This Rock (20 page)

I seen Moody had been so contrary because Muir argued with him. And he was ashamed, now Muir had gone, maybe for good, and was trying to make up for it. Muir and Moody had brought out the worst in each other all these years.

I had always showed Muir favor, and I reckon that had kept Moody riled up and lashing out. I had favored Muir in my heart. Moody was feeling more at home and at ease with his younger brother gone. I was the guilty one. I was glad for his help and for his change of heart, but I felt guilty too.

Moody helped me pick up apples in the orchard to make cider. We gathered all the apples that had fell in the grass and washed them in a tub by the springhouse, then crushed them in the cider mill. The air was filled with the scent of ripe and busted apples. Moody sweated and the smell of liquor on his breath mixed with the scent of ripe apples.

“Where do you reckon Muir is by now?” I said. It was the third day since Muir had left.

“He's probably holding to the North Pole by now and trying to kiss a polar bear,” Moody said.

“I hope the car don't break down,” I said.

“The Model T is so simple you can fix it with chewing gum and a tin can,” Moody said.

“He will need heavy clothes in the North,” I said. As I turned the screw on the press, golden juice foamed out through the cracks and gathered in the groove and run to the spout. Fresh cider has the most mellow smell.

“Muir can kill a polar bear and sleep under its hide,” Moody said. He was in a jolly mood, and the more he worked the more cheerful he got. I'd never seen him work so long and steady.

“I hope Muir will go to church in the North,” I said. Juice bubbled and seethed out of the cracks in the press and run to the bucket beneath the spout. Flies and yellow jackets buzzed around us.

“Maybe he can preach to the wolverines,” Moody said as he dumped more apples in the grinder.

“It broke his heart that his preaching failed,” I said.

“Maybe he will be a preacher yet,” Moody said.

I thought how Muir was really just a boy still.

T
HAT NIGHT
I had a dream about Muir. He was faraway but I seen him pushing the Model T, like it had run out of gas or broke
down. He was pushing the car down the road in flat country with briars and bushes on either side. And then I seen it wasn't a road but a river he was pushing the car in. He was wading in water up to his knees and pushing the Model T. It was a muddy river and the current was fast, and I heard a roar of shoals or a waterfall ahead. But he was so busy pushing he didn't hear the noise. Watch out, I hollered, and tried to touch him. But he couldn't hear me, and he just kept struggling through the muddy water. I reached out again but couldn't touch him. And I seen there wasn't any wheels on the Model T. And then I woke up and heard the crickets on the pasture hill.

Muir

I
PULLED INTO
a diner between Dayton and Cincinnati. It was near dark and the light inside was so bright I blinked as I set down on a stool. I ordered coffee and two hotdogs all the way. I was hungry for onions and chili on the weenies.

A salesman in a shiny striped suit set down beside me and laid his soft gray hat on the counter. “How you doing, buddy?” he said. I nodded and kept eating. I didn't want to have nothing else to do with strangers, but he sounded like he was from down home. He leaned over and asked me where I was headed.

“North Carolina,” I said and kept chewing.

“That's where I'm from,” he said. He told me he was from Raleigh and that he sold advertising for Mail Pouch tobacco. It was good to hear a friendly voice.

“What you doing way off up here?” he said and winked. “If you don't mind my asking.”

I told him that I had planned to trap in Canada but changed my mind.

“Why would you freeze your butt in Canada when we have the most fur in North America right in North Carolina?” he said.

“Where?” I said.

“Why, on the Tar River, east of Raleigh,” he said. “I come from that area, and where the river runs from Rocky Mount to Tarboro and then to Greenville, there is so many muskrats they're a nuisance to farmers.”

“Don't nobody trap them?” I said.

“Sure, people trap them,” he said. “But there's so many it don't make no difference.”

He described the pine woods along the Tar River, and the muskrat tunnels in the banks of the stream. He said the winters was mild down there, and I'd be a fool to go to Canada when the Old North State had more fur than anybody could catch in a hundred lifetimes. When I got up to leave he give me his card.

I got back in the Model T, and as I drove toward Cincinnati I kept thinking about the muskrats on the Tar River, and about the level pine woods in eastern North Carolina. I thought about the mild winters there, and the hundreds of dollars worth of fur I could catch in one season. Everything Mr. MacFarland had said had took me by surprise. I stopped for the night in a little tourist court just north of Cincinnati. All night I dreamed about hundreds of muskrats with glistening fur.

I reached Green River in the middle of the next night. It was two o'clock in the morning as I turned onto the Green River Road. The dirt road was rough and rocky and jolted me awake. A possum run across the ruts in front of me. When I seen that grizzly possum I knowed I couldn't go back to the house. It hit me that sudden. If I went back to the house Mama and Moody and everybody else in the community would see I was defeated. I was defeated again. I had failed as a preacher, and I had failed as a trapper in the North. I had drove bootleg whiskey for Moody. I couldn't go back to face U. G. knowing I still owed him money.

What I did was stop the Model T at the gate to the pasture. I turned the motor off and the lights off and set there in the dark. The motor creaked and ticked as it cooled. Katydids and crickets was loud in the pasture and in the trees above the road. In Toledo I had wanted more than anything else to be home. I had wanted to set my
feet on the ground of Green River. But now that I was there I couldn't bear to face Mama. I couldn't face myself either if I just drove up into the yard and admitted I had been defeated. I was still ashamed of myself.

I wanted to be a trapper, and I wanted the freedom of the woods and creek banks. I could not be satisfied with just working around the place knowing I was a failure and a coward. I set in the dark and listened to the blood behind my ears.

A plan started taking shape in my head as I set there in the car. Instead of going back to the house in disgrace, I would head down to the Tar River to trap that winter. I could make hundreds of dollars in a few months catching muskrats. The winter was mild there and I could camp out in the pine woods by the river. I could live on rabbits and squirrels and save my money, and see a part of the state I'd never seen. And when I come back I would not look as foolish as I did now. Maybe I could respect myself.

I set in the dark and shivered, thinking what a good plan it was. I still had forty dollars left, enough for a train ticket to get me down there. I wouldn't take the Model T but would leave it for Moody and Mama to use. I'd have to carry my traps and things to the train depot and leave them to be shipped to Rocky Mount on the Tar River. And then I would leave the car by the gate with a note and walk back to the depot.

I got my map of North Carolina out and studied it by match light. The Tar River run through Rocky Mount and Tarboro and Greenville. I could take the train and be there in a day. I could camp out and catch hundreds of muskrats. Why hadn't I thought of that before? I knowed everything about catching muskrats. The Lord was showing me how to get away from Green River, and how not to be such a failure.

I would be living in the woods, and I would need a boat to trap on the river. But I could buy the boat once I got down there. I already had my traps and scent bottles, mackinaw coat and boots. I would pack them all up in a box to ship to Rocky Mount. I would leave a note in the car at the gate saying I was trapping on the Tar River and would be back in the spring. I was so tickled at the plan I grinned in the dark.

I'
D NEVER TOOK
a long train trip before. I'd been to Tompkinsville and Spartanburg and Asheville. I'd never seen the eastern part of the state, but I'd seen pictures of the flat fields and lazy swamp-lined rivers, the wide pine forests of the coastal plain. I kept thinking about Annie as I rode the train to Asheville, about how she'd look when she was growed up a little bit more. I was still mad at her for flirting with so many boys.

I had to make that journey. I was thrilled and sad at the same time. You have to go far away before you can return and start again, I said to myself. You have to go east to go west. It sounded like something I'd read in a book about Columbus.

I looked out the train window at the trees on the mountainside, the yellow poplars and gold hickories, the red and orange maples. The world through the window looked like a painted picture. I wished I could draw a mountainside of colorful fall trees. I patted the bills in my pocket. The crisp money felt alive.

T
HERE WAS A
two-hour layover in Asheville. My suitcase and shotgun and coat had to be carried into the station. The big box of equipment was being sent on as freight. I set in the station surrounded by my gear and looked around the crowd in the station for faces that I knowed. Everybody that I seen was a stranger. Everywhere I went I'd be looking for faces that I knowed, like I was still on Green River.

The train east finally left around ten o'clock. I wrestled my stuff on board and settled in a seat. This is a long trip away that will give you months of freedom, I said to myself as I watched Asheville drift away. After swinging around the end of Beaucatcher Mountain, past the many summer hotels and cottages, past the TB sanitarium at Oteen, the train begun the long climb up the Swannanoa River to the crest of the Blue Ridge.

There was brief stops at Swannanoa and Black Mountain before we slipped through the nick of the mountain wall and begun winding down into the Piedmont. A tunnel passed us under a ridge. I have read that building the railroad into the mountains was one of the most spectacular construction jobs east of the Rockies. The state of North Carolina started the railroad several times before the Confederate
War and tried for ten years after the war to complete the line. But the grade was too steep and a lot of the ridge was solid granite under a thin covering of soil and trees. Twice, the money was raised and then embezzled by officers of the railroad company. Finally the road was built with convict labor. The state was too poor to afford blasting powder, so they heated the rock face with giant log fires and then doused the spot with floods of cold creek water. That cracked the granite and they was able to pry and hammer a few feet loose at a time. There was riots and knifings in the convict camp, and a lot of prisoners died while building the high trestles. Finally in 1879 the rails from Morganton and the east connected in the middle of the tunnel with the tracks coming down from Asheville.

As we come out of the tunnel I could see the engine puffing in a curve far below. The tracks coiled down the mountain through eight or ten curves. Ahead I could see out fifty miles or more over the foothills and the autumn woods to where fields of shocked corn and red clay gullies disappeared into the haze. It was like I'd passed through a barrier and there was a new world ahead, at my feet. I felt joy mixing with the sadness as we turned and twisted down the mountainside and roared through smaller tunnels. I seen the great fountain at Old Fort raising its sheaf of feathery water against the breeze in the station yard. I watched a river winding as it descended and split apart over a rocky bed.

All day long, as we stopped in Hickory, Statesville, Winston-Salem, and then Durham and Raleigh, I kept thinking what a big wonderful state this was. The towns was almost like northern cities I'd seen. There was tall buildings in the centers of the towns, and big shining cars around the stations. And there was many warehouses and tobacco-scented districts of factories and storage buildings. The smell of tobacco hung over the towns like clear smoke.

It was between Burlington and Durham, late that afternoon, that I set behind a group of college boys. From their talk I understood they'd been to a debate at Davidson College and was returning to Trinity College. They must have won, for they sounded loud and full of theirselves. All wore blue jackets and little white-and-blue caps. When the conductor was not around they passed a thin flask among
theirselves. I couldn't tell from the talk what the debate had been about.

“I could have died with pleasure when he said, ‘It's part of the modern
consciness
to be concerned about the poor.' I couldn't believe my sweet ears. I wondered if he was confusing
consciousness
with
conscience
.”

“That was choice,” another boy said.

“Then after he said it once he couldn't seem to stop repeating it. He must have said it ten times.”

“Oh, that was rich, really rich,” another boy said.

“No, that was choice; let's say really choice.”

“If you must say so.”

“I once had a science teacher,” the first boy said, “who couldn't say the word
oxygen
. It seemed impossible for him. Something like
okigen
was the best he could manage. He would avoid saying
oxygen
as long as he could, referring to ‘element number sixteen' or ‘O
₂
' and ‘the element we breathe.' But since it was a science class he eventually had to say the word again, and it always came out
okigen
.”

“Oh, that's rich.”

“No, choice, my boy, choice.”

“Oh, you're drunk. Be careful or we'll get thrown off the train.”

“And this same science teacher couldn't say
debris
either. He always pronounced it
derbis
.”