“Well, the deed was done, and when it was all over, as often happens, they opened their eyes and saw each other clearly for the first time. As the boy rose to put back on his mama-made suit, the girl thought, surely he will speak to the future. Surely he will invite me to come live at his mother’s house. And as the boy pulled on his clothes, he thought, surely that was tasty, but I am destined for greater things. Maybe I am mistaken, she thought, as he slipped on his jacket and socks and shoes. Maybe he will speak now. But when he had fully suited up, kissed her forehead, and started for the door, she had her answer. This girl, pretending nothing was wrong, rose and packed her young lover a nice supper for his long journey home.”
“I suppose that boy gets what he deserves?” asks Tucker.
“Oh, Mr. Hayes,” says Cora. “You know how these stories go.”
Her hair has slipped its plait, falling loose around her cheeks. It’s habit, he sees, how she gathers it back, rebraiding as she goes. He finds himself looking for that dream creature in her, as if it were not something of his own creation.
“See, this girl had given herself over to the Devil years before, in despair over another boy she’d loved till this one come along to take his place,” she continues. “Back then, she’d swore in with the Dark Man, and he gave her the power to hex people’s cattle and sour their milk in the churn. She mixed witch balls of hair and fingernail clippings and earwax for paying customers, and now, used and messed, she called upon her first love, the Devil, to avenge her.”
Cora takes the fallen chestnut trunks as a hurdler might, up and over each one gracefully, while Tucker struggles to keep up. There is almost no clear ground between the felled trees now, they are walking across acres of extinction, as if across the bones of a mass burial pit. The ginseng bird has disappeared but Cora walks as if she knows where she’s going.
“The hollow that night was a kettle of fog,” she continues, opening her arms as if to conjure it. “That boy’d got about two miles along, thinking thoughts of city girls and smoothing the wrinkles from his suit, when behind, just off in the woods he heard something shriek. It sounded like a woman screaming with child, but it weren’t no woman. The boy trotted along, he still had a good mile to go before he reached his mama’s house. As he walked, he heard a rustling behind him in the woods—SNAP—a twig. CRACK—a broke branch. Now he was troubled ’cause in his letch for the girl of my family he’d forgot to bring along his gun. All he had was the supper she’d packed him.”
Cora is pushing them to walk faster though her voice is no more urgent. She doesn’t look at him, but keeps her sharp eyes fixed on the way forward. I have been here before, Tucker thinks, trying to keep up. I know this place. When he was a boy coming through these mountains the chestnuts had been tall and healthy, but now the few standing are scored with deep orange marks as if raked by angry claws. Every grown thing is dead, and the saplings pushing into the empty space are themselves showing cankers of the blight that had taken their parents.
“Then suddenly,” she says, “he heard a low growl like a bar threat in his ear. The boy spun and there, glowing out of the fog, were the two green eyes of a hollow-bellied panther. He froze, not knowing what to do. Now the Devil might be evil, but like all sinners, he’s easy to distract, and this girl was a good cook. So the boy flung his supper at that witch cat. When the panther stopped to gobble up the boiled egg and cornbread and salt pork she’d packed, the boy ran as fast as his long shapely legs had ever carried him. He was just ready to congratulate himself on a close escape when, sure enough, he heard the gallop behind him, crashing through the brush and howling with rage. This time when he felt that cat’s hot breath, he ripped off his jacket and flung it as hard as he could off the path behind him. The panther turned and fell on that jacket, tearing it to shreds. Again the boy ran, but soon enough, the panther had caught up. This time the boy peeled off his vest, flinging it in the opposite direction, and again the panther went for that. Off comes his shirt, his shoes, his suspenders, till, at last, to his huge relief, the boy saw through the clearing, the light in his mother’s window. He saw his mama through the glass, her foot working the treadle of the spinning wheel upon which she’d spun the thread to weave the fine suit he’d worn to bewitch the witch of my family. Mama! he cried. But she didn’t hear. She was too busy spinning for him. With the lamp just ahead and the cat just behind, he peeled off his underdrawers, jumping on one leg, so ridiculous, so close to home, just at the clearing of his mother’s yard. But do you know anyone who’s ever outrun the Devil? His legs got tangled up and down he went. In an instant, the panther was all over him, and they say that faithless boy’s widowed mother found nothing but a bloodstained rag the next morning when she went outside to milk her cow.”
They have reached a drop-off, down into which spills a vortex of inverted grapevine. The gray loops froth with a false bottom of leaves, Tucker knows. If they fell, they’d keep on falling, forever and ever, amen. He looks back and the graveyard is behind them.
“That’s quite a story,” he says, breathing hard. “You know the Greeks had one very similar, about a man who wanted to win a woman who was a mighty runner. Every time she’d be set to pass him, he’d fling a golden apple into the bushes to distract her. He turned her off course enough times she had to marry him.”
“But mine is not a love story,” says Cora simply. “Nobody wins. And that’s how you can tell it’s the truth.”
She stands looking down over the edge without the least sign of fear. This is her terrain and it makes her, for a blinding instant, beautiful. Not city beautiful like Sonia, but in the way a cracked blue patent medicine bottle found in a trash heap is beautiful or a tin can rusted down to tetanus lace.
“Do you see the bird?” Tucker asks, to have something to say. He feels giddy from the story and the walk. He’s come unmoored again, with no idea where they are or how he would get back. He’s getting used to this feeling.
“He may have gone deeper,” she says. “There’s a hollow below this hollow. A part of the mountain that’s just mine.”
“A private part?” Tucker grins. “Then surely we must go.”
Cora grasps a trunk of vine growing on the edge of the gorge and swings herself down into the leaves. He watches her hang, suspended over the deep green pit before she lets go. The tangle swallows her, he hears the tearing of leaves stripped away, and then the sound of her finding solid ground below. It’s his turn and Tucker grasps another loop, giving a holler, and he’s swinging out, too, pushing off from the rock face. He squeezes his eyes shut and drops, absorbing the shock through his knees, and then he’s there beside her, on the ledge of a deeper fissure. Once his heart stops pounding in his ears, he can hear rushing water somewhere far off, or maybe it’s close by, the chasm sends up plumes of mist and sound.
“This way,” Cora says, heading toward another dry creek bed. She will keep going and going, he thinks. They will never come to rest.
“Cora, stop,” he says.
She turns back, impatient, but it’s too bad. Taking his pouch of tobacco and his papers from his satchel, he rolls himself a cigarette. He is too lost for comfort.
“Like one?” he asks. Cora shakes her head.
“No brandy, no cigarettes? Have you any pleasures at all, Mrs. Alley, besides scaring grown men half to death?”
Tucker makes a seat for himself and leans back against the wall of the drop-off. He has fallen down a well, and looking up he can see clear blue sky and hawks wheeling on the updraft. Juniper grows along the rock face opposite. He recognizes the silvery berries and wafting familiar smell of gin. The other side of the pass lies deep in emerald shadow, but the sun on their side is hot on his face; he’d sell his mother for a cold gin and tonic right about now.
“Won’t you sit down?” he asks, because her pacing is making him nervous, but she shakes her head no to that as well. So be it, he thinks. Holding his cigarette between his lips, he fishes out his notebook and fountain pen from his sat
chel to record what he can remember of her panther story. It’s an archetypal legend, nearly every culture in the world has its avenging furies and its striptease. He thinks of Medea and Jason fleeing with the Golden Fleece, and how Medea hacked her brother to bits, casting his pieces into the wake of their ship, compelling her father to stop and retrieve the remains.
“What do you have in there?” she asks, as he flips the pages to find a blank.
“Genies in a bottle,” he answers.
“You going to cork me up, too?”
“Something tells me it would take a good deal to contain you, Mrs. Alley.”
Cora paces slowly while he smokes, walking the edge of the ravine. She could go over at any minute, and she’s aware she’s disturbing his rest.
“I like the quiet of this place,” she says. “Other parts of the mountain can get so crowded and up in your business.”
“What exactly is your business?”
“I’d like to be a hairdresser,” she says. “If I could get my license.”
Well, thinks Tucker. That’s what he gets for trying to flirt. He takes a deep drag of his cigarette and exhales. If she goes over, she goes over, he tells himself. He can’t keep holding his breath on her behalf. “How did that one survive?” he asks.
“What?”
“That tree, across the divide?”
On the other side of the ravine a single chestnut is standing. Even from this far away, he can see the spiny pods among the flat leaves, it’s one of the trees he knows because, before his mother sold their farm and moved them into town, a chestnut grew outside his bedroom window, and on a certain morning every autumn, a storm of nuts would wake him, raining down on the red tin roof. He would rise and pull on his boots so the pods would not cut his feet and fight the foraging pigs for the sweet meat inside. The air is crisp and the smoke of his cigarette looks like autumn breath. He can hear the rolling deluge on the roof, and he feels mournful out of proportion.
“The trees infect each other,” Cora says. “Can’t say exactly how. All we know is their roots are still alive, underground. A chestnut can live just so long as it never pushes up. I suppose that one is far enough away from the others.”
“Is that a house back there?” Tucker asks. Beyond the tree, through a thicket of underbrush, he can just make out the outline of a shack. The planks are light and dark, of wattle and daub; it looks to be very old. To his surprise, Cora is blushing deeply.
“That’s my old homeplace,” she says. “Where I was born.”
“This is where the witch slipped in?” Tucker asks.
Cora Alley stares off over the chasm. There are no roads for miles around. Why would anyone choose to live here?
“Do you believe in witches, Mr. Hayes?” she asks.
“Of course not,” he answers, shortly. “Do you?”
Wordlessly, she kneels beside him where he sits on the ground, dirty and sweating from their walk. With tender fingers, she lifts his shirt. Tucker tenses, not knowing what to expect. Across his ribs runs a long lash mark, lightly raised and scabbed like a march of aphids. He feels that old hunger dread that led him to follow Sonia’s trail of clothes rising in his groin. Cora lets his shirt fall.
“You got hurt, too,” Cora says, standing. “Just like Eddie.”
Tucker looks down at his wound. Had it gone unnoticed from the accident? No, it wasn’t there before this morning. Her face is so close to his, he feels the panic of his dream rise up in him.
“Why did you bring me here?” he whispers. She shakes her head.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just wanted to show you someplace different. For your map.”
Her face is so close, and he knows if he kissed her now, she would never tell anyone. Neither would he. It would just be a lovely thing between them, like an acorn dropping to the ground or a flower opening in the sun. Something natural and expected and out of time. He could get back in the car with Sonia tomorrow and kiss her and not feel bad about either one, because both were honest and offered. And yet the dream hangs between them, that grotesque red and raw creature he knew her to be. Was it her plan all along to bring him back to the place he dreamed, is he being led once more?
“I am not bringing you good luck on your hunt,” Tucker says gruffly. “I’d like to go back. I don’t like leaving Sonia alone so long.”
She nods and rises without another word. The way back up and out is steep, without the thrill of the leap down. Cora pauses uphill ahead of him and reaches around to tug the elastic from her braid, digging her fingers deep underneath her white-shot hair, letting it spill over her shoulders before she blindly replaits it. He finishes off his cigarette and drops it to the ground, crushing it with his shoe. A flap of crimson wings and a streak of white, the startled bird lifts up and whips across the chasm, faltering at the edge before coming to light on the chestnut across the way. And there, at Tucker’s feet, where he flushed out the bird, he spies the X drawn in the loose dirt. A whorl of golden leaves and a spray of bloody berries. Of course it’s there in plain sight, where it’s been hiding all along. He had been sitting right beside it. If it had been a snake, as his mother used to say, it’ve bit him.
“Cora!” he calls. “Come back.”
Cora turns and gazes down at him from her perch a little higher up.
“Well, look at that,” she says, without surprise. “The wily sang.”
Eddie
NEW YORK CITY
1:00 a.m.
The other day I asked my oncologist how I could remember the smell of seventy-year-old chestnuts when I couldn’t remember what I ate for lunch. I think it was my oncologist I asked. It might have been my butcher.
He told me there was no past. Or should I say, that the past is always on and waiting. Memories coded on a billion chemical loops playing in the background like a movie with the sound turned down, until we reach back for that day in time. That face. That kiss. He said, Oh, our marvelous, mysterious little brains. Evolved from the single-celled bacteria we once were, huddling together for survival, and we still communicate as those colonies once did, one impulse colliding with the next impulse, in lightning strikes of fight or flight, leaping the gaps of synapse; and the memories we retrieve most frequently carve the deepest neural pathways, like water eroding a mountain gorge, and become our truth. Walking and rewalking our hauntings, our family story evolved from our human family story.
Or maybe he said, Want me to trim the fat off that, Mr. Alley?
It’s dark inside this box.
Wallis, you haven’t called me back. I know your show is over. I couldn’t watch it tonight. An interview with a failed suicide bomber? Did you think that was funny? A fitting tribute? Did the irony even cross your mind? You have not forgotten what night this is.
Yes, the past is always on. I’ve been remembering Tucker Hayes but it is Jasper who haunts us tonight, isn’t it, sweetheart? And the path between those two is carved the deepest in me. So far, Jasper is the only one of us who has succeeded in getting it right. You, Wallis, have always been more subtle in your suicide attempts. I remember the day of your last try, yet another path that winds through time, returning to tonight.
I was out grocery shopping for the week. Your mother had always been so on top of things when we were married that we were all surprised by how competent I was. It’s really not that hard to know what you need when your cabinets finally belong to you. I came home that afternoon with my Roma tomatoes and wedge of Parmesan, my olives and capers, all my greens and the to-be-refrigerated jar of salad dressing, but by that time Charles had already accepted the overseas charges, spoken to you, and hung up. Between the two of you, you’d decided the emergency was over, there was no point alarming me. Charles is always so scrupulous about keeping other people’s secrets that I didn’t suspect a thing, though how he got through that dinner, I’ll never understand. Secrets are always hardest at the beginning. After a while they settle in, like the cavities in your teeth, and you only think about
them when they hurt. I probably never would have learned what happened, except about a year later, I made that exact meal again, but this time Charles couldn’t eat it. This puttanesca tastes like burned flesh, he said, and when I threw a fit and accused him of not appreciating all the things I did for him, I got the real story. With you safely home, it felt less like a betrayal. But I was angry with you for telling him before you told me.
In between phone calls and letters, we killed each other off, you and I. You couldn’t have been thinking much of us, to put yourself in the situations you did, leaving us to rehearse your death a dozen times a day. Or maybe you knew we enjoyed it, too, being able to talk about you with pride and trade on your war stories. You were doing something important while we were back home cooking spaghetti sauce and slicing bread. I told myself your rudimentary Arabic and press pass were shield and armor enough, that being a woman—which made you vulnerable over there—also kept you safe; for a strong woman, no matter where she lives, still has the power to shame men, and maybe that would be enough to get you through. But knowing all that, I still had to kill you off to get through every day. Here’s how it would go: we’d get one of your long, hysterical letters about the gum under the school desk where you hid in Chechnya, or about being blindfolded and led through mountain passes to the birthday banquet of a warlord. You would spend pages trying to capture the precise gaminess of the stewed goat and mare’s milk, while the drones overhead merited no more mention than a passing hawk. Charles and I would sit up in bed and take turns reading your pages. He did your voice perfectly, so lilting and melodious for the ferocious girl you’ve always been. We’d get to your signature on the last page. Love, W., and then Charles would pass the letter to me and I’d fold it up carefully and stick it in the drawer of my bedside table. When I closed the drawer it was like sliding your body into a crypt. I couldn’t think about you until the next time, because that letter had brought you so directly into my bedroom and made me love you all over again. And then all I could think about was the loss of you, of a stray sniper’s bullet in your temple or a land mine beneath the wheel of your jeep. Sometimes, when the news was especially grim over there, your mother would call and beg me to do something, but what could I do? You were an adult and you were becoming more famous with every broadcast.