The ending of "Mountain."Got much more overall to edit, but I thought if I posted this part, I'd stop fucking around with it. Not sure why it took me three months to get this far. Anyway, hope you enjoy it...
Lynn
and the boy headed back to the house to search for scrap lumber to put under
the two jacks. I smoked on my tail gate and
watched the swollen creek with the out building behind it. The water caught
what little sunlight there was. It shone. The sound of it slowly replaced the
noise of smoking ruin I had in my head. I decided right then and there, that little
creek who had nearly jumped its banks, and its cousin the tobacco barn would be
my idea of heaven. Rushing along with
grass waving inside of it. Fast and cold and pure.
After a minute an older man appeared
in the field across the road in tan and black coveralls. Well, I say black but when he got up on me I
noticed the black were great streaks of grease, oil and dirt. I waved and
called. Tall and bearded, he said nothing until he got up on me.
“Yeah I
know who you are,” after I introduced myself, “I’m Lynn’s uncle Bobby. He asked me to come watch after you.”
“Oh. You
been hunting with them this morning?”
“No. I
was by myself over on that far ridge. Trailing this fuckin bear that’s been
chewing half our hounds up.” He growled through his salt and pepper beard.
“Really?”
I asked and chuckled, “what were you gonna shoot him with?” I hadn’t seen a
rifle.
He
reached into his grease stained coveralls and pulled out a pistol with a barrel
the length of my forearm. “This here.” He
fixed a steady gaze on me and then put it away.
“Oh.
That might do it.” I said. He put the gun away, pulled out a bag of chewing
tobacco and commenced to load up.
“Good
thing you broke down here, “he said, fitting the plug into his mouth “about a
quarter mile back and you would have been on old Copperhead’s place.” He had
the same grim smile Lynn had, a few small random stalks poking out from his
beard. It occurred to me his eyes didn’t have the same kindness as his nephew.
“Things might not have worked out so well for you there.”
I knew
what property he meant; an old bungalow next to a country-store long boarded
up. The yard had multiple vehicles sitting in disrepair, four-wheelers, trucks,
innards strewn about in the dirt. Not one but two confederate flags waved on
the listing porch. “You mean that old
place up by the dog-leg in the road?”
“Yeah,
used to be Miller’s store.”
“Thank god I didn’t roll up on that
man there in the dead of the night. Does he own the store too?”
“Yes he does. Place goes back five
generations of his people. His momma and her sister kept it going till they
died off and then he promptly let it all fall to shit.”
“Across
the road from there is an old foundation by the creek. Was that the old mill?”
“Yes it
was. It burned before my time. My daddy said they used to grind for the whole
valley.”
“Wow.” And
left it at that. I figured I’d better shut-up for the time being, however
struck by a thousand questions. I sat instead on the tailgate and lit another
cigarette, watched the smoke rise and tried to imagine what the valley might
have looked like. The fun, loopy, still-drunk feeling was ebbing and was
quickly replaced by a throbbing behind my eyes. I rubbed them. The creek sang
its forever song. Bobby leaned, elbows on the sidewalls of the bed of my truck
and punctuated what the creek said by spitting occasionally into the grass.
Lynne
and the boy eventually showed back up, “You too getting along alright?” he
asked.
“Famously.
“ I said.
They
had brought an armful each of various scraps of two by eight, cut on an angle,
about two foot long. They were wrapped in dirty cobwebs, potentially the
drop-offs from old rafter tails. The
sides were rough hewn and brown as tobacco. I hated dropping them into the mud,
but I needed to shake the worms in my head, get on the road and get on home. I
tried not to think about home. I set to it, crawling under the truck and
positioning the two jacks. Lynne’s boy stayed out and cranked the rod on the
little one, and I found a flat on the axle where my cherry-bomb could get a
good bite. It took a minute, even with the wide boards, the weight and the mud
kept sliding everything out of plumb. The boy got his end straight first,
started cranking a few times with the twist rod, and then waited for me. I got
mine to come around finally and the back end of the truck began to rise when
Bobby suddenly commanded- “Come out from under there.” I did of course, fearing
that I’d done something terribly wrong, something worse even than everything
I’d already done.
“Break
those lug nuts loose while you still got some weight on that wheel. It’ll be a
lot easier than once she’s ass up in the air.”
I
stared at him amazed. The kid laughed. Lynn just smiled at me and said “Stick
around this world a little longer and you’d be surprised at what you might
learn.”
They
all stood there and let me get into the wet and wrestle the tire around. I
could feel the old man scrutinizing my every move, judging how I worked, how my
hands moved. Just to make conversation, I got them to describe how their land
went back to where the rolling hills tucked under the darkened tree line and
then crept up the mountain. They told how many generations had been on it, what
all they had farmed. They only had a few cows anymore. The rest they just
mowed. “Reefer turns a good crop,” said Bobby. Everybody laughed, nobody
thought he was joking.
“You
ever thought about selling it off?” I asked, twisting the nuts back into place.
“Nope.”
“You
know, I sometimes work for a contractor who’d pay good money for that old barn
over yonder. He takes ‘em down and re-assembles them for log cabins up in
Cashiers. Rich folks love them.”
“Yeah,”
Lynne chuckled over my shoulder “he’s stopped by here a few of times.”
“What
are y’all gonna do with it?”
“We’re
gonna let it stand there as long as it wants to.” He said
I stood
on the wrench for the last turn, putting all my weight on each lug-nut. I got
up from a crouch and faced them, wiped my hands on my jeans. It was time to go.
Three generations fixed the same look on me, with eyes the color of the creek.
It was neither a look of meanness nor particularly of welcome either. I thanked them as graciously as I could, apologized
for rooting everything up into mud and eased it back on the road. Pointed it
toward home and whatever I would find there. I figured I wasn’t so pickled
anymore that I couldn’t keep it between the lines. Fierceness, I decided, it was
the look of fierceness. The boy waved and called out,
“Be good.”
