The Lost Saints of Tennessee (2 page)

Two

1985

I call in sick to work. Say it's the flu. By the third day the boss grumbles about needing me to come in, but I lie and tell him I can't keep any food down, how it's coming out both ends. Bad. Chickasaw Lake is the place I spend my days, staring at the pyramid-shaped sweet gum and weeping willow trees and fishing for bream. On Thursday a cloudless sky invites me up to the Tipton Trail Tower. I climb all seventy-three feet of it, my breath coming faster than I'd like.

My brother said the angels sang up here. I listen. Wait. A wind melody ruffles the trees. The shushing of a crow's wings brush the air. The crow loops a wide circle before landing with a sureness I envy on the highest branch of a pine tree. The cry of a whip-poor-will echoes across the quiet.

That night the cry weaves through my dreams, carrying images of Carter as he changes into the bird and back again. In the morning, bright sun sears the shade of the bedroom window. First light used to be my favorite time of the day. While Jackie and the girls slept, I got up and made coffee. Carter would amble out from his room, still wearing pajamas, and we'd sit at the table drinking from chipped mugs—the sun slowly rising, the soft light warming our backs. Now the only thing that fills me with any kind of warmth is cracking open the first beer of the night.

Leaving isn't something I do much. I seem to be better at being left. Jackie marrying Curtis last week killed any reunion fantasies I might have had. Not ten days ago she told me I needed to let go, get on with things. I told her to worry about telling Curtis what to do. She's right, though. As usual. Neither Carter's death nor losing Jackie has moved through me, settling in the space reserved for “bad things that have happened in the past.” They are right here, in the middle of my chest, heavy and tired and present.

By Friday afternoon I decide to try work. When Jackie and the girls left, I moved from first shift, which ended when they got out of school, to second shift. Tucker was the only one to mind my getting home around midnight. On the drive to the plant I pass our old house on Tyler Road. The truck seems to stop on its own, pulling over to the side of the road next to the driveway and making me remember what our lives together were like. How Honora and Louisa found a litter of calico kittens living under the house one spring. How Carter liked to clomp down the hallway in work boots at night, yelling,
Uncle Carter's going to get you,
while Honora squealed into bed. How Jackie and I made love in every room of the house the first weekend we moved in.
To christen it,
she said.

A different wife now cooks at the stove I bought Jackie the year I got a raise. The new family includes a father, a mother, two little boys, and the rangiest hunting dog in Hardeman County. The wife spies my truck. She comes out into the front yard with the dog skulking by her side.

“Anything I can help you with?” she asks with a look that is anything but helpful.

I shake my head and drive back home. How do you tell a stranger she's got the life you thought you had?

Where to go seems less important than the going. It doesn't take long to throw a few things in a duffel bag. The bottles of pain pills, the spiral notebook next to the phone. Notes will need to be written.

I get into the truck, then climb right out again to grab the Folgers coffee can from above the fridge and pull out three hundred dollars, all in twenties. Savings for the girls' Christmas presents this year. I had planned to buy Louisa a leather sketchbook and pastels set at Mulligan's Hardware. For Honora I had imagined wrapping as many packages of double-A batteries as I could afford, to keep her Sony Walkman running. The thought of never seeing my girls again makes me hesitate. I should go find them at school and tell them good-bye.

But I can't. There's no way I could look at them and still leave. This way is better.

A book on the couch catches my eye. It is an ancient paperback, the front cover lost a hundred summers ago, leaving the opening pages wavy from decades of humidity.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is placed carefully in the bag between the socks and T-shirts.

Tucker waits by the truck, suspicious. If he could, the dog would climb up to prevent any chance of being left behind. But the thirteen-year-old body requires help now. When I place him on the seat, he leans down and gives my hand a quick lick.

Movement stirs at the side window of Mother's house. My own home, though “home” seems a grand word for it, is the shed right behind her house. Originally a tool shed, my father and I renovated it in 1961 so Carter and I could live there together. The curtain falls back into place and I know Mother has seen me packing up. Probably been watching from the back bedroom window, too. As the truck nears the end of the long driveway we share, she steps out onto the front porch, arms crossed against her chest. The years have added heft to her figure and softened the bones of her face. She has taken to wearing her hair short for the first time. It doesn't suit her.

“Where are you going, Ezekiel?” Her voice carries across the yard. “It's too late for you to be going in to work.”

Tucker begins to whine next to me. He loves Mother. Always has. Must be the scraps she feeds him at the back door.

“Headed out of town.” I don't stop the truck until she comes down from the porch and blocks the driveway. “Christ, Mom. Get out of the way, will you?”

She is wearing a sleeveless housedress with big flowers on it, something she swore she'd never do.
Housedresses,
she used to say,
are for three kinds of women: fat, old, or too tired to care.

The outside air has already warmed up. Possible thunderstorms tonight. Another reason to get on the road. The paper said they would be coming our way from Memphis, so heading east seems reasonable. Picking a direction, general as it might be, makes me happy.

“You're not going to tell me, are you?” She scowls, shakes her head. “You know it'll be ten years next week that your brother drowned? We're supposed to have a nice memorial at church this Sunday. And here you are leaving.”

She wants to say more but a coughing fit prevents it. It is a deep, cavernous rumbling. Last week my sister Violet had to take her to the emergency room while I was at work. They diagnosed her with walking pneumonia and a touch of emphysema. When I ask if she needs a drink of water, she waves the question away.

I know all about the plans for Carter's memorial.
Preacher Wilson caught me in the bread aisle at the Mabry Piggly Wiggly last week to tell me how we'd have the whole congregation singing Carter's praises and thanking the Lord for carrying him into the gates of heaven. I nodded but all I could think was how grateful I was for getting enough notice to ask for the Sunday shift at work.

What I want to say to Mother is
It's nice you're so worried about making a fuss over Carter. Shame you couldn't manage it while he was alive.

“Please move,” I say instead.

She steps back, shrinking into herself a bit, and I try not to notice. Try instead to remember my brother and how she almost threw him away.

“Give your sisters a call and let them know you're okay. You hear?”

I wave out the window and watch in the rearview mirror as she picks her way back up the stairs, favoring the bad left knee. She lowers herself onto the top step, tugging the dress down over her legs so only the thin ankles are visible. She looks small and alone and tired. Perhaps more so than I have ever seen her.

Mother's fierce presence guided her family. Prodding. Shouting. Loving. When Lillian Parker Cooper entered a room, there was a sense of the wind shifting, the very air seduced to come her way by her intoxicating combination of beauty, specialness, and sweet regret. Mother made you want to stand close to catch a bit of that breeze, to feel it filling the space around you.

A while ago I gave up wanting to be near her. I can speak politely to Mother for as long as it takes to say thank you for dinner or I'll fix the chimney next week. Anything more leads us back down the path to Carter.

Three

1946

Growing up, everybody used to string Carter's and my names together whenever they needed to find one of us—“CarterZeke!” echoing through our house and out onto Five Hills Road. Being the boys in a family with three girls was part of why we were
close, but being twins seems more important. There was only
one other set of twins in Clayton—Mary and Carrie Olney, five years older than us. They were identical and wore their hair, the color of darkest night, in two long braids down their backs. The girls were inseparable to the point of buying homes right next door to each other after they married.

Unlike the Olneys, when my brother and I looked in the mirror we saw the differences in each other: his dark eyes versus my light ones, the tops of my shoulders only grazing his triceps. But we knew what it was like to want the other within arm's reach. Mother used to tell us stories about how she'd be busy cooking or cleaning and my brother would come running in to pull her away. This was before Carter could talk. He took longer than any of us, giving Mother good reason to worry. She said Carter would get this look on his face, his brow all crinkled up, and she knew it meant I was in trouble, could see it as plainly as if he'd told her.

This was a truth about Carter. His face showed whatever he was feeling, the moment he felt it. Worst bluffer in the history of poker. I asked Mother once if we ever had one of those “twin languages” you hear about. The Olney girls made up their own sign language when they were toddlers and somehow remembered it their whole lives. Mother had thrown back her head and laughed at the question.
Ezekiel, honey, you two never did need to speak to each other much. What does a person say to the other side of his heart?

Four years old when our dad first brought us to Chickasaw Lake, we couldn't believe the sheer size of it—the water rippling across the floor of Lavice Valley until it looked like it might swallow up the shortleaf pines tracing the eastern shoreline. Generations of boys like us grew up fishing the lake, hoping to catch one of the abundant bluegill or catfish or maybe a leftover skeleton from the nearby Battle of Davis Bridge site. Carter captured a small female bluegill that day with our father, the October sun glittering against its brilliant yellow underside.

When I sulked over him catching a fish first, he held it out to me. I touched it, the gills still fluttering with gasps of air.

“You caught a pretty one.”

Carter pushed the fish into my hands. More than anything I wanted to take it and pretend
I
had felt the tug on the line and reeled it in. But I knew the beautiful fish wasn't mine, no matter how much Carter or I wanted it to be.

I gave it back and turned my gaze from the lake to the valley surrounding it. Second-growth oaks, cedars, and willow elms formed a blanket of the deepest green across each hill as if God had unfurled Lavice Valley like a woman shaking out the bedclothes.

“You'll catch your own soon enough,” our father said, ruffling the back of my hair in a way that meant I had done the right thing.

As we grew older, Carter and I spent all of our free time at the lake, only a ten-minute walk through the woods from our house. The water reflected the valley's annual color transformations from green to gold with splashes of garnet to bare silver
as clearly as it captured the growing images of us. Carter's reflection always stretched taller than mine, even when I tried to outsmart it by wearing my Cleveland Indians cap high on my head. For a while, our trips to the lake included me helping Carter learn to read. In between tugs on the line, I read aloud from whatever comic book I had and spelled the occasional word in the soft sand of the shore—
See, Carter,
I would say as I sketched with a fallen twig,
this is how you spell
“
Shazam
.”

One June day when the summer's heat had yet to wrap itself around Clayton, Mother sent Carter and me out back to weed the vegetable garden. Mother spent hours in the garden every year, coaxing the best tomatoes in Clayton out of it. Aunt Charlotte couldn't understand why her garden plot, only three houses down from ours, produced mealy tomatoes and her sister's county-fair winners. Pulling weeds was our primary chore and it always took longer than we thought it should. Time we knew could be better spent.

“If you do a good job,” Mother said, “I'll let you have a couple of the lemon cookies I'm baking for the church picnic tomorrow.”

This was motivation. Thin and crispy, Mother's lemon cookies tasted sweet and tangy all at the same time. She made them only twice a year—for Easter and the annual church picnic.

Saturdays changed our yard next to the well into a laundry area. Our oldest sister, Violet, stood over the big wash tub, scrubbing the clothes on the board while Daisy cranked the clothes through the wringer. She stuck her tongue out at me as we walked by. I'd weed the garden any day over doing the wash.

For a good while, Carter and I went through the garden rows, following each one, pulling a weed here and a weed there like we were supposed to until my brother launched into our favorite garden game.

“Soldiers!” he yelled.

We threw ourselves down on the ground, flattening the pole beans we'd never liked anyway. I was Lieutenant Cooper and Carter was a Nazi SS officer. I always made him the Nazi. Dirt flew as we tore out most of the tomatoes and cucumbers, throwing them at one another like grenades.

Carter ran out of ammunition first. He stood, raising both hands in the air. “
Nicht schießen! Nicht schießen!
”

I taught him to say that after reading it in
Our Army at War
. The rules said I had to honor Carter's don't-shoot request. But the sun caught the glint of a brilliant green cucumber inches to my left. It was perfect, shaped like a fat little grenade. I grabbed it.

After taking a few steps back, I ran full out and let it fly in Carter's direction.

At least I thought I let it fly in Carter's direction.

“Incoming!” I yelled.

Carter hit the ground.

Inside the kitchen, Mother stood at the sink rinsing dishes. She looked up just as the perfect cucumber grenade sailed toward her. Toward the kitchen window. Through the bottom pane it flew, landing in the sink neatly sliced in half.

I ducked my head. Carter ran over to me. He kept looking over his shoulder to where Mother's angry face loomed in front of the now-broken window.

“No lemon cookies, Zeke,” Carter said with a sorrowful look, shaking his head.

Mother stormed down the back stairs strangling a dish towel in her hands. I wanted to run but knew it would only postpone the punishment.

“You just broke a brand-new window your daddy put in last week. Last week, do you hear me?”

She strode toward us, the wide skirt of her dress whipping against her legs. When she saw the garden, she stopped—the rows were no longer rows, and broken tomatoes spilled red goo over the ground.

“You break my window and ruin my garden? The whole family will go without vegetables for a month. I work hard so my children will have something on their plates that isn't brown or white.”

Violet pointed out that there were a few tomatoes left on the vines.

“Not many,” Daisy said, always helpful.

“Girls, hush up. I'll deal with these two.” She pointed at the back door. “Inside. Now.”

“We're going to get whupped, aren't we?” Carter whispered.

And we did, the sting of Daddy's leather belt across our backsides easier to bear when the two of us took it together.

My brother was different in a slippery sort of way. As a little boy, he looked normal and most of the time acted normally, if a little quiet. But things changed when we started school. Lucille Ryder taught first through eighth grade in Clayton's one-room schoolhouse on the east side of Highway 57. Miss Ryder made you pick the switch to be hit with from the hickory tree in the yard if you got in trouble.

On the second day of school, Carter and I sat at our desks working on the morning's writing assignment. Violet and Daisy had stayed at home with a bad case of poison ivy. The girls got it while picking blackberries the day before. Daisy wanted to make the biggest berry pie ever and ignored her older sister's warnings to mind the plants with the three leaves. When it was too late
and Daisy picked a leaf off just such a plant because it looked
pretty, she got mad and ran up to Violet, rubbing her hands
across Vi's cheeks so Daisy wouldn't be the only one miserable.

My brother was having trouble writing his name—it would be two more years before he could print it legibly—so I scribbled it for him at the top of the page, dotting the letters so Carter could trace over them with his pencil. Miss Ryder caught sight of this.

“Ezekiel Cooper, come here.”

The last place anyone wanted to go near was Miss Ryder's desk. She smelled of old shoes and rotting bananas. I put down my pencil and stood up. As I walked to the front of the class, the boys started chanting, “Trouble, trouble.”

Miss Ryder grabbed my right hand. “Did you or did you not write on your brother's assignment?”

I nodded. She wrenched my wrist.

“Yes,
ma'am
. I did.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

When I told her my brother was having trouble writing his name, a strange smile spread over her face. She released my hand, leaving a red welt around the wrist.

“Go sit. Mr. Carter Cooper, come here.”

My mind scrambled for a way to get Carter out of there without earning both of us a whupping. He walked slowly up to the front and we passed each other in the aisle.

As our shoulders brushed, I whispered, “Keep your eyes down. Don't look at her. You'll be okay.”

One of the older girls, Betty Streit, hissed, “Stupid, stupid,” as Carter passed her desk. Miss Ryder told him to go to the chalkboard. My heart began to beat so fast I could hear its thrumming in my ears. The urge to throw up pricked at the back of my throat.

“Carter, please write your name on the board ten times. You will not be excused from class today until you finish.” She grimaced in a way that was supposed to be a smile before adding, “I'll even give you a brand-new piece of chalk. How's that?”

He looked back at me, his eyes big. I pretended to write in the air to show him what to do. Miss Ryder pushed back from the desk. Her chair scraped against the floor, causing the hairs on my arms to stand up. She gave Carter the chalk.

By now, half the class was giggling. In the moments before Carter's hand began to move, I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed harder than I ever had.
Dear God, please help him. Please make him write his name.
It would be a miracle if he did, but Preacher Dawson was always going on in church about miracles happening every day.

Carter drew row after row of
o,
the only letter he knew how to write properly.

Snickers spread through the class. Our friend Tommy Jackson told them to shut up. The teacher smirked.

“Well, now, Carter,” she said, “that's the strangest spelling of a name I believe I've ever seen. Son, why don't you go on along home? Come back when you're ready to do your own work.”

The chalk dropped from my brother's hand, splintering into powdery pieces across the dark wood floor. He ran for the back entrance, not even looking my way. I took off, ignoring Miss Ryder's threats of a whupping tomorrow. The air outside cooled the heat on my cheeks—flushed from rage and from the double dose of shame over Carter's ignorance and my own momentary wish that he was not my brother.

His figure sprinted down Main Street. After chasing him three blocks, I finally caught up by the crossroads. Tear tracks made dusty pathways down his face. His chest heaved with loud, hiccuping breaths.

“It's okay,” I said.

The words sounded empty. My brother understood more than I may have realized. Life might have been easier if he had been less intelligent. He would not have grasped that there was a whole world out there he would never join, a world sure to pull me away from him.

Carter placed his hands on the back of his neck, cradling his head between his arms, as if shielding himself from an attack.

“Won't be okay,” he said. “No, sir.”