On a routine patrol Goins became separated from the rest, and was not missed until the sound of gunfire. American soldiers found him bleeding from two bullet holes and a bayonet wound. Five enemy lay dead around him. Goins was decorated with honor and returned to Kentucky, but stayed in town. He didn’t want to live near killing. Out of respect for its only hero, the town overlooked which hill he was from. Now the town had forgotten.
Goins rose from his desk and walked to Gipson’s cell, his boots echoing in the dark hall. The smell of human waste and disinfectant made his nose sting. The walls were damp.
“How long you aim to stay?” Goins said.
“Just overnight. Hotel’s too risky.”
“Why stay in town at all?”
“Man gets old,” Gipson said. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No,” Goins said. “I ain’t been up there in thirty years.”
“Longer for me. I’m the one that left and went north.”
“Plenty of work?”
“As many taxes they got laying for a man, it don’t hardly pay to work.”
“What’d they take you for up there?”
“Went by ever who else was around. Italian mostly. Couple times a Puerto Rican till they heard me talk. Sometimes it never mattered.”
“Why come back?”
“I got give out on it,” Gipson said. “I’m seventy-six years old. Missed every wedding and funeral my family had.”
“Me, too.”
“By choice.” The man’s voice was hard. “You can walk back out your ridge any day of the year. Don’t know why a man wouldn’t when he could.”
Goins gripped the cell door with both hands the way prisoners often stood, shoulders hunched, head low. He didn’t hunt or fish anymore, had stopped gathering mushrooms and ginseng. Being in the woods was too painful when he didn’t live there. The last few times he’d felt awkward and foreign, as if the land was mocking him. He wondered if Gipson’s exile was easier without the constant reminder of what he’d lost.
Goins unlocked the cell and pulled the door open an inch. Gipson’s face twisted in a faint smile. One side of his mouth was missing teeth.
“I’m going,” said Goins.
“I’ll be here come daylight.”
“Hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Some of my grandkids have got kids,” Gipson said. “You don’t know what it’s like to see them all at once. And them not to know you.”
“You were up to the mountain?” Goins said.
The man nodded.
“Bad as ever?”
“Not so much as it was. They’re married in now and don’t bother with it no more. The kids have got a game of it, play-acting. I look for it to stop when the next bunch gets born. Still ain’t full safe for me. I’m the last of the old Gipsons left alive.”
He moved to face the wall again. Goins walked quietly away, leaving the cell open, hoping Gipson would change his mind. He left the front door unlocked. The dusk of autumn cooled his face and he realized that he’d been sweating. The fading sun leaned into the hills with a horizontal light that made the woods appear on fire.
• • •
A gibbous moon waned above the land when Beulah Mullins left her house. Though she hadn’t been off the mountain in fifty years, she found the old path easily, and followed it down the final slanting drop to the road beside the creek. The road was black now, hard and black. She’d heard of that but never seen it. Beulah stayed on the weedy shoulder, preferring earth for the long walk to Rocksalt. The load she carried was easier on flat terrain.
Beulah had never voted or paid taxes. There was no record of her birth. The only time she’d been to town, she’d bought nails for a hogpen. Her family usually burned old buildings for nails, plucking them hot from the debris, but that year a spring flood had washed them away. Beulah had despised Rocksalt and swore never to return. Tonight she had no choice. She left her house within an hour of learning that Haze was on the mountain. He’d slipped away, probably after hearing that she was still alive, and headed for town. Beulah walked steadily. The air was day-white from the moon.
Sixty years before, five Mullins men were logging a hillside at the southern edge of their property when a white oak slipped sideways from its notch. The beveled point dug into the earth. Instead of falling parallel with the creek, the oak dropped onto their neighbor’s land and splintered a hollow log. Dislodged tree leaves floated in the breeze. When the men crossed the creek, they found a black bear crushed to death inside the hollow log. They built a fire for the night and ate the liver, tongue, and six pounds of greasy fat.
In the morning, a hunting party of Gipsons discovered the camp. The land was theirs and they demanded the meat. Since the Mullins men had already butchered the bear, they offered half. The Gipsons refused. Three men died in a quick gun-fight. The rest crept through the woods, leaking blood from bullet wounds. Over the next two decades, twenty-eight more people were killed, a few per year.
Ground fog rose to the eastern sky, streaked in pink like lace. Beulah’s face was dark as a ripe pawpaw. Checkered gingham wrapped her head, covering five feet of grey hair. She wore a long coat that smelled of oil and concealed her burden. Her legs hurt. A flock of vireos lifted from a maple by the creek, a thick cloud of dark specks that narrowed at the end like a tadpole. Beulah watched them, knowing that winter would arrive early.
She scented town before she saw the buildings. Rocksalt was bigger now, had spread like moss. Frost in the hills was heavy enough to track a rabbit, but here the ground was soft. Town was suddenly all around her. Beulah moved downwind of a police car. She couldn’t read, but knew that an automobile with writing on its side was like a tied dog. Whoever held the leash controlled it. She stalked the town from the shade. Her shins were damp from dew.
Railroad Street was empty. The muddy boardwalk was gone, and the cement sidewalk reminded her of a frozen creek, shiny and hard in the shade. Beulah leaned against the granite whistle post in the morning sun. On her last trip this had been the center of town, busy with people, wagons, and mules. Now the tracks were rusty and the platform was a bare gantry of rotted wood. Beulah looked past it to the tree line, listening to a cardinal. The hollow was glazed by mist like crystal.
She turned her back and headed into the silence of improvement. Sunlight crept down the buildings that faced east. She walked two blocks out of her way to avoid a neon diner sign glowing in the dawn. No one here would take Haze in. There was only one place he could have gone.
A bench sat in front of the jail with one side propped on a concrete block. The load she carried prevented her from sitting and she moved to shade, leaning against the southern wall. She was eighty-four years old. She breathed easily in the chill air.
• • •
Goins slept rough that night, listening to the building crack from overnight cold. At dawn he rose and looked at the hills. He missed living with the land most in autumn, when the trees seemed suddenly splashed in color, and rutting deer snorted in the hollows. There were walnuts to gather, bees to rob. Turkeys big as dogs jumped from ridgelines to extend their flight.
He rubbed his face and turned from the window, reminding himself of why he’d stayed in Rocksalt. Town was warm. It had cable TV and water. He was treated as everyone’s equal, but his years in town had taught him to hide his directness, the Melungeon way of point-blank living.
After breakfast, he reached under his bed for a cigar box that contained his Purple Heart and Bronze Star. They were tarnished near to black. Beneath them was an article he’d cut from a Lexington paper a few years back. It was a feature story suggesting that Melungeons were descendants of Madoc, a Welsh explorer in the twelfth century. Alternate theories labeled them as shipwrecked Portuguese, Phoenicians, Turks, or one of Israel’s lost tribes. It was the only information Goins had ever seen about Melungeons. The article called them a vanishing race.