Scratch, page 16
“Please say you’ll do it,” Holly said. Adam could hear the excitement in her voice, and the total belief she had in him. He thought there was something else, too. Something that said it was time for him to start his life again.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “It sounds like a good idea, but I need to roll it around in my head for a while. Okay?”
“Yay!” Holly said, and hugged him tightly.
“Yay!” Mike yelled and wrapped her arms around his leg. She didn’t know what for, but she didn’t want to be left out of the celebration.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Hey,” Holly called from the living room later that afternoon. “I finally got a dial tone on this thing.” She was on the couch with a large black telephone in her lap. The receiver looked huge against her cheek, and the rotary dial was positively charming in an old-fashioned sort of way. It was a pain in the ass to actually dial, yes, but charming nonetheless.
“I’m going to call Mom and let her know we made it here okay,” she said.
“Okay,” Adam said, coming into the room from the foyer. Michaela tagged along, and climbed sleepily onto the couch next to Holly. She clutched Buggly and stuck a thumb in her mouth.
“Nap time, hunh?” Holly said while ruffling Mike’s hair.
“Tell your Mom ‘hi’ for me,” Adam said. “I think I want to do some exploring. I’m gonna take a walk.”
“Don’t get lost, city boy,” Holly teased in an exaggerated hillbilly drawl. “And watch out for the inbreds. They’ll fetch you up the holler and make you squeal.”
“I’ll stick to the road,” Adam said. “Or a well worn path at the worst. The country really is beautiful here. If we’re going to stick around I want to get to know the place.”
“Be careful,” Holly said. “Give my idea some thought.”
“I plan on it.” He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss, then tried to put one on Mike’s cheek. Mike rolled over, too tired and cranky to be affectionate. Adam snuck one on the back of her head then turned and walked to the door and left the house.
Holly lifted the receiver to her ear again and clicked the buttons on the cradle to get the dial tone. She stuck her finger in the hole in the dial over the zero and swirled it around, then waited impatiently as it returned.
“Good God,” she mumbled to herself. “I could’ve punched in the whole number while I was waiting. She shook her head and wished for speed dial.
“As soon as we find the box with our own phone in it, this one is going on the mantle as a conversation piece.” She smiled at her unintentional pun as the phone at her mother’s house began to ring. After four rings Carol finally picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom!” Holly said.
“So you finally thought to call,” Carol said. Holly heard her light a cigarette.
“Finally?” Holly hated the way her mother always made her feel like she had to explain herself, but she launched into it anyway. “Mom, we just left you yesterday. The phone didn’t even work until this morning.”
“So, you’re in Canaan?” Carol asked. “How is the place?”
“It’s nice, Mom. The house is even more beautiful than I remembered.”
“I don’t know how your grandmother lived there alone for all those years,” Carol said. “Rattling around in that big, old barn all by herself. I tried to get her to move up here, but she wouldn’t leave.”
“It’s not a barn,” Holly said. “It’s big, but it’s really gorgeous here.”
“Have you met your neighbors yet?”
“Some,” Holly said. “The Reverend Toland and his wife, and a couple of others. They all seemed nice. Jack Hardy gave us the key and showed us to the house. He said to tell you ‘Hi,’ Caroline.”
“He always called me by my full name,” Carol said. “I hated it. How’s Michaela?”
“Mike,” Holly said, relishing the irony even as she said it, “is fine. She’s taking a nap. I think the trip tuckered her out pretty good.”
“Tuckered?” Carol said. “Good lord, you’re already starting to talk like them. You’ll be saying ‘y’all’ in no time. Better move back while there’s time.”
“Aw shucks, Ma,” Holly drawled. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my talking. Jest ‘cause I ain’t using no high-faluting words.”
“Oh, ha ha,” Carol said. “By the way, changing the subject, did the movers get all of your stuff there?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see them?”
“No. They put everything in the house the day before we got here. Had some help from some of the locals, I guess, but they left when they were done. Why?”
“Because no one has seen them since the morning they left to go to Canaan.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re missing,” Carol explained. “Never came home. Elmer lives alone, and I guess that boy, what’s his name?”
“Joe, I think.”
“Joe, yeah,” Carol said. “Anyway, I guess Joe’s wife just thought he was out drinking with some buddies, ‘cause he never came home, and since she works she didn’t even miss him till last night. Started calling around and found out nobody had seen him. Checked on Holland’s place and it was empty and the truck was gone.”
“How do you know all this if it was just last night?”
“It’s Appleton,” Carol said. “Word gets around. And besides, when the sheriff checked Elmer’s records at the office they got my number, since I hired them, and he called me himself to ask if I knew where they were going or if I’d heard anything.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing,” Carol said. “Other than what they already knew. They were supposed to haul your stuff to Canaan, and as far as I knew, that’s what they did. Nobody’s real worked up about it yet, ‘cept maybe Joe’s wife, and I think that’s just ‘cause she thinks Joe left her for somebody else.”
“That doesn’t explain Mr. Holland though.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Jack said that they left late the night before last,” Holly said. “Everything was fine then. Maybe they were in an accident and no one knows where they are.”
“They’ll turn up,” Carol said. “You might get a call from the police about it in the meantime, but it doesn’t sound like you know anything that will help.”
“Weird,” Holly said.
“So call when you’re ready to come to your senses and come home,” Carol said. “Give my baby sugar from Gran’ma.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” Holly said. “Love you.”
“Un-huh,” Carol said, and then hung up. Holly dropped the heavy receiver back into its cradle.
So what happened to the movers?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Adam strolled down the path in the front yard with no real destination in mind. It was hard to know where you were going when you only had a vague idea of where you were. He crossed the dirt road to the barn. The large front door was made of the same lumber, hard and gray with age, as the rest of the structure. It was held shut with an eight-inch piece of wood that revolved around one single rusty nail. Security apparently wasn’t much of a concern out here in the boonies. Adam turned the “lock” and the door swung open on hinges that screamed a cold chill into his vertebrae.
Thin shafts of afternoon light sliced the dark interior of the barn. A galaxy of dust motes danced in the vertical spotlights. The air was stuffy and smelled of musty old hay. Through quarter-inch and wider gaps in the floorboards Adam could see that there was a lower level that had a dirt floor. More boards had been nailed to one wall to form a crude ladder down through a trapdoor. Another ladder ran up to the hayloft. Adam saw their furniture under tarp-covered piles in the middle of the floor. To one side of this were the remains of an old horse-drawn buggy. Two wheels were missing, and another was in poor repair. The grime of decades layered the hard wood bench.
Adam closed the door and turned the latch. He wanted to explore the barn... and the attic and basement of the house, for that matter. He would have plenty of time for that later. Today he wanted to walk in the country.
If he took the easy route, downhill, he would end up in Canaan. Instead, he turned uphill and went in the opposite, unexplored direction. The sun was bright, but there was a good early May breeze, so it wasn’t too hot. His feet kicked up dust with every step on the narrow road. Flowers and weeds, none of which Adam could identify, bloomed in great profusion along the side. Trees proudly displayed their new leaves, and the air was alive with the sound of birds and insects.
Before he had gone a hundred yards he was out of sight of the house and in the wilderness. It was foreign to Adam, who had spent his life in one city or another. He had walked on nature trails, of course, in parks where civilization wasn’t that far away. But this was different. It was peaceful in a way that no city park, no matter how well kept, could ever rival. There was an overwhelming sense of being alone, yet it didn’t feel threatening. Adam supposed there could be dangerous animals out here, though he doubted he would run into lions, or tigers, or even bears for that matter, but he wondered about skunks, and rabid raccoons, and snakes, Oh My!
But the only wildlife he encountered was the occasional groundhog that scampered across the road in front of him, and more squirrels than he had ever seen, performing circus maneuvers in the branches. Once he heard a crashing noise in the woods as something large ran through bushes. He didn’t see anything, but assumed it was a deer.
Adam had always been a walker. Before this past winter he had tried to get out for a walk every day. Usually just around the block, but it was something. Walking cleared his head and allowed him to think more clearly. It probably would have helped with his depression if he had had the energy to get off the couch.
He had a lot to think about. It had been a busy and life-changing couple of days, and he knew that he hadn’t really thought about all of the ramifications of their move yet. The reality of living out here was going to be different than what they expected. Holly seemed happy, and Mike would be wherever they were, so Adam decided to let life take care of itself for a while.
He liked Holly’s suggestion about writing children’s books. It was an idea he would never have thought of on his own. He liked to write, and short pieces seemed to be his strength. He really liked the notion that his stories might not only entertain kids, but teach them as well. He thought of Michaela’s rapt attention when she listened, and the simple joy the act seemed to bring to her. He also remembered how, just the other night, she had used his stories to help deal with a trauma. Stories, at least the best of them, were healing as well as entertaining. And wasn’t healing what he really wanted to do? The problem was, he didn’t know where to start.
That wasn’t true. Of course he knew where to start. Even Michaela knew where to start.
Once upon a time…
Everything else would lead from there. Adults wanted to know more than that in their stories. Adults wanted to know where characters came from, what their backgrounds were, why they were in the place they were in. Adam supposed novelists were glad of that. It made for a lot of pages, if nothing else. But for a kid, it was much more simple.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Mike, and her very best friend in the whole world was a big old bear named Buggly. They had many adventures together, and this is one of them.
Adam composed as he walked. He felt more relaxed, more whole, than he had in a long time. Ideas for stories filled his head easily. Writing them would be simple. It would take Holly far more time to do the illustrations. As far as getting them published, that would come next, and Adam trusted that he and Holly could do the work needed to make that happen. It wasn’t guaranteed, but then, nothing was. The stories had to come first.
He walked for about a mile, lost in thought but enjoying the peace of the country. He went around a sharp curve and came upon a Y in the road. Another road, little more than a path through the trees, broke off to the left of the one he was on. Rising out of the tall weeds was a sign which read, “Canaan Coal #2 Quarry Road.” Adam hesitated for a moment, and then decided the smaller road looked more interesting. He turned and continued his walk along this new route.
The road consisted of two dirt paths where car wheels, or more probably truck, had tamped down the earth. Grass and weeds grew in a strip down the middle. There wasn’t room for two vehicles. If you met someone here, one of you was going to have to back up. Adam idly wondered when the road had last been in regular use. Not since the mines had gone under, he supposed. The weeds looked like they had been knocked down recently by the passage of something. This path probably served as a great place for teens to go parking, not that he had seen any teens in town other than Shelley. He assumed there was more somewhere, though. He realized he was making a lot of assumptions. Someone could live out here. He could be on somebody’s driveway for all he knew.
He paused as the thought sank in, visions of the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s with over-sized squirrel guns chasing him “offen their prop’ty.” He laughed the image off, but proceeded with more caution. At the first signs of habitation, he would turn around and go home.
The road continued, becoming rougher and more rutted as it progressed. He saw shards of rock scattered along the trail, and then piles of the same gray stone. The light grew brighter as the trees around him grew thinner.
There was a clearing ahead, and coming from it, a sound he couldn’t identify. It was a chirruping noise, loud and pervasive. He stopped for a moment and listened. The noise continued unabated. It didn’t sound dangerous, so he moved on. Abruptly, the road came to an end and he stepped into a clearing in the middle of the forest. There was no grass on the ground, only dirt and gravel, and a few struggling weeds. Less than fifty feet in front of him was the quarry, a large gash in the earth, half full of cloudy water. Adam walked to its edge and stared out over the trench.
The chirruping noise stopped as hundreds of tiny frogs leapt into the algae-covered water of the quarry. Adam jerked back in surprise, then laughed at his own fear. Frogs. That was all it had been all along. They were harmless, even if there were a lot of them. Probably not as many as Carol had in her collection. He watched as tiny bubbles rose through the murky water. Carol had grown up here. Adam idly wondered if, like Holly and her angels, Canaan was where her obsession had begun
The walls of the pit were solid stone, scarred and damp. The whole spot had once been the site of a substantial work area. As he walked around, Adam saw tire tracks impressed in the ground, left by some massive vehicle, fossils of a time long gone. There was a rusty length of chain half buried in the dirt, and broken glass, and the remains of a rotted work glove smashed flat in old dried mud. Adam felt like an archeologist who had stumbled upon the remains of an ancient and abandoned civilization.
We know little about the indigenous people of Canaan, he thought as he pried the glove out of the dirt and speculated whose hand had last been in it. There were few clues to the way they lived, so we can only guess what strange customs and rituals they observed. He walked back to the edge of the pit. There was a drop-off of about forty feet to the water level. The algae was a thick green scum around the edges of the water, but grew thinner near the middle of the pond. The air was filled with a cloying, vegetable smell. Adam looked down again, unable to see any frogs this time. Cattails grew around the edges, some old and dead, others green with new life. Directly below where he stood he could see black water through a large opening in the algae, and he briefly wondered what could have made the hole. The image of a giant frog, the size of a truck perhaps, leaping into the water and swimming away came to mind. It was a good image, one he might be able to build a Mike and Buggly story around. He smiled and tucked the image away
He tossed the old glove into the pit and watched as the murky water claimed it. It sank below the surface and, unseen by Adam, settled on the windshield of “Holland’s Moving, Delivery, and Storage” truck.
Adam walked around the edge of the pond. Several times he heard a splash as another frog leapt in. Dragonflies buzzed lightly on the breeze, and a long necked bird, a heron or maybe a crane, stood knee deep at the far side of the pit. He watched it for a few moments, until it flapped its huge wings and lifted itself over the cattails and disappeared over the trees of the forest.
He thought about going back, but was enjoying himself more than he had thought he would. There was something very freeing about being alone in the wilderness. His mind felt clearer than it had in months, and while he was having lots of ideas, his thoughts weren’t racing out of his control. He wanted to explore some more, his own thoughts as well as the area.
He was fascinated by the idea that, in spite of how deserted this place was now, there had been life here at one time. He was a newcomer, but the woods and the mountains had always entertained life. Sometimes when traveling, Adam would look at the houses and wonder about the people who lived there, aware that while he was just passing through, this was home to someone. He felt that very strongly here. Until he met Holly he had never heard of Canaan, West Virginia. It was as unreal to him as Atlantis or Oz; even more so, because he at least had mental pictures of those fictional places. Canaan just didn’t exist in his world.
But it had, of course. People had lived here for decades, probably centuries. He wasn’t sure that Native American tribes had lived in this area, but he supposed they probably did. Centuries of history had taken place here, people living their lives, enduring their pains and sorrows, and sharing their joys. He might hear a few stories, but Adam knew he would never know everything. That was always true, he supposed. Even life-long residents of the valley couldn’t know everything that happened here. People, and communities, always had secrets running through them just under the surface, like a vein of coal in a hillside. Sometimes you could mine that coal, other times it stayed hidden forever.
