Out of the Woods: Stories

Melungeons

Deputy Goins sat in his office and watched the light that seeped beneath the door of the jailhouse. When it reached a certain pock in the floor, it would be time to go home. Monday was nearly over. In the town of Rocksalt, the deputy doubled as jailer to balance each job’s meager pay. Goins had come in early to free his prisoners in time for work at the sawmill. They’d left laughing, three boys who’d gotten drunk through the weekend. Goins had spent all day in the dim office. He was tired.

Something outside blocked the light and Goins wished the county would buy a clock. A man opened the door.

“Time is it?” Goins said.

The man shrugged. He peered into the dark room, jerking his head like a blackbird on a fence rail. He looked older than Goins, who was sixty-three, and Goins thought he’d probably come for a grandson.

“Nobody here,” Goins said. “Done turned them loose.”

“I heard tell a Goins worked here.”

“That’s me. Ephraim Goins.”

“Well, I’m fit for the pokey. What’s a man got to do to go?”

“Drunk mostly.”

“Don’t drink.”

“Speeding.”

“Ain’t got nary a car.”

“Stealing’ll do it.”

“I don’t reckon.”

The man kept his head turned and his eyes down. Goins decided that he was a chucklehead who’d wandered away from his family.

“Why don’t you let me call your kin,” Goins said.

“No phone.” The man jerked his chin to the corridor where the cells were. “What if I cussed you?”

“I’d cuss back.”

“Ain’t they nothing?”

“Let’s see,” Goins said. “Defacing public property is on the books, but it’d be hard to hurt this place.”

The man walked to the door and stood with his back turned. “Come here a minute,” he said.

Goins joined him. The man had unzipped his pants and was urinating on the plank steps leading to the door. Goins whistled low, shaking his head.

“You’ve force put me, sure enough,” he said, hoping to scare the man away. “Looks like you’re arrested. Lucky they ain’t no lynch mob handy.”

The man inhaled deeply and hurried down the hall to a cell. Goins opened the heavy door. The man stepped in and quickly pulled it shut behind him.

“Name?” said Goins.

“Gipson. Haze Gipson.”

He lifted his head, showing blue eyes in rough contrast with his black hair and smooth, swarthy skin. They watched each other for a long time. The name Gipson was like Goins, a Melungeon name, and Goins knew the man’s home ridge deep in the hills. He glanced along the dim hall and lowered his voice.

“Say you’re a Gipson?”

“Least I ain’t the law.”

“What’s your why of getting locked up?”

“You been towned so long,” Gipson said, “I don’t know that I can say. I surely don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t know which way you’re aimed at these days.”

Goins stepped close to the bars.

“You know,” he said. “If you’re a Gipson, you do. But you ain’t making it easy.”

“It never was.”

Gipson lay on the narrow cot and rolled on his side, turning his back to Goins. A mouse blurred across the floor.

“I’m a done-talk man,” Gipson said.

Goins returned to his desk. He stared through the window at the courthouse and remembered his fourth-grade teacher threatening a child who was always late to school. “If you don’t get up on time,” the teacher had said, “the Melungeons will get you.”

Melungeons weren’t white, black, or Indian. They lived deep in the hills, on the most isolated ridges, pushed from the hollows two centuries back by the people following Boone. The Shawnee called them “white Indians,” and told the settlers that they’d always lived there. Melungeons continued to live as they always had.

Goins wasn’t born when the trouble started between the Gipson and Mullins clans, but he’d felt the strain of its tension all his life. Members of his family had married both sides. To avoid the pressure of laying claim to either, Goins had volunteered to serve in Korea. Uniforms rather than blood would clarify the enemy.

When a dentist noticed that his gums were tinged with blue, the army assigned Goins to an all-black company. Black soldiers treated him with open scorn. The whites refused to acknowledge him at all. Only one man befriended him, a New Yorker named Abe, whom no one liked because he was Jewish.

On a routine patrol Goins became separated from the rest, and was not missed until the sound of gunfire. American soldiers found him bleeding from two bullet holes and a bayonet wound. Five enemy lay dead around him. Goins was decorated with honor and returned to Kentucky, but stayed in town. He didn’t want to live near killing. Out of respect for its only hero, the town overlooked which hill he was from. Now the town had forgotten.

Goins rose from his desk and walked to Gipson’s cell, his boots echoing in the dark hall. The smell of human waste and disinfectant made his nose sting. The walls were damp.

“How long you aim to stay?” Goins said.

“Just overnight. Hotel’s too risky.”

“Why stay in town at all?”

“Man gets old,” Gipson said. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“No,” Goins said. “I ain’t been up there in thirty years.”

“Longer for me. I’m the one that left and went north.”

“Plenty of work?”

“As many taxes they got laying for a man, it don’t hardly pay to work.”

“What’d they take you for up there?”

“Went by ever who else was around. Italian mostly. Couple times a Puerto Rican till they heard me talk. Sometimes it never mattered.”

“Why come back?”

“I got give out on it,” Gipson said. “I’m seventy-six years old. Missed every wedding and funeral my family had.”

“Me, too.”

“By choice.” The man’s voice was hard. “You can walk back out your ridge any day of the year. Don’t know why a man wouldn’t when he could.”

Goins gripped the cell door with both hands the way prisoners often stood, shoulders hunched, head low. He didn’t hunt or fish anymore, had stopped gathering mushrooms and ginseng. Being in the woods was too painful when he didn’t live there. The last few times he’d felt awkward and foreign, as if the land was mocking him. He wondered if Gipson’s exile was easier without the constant reminder of what he’d lost.

Goins unlocked the cell and pulled the door open an inch. Gipson’s face twisted in a faint smile. One side of his mouth was missing teeth.

“I’m going,” said Goins.

“I’ll be here come daylight.”

“Hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Some of my grandkids have got kids,” Gipson said. “You don’t know what it’s like to see them all at once. And them not to know you.”

“You were up to the mountain?” Goins said.

The man nodded.

“Bad as ever?”

“Not so much as it was. They’re married in now and don’t bother with it no more. The kids have got a game of it, play-acting. I look for it to stop when the next bunch gets born. Still ain’t full safe for me. I’m the last of the old Gipsons left alive.”

He moved to face the wall again. Goins walked quietly away, leaving the cell open, hoping Gipson would change his mind. He left the front door unlocked. The dusk of autumn cooled his face and he realized that he’d been sweating. The fading sun leaned into the hills with a horizontal light that made the woods appear on fire.

• • •

A gibbous moon waned above the land when Beulah Mullins left her house. Though she hadn’t been off the mountain in fifty years, she found the old path easily, and followed it down the final slanting drop to the road beside the creek. The road was black now, hard and black. She’d heard of that but never seen it. Beulah stayed on the weedy shoulder, preferring earth for the long walk to Rocksalt. The load she carried was easier on flat terrain.

Beulah had never voted or paid taxes. There was no record of her birth. The only time she’d been to town, she’d bought nails for a hogpen. Her family usually burned old buildings for nails, plucking them hot from the debris, but that year a spring flood had washed them away. Beulah had despised Rocksalt and swore never to return. Tonight she had no choice. She left her house within an hour of learning that Haze was on the mountain. He’d slipped away, probably after hearing that she was still alive, and headed for town. Beulah walked steadily. The air was day-white from the moon.

Sixty years before, five Mullins men were logging a hillside at the southern edge of their property when a white oak slipped sideways from its notch. The beveled point dug into the earth. Instead of falling parallel with the creek, the oak dropped onto their neighbor’s land and splintered a hollow log. Dislodged tree leaves floated in the breeze. When the men crossed the creek, they found a black bear crushed to death inside the hollow log. They built a fire for the night and ate the liver, tongue, and six pounds of greasy fat.

In the morning, a hunting party of Gipsons discovered the camp. The land was theirs and they demanded the meat. Since the Mullins men had already butchered the bear, they offered half. The Gipsons refused. Three men died in a quick gun-fight. The rest crept through the woods, leaking blood from bullet wounds. Over the next two decades, twenty-eight more people were killed, a few per year.

Ground fog rose to the eastern sky, streaked in pink like lace. Beulah’s face was dark as a ripe pawpaw. Checkered gingham wrapped her head, covering five feet of grey hair. She wore a long coat that smelled of oil and concealed her burden. Her legs hurt. A flock of vireos lifted from a maple by the creek, a thick cloud of dark specks that narrowed at the end like a tadpole. Beulah watched them, knowing that winter would arrive early.

She scented town before she saw the buildings. Rocksalt was bigger now, had spread like moss. Frost in the hills was heavy enough to track a rabbit, but here the ground was soft. Town was suddenly all around her. Beulah moved downwind of a police car. She couldn’t read, but knew that an automobile with writing on its side was like a tied dog. Whoever held the leash controlled it. She stalked the town from the shade. Her shins were damp from dew.

Railroad Street was empty. The muddy boardwalk was gone, and the cement sidewalk reminded her of a frozen creek, shiny and hard in the shade. Beulah leaned against the granite whistle post in the morning sun. On her last trip this had been the center of town, busy with people, wagons, and mules. Now the tracks were rusty and the platform was a bare gantry of rotted wood. Beulah looked past it to the tree line, listening to a cardinal. The hollow was glazed by mist like crystal.

She turned her back and headed into the silence of improvement. Sunlight crept down the buildings that faced east. She walked two blocks out of her way to avoid a neon diner sign glowing in the dawn. No one here would take Haze in. There was only one place he could have gone.

A bench sat in front of the jail with one side propped on a concrete block. The load she carried prevented her from sitting and she moved to shade, leaning against the southern wall. She was eighty-four years old. She breathed easily in the chill air.

• • •

Goins slept rough that night, listening to the building crack from overnight cold. At dawn he rose and looked at the hills. He missed living with the land most in autumn, when the trees seemed suddenly splashed in color, and rutting deer snorted in the hollows. There were walnuts to gather, bees to rob. Turkeys big as dogs jumped from ridgelines to extend their flight.

He rubbed his face and turned from the window, reminding himself of why he’d stayed in Rocksalt. Town was warm. It had cable TV and water. He was treated as everyone’s equal, but his years in town had taught him to hide his directness, the Melungeon way of point-blank living.

After breakfast, he reached under his bed for a cigar box that contained his Purple Heart and Bronze Star. They were tarnished near to black. Beneath them was an article he’d cut from a Lexington paper a few years back. It was a feature story suggesting that Melungeons were descendants of Madoc, a Welsh explorer in the twelfth century. Alternate theories labeled them as shipwrecked Portuguese, Phoenicians, Turks, or one of Israel’s lost tribes. It was the only information Goins had ever seen about Melungeons. The article called them a vanishing race.

He slipped the brittle paper in his pocket and walked to work. Strands of mist haloed the hills that circled the town. The jailhouse door was unlocked, and Goins hoped the cell would be empty.

Inside, Gipson sat silently on his bunk, making a cigarette. Goins gave him a cup of coffee. The cigarette hung from Gipson’s mouth. Once lit, he never touched it.

“Sleep good?” Goins said.

“My back hurts like a toothache.”

Goins unfolded the newspaper article and handed it through the bars. Gipson read it slowly.

“Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “They’re just fighting over who come to America first. Damn sure wasn’t you and me.”

“I kindly favor that lost tribe of Israel idea.”

“You do.”

“I’ve give thought to it. Them people then moved around more than a cat. Your name’s off Hezekiah and mine’s Ephraim. I knowed a Nimrod once. Got a cousin Zephaniah married a Ruth.”

Gipson shook his head rapidly, sending a trail of ash to the grimy floor.

“That don’t make us nobody special,” he said.

“We’re somebody, ain’t we.”

“We damn sure ain’t Phoenicians or Welshes. We ain’t even Melungeons except in the paper. It don’t matter where we upped from. It’s who we are now that matters.”

“Man can study on it if he’s a mind to.”

“You’re a Goins.”

“I’m a deputy.”

Goins returned to his desk. He wanted to ask for the article back but decided to wait until the man wasn’t twitchy as a spooked horse. A preacher had donated a Bible for the prisoners and Goins hunted through Genesis for his namesake, the leader of a lost tribe who never made it to the land of milk and honey. He hoped it was hilly. He turned to Exodus and thought of Abe, his army buddy from New York. Goins wondered if he had a phone. Maybe Abe knew where the lost tribes went.

The jail’s front door slowly creaked open and a woman’s form eclipsed the light that flowed around her. She stepped inside. Goins didn’t know her, but he knew her. It was as if the mountain itself had entered the tiny room, filling it with earth and rain, the steady wind along the ridge. She gazed at him, one eye dark, the other yellow-flecked. Between the lines of her face ran many smaller lines like rain gulleys running to creeks. She’d been old when he was young.

“You look a Goins,” she said.

He nodded. He could smell the mountain on her.

“They a Gipson here?” she said.

Goins nodded again. He swallowed in order to speak, but couldn’t.

The woman shifted her shoulders to remove a game bag. Inside was a blackened pot, the lid fastened with moonseed vine. She looked at him, waiting. He opened a drawer for a plate and she removed the lid to reveal a skin of grease that covered a stew. She scooped a squirrel leg onto his plate, then a potato. The musk of fresh game pushed into the room. Her hands were misshapen from arthritis but she used them freely, her lips clamped tight. Goins understood that she was following the old code of proving the pot contained no file or pistol. He relaxed some. She wasn’t here for trouble.

The woman shifted her head to look at him. The blink of her eyes was slow and patient. She stood as if she could wait a month without speech or movement, oblivious to time and weather. Goins tried again to speak. He wanted to ask her where they’d all come from, but knew from looking at her that she wouldn’t know or care.

When he realized what she was waiting for, he opened his pocketknife, sliced some meat from the leg, and lifted it to his mouth. It tasted of wild onion and the dark flavor of game. He nodded to her. She straightened her back and faced the hall and did not look at him again.

She walked to the cells, moving stiffly, favoring her left side as if straining with gout. The long coat rustled against her legs like brush in a breeze. Goins pivoted in his chair to give them privacy. He looked at the strip of light below the front door, knowing that as the sun passed by, the light would get longer, then shorter, before he could leave. Outside, someone laughed while entering the courthouse. A car engine drowned the sound of morning birds. Goins stared at the closed door. He swallowed the bite of meat.

Behind him he heard the woman say one word soaked in the fury of half a century. Then came the tremendous bellow of a shotgun. The sound bounced off the stone walls and up the hall to his office, echoing back and forth, until it faded. Goins jerked upright in the chair. His legs began to shiver. He held his thighs tightly and the shivering traveled up his arms until his entire body shook. He pressed his forehead against the desk. When the trembling passed, he went down the hall to the cells.

Gun smoke stung his eyes and he could smell cordite. The left side of the woman’s coat was hiked across her hip where she’d hidden the gun. Its barrel was shiny and ragged at the sawcut. Her legs were steady. She tossed the weapon into the cell, looked at Goins and nodded once, her expression the same as before.

The cigarette in Gipson’s cell still trailed smoke. Blood covered the newspaper article and flowed slowly across the floor. The woman stepped to the next cell and waited while he unlocked the door. Her face seemed softer. She stepped inside. When the door clanked shut, her back stiffened, and she lifted her head to the gridded square of sky visible through the small window.

People were running outside. Someone shouted his name, asking if he was hurt. Goins used the phone to call an undertaker who doubled as county coroner. It occurred to him that coroner was a better job than jailer. The coroner would receive twenty-five dollars for pronouncing the man dead, but Goins got nothing extra for cleaning the cell.

He put the Bible away and found the prisoner’s log and wrote Mullins. Under yesterday’s date he wrote Gipson. Goins rubbed his eyes. He didn’t write Haze because the man was down to a body now, and the body was a Melungeon. Goins covered his face with his hands. It was true for him as well.

He opened the door and stepped into the sun. People ducked for cover until they recognized him. He looked at them, men and women he’d known for thirty years, but never really knew. Beyond them stood the hills that hemmed the town. He began walking east, toward the nearest slope. There was nothing he needed to take. The sun was warm against his face.