The World Made Straight (9 page)

“Not much use to. The fellow I got it from said he'd swept that site pretty good.”

“I'd still like to try.”

“Then stick it in the truck and get a shovel as well,” Leonard said, and went to the bathroom Dena had just vacated. The mirror was clouded with condensation, water on the floor because once again she hadn't pulled the curtain into the tub. Speeding up the rot in the flooring, not giving a damn if the floor gave way beneath her. Leonard rubbed the mirror's center with his hand, the image of himself clear for a moment, then slowly fading as if receding farther into the mirror, the mirror soon cloudy as before. He remembered the day his Grandfather Candler had died. His grandmother had stopped the mantel clock's ticking, its hands suspended at eleven and five, the time of her husband's death. Every mirror in the farmhouse was covered as well, because mirrors were portals through which the new dead could return to the place they'd once lived. Kera was right. They had gotten to him early.

December
21, 1859

A.M.

Sophie Holifield, age
79.

Complaint: Aches and swollen joints.

Diagnosis: Rheumatism.

Treatment: Poultice of warmed ginseng applied to bothersome
joints. Three teaspoons of clover honey every night. One-hour
soak in baths at Hot Springs soon as weather permits.

Fee: One dollar and a quarter. Paid with peach pie.

Naomi Lewis, age
22.

Complaint: Sore eyes.

Diagnosis: Optical inflammation due to handling mistletoe.

Treatment: Wash made of infusion of goldenseal root in cold
water. Use twice daily.

Fee: One dollar and a quarter. Paid with cash.

Note: Consulted Barton's Collections Towards a Media Medica.
Try to obtain cayenne powder next trip to Asheville.

P.M.

Summoned to Shelton Farm.

David Shelton, age eight.

Symptoms: Fever and chills. Galloping pulse. Strawberry
tongue. Rash on neck and tongue. Agitated speech.
Imaginings.

Diagnosis: Scarlet fever.

Treatment: Sponged with water and vinegar. Two spoons of
laudanum. Had patient drink cold well water. Moved bed
farther from hearth.

Nine
P.M.

Galloping pulse. Fever high. Patient agitated, talking his
imaginings. Prepared family for possible dismal reckoning.
Prayers. Mother in much consternation. Continued sponging
but little effect. Boneset tea alternated with cold water.

Ten
P.M.

Packed snow on patient's forehead and chest.

Twelve
A.M.

Pulse fuller but fever still high. Two spoons of laudanum.
Continue to pack snow on chest and forehead.

Three
A.M.

Fever quietened. Pulse not as tense. Family sent to bed with
assurances. Snow packs ceased. Continue to sponge with water
every thirty minutes. Patient less agitated, able to sleep with
no irksome dreams or imaginings.

Six
A.M.

Fever lessened. No sweats. Continue to sponge every thirty
minutes.

Ten
A.M.

Pulse full. Fever abated. Sleeps finely now.

Two
P.M.

Patient awake and taking broth.

Prescription: Stay in bed three days. Continue broth. Keep away
from drafts.

Boneset tea three times a day.

Fee: Five dollars. Paid with five laying bantams and cured ham.

Travis and Leonard rode northward with the windows down. They took Highway 25 and turned on 208, following Laurel Fork as the valley narrowed. Soon the air blowing in through the windows grew cooler and less humid. The stream ran on the left beyond the guardrails, the water a white rush and plunge occasionally slowed by deep pools the old folks called blue holes. Travis knew some huge hook-jawed browns had been pulled from these pools, caught with minnows or bass plugs by older men who'd fish a month to get one wrist-snapping strike.

By the time they entered Shelton Laurel the stream was diminished enough that Travis could easily jump it, no bigger than the creek that had led him to Carlton Toomey's pot plants, the place he went back to so often in his dreams. He was always caught in the bear trap, but when he shouted for help it
wasn't the Toomeys who showed up but a dark shape-shifting presence. Only when the presence spoke did it solidify to become his father, who claimed caught in a bear trap was exactly where a no-account son like Travis deserved to be.

They now passed tobacco fields whose rows rippled out over bottomland in lush waves. The plants were healthy, their leaves bright green like lamb's ear, stalks tall and straight and not riven. No blue mold or yellow spots. Travis knew if he touched these leaves he'd feel the same cool leathery dampness he'd felt eight days ago in his family's tobacco field.

The old man hadn't let it go, the beer in the cab, the hospital bill. The grocery store manager had felt sorry for him and given Travis his old job back. He'd worked his usual forty-five hours there, but his daddy demanded twenty hours a week on the farm as well. Travis had done that extra work, suckering and topping tobacco in the fields every evening even though he'd bagged groceries all day and his aching Achilles tendon needed to be propped up and iced. To help pay hospital costs, the old man claimed, but Travis knew it was more to punish him, the same way his daddy had once done their black-and-tan when it killed a chicken, rubbing the dog's face in the rotting carcass every day till the chicken was nothing but mush and bones.

Then things had become even worse. One evening his hoe hit a yellow jacket nest. The insects boiled out of the ground and swirled a stinging halo around his head. Travis jerked off his cap, swatting at them as he stumbled across the rows fast as his game leg would take him, stung seven times before he was out of their range. The poison raised white welts on his arm
and face and neck. The old man had spit a plug of Beechnut from his mouth, then dabbed the wet tobacco on each sting to draw the venom, all the while acting put out with him, like Travis had done it on purpose. You ought to have been looking better, boy, his father had said. Your damn hoe would have hit them as well, Travis had mumbled softly, but not soft enough.

He'd seen it coming, his daddy's right hand flattening, raised like he was taking an oath before the hand came forward, slapping him so hard it felt like he'd been hit by a two-by-four. The blow sent him to the ground, where he lay sprawled across a tobacco plant. Long as you live under my roof I'll not abide your back sass, his daddy had told him.

His mother had stood on the porch the whole time he packed the truck, trying to talk him out of leaving, downright begging him. But all the old man said was Travis would be back in a week. You ain't got enough man in you to go it alone, his daddy had said.

Travis shifted gears as the land rose sharply. He imagined the old man looking out the farmhouse window for over a week now for a pickup that wasn't coming, because Travis had more sand in him than his daddy supposed. Travis imagined more—his daddy out in the fields alone and realizing how much of the farmwork Travis had done, his daddy stove up with regret about slapping him and wishing Travis would come home so he could apologize.

“You can tell we're getting close,” Leonard said, staring out the passenger window.

Travis looked out and saw nothing other than a tractor working a cornfield.

“Look at the mailboxes,” Leonard said.

At first Travis didn't understand. Some were new and silvery, some little more than rusting cylinders nailed to leaning locust posts. Then he saw the name Shelton. Saw it again and then again, each mailbox looming clear a moment then whisking away as the next rushed into view. Like a fast-turning calendar, Travis thought, but with one unchanging word instead of months and days.

“Your kin, I suppose,” Leonard said.

“I guess so,” Travis said, and remembered something he'd been meaning to ask Leonard.

“One summer when I was a kid we had a family reunion at my great-grandmother's house. Her clock hadn't been changed for daylight savings time, and I remember one of my uncles saying her doing that was because of the Civil War.”

“Roosevelt time,” Leonard said. “That's what they called it because Roosevelt started daylight savings time. Lincoln Republicans like your great-grandmother didn't want to go along with a Democrat's idea.”

“She was remembering what happened in Shelton Laurel in 1863?”

“Yes,” Leonard said.

They passed a store, its gas pumps reminding Travis of old-timey diving bells, then a white clapboard church and a field some farmer had let go, full of chickweed and bull thistles. A sure sign the soil had gone poor from overgrazing, his daddy always said, claiming any farmer sorry enough to let his pasture get in such shape wasn't worthy of farming a hog lot.

“Turn there,” Leonard said, pointing up the road at a shotgun-frame house on the right.

Travis turned and bumped up a washout that passed close to the house before ending abruptly.

“They don't mind us parking here?”

“No, they're used to people coming.”

Leonard lifted the metal detector and shovel from the truck bed. Travis took the shovel, letting it dangle at his side like a rifle as they followed a faint trail through a stand of white oak. The trail slanted downward and Travis shifted more weight to his left leg, set the right foot down carefully as though afraid of a stump hole. He iced the Achilles tendon every night, did the exercises the nurse had shown him, but it still nagged like a bad tooth. Farther down honeysuckle sweetened the air, a smell that reminded Travis of Lori's perfume.

She was in church this morning with the rest of her family. Not too far from here, Travis knew, eight miles at the most by road, less if you had a way to cut across Roundtop Ridge. She wanted him to go to church with her, and he would, maybe next Sunday. He'd have to get up early but it'd be worth it just to have an extra hour with Lori, to sit beside her and smell her perfume, feel her hand touching his as they shared a hymnal. He liked the way Lori always reached for his hand when they were together, how that made him feel he was protecting her.

Soon the land leveled out and they stepped onto hardtop, a broad meadow on the road's other side. A steel historical marker stood nearby. Travis read the placard and then went into the meadow. He tried to envision it, not the killing but
afterward. Late January after a blizzard, the book had said. Snow pinked by blood. The dead half buried. Travis couldn't imagine thirteen bodies, that was too much, so he thought only of the youngest, David Shelton.

Maybe it was because the sun hovered high overhead now, but the meadow was intense with light, its pallor distilled, insistent, almost as if the place radiated something of itself from within. Travis wondered if the meadow would feel the same if he didn't know what happened here.

Leonard came up and stood beside him.

“You know a place is haunted when it feels more real than you are,” Leonard said.

As soon as Leonard said those words, Travis knew that was what he felt, not just now but over the years when he'd turned up arrowheads while plowing. Rubbing off the layers of dirt, he'd always had the bothersome notion the arrowheads were alive, like caddis flies inside their thick casings. He'd tried to make sense of the notion that time didn't so much pass as
layer over things,
as if under the world's surface the past was still occurring. Travis had never spoken of this feeling because it was something you couldn't explain or show, like how to tie a fishing knot or check tobacco for black shank. But just because it was inside you didn't mean it wasn't real. And now he felt it here, more than even when he'd held those arrowheads.

“You believe in ghosts?” Travis asked.

“When I'm in this meadow I almost do,” Leonard said. He nodded at the marker. “It ought to feel even more that way to you. It's your family's blood that got spilled here.”

Travis walked toward the creek, his hands brushing hip-high
broom sedge whose coppery color shone in the meadow's gathered light. Grasshoppers leaped stalk to stalk in brown and green arcs, the biggest ones whirring as their wings spread like paper fans. The creek ran thin and muted, a low gurgle where it rubbed over rocks. The morning of the massacre it would have been even quieter, the creek muffled under ice, no metallic chatter of cicadas in the high branches. Not much color either, gray sky and everything below it coated white. At least until the killing started. Travis tried to imagine what he'd read—David Shelton shot in both arms, his father and three brothers lying dead around him, the last Shelton still alive in that meadow speaking his last words:
I forgive you all this—I can get well. Let me go home to my mother and sisters.

Twelve years old.

Travis thought of himself at twelve and when he'd been most scared. Probably sitting in the principal's office waiting for his daddy to show up. He and Shank had put a green snake in their homeroom teacher's desk, causing Mrs. Debo a near heart attack. Mr. Ketner had threatened everything short of the electric chair, but it was only when the principal called their parents that Travis became afraid. Whatever Mr. Ketner did, his daddy would do far worse with a belt. But knowing somebody was going to shoot you. He couldn't imagine how terrifying that was. But as quick as Travis thought that he remembered Carlton Toomey opening his hawkbill, the soft click as the blade locked into place.

He turned his mind from that thought, watched Leonard skim the metal disk over the broom sedge, Leonard's face intent as he listened and interpreted the messages seeping up
from the underworld, moving slow and tentative behind it, like a blind man using a cane. Leonard paused, let the machine comb a small area for a few moments, homing in on something. Travis watched Leonard lay down the machine and get the shovel. Leonard knelt and dug a few moments before raising a bottle cap from the soil.