Дэвид Балдаччи - Wish You Well

The Negro man was young and, in keeping with the geography, ruggedly built. He was tall and wide of shoulder, deep-chested, with arms like slabs of ham, a waist not small but not soft either, and legs long but one oddly pushed out where calf met knee. His skin was the color of deep rust and pleasing to the eye. He was looking down at his feet, which necessarily drew Lou’s gaze to them. His old work boots were so big a newborn could have slept in them with some room to spare, the girl observed. His overalls were as worn as the shoes, but they were clean, or as clean as the dirt and wind would allow anything to be up here. Lou held out her hand, but he did not take it.

Instead, with one impressive move, he picked up all their bags, then flicked his head toward the road. Lou interpreted this as “hello,” “come on,” and “I’ll tell you my name maybe later,” all wrapped into one efficient motion. He limped off, the bulging leg now revealed to be a bum one. Lou and Oz looked at each other and then trudged after him. Oz clutched his bear and Lou’s hand. No doubt the boy would have tugged the train after them if he could have somehow managed it, so as to effect a quick escape if needed.

The long-bodied Hudson four-door sedan was the color of a sweet pickle. The car was old but clean inside. Its tall, exposed radiator looked like a tombstone, and its two front fenders were missing, as was the rear window glass. Lou and Oz sat in the backseat while the man drove. He worked the long stick shift with an easy skill, nary a gear ever left grinding.

After the woeful state of the train station, Lou had not expected much in the way of civilization up here. However, after only twenty minutes on the road they entered a town of fair size, though in New York City such a meager collection of structures would hardly have filled one sorry block.

A sign announced that they were entering the township of Dickens, Virginia. The main street was two-laned and paved with asphalt. Well-kept structures of wood and brick lined both sides of it. One such building rose five stories, its vacancy sign proclaiming it to be a hotel at fair rates. Automobiles were plentiful here, mostly bulky Ford and Chrysler sedans, and hefty trucks of various makes adorned with mud. All were parked slantwise in front of the buildings.

There were general stores, restaurants, and an open-door warehouse with box towers of Domino sugar and Quick napkins, Post Toasties and Quaker Oats visible inside. There was an automobile dealership with shiny cars in the window, and next to that an Esso gas station sporting twin pumps with bubble tops and a uniformed man with a big smile filling up the tank of a dented La Salle sedan, with a dusty Nash two-door waiting behind it. A big Coca-Cola soda cap was hanging in front of one café, and an Eveready Battery sign was bolted to the wall of a hardware shop. Telephone and electrical poles of poplar ran down one side of the street, black cables snaking out from them to each of the structures. Another shop announced the sale of pianos and organs for cash at good prices. A movie theater was on one corner, a laundry on another. Gas street lamps ran down both sides of the road, like big, lit matchsticks.

The sidewalks were crowded with folks. They ranged from well-dressed women with stylish hairdos topped by modest hats, to bent, grimy men who, Lou thought, probably toiled here in the coal mines she had read about.

As they passed through, the last building of significance was also the grandest. It was red brick with an elegant two-story pediment portico, supported by paired Greek Ionic columns, and had a steeply pitched, hammered tin roof painted black, with a brick clock tower top-hatting it. The Virginia and American flags snapped out front in the fine breeze. The elegant red brick, however, sat on a foundation of ugly, scored concrete. This curious pairing struck Lou as akin to fine pants over filthy boots. The carved words above the columns simply read: “Court House.” And then they left the finite sprawl of Dickens behind.

Lou sat back puzzled. Her father’s stories had been filled with tales of the brutish mountains, and the primitive life there, where hunters squatted near campfires of hickory sticks and cooked their kill and drank their bitter coffee; where farmers rose before the sun and worked the land till they collapsed; where miners dug into the earth, filling their lungs with black that would eventually kill them; and where lumberjacks swept virgin forests clean with the measured strokes of ax and saw. Quick wits, a sound knowledge of the land, and a strong back were essential up here. Danger roamed the steep slopes and loamy valleys, and the magisterial high rock presided over both men and beasts, sharply defining the limits of their ambition, of their lives. A place like Dickens, with its paved roads, hotel, Coca-Cola signs, and pianos for cash at good prices, had no right to be here. Yet Lou suddenly realized that the time period her father had written about had been well over twenty years ago.

She sighed. Everything, even the mountains and its people, apparently, changed. Now Lou assumed her great-grandmother probably lived in a quite ordinary neighborhood with quite ordinary neighbors. Perhaps she had a cat and went to have her hair done every Saturday at a shop that smelled of chemicals and cigarette smoke. Lou and Oz would drink orange soda pop on the front porch and go to church on Sunday and wave to people as they passed in their cars, and life would not be all that much different than it had been in New York. And while there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, it was not the dense, breathtaking wilderness Lou had been expecting. It was not the life her father had experienced and then written about, and Lou was clearly disappointed.

The car passed through more miles of trees, soaring rock and dipping valleys, and then Lou saw another sign. This town was named Tremont. This was probably it, she thought. Tremont appeared roughly one-third the size of Dickens. About fifteen cars were slant-parked in front of shops similar to those in the larger town, only there was no high-rise building, no courthouse, and the asphalt road had given way to macadam and gravel. Lou also spotted the occasional horse rider, and then Tremont was behind them, and the ground moved higher still. Her great-grandmother, Lou surmised, must live on the outskirts of Tremont.

The next place they passed had no sign naming its location, and the scant number of buildings and few people they saw didn’t seem enough to justify a name. The road was now dirt, and the Hudson swayed from side to side over this humble pack of shifting earth. Lou saw a shallow post office building, and next to that was a leaning pile of boards with no sign out front, and steps that had the rot. And finally there was a good-sized general store with the name “McKenzie’s” on the wall; crates of sugar, flour, salt, and pepper were piled high outside. In one window of McKenzie’s hung a pair of blue overalls, harnesses, and a kerosene lamp. And that was about all there was of the nameless stop along the poor road.

As they drifted over the soft dirt, they passed silent, sunken-eyed men, faces partially covered by wispy beards; they wore dirty one-piece overalls, slouch hats, and lumpy brogans, and traveled on foot, mule, or horse. A woman with vacant eyes, a droopy face, and bony limbs, clothed in a gingham blouse and a homespun woolen skirt bunched at the waist with pins, rocked along in a small schooner wagon pulled by a pair of mules. In the back of the wagon was a pile of children riding burlap seed bags bigger than they were. Running parallel to the road here a long coal train was stopped under a water tower and taking in big gulps, steam belching out from its throat with each greedy swallow. On another mountain in the distance Lou could see a coal tipple on wooden stilts, and another line of coal cars passing underneath this structure, like a column of obedient ants.