Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

One night when they were in high school, I’d gotten a call around ten o’clock about gunshots in one of the new developments out by the interstate, and I left the office in Marshall and headed east on 25/70 toward Weaverville. There are so many neighborhoods out that way now that I couldn’t even tell you which one it was with any certainty, but back then there wasn’t but a handful, some without any houses built in them yet, a few of them without paved roads.

I turned my lights off and rolled down into one of those developments and instantly noticed how dark it was once I’d left the main road. After a second I realized it was because somebody had gone through and shot out all the streetlights. The busted glass looked like huge pieces of broken eggshells had been gathered into little piles and left on the sides of the street. At the end of a cul-de-sac I saw an old Camaro parked with its lights out. I recognized it as belonging to a friend of theirs Jeff and Ben called “Spaceman,” and after all these years I can’t remember that boy’s real name, probably because that nickname suited him so good. I parked and killed the engine and walked the rest of the way to the car. I found the three of them sitting on the ground, leaned up against the Camaro’s back bumper, Ben holding a still warm.22 rifle, and two bottles left in a twelve pack of Michelob sitting on the ground in front of them. The rest of the bottles had been busted, and the glass was scattered all around them. I knew they were good and drunk when Jeff looked up at me and smiled like he wasn’t one bit surprised to see me standing there in front of them.

“Well, hey, Dad,” he said.

“Y’all know I could arrest all three of you, don’t you?” I told them. I leaned over and took the gun from Ben and checked to make sure it was empty.

“Yes, sir,” Jeff said, suddenly somber. The other two didn’t look up at me.

“But I think it would be better for me and worse for y’all if I just took you home so we can let your folks know what you’ve been up to tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll come back down here and get all this glass cleaned up. And then we’ll find out who y’all need to pay to replace these streetlights.”

“Man,” Spaceman muttered. I loaded them all into the cruiser and drove up out of the dark, empty development and back toward the county. Jeff sat in the seat beside me, and I could smell the beer on his breath, and I tried to predict what Sheila would say to him, and to me, about all this. I looked in the rearview mirror through the metal screen that divided the front and back seats, and I saw that Spaceman had laid his head back on the seat and his eyes closed. Ben stared out the passenger’s-side window. I turned my eyes back toward the road.

“My dad’s going to kill me,” Ben said, almost to himself. I looked in my mirror again and tried to catch his eye, but he was still staring out the window.

“I think you might need it this time,” I said. “Drunk and disorderly. Discharging a firearm. Destruction of property. You might need a little killing.” Ben closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat just like Spaceman had.

“Y’all don’t understand,” he said. “He’s really going to kill me. Y’all don’t know what it’s like.”

Ben Hall was already six foot two by then, maybe six foot three, and his daddy was just a little guy, maybe five nine, but I could see fear in Ben’s face and I could hear it in his voice. I’d seen his eyes blacked up a couple of times, and I knew that whatever beating his old man had put on his wife that drove her to leave him he’d also put on Ben more than once. I just couldn’t believe a boy that huge wasn’t big enough to put a whooping on a man that small. I reckon I understood then just what Ben was up against, and I sighed loud enough for all of them to hear it.

“Well, maybe y’all should just stay at our house tonight,” I said. “We can figure all this out in the morning.”

“Yes!” Spaceman whispered to Ben like he was celebrating an eleventh-hour reprieve. Even Jeff seemed to relax in the seat next to me, as if knowing that having his friends at our house would stall whatever punishment was coming his way. It got quiet again.

“Putting it off ain’t going to make no difference,” Ben said.

SOMETIMES I THINK THAT I MIGHT’VE LET BEN STAY THE NIGHT with us not because I was afraid of what his daddy would do to him if Ben came home drunk just like his old man did every night but because I was afraid of what Ben might finally do to his daddy with that license that alcohol can give a man. I wasn’t ever afraid of Ben Hall, but I think I might’ve been a little afraid of what he was capable of doing to other people, including his daddy.

It was the memory of that night, especially the look of what I took to be fear or maybe anger in Ben’s face, that put me ill at ease as I drove out to Adelaide Lyle’s house. The thought of Ben confronting some of those folks from his wife’s church with the knowledge that they might be in some way responsible for his son’s death made me worry that all those years’ worth of beatings would come to a head in a violence that Ben couldn’t predict, a violence he’d have no interest in controlling. My fear wasn’t founded just on the fact that he was a big boy who’d had to develop a tough streak or because his drunk-ass daddy had come back to Madison County and was likely headed over to Adelaide Lyle’s house with him. I was afraid because I knew that church, and I knew the man who ran it as if he thought he was Jesus Christ himself, and some of those people who went to that church believed in Carson Chambliss like he might just be.

People out in these parts can take hold of religion like it’s a drug, and they don’t want to give it up once they’ve got hold of it. It’s like it feeds them, and when they’re on it they’re likely to do anything these little backwoods churches tell them to do. Then they’ll turn right around and kill each other over that faith, throw out their kids, cheat on husbands and wives, break up families just as quick. I don’t know exactly how long Carson Chambliss had been living in Madison County the first time I ever ran up against him. And I’m not saying this fanaticism started with him, because I know it didn’t. That kind of belief has been up here a long time before I arrived on this earth, and it’s my guess it’ll still be around for a long time after I’m gone. But I’ve seen his work firsthand, and I still can’t put my finger on what it is and why it affects folks like it does. Ten years ago I saw a man set his own barn on fire while his family just stood out in the yard and watched it go, just because he thought it was the right thing to do.

In my mind that barn’s still a burned-out spectacle set against a darkening sky. The neighbors had all left their houses in the cove and followed the gravel road down to Gillum’s land, where they were facing the grassy rise atop which that barn sat with the bright orange light flickering inside. I’d followed the smoke down from the highway, and I was driving slowly past the fence when some of them turned to look at me like they hadn’t ever seen the law before. But most of them kept their eyes on the barn where it was swollen with smoke from a season’s worth of crop burning. What looked like fog rolled the length of the pasture and picked its way through the barbed wire fence. The cruiser’s windows were down, and the air was tobacco-sweet.

Gillum and his two daughters were standing in the yard watching the barn. His wife had gone into the house to save herself from watching it burn and to put off the accounting of loss that would follow. I still picture her inside a too-warm room with closed windows and doors, where she busies her hands and pays no mind to the smoke drifting through the yard and the sound of the boards burning and popping loose from the barn’s frame. If she’d have pulled back the curtain, she’d have seen me walking through the yard toward the smoke where Gillum was standing with their daughters and waiting for it to be done.