Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories

“That wafer might as well be a burnt marshmallow for all the passion it evokes in that crowd,” my father said one Sunday as we drove home. “If Jesus Christ and his disciples marched in during a service, the ushers would tell them to have a seat, that the congregation would be glad to hear what they had to say as soon as the monthly business meeting was over.”

My mother glared at my father but addressed her words to the backseat, where I sat.

“Just because a service is orderly and dignified doesn’t mean it isn’t heartfelt,” she said. “Don’t trust people who make a spectacle of what they believe, Joel. Too often it’s just a show, a way of drawing attention to themselves.”

AS WE ENTERED summer, our lives took on a guarded normality. My father taught a six-week summer school session. My mother resumed, after a two-month absence, her part-time job as a bookkeeper for my uncle Brad’s construction firm. I worked for my uncle as well, driving nails and pouring concrete. My uncle also gave us free rein of the lake house he’d bought years earlier, when he’d had the time to use it, so on Saturday mornings we drove up Highway Ten to spend the day at South Mountain Reservoir, where cool mountain breezes and teeth-chattering water might revive us after a week of wilting piedmont humidity. No doubt my mother packed up food and swimsuits each Saturday in hopes the lake might be beneficial for my father after a week of remedial teaching in an unairconditioned classroom.

My father was eager that I share his new hobby. He gave me demonstrations on how to use the scuba apparatus. At supper he spoke excitedly of water’s other side. He often wore his diving equipment around the house, once opening the door to a startled paperboy while wearing a mask and fins. My mother was reluctant to let me participate, but she acquiesced when I promised not to go into the reservoir’s deep heart, where a diver had drowned the previous summer. So on Saturday afternoons she read paperbacks on the screened porch and cast nervous glances toward the lake as my father and I shared the diving equipment. When my turn came, I fell backward off the dock and into the lake, watching a rushing away sky as I hit the water and sank, air bubbles rising above my head like thoughts in a comic strip.

I could never see more than a few yards, but that was enough. Arm-long catfish swam into view sudden as a nightmare, their blunt, whiskered faces rooting the bottom. Loggerheads big as hubcaps walked the lake floor, their hand-grenade heads ready to bite off a careless finger. I found what no longer lived down there as well: fish suspended like kites, monofilament trailing from their mouths to line-wrapped snags below; drowned litters of kittens and puppies; once an out-of-season deer, a gash on its head where the antlers had been. On the reservoir’s floor even the familiar startled. Gaudy bass plugs hung on limbs and stumps like Christmas ornaments; branches snapped off like black icicles; a refrigerator yawned open like an unsprung trap.

Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden. By August I’d joined my mother on the porch, playing board games and drinking iced tea as my father disappeared off the dock toward mysteries I no longer wished to fathom.

On one of these August afternoons after he’d finished diving, my father decided to drive out to the highway and buy ice so we could churn ice cream. “Come with me, Joel,” he said. “I might need some help.”

Once we turned onto the blacktop, my father passed two convenience stores before pulling in to what had once been a gas station. Now only a weedy cement island remained, the pumps long uprooted. HOLCOMBE’S STORE, nothing more, appeared on a rusting black-and-white sign above the door. REDWORMS AND MINNERS FOR SALE was scrawled eye level on a second sign made of cardboard.

We stepped inside, adjusting our eyes to what little light filtered through the dusty windows. A radio played gospel music. Canned goods and paper plates, toilet paper and boxes of cereal lined the shelves. A man about my father’s age sat behind the counter, black hair combed slick across his scalp, a mole above his right eyebrow the size and color of a tarnished penny. The man stood up from his chair and smiled, his two front teeth chipped and discolored.

“Why, hi, Brother Hampton,” he said warmly in a thick mountain accent. “What brings you up this way?”

“Spending Saturday on the lake,” my father said, then nodded toward me. “This is my son Joel.”

“Carl Holcombe,” the man said, extending his hand. I felt the calluses on his palm, the wedding ring worn on his right hand.

“We’re going to make ice cream,” my father said. “I was hoping you had some ice.”

“Wish I could help you but I weren’t selling enough to keep the truck coming by,” Mr. Holcombe said.

“How about some worms then?”

“That I can help you with.” Mr. Holcombe came around the counter, walking with a slight limp as he made his way to the back of the store.

“How many boxes?” he asked, opening a refrigerator.

“Four,” my father said.

My father laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. Mr. Holcombe rang up the sale.

“See you at church tomorrow?” Mr. Holcombe asked, dropping coins into my father’s hand. My father nodded.

I tried not to stare at the mole as Mr. Holcombe filled my hands with the cardboard containers.

“Your daddy,” he said to me, “is a Godly man, but I suspect you already know that.”

He closed the cash register and walked with us to the entrance.

“I hope you all catch something,” he said, holding the tattered screen door open.

“Why did you buy the worms?” I asked my father as we drove off.

“Because he needs the money,” my father said. “We’ll let them go in the garden.”

“Mr. Holcombe’s a friend of yours?” I asked, wondering if my father would note the surprise in my voice.

“Yes,” my father said. “He’s also my pastor.”

THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY my father left to attend his midweek church service. I’d already asked my mother if I could borrow the Buick that evening, so when he departed so did I, following the Fairlane through town. At the stoplight I too turned right onto Highway Ten. Since the previous Saturday I’d been perplexed about what could compel my father, a man with a university education, to drive a good half hour to hear a preacher who, if his spelling and grammar were any indication, probably hadn’t finished high school.

Outside of town it began to rain. I turned on the Buick’s windshield wipers and headlights. Soon hills became mountains, red clay darkened to black dirt. I swallowed to relieve the ear pressure from the change in altitude as the last ranch-style brick house, the last broad, manicured lawn, vanished from my rearview mirror. Stands of oaks and dogwoods crowded the roadsides. Gaps in the woods revealed the green rise of corn and tobacco, pastures framed by rusty barbed-wire fences. Occasionally I passed a prosperous looking two-story farmhouse, but most homes were trailers or four-room A-frames, often with pickups, cars, and appliances rusting in the side yards, scrawny beagles and blueticks chained under trees.

The rain quit so I cut off the windshield wipers, let the Fairlane get farther ahead of me. I came over a rise and the Fairlane had already disappeared around a curve. I sped up, afraid I’d lost my father, but coming out of the curve I saw his car stopped in the road a hundred yards ahead, the turn signal on though our Buick was the closest car behind him. My father turned onto a dirt road and I followed, still keeping my distance though I wondered if it were really necessary. He slowed in front of a cinder-block building no bigger than a woodshed, pulling into a makeshift parking lot where our ancient Fairlane looked no older than the dozen other cars and trucks. I eased off the road on a rise above the church and watched my father walk hurriedly toward the building. A white cross was nailed above the door he entered.