Arlen nodded, and they were quiet again for a time, riding with the windows down and the hot air pushing into their faces. The forest had given way to swampy stump fields now, and Arlen looked out across the litter of slashed timber and felt a pang, remembering the way forests of his boyhood had fallen. He’d been at Arlington National Cemetery once after the war, and the first thought he’d had, staring over the columns of stone markers, was of the clear-cut woods that climbed the hills behind his home. They were both fields of death, filled with inadequate reminders of what had been.
“They cut a lot of timber out here,” he said.
“Yes, they did. Sawmill was not far from here. I worked there for three years. Used to hear the band saw in my sleep.”
“When it went under, the town went with it, is what Rebecca told me.”
“That’s right. There were two thousand people in this town not five years ago. Ain’t but a few hundred left, and a lot of stumps. You take a canoe out through the swamps not far from here, and you’ll find stumps nine, ten feet around. Some big boys, they were. The wood lasts, too. Cypress is damn strong.”
“It makes the finest coffins,” Arlen said.
“How in the hell do you know a thing like that?”
“My father told me,” Arlen said. “He paid a lot of mind to such things.”
The memory lingered. Long after he and Barrett had returned with the lumber and carried it down to the dock, Arlen was thinking of his father. He could see the dark eyes above the thick beard, hear the deep, easy voice. He could see the big hands wrapped around a plane or a piece of sandpaper, smoothing the grain of someone’s final home. He spent time on coffins that few would, treated each pauper’s grave as if it were a rich man’s tomb. Even in the summer of the fever, when twenty-nine died in eleven days, he’d taken care with his coffins. Arlen could remember him working through the night that summer, the summer his mother had died. Arlen had been twelve at the time, and she’d gone slow and suffering and with her hand in Isaac’s, who’d looked his son in the eye and told him to have no fear, the earthly being mattered not in the end.
That was twenty-five years ago.
He sorted and stacked the lumber and tried to push it all from his mind, but it would not stay at bay, and that evening when he sat on the porch with Rebecca, he said, “I reckon I’m ready to tell you the story.”
She studied him for a moment and then said, “Why? What changed?”
He thought on that while he slipped a cigarette out and lit it. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could pin down; the world had shifted on him in a way he didn’t fully understand. It had an awful lot to do with her, he knew that much.
“It’s just time to tell the tale,” he said. The tale he had not told anyone, ever.
She didn’t answer. Sat with her hands folded in her lap and waited. He smoked the cigarette down a little bit and watched the waves, and then he told her about the day his father died.
32
IT WAS FIVE YEARS after Arlen’s mother had passed. Isaac had taken to spending more time in his shop, particularly at night, when visitors were unlikely. The shop was located beneath the room where Arlen slept, and the sounds drifted up, barely muffled by the thin floor that separated them. He’d long known the sounds of the tools on the wood-his father’s paying job, other than a bit of small-time farming, was as a furniture maker-and sometimes Arlen could also hear Isaac humming to himself or occasionally speaking bits of German, his mother tongue. The conversations, however, were a new twist.
At first Arlen had thought his father was talking to himself. The words were soft-spoken, and initially it was just background noise, mumbling of which he did not take much heed. It was only after it had persisted for a time that he began to pay attention, and the phrase he heard uttered again and again raised a prickle across his spine.
Tell me, Isaac Wagner would say. Tell me.
The more he listened, the more evident it became that his father was trying to speak to the dead. Not only that-he believed he was. The words that left his mouth were parts of an exchange.
The conversations had gone on for many weeks before Arlen chanced a trip down to the shop to see for himself. What awaited him was chilling: Isaac spoke with his hands on the corpses. Stood above them and placed his palms flat on their chests or on either side of their heads. When he’d talked himself out, he removed his hands and returned to work and fell silent. Always he was silent unless he had his hands pressed against their dead flesh.
He was a different man outside of the shop as well-both with Arlen and with the townspeople. Moody and unpredictable, given to perplexing statements and a constant tendency to dismiss the worries of the living.
It was a few months before Arlen could admit that his father was truly losing his mind.
Rumors swirled through the town but avoided a troublesome pitch until a teary-eyed man came to the shop with a child’s toy in his hand, prepared to ask that it be buried with his wife, and found Isaac in his now-customary pose, standing above the body with his hands on the dead woman’s head like a preacher offering a blessing. The sight had rankled the grieving husband, and while no more than a heated exchange of words took place-with Isaac taking no steps to pacify the man, simply saying that he’d talk aloud in his shop if he was so inclined, to whomever he liked-it added coal to the fires of suspicion already smoldering throughout the town.
What did you do with a father who was insane? The question haunted Arlen through his days and kept him awake through his nights. It was just the two of them now; there was no other family in the town. Isaac had led the way to this place, and Arlen’s mother had been unable to conceive after giving birth to her first and only child. No confidant existed. He listened to his father speak to the dead and thought of what might happen if he sought help for him, if he told anyone in town the truth, and he decided that it would be better to keep silent. There was no harm being done. It was strange, certainly, unsettling and troubling, but it wasn’t harmful. He promised himself that if it ever became so, something would have to be done.
It was a day on the fringe of winter when Joy Main died. Three nights of frost had been followed by a final gasp of Indian summer that burned out behind a cold wind, and no one in the town had passed in six weeks. Isaac was making furniture instead of coffins, and Arlen had been allowed to slip into something close to a peaceful state. At night his sleep was uninterrupted by voices from below, and the dark rings around his father’s eyes had lessened, his strange remarks becoming fewer. Then they brought Joy Main’s body to the shop.
The Mains were the power family in town. Edwin’s father had been a surveyor-and a damn shrewd man. He asked for, and received, acreage instead of wages, and he had a fine eye for land, acquiring large parcels along the New River and through the gorges that bordered it. It was coal and timber country, beautiful land that was soon to become rich land, and by the time Edwin was grown, the mining boom was under way and the property he inherited made him a wealthy man. He stayed in Fayette County and filled his father’s void. He was large and pompous, and charming when he had cause to be. At other times he was harsh and cruel, but the townspeople seemed to believe you could expect that from your leaders.
Joy Hargrove was the most beautiful girl in the county, bright and clever, a gifted piano player and blessed with a haunting, gorgeous voice that turned heads at Sunday services. The marriage was of the arranged sort-Joy’s father was vying for purchase of a promising mine. The courtship was strongly encouraged despite the fact that Edwin was past forty and their daughter just seventeen, and it was only a matter of weeks before Joy Hargrove became Joy Main.