Wish You Well (24 page)

The first name was Joshua Cardinal. The date of his birth and death made Lou believe that he must have been Louisa’s husband, Lou and Oz’s great-grandfather. He had passed in his fifty-second year—not that long of a life, Lou thought. The second grave marker was a name that Lou knew from her father. Jacob Cardinal was her father’s father, her and Oz’s grandfather. As she recited the name, Oz joined her and knelt down in the grass. He pulled off his straw hat and said nothing. Their grandfather had died far younger than even his father. Was there something about this place? Lou wondered. But then she thought of how old Louisa was, and the wondering stopped there.

The third grave marker looked to be the oldest. It only had a name on it, no dates of birth or death.

“Annie Cardinal,” Lou said out loud. For a time the two just knelt there and stared at the pieces of board marking the remains of family they had never known. Then Lou rose, went over to Sue, gripped the horse’s brushy mane, climbed up, and then helped Oz on board. Neither spoke all the way back.

At supper that night, more than once Lou was about to venture a question to Louisa about what they had seen, but then something made her not. Oz was obviously just as curious, yet, like always, he was inclined to follow his sister’s lead. They had time, Lou figured, for all of their questions to be answered. Before she went to sleep that night, Lou went out on the back porch and looked up to that knoll. Even with a nice slice of moon she could not see the graveyard from here, yet now she knew where it was. She had never much been interested in the dead, particularly since losing her father. Now she knew that she would go back soon to that burying ground and look once more at those bits of plain board set in dirt and engraved with the names of her flesh and blood.

Cotton showed up with Diamond a week later and handed out small American flags to Lou, Oz, and Eugene. He had also brought a five-gallon can of gas, which he put in the Hudson’s fuel tank. “We all can’t fit in the Olds,” he explained. “And I handled an estate problem for Leroy Meekins who runs the Esso station. Leroy doesn’t like to pay in cash, though, so one could say I’m flush with oil products right now.”

With Eugene driving, the five went down to Dickens to watch the parade. Louisa stayed behind to keep watch over Amanda, but they promised to bring her back something.

They ate hot dogs with great splotches of mustard and ketchup, swirls of cotton candy, and enough soda pop to make the children run to the public toilet with great frequency. There were contests of skill at booths set up wherever space was available, and Oz cleaned up on all those that involved throwing something in order to knock something else down. Lou bought a pretty bonnet for Louisa, which she let Oz carry in a paper bag.

The town was done up in red, white, and blue, and both townfolk and those from the mountain lined both sides of the street as the floats came down. These barges on land were pulled by horse, mule, or truck and displayed the most important moments in America’s history, which, to most native Virginians, had naturally all occurred in the Commonwealth. There was a group of children on one such float representing the original thirteen colonies, with one boy carrying the Virginia colors, which were far bigger than the flags the other children carried, and he wore the showiest costume as well. A regiment of decorated war veterans from the area trooped by, including several men with long beards and shriveled bodies who claimed to have served with both the honorable Bobby Lee and the fanatically pious Stonewall Jackson.

One float, sponsored by Southern Valley, was devoted to the mining of coal and was pulled by a customized Chevrolet truck painted gold. There wasn’t a black-faced, wrecked-back miner in sight, but instead, smack in the center of the float, on a raised platform simulating a coal tipple, stood a pretty young woman with blond hair, a perfect complexion, and brilliant white teeth, wearing a sash that read “Miss Bituminous Coal 1940” and waving her hand as mechanically as a windup doll. Even the most dense in the crowd could probably grasp the implied connection between lumps of black rock and the pot of gold pulling it. And the men and boys gave the expected reaction of cheers and some catcalls to the passing beauty. There was one old and humpbacked woman standing next to Lou who told her that her husband and three sons all labored in the mines. The old woman watched the beauty queen with scornful eyes and then commented that that young gal had obviously never been near a coal mine in her entire life. And she wouldn’t know a lump of coal if it jumped up and grabbed her in the bituminous.

High-ranking representatives of the town made important speeches, motivating the citizens into bursts of enthusiastic applause. The mayor held forth from a temporary stage, with smiling, expensively dressed men next to him, who, Cotton told Lou, were Southern Valley officials. The mayor was young and energetic, with slicked hair, wearing a nice suit and fashionable watch and chain, and carrying boundless enthusiasm in his beaming smile and hands reaching to the sky, as though ready to snag on any rainbows trying to slip by.

“Coal is king,” the mayor announced into a clunky microphone almost as big as his head. “And what with the war heating up across the Atlantic and the mighty United States of America building ships and guns and tanks for our friends fighting Hitler, the steel mill’s demands for coke, our good, patriotic Virginia coke, will skyrocket. And some say it won’t be long before we join the fighting. Yes, prosperity is here in fine abundance and here it will stay,” said the mayor. “Not only will our children live the glorious American dream, but their children will as well. And it will be all due to the good work of folks like Southern Valley and their unrelenting drive to bring out the black rock that is driving this town to greatness. Rest assured, folks, we will become the New York City of the south. One day some will look back and say, ‘Who knew the outstanding things that destiny held for the likes of Dickens, Virginia?’ But y’all already know, because I’m telling you right now. Hip-hip hooray for Southern Valley and Dickens, Virginia.” And the exuberant mayor threw his straw boater hat high into the air. And the crowd joined him in the cheer, and more hats were catapulted into the swirling breeze. And though Diamond, Lou, Oz, Eugene, and Cotton all applauded too, and the children grinned happily at each other, Lou noticed that Cotton’s expression wasn’t one of unbridled optimism.

As night fell, they watched a display of fireworks color the sky, and then the group climbed in the Hudson and headed out of town. They had just passed the courthouse when Lou asked Cotton about the mayor’s speech and his muted reaction to it.

“Well, I’ve seen this town go boom and bust before,” he said. “And it usually happens when the politicians and the business types are cheering the loudest. So I just don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different this time, but I just don’t know.”

Lou was left to ponder this while the cheers of the fine celebration receded and then those sounds were gone entirely, replaced with wind whistling through rock and tree, as they headed back up the mountain.

There had not been much rain, but Louisa wasn’t worried yet, though she prayed every night for the skies to open up and bellow hard and long. They were weeding the cornfield, and it was a hot day and the flies and gnats were particularly bothersome. Lou scraped at the dirt, something just not seeming right. “We already planted the seeds. Can’t they grow by themselves?”

“Lot of things go wrong in farming and one or two most always do,” Louisa answered. “And the work don’t never stop, Lou. Just the way it is here.”

Lou swung the hoe over her shoulder. “All I can say is, this corn better taste good.”

“This here’s field corn,” Louisa told her. “For the animals.”

Lou almost dropped her hoe. “We’re doing all this work to feed the animals?”

“They work hard for us, we got to do the same for them. They got to eat too.”

“Yeah, Lou,” said Oz as he attacked the weeds with vigorous strokes. “How can hogs get fat if they don’t eat? Tell me that.”

They worked the hills of corn, side by side under the fierce sun, which was so close it almost seemed to Lou that she could reach up and pocket it. The katydids and crickets scraped tunes at them from all corners. Lou stopped hoeing and watched Cotton drive up to the house and get out.

“Cotton coming every day and reading to Mom is making Oz believe that she’s going to get better,” said Lou to Louisa, taking care that her brother did not hear her.

Louisa wielded the hoe blade with the energy of a young person and the skill of an old. “You right, it’s so terrible bad having Cotton helping your momma.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I like Cotton.”

Louisa stopped and leaned on her hoe. “You should, because Cotton Longfellow’s a good man, none better. He’s helped me through many a hard time since he come here. Not just with his lawyering, but with his strong back. When Eugene hurt his leg bad, he was here ever day for a month doing field work when he could’ve been in Dickens making himself good money. He’s helping your ma ’cause he wants her to get better. He wants her to be able to hold you and Oz agin.”

Lou said nothing to this, but was having trouble getting the hoeing down, chopping instead of slicing. Louisa took a minute to show her again, and Lou picked up the proper technique quickly.

They worked for a while longer in silence, until Louisa straightened up and rubbed at her back. “Body’s telling me to slow down a bit. But my body wants to eat come winter.”

Lou stared out at the countryside. The sky looked painted in oils today, and the trees seemed to fill every spare inch with alluring green.

“How come Dad never came back?” Lou asked quietly.

Louisa followed Lou’s gaze. “No law say a person got to come back to his home,” she said.

“But he wrote about it in all his books. I know he loved it here.”

Louisa stared at the girl and then said, “Let’s go get us a cool drink.” She told Oz to rest some, and they would bring him back some water. He immediately dropped his hoe, picked up some rocks, and started heaving and whooping at each toss, in a manner it seemed only little boys could successfully accomplish. He had taken to placing a tin can on top of a fence post and then throwing rocks at it until he knocked it off. He had become so good that one hard toss would now send the can flying.

They left him to his fun and went to the springhouse, which clung to one side of a steep slope below the house and was shaded by leaning oak and ash trees and a wall of giant rhododendrons. Next to this shack was a split poplar stump, the tip of a large honeycomb protruding from it, a swell of bees above that.

They took metal cups from nails on the wall and dipped them in the water, and then sat outside and drank. Louisa picked up the green leaves of a mountain spurge growing next to the springhouse, which revealed beautiful purple blossoms completely hidden underneath. “One of God’s little secrets,” she explained. Lou sat there, cup cradled between her dimpled knees, watching and listening to her great-grandmother in the pleasant shade as Louisa pointed out other things of interest. “Right there’s an oriole. Don’t see them much no more. Don’t know why not.” She pointed to another bird on a maple branch. “That’s a chuck’s-will-widder. Don’t ask me how the durn thing got its name, ’cause I don’t know.” Finally, her face and tone grew serious.

“Your daddy’s momma was never happy here. She from down the Shenandoah Valley. My son Jake met her at a cakewalk she come up for. They got married, way too fast, put up a little cabin near here. But I know she was all set for the city, though. The Valley was backward for her. Lord, these mountains must’ve seemed like the birth of the world to the poor girl. But she had your daddy, and for the next few years we had us the worst drought I ever seen. The less rain there was, the harder we worked. My boy soon lost his stake, and they moved in with us. Still no rain. Went through our animals. Went through durn near everything we had.” Louisa clenched her hands and then released them. “But we still got by. And then the rains come and we fine after that. But when your daddy was seven, his momma had had enough of this life and she left. She ain’t never bothered to learn the farm, and even the way round a frying pan, so’s she weren’t much help to Jake a’tall.”