Wisp of a Thing

9

Bliss drove past the closed gas station at the far end of town and turned left at the light. Almost at once, the road became a shattered ribbon of potholes and rippled pavement. The way the truck bounced on the uneven blacktop made Rob’s head hurt more. He tried to look at Bliss, but couldn’t keep his vision focused. Just like the Gwinns in their truck, there were two overlapping images, and he couldn’t make his eyes decide on just one.

Bliss tapped her thumbs on the steering wheel in time with her racing mind. Just when she’d thought herself free of whatever effect this stranger had had on her at the Pair-A-Dice, there he was on the street, her street, about to be pounded senseless. She had to act; her own people’s laws and rules would not allow her to simply ignore it and drive away. Now he was in her truck, under her protection, and shortly she’d be alone with him, touching him. Would that same desire return?

They arrived at a small volunteer fire station, a cinder block square with one big garage for a single fire truck. A basketball goal hung over the door, which sported many ball-sized dents. Rob hoped they were better at fighting fires than they were at pickup games.

He stepped out of the truck, and his head swirled the moment he stood upright. “Hang on,” Bliss said calmly as she slipped one hand around his waist and draped his arm across her shoulders. It was a professional reflex, and by the time she belatedly realized she was touching him, it was clear he had no more effect on her than any injured person. She wanted to laugh at her own worries.

“I don’t need any help, I can walk,” Rob protested weakly as they crossed the driveway.

“I could tell,” she said. “Must be some newfangled kind of walking I haven’t seen before.”

“I didn’t mean right now,” he said as she guided him to the building. She propped him against the wall while she unlocked the door, then helped him inside.

He winced as the fluorescent lights flickered on, revealing the white utilitarian room used as both kitchen and staging area. “Going down,” she said, and dropped him into a folding chair at the table. He sat with his eyes closed.

Bliss put down a white cloth, then carefully arranged bandages, needle, and suture thread on it. “I should shave around the cut before I sew it up, but I’m guessing you won’t want that.”

“No, thanks.”

She dipped her fingers in a small container and smoothed the hair down away from the cut. “No problem. This curdled possum fat works just as well.”

Rob jumped and looked around, then scowled when he saw the Vaseline label. “Very funny.”

“It’s kind of funny. Now, be quiet or I’ll stitch your mouth shut, too. I’ll be right back.”

She went outside and returned with something he couldn’t see. She pressed it to his scalp around the cut.

“Ow. What is that?”

“Spiderwebs.”

“Ha ha.”

She held up her hand, with a bundle of the fine threads between her thumb and forefinger. “Seriously. It does wonders to stop bleeding.”

“Spiderwebs,” he repeated.

“The night wind didn’t give us any sickness or injury that it also didn’t give us the cure for.” Immediately she wanted to kick herself. Why am I mentioning the night wind? Trying to change the subject, she said, “Folks can live a long time using stuff like spiderwebs and pine needles.”

“Like that old bastard at the post office?”

“Yeah, he’s lived a long time, all right.”

“Peggy at the motel said he was a couple hundred years old.”

Good God, she thought, even Peggy is forgetting herself when it comes to this boy. “Oh, she was just exaggerating. I’m sure his family feels like he’s been around that long, though. Still, he’s a heck of a banjo player.”

“And that quilting lady? The one who looked like a dried-apple doll?”

She snorted. “That’s just Momma Rita.”

“Margarita?”

“No, Momma… Rita. She’s seventy-five years old, and lives all alone with her old blind husband. Believe it or not, they got about a hundred and twenty direct descendants.” She snorted. “And not a blessed one of ’em is of any account.”

One of her long braids fell in front of him, and he found himself focusing on the individual strands looped and twisted together. As her movements caused the braid to sway, his slightly fuzzed mind went through a list of connections: a black racer snake, a bullwhip, a horse’s mane, and finally a hangman’s rope. A lyric struck him:

He hoped he’d remember to write it down later. And he wondered if, instead of a lyric, it was a premonition.

The split in Rob’s scalp was deep but not wide, and less than an inch long. Bliss could’ve stitched it in her sleep, and as she worked, she tried to puzzle out both why this boy had affected her so deeply the night before, and why he left her cold now that she was alone with him. He looked like a Tufa, but there was none in him; she’d been almost sure of that anyway, and now she was positive.

“So how’d you get the name Bliss?” he asked.

“The granny-woman who delivered me named me.”

“‘Granny-woman’? Your grandmother?”

“No, sort of a… community grandmother. Like a midwife. She delivered almost all the children around here, and it was a sign of respect to ask her to sing a song that names the babies.” She dabbed at the cut, then asked, “You were down at the Pair-A-Dice last night with Doyle and Berklee Collins, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. I noticed you, too. You were—ow!—incredible, and I wanted to talk to you, but you ran off before I could.”

“Once Rockhouse and the boys get you started, you’re lucky to get out before dawn. They’re all retired, they don’t have to get up early and go to work. I told ’em I’d come by, but not how long I’d stay.”

“And you wrote that song you sang?”

“Yeah.” If he noticed the slight hesitation before she answered, he didn’t mention it.

“What was it called?”

“Er… ‘Lament for the Storm.’ Silly, I know.”

“So why are you doing this instead of playing music full-time?”

“Under the circumstances, you should be grateful that I am. Besides, all anybody really wants to hear is what’s on the radio, and I don’t have any interest in playing that.”

“So you know a lot of the songs from around here?” he asked before he’d even consciously formed the question.

“Some,” she said. “Why?”

“Well… I’m looking for one.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t know. Someone told me about it. Said, ‘If you sing it, it’ll heal your broken heart, and the heart of anyone who hears it,’ and ‘It would be on a hill, carved in stone.’”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Pretty much.” He found himself holding his breath, awaiting her reply.

“Never heard of anything like that,” she said. The thread pulled tight, and he heard it snap. “There. Good as new in a few days. Go see your regular doctor to get these out.”

He tenderly felt around the cut. As she’d said, pine needles protruded from his scalp like an acupuncture treatment. “It still hurts.”

“It’d hurt worse without ’em.” She wrapped the towel around the bloody tools. “You’ll probably have a black eye, too. Now, let’s walk around a little, make sure you didn’t do anything more serious.”

She helped him to his feet and led him through an adjoining door into the garage, past the fire truck. They went into the backyard, which bordered an overgrown field slanting down toward the valley. Beyond that, the ever-present Smoky Mountains formed cool blue and gray curves. The view, like all those in Needsville, would’ve been breathtaking if the sun hadn’t added to his headache. The light seemed extra bright, the way it did after a summer thunderstorm.

Bliss stood in front of him to again check his pupils. “Don’t squint.”

“Can’t help it.”

He managed to open his eyes enough for her, and she nodded approvingly. “I think you’ll live.”

“Will I be able to play the piano?”

“Of course.”

“Good, I always wanted to do that.” As his eyes adjusted, Rob noticed something in the field. “What’re those?” he said, pointing at a spot where some white stonelike objects rose above the tall grass.

“What?”

“Those. Those things sticking up there.”

“Some old family cemetery. They’re all over the place around here. This is the second-oldest town in Tennessee, you know.” Her blasé demeanor masked her frustration and confusion. What the hell are you? she wanted to scream. How can you see that graveyard when there’s not an ounce of the true anywhere in you?

Impulsively, Rob walked into the field toward the cemetery. “Hey, where are you going?” Bliss asked, following him. “Maybe you should go back and sit down for a while.”

“A minute ago, you said I needed to walk around.”

Before she could think of a reply, they’d reached the spot. A waist-high, rusted iron fence surrounded the tiny graveyard. Inside it, the ground was mostly bare, as though grass did not grow there very well. Four headstones and a smattering of foot markers delineated the burial plots, all adorned with the surname SWETT.

“So how come the Swetts bury their kin all the way out here behind the fire station?” Rob asked.

“They used to have a house here, but the family’s gone now. The last one sold it to the city for a dollar to use as the first fire station, in fact. Until it burned down.”

“The fire station burned down? That’s ironic.”

She nodded. “I was in high school when it happened. One of the firemen fell asleep on the toilet with a lit cigarette. He got out, but the old building went up like rice paper.”

Rob opened the gate with difficulty; the hinges were rusty and stiff, and the tilted ground had caused them to seize up at an angle. The grass stopped growing in a straight line exactly beneath the edge of the gate; he wondered if the ground had been treated with something.

“That’s not very polite,” Bliss said. “You don’t know these people.”

“‘I beg the pardon of the dead, should I tread upon their head,’” Rob said with mock solemnity. It was part of a poem he and his friends used to chant when they’d play hide-and-seek in the church graveyard. In his peripheral vision, he saw Bliss make another hand gesture, similar to the one he saw back in town. “Hey, you just did it again.”

“Did what?”

“That hand thing. Like you did to Queen Kong that made her stop dead.”

“I was shooing a bee.” Another insect, small and fluttery, popped up around her face, and she made roughly the same move again to chase it away. “See?”

He knelt before the tallest tombstone. It read THOMAS SWETT, 1824–1901. The letters were cut so deeply, the normal weathering had not yet obscured them. Beneath the name was an inscription:

Rob ran his fingertips over the chiseled letters. On a hill, the man had said…. “That’s not from the Bible, is it?”

“I’m not sure.” Oh, hell, she thought. He had to notice that.

He moved to the next marker, whose name was illegible, although the words BELOVED DAUGHTER and the dates 1832–1837 indicated it was a child. Beneath that was another inscription.

“Am I reading this right?” he asked. “‘Buried in a keg’?”

“Yeah. It means she died at sea, and her body was kept preserved in alcohol until they could bring her home. She was literally buried in a keg of rum.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, it was more common than you’d think.”

“Why didn’t they just bury them at sea?”

“Because for some people, the sea’s not home. Don’t you want to be buried somewhere near home?”

He recalled Anna’s funeral, in the graveyard of the church they’d both grown up attending, and where they planned to be married. “Never thought about it,” he lied.

The name and date on the next stone, FERLIN EDWARD SWETT, 1802–1855, were legible, but lichen covered part of the inscription beneath it. He was about to move on, when he noticed the word “feeble.” That seemed such an odd word for an epitaph that he knelt and picked enough of the green cover away to make out the phrase:

“What does that mean?” Rob asked.

“Who knows? Probably some old Victorian poem or something. I’m not a tombstone-ologist.” She knew she sounded tense, but Rob was too engrossed to notice. He looked back and forth between the two headstones.

Long forgotten, the man had said. Carved in stone.

“You know… these inscriptions could almost be two verses of the same song. Except the more recent one would be the first verse, since it talks about what happens at the point of dying, and the older one is what happens afterwards. What do you think?”

Nervous perspiration trickled between her shoulder blades, and it took real effort to sound casual. “Hm. Well, as fascinating as this is, you seem to be recovering nicely, and I need to take you back to town so I can get on to work.”

“Yeah.” He stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Thanks, by the way. For helping out back in town, and for the stitch job.”

She nodded. “Glad to do it.”

He took out his phone and began taking pictures of the inscriptions.

“What are you doing?” she almost shouted.

“Just taking pictures. That way I can play around with the words later.”

“You’d steal someone’s epitaph and turn it into a song?” She couldn’t keep the fear from her voice, but luckily it came out as outrage.

He looked at her oddly. She seemed offended all out of proportion. “Wow. I’m sorry, are these some of your people?”

“No,” Bliss said. “It just seems… rude.”

“What I really hope to do is find the poem these came from.”

“Oh.” She fought to appear calm. “That’s sensible, then. Come on, let’s get you back to the Catamount Corner.”

He started to protest, but suddenly his head swirled and he truly just wanted to lie down back in his room. He followed her back to the station, where she finally gave him some aspirin.

They were about to drive away when she abruptly stopped the truck at the end of the driveway. She searched his eyes for any gleam of the true, no matter how small, but found none. “You’re really not from around here, are you? I mean, no family from here, no history, nothing.”

“No. Sorry.”

She shook her head. “You sure look like you’ve got a good bit of Tufa in you. Hell, you and I could be brother and sister.”

“That’s a weird thing to say.”

“No, I’m serious. You don’t have any family ties to this area?”

“Not a one. It’s just a coincidence.”

They rode in silence back into town, and she dropped him off in front of the Catamount Corner. He carried his guitar through the empty lobby to his room, where he fell facedown on the bed. But he couldn’t sleep; the words from the two grave markers kept running through his mind, finding their own meter and melody.

He knew from experience that there was no fighting the muse when she struck. He pulled up the pictures on his phone, quickly transcribed the words to a piece of motel stationery, and began quietly noodling on his guitar, trying out the stanza in different ways, breaking it at different points. It worked best as a simple 4/4 rhythm, a basic chord progression, simplest thing in the world….

“Soul to earth” was a weird metaphor, he realized. Souls normally sprang to heaven, not earth. And yet it couldn’t be a euphemism for decay, because the next line explicitly covered that. He knew of no branch of Christianity that allowed the soul to return to the earth; so what religion had these people practiced?

And “through his wings”; what could that mean? Wings were reserved for angels, yet the subject of the verse was clearly not yet dead.

His cell phone rang and he jumped. He set the guitar aside and answered it. “Hello?”

“Hey, tough guy,” Doyle said, amused. “I hear you had a donnybrook on Main Street this morning.”

“Yeah, with some Neanderthal hill woman named Tiffany.”

“She’s a monster, all right. So did she beat you up too much to come over for that dinner tonight?”

“Not at all. I don’t know how much fun I’ll be, but I could sure use some home cooking.”

After Doyle gave him directions and hung up, Rob got online and tried a search for the poem or song that had inspired the epitaph. He got no results that fit. This thrilled him even more, for it meant he might be on the track of the secret, magical song that had brought him here. And they were right where the man had said they’d be: on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone.