Eddie licks flecks of stone and dirt from his lips. He has landed in the ditch by the side of the road. A woman with silver hair is kneeling over him. She looks nothing like his mother. Where is his mother? He hears a man’s angry voice shouting.
“What the hell, kid? Didn’t you see the car?”
“Can you move?” the woman asks.
“Sure,” says Eddie, struggling to sit up. His blood feels stuck in his chest but he tastes it in his mouth. How is that possible?
“He needs a doctor,” the lady says. “Did we pass a hospital?”
“No hospital,” Eddie insists, struggling harder. Then the angry man is kneeling over him, too, though now he looks more worried than mad. He wears a suit but he needs a haircut. His hair is gold and the lady’s is silver. They are like money.
“How are you feeling?” the man asks.
“Okay,” he lies.
“Do you know where you live?”
Eddie nods. The man waits.
“Where?” he asks at last. Eddie tries to remember.
“Up the mountain. Toward Panther Gap.”
“Can you show me how to get to it?”
“I think.”
“I’m going to pick you up now,” the man says. “We’re going to drive you there.”
“Be careful,” the lady says. “His neck.”
The man scoops him under his shoulders and knees and Eddie cries out without meaning to. Little Ferris has inched around the old clapboard schoolhouse and is making a break for the woods, where Eddie sees plaid shirts behind trees.
“Are those your friends?” the lady asks.
“The prison,” mumbles Eddie. He is sagging in the man’s arms and now his head hurts very bad. The lady runs ahead while the man carries him to the road and stops before a big black car. She is already in the backseat and Eddie is passed through the door and onto her lap. On the floor he sees cloudy glass Coke bottles; the car smells like syrup in the sun. The man appears in the front and turns the ignition.
“You know my daddy had fourteen pieces of shrapnel in him,” he says, turning around to address him. “He told me when the bomb went off, it felt like someone standing a few feet away driving baseballs into his ribs.”
The stranger’s voice sounds distant and crackling, like a voice over the radio. Cradling his head, the lady traces Eddie’s cheek with blacktipped fingers. She is so gentle, he never wants her to stop. She is looking at him and the man is looking at him. They want him to say something, but his brain is a blank, blooming with pain, petal upon petal opening out and dropping to the ground. He says the only thing that comes to mind, the last thing he remembers thinking before he ran against the car and the car tossed him back.
“Is the door locked?” he asks.
Tucker leans over and presses down the latch.
“It is now,” he says.
Over the boulders and down the ravine, hand over fist up grapevines, Eddie follows the muddy hemline of her housedress. He hears the boys and girls whisper. When Cora Alley is mad, milk sours in the pail. Storms blow in from the east. And they don’t even know what Eddie knows. The men she keeps buried in the woods. Or how she slips out of her skin from time to time, leaving it hanging on a peg in her bedroom while she disappears through the keyhole. Still, is it proof enough? A boy never wants to believe ill of his own mother.
They are saying, “He doesn’t want his mother to know.”
He follows the thick gray braid that she wears in a cobweb spine down her back. At eight years old, Eddie is still young enough to find his mother the most beautiful and terrifying woman in the world. He can stare at her for hours and see nothing remarkable, but then, just as he starts to look away, to clear a dish or milk the cow, the light will hit at exactly the right angle or she will smile in some knowing way, and suddenly her features rearrange themselves, and he can see that second self, like the Mother Mary appearing in the crazing of a rock face or the dew on a screen door. It is that second self he wonders about now, that hint of nonmother caught from the corner of the eye. Is that the part of her they call witch?
“They pay most for the roots that look like men,” she says, startling him with that Daniel-in-the-Lions’-Den voice of hers, thrown up from some flinty chasm deep inside her. “Listen close and you might hear them scream when you tug them from the ground.”
His head aches from listening to her, his neck aches scanning the understory for telltale golden leaves of sang. They never gather or collect the sang, but hunt it, like a wild and sentient creature.
“You might think you know her habits, where she holes up,” his mama says. You might be thinking she’s sweet on you, even, that she wants to give herself to you. One year you know just where to look for her, she lets herself be gathered unto you; the next year she’s vanished, though you’ve made yourself a map and know her woods like you know your family Bible. For two years, three, she’ll go underground, sucking from the soil all that makes it strong. Then on the fourth year, fifth one maybe, she’ll stretch her stalk through that packed earth and show her blushing berries once again, with a little come-and-get-me. “Ginseng, she’s faithless,” his mama says. “She’s a plant what looks out for herself.”
Where do you go at night, Mama? Eddie asks the muddy hem of her dress as it switches across the road ahead, on its way with the feline rest of her, naked calves and raw red ankles rising from his father’s work boots, crossing into Panther Gap. Where do you go when you slip through the keyhole?
“I’ll go this way, you go that,” she says. “Don’t come back emptyhanded.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Tucker asks.
“He’s not dead,” Sonia replies. “He’s resting.”
Supporting his neck, Sonia tests each of his joints to make sure nothing is broken. Tucker hunches forward over the steering wheel, scanning the woods for something else to race across his path. There is nothing, but he feels it again, the jolt like the involuntary jerk his body gives when falling asleep. Tucker watches them in the rearview mirror. Does she blame him? The kid came out of nowhere.
“We’ve gone too far,” Tucker says.
“There,” Eddie whispers, pointing to the woods.
“Where?” Sonia asks. “There’s nothing there.”
Tucker steers the car into a small clearing at the edge of the woods. He cuts the motor and the swell of cicadas presses in. A footpath leads deeper into the forest and up the mountain, but even leaning out the window, Tucker can see no house. Feeling the car slow to a stop, the boy in back rouses himself as if from any lazy summertime nap.
“I’m feeling much better,” Eddie manages, struggling to lift his head.
Tucker looks back doubtfully. “What’re you called, son?”
“Eddie Alley,” the boy replies.
“Can you walk, Eddie?” Tucker asks.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “But can I sit here just a little longer?”
“Of course,” says Tucker, surprised. “Take your time.”
Sonia helps the boy up to sitting and his dirty hand sneaks out to stroke the velvet seat cushion. Maybe he’s not hurt that bad, Tucker thinks, maybe it will all be okay. He tries not to be too obvious looking at the boy’s pupils. They are of equal size and not too big. No concussion.
“This is a nice car,” says Eddie.
“You’re riding in a 1935 Ford, son,” Tucker says out loud, “and the comfort you feel is Centerpoise. Backseat passengers receive a front seat ride.” Tucker rotates a red dial in the dashboard to reveal an ashtray.
“Now you see it, now you don’t.”
The boy grins, showing his stair-step teeth, and the pounding in Tucker’s chest begins to ease. Yes, they’ll all be okay. He just has to face the parents and explain. Your kid ran right out in front of me. No. I didn’t see your kid when I came around the corner. No. I’d been drinking applejack and my mind was back in the moss by the river gorge.
Eddie leans over and cranks the window open and shut. After a
few dozen rounds of this, Sonia gently pats his knee, which means it’s time to go now. Tucker helps the boy out of the car.
“It’s hot,” Eddie says, running his hand over the flank of the wheel well. Had he been a second or two quicker Tucker would have missed him altogether, a second or two slower, he would have struck him head on and killed him. The math sets Tucker trembling again. Sonia is out of the car now and watching him.
“Let’s get you home,” he says to the boy.
Eddie is unsteady on his feet, but leaning against Tucker he starts up the footpath that leads uphill through virgin hardwood and younger scrub. Running patches of oak seedlings and shoulder-high saplings, their few leaves already yellow against the deep green of pines and hemlock. Sonia walks ahead, waiting every few yards for them to catch up. They scale a near vertical dry creek bed before the way jags to the right, running along the rim of a gully filled with broken bluestone, fern, banks of lacy vine. Tucker worries a single misstep will take them both down.
Eddie says, “When my mama had me, the snow was so deep, the doctor couldn’t get up the path. Daddy took the legs off the kitchen table and roped her to it so he could drag her down to the road. She near died.”
Sonia meets Tucker’s eyes over the boy’s head. “She’s okay now?” she asks. Eddie shrugs.
“I guess,” he says.
Together the three trudge upward past a clearing planted with tobacco, where a wooden rack holds drying leaves. A few yards on and the woods close in once more, tree roots wrap like the tentacles of a giant squid around granite slabs overhead. Tucker passes through a rampart of white birch and then, without warning, they are there. Eddie’s home, a hand-hewn dogtrot cabin, built of chestnut planks and divided by a breezeway, teeters at the edge of another drop-off. Tucker has seen a lot of miserable dwellings in his travels, but this isolated shack, roofed with flattened Pennzoil cans, the chinks of its windows stuffed with dirty rags, is among the poorest. Behind the cabin, a springhouse is fit into the ledge of rock, and beyond that sits the barn, its planks gapping like the space between milk teeth. Half a dozen black Silkie hens pecking in the dust rise up when they approach.
“Tucker, catch him,” Sonia says. The climb has been too hard and Eddie sits heavily at the edge of his yard. Tucker lifts him once more and carries him up the broken front steps of the cabin and down the breezeway. The house is silent and empty, only the lowing of an unrelieved cow echoes off the rock.
“Hello,” Tucker calls. “Anyone home?”
“Eddie, do you know where your parents are?” Sonia asks. “Do they go out to work?”
Eddie’s eyes are closed but he mumbles. “Mama’s hunting the sang.”
Sonia shakes her head, not understanding. “She’s hunting?”
He says, “Maybe I could lie down?”
Across from the kitchen, the door to the bedroom is open. The room is barely large enough to hold a bedstead and dresser with space to turn around. Tucker lays the boy on a neatly made bed that smells of mint. Tugging Eddie’s knotted bootlaces through their eyelets, Sonia plucks away a tick crawling across the ribbed neck of one filthy sock. All the while, Eddie lies ashen and tight-lipped, holding in a moan.
“You rest up,” she says, drawing a quilt over him. “We’re going to get something to help you feel better. Your mother will be home in no time.”
“Chin up,” Tucker says, joining Sonia in the breezeway.
“He really should see a doctor,” she says, lowering her voice. “What if he has internal injuries?”
“The car just glanced him. Nothing’s broken.”
“Jesus, Tucker,” she says, and now she is shaking as he was before, and that gives him the strength to hold her. He presses her tight, until he feels her start to stiffen, her need for comfort fleeting. She detaches herself, stepping into the kitchen.
“Do you suppose his mother keeps morphine?” she asks.
The kitchen is another raw box with a window and a second door onto the back porch. To keep out the drafts, its walls are papered with overlapping newsprint and comic strips. The war in Europe. In the center of the room stands the family’s dinner table, its legs restored, covered in red-checked oilcloth. They still eat on that? The potbellied cooking stove rests on a slab of fieldstone by the back door; beside it is a porcelain sink whose faucet is a bent lead pipe channeling water from the spring down a hole back into the ground. The kitchen has none of the homey touches of Tucker’s own childhood kitchen; there are no Seasons of the Year figurines on the windowsill or bud vases purchased at church bazaars, no electric wall clock with its sunny daisy face and cloth cord trailing down the wall. There are instead four mended cane-back chairs, a mismatched crockery set on open shelves, and two portraits on the wall, tanned and blurred by cooking grease. One is FDR in a wooden frame. The other is of Jesus Christ, titled “The Unseen Guest,” and underneath are the words, “Christ is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.”
Tucker draws back a gingham curtain that partitions off the pantry shelves. Looking for morphine, he finds instead a cloth sack of graham flour and a nearly empty sack of sugar. The shelves are stocked with jars of canned beans and tomatoes, damson preserves, a leathery haunch of deep red ham. Or maybe it is dried venison. Ropes of herbs hang from the ceiling. A furry line of boric acid runs along the baseboard to keep away the ants and cockroaches.
Sonia has taken down a wooden cask from the ledge above the stove. She sets it on the table and looks around before opening it. I don’t want to be here, her look says. It’s only because we nearly killed your boy, ma’am, that I am pawing through your things. Sonia lifts out an unlabeled brown glass bottle.
“This may be something,” she says. “Or maybe I’d poison him.”
“Keep looking,” Tucker says. “His mother has to be home soon.”
He leaves her in the kitchen and steps across to the bedroom. Eddie has rolled over on his side, anxiously watching the door. Tucker feels a little impatience rise up, not knowing how long he’ll have to stay here, keeping this strange boy company.
“Hey chum,” he says, taking a seat on the bed. “You sure know how to get a person’s attention.”
Eddie’s lips tremble. “I’m sorry I ran in front of your car.”
“We’ll send you a bill,” Tucker says.
Eddie has been fighting hard not to cry and he wipes his runny nose on the back of his sleeve. The pattern of his shirt is the same as the red-checked flour sack in the pantry. Hanging on wooden pegs along the wall Tucker sees only carefully mended dresses, but no overalls or greasy work shirts.
“Your daddy’s not at home?” he asks.
“He’s off with the CCC.”
“So you’re the man of the house?”
“I guess,” Eddie says.
Tucker says, “That’s rough. My daddy was away when I was a boy.”
“Where to?” asks Eddie.
“Belgium. France. Hospitals.”
“My daddy’s on the Skyline Drive.”
“You miss him?”
The tears that Eddie has been holding back begin to flow. He rubs his face against the pillow.
“When he’s home he takes me fishing sometimes,” Eddie says.
“My father used to take me fishing when I was just about your age,” Tucker says, reaching over to wipe the boy’s nose with the untucked bedsheet. “He used to say that fishing gave him a good excuse not to talk. So every few weeks or so when he needed very badly not to talk, we’d roll our cuffs and skim ourselves some minnows and carry them in a bucket up to a stream not far from our house. We’d set up on a flat rock and I’d reach into the bucket and take a minnow flip-flapping in my fist and sink my hook just behind its head, like this,” he says, demonstrating with his fingernail on the back of Eddie’s hand. “You ever do that?”
“Mostly we use bloodworms,” Eddie says, brightening a little. “And crickets.”
“One afternoon,” Tuc
ker continues, “we got to the stream and a wicked old mama water moccasin had nested under our rock. My father rolled up his cuffs and cast his minnow; I remember that silver fish flying overhead in a great arc against the blue sky. He sat down on the rock and let his naked white feet dangle in the water, but that water moccasin did not understand his peaceful intentions. She thought he was after her babies, and she sank her fangs into his ankle so deep I thought she’d snap clean through the bone. Do you know what my father said, Eddie?”
“What?” asks Eddie.
“He pulled up on his line and he turned to me and said—so calmly—‘Tucker, son, I believe I have a bite.’”
Eddie is unsure whether or not the story is supposed to be funny.
“My daddy would’ve grabbed her by the tail and bashed her brains out,” he says.
“As he should,” Tucker replies. He looks across to the kitchen where Sonia is still searching the wooden box. He thinks of the jug of applejack down in the car. Maybe that would help the pain?
“What time you think your mama’ll be back?” he asks.
“When she goes hunting she’s mostly home by supper. I’m mostly with her though. She might think I’m lost.”
“You worried she’s out looking for you?” Tucker asks gently. Eddie’s tears threaten once more.
“She’ll be mad I came home empty-handed.”
“But you’re not empty-handed,” Tucker chides. “You found us.”
Eddie smiles weakly. He half hides his face behind the covers. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I’ll reserve my right to evoke the Fifth.”
“Is that your name? Tucker?”
This poor kid, thinks Tucker. Hit and carried and preached at by a complete stranger. He never thought to introduce himself.
“My name is Tucker Hayes,” he says. “And I am profoundly sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Eddie sinks back into his pillow and Tucker sees him turn over the name. It is not a mountain name but it is a nearby name and Tucker thinks it comforts the boy that the stranger is not even stranger.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know?” Tucker asks.