“Cultures disappear, are replaced by other cultures, and that’s as it should be,” the archaeologist on the radio had said. Marshall had no problem understanding the disappearing part. As a child, he’d found arrowheads and pottery shards in his neighbors’ fields, occasionally even in the vegetable garden his father tilled behind the house. They surfaced from the ground like afterthoughts, something briefly remembered before being forgotten again.
And not so different from the men who’d once come into the hardware store on Saturdays. Men who wore dirt-crusted brogans and Red Camel overalls and who after their sales were rung up lingered awhile to talk, sometimes about hunting and fishing, sometimes religion and politics, inevitably, the weather.
Only a few such men were left in the county now, all old. They’d been replaced by college professors and wealthy retirees, people who liked the “quaintness” of Marshall’s store — the smell of linseed oil on the oak floors, the potbellied stove and ceiling fan. That was why they shopped at Vaughn Hardware instead of True Value or Kmart. Marshall knew they found him and his mountain accent quaint as well, were always surprised and a little disappointed when they came in and heard NPR on the radio, or found out he had a degree in agriculture from N.C. State.
“You’re a dying breed,” a retiree from Ohio had told him last month. “When that Wal-Mart comes next year they’ll cut your business in half.”
At a few minutes after eight, just as Marshall prepared to leave for Boone, the phone rang.
“I had to fire Brad,” Jarvis Greene said. “You know how it is with a construction crew. You let one man lay out and pretty soon the whole crew figures they can get away with it as well.”
“I know,” Marshall said. “You gave him a chance. That’s all I expected and I appreciate your doing that.”
Marshall put down the receiver. For a few moments he debated calling either the counselor in Lenoir or his brother at the highway patrol office. But he didn’t. As he drove to the hardware store, Marshall remembered the first months after Linda had left, how Brad, though twelve at the time, had insisted on sleeping with him every night. Once the boy had waked him at three in the morning. “You won’t ever leave me?” he’d asked, and Marshall had held him close and promised he never would. At that moment Marshall knew Brad would have made the same promise to him had he asked. But not now, Marshall thought, not now.
TWO WEEKS PASSED before Jared Crawford showed up at the hardware store, another worthless check in his hand. He came in alone.
“I’m not giving you anymore money,” Marshall said.
“Somebody’s got to pay us,” Jared said, refusing to meet Marshall’s eyes. “Me and John got people to pay too.”
“Then why did you take a check you knew was worthless, Jared?” Marshall asked.
“We got to be paid,” Jared said, his cheeks reddening, still not meeting Marshall’s eyes.
At least he’s got some sense of shame about this, Marshall thought.
“You take that up with Brad,” he said. “That’s between you and him.”
“We’ve already did that,” Jared said. “He said he didn’t have any money.”
“Where is your buddy?” Marshall asked.
“He wouldn’t come, didn’t want me to come here either. He wants to go over to Brad’s trailer and take Brad’s TV and CD player. If that don’t make us square he figures to take the rest out of Brad’s hide.”
Jared finally looked at him.
“He’s going to do that this afternoon, Mr. Vaughn, if you don’t pay. That’s why I came.”
“I’m not going to pay,” Marshall said. “I told you that once already. How about leaving now. Some folks actually still work for a living.”
Only a few customers came in during the afternoon, so Marshall spent much of the time unloading boxes in the back room. There had been changes in the front part of the store — fluorescent lights, electric heat, shelves stocked with bird and grass seed instead of tobacco and corn seed, lawn mowers and rakes filling corners instead of hoes and plows.
But the back room was the same as half a century ago when Marshall first began helping his father and grandfather run the store on weekends. A single dusty forty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling. Tin signs advertising DeKalb corn seed and Aladdin lamps were nailed on unpainted wall planks. The smell of sweet feed lingered, as did the smell of the Prince Albert pipe tobacco his grandfather and father had smoked. As Marshall opened the first box, he looked around and realized the world he understood had been reduced to this one room.
Marshall waited until four-thirty before he turned the sign on the door. He lifted the gun from under the counter and took it with him.
Once he got to Deep Gap he turned right at the intersection, opposite the road that led to Brad’s trailer. Marshall drove slowly past where his elementary school had been, past the land his grandparents had once owned. He drove up back roads he hadn’t been on in years. He looked through the present into the past, bringing back farmhouses and barns and pastures and woods.
He did not drive to Brad’s trailer until the dashboard clock said six. The only car parked out front was the Camry. The TV and radio were gone and an open window gaped where the air-conditioning unit had been. Brad lay on the bed in the back room. One eye was swollen completely shut, and a cut below the eye would need stitches. When Marshall asked if anything was broken, Brad pointed to his ribs. Marshall pressed the flat of his hand against his son’s left side and the boy’s face tightened.
Marshall had learned in Charlotte he could take another man’s life. Now he believed he could take his own. He stepped back from his son and showed the pistol, past some point he could not give a name to.
“If you want me to end this right now I’ll do it,” Marshall said, “but it’s got to be both of us. I’ll even go first if that’s what you want.”
Brad started to speak, but Marshall stopped him.
“Don’t answer quick. Think about it first and think about it hard.”
Marshall laid the gun on the bedside table, then walked into the front room. He stared through the open window where the air conditioner had been. Osborne Mountain rose in the distance, above it a blue sky so deep it seemed not so much a color as a clearness beyond distance and time. Marshall knew there were houses on that mountain but distance and summer foliage hid them. Eight or ten thousand years ago a man would have seen nothing more than this, a leaf-greened mountain and a blue sky.
When he went back the gun was on the table.
“So you want me to go first?” Marshall asked.
“No, I don’t want that, for you or me,” Brad said. “I want to get better.”
Marshall felt more resignation than relief when he heard his son’s words. There would be no quick fixes for either of them. It might take weeks or months or even years before either one of them knew if Brad could live the truth of what he now claimed. But that was what he would do, try to save his son, because there was nothing else left to save.
“Can you walk?” Marshall asked, and Brad shook his head.
Marshall lifted his son from the bed. Though Brad was thirty pounds lighter than Marshall, it still wasn’t easy. Just getting him off the bed and into his arms took several tries, and he nearly tripped going down the trailer’s cement steps. By the time Brad lay on the Camry’s backseat Marshall gasped for breath.
Brad had not moaned or whimpered though Marshall knew the jostling must have been excruciating. As he drove toward the hospital Marshall remembered another moment years earlier when he’d made a similar trip.
Brad was playing in the creek below the house and had come too close to a hornets’ nest. Marshall was on the front porch reading the paper when the boy came running toward him, hornets swirling around his terrified face like a malevolent halo.