The World Made Straight

Travis Shelton is seventeen the summer he wanders onto a neighbor's property in the woods, discovers a grove of marijuana large enough to make him some serious money, and steps into the jaws of a bear trap. After hours passing in and out of consciousness, Travis is discovered by Carlton Toomey, the wise and vicious farmer who set the trap to protect his plants, and Travis's confrontation with the subtle evils within his rural world has begun.

Before long, Travis has moved out of his parents' home to live with Leonard Shuler, a onetime schoolteacher who lost his job and custody of his daughter years ago, when he was framed by a vindictive student. Now Leonard lives with his dogs and his sometime girlfriend in a run-down trailer outside town, deals a few drugs, and studies journals from the Civil War. Travis becomes his student, of sorts, and the fate of these two outsiders becomes increasingly entwined as the community's terrible past and corrupt present bear down on each of them from every direction, leading to a violent reckoning—not only with Toomey but with the legacy of the Civil War massacre that, even after a century, continues to divide an Appalachian community.

Vivid, harrowing yet ultimately hopeful,
The World Made Straight
offers a powerful exploration of the painful conflict between the bonds of home and the desire for independence.

ALSO BY RON RASH

NOVELS

One Foot in Eden

Saints at the River

SHORT FICTION

The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth

Casualties

POETRY

Eureka Mill

Among the Believers

Raising the Dead

THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT

RON RASH

Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
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New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com

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Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

A version of chapter one appeared in a slightly different form in
The Kenyan Review
and
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.

Copyright © 2006 by Ron Rash

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rash, Ron, date.
        The world made straight / Ron Rash.—1st ed.
            p. cm.
        ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7866-4
        ISBN-10: 0-8050-7866-5
        1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—
    Influence—Fiction. 3. Marijuana industry—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Fiction.
    5. Male friendship—Fiction. 6. North Carolina—Fiction. 7. Massacres—Fiction.
    8. Violence—Fiction. I. Title.
    PS3568.A698W67 2006
    813′.54—dc22                                                                                     2005050304

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First Edition 2006

Designed by Kelly S. Too

Printed in the United States of America

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For my son, James

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness,
and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen,
it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay,
the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as
it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to
mankind.

Moby-Dick

August
5, 1850

A.M.

Lansford Hawkins, age
48.

Complaint: Fevered, headache.

Diagnosis: Coriza. Consulted Wood's Theory and Practice of
Medicine.

Treatment: Dover's Powder. At patient's insistence cupped
sixteen ounces of blood from left arm to remove morbific
matter. Rest in bed two days.

Fee: Fifty cents. Paid in cash.

Clementine Crockett, age
58.

Complaint: Locked bowels.

Diagnosis: Same.

Treatment: Blue mass.

Fee: Fifty cents. Paid with twenty pounds flour.

P.M.

Summoned to Shelton Farm.

Maggie Shelton, age
25.

Complaint: Uterine bleeding. Seventh month with child.

Diagnosis: Physical exertings inducing early labor. Consulted
Meigs's Females and Their Diseases.

Treatment: Tincture valerian to relieve spasmodic tendency. Bed
rest for week. No field work until month after child born. Black
haw tea twice daily to lessen bleeding. Bloodstone for same
though dubious of effectingness.

Fee: Two dollars. Paid with venison, two dozen eggs delivered
next time in town.

Travis came upon the marijuana plants while fishing Caney Creek. It was a Saturday, the first week of August, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning he'd had the rest of the day for himself. He'd changed into his fishing clothes and driven three miles of dirt road to the French Broad. Travis drove fast, the rod and reel clattering in the truck bed, red dust rising in his wake. The Marlin .22 slid on its makeshift gun rack with each hard curve. He had the windows down, and if the radio worked he would have had it blasting. The truck was a
'66
Ford, battered from a dozen years of farm use. Travis had paid a neighbor five hundred dollars for it three months earlier.

He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon light slanted over Divide Mountain and tinged the water the deep gold of curing tobacco. A fish leaped in the shallows, but Travis's spinning rod
was broken down and even if it hadn't been he wouldn't have bothered to cast. Nothing swam in the French Broad he could sell, only hatchery-bred rainbows and browns, some smallmouth, and catfish. The old men who fished the river stayed in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Travis liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn't go.

In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the rod still in two pieces. There were trout in this lower section, browns and rainbows that had worked their way up from the river, but Old Man Jenkins would not buy them. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the creek's deepest pool. This was the place where everyone else turned back, but Travis waded through waist-high water to reach the waterfall's right side. Then he began climbing, the rod clasped in his left palm as his fingers used juts and fissures for leverage and resting places.

When he got to the top he fitted the rod sections together and threaded monofilament through the guides. He was about to tie on the silver Panther Martin spinner when a tapping began above him. Travis spotted the yellowhammer thirty feet up in the hickory and immediately wished he had his .22 with him. He scanned the woods for a dead tree or old fence post where the bird's nest might be. A flytier in Marshall paid two dollars if you brought him a yellowhammer or wood duck, a nickel for a single good feather, and Travis needed every dollar and nickel he could get if he was going to get his truck insurance paid this month.

The only fish this far up were what fishing books and magazines
called brook trout, though Travis had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them a name other than speckled trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and paid Travis fifty cents apiece no matter how small. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.

Mountain laurel slapped his face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing rocks there was no other way around. Water was the only path now. Travis thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled. The old man had told him never to fish places like this alone, because a broken leg or rattlesnake bite could get a body graveyard dead before someone found you. That was about the only kind of talk he'd ever heard from the old man, Travis thought as he tested his knot, always being put down about something—how fast he drove, who he hung out with. Nothing but a bother from the day he was born. Puny and sickly as a baby and nothing but trouble since. That's what his father had said to his junior high principal, like it was Travis's fault he wasn't stout as his daddy, and like the old man hadn't raised all sorts of hell when he himself was young.

The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a washtub. Travis flicked the spinner into the front of each pool and reeled soon as it hit the surface, the spinner moving through the water like a slow bright bullet. In every third or fourth pool a small orange-finned trout came flopping onto the bank, treble hook snagged in its mouth. Travis slapped the speckleds' heads against a rock and felt the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike brown and rainbows,
speckleds would hit twice, sometimes even three times. Old Man Jenkins had said when he was a boy most every stream in Madison County was thick as gnats with speckleds, but they'd been too easy caught and soon fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.

EIGHT TROUT WEIGHTED THE BACK OF HIS FISHING VEST WHEN
Travis passed the
NO TRESPASSING
sign nailed aslant a pin oak tree. The sign was as scabbed with rust as the decade-old car tag nailed on his family's barn, and he paid it no more heed now than when he'd first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Carlton Toomey once used his thumb to gouge a man's eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man's face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Travis's daddy had witnessed before he'd got right with the Lord. But Travis had heard other things. About how Carlton Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard-drinking to hold steady jobs. Travis's daddy claimed the Toomeys poached bears on national forest land. They cut off the paws and gutted out the gallbladders because folks in China paid good money to make potions from them. The Toomeys left the meat to rot, too sorry even to cut a few hams off the bears' flanks. Anybody that trifling wouldn't bother walking the hundred yards between farmhouse and creek to watch for trespassers.