Dogwood (14 page)

“Why do you stay? Why don’t you move someplace where this whole thing doesn’t hang over you?”

She leaned close again, and I wondered if every man who got a haircut had the same view. “Give me a reason to leave.”

Carson cleared his throat. “You two come on in—Mama has supper ready.”

She had made my favorite salads, macaroni and potato, along with her famous chicken and rice dish. As kids, Carson and I had fought over the leftovers like they were rare baseball cards. The rice and chicken blended perfectly, the chicken falling off the bones in homage to my mother’s intemperate ability to take a few pots and pans and mix them with heat and come up with food that would literally make you want to not stop eating.

There were green beans from the previous canning season that tasted like they’d just been picked. Rolls that melted like manna in my mouth, slathered with “cow butter,” as she called it. No margarine for her. And a pitcher full of sweet tea and lemonade—something we discovered long before Arnold Palmer ever did. The only thing missing was my father’s sweet corn, and I figured I’d plant that as an offering to his memory and enjoy it in the summer.

“Bet you didn’t eat like this at Clarkston,” Carson said.

“You’re looking skinny compared with how I last remember you,” Jenna said.

“Now leave him alone and let him eat,” Mama said. “You look good, Will.” She jumped up, if you could call it that, her languid arms firmly pressed on the table for support, as if some intestinal pain had hit her.

“What is it?” I said.

“Sweet potatoes. You always liked sweet potatoes, and I cooked a whole dish full and forgot to get them out of the oven.”

I made her sit and searched for an oven mitt in the drawers by the sink. I opened the silverware drawer by mistake and noticed cloudy forks and knives, the tray edged with dirt, spoons caked with splotches. Her eyesight had become worse in her old age, but she still worked hard trying to keep the place clean and I couldn’t help but love her for it.

I brought the CorningWare dish, covered with foil and bubbling like lava, to the table. She cooked the potatoes cut in half and soaked in a perfect juice—some concoction of her mother’s filled with brown sugar and cinnamon and other spices.

To my mother, cooking was not just an exercise in survival. It had been growing up in the hollows of Camel’s Creek. Cornmeal and molasses for breakfast and dinner—no lunch. The smell of her mother’s iron skillet cooking a squirrel or rabbit her brothers had killed or a fish they’d caught in the stream. At some point in the abundance we enjoyed when I was a child, cooking had changed from an avoidance of hunger to an act of worship. She worked as a high priestess, toiling and sweating before the altar, combining ingredients, and eliciting unforgettable flavors.

I never marked Xs on a calendar at Clarkston, but I did count down the meals at the end, knowing it would only be a year before I had a taste of her pecan pie. Or the rum-laced pound cake. Or blueberry crunch. To me, grace is my mother’s sweet potato casserole—undeserved, unmerited favor lavished on children who have no idea what it took to achieve.

Jenna brushed her foot against mine under the table, and I finally rose and held my plate in my hands, leaning against the oven.

“Why don’t you sit?” my mother said.

“I’ve been sitting all day.”

Carson laughed. “Yeah, and he can pack more in that way.”

“Where are you going to work, Will?” Jenna said.

Carson gave her a halfhearted scowl.

“Well, he doesn’t want to sit around here all day,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that. I figure I need a long walk or two before I go down that road.”

“Carson can find you something, can’t you?” my mother said. “You’ve hired a ton of people.”

“Government would have trouble with me hiring a convict. Besides, Will doesn’t want to work indoors and stare at a screen all day. He’s been cooped up enough to last a lifetime. I mean, I could help you get back on your feet—”

“It’s okay,” I said, less annoyed by the conversation than the feeling of being trapped again. I had spent years in a cage, working off my debt by listening to conversations I didn’t want to hear and breathing air forced on me. Sweat and odors too foul to describe. Now I felt I had walked back into another prison. A prison of childhood memories and words I didn’t—or
couldn’t—
accept.

“Think I’ll take a walk back on the hill before dessert,” I said.

“But it’s getting dark,” my mother said.

“And we have to get going,” Carson said, pushing back from the table. “Got an early morning tomorrow.”

I smiled at them. “I made a promise—to myself and the Almighty—that if he got me out of that place, the first thing I’d do when I got home was go up on that hill and thank him.” I kissed my mother on the forehead and grabbed a black flashlight my father kept by the door. “Thanks for the ride,” I said to Carson. “Jenna.”

“Don’t be a stranger now,” she cooed. “I could probably ask the owner at the shop if she knows of anything.”

“I appreciate that, but I’ll be okay.”

The flashlight was a black behemoth my father would take on early morning hunting and fishing trips. It weighed five pounds if it was an ounce. I could hardly pick the thing up when I was a kid. Now it almost felt light.

The barn lay in ruins at the base of the hill. It had fallen midway through my tenure at Clarkston. The mass of wood and tin was probably worth a fortune at the flea market about ten miles down the road, and I laughed as I thought about how much money I could make selling knickknacks from the basement and out of the rubble here.

Weeds and brush grew around the shell, and the barbed wire fence had succumbed to rust. I moved past the hulk of my father’s hay rake, a rusted, spiderlike metal sculpture with red fingers pointing toward the sky. My father would hook it to the tractor, Carson or me perched precariously on the metal seat, and when he gave the word, we would kick a pedal in front of us. The fingers would lift, leaving behind a perfect row of hay for the baler a few hours later; then the fingers descended, catching dried grass and pulling it to the next line where we would kick again. On a flat piece of property it was actually fun, but our land was marked with rolling hills that looked innocuous and gradual.

As we rode, the back of the rake filled us with dread. It was like hanging on to the side of a listing ship, and when my father stopped the tractor to avoid a rabbit scurrying for its life, we hung, suspended in the air. I was sure the feeling was the same one astronauts had while waiting for the lunar module to fire.

I used the flashlight to guide me up the hill. To my left the moon reflected on the surface of the pond. Water had changed the slope of the graded pathway, revealing new seeds of limestone I’d never seen. But I remembered the trees, a mighty oak at a curve that held back the shifting earth, and a fecund smell engulfing me. Halfway to the top I turned and saw the trail of headlights snaking down our driveway toward the road and the soft, yellow glow of the light at the end of the walk.

Home. It hit like a wave and the emotion was strong. I was finally home.

The rest of the trip was blurry, a mix of regret and emotion at
what I’d lost. The feeling of simply walking up a remote hill, alone, no guards, no one watching. When I made it to the field at the top of the path, a cool breeze met me, and I ran my hand through the growing hay, recalling the faces of cattle and our old mule, Pet.

Stars reached out as I moved toward the plateau of the two hills. A little farther, I could see the outline of the tall pines.

I found remnants of campsites of my youth, a ring of rocks where we’d kept warm through the night, sharing stories, trying to scare each other. Once, we’d seen a light moving through the darkness, and Carson told me it was a headless hunter looking for his gun. It turned out to be our father and the big flashlight I now carried. At the moment he reached our tent, the wind picked up and blew like some Appalachian hurricane. He helped us gather our things, extinguish the fire, and hurry back down the hill. That night the maple tree behind our house fell, a victim of lightning and a fierce storm.

I sat on one of the rocks, clicked off the flashlight, and stared at the sky. The moon was a crescent, and I traced Orion with a finger and found the Big Dipper. My father had instilled within us a love for places we would never go but could only see.

Below me, half-hidden in the treetops, were the lights of our town. Though it had grown since I had left, it was still small, and I could pick out the lamps over the Foodland parking lot and the flashing yellow at the railroad tracks.

“I do thank you for bringing me back here,” I whispered. “You’ve been faithful to me and I’m grateful. Now I just have one more thing to ask, and then I’ll leave you alone and never bother you again.”

My voice drifted down the hill and into the woods. I closed my eyes and thought of Clarkston—I’d seen this in my mind a thousand times. If this could become a reality, why couldn’t my dream of Karin also come true?

Through the trees walks a figure in white, her skin milky and
ghostlike. She glides along, her skirt touching the grass top as she sways to the beat of unwritten songs. As she nears, I stand and reach for her. Her skin is soft and warm, and she envelops me with her arms.

“Karin,” I whisper, “I’ve waited so long.”

She pulls away, and there is nothing but the sky and her smile and the curve of her lips and the softness of her back.

“I will build our house here,” I say out loud, for no one to hear. For everyone. “I will marry you. Our children will roam these hills, our laughter will bounce off the walls, and our love will grow.”

I could almost hear her laugh. The weight of the task is heavy—not just building the home or grading the road or the thousand things it will take to make the dream come true, but the wooing, the process I am about to undertake with
her
. How it will be accomplished and how long it will take I don’t know.

But I do know this: I love Karin. She is the unsung song of my life. I long to see her smile again and hear her laughter. I long to sit on this very spot and watch the sun go down over the hills, watch the fireflies rise, and enjoy our children. We will sip tea, hold hands, make love, and give life where there’s been death.

“Karin, I’ve waited a long time. But I will wait longer. I will wait for you.”

I camped there that night, returning to the house for a piece of pie and digging an old sleeping bag out of my closet. My mother had kept the room virtually the same as when I’d last slept there—the innocence of the walls and bookshelves shocked me. It was like walking into a stranger’s life.

My mother caught me sneaking out the back, and I told her I didn’t want to wake her.

“Why would you want to sleep up there on the ground after all you’ve been through? I made your bed.”

“It’s hard to explain, Mama. I guess maybe it’s because I can. Inside, they told you what to do and when to do it. This is the first thing I can do without anyone having a say in it.” I moved toward her. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

She recoiled at the notion of being needy. All her life she had presented a can-do attitude, never asking for help. The very suggestion that she
needed
me in the house was anathema to her. But it was the easiest way to be released. She had taught the art of guilt and manipulation well.

“I’ll have your breakfast cooking tomorrow morning,” she said, closing the door.

I ate some pie on the way, the moon higher and brighter now, and carried the flashlight along with my grandfather’s old quilt. I also found a small shovel, some old newspaper, and a box of matches. After I cleared the fire pit, I dug enough grass away so the fire wouldn’t spread and moved the rocks into a complete circle. It took three trips to get enough wood to burn through the night. I used the newspaper to start the fire and spread the quilt and sleeping bag on the ground.

With the stars set perfectly above, I laid plans to work my way back into the world. Her world. Sleeping outside cleared my head and energized me the way it had when I was a kid. It was my hope to build a house on this spot and, as simple or as crazy as it felt, begin an adult life.

The fire caught, and soon yellow tendrils of flame licked skyward. The smell of woodsmoke brought back nights Carson and I spent with my father at the lake or hunting. I could almost feel my father’s touch. It was during those long, languorous nights that I learned the most from him and about him. He would teach something new about himself or reveal something about me with each outing, not in a planned, scripted way, as if he had an agenda, but in a loving, more natural way that flowed like the laughter we shared.

I often imagined his reaction to what I’d done—did he stare
out at the yard and anticipate what lay ahead for us? Did he weep or was he resolute, unmoved in his compassion for me?

“How do you know the right person to marry?” I asked one summer night as we lay by the fire, our hands behind our heads, our bellies full of fish and baked potatoes.

He answered as if we were talking about catching a fish or shoeing a horse. “You never
really
know who the right one is, if there is such a thing. I’ve always thought it was more important to
be
the right one than to find her.”

“What do you mean?”

“A smart woman who’s looking for more than just income to spend or a hunk of a body that will get flabby in a few years looks for more than she can see.” He touched his chest. “It’s in here. Develop your heart, and you’ll be the right person when that special one comes along.”

“How do you develop your heart?”

“You work on it like anything else. It takes time and effort. Your heart is like an unplowed field. Even if you have good soil, you have to work it up and see what’s best to plant there. If you train your heart to see things, to lean toward others, to care about people rather than things, to always take advantage of an opportunity to reach out to strangers and sacrifice for your friends, you’ll wind up with a good heart.”