This Rock (7 page)

“Ain't nothing wrong with hunting,” he said.

“How can you help Muir in the fields if you're always wore out?” I said.

Over the past few months Moody had worked less and less and Muir had done more and more. It was Muir that pulled the fodder and chopped the wood and made the molasses to sell at the cotton mill. Me and Muir done the milking and boiled the sorghum, so I let Muir, who was only thirteen, keep half the money he got from selling syrup. That made Moody mad.

“Why don't I get no molasses money?” Moody snapped.

The next time I went out to the smokehouse where we kept the jugs of molasses, I seen one had fell off the shelf and broke. The sorghum had spilled out over the dirt in a tongue of glistening brown. I didn't think it fell off the shelf by itself, but I didn't say nothing.

T
HE NEXT TIME
U. G. come by to bring a bag of shorts I'd ordered for the hog, I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “You're getting more work out of Moody these days than I am.”

“He ain't working for me,” U. G. said. I knowed that; I just wanted him to talk about Moody.

“I wish I knowed where he went at night,” I said. “He's only sixteen.”

“I wish I didn't know,” U. G. said. U. G. was about seven years older than Moody, and he had always been like a son to me. He was short and strong, built like a pony. He wore silver-rimmed glasses that flashed in the sun.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Don't want to be no tattletale,” U. G. said.

“I'm his mama,” I said. “I have a right to know what's happening to my boy.”

U. G. looked at the ground and shook his head. He drug his toe across the dirt of the yard like he was drawing a line. “Ain't none of my business,” he said.

“What kind of meanness has Moody got into?” I said. My stomach felt so sour I thought I was going to throw up.

“I think he's working for Peg Early,” U. G. said.

“What is he doing for Peg Early?” I said. But in my heart I already
knowed. Peg Early was the biggest bootlegger down in Chestnut Springs. Her husband had been in the liquor business for years and years, and when he died Peg took over herself and made it even bigger. There was all kinds of rumors about Peg Early, that she paid off the police, including the federal revenuers, that she run houses of ill repute in Chestnut Springs, as well as cockfights and gambling joints. Rumor was that anybody that crossed her would disappear. A shudder passed through me down to my toes. It was also said that Peg Early went regular to church and give a lot of money to the North Fork Baptist.

“What would Peg Early want with a boy like Moody?” I said.

U. G. said Peg used boys to carry liquor across the state line at night. She would pay them two dollars for every five gallons they lugged from Possum Holler across the gap into North Carolina. All they had to do was leave it in a thicket before daylight, and Peg would be there in her roadster to pay them. I asked why she wouldn't carry the liquor up the mountain in a truck.

“No reason to take the risk,” U. G. said. “She's covered on every front. She has at least two dozen men working for her.”

I was so alarmed I couldn't sleep after U. G. told me that. I had lost my husband, and I had lost my pa, and I had lost my older girl, Jewel, to the 1918 flu, and here my oldest son was getting hisself into trouble, bad trouble. My family had never lived outside the law. I felt like something had slipped loose down in my guts. I had to think what to do. If I throwed it up to him, what U. G. had said, Moody would just deny everything. That's the way he was. Moody would never own up to his doings. I'd have to try another way.

“I want you to stay home tonight,” I said to Moody the next day.

“Ain't no little youngun,” Moody said.

“You need more sleep,” I said. “You'll get sick at this rate.”

“You want me to get down on my knees and say my prayers?” Moody said and laughed.

“You will stunt your growth,” I said. Moody was poor as a whippoorwill. He had never put on no weight.

That evening Moody was gone same as usual. He didn't pay a bit of attention to me. He was too big to whip, and I was afraid he was
too big and too angry to control. What is a mama to do with a big boy that don't mind her? My pa had never had such trouble with his boys.

Nothing I had done before seemed to be of any help. Everything I had learned from raising younguns appeared to be useless. It was my job to look after Moody and to keep him out of trouble. Everything I done or said seemed to make it worse.

One morning when Moody got up I seen he had a black eye and a cut on his cheek. He looked so tired he was bent over. He wouldn't look at me straight. “You have been hurt,” I said.

“Run into a tree,” Moody said.

“You have been in a fight,” Muir said.

“Shut up,” Moody said, and shoved Muir back against the kitchen wall.

“Stop that,” I said. “Let me put some camphor on that,” I said to Moody.

But Moody wouldn't let me touch the black eye or the cut. He jerked away from me and slipped out the back door.

One night soon after that Moody didn't come home at all. He didn't appear at the breakfast table, and when I asked Muir where Moody was, Muir said he hadn't seen him. I can still remember the raw pain that sliced through me. I couldn't go ahead with my work that day, and I didn't know where to look for him. I got my bonnet from the nail by the door. “I'm going to the store,” I said.

“Can I go?” Fay said. Fay looked more like Moody than anybody else in the family.

“You stay here,” I said.

It always made me a little nervous to go to U. G.'s store by myself. Maybe it was because Hicks Summey and Charlie and Blaine and others was always setting around the store and playing checkers. The store was a man's place. I always felt they was staring at me when I went in there. Some women knowed how to joke with the men and carry on at the store, but I never did. Florrie could talk to the men there by the stove as easy as in her own kitchen.

When I got to the store U. G. was weighing ginseng for old Broadus Carter. It was as pretty an October day as you'll ever see, but dark in
the store, and smelling of coffee and leather from the harnesses U. G. sold. U. G. put the roots that looked like a man's private parts in a pan on the scale, and he moved the weight down the markings on the arm. He slid the weight a little, then pushed it back a little. “Can't give you but nine dollars,” he said to Broadus.

“That is prime sang,” Broadus said. “You know that is prime.”

“It's garden growed,” U. G. said.

“I dug it myself backside of Pinnacle,” Broadus said.

“It's garden growed,” U. G. said and held up a root that was wrinkled and withered.

“Maybe some of it is garden growed,” Broadus said.

U. G. counted out a five and four ones into Broadus's hand.

“I'm looking for Moody,” I said soon as Broadus left.

U. G. looked at Hicks Summey and then back at me. “He was here yesterday evening,” Hicks said. Hicks was always hanging around U. G.'s store, and he looked like he had had a drink.

“He never come home last night,” I said. I felt an awful chill in my bones, even though it was a mild fall day. I shivered and my voice shook.

U. G. said Moody had left the store before dark with Wheeler and Drayton.

“Where did he go?” I said.

U. G. looked at the ginseng he had bought, and he looked at the men setting by the stove. It was ten o'clock in the morning and I knowed he had a lot of work to do. U. G. was one of the hardest-working men I knowed. He worked as hard as my husband Tom had.

“I'm worried sick,” I said.

U. G. took a key out of his pocket and opened a tin box. There was shelves and compartments in the box and he placed the ginseng Broadus had brought him in one of the trays. “I might know where Moody is,” U. G. said.

U. G. asked Hicks and Charlie and Blaine to leave, and then he locked up the store. He was so dedicated to business I knowed it pained him to do that. It pained me to ask him to help, but I didn't have no choice.

We got into U. G.'s pickup truck and drove south on the highway. We crossed the river and drove up into the flats of the Lewis place. The highway turned sharp downward at the state line, dropping down into the gloom of Possum Holler and the sickening curves of the Winding Stairs. I had a shudder of dread when I thought of Dark Corner and Chestnut Springs. Ever since Pa had took me to the Indian doctor down there when I was seventeen, I thought it was a place of fearful goings-on.

The deep hollers in Dark Corner was full of stills and hideouts for them running from the law. The dives and taverns along the road in Chestnut Springs was full of gambling and bad women. There was people killed all the time in Dark Corner, killed in knife fights, shot in ambush on the trails. Rumor was the law was afraid to come into Chestnut Springs except in the daytime. The sheriff in Greenville didn't interfere with what went on there. I reckon all the deputies was in the pay of Peg Early.

Even though it was a bright day, I felt we was descending into the depths of some hell. The dark of the hollers looked evil. You felt you was being watched. The rocks on Corbin Mountain above looked ugly as gargoyles. The trees appeared stunted and deformed. The red clay in ditches looked tainted and sour.

“Are we going to Peg Early's?” I said, and my teeth chattered I was so nervous.

“We'll have to,” U. G. said.

Peg Early's house was the biggest place in Chestnut Springs. It was two stories with long porches set back high above the highway. The house was painted blue. Water from one of the springs on the mountain was piped into a trough in the yard. I'd heard that when somebody got cut in a knife fight they would wash them off in the trough.

I looked around at the little valley across the road. Without all the houses and taverns along the highway it would be a peaceful valley. There was sycamores along the creek, and a grassy meadow running back to the woods. If it wasn't for the people it would have been a beautiful place.

Peg Early's house had a tavern on the first floor. A motorcycle with purple saddlebags on it, and strings hanging from the grips of the
handlebars, was parked near the door. The motorcycle leaned like it was about to fall over. Some kind of music come from inside. I couldn't tell if it was a Victrola, or somebody picking a banjo.

“You stay here,” U. G. said. “I'll go in and ask about Moody.”

After U. G. disappeared inside the tavern I looked up at the porch on the second story. A girl in a silky robe was leaning on the bannister smoking a cigarette. She didn't look more than fifteen, and her robe was unbuttoned, showing her bosoms. Her hair was curly but uncombed, like she had just woke up. I nodded to her and said howdy, but she just knocked the ash off her cigarette so it fell onto the ground beside the pickup.

A truck passed on the highway and left its smell of oil and exhaust. I heard a woman laughing but couldn't tell if it come from the first or second story. I looked down the road at the other houses, hoping to catch sight of Moody. I wondered if Wheeler and Drayton had come down here with him.

I waited for a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour. I fidgeted around in the truck seat. I was Moody's mama and it was my job to find him. If he was in trouble it was my fault. I turned on the seat and looked across the road. Two men was helping a third into a car over there. I couldn't tell if the man was sick or drunk or had been hurt.

I wished U. G. would come back and say what had happened. I rubbed my hands together and gripped the edges of the seat. I looked at the sycamore trees by the branch across the road, and I watched the tongue of water from the pipe tickling the water in the trough and making it shiver. A yellow jacket buzzed by the window of the truck.

“Where is Moody?” I said between clenched teeth. “Where is that boy that is my most troubled youngun?” I tried to see into the door of the tavern, but it was dark in there. The bright sunlight made it impossible to see inside.

I scooted myself around in the seat, but I couldn't wait any longer. I had to go in and find out about Moody. I opened the door and stepped out onto the ground. I tightened my fists and made up my mind to get to the bottom of this. I had gone too far to stop now.

As I stepped through the door into the dark, I couldn't see nothing
at first. The place smelled of sawdust and pepper and the sweet fruity fumes of liquor.

“Howdy, ma'am,” a man said.

In the gloom I seen a man standing behind a linoleum-covered counter. There was tables around the room, and a billiard table at the far end.

“I'm looking for Moody Powell,” I said.

“Ain't no Moody here,” the man behind the counter said. He wore an apron like U. G. wore in his store.

“Where did U. G. go?” I said.

There was other men setting around some of the tables, but in the dark I couldn't hardly see them. Somebody was talking in the room behind the counter.

“U. G.!” I hollered.

U. G. come out from a door at the end of the counter and I run to him. “Where is Moody?” I said.

U. G. shook his head, and a woman appeared in the doorway behind him. I couldn't see her well at first. I don't know how I expected Peg Early to look. I reckon I thought she'd be a heavy woman wearing a man's hat and man's clothes. As she stepped closer I seen she was wearing some kind of shiny slacks, and she was slim as a rail. She had short gray hair and there was a pistol strapped around her waist, and she was holding a cigarette between her fingers.

“Honey, I wish I could help you,” she said. “Moody was here last night, but he left.”

“When?” I said.

Some of the men around the table behind me had stood up. I felt like everybody was looking at me.

“Sugar, Moody had a little too much and got handy with his knife. I had to ask him to leave,” Peg said. She blowed smoke out the side of her mouth. Her face was wrinkled as an old corn shuck, and her lips was painted red.