Strange Folk, page 3
Belva clicked her teeth with her tongue. “Eat the food, at least. You’re skinnier than sin.” She pulled a buckeye from her pocket. “And carry this with you for the interview. For good luck.”
Lee gave her a woozy look.
“Humor an old broad.”
Lee begrudgingly took the large nut and stuffed it in her purse.
Luann came in with the kids, their cheeks flushed and eyes shining. Meredith threw a warrior pose in the middle of the room. “Mom, Luann is a total badass. She let me split wood with an ax.”
Lee imagined her headstrong daughter slicing off a limb with a sharp blade, and she internally cringed. “Iff, did you have fun?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to hold it, though.”
“That’s all right, bud. Me and Meredith can chop the wood around here.” Luann gave his shoulders a squeeze.
Lee searched his face for any signs of last night’s disturbance. “Are you still up for school today?”
He paused, but then nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
The whistle of a cardinal came from a clock on the wall, signaling that it was seven a.m.
There was a sick blur at the edges of Lee’s perception as she tried to focus on her children. She brought her hands down firmly on the table, attempting to clear it. “We need to leave in twenty minutes. I’ll get ready.”
* * *
Lee pulled up to the brick school and parked among the students’ rusting pickups and hand-me-down Corollas like no time had passed. It was a sad, ugly building, but it had been glorious to her as a teenager. Every day spent there had been one step closer to her getting out.
“Is this my school or Cliff’s?” Meredith said with a slight sneer as they got out of the car.
“Both. The middle school and the high school are in the same building.”
“Weird. So this is, like, a public school, right? It looks like it was built in the eighties.”
“Yes. A public school. I think it was the sixties. Kids used to sneak into the Cold War bomb shelter to smoke when I was here.”
At that, Meredith looked slightly impressed.
As they stood there, an incongruous red Tesla SUV pulled up at the drop-off circle in front of them and the driver’s window came down, revealing a blonde, tanned woman.
Lee froze.
“Opaline?”
Lee barely recognized her cousin Dreama. She’d dyed her long, stringy, ash-colored hair to a yellow gold threaded with platinum and had her nose shaped into a thin, pert tip. Her face was airbrushed, her left ring finger sagged under an ostentatious diamond ring, and her blouse was a blush silk.
With nowhere to hide, Lee walked slowly over to the window. “Hey, how’s it going?”
“What are you doing here? Are you moving back?”
“We’re staying for a little while. I’m surprised Grandma Mama didn’t tell you.”
“Yeah, well, Belva and I aren’t close. She doesn’t like that my husband and I are opening up new businesses around town. But we deserve to have nice places just like anywhere else. You’ll appreciate this more than anyone.” Her eyes narrowed in on Lee. “We’re going to make Craw Valley the destination in this area. We’ll have cool restaurants, nice neighborhoods, good jobs. My husband is the one who put the shopping center in at Exit 118—you might have passed it. We’re building a new subdivision out in Cradleburg right now. You should come see our house; it’s gorgeous.” She smiled. “When we’re done with it, people will actually want to come here. There’s more than enough cheap land for anything they want to build. It’s the dream.”
The idea intrigued Lee, but she was distracted by Dreama’s transformation. She had once been a quiet, sullen teenager who walked quickly in between classes and spoke only to her brother in public. It was hard to reconcile that girl with the magnetic woman in front of her.
Dreama continued in a more somber tone, “Honestly, it’s sad. I used to look up to Belva. Now she seems so out of touch. But anyway. Are those your kids? I’d love to meet them.”
Lee waved them over and made the introductions as Dreama and her sons stepped out of their car. The two boys were around Meredith’s age with neat haircuts; lean, muscular bodies; and perfect teeth.
“This is my older son, Colt. He’s the quarterback on the football team. And this is Ridge. A modeling agency in Franklin City just scouted him. You should follow him. @ridgeconway.”
Meredith looked at the boys like they were aliens, and Cliff gave Lee the let’s GTFO look.
Lee politely told them they needed to get going. As they walked toward the school, Meredith asked, “Who was that?”
“My mother had a sister named Ruby Jo, and that was her daughter. We were close when we were little, but she wasn’t a big fan of mine when we were teenagers. Though you wouldn’t know it now…”
Lee kept her head down as they walked around the building to the school entrance, afraid more people would jump out of the bushes, demanding to catch up. As she reached for the door handle, a few drops of red fell onto the pavement, flecking her shoes.
She and the kids looked up.
Hanging above the arch was a deer with its neck split and the blood running in tributaries over the door frame.
“Holy shit. That is gnarly. Am I going to be sacrificed?” Meredith looked impressed in the way she reserved only for great feats of human ability. Lee wasn’t sure what to make of this. Didn’t she find it all so… barbaric?
“I remember this. First day of deer hunting season.” She turned to them both. “Don’t worry, guys. I’ll get us out of here soon.”
* * *
In the office, she filled out employment forms after a mildly humiliating interview with the vice principal in which she had thankfully gotten the sub position. This wasn’t the triumphant return she’d imagined.
She spotted a man in a conspicuous dark purple blazer out of the corner of her eye, pulling papers out of a cubbyhole.
“Mr. Hall?”
The man looked shocked at first, but then quickly recovered, his eyes shining with pleasure.
“Opaline Ford. As I live and breathe.”
Lee took him in. Unlike most people from her old life, her feelings about Mr. Hall were uncomplicated. He had been her favorite teacher. Even after his class ended her sophomore year, she often dropped by his classroom during lunch or after school just to talk. He had moved to Craw Valley from some distant place and gone to college at a fancy school. He helped shape what her future might look like; he gave her hope.
“I’m actually going by Lee now. Lee Carnell.”
He gave her the smirk she remembered from his lectures on Catcher in the Rye. “Married, then?”
“I was. Or, technically, I am. But it will be past tense soon.” She chuckled self-deprecatingly.
He spared her the divorce condolences and said, “I see. Well, if we’re reintroducing ourselves, I go by Joseph. Outside the classroom.”
“Really? I can’t believe you were an average Joe this whole time.”
“Never Joe. Or Joey. Only Joseph.”
Lee laughed and readied herself for the next question. Why was she here? How had she fallen so far?
“Would you like to have a coffee? I have a free period.”
“Yes. That would be lovely.”
The teachers’ lounge was empty and smelled of burnt toast. Mr. Hall skipped the ancient, stained coffeemaker and pulled out two mugs, a Tupperware of ground coffee, and a pour-over device.
“I grind it myself every morning.” He poured boiling water from a kettle over the grounds. As the coffee diffused into the cups, she told him she had just taken the long-term sub position.
“What lucky children they will be,” he commented but didn’t pry further.
He had always been this way, allowing her to reveal only what she wanted of herself, to curate the personhood she desired.
Lee was transported back to those afternoons in her junior year. The light had seemed mixed with a different color once school ended. While Lee’s vocabulary was impeccable, she couldn’t fight the accent she’d imitated since birth. When she voiced a concern that she wouldn’t be taken seriously once she finally escaped the town, Mr. Hall offered to help her eradicate it. Once a week, she stood in front of him in the empty classroom and recited Shakespeare over and over, until the round, grassy accent was leached from her voice entirely.
There were times in high school when Mr. Hall seemed like the only person who understood her, and she felt the old urge to unburden herself to him.
“I know you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” she said. “And honestly, I don’t know. When I left Craw Valley, I really thought that I was going to make a nice life. And now I’m back, and I don’t have much to show for it. There are my children, but they are their own people. I can’t take credit for them. I don’t have a home, or a career, or a place to be. I’m not even back at the beginning. I’ve devolved beyond that, into this thing…”
He put a light hand on her shoulder. “Lee. To this day, you remain one of the most gifted students I have ever taught at this school. That kind of ability doesn’t just leave a person. It sounds like you’ve had a hard time of late. But what does literature teach us? Have you already forgotten my class?” He tried to coax a smile from her, but she couldn’t dredge one up. “The greatest heroines all go through trying times. Those are the moments we see what they are truly made of. It is how we know they are great.”
He’d always been able to make her feel better, even when her home life was a mess and all she had to cling to were the few hours at school when she felt a special light shining inside of her. She wanted to believe this was true, that there was some greatness that would reveal itself now that she’d ended up here. But it was doubtful.
Disgusted with her self-pitying, she studied Mr. Hall. Though she could tell he had aged by the sagging of the skin around his eyes and the airbrush of gray along his temples, he seemed the same man she had taken class from twenty years prior. His core was untarnished by the years of repetition and wrangling and solitude. This must be what it was like to find your place in the world.
Seeing him now, as a real person, she realized their relationship had only ever been about her. What she thought and what she dreamed of. She knew very little about him.
“How did you end up in Craw Valley?”
He paused and looked out the window. “When I was in grad school, my girlfriend got pregnant. Her family lived here, and she wanted to be close to them so they could help with the baby. So I graduated, we moved, and I got a teaching job at the high school.” He looked back at her. “The baby was stillborn. One morning I woke up, and she was gone. Ours was not a great love story—we were only together because she got pregnant. I should have moved on, but I loved it here. I felt like a Romantic poet or Thoreau by his pond. I imagined myself chasing fair maidens barefoot through the trees and drinking from fresh streams. One can build their own life here without feeling the pressures of the outside.”
Lee had never seen her hometown through this filter. Mr. Hall seemed to see everything through gossamer, the town’s crumbling school and faded American flags shimmering like gasoline in water. She wondered if Mr. Hall would have thrived on the outside, or if he’d sensed that he would be crushed underfoot.
THREE
Lee found herself on the porch again that night, hunched over a mug of mystery liquor.
That afternoon after school, she’d found a can of motor oil in the shed to top off her tank, but when she opened the lid, she smelled a sharp, leafy sweetness like dogwood blossoms preserved in acetone. She’d dipped her finger and brought it to her tongue. It was definitely a liquor of some kind, though nothing like the stuff you bought at a store. There was something mercurial about it, the smell and taste shifting from one sip to the next—wild, unfiltered, unregulated. It must have been Luann’s. Or Billy’s. Belva never drank.
Lee sat in the hot coals of the liquor’s strange buzz, her mind glinting gold and purple in the utter darkness. She replayed recent humiliations, picking apart each word. She could still taste Cooper in her back molar, his mouth a little sour from the last argument they had before she left.
He’d wanted to take Cliff to yet another specialist, and she’d finally confessed that she wasn’t sure something was wrong with him. Perhaps he was merely not what Cooper had hoped for in a son. She knew this incessant need to discover the root cause of his difference hurt Cliff’s feelings and made him retreat into himself, afraid of expressing what he was thinking and feeling for fear it would make Cooper angry. Cliff had once been a vibrant, social creature, but now he only spoke in front of Lee and Meredith, which had spawned new criticism from his father. Suddenly he was too shy. Too quiet. He was a freak no matter what he did. She couldn’t watch him be hurt like that any longer.
She couldn’t sit there feeling Cooper’s silent blame either, this sense that she’d somehow passed it along from her inferior body. Through a toxin absorbed in her womb or a kink in her mountain folk genetics: a protein shaped like a starburst in the chain.
If Lee was honest with herself, sometimes she wondered if she had passed something along to her children. When she was younger, she thought that once you got out, you’d be rid of the land’s twisting, stultifying effects. But over the years, Lee worried that it was still inside her. This strangeness. And now she had brought her children here. If they stayed too long, they would soak it up as she had and eventually lose themselves. She would have to stay vigilant. She would need to find a way out and not allow the place to suck her back in with its sinking gravity.
All she needed was money. That one constant throughout her life. The type of essential physics they neglected to teach in school, each person learning it in their own time.
Her first lesson was at age ten, the summer after the bridge collapse. Ten people had died, including her father and her aunt Ruby Jo. It happened early on a Sunday morning, when most of the cars were on their way to church. Except for her father—she imagined him hungover in his truck with a crease in his cheek from the couch he’d passed out on the night before. They were waiting for a train to pass, the cars backed up along the bridge filled with women in their best dresses and children silently pinching each other in the backseat with their hair still wet from the shower.
The wood buckled in the center, and then both halves sloped down and deposited car after car into the frigid water. The sheriff said her father hit his head on the way down and sat there unconscious as his truck filled to the top. He was still belted in when they found him.
Her lesson was this: one less income that summer. Three months of her ten-year-old self selling vacuums door to door and swooning in the heat while her mother turned to husk.
A shock of light streaked through her reverie as a car pulled up to the front of the house. A figure stepped out with the engine still running and the brights on, so that she could only see its shadowy outline.
“Opaline?”
“… Yes?”
“It’s Otis. I’m here for Belva.”
Otis.
The outdoor lights came on. Otis turned off the car, and the brights went black. Belva and Luann stepped onto the porch as he came through the screen door with an old man cradled in his arms like a child. Belva hurriedly opened the door and gestured them over to the living room couch already made up for Lee. She propped his head up on the cushion and wrapped him in the afghan while Luann pulled her ax from the wall and slid it under the couch.
Lee watched Otis from the other side of the room as he conferred with Belva. She recognized his collection of lines, and its imprint thrummed deep inside of her. The curve of the nose sloping into the mouth and curling up into the chin. The biceps covered in fine, dark hairs. His hair was longer and more loose without the gel that was popular when they were younger, and he’d grown a beard. But he still maintained his inscrutable calm.
“I’m sorry it’s so late. Dad hasn’t slept for three days, and the pain is making it hard for him to breathe. He won’t take the pills they gave him, and he made me promise not to take him back to the hospital. I didn’t know what to do.”
Belva reached up and put a firm hand on his shoulder. “You did the right thing. Luann will sit with him while you and Opaline help me in the back.”
Lee wondered if it was legal to practice alternative medicine on a man who clearly needed real medical attention. She knew this was part of Belva exercising her folk magic, but she saw it through a new lens now. She had encountered plenty of it on the West Coast. Lee generally believed these methods had as much power as the people believed them to have, but they couldn’t treat real, body-destroying illness. The mind could only do so much.
Meredith came out into the living room in her pajamas with her hair askew. “Mom, what’s going on?”
Lee put her hands on her shoulders and steered her back into the bedroom. “We’re just helping a friend out. Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”
“Why? What are you guys doing?” Meredith shrugged out of her grip and tried to return to the living room, but Belva’s sturdy form blocked the doorway.
“Listen to your mama, little girl. I ain’t gonna tell you twice.”
Meredith paled and quieted in response, and Lee closed the door.
Lee and Otis followed Belva to the back room where she did most of her work. Dried bunches of flowers and herbs hung from the rafters above their heads, and a fireplace stood in the corner, scarred black from frequent use. A large wooden table sat in the middle, covered with candles, piles of fabric scraps, knives, a small scale, plastic funnels. Shelves lined the walls, filled with mismatched jars of colored powders and gleaming oils, knots of hair and pieces of bone. There was a section of dirts labeled in cursive script citing dates and locations around the county, and a line of waters tinted various colors and floating with debris. The room smelled fresh and dried, zest and dust, a scent that contained too much for the brain to process.
