before the track came alive from the speakers with the reassuring score against the frantic overlay of the preacher’s sermonizing, his rhetorical “What’s wrong with a withered hand?” repeating like errors too beautiful to correct.
In the bottom drawer beneath a sheaf of exams graded but never returned to students at the end of the semester, he found the property documents rubber-banded in a manila folder. He pulled them out and spread them on the desktop. There were well reports and original home inspections, everything maintained from the time he and Liza had bought the property. At the bottom was the tissue-thin trifold of the plat. Here were written the details of ownership, not only of the house but of the secondary holdings as well, the fifty acres of land that belonged to him alone, paid out fully now since the disbursement of Liza’s life insurance policy. He placed his finger where the derelict homeplace stood, the oil in his fingertip leaving its faint fading shape.
He refolded the plat and set it aside from the rest of the house’s papers, sat looking at it for a while as he finished his drink, his eyes lifting occasionally to regard the walls of the house, the blue portal of the window trained on the night. He took some quiet pleasure in the physical presence of the place itself, the real alignments of architecture and décor that comprised the structure anchoring him to this specific point in time. The abstraction of the plat told its own kind of truth, presented the science of azimuths and acreages, but it lacked the living experience of being at home among one’s private things. Impossible to explain that to someone who might come out to have a look around with the idea of buying it all in order to transpose their lives into what had already been lived through. Impossible also to explain the feelings this made him have for these people trespassing, his desire to wish their presence unknown because ultimately it would force an action he had no appetite for.
The CD ended and it was getting late. He shut off the office light and went into the kitchen to pour out a saucer of milk for the cat, warmed a small cupful of the same for himself. Like two old friends, they drank their simple nightcap while they watched over each other, companionably silent.
5
RAIN SLIPPED the light cover of the summer sleeping bag and walked naked down to the stoop where all the sandals were piled. She sat and listened to the sounds of Wolf and Winter asleep, coiled into one another atop the inflated sleeping pads. She had lain with her back to Wolf, remained awake after they’d eaten supper and made love all together.
Without knowing why, she began to walk away from the house, followed the moonlight to the clearing beyond. Her solitude gave her courage against the night. As a little girl she had been terrified of darkness and what invisible threats it held. But now she felt protected and insulated by it. She couldn’t remember when that change had taken place, when solace overtook fear, but it was written indelibly in her now. She did not need to evolve some further defense against the dangers of the world because she carried the gift of living so close to the earth. What most people feared losing could never belong to her and this was a distinct freedom. She had known that on her own but Wolf had been able to articulate it in such a way that it was a part of her character. He had retailored a piece of her and it was impossible not to admire him for that.
She thought about when she had left home, those last few months in her mother’s house. How time had eaten her like something it kept in a trap and portioned out. She’d watched a show on TV once, one of those cable reality dramas where the camera went into the worst state penitentiaries and you got to see how men lived in the prison underworld, thieving and raping and torturing one another while the guards did their best to stay clear of the cultural undertow of it all, and she’d remembered one of the prisoners, a thin Mexican kid with a tattoo of a Henry David Thoreau quote on his neck. This kid had said how after what he had seen that he was going to survive just by keeping his head down. And that was how it was with her and her mother and that last man who had been there, Robbie, who never did actually come out and do anything to her exactly, though she knew it was more because he was afraid of getting caught with his hands on her than because he was morally opposed. All that time, those six months, she’d managed to put away enough money from her Burger King job until she had what she thought would be enough to get her clear of Elizabethton, Tennessee, and maybe get a cheap apartment up over the mountains near Asheville, find work there waiting tables or maybe on the Biltmore Estate. That had been the plan, at least, until her momma or Robbie had found the scratched-up flap of carpet where she’d hidden the money. Full withdrawal, close to eight hundred dollars. She didn’t say anything to her mother about it, knew it held no purpose now that the money was gone, likely already spent. That was what surviving by putting her head down had gotten her.
She left that night in her Escort, a vehicle older than her by a decade. It coughed and quit not much longer after she made it over the state line mountain pass, not too far from the town of Mars Hill. She’d sat inside and cried for a couple of hours, slept badly, then got out and began walking, the new mountains coming up around her from behind the complete wall of darkness into something fractured, lovely, and pale. She caught a ride into the city and was walking around its streets at midday.
She spent most of the summer in Asheville, bussed tables at a Japanese steakhouse on the west side of town, roomed with a hippie couple that flew a Che Guevara flag from the front of the disheveled bungalow they rented. But the couple argued and fucked in a relentless cycle that was maddening. Then an apartment on her own fell through at the last minute and then she was fired.
There seemed to be so many And Thens. So many.
When it got bad enough she called her cousin in Boone who worked waiting tables at a downtown pub, told her she could set up something in the kitchen there for her, but after spending her last money on a Greyhound ticket to get there the hiring man said he wanted cooks, not bussers. Her cousin let her stay for free for a while on the couch, but she was married and it didn’t take long to see that her husband had no use for her being there.
To get out of the house she sometimes went to the university library, pretended she was a student there. She walked each of the floors, breathing it in like it was a more exotic kind of air. She talked to the librarians some, asked them questions about what was good to read, what was new. One handed her a book with the picture of a handsome man squinting off into the sunset called The Last American Mountain Man. She sat down at one of the long tables and read the entire book, learning of Eugene Connors and his Falling Sky Preserve just a few miles outside of Boone city limits. Falling Sky was a wilderness school that was entirely self-sufficient, growing its own crops and raising livestock to sustain those who worked and trained there. No one who was accepted had to pay with anything other than their labor and an openness of mind to Connors’ strict tenets. Hard work was expected, as well as unquestioning obedience. But the potential rewards were undeniable. This was a place where you could learn to live truly off the grid, where you could shape your future. Connors believed in the value of the young and their commitment to making the world a better place through discovering their inevitable connection to the land. Rain couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. That night she went home and told her cousin she needed to borrow a few camping things she’d seen in the garage.
She showed up at the front gate of Falling Sky with everything she owned or had borrowed strapped to her back, considered turning around for a half hour before she finally went on to the receiving building. The young man behind the counter took her information with a cold efficiency, asking her next-of-kin, her blood type, her religious affiliation. When she joked that she didn’t realize she was enlisting in the military he told her that no she wasn’t, what she was doing was much harder than that.
She was issued a pair of gray wool blankets and a surplus sleeping roll, assigned to Quonset hut “C” up a ridgeline road flanked tightly by Canadian firs. Above the lintel post hung a hand-painted shingle that read “Mama’s House.” Inside she found a tangle of shouting, laughing women getting ready for the supper bell. Her sisters, she was told.
“Come on, Little Bit, throw your shit over here,” said a woman with pigtails. She showed her an empty cot and helped her put her few things in order. She was not pretty exactly, but there was something in the woman’s face that attracted her. When her hand brushed her hip as she reached