Signs in the Blood (8 page)

You ol huzzy, I said, I wisht I could be shed of you and your ways. Just then I looked up to see a dark shape there against the evening light. At first I thought hit might be Mister Tomlin, come to talk to me some more, but then I seen hit was Daddy. He leaned against the big logs there in the barn hallway but didn't say nothing for the longest time. When at last I had stripped ol Poll dry and turned her back out to the pasture, Daddy said, Little Sylvie, Mister Tomlin wants you for his wedded wife. I didn't answer him right off, for though I had thought some about hit, I couldn't rightly say how I felt. Well, girl, Daddy said, wouldn't that be a fine thing? Romarie and Clytie has both told me that hit ain't fair, him a-sparkin you and you the least un, but yore the one he wants. And I'll tell you what's the truth, Little Sylvie, a chancet like this'll not come yore way again.

I stood there in my old ragged work dress that had belonged to Clytie and to Aetha before her. I thought of what Mister Tomlin had said about his wife not having to lift a finger. My face stung where Poll's tail had whipped me, and atter a while I said, I reckon I just as soon.

CHAPTER 6

H
IPPIES ON
H
OG
R
UN
 (
M
ONDAY)

A
FTER ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF VISITING
with the Johnsons, Elizabeth had heard enough about whose taters were growing good and which cousin had a brand-new tractor. The hint about hippies on Hog Run tantalized her—could Cletus have been up there recently? But mountain manners required that they stay at least an hour, and Birdie was obviously relishing her visit. The talk ranged on: from Dessie's funeral to the weather and back to the state of their gardens and who would have the first ripe maters. Walter had refused to say anything more about the hippies and Ollie too had been strangely silent, on that subject at least.
Relax, Elizabeth,
she told herself,
there's time; this is what you're doing now.
She leaned back and let the quiet talk flow around her.

She watched Walter and Ollie: the one, taciturn, the other, talkative, but each completely attuned to the other.
They're the two parts that make a whole,
she thought enviously.
Sam and I were like that. And we were going to grow old together, die on the same day, and be buried in the same grave. Oh, Sam!

Elizabeth took a deep breath and resolutely turned her mind to other things.
Walter would be kin to the Johnson fellow that Little Sylvie ran off with,
she thought.
I wonder what he could tell me about them? That is, if Ollie would let him. It's a sad story—if the baby died of neglect, I wonder how Little Sylvie and her lover could have been happy with each other.

But at last Miss Birdie was pulling herself up from her chair and the standard mountain exchange of parting courtesies was beginning. “Go home with us!” Birdie said, and “Stay all night!” Ollie answered. Elizabeth, wondering if anyone ever acted on these routine invitations, waved a good-bye to the Johnsons as she and Birdie climbed into the car.

Birdie started to buckle her seat belt, then stopped. “Lizzie Beth, honey, I done left my walking stick on the porch by my chair. Let me just—”

“I'll get it, Miss Birdie,” Elizabeth said hastily. “You wait here.” She hopped out of the car and hurried back to the trailer's porch. Walter and Ollie had gone inside and as Elizabeth bent down to retrieve the cane, she could hear Ollie's voice.

“Walter Johnson, you know it ain't right. We got to stop her. I'll speak to Burlen—”

“I'm just getting Miss Birdie's cane,” Elizabeth called out, embarrassed to be eavesdropping, however inadvertently. Immediately Ollie's head peered round the door. She glanced at the car where Birdie was waiting, then whispered fiercely to Elizabeth, “It ain't goin' to do a bit of good you and her pokin' into things. They's a sight of mean folks back in some of these hollers. You best leave things be!”

The change in Ollie's demeanor was startling. She watched unsmilingly as Elizabeth stammered something and retreated back down the steps. Then she turned and disappeared into the trailer once again.

“Ay law, honey,” Birdie said as the jeep jolted its way down the steep road back onto the pavement. “I sure am proud we got to see Walter and Ollie. I don't know how long it's been since I seen Ollie; anymore, they don't hardly leave their place. Walter don't like to drive only to the grocery or to the doctor. But they know a-plenty about what's goin' on and if they didn't see Cletus, I reckon he must of gone some other way. Reckon we ort to go up Hog Run next, like Walter said. I mind Cletus talkin' bout them hippies; he said they was right peculiar folks, but that they was allus good to him.”

Squirming uncomfortably in her seat, she continued, “If you don't care, Lizzie Beth, maybe we could pull off the road up here and eat our dinner. That bumpy road done something to my back. Hit's like fire runnin' up and down my vertables.”

They parked under a spreading black walnut that grew beside Bear Tree Creek to eat their lunch. “I'll just rinse this mason jar out in the branch,” said Miss Birdie when they had eaten the biscuits and drunk the buttermilk. “Hit'll feel good to walk a mite and kindly unjangle my vertables.”

Elizabeth was studying the map she'd brought with her, noting just how many coves and hollows there were that Cletus could easily have hiked to from the top of Pinnacle. Suddenly she heard a barely suppressed cry of anguish. Birdie was standing on the pebble-strewn creek bank, bent almost double, one hand pressed to her side. Her face was pale with pain.

“What is it, Miss Birdie?” Elizabeth called anxiously as she ran to help the old woman.

“Oh, Lizzie Beth, honey, I done stepped wrong and wrenched my back. Hit's happened afore and hit'll pass off, but I got to get back home and lay down.”

Elizabeth delivered Miss Birdie to her house, found her an aspirin to take, and settled her in the big recliner chair that faced the television. When Birdie seemed to be more comfortable, Elizabeth asked gently, “Miss Birdie, do you want me to go on back to Hog Run and see what I can find out? Or do you want me to wait till another day when you can go with me?”

The old woman thought briefly then said, “Lizzie Beth, honey, if you don't care, I reckon hit'd be best was you to go on without me. Hit may be a week afore my back feels better. I'd take it mighty kindly was you to go on and ask about Cletus everwhere you can.”

Elizabeth left Birdie watching a soap opera. “Law, honey, the things these folks gets up to, hit's a scandal.” Her eyes were glued to the screen as she said, “Now you call me iffen you find out anything.” As she left the little house Elizabeth could hear the words, “Brad, I don't think you realize what Cynthia has been through.”

Back on Bear Tree Creek, Elizabeth turned her jeep up the rutted tracks marked by a green sign that read
HOG RUN ROAD.
At the base of the road were weedy pastures and overgrown fields, which gave way to second-growth timber. After about a quarter of a mile she came to a large clearing where four broken-down house trailers were propped up on blocks. All but one seemed to be occupied: drying clothes flapped from makeshift clotheslines; grimy, half-naked children played on the packed dirt around the trailers. An ancient claw-footed tub was a center of activity as squealing youngsters climbed in and out, splashing water at each other. Two little boys were struggling toward the tub with a red plastic bucket filled with muddy water from the branch. Just upstream from the spot where the children had dipped their bucket, murky water swirled around the rotting head of a deer.

Elizabeth slowed as she saw a little girl hauling on a rope attached to what at first she took to be a large dog. As the pair came closer she saw that it was actually a goat wearing a ragged pair of men's pajamas. By the side of a ramshackle tobacco barn, a dark-haired man was skinning some small animal. Drying hides of many different sizes and colors were nailed to the silver-gray planks of the barn. The man looked up from his work, squinted at Elizabeth's car, then spat to one side. Elizabeth increased her speed slightly. As she left the clearing behind, she caught sight of two more men tipping a filthy green sofa onto a small fire of worn-out car tires.

My god,
she thought,
it's the Trailer Park of the Damned. It's like a modern Brueghel or Hieronymous Bosch.
Such squalor was unusual in the mountains. Most people's places, whether mobile homes, ancient cabins, or new brick ranch houses, were kept painfully tidy, mowed and weed-eaten at least weekly. More than once Elizabeth had been thankful that her farm was not visible from the main road so that her somewhat relaxed standards of lawn care would not be apparent to her neighbors.

“I can allus tell when Lizzie Beth's been weed-eatin' down along the hard road,” Dessie had said with a laugh years ago. “She won't mow down a weed iffen hit's got a purty flower.” So Elizabeth's roadside boasted untidy clumps of blue chicory, red clover, yellow hawkweed, and the delicate white umbrellas of Queen Anne's lace.

As did the roadside ahead of her, she realized. The straggling dusty grasses of the unmown verge had given way to a close-clipped tidiness punctuated with wildflowers. A wooden gate, artfully constructed of peeled rhododendron limbs, lay open before her. Hanging from the gate, a carved sign read
STARSHINE COMMUNITY.
The letters were picked out with gold paint, and small golden stars were scattered on the deep blue background. Beyond the gate, the road forked. Another carved sign set in a clump of orange daylilies said
VISITORS
and pointed down the right fork.

The narrow road ran past thick woods on the left and steep sloped pastures on the right. A six-strand electric fence bordered the field, which was home to a large flock of droopy-eared Nubian goats, most munching industriously on the huge multiflora rosebushes that dotted the mountainside. Elizabeth stopped her car and leaned out her window for a closer look at a beautiful long-eared doe that was cropping weeds near the fence. The goat raised her head and regarded Elizabeth appraisingly through her odd slit-pupilled eyes, then went back serenely to her browsing.

“She was hoping you might, like, have some goat feed with you. They're all pretty spoiled.”

The voice startled Elizabeth, and she turned her head to find a sweet-faced young man with long blond dreadlocks speaking to her through the open window on the passenger side of her car. “Were you, like, looking for someone?” he asked.

“Well, yes, in a way,” Elizabeth answered. “Maybe you read about the man they found in the river about a week ago?”

The young man looked at her blankly for a moment, then replied, “We stay out of the world's doings as much as possible. No newspapers, no radio, no TV. It's Polaris's rule.”

Okay. And Polaris would be . . . ?
Elizabeth thought, finding herself feeling unaccountably annoyed by the beatific little smile on the young man's face.

Polaris, she learned, was the founder of Starshine Community. He and three others had bought the hundred-and-sixty-acre property a few years ago, and it was he who decided who could come to live in the community. “We all, like, take star names when we evolve,” the young man informed her. “I'm Rigel.”

Rigel listened serenely, his forearms propped on the open window, as Elizabeth introduced herself and then told him about Cletus and the missing shotgun. Finally he had said, “You'd better talk to Polaris. He would know if your friend's son had been here recently. We always, like, take visitors, especially earth parents, to him.”

“Earth parents?” Elizabeth asked, wondering if she had heard correctly.

“Once we join the community we acknowledge that we are children of the cosmos,” Rigel explained solemnly. “We're supposed to share with our earth parents about how we've, like, evolved beyond them. But some people who come here, they've, you know, run away from bad situations. And sometimes their earth parents come looking for them.”

Finally Rigel had directed her to follow the right fork to a big dome. “Polaris is usually there after the day-star meal, like, meditating and stuff. He'll be able to help you for sure; he's the most evolved of any of us.” The young man straightened and stood back from the car, indicating with a wave of his arm which way she should go.

As she continued up the road, Elizabeth glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Rigel pull what looked like a cell phone from one of the pockets of the baggy sun-bleached overalls that seemed to be his only garment. He put it to his ear as he disappeared back into the wooded area between the two forks.
I wonder if he's a watchman or something,
Elizabeth thought half seriously.
He could be reporting on me to, what was his name? Polaris?

The road ran through a gentle little hollow that showed the remains of a once extensive apple orchard. Here and there small, newly built log cabins were scattered, interspersed with an occasional felt-covered yurt. Elizabeth smiled nostalgically, remembering when these shelters—originally the portable dwellings favored by central Asian nomads—had been embraced by counterculture types back in the seventies.
The
Whole Earth Catalog
lives!
she thought with a grin.

Beneath one of the largest of the apple trees lounged a group of young women, all very pregnant. They were wearing gauzy white robes; some of them had wreaths of flowers on their heads. They glanced without curiosity at Elizabeth's car and one or two gave a perfunctory wave.
And the flower children, too.
She nodded at the picturesque group and drove on, humming,
“If you're going to Saan Fraan-ciso,/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. . . .”

A little beyond the old orchard was a geodesic dome of the type popularized by Buckminster Fuller.
More seventies stuff,
she thought, smiling broadly.
I have obviously driven right into a time warp.

Composed of large triangular panels, the dome rose huge and sparkling white in the sun, an imposing and unlikely sight in this ancient mountain cove. Triangular windows were set in vertical rows over its surface, and two tall purple-painted doors stood open at the end of a quarry-stone path. Elizabeth parked in the neat gravel parking area, marked with more of the hand-carved signs. Polaris, Algol, Altair, and Canopus each rated a private spot, while the eight remaining slots were all labeled “Visitor.” As she crunched her way through the thick gravel toward the dome, she noted that Polaris had a very new white Range Rover, while Algol and Canopus made do with silver Navigators. Altair was not there and there were no visitors besides herself.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust as she stepped from the bright sunlight into the cool dim open interior of the dome, the heavy doors automatically and silently swinging shut behind her. The sensation was very different from that of entering an ordinary building. Somehow, there was a feeling of vastness—as if the interior of the dome was bigger than the outdoors. She felt the urge to call out
Hellooo,
as one might in a cave, certain that there would be an echo.