VICKY WAS born with two strikes against her.
She was one of Hap McCall’s brood. She was born into hill trash. I used to see her in Big Hominy when Hap brought his tired, work-worn wife and passel of kids to town in a wagon held together with bailing wire.
They were a sorry, sad, shiftless lot, but Vicky was different. She was ashamed, and fiercely proud. Her eyes reflected intelligence, and she was beautiful.
I was born within forty miles of the mountain where Hap moonshined and worked his rocky farm, but I was born into a different world. I was a Calhoun.
True, the glory of the Calhoun name was as dim as the shuttered, memory-haunted rooms in the main part of the once-fine house my mother had closed after the bank manipulation and my father’s suicide. But my mother was one of those silken-strong women peculiar to an older era in the South. As mortgages ate away the Calhoun land, she never lost hope, nor forgot that she was a Gilliam married into the Calhoun line.
Big Hominy never forgot either. They judged my father gently, especially after it was learned that he had been trying to bring the railroad in. Big Hominy might have been more kindly to me too, but I had a wrong foot forward. I flunked out of Riverdale, the military academy where Calhouns had gone back to the time of Colonel Judd, the Calhoun at Lee’s left hand at Appomattox Courthouse. And somewhere along the line I developed a veneer of aggressiveness to cover the fact that I was never far from the sight of Calhoun poverty and the way my father had died.
I guess I had Vicky in my blood for a long time. I used to think about her during my army hitch, which ended during rear echelon duty in Korea before I ever got to the front.
When I came back stateside I got tanked up and went up to Spivey Mountain to see her. I loused that up the way I had a lot of things. I was a Calhoun on a binge, out to find some easy pickings among the hill trash. That’s the way I guess she must have felt. It wasn’t the way I felt, but she never did trust me after that.
Rock Hustin was seven years her senior when Hap McCall forced her to marry him. I didn’t learn and didn’t care to know what method Hap used. But I did know that Rock gave Hap three hundred dollars when the wedding was over. Hap used the money to buy a flivver and get drunk. He ended in a junk heap of metal at the bottom of a mountainside, losing his left eye and most of that side of his face. He almost bled to death by the time he crawled home.
Rock was a pathological criminal. He took Vicky across the mountain into Tennessee, got in a shooting scrape and had to leave the country.
Vicky got a job in Knoxville, returning only when her mother broke her hip. The return was a compromise. Nothing could chain her to Spivey Mountain again. She helped her mother through the illness and got a job in the Stonewall Jackson Hotel as a dining-room hostess. Once or twice a month she would go to the McCall place to give her mother what help she could. Always she took along candy, dress material, and gifts for the kids.
Big Hominy talked about her for a while and at first there were men who considered her fair prey. She moved through it all with a quiet, natural dignity.
I saw her every time she would let me. Big Hominy saw us and talked. My mother was bewildered. I begged Vicky to marry me as soon as her divorce was final.
“I’m too old for you, Wade.”
“I beat you into this world by three years.”
“I wasn’t talking about that kind of oldness.”
She would sit quiet and remote sometimes as we drove up to the Stonewall Jackson, the rambling old resort hotel overlooking Big Hominy.
Sometimes she warmed to my kisses, and sometimes she pushed me away.
“You drink too much, Wade.”
“I’ll quit.”
“You quit last week and the week before that.”
Some nights I didn’t sleep well but lay seething with hatred of Rock Hustin because of the scars he’d left behind. I wondered if she’d ever trust a man again.
Word trickled through the hills that Rock was back. Vicky didn’t show fear, but I knew it was there.
Clarence Oldham came to the hotel with his conservative black car, his cool, assured manner, his tailored hunting togs.
“I’m losing you,” I told her. We’d driven out to Bit Barney’s Bar-B-Cue for supper, and I’d parked later on the mountain above the hotel.
“You don’t have any claims on me, Wade.”
“The claim of my feelings. That’s all. That’s enough.”
“I’m fond of Clarence, Wade.”
“And he can give you the kind of life you’re after?”
Moonlight had given her face a haunted look. “I think we’d better go now.”
The next day Rock was dead. Talk of it was all over town. Kirk Hyder didn’t have her in jail. Kirk Hyder hadn’t been able to find her. She’d gone off with Clarence Oldham early in the morning. Big Hominy gasped and talked, and the air was electric. The waiting and foretelling were over. Blood had told. She had lived down to her name.
Faces swam by me. Snatches of talk gave me the facts of Rock’s death, the case against her. The flesh grew tight across my shoulders.
I’ll find them. I’ll take her from Oldham. I’ll run further than Oldham would ever dream of running. Fight in ways Oldham would never imagine.
I am her only real hope.
She’s mine now.