Before Familiar Woods Read online

  In the distance the low-slung mountains were just visible, all the color gone from them and nothing left but white and gray. There weren’t many vehicles parked along Main Street, and there were no people on the sidewalks. In the distance Ruth could hear the rumbling of a motor along Wicket Street. She crossed the road and came up the stone steps that someone had covered with sand and salt and studied the long steeple and the copper spire.

  Elam had been missing three days.

  She didn’t know what she would say to Jack Barlow when she saw him. She knew Cecil had seen him talking to Elam and Horace at the Whistler the night before they disappeared, but Cecil had also said they didn’t talk long, and she wasn’t sure she could trust anything Jack had to say regardless.

  The church was musty smelling. A corkboard hung from the foyer wall with various flyers tacked under colored-paper letters that spelled JESUS GIVES NEW LIFE. A glass font filled with holy water hung from the chipped wood door frame underneath a metal cross. Ruth could hear faint voices coming from the basement.

  Ruth had never asked Elam to go to AA, even after those nights he spent passed out on the bank overlooking the brook. He had hardly drunk before Mathew died, and she couldn’t bring herself to blame him for it afterward. Drinking to deal with pain was as old as cursing God for the same. Besides, she wasn’t much better. She had stopped looking for work after the light factory closed and all but locked herself inside their home. She thought from time to time of moving to another part of the country, but it felt too much like leaving Mathew. And so she chose to stay and wait like a mother whose child wasn’t dead but had only gone missing—as though she needed to sit by the telephone or by the window in case he called or came back.

  Still, something had changed a couple of months back when her mother fell coming up the porch steps. It had taken all the strength Ruth had to get her up the stairs and into her bed, where she could get her comfortable and call Dr. Kellogg to come see if anything was broken.

  Ruth didn’t think her and Elam were ever going to get back to holding hands and watching the leaves turn. But they were going to need each other if they meant to go on with their lives. They might not have wanted it that way, but there had been a time both of them did, and she still remembered that time. The morning after her mother fell, when Elam showed up at the house still smelling of alcohol, she told him that if he came home again after having spent the night passed out somewhere, he wouldn’t get past the front porch.

  * * *

  THE MEN CAME out the side door talking and laughing, their boots crunching the frozen grass. Ruth spotted Jack walking toward his truck with a man she didn’t recognize. She ignored the stares and waited until Jack finished his conversation, and then she stepped down onto the road and made her way toward the orange pickup truck that bore the word CHEVROLET across the tailgate in faded block lettering.

  “Good afternoon, Jack.”

  “Ruth.”

  Jack Barlow had deep wrinkles that framed his mouth and eyes. He wore a black coat and a brown Stetson hat with a bronze two-sided ax pinned just below the pinch.

  “Cold as a booger, ain’t it,” Ruth said.

  “It wouldn’t be confused for Florida.”

  Ruth watched Jack’s breath drift out in front of him. “I’ll cut to it,” she said. “I heard from some folks at the Whistler you might’ve talked to my husband the other night.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Cecil.”

  Jack laughed a little and turned toward the lot. Most of the men had gotten into their vehicles. Only a few remained, standing on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and talking. “Go on and get in the truck, Ruth. If we’re gonna talk, I’d just as soon not stand out here in the cold.”

  The truck smelled like cigarettes and diesel fuel. A figurine of a bent-over woman wearing nothing but a red sliver between her ass cheeks sat on the dash. Jack pulled a cigarette from his coat pocket without producing the pack. “You mind if I smoke?”

  “It’s your truck.”

  “That’s the way I see it. But you’d be surprised how many people don’t.” Jack drew a match. A thick vein ran down the side of his neck. “I heard about Elam. I’ll tell you right now, I don’t know where he is.”

  “I only want to know if he said something to you.”

  Jack slung his wrist over the steering wheel. “I seen him there at the bar, and I went over to see if his boss had made up his mind on the new ball field. He didn’t know nothing about it.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about Horace?”

  “Horace neither.”

  “Do you know what they were doing together?”

  “Don’t know and don’t really give a shit. Like I said, I thought Elam might know which way George Hodgkins was voting on the new ball field. I would’ve asked Horace the next day—what he was doing with Elam, I mean. But he didn’t show for work.”

  The flurries started to gather on the windshield, and Ruth could smell the damp weather mixed in with the cigarettes and diesel fuel.

  “They’re thinking of naming the new ball field after Horace’s boy,” Jack said. “If it gets approved, that is. It was my idea. I think he deserves it. That boy was a natural. He could’ve been better than his father.”

  “He was fifteen.”

  “Old enough so’s I could tell.” Jack took a drag and tapped the ash into a sawed-off plastic cup that sat in the console holding some kind of brown substance. “I don’t ever recall your boy playing. I mean—I know he was on the team. But I don’t recall him playing.”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about Mathew.”

  “No. That’s right. You came here to talk about Elam. But that sail is cut pretty much from the same cloth, ain’t it? People said Elam didn’t get to be the way he is until after Mathew. But even when we were growing up, there was something off about him. Like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. He used to have that terrible stutter. Of course you remember that. You couldn’t hardly get him to speak, he was so afraid he’d lose his words and have to set off trying to catch them. I remember sometime about the fourth grade this handicapped girl moved into town from somewhere up north. Bertie Ann Peas. She got to following the bunch of us around town. Sometimes she’d come to the sandlot and just sit in the grass and watch us play ball. One time she overheard Elam talking and that was it—she got to copying him and wouldn’t let up. Like a dog latched on to the end of a rope. Used to follow him around stuttering, ‘E-e-e-elam. C-c-c—ome h-h-h-ere. P-p-p-lease.’ He never said nothing to her. I thought he might get mad, but it seemed like maybe he was sweet on that dumb little girl.”

  Ruth opened the passenger door.

  “Della already came asking about Horace,” Jack said. “She came asking about your husband too. It seems the two of you are talking now. I suppose you could’ve just asked her and saved yourself some trouble.”

  Ruth got out of the truck.

  “Listen, Ruth.” Jack pointed his cigarette. “I don’t know what’s going on with Elam. But you got balls to come asking about it. It seems to me you’re trying to cash in on some goodwill you ain’t got.”

  Ruth shut the door. A few of the men were still standing outside on the sidewalk, and they watched quietly from a distance, and when she passed they made their way over to where Jack Barlow said something and started laughing, and then they all laughed along with him, like laughter was something Jack Barlow had caught and they were all picking at it like coyotes over a small carcass in the middle of the woods.

  RUTH FENN

  What she should have done was come in the evening after Cecil returned from work. But after three days she couldn’t just sit around and wait, so what she did instead was walk directly from the church to Cecil’s house.

  The only person there was some stick-thin blonde standing on the concrete steps shoving a corn whisk broom through the letter box.

  “It works better if
you put it on the floor,” Ruth said. “Move it back and forth a little.”

  The woman looked at Ruth and then went back to doing whatever it was she’d been doing.

  “Or you might consider a duster. They got them long ones with the lamb’s wool.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Probably not.”

  The woman pulled the broom from the letter box. The cover flap clanged shut. She was at least twenty years younger than Ruth, but something worse than time had aged her. Her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets and the skin around her mouth had drawn tight.

  “I’m looking for Cecil Higgins,” Ruth said.

  “He ain’t here.”

  “I guess you don’t know where I can find him.”

  The woman shrugged. “Work, I guess.”

  “I probably should have figured that.”

  “Probably.” The woman leaned the broom against the letter box and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. “You some kind of ex-girlfriend or something?”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “That’s right. I don’t care if you are.”

  “No. I haven’t been nobody’s girlfriend for a long time.”

  “I hear that.” The woman lit her cigarette and took a drag. “I left my bottle of Old Heaven Hill inside on the counter. Come back for it.”

  Ruth looked at the green single-story house. The windows in the front were curtained.

  “I don’t figure I’ll wait around all day, though. I got the bottle from a guy outside Southwestern Medical. He said it was expensive. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “And you figure that broom will get you inside?”

  “It’s the only thing I could find out back that might. Unless I throw a rock through the window. But …” The woman’s voice trailed off. She blinked at Ruth over her cigarette. “Why are you huntin’ Cecil? He got something of yours?”

  “I owe him an apology.”

  The woman nodded her head like she could understand how that might be. “This is my last day in this hellhole.” She pointed a finger to the sky and turned it around in a tight circle. “I’m moving in with my sister. She lives down in Sessoms, Georgia. Right in the middle of a two-hundred-acre pine forest. Ain’t nobody out there but her.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It is. There was this one time, though—about ten years back—when one of them single-engine planes came down right out of the sky and nearly crashed into her living room. Pine trees saved her life. She stepped out her front door and there it was. The plane all torn up into a million pieces. Four of them people dead and hanging from tree branches. But then my sister spotted this little girl still strapped into her seat. Both her legs broke but otherwise fine. She don’t remember a thing is what they say. Some kind of shock, I guess.”

  “I hope for her sake that’s true.”

  “She ain’t the only one. World is full of ’em. Sole survivors, they call them, and some of them get together, like a club or something. What I wonder, though, is if you took all them sole survivors and put them on a plane and that plane went down—would all of them survive?”

  “You probably couldn’t get them on a plane. That’d be your problem.”

  “But if you could—I wonder what would happen then.”

  “I don’t know. Somebody’s luck runs out, I guess.” Ruth looked toward the house. An open woodshed stood beside it with the wood stacked high underneath the roof. Ruth remembered hearing that you could tell a lot about a man by the way he stacked his wood. But she couldn’t remember what exactly. She turned to the letter box. “You sure Cecil don’t have no spare?”

  “Hell. If I knew something about a spare, I wouldn’t be messing with this broom, would I?”

  “No. I guess not. It just seems to me that Cecil is the type to keep a spare. My guess is if you lifted them cinder blocks in front of that woodshed, you might find something more than earthworms.”

  The woman took a drag from her cigarette. She came down the steps and walked over to the cinder blocks and tipped over the first and then the second. “I’ll be damned,” she said. She bent down and picked something off the ground and turned to Ruth. “You sure you ain’t no girlfriend?”

  * * *

  THE INSIDE OF the house was the same as Ruth remembered. Some of the hackberry bushes along the side of the house had grown tall and were visible through the window. The woman pulled two glasses from the cupboard and set them on the orange countertop.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ruth.”

  The woman filled the glasses with Old Heaven Hill and handed one to Ruth. “I’m Pearl Atkins. My sister—the one I was telling you about—her name is Linda Fay Atkins. She got her name from our mama. I don’t know where Pearl come from. I asked my mama one time and she said from dirt, same as me. That was about as nice as she could be.” The woman raised her glass to her mouth and paused. “Hold on a minute.” She held her glass out toward Ruth. “Here’s to sole survivors.”

  Ruth raised her glass, and the two women took a sip.

  “You been living in town a while?” the woman asked.

  “If forty-eight years is a while.”

  “Hell yes it is. I was born in Georgia. A little town called Helena. You wouldn’t know it. Only thing people know about Georgia is the devil went down there.”

  “That may be. But they say he settled here.”

  “Do they? Well, I only been this far north a couple years now, and you might be right. You got nine months you can’t go nowhere ’cause of the snow and two months you can’t go nowhere on account of the mud. Then you got one month where you can go anywhere you damn well please, but it only takes you a day to find out there ain’t nowhere to go.”

  “People learn to stay home some.”

  “I guess that’s right.” The woman finished off her whiskey and poured some more.

  “How’s his leg?” Ruth asked.

  “How’s that?”

  “Cecil. How’s his leg.”

  The woman studied Ruth a moment. “Oh hell,” she said. She started to laugh. “You’re the crazy bitch that stabbed that old cocksucker.”

  “I didn’t stab him—I just got him stabbed.”

  “That’s why you’re huntin’ him, then?”

  “That’s it. I been calling, but I can’t get no answer.”

  “Well, don’t let him milk you for nothing. It don’t seem to bother him all that much. He can still do everything he could do before he got stabbed, if you know what I mean.”

  Ruth took another sip of whiskey. The house smelled like burned wood. The wallpaper was peeling in spots, and the floors had been sanded down so many times there were big gaps between the boards. She regretted not coming to Cecil’s sooner. He’d always been good to her and Elam.

  “You know what that girl’s doing now?” the woman asked. “That little girl I told you about survived the plane crash? My sister kept tabs on her for a while. Last she told me the girl had dropped out of high school and was working the produce aisle at the Piggly Wiggly. You believe that?” The woman took another sip of whiskey. “She ain’t done nothing with her life.”

  * * *

  RUTH CAME HOME to find two shingles on the ground. She stood in the middle of the drive feeling half past worn out. In the distance she could hear the drumming of a red-bellied woodpecker. She studied the roof and then went inside and put on her sneakers with the good soles and her fleece cap with the fold-down ear flaps. The one Elam thought made her look like an Eskimo. She went to the garage and got the ladder and carried it to the side of the house and secured the rubber feet on the flat ground to the east of the porch with the head leaning against the crooked eave.

  The sky had broken, but the temperature remained colder than the underside of a concrete pillow. Ruth thought of Elam and the time he tied one end of a rope around his waist and the other around the chimney to clear snow from the roof. Mathew had been six years old at the time, and he
stood outside on the drive with the snow falling and watched his father like he was some sort of superhero born from the hills of Vermont.

  Ruth turned to the woods and without thinking stuck her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistled as loud as she could. Then she took a step toward the woods and did it again. She watched the wind move a little in the high branches and pictured Elam walking the tree line with Mathew swaddled in his arms, talking him to sleep, and felt tears well in her eyes. She wiped them away and turned back to the roof. She gripped the sides of the ladder and set her foot on the first rung, hoping it was just a couple of loose shingles and not a hole.

  She paused when she heard an engine. A black pickup truck turned off the road and came up the gravel drive. The paint was unscratched and the tires looked brand-new. She studied the cab but couldn’t see past the tinted glass.

  The truck stopped at the top of the drive, and a young man opened the door and stepped out. He wore a Red Sox cap pulled down tight and kept his chin high like he was trying to lift something heavy with it.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said.

  “I don’t know as you’re bothering me yet.”

  The man patted his coat pocket and pulled out a piece of yellow paper. “I got a paper here with your name on it. A woman named Jett Oakley recommended I find you.” He stuffed the paper back in his pocket. “This is my boy—Daniel.”

  The man looked back to the truck and motioned for his boy to come out. The boy got out of the truck and shut the door and stood close to it. He wore an oversized coat the same color as the man’s, and he had a large black eye.

  “Hello, Daniel.”

  The boy nodded.

  “It looks like he took quite the shot.”

  “He did. Got it when we were working with a circular saw.” The man wiped the underside of his nose. “It don’t look good, I guess.”

  “No, it don’t.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “Isn’t that something?”

  “What’s that?”