farmhouse that had belonged to my grandparents was a wreck, thick with the smell of mold and mildew and rife with evidence of leaks in the roof. The ceiling tiles had fallen through in several places. In the kitchen, the cabinets were largely bare, yet the countertops were littered with to-go food containers that no one had bothered to throw away. Bugs, rat droppings, and spilled
potato chips dotted the filthy corners behind furniture. I was glad I’d left Friday to wait in the car. I didn’t want him eating that stuff. No one should be living like this.

A window broken during the electrical fire in my youngest sister’s bedroom had been repaired with plastic and duct tape. Now with the power to that part of the house shut off, Lily Clarette was trying to finish high school by the light of an oil lamp, while taking care of my father and essentially helping to raise Marah Diane’s four kids.

Lily Clarette was already talking about getting married. At seventeen. And everyone seemed to be celebrating that. Coral Rebecca hoped she would complete her last year of high school first. Marah Diane couldn’t see the point.
She
hadn’t graduated from high school, after all. Lily Clarette’s intended had recently turned twenty-one and gotten a job driving a propane delivery truck for his uncle. In Marah Diane’s view, the couple was all set to start a life. One of my sisters had even spotted a wedding dress in a resale shop.

“Might be they’ll let her put it on hold till we can get the money,” Marah Diane groused as she told me about the dress. “Don’t guess you’ll wanna kick in for it.”

I just stood with my mouth agape, surveying Lily Clarette’s chemistry book and oil lamp on the desk beneath a duct-taped window. Atop the bed crammed next to it, a lopsided teddy bear lay tangled in the sheets. Lily Clarette was still a child, for heaven’s sake.

“I think she should finish high school first,” I managed to croak out. The smell of charred wood burned my throat and made my eyes water. How could Lily Clarette be expected to form any dreams in this place? Any at all?

“’Course you do,” Marah Diane grumbled. “She’s found her
a good man with a good job. A man of the church. Not like he’s gonna just wait forever, bein’ twenty-one.”

I didn’t even answer. I just stared at her.

What was
wrong
with these people?

I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how horrible, how hopeless, how incredibly sad this place, this life, was. It started to seem unreal after you were away from it for a while. And then, all at once, it was uncomfortably real again. Staring me down from all directions.

I glanced at the chemistry equations written in Lily Clarette’s notebook. The top of a quiz peeked from between the pages. A ninety-three. Lily Clarette had always been smart, but she had to be beyond exceptional if she was surviving all of this and doing well in chemistry.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, drew my attention through the duct-tape-and-plastic kaleidoscope to Marah Diane’s children playing in the yard with the hounds.

All these little kids. All these little kids, growing up this way . . .

What hope was there?

A gift isn’t anything more than magnificent litter if you leave it unopened.
Wilda Culp again. She’d told me that as she pushed me to struggle through high school with the needs of five young siblings always pressing in. I’d come so close to ending up like Lily Clarette. There was Jason, who’d graduated a year before me, had a job with a heavy-equipment company, whispered all the things I needed to hear.

I can take care a you, Jennia Beth, and I can help your family out, like a son’s supposed to do.
He’d been just a boy himself, poor thing, trying to take on my problems.

All of it played in my head again as I climbed into my car to leave my father’s house behind. Down the road, Marah Diane and Roy’s trailer house didn’t look much better than the rest of
the place. The roof was covered with plastic sheeting held down by old tires. I was still paying off the three thousand dollars I’d sent to Marah Diane for a new roof on the trailer last year. There was no new roof on the trailer.

I watched her rattle home with two kids in the pickup bed, two kids in the front, and one on the way. So far, the only interaction I’d seen her have with them was to yell in frustration. Four children under the age of twelve were more than a handful. My sister was obviously overwhelmed.

And don’t look at me like that,
she’d snapped when she’d caught me surreptitiously checking for a baby bump.
Every little child is a blessin’. If you ever had one, you’d understand.

Five minutes before, she’d yanked one of her girls up by the arm, smacked her on the backside, and said,
Hush up, you hear me? You are not even worth havin’ sometimes.

Her voice rang in my ears as I left the farm, the conversations traveling with me, replaying in my head over and over and over while Friday rolled concerned looks my way. Perhaps he sensed that I was on the brink of some sort of emotional collapse. Finally free from the stench of mildew, old carpet, and charred wallboard, I felt myself coming completely unstrung.

My visit here hadn’t solved anything. We’d just decided we should leave, in case the men’s dog trade didn’t work out and they came home early, in foul moods.

Meanwhile, the money the traded-for ATV might bring in was already being spent. Marah Diane had begun formulating plans to have a combined birthday party for her girls and Coral Rebecca’s.

Rolling down the window, I tried to let the crisp late-afternoon air soothe the heat of my frustration. Without even meaning to, I slowed the car as I passed the familiar turnoff to Wilda Culp’s house.
For a moment, I was tempted to veer off, but I didn’t. The place wouldn’t be the same anymore, with Wilda and Richard gone. It was easier to imagine that Wilda’s haven lay frozen in time, a glass-globe centerpiece with the seasons passing inside it. Falling leaves in autumn, snow in the winter, wildflowers in spring, multicolored sprays of climbing roses in midsummer. As beautiful as always.

I turned off, instead, fifteen minutes later, taking a cutoff onto the winding back road that followed Honey Creek through a long, slim hollow where a Cherokee trade road had traveled in ancient times. The road would circle back to the highway eventually. We’d often used this thirty-mile stretch to either circumvent Towash, avoid law enforcement officers who might stop us for out-of-date tags or poached game, or bypass slow-moving trucks on the mountain highway.

For now, this was peace. A chance to temporarily leave behind the burden.

The road narrowed and roughened as the miles passed, the creek peeking through here and there, its surface a soft, shimmering gray, reflecting the cloudy sky. The rustling waters of Honey Creek were the welcome face of an old friend.

How many difficult teenage hours had I spent along these banks, seeking refuge with one of Wilda’s Readers Digest Condensed volumes or a smuggled library book or my schoolwork? Around my grandparents’ house after my mother left, there was no room for books other than the Bible, and that was only quoted and wielded, never read. There were portions that didn’t fit with the things taught on Lane’s Hill. The worst whipping I could ever remember came just after I brought up that issue and pointed to a page in the family Bible as evidence.

After that, I learned to leave such things alone.

The car rattled over a chuckhole, toppling my purse onto the
floorboard. Friday cracked an eye open, then slid from the seat to look for edibles. Before I could stop him, he was helping himself to a roll of Life Savers, paper and all. He looked up with his lips wrapped around one end of the tube, his minty-fresh breath whistling through the hole.

“Friday, quit. You’ll end up constipated . . . or worse,” Leaning over, I grabbed the other end, and we played an awkward game of tug-of-war. “Friday, leave it alone, that’s
 
—”

The sudden drop-off in the road caught me completely by surprise, and we took a redneck roller-coaster ride, going just short of airborne. The car landed with a thump, and mud spewed wildly as we clattered across a washboard of potholes, then bumped upward onto a stretch of pavement. It was smooth and new, and something metal glinted through the trees ahead, out of place with the back-roads scenery.

“What in the world . . . ?”

Friday hopped onto the seat to check it out for himself.

We passed under the branches of an overhanging oak, came out the other side, and all of a sudden, the unidentified foreign object on Honey Creek Road looked very familiar.

“I can
not
believe it.” Letting the car drift to a stop, I craned toward the window and took in an endless span of twelve-foot chain-link fence. No guard shack, but the gate and
E. H.
script atop were unmistakable.
Evan Hall.
Again. Not only did the man own an entire mountain and the old road just past Sarra Bend Bridge, but he’d taken possession of Honey Creek Road as well. Thanks to him, we’d have to turn around and travel the twenty or so miles back the way we’d come to get to the highway. Because Evan Hall
owned
the road. He literally must’ve landgrabbed half the county.

“You have
got
to be
kidding
. Friday, can you believe this?”

Friday didn’t have an answer, but he seemed stumped as well.

A growl started low in my throat and gradually grew louder, and Friday squeezed himself toward the passenger door, suddenly worried.

I was tempted to ram the gate, or at least leave a really nasty note on it, but there was a camera perched atop. It’d be just my luck that the video would end up being used as evidence in my stalking trial. The only good thing was that the roadblock gave me a new focus for my anger. I’d temporarily forgotten all about the family problems, or maybe they were just fuel to the fire, but I was livid. Insanely so.

Gunning the engine, I peeled out and whipped around, purposely making a wide loop, intent on slinging as much mud and gravel as I could. Given the front-wheel-drive nature of the car, it was an idiotic plan
 
—I was largely showering my own ride
 
—but it felt good. A protest against the day. Against family bonds. Against people owning roads and locking other people out and . . .

The mud was flying and the wheels were spinning, but I realized that Friday and I were moving sideways down the ditch.

Not. Good.

I knew better. I should have known better. I’d grown up on dirt roads.

Gunning the engine sent the car lurching forward, pinning Friday upright against his seat so that he looked like he was begging, which seemed appropriate, because that made two of us.

Please. Please, please, please, please, please . . .

We crawled toward the pavement, slinging mud, digging deeper, slinging mud, digging deeper . . .

“Come on, baby. Come on, baby. If you get me out of this one, I’ll take you to the car wash, I promise.”

The pavement drew closer, inch by inch. The engine roared. The transmission squealed long and loud. I prayed it wouldn’t drop out right then and there.

Another forward lurch. Hope crept up. And then . . . we weren’t going anywhere but
down
. I didn’t stop until I’d mired it up to the axles, a foot shy of the pavement.

The breath I’d been holding seeped out of me as my forehead sank to the steering wheel. A long, low moan slowly filled the space inside the car, and I realized it was coming from me, not Friday. On the passenger seat, he joined in with a howl.

Hoping against hope, I tried the cell phone. No reception, of course. My available options had just narrowed considerably. I could either walk back the way I’d come
 
—and I hadn’t passed any sort of house for at least ten miles
 
—or I could take my chances with Evan Hall.

He would never believe I hadn’t gotten the car stuck here on purpose. Did I care what he thought? Not really, but another altercation wouldn’t help in building trust, and after having found Sarra Bridge only a stone’s throw from his property, I was more convinced than ever that I needed to somehow win his trust. He knew more about that manuscript than he was admitting.

Sadly, all roads seemed to lead to Evan Hall at this point.

The memory of his annoying, haughty smirk taunted me as I walked to the gate with Friday in tow, positioned myself in front of the camera, and gave the international distress signal for
I’m stuck in the mud and I can’t get out
. Then I stood there wondering if anyone would come. What was I going to do, exactly, if no one did? It’d be dark before I could walk to the nearest house, and who could say, this far off the beaten path, whether that place belonged to anyone who could be trusted?

There wasn’t even a flashlight in the car, other than the one on my cell phone. And all I had for food was a half roll of slobbered-up Life Savers.

Now what?

Fifteen minutes ticked by. I waved, stood, waved. No one came.

Thunder rumbled over the mountains. The storm was taking longer to top the crest than I’d thought it would, but it
was
coming. A chilly, wet wind swept through the valley as proof. I wrapped my arms, shivering. I wasn’t dressed for the kind of weather that could hit after dark when the first hints of winter blew in. How cold would it get tonight?

“Hey!” I hollered at the camera. “Hey! My car’s stuck in the mud! I need help! Hey!”

I pictured Evan Hall in his mountaintop fortress, casually turning off the switch, saying to the security men, “Just leave her there. Then we won’t have to worry about her anymore.” He wanted to be rid of me after all.