Strange Folk, page 29
He balked. “You can’t be serious. This place is… a nightmare. How could you ever want to live here?”
She felt sorry for him. His worldview was so limited, and it hadn’t necessarily been his fault. He was a victim of his upbringing. “I don’t expect you to understand. But you can respect what we want and drop all of this legal stuff. No one cares about it. No one’s paying attention to you. It’s why Mom hasn’t come to court. We have more important things to tend to.”
He seemed to realize he’d lost control of the conversation, and he groped around to take it back. “You’re still a child, Meredith. You don’t get to make these decisions.”
“Dad. Is this what you really want? To be in a house alone with me and Cliff? It would be so weird and awkward. You know it. I know it. So please, just let us be happy here. We’ll all be so much happier if we admit what we want and allow each other to have it.”
Cooper sighed and chewed on the end of his sunglasses. He looked around at the property as if surveying the place, but she knew he was just avoiding eye contact. “Fine. If that’s what you and Cliff really want.” He put a hand up to the back of his head. “I love you guys, no matter what she’s been saying to you. I’m still your father.”
Her face softened, and she put her arms out for a hug. “I know, Dad. I love you, too.” He put his arms around her, and she could smell his cologne, like spicy, deep-hued oranges. He was such a fragile man at his core, and she started to write a spell in her head for his protection.
Corn silk wrapped around an abandoned turtle shell until you can’t see it. Must be kept in breast pocket of coat for storage against the heart. Words said while wrapping, “This man is a soft by-product of insulated privilege. He does not have the armor for this world. Give him this shell and protect him from harm.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
LEE
Lee came to in the milky light of morning.
Her mother sat sleeping in a chair pulled up to the bed. She wasn’t the wretched addict, and she wasn’t the glowing witch. She was something in between, or maybe she was neither of those things. Lee thought it was a special talent to be inscrutable, even to those closest to you. It didn’t have to mean that you were emotionally deficient. It could mean that you were constantly changing, and that you had a rich inner life that was like a world unto itself.
Lee reached out for Redbud’s wrist hanging over the arm of the chair, and she felt her rich inner life opening for her.
It had the wispy watercolor quality of a dream. Rocks rose up on either side of the wide lazy river, sparkling mud-colored in the sun. Daddy rowed in the back of the small boat, looking sober and wily in his blue jeans with a cigarette clenched between his lips. Redbud sat in the front facing him, her vibrance startling—hair like lacquered wood, skin undented, clean hazel eyes. She got on her knees next to a young Lee, and they both leaned over and trailed their hands in the water. A dragonfly landed on Lee’s small arm, and she and her mother cooed at its iridescence. A look passed between them, something unknowable and charged with an amber light.
Lee lingered on the fairy-tale tableau, trying to soak up the feeling. Then it started to dissolve at the edges, and slowly, the light at its center went out, and she returned to the bedroom.
Redbud was watching her from the chair, and Lee let go of her wrist.
“You got your memories back.”
“Some of them.” Redbud sighed. “If only we could go back and do it all over.”
“It wasn’t all romantic river floats, Mama.” She smirked at her mother, and they both chuckled.
“I know. It just hurts to remember what I used to be. I wasn’t perfect, but I was powerful. And I’m the one who threw it all away. No one took it from me. I got no one else to blame.” Her eyebrows raised and her eyes filled. “And what I did to you. And us. I’ll never forgive myself. I understand if you and I can’t have a real relationship. I don’t deserve it. As someone who can hold a grudge, believe you me, I understand.”
Lee gestured for Redbud to join her on the bed, and she obeyed. They sat there against the headboard with their legs crossed at the ankle in the same way. “We’ll never get back to the way things were. I was only a kid back then, and things are more complicated now. But I want a real relationship. I want to give you another chance. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. I was just afraid you would hurt me again if I gave it to you.”
Redbud clutched at Lee and wrapped her arms around her, and Lee let herself fall into it, as scary as it still was. She fell into a tender, pink feeling of their love.
Then Lee gently pulled away, and Redbud settled back against the headboard and entwined her arm with Lee’s. “I’ll try as hard as I can to deserve it, baby, I promise. That’s the fun of grandkids, ain’t it? You can do things right this time. They can know a better version of me than you did.”
Lee smiled. “There’s just one version of you, Mama. All of that power is still in you. I can feel it.”
Redbud smiled gratefully and wiped a tear away.
Meredith came into the room and stood in front of the bed, and they made a space between them for her.
Redbud gripped Meredith’s hand. “I’ve been meaning to apologize for lying to you, honey. I was trying to keep you from making my same mistakes.” She smiled. “But I don’t have to worry about that with you. You’re a better person than I ever was.”
Meredith smiled and leaned into Redbud’s shoulder. “Thank you for saying that.” She paused. “Will you teach me for real now?”
Redbud raised an eyebrow. “We’ll see.”
They heard footsteps, and Cliff timidly entered the room before leaping onto the bed. Meredith pulled him into their pile, and his giggles were infectious, spreading through their bodies.
“What’s going on in here?” Kimmie appeared in the doorway, looking put out. “How dare y’all cuddle without me!” She launched herself at the pile, and the bed groaned beneath them.
Sausage vapors wafted into the room, and Meredith’s stomach grumbled audibly. They all laughed at the demonic sound and filed out of the room to the kitchen.
Billy was stirring sausage gravy in the skillet, and Belva was pulling fresh biscuits out of the oven. Luann came in from outside with a bowl of apples from the tree.
Meredith and Cliff pushed the tables together and covered them in a tablecloth like Belva liked. Then they all sat down to eat together, devouring the food like wild animals until the plates and pans were clean. As they sat there with their hearts and bellies full, Belva slapped her thighs and looked around at her family. “Okay, y’all. Let’s go to the creek.”
* * *
They were some kind of procession as they walked down to the water: Cliff and Meredith skipping ahead with Kimmie, Billy and Lee supporting Belva between them, Redbud and Luann linking arms like teenagers. Lee felt like she was attending a reverse baptism, a group of people restored to themselves, unsaved.
When they reached the bank, Belva tried tugging off her sweater, and Lee helped her pull it over her head. Then came her T-shirt and pants and her shoes. Billy and Lee held one arm each as she lowered herself into the water and sighed.
Meredith was the first to follow suit, stripping down to her underwear and wading in, followed by Luann, Cliff, Billy, Kimmie, and Redbud. Meredith and Cliff splashed around in the sun, and Luann and Belva floated on their backs like lilies.
Lee just wanted to sit and take it all in from the bank. She swept her fingers through the water, warm as a bathtub in the autumn chill. It was like a hot spring, but she wasn’t sure what the energy source could be. She imagined something warm and pulsing below them, like a giant heart made of fat roots.
The peach seeped back into Belva’s pale cheeks and hair, and the violet bags disappeared from Luann’s eyes as they giggled on their backs. Billy rose from the creek with Cliff standing on his shoulders, and he shrieked before diving off. Redbud glinted with the water as she swam strokes. Meredith and Kimmie jumped in holding hands, and when they came up for air, Kimmie’s quiet sadness had washed away.
Lee allowed herself to lean back onto the bank and listen to the sounds of her family. The wild grasses cocooned her, and she could smell the wet split of their broken stalks. She brought her face up to the sunshine dappling through the canopy.
She wondered at how she had overlooked such nourishment. Elsewhere, people were trying to re-create this feeling in many different ways and often coming up short. Here, she only needed to stop moving and unfold herself to it.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
The sun was still out as they made their way to the clearing.
Cliff pulled his hand free from Lee’s and ran ahead to Kimmie, who placed her flower crown on his head. They skipped through the throngs of people coming down the path.
Once the investigations into TJ and Mr. Hall went cold and the memory of the Bucks’ involvement was buried under the frost and snow, the town returned to Belva’s booth at Peeper’s and resumed shaking their hands in church. No matter what happened, the community always came back together. They had no choice; they were all they had.
At the clearing, the townspeople greeted one another and gossiped in clusters and held each other after the long, harsh winter. They were like cave creatures poking their heads out after a lonely hibernation and drinking up the sunshine. They were all blasted off its rays.
Billy and Luann tended to the fire. The flames took on a different quality in the sunlight, light meeting light and becoming a joyous, unfamiliar element. Beverly and Linda handed out flower necklaces and wove the leftover blooms in their hair, so that every encounter was filled with wild perfume.
Redbud stood off to the side, away from the crowd. She had known most of these people her whole life, but she was self-conscious that they still saw the addict. She’d yet to relapse, and Lee was grateful for the time, however brief it might be.
Belva sat in the corner on an old wooden chair, her skin and hair bleached, more sun than blood now. She was fading, and they all knew it. Meredith spent hours with Belva every day, watching as she went about her daily business, sometimes with Cliff when he was interested. Lee liked to sit in just to hear Belva speak.
It was clear that Meredith was special. Extraordinary, like Redbud had been. A conjurer.
And then there was Cliff. The first seer in the family in five generations. He could see snatches of the future, but also people’s emotions and the hidden qualities of things.
They, not Lee, would be the ones to perpetuate the tradition and continue Belva’s work. Lee would always be there to support them and to spend a day or a night around the fire. But she didn’t want to dedicate her life to it.
Lee had started looking at the counseling graduate program at the university a few hours away. She may not be powerful like her mother or Meredith, but she could roam around a person’s internal landscape. She wanted to help people like her mother. She knew how seemingly impossible it was to treat addiction, and that was a challenge she wanted to meet. The quest for knowledge was where she’d thrived all those years ago, and she wanted to return to it. That was where she belonged. And now she would use it to serve her community, as generations of Bucks had done before her.
Lee had only seen Dreama from afar since that night, roaming the back roads in a daze. Her hair had thinned close to the skull, and her features were puffed but frail like balloon skin. She looked like a husk of a person, hollowed out and fading into the gray around her.
She and her husband were forced to file for bankruptcy after failing to sell enough plots in their subdivision development. Their restaurant chain had also failed to draw the right investment, and the crowds had slowed to a trickle, annoyed with the high prices and the forced versions of their grandma’s favorites. They could taste the pretense, and it would close soon as well. Her husband had already left town to return to the Northeast without her, and he’d taken his strapping sons with him.
Lee imagined Dreama wandering the woods for the rest of her days and slowly fading into the scenery. Lee couldn’t feel pure empathy for her after what she’d done to Otis, but she could lament the ruin of it, that such degradation could exist inside a person, and she had witnessed it.
A band began to play off to the side, and she noticed they were the same musicians from the bonfire when she first returned to Craw Valley.
Lee thought of drinking, and the way it had made that bonfire transcendent. She could feel that there was magic happening here, even without the booze, and she tried not to grip the feeling too hard. She’d started going to meetings with Redbud, and while she felt like a fraud with her stories of suburban boredom and late-night benders that paled in comparison to the depravity of the others, she found kinship and fortitude against the temptation there. Her addiction story extended beyond the boundaries of her own experience and radiated out around her in the community and behind her for generations, like the healing and magic that was also a part of her blood.
The smell of wild blueberries filled her nose, as if materializing out of the memory of the bonfire. A hand touched her shoulder, and she turned around.
There he was. Haloed in sunlight and wearing a garland of blossoms over his flannel. Otis ran a hand through her hair, and she kissed him on the wrist. They would have their time together later, and she burned at the promise of it.
Otis had woken from the coma the morning after they met Dreama in the woods. He still had a few minor neurological and motor issues, but it was undeniably him. He’d returned to her.
Meredith began to hum in the middle of the crowd, and gradually, the rest joined her unquestioningly, caught up in the moment. The sound was not as harmonious as usual, but it was beautiful for its slipshod form, like a cocoon made of sticks, feathers, and metallic ribbons of old chip bags.
When the hum reached a crescendo, Meredith let it resolve into a scream that she lobbed up toward the sky. In that scream, Lee could feel her daughter’s love for Belva and her fear of losing her that had stored up all winter like snowdrifts. The energy of it released into the air like invisible fireworks.
From Redbud’s place at the edge, Lee heard a painful, guttural holler shoot up like a rocket. Something shifted in her mother’s face, and then her shoulders relaxed, and Lee watched her finally join the crowd.
Lee imagined all of her old regrets combining into a small sticky ball inside of her. She lit it on fire, and it burned a trail through her as it exited in a scream, sailing up and disappearing into the raw sunlight.
Others joined in, and their energy shot up in plumes among the treetops. The land would absorb this energy, this pain and elation, and channel it toward growing new things.
The band kicked up, and she watched as Kimmie pulled Cliff into a feral, twisting dance. Then Billy and Otis joined, moving their shoulders and shuffling their feet. Meredith leaped into the fray with Redbud, who swept her around the floor in a gleeful two-step.
Others joined in, inspired by the rough-edged movements of her family. Luann dragged Belva’s chair to the center and danced around her as she clapped her hands. The dark flowers were innocent and emerald in the sun, curling around the dancing throng like wedding decorations.
For a while, Lee watched from the outside. There was so much joy and beauty in it.
Meredith came toward her with her arm outstretched and mischief in her eyes. Lee looked at her daughter, her heart pounding and the air fluttering in her throat. Then Lee took her hand, and she was pulled into the twisting, writhing tangle—
And she became one of them, their bodies moving together under the redbud branches flowering in the new sun—the first sign of spring.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First off, thank you to the ancestors, both distant and recently departed. To Peggy Shockley, the original “Grandma Mama,” you were a special woman. I wish we had more time to know each other. To Lowangie Buck, a historian, a naturalist, an autodidact, a figure of elegance. This book is neither of your stories, but little pieces of you live within it.
To my former editor, Natalie Hallak, for helping me locate the organs of this book, especially the ones that feel. I have learned so much from working with you. To my new editor, Laura Brown, I’m excited to start this journey with you. To Elizabeth Hitti for your thoughtful suggestions and continued support—I am so happy to have you on my team. To Lindsay Sagnette and the rest of the exceptional team at Atria—I can’t imagine a better place for this story.
To my agent, Alexandra Machinist, for reading this book in the middle of the night and deciding to take a chance on it. You are a force, and I am grateful to have your power in my corner. To Katherine Flitsch for everything you do behind the scenes—it is not taken for granted. To Michelle Weiner, Sarah Harvey, Karolina Sutton, and the rest of the team at CAA for your hard work.
To Clare Beams, who ran an online workshop for the Center for Fiction in the fall of 2020 where I wrote the first chapters of this book. Your enthusiasm helped me finally begin something I’d been working toward my whole life. Thank you to the writing group that grew out of that workshop—Tim Wojcik, Jason Baum, Rosa del Duca—for your invaluable feedback.
To the writing professors at UVA for my first undergrad workshops and to my fellow writers for reading and commenting on my early work.
To my friends at WME and Temple Hill for teaching me about books and stories, and to all the authors I’ve worked with for teaching me about writing.
To Kate Ringo for being my first reader and sounding board for all things. To Alex Addison for reading and offering guidance every step of the way. To Kaleigh Oleynik and Sarah Dougherty for reading early drafts. To Audrey Terrell for reading my first stories when we were kids. To all the friends who encouraged me to write and supported me over the years.
To Mark Dyer for giving me opportunities for a good life. To Amy Dyer and Lamont Ingalls, who showed me a life devoted to ideas and books. To Neile Minette, an avid reader and a loving mother; I wanted to write a book that you would read. To Jen Murphy for all that you do for us.
