The World Made Straight (11 page)

“I'll get them some water,” Travis said.

“Give those tomato plants a good soaking too.”

“You mind if I go in and get a beer first?” Travis asked. “I'll pay for it. I'm near about as hot and thirsty as those dogs.”

“There's a Coke in there you can have,” Leonard said, “but as long as you're staying here you get no beer or drugs.”

“Why?”

“One less charge that can be leveled against me if I get busted.”

Travis followed Leonard inside. He got the Coke out of the refrigerator and drank it in three gulps, then went and filled the two hubcaps that served as water bowls. The harsh spray drummed against the metal sides, a full ringing sound he liked.
A small rainbow wavered above as the dogs lapped the water, so thirsty they didn't care when spray hit their faces. Travis slowly raised his eyes, let them pass over the parched grass to where Dena sunbathed.

Dena's eyes remained closed so Travis let his gaze linger until water spilled onto the ground. He unraveled the hose and dragged it over to the tomatoes. Dena got up as he was starting the second row. Travis thought she would cover herself, but she didn't. She walked toward the trailer, seeming not to notice him.

He had seen women's breasts in magazines before but these were different. They drooped more and were starkly pale compared to the rest of her skin. He felt himself grow hard as he watched Dena disappear into the trailer.

When them nipples get hard you know you got them good and ready to give it all to you. That was what Shank always claimed, and Travis had agreed. But that had just been talk on Travis's part. The few girls he'd been out with hadn't let him do more than some kissing. He'd had to make up stuff to tell Shank and the others so they wouldn't be ribbing him about not having his cherry busted.

It didn't look like that was going to change anytime soon if Lori had her way. Friday night she'd told him about her sister getting pregnant at seventeen and how she wasn't going to let that happen to her. Travis hadn't much liked the way she'd said it, like she was lecturing him, but right afterward she'd let him french kiss her for the first time and he'd forgot all about being lectured and most everything else.

Lori would be out of church by now, probably already home helping her mother fix noon dinner. He wished he was
with her, helping look after her brother till the food was ready. Maybe afterward him and Lori going for a walk so they could be alone. He'd go over to the café on Monday during his break. Lori would be busy but he'd at least be around her.

Shank and the other fellows would bull-rag him good if they knew he was getting all moony about Lori. You got it bad as a calf bawling for its momma, he could hear Shank saying, and Travis reckoned he sure enough did to be thinking of her all the time.

May
13, 1861

A.M.

Summoned to Allen residence.

Lawrence Allen, age
28.

Complaint: Losing voice.

Diagnosis: Aphonia.

Treatment: Take gargle of honey, vinegar, alum. Slippery elm
morning and night.

No talking for three days.

Fee: Two dollars. Paid in cash.

Would it be that not just Allen but Zeb Vance and his Raleigh
firebrands would get aphonia to quite their braying about
states rights.

P.M.

Summoned to courthouse.

Julius Candler, age
32.

Complaint: Bleeding from nostrils resulting from fisticuffs.

Diagnosis: Fracture of nose.

Treatment: Set nose.

Fee: None.

Summoned to Main Street.

Elish Tweed, age
12.

Complaint: Gunshot through arm and into ribs.

Diagnosis: Same.

Treatment: Sponged both wounds. Probed arm for torn blood
vessels or broken bone. Removed bullet from rib cage. Shot by
accident.

Fee: None.

Ransom Merrill, age
48.

Two gunshot wounds. Deceased at time of arrival.

Roland Norris, age
22.

Complaint: Knife wound to arm.

Diagnosis: Same. No severed vein or artery.

Treatment: Sponged wound. Sewed up with cotton thread.

Fee: One dollar. Paid with side of ham.

Abney Shelton, age
19.

Complaint: Bleeding lip from fisticuffs.

Diagnosis: Cut requiring suture.

Treatment: Sponged wound. Sewed up with cotton thread.

Fee: One dollar. Three bushels of oats to be delivered.

Final delegate vote:
28
for Secessionists,
144
Unionists. This
folly may yet be prevented.

“That GED you mentioned a few weeks ago,” Travis said.

“I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt none for you to look into it.”

Leonard's palms pressed his coffee cup to take in its warmth. Leonard wore a sweatshirt, though he would shed it once sunlight settled on the trailer's tin. A raven made its harsh call from the woods. They were hardy birds that would winter out in the mountains, and this one sounded invigorated by the cool late-September morning.

He raised his cup and sipped. The boy wouldn't bring up the GED if he hadn't been thinking about it a lot the last month, maybe had already mentioned the test to Lori. Still skittish though, not yet committing himself. But Leonard had committed
himself,
just blurted out the offer of finding out what needed to be done. Leonard had not brought up the matter again, but now Travis had.

“I guess I could go by the vocational school this morning,” Leonard said. “Find out what you'd need to do.”

“Thanks,” Travis said. He looked down at his cereal. “Would you help me study if I was to make a go of it?”

Leonard didn't answer.

“I reckon that to mean no,” Travis said.

“I guess I can help you some,” Leonard said.

Soon after Travis left for work, Leonard followed Highway 25 down to Marshall as well. The dogwood trees had begun to turn, stipples of russet now under the green canopy. Dogwoods were always the first to acknowledge that widening between sun and earth. In another week the tulip poplars would yellow, followed by the purpling of the sweet gums. Then all green rubbed off the mountains but for the resolute firs and pines on the high ridges, that and the club moss scabbing the understory's brown skin. The morning shadows transforming as well—deeper, more pronounced. Laying heavier on the ground when cool weather comes, his mother claimed, as though shadows had a corporeal reality.

When he was a child, Leonard's mother had often sat on the steps of their farmhouse, at times half an hour passing as she stared at the mountains rising beyond their pasture. The prettiness of it takes me away from myself, she'd once explained to him, her voice soft as if sharing a secret. She'd told him that sometimes a Bible or church wasn't enough. That's why there's need for a world in the first place, son, she'd said. In the days right after Emily and Kera had left, Leonard had tried to see the world the way his mother had. He'd drive out to the Calumet River, the one place with enough trees to hide a landscape
that looked like it had been leveled by a huge rolling pin. He'd sat on the bank and stared at the cottonwoods and birch, the black alders and witch hazel huddled beneath the bigger trees, the slow brown water, trying to find the same inner peace his mother had years earlier on those farmhouse porch steps.

When he arrived at the vocational center, Leonard almost turned around and drove back to the trailer. He didn't owe the boy this. He could tell Travis the person in charge of adult education hadn't been in. Tell the boy if he wanted a GED he could find out about it himself. Minutes passed before Leonard finally walked through the main door.

Even blindfolded he'd have known he was in a high school. Cheap perfume and cologne clogged the air, a smell of linseed oil on the waxed wood floors. The secretary gave him a room number and Leonard walked down the hallway. Students were changing classes, lockers clanging shut amid a muddle of voices. He moved around clots of teenagers, and each time one brushed or bumped against him his stomach tensed as if expecting a blow.

Mrs. Ponder had been his high school's guidance counselor, but now she was the county's GED director. She'd helped Leonard apply to colleges the fall of his senior year, but when he said his name she didn't appear to remember him. He told her why he'd come, mentioned the reading Travis had done during the last month.

“All that's good,” Mrs. Ponder said. “This test is more about interpreting what's read than specific subject matter. Of course it will be different with the math. He can probably do
the multiplication and division, but he'll need an understanding of fractions and decimals, a few formulas as well.”

Mrs. Ponder turned to the bookshelves that flanked her desk. One afternoon after school she had helped Leonard fill out forms for Chapel Hill and NC State. She'd been thinner then, her hair longer and unstreaked by gray, only a few years out of college herself. He was one of many male students with a crush on her. They had sat at a table in the library, the applications and transcripts spread before them. Close enough that he could smell the soap on her skin and see the bared rise of her collarbone, the fine blond hairs on her forearm. I'd bet a month's salary you'll end up teaching at some college, she'd told him that afternoon. A bet he should have taken, Leonard now thought as Mrs. Ponder ran her index finger over a row of books.

She lifted a thick paperback titled
Essentials of Mathematics
from the shelf. “If he can work through all the problems in these first ten chapters, he'll do fine on the math part.”

Mrs. Ponder handed the book to Leonard.

“Courtesy of the state of North Carolina,” she said.

“How often is the GED given?”

“First Thursday and first Saturday of the month at Asheville-Buncombe Tech. Let me know at least two weeks in advance and I'll reserve him a place.”

“I'm thinking April. Math's not my strong suit so I may be learning right along with him.”

“I remember,” Mrs. Ponder said, meeting Leonard's eyes. “If your math scores had been higher you'd have received
scholarships to out-of-state schools as well. Maybe you would have gotten far enough away not to find your way back here. That's what I hoped for you.”

Mrs. Ponder looked out her window at the mountains as if to emphasize they were still in Madison County and not some bucolic New England college town.

“I'm glad I'm not at the high school anymore,” she said. “There are fewer disappointments here. Be able to read a safety manual. Balance a checkbook. Get a job as a secretary or foreman at a mill. That's all I have to hope for now, Leonard.”

He wore what he always wore these days—ragged jeans and a tee-shirt, work boots. His hair long, his beard unkempt. Leonard knew what Mrs. Ponder saw before her, heard it in the bitterness of her voice. Whatever she knew or didn't know of his life since high school, his appearance evidently verified enough.

“Is this for your son?” she asked, and he knew this was a judgment of him as well.

Mrs. Ponder had grown up in Madison County herself, come back after graduating from UNC-Greensboro and married her high school sweetheart, a dairy farmer who'd barely graduated high school. Mrs. Ponder's left hand rested on the desk, and Leonard saw she no longer wore a wedding ring. He thought about telling her it appeared he wasn't the only one whose life hadn't turned out as expected.

“Thank you for your help,” he said.

Leonard walked back down the hall, studentless now. He passed classrooms, some doors open, some shut. Chalk tapped
a blackboard, a projector whirred, typewriters clattered, then a room where a man near Leonard's age spoke of the past.

Why can't you just let them take a different test on the material? one of the parents had said that afternoon in Illinois. Six people had been in the conference room: the principal, Leonard's department head, himself, and three parents. He'd looked out the window before he spoke at what passed for landscape in southern Illinois—a few scraggly cottonwood and bald cypress poked into an endless unscrolling west toward Missouri and Kansas. At that moment Leonard had realized how truly oppressive the openness was, its wide possibilities he no longer believed in. By then he was no longer living with Kera and Emily. He and Kera passed each other in the school's hallways with little acknowledgment, negotiated evening and weekend exchanges of their daughter with the cold formality of pawnbrokers.

School policy stated cheating was an automatic zero, and Leonard had reminded the parents and principal of that policy, then gotten up and left the room. But school policy had been only part of why he refused. Stacks of unmarked tests and essays cluttered his desk. Lesson plans unwritten. Finding the energy and focus to make a new test had seemed impossible.

On the way back to the trailer, Leonard stopped at the Winn-Dixie and bought two cases of beer to bootleg. He paid with the twenty dollars in rent money Travis had given him last night. Money he shouldn't feel the least bit bad about taking, because Travis couldn't have found any place short of a tree stand where he could have stayed as cheap. Leonard was barely out of the parking lot before he'd downed a beer and
pulled another from the opened case. Entering the school had brought back memories he'd tried to keep submerged. The dark glossy sturdiness of the lawyer's desk. An ink pad's plush, mossy dampness as the policeman blacked his fingers and thumb. Emily asleep in his bed while he spent the night on his apartment's ragged couch. The click of metal locking around his wrists.