G — for Glory, a name she hated — told him to quit that, he’d get pinched under the stone and they’d have to saw off his arm at the joint.
“I’m on a pension,” he said — his answer to most demands.
The stone fell forward with a skirling sound.
Vaughn’s face went white, drained. “Help!” His body curled with shocking speed, like a muskrat clapped in a snare. “I’m pinched! Oh God!”
Neely began to cry. Uncle Vaughn told them to keep calm, run back to the house, get their mother and a hacksaw. After a while, with the girls too frightened to move, he pulled his arm from the hole and began to giggle.
Neely and G couldn’t forgive that. They avoided him for two or three days — no easy task on those small acres — before realizing that without Uncle Vaughn they had little to distract themselves.
When he asked if they wanted to take a walk, they didn’t say no.
If the television signal was crackly, Uncle Vaughn was the one who climbed the hill to clear limbs off the line and check the antenna. He brushed aside a fallen grapevine, saying, “You wouldn’t think that would foul up the TV, but there you go.”
Really, it was too cold this March to wander about, but after a long, drear winter, they couldn’t bear being inside. A few bold crocuses offered their buds from the snow. You couldn’t smell much of anything in the world. The forest had no life.
Uncle Vaughn asked if they wanted to tilt the rocking stone. Walking there, they saw tree-frog eggs billowing in a swampy place, in horrid, grapelike bunches with black dots in the centers, even though there hadn’t been a single warm day.
This time, Uncle Vaughn let the girls rock it back and forth on their own. It took the both of them. Neely and G idly made the stone work its magic. Soon they grew bored. Maybe they could fetch a screwdriver and chisel their names?
Once again, Uncle Vaughn got on his belly. “Let’s see if I can fish out Mr. Copperhead.”
The girls shot one another a look. They knew what was coming. Uncle Vaughn reached in the hole. “I think there’s something in here.” Further now, up to his shoulder. Neely rolled her eyes. She gave the stone a big kick. They heard a crack like a tree branch.
“Oh God,” Vaughn said. His shoulder was flush to the hole, the arm deep inside.
Neely and G laughed a little. Vaughn’s face was turned away from them, probably so they couldn’t see him laughing. He didn’t move.
“Go get your mother.” Then he said nothing more. G climbed off the rock and prodded her uncle. He was unconscious. “Playing possum,” she said and gave him a kick. When they heard their father’s dairy truck grinding up the road, they went down to see him. After helping unload the galvanized cans, they told of their day with Uncle Vaughn.
Their father pulled Uncle Vaughn out of there, without needing the saw, but the blood on the rock unnerved everyone involved. They were glad when a spring rain washed it away. Uncle Vaughn was never quite the same. He couldn’t lift his arm above the shoulder; he went once to church; and when healed up as much as he was going to, he went to the rocking stone with a stick of dynamite. (On hearing of it later, their father said, “A quarter stick would do.”) No one was sure where Uncle Vaughn had gotten it. Neely and G wanted to watch, but he wouldn’t let them. They had to content themselves with a bang and the thin shower of sand that fell in their hair, all the way over at the house.
Vaughn didn’t have much use for children after that.
THE SLOW LEAN OF TIME
THEY CALLED THE VILLAGE GAULEY BRIDGE after its most discernible feature. In those times, the bridge itself was a swinging affair of rope and boards, enough for one body to cross at a time, and you wouldn’t want to in a rattling wind. The river ran thirty feet below. Once, a grand bridge vaulted the Gauley River, before the war, trig enough for horses, wagon trains, even the army that blew it up upon retreat. It was rebuilt, then blasted again to high heaven, this time by the town fathers. They wanted a river clear for logs. So commerce. So the swinging bridge.
For half a morning, Henry Gorby perched on the bridge like a falcon, and small like a falcon. If anyone noticed him up there, he would’ve been thought eccentric. Most hurried across. The bridge did not inspire confidence. Especially in the men who had roped it. Henry lingered out in the middle in comfort. There was no wind, no one wanting to cross. Despite his slight stature, the rope yawned a bit when he shifted weight. The current bent the weeds below. The Gauley wasn’t wide here, but deep, March-green with snowmelt and swollen. Weathered, quartzite ridges loomed on both sides. Henry couldn’t see the mountains. He was in the mountains.
Any time a bird or a body flashed through the bankside trees, he was certain it was his cousin Ezekiel coming. Despite the years, he reckoned he’d know Ezekieclass="underline" someone brisk and swarthy, from playing out in weather, from a gauge of Lebanese blood. From up here, Henry could see the post office, where they were to meet, and the muddy main drag and every direction going there. Gauley Bridge wasn’t much. All paths led to the post office. Ezekiel’s letter said two hundred souls lived here. Henry wondered where they all could fit.
Ezekiel wrote yes, he could find a man work.
Below, a wood duck and her raft of young eddied about in worried spirals. It is a duck that lives in the high hollows of trees — Henry didn’t know that, he only knew the paving stones of Kanawha City — and he would’ve been startled at how the ducklings fling themselves from that great height, trusting their downy bodies to God and the soft bounce of a forest floor. Henry, newly seventeen, could paddle and chug along a bit. The ducklings, swimming with prowess, a couple days old, bested him. He could laugh. He had that virtue.
In the Gauley the green fish rose. Henry thought it a piece of bark until it turned in diagonal sweep and showed the grim, pointed mask of its face. It merely drifted to the surface, the length of a child. Then it sank in grassy nothingness with no more motion than a slight, sinuous curve Henry could have imagined. Or was it a lizard? It left like the demon of dreams.
When it returned, Henry was looking in the wrong direction. An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish tossed water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true.
Ezekiel never showed. Two shoppers shifted among the rows — the post office was a corner of a store, elbowed in like an afterthought. Henry stood at the stove, which kicked out the heat of a blast furnace. The weather was mild, the brutal fire kept up out of habit. He mooned about and began to sweat. So it took a moment to hear that other voice.
“You looking for Zeke?”
Henry turned to find a clerk. No one called his cousin Zeke. No one he knew.
“Zeke,” the clerk said again. “Are you looking for him?”
“I am.” Henry moved to the counter.
“Zeke can’t make the run. He says go to the staging grounds, it’s at Mouth-of-Gauley, that’s six mile. Stay on this side of the river and follow the path. Zeke says he’s sorry.” The clerk added, “Zeke says luck to you.”
Henry woke at this jolt. “Wait. What’d you say? He ain’t coming?”
“Six miles downriver. You’ll see a hoving mountain of logs. The path’s muddy but you can make it in three hour. Two if it’s dry. It’s not.” Wearing a clean apron, the clerk stepped out from a half-door and went ferreting in a dark corner. He thunked something heavy on the butcher block. “Zeke says borrow these. He wants them back.”