Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories

When she came back the next morning he was gone, helicoptered to the 311th station hospital, where he would begin his rehabilitation.

That was two years ago. Anna couldn’t remember what he looked like except he had gray eyes. It seemed so wrong to her that she remembered the faces of the dead more clearly than one who had lived.

Dawn filtered through the one window in her apartment, and though it was Saturday she did not try to drift back to sleep. She left the bed where she’d lain awake the last hour, the bed she’d slept in alone the last three months. She opened the dresser drawer and read the letter from Josh Triplett’s mother.

Dear Miss Bradley,

Thank you for looking after my son and thank you for letting me

know he is all right. God bless you and all others helping save

our boys.

Sincerely,

Edith Triplett

On the envelope was the address she’d memorized. She ate quickly and showered. Then came the hardest thing, deciding what to wear. She finally chose a navy blue skirt and blouse her husband had given her their one Christmas together. She already knew which roads to take, had mapped the route weeks ago.

There was one more thing to do before leaving. She found the note he’d mailed with the papers and dialed the number. The phone rang five times before Jonathon’s groggy voice answered.

“I’ve signed the papers,” she said.

“I’ll come by and get them or you can mail them back,” Jonathon said.

“I’ll mail them back.”

“Anna,” he said. “Call the VA. They’ve got doctors, psychiatrists. They might be able to help you.”

“So you think I’m crazy.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She hung up the phone.

Anna picked up her purse and the atlas. Midafternoon and I’ll be there, she guessed, glancing at the clock as she walked to the door. Whether Josh Triplett would be there she did not know. A phone call could have answered this question, but she didn’t want him to know she was coming. If they met again, it would be just like the first time — suddenly, with no time for calculated responses but instead a gesture from the heart, like that morning he’d raised his hand to hold hers.

SHE WAS OUT of Washington by six-thirty, passing through Alexandria, where she’d grown up. Few cars were on the road as she drove south into the hilly region where so many battles had been fought a century earlier. The blue and white signs raised at the highway’s edge listed them. Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania recalled wide, deep-green pastures she’d visited on school field trips, Saturday excursions with her parents. These outings had always been fun, the dead mere numbers on metal and stone. It was only after Korea that she found it obscene that people could picnic, play softball and football on ground where men had shed their blood.

She stopped outside of Richmond at a store across the highway from Cold Harbor, the battlefield where Grant had lost seven thousand men in eight minutes. While an attendant filled the Studebaker with gas and cleaned the windshield, Anna walked inside the cinder-block building. Paintings of gray- and blue-clad soldiers filled the wall behind the cash register, orange price tags taped to the corners. Raised sabers and tattered flags jabbed the tops of paintings, below them men gripping muskets. As she waited for her change, Anna remembered what she’d learned in high school about Cold Harbor, how the night before battle Union soldiers sat by their campfires and pinned names and hometowns on the backs of their uniforms, knowing better than their commander what the morning would bring. She wondered how many of these paintings would sell if they depicted men whose faces had been torn from their heads, men whose intestines spilled from their bodies like some pink stew. Things she’d seen and knew would have occurred in the 1860s as well, for though the weapons were more efficient now the results had always been the same.

South of Petersburg she turned west, passing through Appomattox and Roanoke and Radford, the land growing less inhabited, more stark and mountainous as she turned south again, following the New River deeper into the Appalachians. The oldest mountains in the world, the road atlas claimed. She soon passed a green sign that said WELCOME TO NORTH CAROLINA.

She stopped in Boone, refilled the Studebaker with gas, bought a Coke and plastic-wrapped sandwich for lunch. She asked the man who took her money for directions to Aho Creek Road, and the man took out a pen and scribbled on a napkin.

“That’s a far-back place where you’re headed,” the man said, handing her the napkin. “You got kin up there?”

“No,” Anna said, “friends.”

Twenty minutes later she turned onto Aho Creek Road, plumes of dust rising in her rearview mirror as she drove up the mountain, slowing to read the names on the mailboxes — Hampton, Greene, Watson — then a white clapboard church, a few dozen tombstones jutting out of the ground like snaggled teeth. A hundred yards farther was a dented mailbox brown with rust, the red flag leaning like a semaphore. Triplett. Anna turned in to a rutted driveway that did not so much end as fade into a front yard.

She glanced in the mirror, decided not to put on more lipstick, then got out, walking across the yard and up the farmhouse’s stone steps. Her hand shook as she raised it, paused, then rapped her knuckles against the wood. No sound came from inside. She knocked again, harder.

Anna heard footsteps and caught a glimpse of a gray eye behind a curtain.

“What do you want?” a woman’s voice asked.

“My name is Anna Bradley.”

The door remained unopened. No muffled reply came from the other side.

“I wrote you two years ago, Mrs. Triplett. I was your son’s nurse.”

The door opened halfway, but the woman did not step out, half of her face hidden as she spoke.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Triplett asked again.

“I came to see Josh, to see how he’s getting along. I thought you could tell me how he’s doing, where he is now.”

“He’s out yonder,” Mrs. Triplett said, nodding toward the pasture, the church spire that rose beyond it.

For a terrible moment Anna thought the old woman meant the cemetery.

“He’s got him a trailer in the pasture there,” she said and opened the door a little wider, jabbed her finger out. “Down there in the hollow. You go down there. You’ll see how he’s doing.”

She waited for Mrs. Triplett to say something else, but the old woman offered no more words, so Anna turned and stepped off the porch. It was windier and colder here than it had been in Washington, the air stingier, like Korea. She straddled the barbed-wire fence carefully so as not to tear her skirt. Anna wished she’d worn pants and a coat as she followed a creek through the pasture and into the hollow, her breath rapid though the land sloped downhill.

After a hundred yards the decline steepened. A scarecrow dressed in a helmet and camouflage rose up before her, a Purple Heart pinned at the center of the empty chest. The scarecrow’s seed sack face was featureless except for an unlipped grin and two black, filled-in circles where eyes might have been, its arms stretched wide as if to embrace her. For the first time in her journey she thought of turning back.

Beyond the scarecrow’s arms Anna saw the trailer’s roof and skinny chimney, wisps of smoke rising from it. She stepped around the scarecrow, more of the gray Airstream trailer visible with each step into the hollow — first the uncurtained window, then the door with no steps leading up to it, finally the rotting tires sagging into the ground.

The metal door swung open before she could knock. A tall, gaunt man filled the doorway. He wore overalls and a flannel shirt the same color as his eyes, the empty sleeve’s cuff pinned to the shoulder. He loomed above her, the look on his face unfathomable. Wind rustled the empty sleeve. Like a flag, Anna thought. She saw the stoma where the laryngectomy had been performed. The only sounds were the whisper of the wind in the trees, the gurgle of the creek as it flowed past the trailer.