Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

I watched the windows fog over, and I pictured Sheila in the kitchen at home, reading a book or flipping through a magazine and looking up now and then to check the window for headlights and listening for the sound of a car door being closed. I didn’t know how in the world I was going to tell her about Jeff, but I kept forcing myself to remember that I knew the routine: the pause on the steps of a stranger’s porch before you knocked on the front door, the awkwardness of answering questions and drinking coffee in the kitchen while you watched a family grieve. I’d broken this news what felt like a hundred times, but now it was my own family, and I’ll be damned if I could remember how to do it.

It almost seemed like payback for all the times I’d sat in those kitchens answering questions, thinking about nothing but the hot dinner and the cold beer I was missing, the warm fireplace and the boots I was ready to kick off and leave on the bedroom floor. But now the comfort of those things was far from my mind, and I couldn’t think of anything except the fear on Sheila’s face while I stumbled through what I had to tell her, expecting any minute to hear Jeff’s keys in the front door, the sound of his footsteps coming through the foyer, his body filling up the doorway in the kitchen. His voice saying, “Mama, why are you crying?”

But the new memory of Jeff’s body smoldering on the roadside forced itself into my head and forced out those imaginings, and just below the noise of the cruiser’s engine and the steady stream of the heat coming from the vents I could hear the sound of steam hissing beneath that blue sheet. I thumped the back of my head against the passenger-side window and tried to keep the tears out of my eyes.

IT SEEMED LIKE HOURS HAD PASSED WHEN I HEARD THE NOISE OF metal striking metal underneath the cruiser. I opened my eyes and saw pale, murky light coming through the fogged-over glass. Somebody’s fist beat hard on the driver’s-side window, and I slid up the bench seat and wiped away the condensation. Bright light poured through the cleared spot, and I squinted my eyes against it.

Jimmy Hall’s face pressed itself against the other side of the glass. Both his eyes were already dark and swollen, and the bridge of his nose was split open and bleeding from where I’d cracked him with my pistol. I sat and stared at him, and I wondered if he had anything in his hands that I couldn’t see.

“Pop your clutch and drop it in neutral,” he said.

I was too shocked to move, and I watched him turn and walk back to his truck, where I lost him in the glow of the headlights. A second later his truck’s engine roared and I felt something tug at the front of my car. I killed the engine and put it in neutral and opened the door and struggled out into the snow. The cruiser lurched in the ditch behind me.

“What are you doing?” I yelled over the noise. His headlights hid his face behind the windshield, and I ran toward his truck and beat on the hood. The snow was near blinding, but I could make out his face once I was through the light. He stared at me through the glass. “I don’t want your help!” I hollered.

Behind me I heard the frame of the cruiser groan as the towline popped from the snow and cinched tight under the strain. Hall slowly backed the truck away from me and the high beams hit my eyes again and all I could see was the bright light through the falling snow. I stood and stared into his retreating headlights.

The cruiser’s undercarriage breached the top of the ditch, and the frame scraped against the packed snow. I turned just in time to see it loose itself and roll out of the gully and into the road. When it did, the towline swung with it and tore through my pants leg and ripped into my thigh. I fell to my knees. My hand went toward the pain, and I could feel where my pants were already warm with blood.

The engine on Hall’s truck geared down, and he put it in park and stepped out onto the road. I scrambled to my feet and saw his silhouette coming toward me in the light. He stumbled past me and bent to the ground and unhooked the towline.

“I had an extra key,” he said on the way back to his truck.

“I didn’t need your help.”

“You got it anyway,” he said. He cranked the winch, and I watched as the line slid along through the snow and came to a stop at his bumper. He fastened the hook to the line. “You broke my nose,” he said.

“I wish I’d shot you,” I told him.

“I don’t expect that to change now,” he said.

“It won’t.”

“I didn’t expect it would.”

He looked up, and we stared at each other and I realized how quiet it was once the roar of the truck and the sound of our voices had died away. I walked to my car and climbed inside and cranked the engine and put it in reverse. My thigh throbbed from where the line had torn into my skin. I heard Hall yell for me to stop, and I turned and looked out the windshield. He stood in the light of my high beams.

“I’m sorry about your boy!” he hollered. I sat and looked at him, and then I turned my cruiser around and headed down the mountain.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I PARKED AT THE TOP OF THE DRIVEWAY AND stared at the house. All the lights were off inside, and it was silent. I stepped out of the car and leaned onto the hood and listened to the engine cool. Snow fell down into the collar of my coat, and my hands felt heavy and cold. A lamp turned on in the bedroom and light slowly flooded the house, and I knew Sheila was inside moving from room to room on her way down the stairs to the door. She stepped onto the porch and called my name, but I couldn’t figure out how to open my mouth and answer her.

She walked down the steps, and I watched her silhouette move across the snow-covered lawn against the bright light of the house. She stopped once to pull her robe around her and kick the snow from her slippers. She reached me and looked into my face.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked, and then she waited for me to say something. She gave me a worried smile. “You’re going to be a snowman soon if you stand out here too much longer.”

I looked down at her and tried to think of what to tell her first, but I felt like I’d been buried deep in the snow and that she’d arrived just in time to dig me out. I opened my mouth to speak, and I felt the cold air on my tongue and saw the heat from my breath rise like smoke before me.

YES, I REMEMBER IT ALL: ELIZABETH AND LOTTIE COMING over from the church and showing up at my door just after dark on Sunday evening, Julie right there in between them, hardly able to stand up on her own. Them two getting her to lie down on the sofa in the front room and then taking me into the kitchen to tell me what had happened, and me asking “Why?” over and over, “Why? Why was that boy in the church again?” I tried my best to keep my voice low so Julie couldn’t hear it, but each time the question just got louder and louder because those two women didn’t have no answer for me. “Why?” And then all that fighting out there in the yard.

It wasn’t but Tuesday morning, just two days later, that Sheriff Barefield came back to ask me all about them bringing Christopher over to my house after it had happened, and “Wasn’t it you who always watched those kids?” All I could give him was a “yes” to that question and nothing else, not because I didn’t want to but because there wasn’t nothing else for me to give. But if I’d have wanted to, I could’ve told that story from the very beginning, thinking back years and years ago to a night when I trudged up that mountain in the snow because Ronnie Norman’s truck wouldn’t go no farther. And now the sheriff coming here and sitting down in my kitchen all bucked up like a rooster, staring me in the eyes like there was something else to it, something I wasn’t telling him. Something I didn’t want to say. Like I couldn’t remember the look on Julie Hall’s face when that little boy crowned and I lifted the hood from his eyes: eyes as crystal clear as spring water and not a lick of fear in them. Clear like glass and him staring up at me without ever opening his mouth to cry. It seems like it was so long ago, but I remember it all. I may be an old woman now, but I can remember it all. I remember the very night he was born like it was yesterday.