STRATTON CLEARED out a bedroom at the back of the house and brought in a rolling cot, a box fan, a simple chest of drawers, and an old TV that only got a pair of public stations. Rain slept poorly the first night, hearing every tick and sway in the timbers of the old house.
She was up before he was and went out to tear the dead plants from their beds. They came up easily, as if relieved to quit the sham of their existence. She saw that the soil inside the raised beds was cheap and could be improved for the next batch, made some notes on a scrap piece of paper of what to buy later. She saw a good patch of ground along the side of the house that would gather midday light and knew that they should plant along there as well. Around back she found the outbuilding and inside it a spade and hoe.
The ground was stony and hard from the drought, so once she marked the dimensions of what she meant to dig it was largely slow work. Still, she warmed to the labor and her strong arms began to make discernable progress turning earth. By the time the sun was treetop tall she sweated freely.
“Looks like I hired somebody worth hiring,” Stratton called down from the porch.
She smiled up at him. “I figured you wouldn’t mind if I saw a way to improve the value.”
“No, no, I don’t mind that a bit. Why don’t you take a break, though? I’ve got breakfast up here and I don’t need any disability claims the first day I’ve got you.”
She leaned the tool handles against the side of the house and followed him in.
Her belly went tight as soon as she smelled fried meat. She tried to recall how long since she’d had the taste on her tongue. It made her want to eat her hand.
“Here you go.”
He flipped two sausage patties beside a yellow crown of soft scrambled eggs, a side of buttered toast, and handed her the plate and utensils. Coffee and juice too. An utter confusion of good things to consume. She tried to develop a method of approach to the food and drink to pretend this wasn’t what she would have torn through a solid door to get to. How important it was, she understood, to have someone bring you a meal of delicious food. How much that mattered.
“Thank you,” she said.
After breakfast he drove her out to the greenhouse and gave her free rein to buy whatever she thought would best suit the house. She appeared to know exactly what she had in mind, so he was content to follow at a distance. Every time she asked his opinion about one of the selections he waved the concern aside, told her that he trusted her better judgment.
Once they had filled two buggies with soil and flowers they checked out, loaded it all into the hatchback and drove home. He helped her set everything down and opened the house up so she could come and go as needed, explained that he had to drive out to the college campus for a couple of short meetings and run a few errands after that. He left her working in her newly turned field, this dreadlocked pioneering woman who seemed to have issued out of the ground itself.
THE CAMPUS was empty of students this time of the afternoon. Though there were summer classes in session, many had already run earlier during the day so that it was administrators and the few straggling faculty still on campus. He drove around the faculty lot twice in vain search of a shaded spot before parking in the midst of the scorched pavement, cracked his windows so that his CDs wouldn’t melt, wondered again why the board of regents made war against trees.
His office was cool and windowless and held to the vague staleness of seasonal abandonment. The book spines of last semester’s texts were warped out of square from having been dumped in a haphazard pile the last day of spring classes. Above that on a metal shelf were his own doubled row of books on music theory, composers, technique. Even though he rarely had time to read at his desk it was a particular comfort to be able to pluck one from the whole and pinch the cover back, scan a line or two, have those authors’ voices rinse over him like a better version of his own. Occasionally one of his students stopping by during office hours would notice his small library and ask something out of genuine curiosity about one of the books, something not directly pertaining to grade percentage. Not often, but sometimes.
He shuttled through some neglected work emails, discarding most, before he stuffed a few relevant papers into his briefcase and went down to the conference room. He nodded at a few weary but friendly faces and sat down next to Josh Callum. After taking the better part of an hour to populate and schedule follow-up subcommittees designed to further lay out issues of curriculum and training, Josh pulled him aside, asked if he had time and the inclination for a cold beer.
“Sorry, I’ve got to get back to the house. For a man not working I’m staying busy as all hell these days.”
Josh shook his head, made a big show of disbelief.
“They can go ahead and plant me in the ground. To say I was there when Stratton Bryant refused an afternoon drinking invitation. I guess you’ll tell me you won’t go down to Douglas Lake this weekend and help me haul some crappie into the boat either, will you?”
“Might be able to make that happen. You headed out early Saturday?”
“The earth hasn’t stopped turning, so I see no reason to change my corresponding plans.”
“All right. I’ll give you a holler.”
“You do that.”
He started across the lot for his car, paused.
“Hey, you mind if I bring somebody along?”
“Somebody?”
“Yeah. My niece. My sister’s kid. She’s come out to visit from Texas. Helping me get the house ready.”
“More the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. As long as she comes with a stocked beer cooler.”
STRATTON AND Rain drove in the cool morning dark down to the Indian Creek boat dock, ate donuts and drank black coffee, rubbed sleep from their eyes. A pair of rods jostled atop some rain gear and what they had packed for lunch. In the cooler was a case of Coors Light and three strawberry cocktails in big cartooned cans. He had promised her a big time.
Josh met them down at the dock already loaded up and aboard the old Bayliner with the outboard softly purring. By the first band of dawn they had slipped their mooring and motored up the inlet, their wake a gentle cut in the calm water. Rain shrugged inside the fleece jacket Stratton had leant her, the cold shooting through as they gained gradual speed and the tight throat of the shoreline dropped away. She’d never been out on a fishing boat before and though she could see the faint outlines of second homes above the banks she felt as strange as if she’d landed on a new planet and traversed this smooth expanse before any other soul. Stratton had told her the lake was artificial, created in the 1940s when the Tennessee Valley Authority had dammed up the French Broad River for the sake of electricity and downstream flood control, but that did not dissuade her from admiring what surrounded her. She remembered once when Wolf had said the dams of the upper South had destroyed the essential wildness, the sufficient danger of the Tennessee landscape. That what we knew of the Tennessee River was a pale counterfeit of the unquiet creature it had once been. He would have wanted her to feel guilty for this present sense of excitement. Justly incriminated. But she could summon no disfavor about what had been made when the river had flooded this country, made something ancient into something new. This lake was its own kind of meaning, revived and altogether different than what had come before.
They slowed as they crossed beneath the interstate bridge, wake water slapping at the concrete stanchions. The bow rose once more as they throttled up and swung in a broad arc toward the eastern shore just short of where they could see bottom. Stratton handed her one of the rods and talked to her about how to fish the artificial lure while Callum dropped anchor. She paid scant attention, had no desire to catch anything. The water alone had been what had compelled her to come here. Still, she realized the need to act the part and she cast out, let the lure sink, and began the slow cranking retrieval. Too slow, she realized, but the men were otherwise occupied in rigging out their rods and wouldn’t bother her. It contented her to be invisible there beside them.
Within half an hour other craft began to appear on the lake. Other fishermen still at this time of the morning, most waving good morning as they passed, though Callum told them to expect to see rednecks out for the sake of churning water from loud outboards as the day wore on. They would have to move into the corners of the lake then, find the narrow places and shoal water, nudge in where others couldn’t follow.
“There’s always a little extra room out there,” Josh told her. “Always just space enough for solitude.”
She liked listening to him talk, his easy drawl. She asked where he had grown up.
“Just over in Johnson City,” he told her.
She started to say that she was from just down the road from there over in Elizabethton when she remembered Stratton had told her to say nothing about that, to keep to the deception of being his Texas kin. It made sense, she supposed, to not give away any more than she had to, but it bothered her too that she had to hold so much back, to keep a part of herself chambered deep inside so as not to spoil the part she was playing.
“Sounds like they must raise philosophers over in Johnson City then,” she said. “All this deep talk about fishing and solitude.”
He smiled over his shoulder at her, didn’t mind that she had poked fun.
“Naw. I’m just a hillbilly that went off to school and learned to talk good. Your uncle here is the philosopher. Better be careful or some of it might rub off on you.”
His rod bent briefly, but by the time he had set his hook the line turned slack.
“A hair too slow, I guess.”
“Must be all that talking,” Stratton offered. “Running off the fish.”
“Naw. They like it when I sing to them so pretty.”
Rain laughed, didn’t make an effort to hide it.
“Look at her making fun of us old farts out here managing to neither catch fish nor tell good lies. I’m not sure I can abide a hostile audience, Stratton. We might be destined to maroon your niece here if this keeps up.”
“Might be,” Stratton agreed, cast once more.
“I’m not laughing at what you’re saying,” she answered. “Just, you don’t sound like I’d expect a college professor to talk is all. Him neither, but you especially.”
Josh lifted an eyebrow: his signature mock injury.
“The road to sophistication, my dear, is flanked on all sides by disillusionment. Speaking of disillusionment, I do believe the hour is presentable for libations, which would disabuse any ideas of my propriety, I’m sure. You would mind passing me one of those cold beers not too much, I hope?”
She reached one out of the cooler and popped the top for him. He winked as he took it and sucked with great savor at the ripple of foam.
They fished on through midday and into the early afternoon, emptied the cooler of the beer and baloney sandwiches while adding a moderate number of fish to the tally. It was time to head ashore when the water skiers started crowding them out. Callum turned the boat around and cut for the dock, bow raised high and the water flat and hard. He tried talking over his shoulder to Rain, but his words were torn by the wind. He seemed not to mind that he went unheard.
Callum followed them back in his truck and stopped off at the house on his way home. He said he’d help clean the fish they’d landed, though Stratton suspected it was something else. Rain went in to shower and tidy up inside while the two men worked shoulder to shoulder over an old picnic table set out in the backyard.
“You mind telling me who she really is or are you planning on lying to me for the rest of the semester?” Callum asked, his knife working up the tough fish gut.
“That obvious?”
“Only about as obvious as a nine-pound sledge.”
Stratton put down his filleting knife, rinsed the blood and foul smell from his hands with a bottle of tap water.
“She’s just a girl who seemed like she needed help. I don’t think it would cost me anything to give her that.”
“You sure about that, bud? Cost can come in a bunch of different ways.”
“I’m not fucking her if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Not yet you’re not. Pretty girl, even if it does look like she just turned up out of a pigpen. There’s a certain atavistic appeal about her, though. I’ll hand you that. You ever watched that show Swamp People? She’d be the queen of the swamp people.”
“I’ve got no use for your sex fantasies.”
“Boy, I do though.”
“Hand me that fish and shut up, will you?”
There was no way he could tell Josh the embarrassing entirety of it. That she was party to a group who had trespassed and stolen from him, who was as much an enigma to him now as when she first appeared stranded on the side of the highway. If he thought about it too hard he was liable to oust her himself, but no, he couldn’t do that. Taken from a reasonable perspective, it was hard to disagree with the worst that could be thought of him for taking such interest in how the girl fared. And yet it seemed inevitable that she was now living there with him under the shoddy cover story he’d crafted. As if they had been destined to share the home for some reason and the problem of gossip held little sting considering how important it was to solve the question of his affinity for this seeming stranger.
Once they were finished and had put Stratton’s share of fish in the freezer, they drank two beers from the fridge while they stood beside Callum’s truck and talked the small talk of work concerns. It was dusk when finally they had exhausted the subject and themselves. Stratton told Callum to be good and Callum told Stratton to be bad and then he struck the truck engine to life and was out the driveway and down the road, a short blast from his horn answered by cricket song.
It was quiet when Stratton stepped inside and the only lights on were in the back of the house. He went to the kitchen and splashed some water on his face, the long day and heat on him like old skin that needed to be shed.
“Hey, would you mind coming back here,” Rain called to him.
His chest clenched, just a little. Strange that his body could still act like a body sometimes.
“Yeah, just give me a minute.”
She was looking at some of Liza’s pictures that were up in the bedroom across from hers. A lot of them were older, what Liza would have called her sentimental stage, though to him they were about as sentimental as a hatchet head.
“When did you take these?” she asked.
“They’re not mine. My wife took these. Same as the ones out front. A long time ago. Just a little while after we were married, I guess. Doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but it has.”
“You haven’t mentioned her.”
“No, I haven’t.”
The silence took up space in the room with them.
“They’re very good,” she said after a time. “I’ve never seen pictures like these. The faces seem like they’re saying something that matters.”
“You haven’t asked me what happened to her.”
“I imagine you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
He smiled, let it sink in.
“She was killed last year. She was riding with some men she was photographing for a magazine. Some men protesting mountaintop removal in Kentucky. It was late and they were drunk. Still, she was the only one that died.”
She said she was sorry. Of course, he told her not to be.
“I don’t think these should be kept back here,” she told him. “Seems like they’re hidden, you know?”
“Well, we’ll see. I’m having a man from a museum in Knoxville come for them, so it’s all temporary anyhow. I’m headed to bed. Turn the light out down here when you’re finished, okay?”
He went back out the hall and up the stairs, left her there in the small room alone.