TEN

BEIMER, KENTUCKY, WAS in a wide, cleared-out valley between two mountain ranges. A narrow, quick-rushing stream called Long Rock River cut in wiggles through the middle of the valley. The railroad followed the riverbed, though not in wiggles. Seen from the window of the train, the water of Long Rock River ran silver over gray and had the look of water cold as dripping ice. Years later, when he told of first seeing the river, Ben would vow he could see foot-long fish leaping up and over the water’s spew, their flesh-colored bodies flashing like shooting stars. It was a tale doubted by those who heard it.

Beimer, itself, was not a town. It was a place, a train stop. It had a small depot, a water tank, and a one-room store that was located across a wide dirt road from the depot.

The store did not have a posted name.

“Don’t need one,” said the man who sat on an empty nail keg near the front door of the store. “Only store around here, almost to Bowling Green, I reckon. Everybody just calls it the store.”

“Just wondered,” Ben said. “Didn’t see a sign.”

The man was lanky and thin, his shoulders narrow and up-pointed, like a buzzard’s wings when the buzzard is on the ground. He wore overalls and a dingy cloth shirt buttoned at his throat and work shoes with dry, cracked soles. A felt hat was pulled oddly low on his head, touching his ears. His hair was dark and long. A beard grew wild over his face, but could not cover the wrinkles that eroded his cheeks. Thick eyebrows nested over his eyes. He had a smile that seemed friendly enough. No teeth. None up front, at least. To Ben, he favored a caricature of Abraham Lincoln.

“Don’t see many folks getting off the train here,” the man said. He laughed a quaint, giggly laugh. “You the first this whole year, I reckon. Old man Clifford Cooley’s boy come last Christmas. Come all the way from Atlanta, by God. Him and his wife and kids. Three of them. Boys, I reckon. They was so blame covered up against the cold, I was hard up to tell. By God, they didn’t stay no longer than they had to. Couple of days later, they was back on that train, going back to Atlanta. Reckon they’d had all they wanted off old man Cooley.”

The man again laughed his giggly laugh and covered his toothless grin with the back of one hand. He added, “Old man Cooley’s not got the sense God put in a pile of dried-up cow shit.”

Ben acknowledged the man’s description of Clifford Cooley with an accommodating nod.

“You got folks up here?” asked the man.

“No sir,” Ben said.

“Who you be?” The question was easy, not threatening.

“My name’s Ben Phelps, sir,” Ben told him. “I’m from down east of Atlanta.”

“Well, God-o-mighty,” the man whispered in awe. “That’s a piece away. Yes, it is. A piece away.” He extended his hand to Ben. “Name’s Henry Quick. My daddy was Gurney Quick. I run this store.”

“Yes sir, I guessed so,” Ben said.

“Who you up here to see, Ben Phelps?” Henry asked.

“I’m looking for Foster Lanier,” Ben answered.

Henry Quick’s head jerked up in surprise. His small, nut-colored eyes fanned open. “Well, by God,” he exclaimed. “Foster. By God. Foster. You not one of them baseball fellows, are you?”

“Sir?”

“One of them baseball fellows, come to try to get Foster to play some more,” Henry said. “Foster’s not got but one leg. Can’t hardly walk no more, even with them crutches he got for hisself. Used to be, they was baseball fellows in here all the time, looking for him, not knowing he’s not got but one leg.”

“No sir,” Ben said. “I’m not looking for him to play ball. We’re just friends. We used to play ball together.”

The news excited Henry Quick. “Well, by God. That right? Me and Foster played some when we was just young’uns. I wadn’t much, but Foster, he was something to behold, I tell you.” He looked at Ben with admiration. “And you played with him? Don’t look like you old enough.”

“Last year he played,” Ben said. “It wadn’t for long. Just a few weeks.”

“By God,” Henry said again. “What you come to see him about?”

“He sent me a letter,” Ben replied. “Just thought I’d pay him a call.”

Henry wagged his head gravely. He said, “Foster’s not doing too good.” He looked at Ben. “You know his woman?”

“Lottie?” Ben said. “Yes sir, I’ve met her.”

“She sure is a pretty thing.”

“Yes sir.”

“She comes in sometimes when they need something. Brings her boy in with her. They got a old buggy and a horse that’s not fit to feed.”

“She been in lately?” asked Ben.

Henry cocked his head in thought, stroked the beard that dangled below his chin. “Can’t say that I seen her in a week or two. But it’s a pretty good way up to their place. Two, three mile, I reckon. Maybe more.”

“You guess you could tell me how to get there?” Ben said.

“Guess so,” Henry answered. “Not hard to find.” He pointed south. “You go on down the road there for about a half mile, down to where they’s a little knoll covered up with rocks about the size of a shoe box. My daddy used to say it was where some Indians was buried, but nobody ever dug up no bones that I know about.”

Henry laughed, rocked back on the nail keg. “Anyways, they’s a little wagon-track road going up in the hills. You follow that, you gone come to where Foster lives. Got him a little log cabin up there. Pretty sight. Reckon it’s pretty as any place you’ll find around here. Used to be, leastways. Not been up there in close to a year, myself. Me’n some others that live hereabout went up there and cut up a stack of stovewood, and I guess we’ll be going back before too much longer, before winter sets in. All that land back up there used to belong to the Laniers. Foster’s sold off some of it, I hear, and I expect that’s right. Don’t know how they’d make out otherwise.”

Ben shifted his suitcase in his hand and glanced inside the store. “You think of anything they might be needing, since I’m going up there?”

Henry’s laugh turned to a cackle. He stood, unfolding a body that was well over six feet tall. His head seemed to bob between his up-pointed shoulders.

“Can’t carry much if you walking around with that valise,” Henry advised, “but I’d guess they could use some chicory coffee, and, knowing Foster, he’d be happy over a bottle of good makings.”

“You got some?” Ben asked.

Henry cackled again. Cackled like a man who has been told a new and surprising joke. “Son, you in Kentucky,” he said.

FINDING THE KNOLL covered in shoe-box-size rock was easy. The tale of an Indian burial ground was most likely true, Ben reasoned. He had read of such rituals from stories of archaeologists—how Indians, for some reason no one really understood, made little mountains for burial grounds. Carried the dirt, handful by handful, or vessel by vessel, from one place to another, tamping it down to make it look like just another hill. Yet, if you dug into those hills you would find pottery and arrowheads and tomahawks and clay dolls and beads. Anything Indians used. And bones. You would find bones of Indians dead hundreds of years. It awed Ben that archaeologists could take a bone fragment and say that it was the remains of a warrior or an old woman or a baby. And from his reading, it seemed to Ben that what the archaeologists really wanted to find was the burying place of a chief. A chief’s grave would be so full of treasure they would have to dig it out with their fingertips, or with spoons, or with brushes.

He would have enjoyed being an archaeologist, Ben thought. Finding things that had been buried for hundreds of years. Bones and beads and flint knives and maybe gold bracelets or onyx and amethyst stones washed up from the creek beds. Sweeping the dirt off the grave of an Indian chief had to be better than sweeping the dirt from the floor of Ledford’s Dry Goods.

The wagon-track road was grass-and-weed-covered. Not often traveled by anyone other than Lottie driving the buggy, Ben guessed. The road had the look of trying to disappear, or to heal itself of the wounds of travel from years back. Only the thin, hard-packed tracks of the buggy’s wheels left marks.

Watch for snakes, Ben thought. Timber rattlers probably. He had never been to the Kentucky mountains, but the look of the land in the long-shadow hour of the day made him think of timber rattlers. Maybe hiding in the ruts of buggy tracks, colored like the dirt, like leaf rot.

The train from Chattanooga had been delayed five hours. A late-afternoon wind blew across the valley and skated up the green-needled backs of hemlock and pine and red cedar, a racing, yowling, playing wind, and the feel of it and the sound of it pushed a chill through Ben’s body. Must get cold in the mountains at night, he thought. Even in summer, it must get cold.

He stopped his walk beside a stream that nudged close to the road, its water lashing at an outcropping of gray, flat rock wedged solidly into the creek bank. He judged that he was better than halfway up the wagon road from the Indian mound. If Henry Quick had the wits to run a store, he would not be too far off on his estimate about the distance to Foster’s home. Another mile should do it, Ben reasoned. Soon, he hoped. The climb had taken energy, and he could feel an ache in his chest and a tenderness in his throat, and he wondered if the summer cold he had had a few weeks earlier was making a return.

He cupped water from the creek in the palm of his hand and drank from it. The water was cold and tasted of moss and, curiously, cinnamon. Whiskey-making water, Foster would call it. Ben wondered if the jar of whiskey that he carried with him, the jar bought from Henry Quick, had been made from the same water, and if it tasted of moss and cinnamon.

A crow cawed from the top of a pine. Another answered from nearby, hidden by limbs.

Ben inhaled slowly, taking the air deep into his lungs. Clean. Cool. Not thick with humidity. A scent of woodsmoke, he thought. Maybe from Foster’s cabin. Or maybe it was not woodsmoke, but the scent of the woods damp with water from rain or from seepage puddling into shallow pockets of springs. Still, he was close to the cabin. He could sense it.

THE CABIN WAS in a clearing on a shoulder of land that bulged up from the road and curved into the side of the mountain. A stand of hemlock, large at the base, sky-tall, surrounded the cabin at the edge of the clearing.

From the road, with the sun’s slant crossing its roof in a bright ribbon through the dense trees, Ben thought the cabin looked like a painting he had seen on the cover of a magazine. A string of smoke rose from a chimney, waved ghostly in the air—smoke arms and smoke legs swimming out of the string—and Ben believed it was the woodsmoke he had smelled, or thought he had smelled. Smoke arms and smoke legs slithering over the mountains, becoming invisible, leaving only their scent.

A small barn was behind the house, a rail fence disappearing into the woods, into a growth of rhododendron and sassafras. The fence was draped with bushes of climbing red roses, heavy-flowered, their petals the color of blood. A horse, back-bowed, thin, a scabbed coat, stood listlessly near the fence.

Ben slowed his walk. He had risked his job because Foster had summoned him, and now, on the yard road to the cabin where Foster lived, Ben was unsure he had made the right decision. Foster and Lottie shared part of his life that he could never share with his mother, or with Sally, or with anyone. They knew the secret of his hit against Baby Cotwell. They knew of his night in the tent with Lottie. They knew of his weakness and his shame. Maybe he had been wrong in answering Lottie’s letter.

He was at the cabin. It was too late to turn back, to undo what he had done.

The door to the cabin opened and Lottie stepped onto the porch. She had not changed, Ben thought. Thinner, perhaps, but still girl-pretty. A small boy moved like a shadow from the cabin and ducked behind her, clutching to the dull cotton dress she wore. The boy had a wreath of blond hair.

“Hello, Ben Phelps,” Lottie said softly. She smiled. A smile of gladness, of relief.

“Hello, Lottie,” Ben said.

“You sure look nice, Ben.”

A blush swept over Ben’s face. He glanced at the suit he wore, felt foolish. “I kind of overdressed,” he said. He added, “For the train ride.”

“I like it,” Lottie told him.

The boy peeked from behind her, tugged at her dress.

“Ben, stop it,” Lottie said. She pulled the boy from behind her, holding him by his hand. “This is Ben,” she said. There was pride in the way she said the name of her son.

“Hello, Ben,” Ben said. “That’s my name, too: Ben.”

“This is the man you was named for, honey,” Lottie said. “Now when I say Ben, I guess you won’t know who I’m talking to.”

“Maybe you better call us Big Ben and Little Ben,” Ben suggested.

“I like that,” Lottie said. “Big Ben and Little Ben.”

“He’s a fine-looking boy,” Ben said. “Looks like you.”

Lottie shook her head, then ran her fingers through the blond hair of her son. “Looks like my daddy, some. Like my daddy looked when I was little. Got Foster’s eyes, though.”

“How’s Foster?” asked Ben.

“He’s inside,” Lottie said. “Just waiting for you. Come on in. See for yourself.”

The cabin had a large center room with a stone fireplace on the back wall. An open-frame door led to the kitchen. Another door, closed, led to another room, a bedroom, Ben guessed. The shade-dark center room was sparsely furnished with a table and four chairs, a rocker near the fireplace, and a bed against one wall. Foster was in the bed, propped against pillows, a quilt covering him at the chest.

“Well, by God,” Foster said in a hoarse whisper.

Ben blinked in surprise. The man in the bed did not look like Foster Lanier. The man in the bed was a skin-covered skeleton. The skin was pale, the color of old straw. A film of perspiration glistened on his brow. His eyes were dull, drawn into his skull.

“Hello, Foster,” Ben mumbled.

Foster laughed weakly, then coughed. He lifted a hand, let it drop back to the bed. “God-o-mighty, Ben, you look like Arnold Toeman.” His voice was like escaping air.

Ben forced a smile. He touched the front of his suit.

“It’s his train-riding clothes,” Lottie said.

The sound from Foster was like a sigh: “Uh-huh.” He scrubbed his head against the pillow. “Come over here, boy. Let me get a look at you.”

Ben put down his suitcase and removed his hat and moved to the bed. Foster’s eyes seemed to float over him.

“Put on a few pounds, it looks like,” Foster wheezed.

“Some,” Ben said.

A sad smile lifted in Foster’s face. “I lost a little bit,” he said.

Ben did not reply. He reached across the bed and touched Foster’s hand.

“Last time I seen you, you was in bed and I was the one standing by it,” Foster said.

“That’s right,” Ben replied.

Foster took Ben’s hand in his own and squeezed it lightly. “Glad to see you, Ben. Damn glad. Glad you come.”

“I’m glad to be here, Foster.”

There was a pause. Foster’s hand went limp on Ben’s hand and then he said, “No, you not.” He paused again, rolled his head away from Ben. “Hell, I wouldn’t be. You looking at a dead man, Ben. Been dead for a long time now. I just keep breathing, and Lord only knows why.”

“Maybe you better see a doctor,” Ben suggested.

The smile returned to Foster’s face. “Well, they’s not one close by, but it won’t do no good if he lived back there in the barn. Don’t take no doctor to know what’s going on here, Ben.”

Ben could hear Lottie move behind him.

“I—bought you something,” Ben stammered.

“What’s that, Ben?”

“I was talking to the man down at the store—”

“Henry Quick,” Foster said.

“That’s right. Mr. Quick. Asked him if he had a bottle me and you could share.”

Foster coughed a laugh.

“I thought it was about time I did the buying,” Ben added.

Foster nodded wearily. “I’d be proud to take one with you,” he said.

BEN WAS SURPRISED at the supper Lottie prepared. Garden beans and squash, tomatoes, onion, slices of cured ham, cornbread, tea from sassafras roots. Foster called it preacher food, but ate only a small piece of cornbread soaked in bean juice that Lottie served him in his bed.

His mother had taught Lottie to cook, Foster said. His mother had died a year earlier, only a month before his own illness became serious.

“But I swear, Ben, Lottie’s better at it than my mama was. My mama cooked the taste out of things.”

Lottie smiled at the praise.

It was after the supper, blue-dark outside, a cooling ground wind stealing down the spine of the mountain. Inside, a small fire burned in the fireplace, giving off heat and the aroma of hickory wood. Weak bubbles of yellow light came from two kerosene lamps. Ben had helped Foster move from the bed to the rocker and had tucked a quilt around him; then he had taken a straightback chair and placed it near the rocker, sitting close enough to hear the whispering that had become Foster’s voice. Lottie sat in another chair, holding Little Ben.

“Did Henry Quick tell you how my mama saved his life?” Foster said in his whisper.

“No,” Ben answered. “How’d that happen?”

“Me and Henry was born a couple of months apart,” Foster said. “His mama died about a week after Henry showed up, and they wadn’t nobody to nurse him, so my mama done it. Nursed us both.” He paused, smiled. “Henry turned out ugly enough.” His smile became a coughed laugh. “Ugliest fellow I ever saw, I guess. Always told him he got the ugly tit and I got the good one. But he’s a good enough man, Henry is. Folks around here depend on him.”

“He said he’d played ball with you,” Ben said.

Foster bobbed his head. “Wadn’t much of a player, Ben. We put him over on first base since he was so rangy and had them long arms, but, Lord, he couldn’t catch much.”

“I’ve seen some fellows like that,” Ben said.

“What about your friend—Milo, wadn’t it? What’s he doing?”

Ben was puzzled by the question. Anyone who followed baseball knew that Milo Wade was one of the great players of the game. He said, “Milo’s doing good. He’s with the Red Sox.”

Foster frowned a question.

“Used to be the Boston Pilgrims,” Ben added. “They changed the name a few years ago.”

Foster nodded once.

“And Nat Skinner’s playing up there, with the Philadelphia team,” Ben said. “You remember Nat? He pitched.”

“Uh-huh,” Foster replied.

“Nat’s doing good, too. About the best pitcher in the big leagues.”

Foster sat, staring into the fire. In the firelight and the lamplight, Foster’s skin seemed as brittle as old parchment. After a moment, he said, “I miss it, Ben. What about you?”

“Some,” Ben told him. “But I stay pretty busy at the store.”

Foster inhaled sharply. He quivered under the quilt. “Lord, God-o-mighty, Ben, I miss it,” he said in a desperate, shrill cry.

“Foster,” Lottie said quietly. “Don’t get worked up. It’ll start the coughing.” She looked at Ben. The look begged him not to talk about baseball.

Foster bobbed his head again. He closed his eyes and began to breathe in even, deep sips of air.

Lottie moved Little Ben in her arms, began stroking his hair with her fingers. She said to Ben, “How’s your mama and daddy?”

“Uh, fine,” Ben said. “Mama is. My—my daddy died a few years back.”

Lottie glanced quickly at Foster. “I’m sorry about that. He was a nice man.”

“It’s all right,” Ben said awkwardly.

Foster laughed softly. He pulled the quilt up, under his chin. “You remember Baby Cotwell, Ben?”

Ben shifted in his chair. “Sure do.”

“Somebody killed him.”

“I know,” Ben said. He wondered if Foster remembered that Baby Cotwell had been killed in Jericho.

And then Foster answered his thought. “Wadn’t me, in case you ever wondered. We’d already left when they found him. I thought he was headed back up to Tennessee with the midget. We heard about it later, and then the midget hung hisself.”

“We sent Ben the story out of the newspaper,” Lottie said to Foster. “Remember?”

A puzzled expression crossed Foster’s face, then vanished. “We did, didn’t we?”

“Sure did,” Ben said.

“He was a mean little bastard, that midget,” Foster said.

“Wadn’t as mean as Baby,” Lottie said.

“Sure wadn’t as big,” Ben said. “And I kind of doubt that he could hit as hard as Baby did.”

Foster laughed softly. “I guess you ought to know. Lord, boy, you looked like they’d scraped you off a cowcatcher.”

“But he didn’t get away with it, did he?” Lottie said. Then: “They ever find out who did it?”

“No, they didn’t,” Ben answered. “They didn’t look too hard, I don’t think.”

For a moment, no one spoke, and then Foster said, “When we started out, me and Baby, we had us some times with that show. They wrote big stories about us in some of them towns, bigger than anything I ever got when I was playing for real. If Baby hadn’t been crazy, we could of made a wagonload of money.” He wiggled his head in memory. “But after that, me and Lottie, we saw some places, didn’t we, little girl?”

Lottie did not answer. She continued to stroke Little Ben’s hair.

“You never saw Lottie dance, did you, Ben?”

Ben flushed. He remembered Lottie in the tent, Lottie nude, Lottie in her dance.

“She’d make men howl at the moon, by God,” Foster continued. “Lord, she was something. I’m telling you, Ben, she was something. Figured I’d better marry her, or have her walking off with somebody up to no good.”

“All that’s over, Foster,” Lottie said simply. “All behind us. Best not to talk about it.”

Foster lifted his eyes to Lottie, held them on her, and Ben watched their eyes speaking, saying words they did not need to utter, words that had already been said. Bitter words, Ben thought. Quarrelsome words. And he knew there had been great sadness as well as great love between them.

A piece of the burning wood hissed and broke, and a spit of smoke, blue-gray, curled gracefully up the stone chimney.

And then Foster said, “Ben, I want you to take Lottie home.”