Emilie Richards – One Mountain Away (страница 7)

Beyond his reflection the faint outline of a crescent moon hung low in the still-bright sky, just visible beyond the neighbor’s tree line. A wisteria-scented breeze through the screen door ruffled his silvering hair. He was just fifty-six. Charlotte had been twenty-five when she had given birth to Taylor, and Taylor had just turned seventeen when Maddie was born. But this evening Ethan felt older than the mountains.

Spring was a time of renewal, of flowers bursting into bloom, of birds mating and building nests. He was twice divorced, but now his first wife, Taylor’s mother, was on his mind, and so was the spring right before they met.

He had only been twenty-five, an intern at a local architectural firm and still a stranger to the city that was now his permanent home. With few contacts and no real friends, he had begun jogging after he returned home in the evenings from the office. He had often parked in unexplored neighborhoods and jogged along residential or downtown streets to learn more about the Blue Ridge community where he’d landed.

Now he remembered one such evening, twilight just beginning to thicken around him and the same haunting fragrance in the air. He had chosen Montford for his jog, a historic neighborhood with a satisfying mixture of architectural designs, some shabby and in need of renovation, but many that were still prime specimens of another generation’s craftsmanship. He’d begun on Montford Avenue, then veered off on a side street to avoid traffic.

He had been lost in thought about the blueprints for an office building he’d been asked to comment on, just aware enough of his surroundings that he didn’t stray into traffic or run behind a car backing out of a driveway. He’d dodged a woman walking two identical yapping poodles, stumbled over a loose chunk of concrete.

Funny the details he still remembered.

He had just been ready to turn the corner and circle the block on his way back to his car when a woman on the next block caught his eye. Back then, as now, Asheville had been filled with young women. He had been as appreciative as any twenty-something heterosexual man of the opportunities, but having just moved away from a failed love affair, he had also been wary.

This woman, seen at a distance, was more vision than flesh. A ruffled skirt floated just above her ankles, a scoop-necked blouse bared a long, graceful neck. Her hair curled over her shoulders, shining and hinting that it might be red, although in the dying light, he couldn’t tell for sure.

Something about the way she hurried tugged at him. She was willowy, bending into the breeze like a sapling at the edge of a mountain stream. He liked the way she held herself. He liked the curve of her hair, of her jaw, of her breasts. He liked the graceful yet determined way she moved up the sidewalk, as if she had all the time in the world and none of it to spare.

He’d wondered then whether the vision-made flesh would be less than this fleeting glimpse. Would he be disappointed, sorry the dream was eclipsed and replaced with reality? He remembered that he had been torn between speeding up or slowing down, and before he could decide, the vision had entered the ground floor of a funky old Tudor and vanished behind the door, never to be seen in that place again, despite more frequent and increasingly desperate jogs.

Charlotte Hale, his twilight vision, who months later would spring to life in a university classroom, and who had not, at least for years, disappointed at all.

Charlotte, who, as it turned out, had been best enjoyed from a distance.

Charlotte, who, this afternoon, unless he was mistaken, had abandoned a park bench as he approached, just thirty yards from the climbing dome where their granddaughter had been playing with her friends.

Chapter Four

First Day Journal: April 28

“Only God knows the hour of our death!”

I’m sitting in a coffee shop not far from Biltmore Forest, because I’m not ready to face my empty house for the evening. I’m writing in this journal with hopes those words will stop revolving in my head once I commit them to paper. Reverend Ana spoke them this afternoon, with no idea of their impact. But the first time I heard them was on a day I wish I could forget. In far too many ways that day defines me.

Maybe in real-time it’s April of my fifty-second year, but in my mind it’s August, and counting backward I think the year must be 1970. I’m ten years old, Maddie’s age, and I’m sure I’ve been sitting in our little country church for at least a century. But, of course, at ten, so much feels that way.

Ten yards in front of me the preacher slaps his Bible against our pulpit, one my grandmother is particularly proud of, since her own father carved it from a fallen black walnut tree. When I was six Gran pointed out the stump of the “pulpit” tree in a wooded clump not far from her kitchen garden. Sometimes now I go there to think, especially when Hearty comes home drunk, which is most of the time.

I’m startled by the slapping noise, and only Gran’s withered arm across my chest keeps me from diving under the pew in front of us.

“Lottie Lou, you sit up now, and no more dozing,” she whispers to me as she hauls me closer. “Else you’ll end up being the ’zample in this fool’s sermon, you get my meaning?”

The preacher screeches the same words again. He’s a guest in the pulpit of our church, the Trust Independent Baptist Church, because the regular preacher, equally loud but less given to repetition, is hauling a truckload of hand-harvested burley tobacco to Raleigh. Preaching is something he does on the side, for the sake of the Lord.

The guest preacher farms tobacco, too, but his is as sorry as his sermons, so it isn’t likely he’ll need a truck or a trip any time in the near future. He’s as scrawny as a cornstalk in a drought, and he drools when he shouts, so now his chin glistens.

I wriggle on the unpadded bench to get blood flowing to my backside. The service started with hymns, then the preacher demanded we stop singing so he could preach—which he’s been doing forever. I worry we’ll be here another hour or more.

And while we listen to Preacher Pittman’s substitute fumble with words, what will Hearty Hale be doing?

It’s as hot inside as it would be if we were standing full in the sunshine. All week the church is closed up, and it takes more than half an hour to suck out the heat before services. The building sits to the side of a country road, and there’s no electricity for fans, although we have a woodstove for winter. Windows dot the walls to let in what breeze can be had, but we have no screens. Wasps fly in and out and circle the freshly washed heads of worshipers.

I have nothing to do except think about the words that brought me so fully awake. I can’t picture a God who not only knows when everybody on earth is going to die, but keeps track of the information, too. I wonder if He makes notes, or if He can just snap His fingers and call up whatever He needs in an instant.

I imagine God pointing and shouting, “You over there, your day’ll be July 17, 1977, and not an hour later! And if I was you, I wouldn’t bother taking out pork chops when you get up that morning. You won’t be needing them.”

When I giggle, Gran pokes me with her elbow. I look for something else to occupy my mind. I settle on a girl who’s two years ahead of me in school and two rows in front of me now. She has white-blond hair, wispy and fine, and she’s pulled it back from her face with a black velvet hair band that has a bow on the side, anchored with a cluster of rhinestones. Her name is Sally Klaver, and she lives not far away, in a brand-new house, brought in by truck and set right down on a slab of concrete. The house is the color of a creek bottom, with a porch in front, just big enough for a pot of flowers and a doormat with Welcome printed nice and proper on it.

The old house, where Sally used to live, is still standing back behind some trees, but it’s boarded up now, and most likely full of mice and hornets’ nests. Sally’s daddy runs cattle and fattens more from his acres of corn. Mr. Klaver grows more tobacco than anybody else in the vicinity. I wonder what that would be like, having a house nobody else ever lived in, having enough cattle to eat beefsteak every night, having money to just walk into a store and buy a velvet headband whenever I felt like it.

I’m not just tired of sitting, I’m tired of worrying, too. This morning our neighbors, Bill Johnston and his wife, picked up Gran and me as we walked down the road on our way to church. Gran squeezed into the cab, and I settled myself in the back of the truck, making a little nest on an old piece of canvas to keep my dress from getting dirty.

I was glad to sit in the open. As we bumped over the dirt road I watched out for my father, but I never saw a sign of his truck or him. I’m not worried something’s happened to Hearty. I’m not even hoping it has, at least not while I’m sitting in church, because it’s possible God listens a little harder here, and wishing your father would keel over dead might get you in trouble.