When he woke, it was light and he felt tired already. At a gas station he stared at the rest room mirror, thinking that he looked like the third day of a three-day drunk. The suit was ruined. He combed his hair with water and stepped into the sun. A dog was in the back of his pickup, digging. Gerald yelled, looking for something to grab. The dog saw him and jumped off the truck and loped away. Gerald shoved dirt over Ory’s exposed hand. A man came behind him.
“Shoo-eee,” the man said. “You waited long enough didn’t you.”
Gerald grunted. He was smoothing the dirt, replacing the weights along the blanket’s edge. The man spoke again.
“Had to take one to the Tenderers myself last week. Got some kind of bug that killed it in three days. Vet said it was a new one on him.”
“A new one.”
“I put mine in a garbage bag. Keeps the smell in better than dirt.”
“It does.”
“Did yours up and not eat, then lay down and start breathing hard?”
“More or less.”
“It’s the same thing. A malady, the vet called it.”
“A malady.”
Gerald got in the truck and decided not to stop until he was home. The stench was bad and getting worse. He wondered if breathing a bad smell made your lungs stink. The land started to roll, the crests rising higher as he traveled east. The sun was very hot. It seemed to him as if summer had arrived while he was gone. He’d been to winter and back.
Deep in the hills, he left the interstate for a blacktop road that turned to dirt, following the twists of a creek. He stopped at the foot of his wife’s home hill. Kay would be up there, at her mom’s house with all her family. They would feed him, give him whiskey, wait for him to tell what happened. He brushed off his suit and thought about the events, collecting them in sequence. He told the story in his head. He thought some more, then practiced again. Ory had quit drinking and taken a good job as manager of a department store. He’d gotten engaged to a woman he’d met at church, but had held off telling the family until he could bring her home. She was nice as pie, blond headed. He was teaching her to shoot a pistol and it went off by accident. She was tore all to pieces about it. He’d never seen anyone in such bad shape. All she did was cry. It was a malady.
Gerald drove slowly up the hill. Later, he could tell the truth to the oldest brother, who’d tell the rest. They’d appreciate his public lie and he’d be in with the family. He parked in the yard beside his mother-in-law’s house. Dogs ran toward the truck, then kids. Adults stepped onto the porch and Gerald could see them looking for Ory in the cab. Kay came out of the house. She smiled at him, the same small smile that she always used, and he wondered how she’d look in a wig.
He got out of the truck and waited. Everything was the same — the house, the trees, the people. He recognized the leaves and the outline of the branches against the sky. He knew how the light would fall, where the shadows would go. The smell of the woods was familiar. It would be this way forever. Abruptly, as if doused by water, he knew why Ory had left.
Melungeons
Deputy Goins sat in his office and watched the light that seeped beneath the door of the jailhouse. When it reached a certain pock in the floor, it would be time to go home. Monday was nearly over. In the town of Rocksalt, the deputy doubled as jailer to balance each job’s meager pay. Goins had come in early to free his prisoners in time for work at the sawmill. They’d left laughing, three boys who’d gotten drunk through the weekend. Goins had spent all day in the dim office. He was tired.
Something outside blocked the light and Goins wished the county would buy a clock. A man opened the door.
“Time is it?” Goins said.
The man shrugged. He peered into the dark room, jerking his head like a blackbird on a fence rail. He looked older than Goins, who was sixty-three, and Goins thought he’d probably come for a grandson.
“Nobody here,” Goins said. “Done turned them loose.”
“I heard tell a Goins worked here.”
“That’s me. Ephraim Goins.”
“Well, I’m fit for the pokey. What’s a man got to do to go?”
“Drunk mostly.”
“Don’t drink.”
“Speeding.”
“Ain’t got nary a car.”
“Stealing’ll do it.”
“I don’t reckon.”
The man kept his head turned and his eyes down. Goins decided that he was a chucklehead who’d wandered away from his family.
“Why don’t you let me call your kin,” Goins said.
“No phone.” The man jerked his chin to the corridor where the cells were. “What if I cussed you?”
“I’d cuss back.”
“Ain’t they nothing?”
“Let’s see,” Goins said. “Defacing public property is on the books, but it’d be hard to hurt this place.”
The man walked to the door and stood with his back turned. “Come here a minute,” he said.
Goins joined him. The man had unzipped his pants and was urinating on the plank steps leading to the door. Goins whistled low, shaking his head.
“You’ve force put me, sure enough,” he said, hoping to scare the man away. “Looks like you’re arrested. Lucky they ain’t no lynch mob handy.”
The man inhaled deeply and hurried down the hall to a cell. Goins opened the heavy door. The man stepped in and quickly pulled it shut behind him.
“Name?” said Goins.
“Gipson. Haze Gipson.”
He lifted his head, showing blue eyes in rough contrast with his black hair and smooth, swarthy skin. They watched each other for a long time. The name Gipson was like Goins, a Melungeon name, and Goins knew the man’s home ridge deep in the hills. He glanced along the dim hall and lowered his voice.
“Say you’re a Gipson?”
“Least I ain’t the law.”
“What’s your why of getting locked up?”
“You been towned so long,” Gipson said, “I don’t know that I can say. I surely don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know which way you’re aimed at these days.”
Goins stepped close to the bars.
“You know,” he said. “If you’re a Gipson, you do. But you ain’t making it easy.”
“It never was.”
Gipson lay on the narrow cot and rolled on his side, turning his back to Goins. A mouse blurred across the floor.
“I’m a done-talk man,” Gipson said.
Goins returned to his desk. He stared through the window at the courthouse and remembered his fourth-grade teacher threatening a child who was always late to school. “If you don’t get up on time,” the teacher had said, “the Melungeons will get you.”
Melungeons weren’t white, black, or Indian. They lived deep in the hills, on the most isolated ridges, pushed from the hollows two centuries back by the people following Boone. The Shawnee called them “white Indians,” and told the settlers that they’d always lived there. Melungeons continued to live as they always had.
Goins wasn’t born when the trouble started between the Gipson and Mullins clans, but he’d felt the strain of its tension all his life. Members of his family had married both sides. To avoid the pressure of laying claim to either, Goins had volunteered to serve in Korea. Uniforms rather than blood would clarify the enemy.
When a dentist noticed that his gums were tinged with blue, the army assigned Goins to an all-black company. Black soldiers treated him with open scorn. The whites refused to acknowledge him at all. Only one man befriended him, a New Yorker named Abe, whom no one liked because he was Jewish.