I know is we never did it that way before.” He had resumed his steel-wooling. “And I’m asking. Maybe you could leave off on my account.”
He stopped scrubbing and gave her a look. “I might do. If you were rational about it.”
She had nothing to say back.
Now she propelled herself toward the hawk and waved her arms. “Shaaa!” Without seeming to see her, the bird stepped off the fence, flapped two deep-sweeping flaps, and sailed capably across the yard, gliding to a stop in the walnut tree, then retreating further to the new-leafing oak.
It hadn’t always been so. He hadn’t always been so. In 1924, there’d been lots of boys. She could have had a choose and pick. Whether it was for her red hair or for her father’s 500 acres of rolling orchard either one, she never knew. Neither had a thing in the world to do with who she was. The land had come to her great-grandfather from the Cherokee at three dollars an acre, and the hair was a matter of luck. Yet they were hers and she’d gotten used to them. As a girl, she’d played in the orchards and grown accustomed to the idea that one of the Eakin boys would someday persuade her to leave them. But they bored her, those boys: Frank Pruitt who was so sure of himself because he could wrestle the others to the ground, Hallie Crisp who never missed an opportunity to talk about his father’s store, Freddy Smith who met the whole wide world with his chin tucked in like a bull set to charge. There wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with them, any of them, but all of them tried so hard to please it reminded her of her least siblings. When she imagined a life with one of them, she knew what it would hold, each day visible years before it happened, like standing in the middle of a row of apple trees. If you were to line it up just so, a corridor opened before you, and you could see further and clearer than you ever thought possible, the length of the view making each tree uniform, each gnarled trunk distilled into sameness, no twists, no surprises, no new. The view unsettled her.
That spring the train engines had huffed down the single gauge railroad track, hauling oak and hickory and birch down the mountain, the timber stacked high on the flatbeds. But even then some of the wood came down the river in flotillas, and with it the log drivers, stepping from trunk to trunk as quick as squirrels, each with his pick pole held loose across his thighs, now and then tipping the end against another log to push it away or steady his balance. The men were grizzly with whiskers, and they shouted halloo whenever they passed schoolchildren gathered on the banks, the expectations of the crowd hanging in the air with the smell of the men’s cigarettes and sweat. Some of the drivers whooped at the girls or touched their hats or hollered pretty things. Brodis never did. He was furthest away, his gaze on the river ahead, as if he was bored by the schoolchildren or spied something downstream the others had no knowing of. In those days he had a mad look about him: red woolen shirt flapping loose from his wide shoulders, hair hatless and wild and swept from his forehead like the crest of an owl. Most of the drivers were small agile men, but Brodis was tall and long. He had family near her sister’s husband, and once long ago, had grown up there. Now he lived in the camps.
When the river rose, Irenie and her classmates carried their lunch pails past the bridge to the falls and watched the logs roll over the ledge and skirt the rocks below. The boys argued back and forth about how much skill was required to drive the timber. Frank said the cleated boots made walking on the wet wood as easy as walking on a floor. Bill Hicks said Frank didn’t know his ass from his elbow. But both watched the logs float through the rips and the slides, the noise of the whitewater silencing their shouts and distancing them from the men on the river. Each driver approached the pitch the only man alive, bent at the knee and feet spread, pick pole ready, eyes reading the water in front of him until the log nosed itself over the edge down and down into the boil, burying itself and the fellow’s knees, and then bobbed up at the edge of the foam pile. And when a driver lost his balance in the chute, he pushed against the rocks or another stick to steady himself, sometimes hopping to another piece of timber altogether. Irenie never saw one fall. But some of them did. Some of them died. But when she spied them at the bottom of the drop, they were forever laughing, Brodis too, as if he made a pleasure of stepping so close to the afterlife and then away again, as if he knew something of his own mortality that she didn’t know. And maybe that was the attraction. Or maybe it was the thousand other things the drivers knew that she’d only heard rumor of: the logging camps in the wilderness, the waterfalls on the peaks, the fires in the Smoky Mountains whenever the trees exploded before your eyes, and the whole enduring journey to the mill towns, to Waynesville, to Canton, to Ohio.
She found herself jealous of girls she’d never met who lived in places she’d never seen. It might be he had someone in one of those towns. Might be she was prettier and smarter than Irenie. Did she eat the same vegetables? Did she study the same books in school?
Then one day he was back. He appeared without warning at a Friday night singing, all stringed sinews and knobby knuckles, too tall for his surroundings even when planted in a straw-backed chair. With anguish on his brow and a wooden cane resting across his thighs, he seemed unplaced, like a carnival bear on a chain. There was no one sat next to him. His eyes vigiled the other cake eaters, skipping from one to the next in vexation. They lit on her but didn’t show a flicker of interest, and she wondered if he was the only unattached fellow in the county who didn’t have a thought for her father’s acreage.
The next time she saw him was the July camp meeting. It was the same four day affair she’d attended every summer of her life. She’d just spread the canvas tent on the grass and was pushing the wooden stakes through the brass grommets. A pair of hobnail boots stepped in front of her, above them a splitting maul balanced across a shoulder.
“Want help with those stakes, Irenie Raines?” His eyes were the color of the furthest ridges, his forehead a cliff, the bones below it jagging forward like bedrock. From the side of his nose to the corner of his lip, ravines. She wasn’t prepared for that kind of handsome, and it caught at her throat so hard she had to look back to the wooden stake. When she stood up, her legs trembled, but there wasn’t a thing in the world for it but to peer into the blue wilderness of his eyes and ask, “How come you to know who I am?”
He watched her evenly but didn’t smile. “Everybody knows who you are.”
She thought on that fact. It wasn’t flattery, the way he put it. It was more like stating the colors of the sky or some other thing they could both lay their eyes on and agree to be true. And once it was pointed out that way, you couldn’t put on that you didn’t know. So she just nodded. “Aren’t you gonna ask if I know who you are?”
He smiled now, and his smile was white and wide-spaced, and the way it landed square on her warmed her so much it alarmed her to consider her old life without it. “Do you?”
There wasn’t any other thing to say. “Yes.”
“And how come you to know that?” He swung the maul from his shoulder and set it at his feet as easy as another fellow would a hoe.
“I know all kinds of things.” She willed her voice calm. “You work on the river. You come from over near Mars Hill. You don’t like to wear a hat.”
And then Brodis Lambey tipped back his head and laughed into the sky so that the muscles in his neck shimmered with sweat, and she thought then that she could say anything she wanted to him so long as it was true.
In 1924 she’d had the steam to make decisions that stuck. She’d taken it for granted it would always be so. That she would always be so.
A year later they’d both changed. God had taken their first child but saved her. Then He’d called Brodis to preach. It had seemed unlikely at first. Here was a man who didn’t spend words cheaply and didn’t savor the company of other farmers, much less a crowd. Here was a fellow who was too young or too handsome or too keen on himself, one. It was years before the town of Eakin gathered to his preachings, and longer still for other places. And nowadays there were those that followed him from street to church to revival, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world. But there was a difference between a man who was working to get someplace and a man who was working to maintain the place he was in. Something about the maintaining had made him hard when there wasn’t call to be so, each year more beetle-browed