South of Broad (44 page)

“Did he tell you where he’s going?” Father asked.

“No,” Starla said. “But he didn’t have to. I know where he’s going: he’s headed for North Carolina. The boy’s going home, to the house where we were born.”

“Do you know where that house is?” he asked.

“It’s twenty miles from some big rock,” Starla said. “I was a little bitty kid when they came to take Niles and me away.”

“Chimney Rock?” Father asked.

“That’s the one,” Starla said. “How’d you know?”

“Leo,” Father said, “a field trip to the mountains tomorrow. You’re going to bring Niles back.”

“I’ll walk to Chimney Rock if you don’t take me,” Fraser said.

“I’m a runaway,” Starla said.

“We want to come too,” said Trevor and Sheba.

Father shook his head. “Too many,” he said. “Let’s limit it to Starla and Fraser. Take your mother’s Buick, Leo. I’ll call your substitute, Bernie, to do the paper route. You sure you can find him, Starla?”

“Pretty sure,” she said.

“I’ll call Polycarp,” he told her. “You and Fraser, go to the guest bedroom, and I’ll call your parents, Fraser, tell them you’re okay. Now, let’s break this up. Get some sleep. We’re going to bring that boy back where he belongs.”

“He’s going to where he belongs, Mr. King,” Starla said.

My Charleston-loving father just smiled. “Charleston’s in Niles’s blood now,” he said. “He’s been home a long time. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

A
t six in the morning, I eased Mother’s car out of the driveway and made my way through the waking city’s dark streets until I mounted the ramp that took me to I-26, where I gassed the pedal and headed west through the heart of South Carolina. Starla sat with me in the front seat, sleeping as we passed Summerville. The sun began to rise out of the sea behind us. In the backseat, Fraser slept on one of the pillows Father had provided, along with a cooler of sandwiches, deviled eggs, a baked ham wrapped in aluminum foil, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies. He handed me two crisp hundred-dollar bills before I left the house, in addition to my shotgun with a new box of shells.

“For emergencies,” Father had said to me. “I packed your fishing rod and gear.”

“We’ll be back by Sunday,” I said. “Whether we find Niles or not. If we don’t find him, I don’t know if Starla will come back or not.”

“She won’t,” Father said.

Outside of Columbia, I pulled the car into a gas station and announced a pit stop. My fellow travelers stumbled out and stretched their limbs in the cold sunlight. I studied a map of the Carolinas and compared it with the one Father had traced with a yellow marker that guided me through a maze of backwoods that would begin our climb into the North Carolina mountains. He had circled a blue smudge of a place called Lake Lure, which seemed to be the entryway to Chimney Rock. Once I hit Chimney Rock, Father had warned me, then I’d enter the land of pure detective work. We’d have to spread out to ask questions of the mountain people, who were noted for their ambiguity and their complete distrust of strangers. Seeing a look of distress cross my face, Father reminded me that Starla was returning to her native land and would be back among her own people.

After leaving Spartanburg, we entered into that haunted country that always represented the real South to me, the God-fearing truck stops and the small whitewashed churches that worshipped a fiercer Christ than I did. We had entered the kingdom of snake handlers and clay eaters and moonshiners, where the farmland itself was stringy, stone-pocked, and unforgiving. We passed through Lake Lure just before noontime, and the tension in the car mounted as we went over the game plan we had devised in ignorance of the terrain and the mumbling people of few words whom we were certain to encounter.

“What’re the mountain folk like?” I asked Starla.

“Like everyone else,” Starla said. “A lot nicer than Charleston people.”

“I resent that,” Fraser said. “Charleston’s famous for its civility.”

“How do you think Trevor and Niles liked Charleston’s famous civility last night?”

“It’s a tradition,” Fraser said, looking straight ahead. “There are always two guys who are picked because they won’t make it. It’s even written into the by-laws of the Middleton Assembly. Chad said it would be the most boring ceremony in the world if not for the eviction of the unfit.”

“It was so thoughtful of Chad to let Trevor and Niles share that experience,” Starla said. “Chad’s cute to be such an asshole. I like for God to mark assholes. You know, make them ugly as sin, their meanness written all over their face. I thought Wormy was like that, but hell, I like him better than Chad.”

“White trash charm,” Fraser said.

Starla fired back, “Niles and I are a lot lower than white trash, Fraser. For us, white trash is a step up.”

“You might be,” Fraser said, “but not Niles. He has some pride, at least.”

I heard a small noise like a cricket turning over on its wings in a bait bucket. I looked over and saw a glitter of metal in Starla’s hand. She held the knife up for Fraser to see.

“Jesus, Starla,” I breathed.

She told Fraser levelly, “I’ve thought about cutting your throat all morning because of what your brother did to Niles. So drop the lectures about pride, you Charleston bitch. You better think twice before you fuck with a mountain girl.”

I steered the car to a screeching halt on a pullover designed to let faster traffic pass and yelled at the girls, “The purpose of this trip is to bring Niles back. I don’t want to hear another word about the debutante-versus-the-mountain-girl shit, or you can both get out. Now, give me that goddamn switchblade, Starla.”

She folded the knife and handed it over to me. I jammed it in my pocket, then eased the car back out onto the road. When we passed over a bridge, I threw the knife into a creek.

“There’s Chimney Rock.” I pointed to a towering outcropping that looked capricious and out of place, as though an imbecilic creator had fashioned it when he tired of making stars. The town of Chimney Rock was a place to buy a Cherokee tomahawk, an Indian headdress, a leather bullwhip, or jars of honey taken from beehives in mountain laurel country. Without tourism, Chimney Rock would be a lonesome stretch of mountain road beside the boulder-strewn Broad River. Several of the stores were closed for the winter, but many were open, trying to lure wayward travelers like us as they climbed the mountains on the way to Asheville. There were storefronts on both sides of the street, and all looked as though they were selling duplicates of the same merchandise. I dropped Starla and Fraser off in front of one, and they scrambled out like beagles as they went door to door asking for any information about the Whitehead family.

On the other side of town, I parked the car and went into a barbershop. As the barber trimmed my hair, I asked about the Whitehead family. Though the name was familiar to him, he wasn’t sure if he had ever actually met a Whitehead, but he had certainly heard the legends; they were mountain people who had a reputation for being disputatious and stubborn, and they had a particular antipathy toward officers of the law. He thought they were part Cherokee, and there was nothing in the physiognomies of Niles or Starla to disprove that theory. But he was fairly certain they had disappeared from the area, probably trickling down to Charlotte to look for work. Though he said there were a lot of hard-up mountaineers, it was hard to find a low-down one, and that’s where you had to look to flush out the Whiteheads.

I went to look for my search party when I spotted Starla and Fraser racing across the street in my direction. “The lady in that souvenir shop made a phone call, and I got me a third cousin once removed who’s coming down to see us,” Starla told me, breathless.

Later, as a pickup truck drew near us, we saw it as our best chance to make any connection with Niles. The man wore a strange fedora and overalls, and he studied us before he spoke. Then he spoke only to Starla. “You’re the Whitehead,” he said, then gave me and Fraser a look of disapproval. “Who’re they?” he asked her.

“I brought them with me,” Starla said. “We’re in this together. Do you know where my family lived?”

“Back there.” He pointed behind him with his thumb. “Way up in the hills. You can’t get there now.”

“Why not?” Starla asked. “I want to see the place where I grew up with my brother.”

“It’s a dirt road. Goes near straight up. Scary at times. I only been there once. There was a rock slide a couple of years ago during a storm. No one’s seen those houses since.”

“How do we get there?” Starla insisted.

“Take the Asheville Highway. You’re on it,” he said. “Start climbing. The Broad River’s on the left. When a trout stream enters the Broad, look for a dirt road leading up the mountain. The angle’s steep. Be careful. Drive to the rock slide. You’ll have to climb over that, a mile to the houses. It used to be called Whitehead Road.”

“Thanks, cousin,” Starla said.

“Anything for family,” he said, then he touched his hat in a fine salute and drove off.

I’ve always admired people who have the ability to give accurate directions, and their tribe is small. Starla’s third cousin once removed provided directions so accurate it was like he had drawn a map. We began the steep incline up the mountains as soon as we left the city limits of Chimney Rock, and soon were struggling in a land of hairpin turns as we made our way through a rain forest while the sun began its decline. I was driving as fast as I could, trying to make it to the Whitehead compound before dark, the Buick climbing and groaning its way upward, until Starla shrieked when she saw the trout stream cascading into the Broad River. We had entered a land of mountain laurel and waterfalls with veils of milk-fed foam careening off house-sized boulders.

I turned off onto a road that looked unfinished. I slammed the car into second gear as we wove our way to an uncertain finish. As we climbed, we left the trout stream below us, one hundred feet, then a thousand, and the road grew more perilous. Then we started back down toward the stream, with the car so close to the edge that I laughed when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw that Fraser had her eyes tightly closed. “I never liked Niles this much,” I said.

I slammed on the brakes when I reached the rock slide that caught me by surprise, then maneuvered the car as we drew close to the river again. The severe cave-in looked as though the entire mountain had exercised a flanking movement to the left.

I put the gear shift in park. “Let’s get to that stream and walk to those houses. They’ve got to be close by. Fraser, grab the fishing pole. I’ll get the food.”

In the last light, I saw an ancient path or deer run going down to the stream, and I headed down it, shouldering the cooler. When I reached the water’s edge, I followed it toward its source. As it grew darker, I heard Starla say these glorious words: “I smell a wood fire.”

We hurried into the setting sun until we saw the silhouettes of four unpainted shotgun houses on stilts built over the stream. We walked toward the wreckage of those abandoned homes, and followed the smell of that Blue Ridge smoke to the last house. I opened the door and we walked into a house undermined by spores and mildew and lack of attention. A lone man sat by the fire.

“Niles?” Starla said.

“What took you so long?” he asked.

It was the saddest voice I ever heard.

I
n front of a stone fireplace, we sat by a towering fire, eating sandwiches and listening to the impatient movement of the stream beneath us. Niles ate three sandwiches in a row without uttering a word. It occurred to me that he had not eaten a thing since he was tossed out of his induction ceremony. Fraser took up a position near him but seemed almost afraid to touch him. The fire, the cold, the dampness of this imperiled house, lent a sense of foreboding among us as we waited for Niles to break his eerie silence. He rose from the floor and threw on a couple of logs he had collected in the surrounding forest. The fire rose higher, crackling into sudden light as the wood surrendered to the devouring cunning of flames. Silence itself began to seem like a series of partitions driving us even farther apart from one another.

Finally, it was Fraser who broke all the treaties that made us silent and unforthcoming. “So this is where you and Starla grew up?”

“I was born here, but we grew up in the first house you passed,” Niles said. “It doesn’t have a floor.”

Fraser looked around in a gloom so impenetrable the fire had little effect on it. “It’s nice. I really like it.”

Starla and I cracked up in unguarded laughter. There was even a thin smile that crossed Niles’s clouded face.

This was not the effect Fraser had planned on, and in her nervousness she kept removing a sapphire ring from her right hand, then putting it back on again. “What I meant was,” she said, “that didn’t come out right. I was just thinking—talk about exotic. Talk about waterfront property.”

And again there was convulsive laughter from Starla and me above the trout stream as the fire made grotesque, jerking shadows on the wall, and the evening fell deeper into discomfort and incoherence. My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life. “When does the welcome wagon arrive?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything else.

“Why’d you come?” Niles finally said.

I said, “Because we heard it was a great time to visit the mountains. Chance of snow. Luxury accommodations. Room service. Feather beds. Hot showers. A sauna. Great talks with old friends.”

“We want you to come back, Niles,” Fraser said. “We’re not complete without you.”

“Your family can always get me again,” Niles said to her, “because I love you.”

Taking her cue, Fraser pulled Niles into her arms and stroked his hair with a delicacy that moved me. A gust of wind blew through some broken panes of glass, moving us all closer to the fire. I threw on some more wood.

“I won’t let them touch you again, Niles, I swear,” Fraser said. “I slapped the shit out of Chad when he came home with his little story. My parents were upset when they saw me fall apart. Charleston society is so cruel, yet none of them can see it. The Middleton Assembly almost folded twenty years ago. The ceremony was so boring, and they were losing membership. One year, only nine members showed up for the induction ceremony. So someone came up with the idea that two boys be nominated as jokes. My parents have never been happy that we’re dating, Niles. You’ve always known that. By leaving Charleston, you played right into their hands.”