Southernmost Page 3

  So Asher kneeled and put his hand on the wet ground. “Roscoe, you were the best old boy that ever was,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  That was a kind of prayer, he supposed. There were different kinds of prayer and different kinds of belief and he might be able to figure all that out someday, but not yet.

  Asher roamed from one neighbor to the next, most of them members of his church. He embraced the ones who needed that, shook the hands of the ones who weren’t ready to be embraced. He helped them search for their belongings or push their vehicles out of the mud or stretch tarpaulins to sleep under. Anything to be near their house-seats. But he did not offer to pray with any of them.

  Asher walked up toward Kathi Hoskins’s house, situated on a shelf overlooking the Cumberland. In the aftermath of the last flood she had housed several of her homeless neighbors in her home high above the flood-line, and it was to her that Asher had sent the newly homeless men. But as he came up the ridge he saw Kathi’s house was gone. There was only the concrete foundation. A toilet and shower stall stood on it along with half a wall of crumbling Sheetrock. All else had been washed away. He found her sitting on the ridge with her three dogs crowded close, two of them curled against her and sleeping tired sleeps, one with his ears alert as if the house might come floating back and reassemble itself if he kept good watch.

  Asher sat down beside her, the two sleeping dogs stirring just long enough to make sure he was someone they knew and trusted. She did not speak but after a time she laid her head on his shoulder. Her eyes were fixed on the spot where her house had stood. Her flannel shirt was damp. He had never seen her without eyeglasses and wondered if she had somehow lost them in the race to get out of the house before the flood swallowed it whole. He sat with her and felt more at home here with the silence and his childhood friend and her dogs sitting in the pasture with the wet ground beneath them than he did back at his house.

  He reached home just as the sky was purpling into night. The dimming of the day yawned itself out over the troubled land as he stood looking at his house. He had to go in; Justin was in there.

  Just as his hand reached the knob, the front door swung open and Lydia stood large there. “Lord, Asher, you’re covered in mud. Won’t you undress here on the porch? I’ll get you a towel.”

  I have been on the road to Damascus, he wanted to say.

  He strode past her and Justin came bounding across the room, arms out to wrap around Asher’s waist. He knew the boy would be muddied and Lydia would have a fit, but he didn’t care. After what he had gone through today. The corpse. The dead cattle, eyes milky and bulbous. The people walking like ghosts. Roscoe. After all of that, he didn’t care about anything but this one moment of his little boy running to him.

  “Did you find him? Did you find Roscoe?”

  Asher told him that maybe Roscoe had gotten carried downstream and someone was taking care of him now and he was just fine and happy and was thinking of them but couldn’t get back. Asher told him that Roscoe dreamt of them when he slept. “I bet his new owner laughs at him for running and wagging his tail in his sleep,” he said.

  Lydia sat down on the ottoman with Justin and rubbed his back, round and round in a circle.

  “I bet they don’t know he’s thinking about playing with you,” Asher added.

  “I want him back, though,” Justin said.

  “The main thing is he’s alright,” Asher said. “Any day now he might come running through the woods and right up on the porch. If he can ever find his way back, he will.”

  6

  That night, Asher dreamt of his brother.

  Luke was caught in the dark, rocking waters, struggling to stay afloat among all the debris. Asher was standing on the ridge and he could see Luke out there, screaming, his face pleading with Asher to help him, to do anything. I’m drowning, he cried out. I’m dying. Yet Asher did not move. He wanted to, but his legs and arms would not cooperate. And then, the river swallowed Luke and he was gone.

  Asher shuddered awake, found himself slumped on the couch where exhaustion had overcome him. He remembered now, the weariness easing down over his body the way a midday cloud shadow can be seen, moving over a pasture. The tiredness, rock-heavy, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. Justin had gone to sleep there with him, his legs stretched across Asher’s lap, mouth thrown open in complete rest, a soft little snore revving in his nostrils. Lydia had thrown an afghan over them.

  The house ticked with the kind of silence that happens only in the middle of the night.

  The dream had left him with a grief he could not shed. He slipped outside and sat on the top step of the porch, looking up at the night sky. No stars now, as clouds had moved back in. The valley was still and black; he could not even see the trees just past the porch.

  Ever since the men had come to the house he had been thinking of Luke.

  Ten years without his brother. He thought of their mother sitting at the yellow kitchen table while Luke danced across the red linoleum. Asher was laughing and clapping—only twelve, Luke four years older. Their mother’s mouth clenched into a wrinkled line, like a pink drawstring purse. “I Don’t Want to Know” on the radio—all those drums and that steering guitar and the hands clapping and the voices of Fleetwood Mac—and Luke was moving every part of himself, twisting, shaking, laughing with his head thrown back. Asher didn’t know what had come over his brother; he only ever danced like this when it was just the two of them. But the music had been too good and so he had jumped up to dance.

  Their mother darted up quick as a spider, snapped off the radio in one sharp click of her wrist.

  The word she had said to Luke then.

  (faggot)

  Luke ran from the room, from the house, down to the willow-shadowy banks of the Cumberland, where Asher found him later, watching the river.

  He remembered Luke’s whitish-blue eyes, the way a column of gnats had been churning above the Cumberland. The lush dark green of the trees, Luke’s clenched jaw, his refusal to cry. Up on the ridge a congregation of starlings arose in a great humming movement of blackness from the hickories, hundreds of birds becoming one undulating mass. A sign, he had thought back then. A wonder.

  The second time their mother had used the word was when Luke told her the truth.

  “It’s how I’m made,” Luke had said, his words even and calm, as if he were saying a blessing over supper.

  Their mother had run into her room and returned with their dead father’s pistol. She’d pressed the barrel against Luke’s forehead and Asher had been frozen in place as a strange calm overtook Luke’s face.

  “I’d rather see you dead than like this,” she said, her words cramped and close together like bad cursive. The pistol did not tremble in her hand. “Eat up with AIDS. An abomination. You’d be better off dead. You hear me?”

  “I’m alive,” Luke had said, and there had been no malice in his voice, only a statement of fact. “I’m here.”

  When she took the pistol away from his forehead a small red circle remained.

  Luke stood before her, his eyes trained on hers.

  “I was just trying to scare you,” she said. “Wasn’t even loaded.”

  “You’re the one who’s scared,” he said, and then he left. That was the last time Luke had ever spoken to their mother and he was long gone and unreachable by the time she died. Asher hadn’t seen him in ten years.

  He thought again of the two men, somewhere out there in the darkness, looking for a dry place to sleep. He could hardly stand the thought of it. He thought of Lydia, sleeping soundly back there in their bedroom, numbed by the church.

  Asher took note of how silent the night stood. Usually by this time of summer there would be a symphony of crickets, katydids, tree frogs, perhaps even early cicadas. But there was nothing except the black night and a complete quiet.

  He moved to a rocking chair and stayed there until the sky bloomed into dawn, a spell of stillness broken o
nly when Lydia stepped out onto the porch.

  “Couldn’t you sleep?” she asked, very quietly, and sat in one of the rockers.

  He didn’t look at her. Across the Cumberland a jagged breath of mist was gliding along the ridge spine so he watched that instead. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” There was a little laugh in her throat at the last word.

  He turned to look at her then. She had closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the rocker. Her face was bathed in the pink golden light of the rising sun.

  There was a night he remembered, when they had first started courting. They had gone for a walk in the woods after church. Cedars breathing out their musk.

  “We don’t see eye-to-eye anymore,” Asher said, suddenly so tired, so weary.

  “We’ve got a partnership, Asher,” she said. She sprang up and went into the house, but he followed. In the kitchen she was scooping coffee into the filter with her back to him.

  He had been a sensation back when they first met, the preacher who was burning through all of the churches round these parts with his Holy Ghost revivals. He had visited her church and she had set her sights on him. After church they had stood at the door talking long after the last car left the parking lot, then he’d asked her to go to the Dairy Dart for milkshakes. She’d worn a dress decorated with little yellow Easter flowers. He liked the way she brought her fingers up to her mouth when she laughed, the determined way she had strolled into the restaurant, her shoulders back as if she owned the place. The next week they had walked through the woods and down to the Cumberland. She slipped her arm into the crook of his. Her laugh was big and full. The prettiest girl he had ever known, full of life and a desire to be of service through the church. The perfect pastor’s wife. They had only dated a couple of months before he asked her to marry him and they had run off to Nashville without telling anyone. She used to take hold of his hand and make him feel safe. She used to touch him and he had wanted that so much, to have someone reach out and put their hand on the back of his neck, to put their head on his shoulder.

  “I can’t get over the way you turned those men away,” he said. She sat down at the kitchen table. She was still so lovely, her long neck, chestnut curls on her forehead, those big brown eyes. She had the coloring of a whip-poor-will and was as small-boned as one, too. The most lonesome of birds. She had been a good wife to him in many ways. But this was too much. This thing he could not overlook. “Just sent them back out into the flood.”

  “Asher, you’re—” She struggled to collect her words and latched her eyes to her hands. “You’re blowing that up into something—”

  “That could have been my brother you turned away like that,” he said.

  “We have to stand up for what’s right, Asher.”

  Now he saw that her hands were trembling. That evening in the cedar woods her hand had felt so small in his. That little moment in time when they thought they could build a real life together.

  The room was filled with the dark scent of brewed coffee but neither of them moved to get a cup.

  “I’ve studied on it a lot, Lydia. You know I don’t believe that way anymore. All my life I’ve thought I’ve understood everything in that Bible, but now I know that none of us can know the mind of God. He’s too big for that.”

  “I won’t change my beliefs,” she said, “just because you have. A person can’t go their whole life believing that one plus one equals two, then have someone tell them it equals three and just—” she snapped her fingers “—start believing that. It don’t work that way.”

  She was a preacher’s daughter and then had gone straight to being a preacher’s wife. This was her life’s work. But for the first time he realized he heard fear in her voice. She had grown afraid of everything. Once she had been open to the whole world—her head thrown back in laughter with the scent of those cedars all around them—and now her rigidity and fear had turned into something bordering on meanness.

  “And my job is to keep my child from seeing two men together like that. And to make sure my husband stays on the right path. If I lay down my beliefs, I’m betraying you and Justin.”

  “Lydia, listen to me. You’ve gotten belief confused with judgment. We’re not to judge. You’ve let all this judgment from the church take you over. It’s taken the joy out of you.”

  “There’s no joy in this world like the kind I feel at church.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. And this fear in you. This hatred. You’re afraid of anybody who’s different. Of anything that’s not your way.”

  “I’m at fault because I’ve stayed the same and you’ve changed?”

  He thought for a moment. “I reckon so.”

  “All a person has is what they believe in, Asher. Haven’t you been preaching that very thing your whole life?”

  “They’re our neighbors,” he said.

  “I love you, Asher,” she said, her voice pleading now, low, careful. “I’ve always loved you.”

  He couldn’t say the same to her, and he was surprised by this. But there it was, clear as the new morning.

  7

  School started back right on time in early August even though the buses still couldn’t run to most places because of the construction to rebuild the roads and bridges. A month of broiling summer had done little more than dry out the mud. School had been back in session only a week when Asher received the call that Justin had been hurt in a fight.

  In the principal’s office Asher saw that Justin’s mouth was busted and swollen, a straight cut—crisscrossed now with three tiny bandages—ran along the cheekbone beneath his right eye, which was already turning a greenish blue. Blood was caked in his nostrils. Asher could see how ashamed Justin was, the way he was trying to hold it together and put on a brave face and act like this was not a big deal.

  Asher tried to not react. He ran his hand down the back of Justin’s head, cupping his fingers around his son’s small neck as he sat beside him. Justin’s dazed eyes were fixed on the principal.

  Mrs. Jackson was from way down in Mississippi and spoke in an elegant drawl, the way people did in movies when they were trying to sound Southern.

  “Justin, darlin, do you want to tell your daddy what happened with me in the room, or do you want me to leave?” Mrs. Jackson leaned forward and the scratchy fabric of her pink blazer scritched loudly in the silent office.

  “It won’t make any difference.” Justin’s voice was very small and he spoke his words to the floor.

  “Why do you say that, now, honey?” Mrs. Jackson spoke with a soothing firmness. “I need to talk to whoever did this to you. You don’t want them doing it to anybody else, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” he whispered. Asher saw that Justin’s hands were clenched together in his lap. He could hardly stand to see his son in this shape. He wanted to knock the hell out of somebody himself.

  Beyond the office the school had grown very quiet. By the time Asher had arrived all the schoolchildren had been unleashed upon the world, bursting outside in a great chattering herd. Now they had gone on home and Asher could hear the ticking of the plain round clock that hung on the cinder block wall behind Mrs. Jackson’s head. Beyond that was the chilling wind of the air conditioner.

  “The therapy has been really good for Justin, so I’d encourage y’all to talk to her about what happened today.”

  “Therapy?” Asher said.

  Mrs. Jackson let out a nervous breath. She lit her eyes on Asher’s face with apology. “If he tells you anything and is willing to share it with me, please let me know. I won’t allow bullying to go on in my school.” Now she looked to Justin, softening her gaze. “Darlin, you just let me know and I will make this stop. Do you understand, sugar?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Justin answered.

  On the way out Justin seemed even smaller than usual.

  They rode along in silence for a time and then Justin asked if he could pla
y some music. When Asher said he could Justin plugged in his phone and sang along with the singer’s high voice: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful the way I feel. Lately he had been playing this song constantly. The windows were down and the warm air smoothed against their faces, ruffling their hair. Justin let his hand float up and down on the rushing wind.

  The world still smelled like the flood, the scent of rotting cattle and grainy mud and the twisted yellow insides of trees. They passed a whole row of foundations where there had once been houses. A line of white FEMA trucks, an old van perched in the crooked limbs of a magnolia tree whose leaves had been stripped away by the floodwaters.

  “Justin, tell me who did that to you,” Asher said finally.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Justin said, sitting back against the seat now.

  “Tell me, I said.”

  “This boy pushed me off the slide.”

  “Why?”

  Justin shrugged. He picked at an old scab on the back of his hand, lifting its edges with his fingernail. “Because he hates me. Always has.”

  “Why would anybody hate you?”

  Justin watched the pastures pass by, kept his eyes on the glint of the river between the trees.

  “What’s this about going to see a therapist, buddy?”

  “Mom takes me, on Wednesdays. In Nashville.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “She told me not to. She said it’d worry you.”

  At the house, Asher turned off the engine but did not get out of the Jeep. The motor clicked and they both kept their eyes on the muddy river.

  “If I tell you something, will you promise to not be mad at me?” Justin asked.

  “Depends on what it is,” Asher said.

  “I believe in God, but I don’t believe in church.” Justin turned to face him. “I said that at recess today, because this girl was praying that the Titans would win. And when she told the others they said I was going to hell. And one of ’em pushed me off the slide.”

  Asher didn’t know what to say. He had not realized until now that he might feel the same way.