My only worry was the high porch. It had a trellis around it but I could see junk and weeds underneath. Climbing up and down them steps might be dangerous for a toddler. But I’d been saving a little bit of money out of my paycheck since I’d been working. It wasn’t much but I hoped by the time the baby was walking I’d be able to rent a better house for us, maybe something away from town. The door was locked but I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the window. There was spots on the carpet but the room looked all right. I could picture my baby playing there on the floor. It was next to a car wash but not a laundrymat. I thought Clint would be proud of me.
JOHNNY
I couldn’t get my mind off what had happened with Carolina. I pulled the chain on the lightbulb overhead and lay listening to the sounds outside. The blanket and pillowcase smelled like rainwater and I imagined that’s what she washed them in. The cot was more comfortable than it looked. I didn’t know I was asleep until a knock on the shed door woke me up. I rose and looked around, disoriented in the dark. Ford opened the door without permission and stood on the threshold like something from a dream, a tall figure with white hair flowing out. He looked clean for the first time since we’d met. He was holding a guitar, his dogs circling behind him. “Sorry to wake you,” he said. “I got me a good fire going. Thought you might want to come out and sit for a while.”
We walked to the mowed field on the other side of the trailer, dogs slinking at our heels. In the middle, a fire writhed and popped. There were three lawn chairs pulled close to the flames. Carolina sat in one of them with her legs drawn up. She looked up and smiled, face bathed in orange. We took our seats and Ford strummed absently at his guitar. “Something about a fire helps me think,” he said. Ford’s fire had the opposite effect on me. It helped me not to think. I leaned back my head and looked up at the stars and my mind was clear. Ford played and for a while Carolina sang along in a high, sweet voice. Then she trailed off, seeming to drowse, and there was only the clumsy music of Ford’s guitar. The two of us talked softly over his strumming, and all the while I looked at his left hand moving on the guitar’s neck, the smooth pink remains of his ring finger.
“So what really happened to it?” I asked.
He smiled, still strumming. “My finger? Well, I was staggering home from this country bar at the crack of dawn one morning. I was getting sleepy, so I slipped off the road into a cornfield. I passed out and when I came to it was later in the day. First the sun was glaring in my eyes but then something blocked it out. A bird came swooping out of the sky. Looked like a crow but I swear it was at least the size of a condor, maybe bigger. All I can figure is that it wanted my wedding ring. You know how crows like anything shiny. It swooped down and pecked off my finger, ring and all, and disappeared with it.”
I laughed. “You’re full of it.”
He grinned down at his guitar and went back to strumming.
“You said it wanted your wedding ring.”
“Yes.”
“So you were married once.”
“I’m married now.”
“I mean before Carolina.”
“There was nothing before Carolina.”
We looked at her together. She was sound asleep in the chair, lips parted and head resting on her knees. “Where’d you find her?” I asked.
“Close to Asheville, North Carolina. About this time last year, I was out book hunting. There was this tall blue house with a sign next to the road that said ‘Antiques.’ Carolina’s dad was selling junk out of his barn. I had an odd feeling when I pulled in the driveway, like before one of my visions comes. I knew something was waiting for me.”
Ford said it was like being pulled along the dirt track to the barn by some invisible line. Tied in the shade of a chokecherry tree near the barn door there was a white German shepherd barking with its ears laid back. Ford had never seen a white German shepherd before. It seemed like an omen. He entered the musty shadows of the barn looking for something remarkable, but there was only junk, trunks and battered picture frames and chipped dishes stacked on a plywood table. He was about to climb a ladder to the loft in search of books when the dog’s barking dissolved into whimpers. He turned and there she stood in the barn’s opening with radiant light all around her. In a way, it was a kind of vision. But Ford had never experienced one so vivid. “It was awful hot in there,” he said, “and I’m no spring chicken. I thought maybe I was having a stroke.” Then she stepped into the barn and he saw that she was human, a barefoot girl in a swaying sundress eating a wedge of watermelon, the juice pinking her lips and fingers. Ford didn’t say what happened next, only that he went back for Carolina at dusk of the following day and found her standing at the road by the “Antiques” sign with a folded-over grocery sack at her feet. He stopped the car and she got in. She had been with him ever since.
Right away Carolina began taking care of Ford. On their first morning together she trimmed his hair out on the porch, lathered his face and shaved off the coarse veil of his whiskers, drew his head into her lap and massaged his temples until he fell asleep. She was goodness, she was rest. Carolina, like the images her name evoked, of high mountains and cool hollows, mists rising off of slow-running creeks, acres of rolling green farmland, and sometimes, carried on the wind, the tang of ocean salt.
Ford insisted he had never taken an interest in young girls before. He swore he wasn’t a dirty old man. “This is different,” he said. “It’s Carolina. I know it sounds like an excuse, but she’s ageless to me.” It was unsettling the way he talked about her. He claimed to have seen her walk through a flock of birds that descended on the yard without even disturbing them. According to Ford, Carolina had her own special gift. He called her an empath. “One time the dogs got to fighting in the yard and Carolina doubled over in pain. Then we saw a woman hit her baby in the grocery store. On the way home Carolina wept so hard I thought she was going to be sick.” Ford believed he and Carolina had some divine purpose together. “Before long,” he said, “God will reveal it to me.”
I looked over at Carolina, still sleeping, and felt sorry for her, to have been so idealized. Then I saw that the fire was dying to embers and the dogs were stirring, preparing to follow Ford back to the trailer. He put down his guitar and the night was over. It was time to go back to bed, but there was something I had to know first.
“What did you think?” I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.
“Of what?”
“My writing.”
“Oh,” Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. “I think the whole world should read your poems.”
Walking across the field, breathing in the night air, my chest felt light again, as if Carolina had placed her hand on it. I went back to the shed and wrote in my notebook all night long. When the sun came up, I had to step outside to cool my burning hand.
Weeks passed and the days grew hotter. At the end of May, Ford and I fixed his old tractor together and I learned to mow the field. We set out tobacco, repaired a fence in the woods, and trimmed the trees crowded close to the trailer. My muscles grew sore and my skin turned brown. The shed became a sanctuary for me. Carolina brought out an old rug for the floor and a metal fan to make the heat more bearable. In the mornings sun flooded through the shed’s cracks and at night moths circled and bounced off the lightbulb overhead. There was always the sound of crickets and tree frogs and dogs panting outside. I went with Ford to flea markets and auctions but mostly I stayed home with Carolina. I helped her paint the porch posts and plant flowers by the front steps. One day we made birdhouses out of gourds. On the weekends Ford built a fire and the three of us talked until the wee hours. Soon I came to trust them both. I began to feel a contentment that I didn’t know if I deserved. Maybe a life like theirs wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes it felt wrong being there, like I was fooling them. I would think as I worked with Ford in the field or helped Carolina in the garden how they’d hate me if they knew what I had done and who I really was, what kind of curse had been passed down to me in my blood.