That last day of October, Dwayne Brewer drove through town at sunset, blue lights screaming past like meteors. Steam bellowed from the smokestacks of the paper mill, white roiling into dull yellow sky, and he watched that place disappear in his rearview like everything else before.
Passing Harold’s Grocery headed into Dillsboro, he saw hundreds of birds filling the sky, a cloud of buzzards shifting on thermals, their wings tilting back and forth to steady their wide-set whirling. He leaned low against the steering wheel to watch them as he crossed the bridge over Scotts Creek. He wondered if they would follow him, if they would always follow, and his heart knew the answer, that their work lies all where and their wings tire not.
Through the windshield, empty flea markets and dimly lit filling stations blurred by in his periphery. He rode past fields separated from the highway only by thin tree lines, yellowed fields of oat grass and sedge where old barns crumbled in on themselves like gray ash. The highway was empty once he passed Bryson City, the dark shadows of mountains closing in, the night now fully upon him.
Fontana Lake opened over a bridge that crossed the Little Tennessee where it slowed through the narrows into stilled slack water. A few miles farther, the highway split one way into the gorge, the other toward Almond, and he followed the northwest fork along Fingerlake and over the mouth of the Nantahala.
He wasn’t sure what to do with the car. His instinct said siphon the gas and douse the Grand Prix with fuel, plug the tank with a gasoline-soaked rag, and burn Carol’s car to the ground. In such darkness, the fire would be seen for miles, drawing the law like moths, tall flames whipping at the sky, black smoke only serving to veil the starlight. He thought then of sinking the car in the water, the stilled surface gurgling a story until it stilled again. There were so many things buried here, entire towns, like Judson, flooded and forgotten, that he could not bear the thought of adding a single ghost. In the end, he simply pulled into a ditch near Fontana Village, rolled the window up on a white rag to make it seem as if he’d broken down and traveled on.
Dwayne backtracked two miles to the marina, slinking along the edge of the woods with Darl Moody’s rifle stretched across his shoulders, his arms draped over the gun like a scarecrow. When he reached the water, a green tin roof covered the rental complex, the red glow of a Coke machine all that offered light. The dock stretched forth lined on both sides by pontoon boats, and from the shadows, he watched the place for a long time before he moved. The marina had been abandoned for season. The tourists and part-timers willing to fork over hundreds of dollars to rent a boat for an afternoon had already left and gone.
Canoes lined the end of the dock with their gunwales resting on sun-bleached planks, their hulls facing the sky. Dwayne flipped one of the canoes and balanced the keel against the edge of the dock to ease the boat into water. He found a paddle stood against the wall by the snack bar, the rolling counter door pulled down and padlocked for winter, and when he loaded all that he had into the canoe, he pushed out from the dock and cast his eyes over the water.
That night, Dwayne Brewer paddled across the sky. Each stroke dipped into the heavens, the stars vibrating on the water’s surface like the strings of an instrument strummed by his gentle passing. He paddled four miles over the next few hours, recognizing the cove by a long strip of land that cut into Fontana like a dagger. He paddled past Cable Branch and Laurel Branch, tiny trickles of water heard rather than seen, then farther back to Proctor, where he beached the canoe on a shoreline muddied with clay. There at the edge of the woods his mind finally caught him and he leaned against the trunk of a dying hemlock thinking about all that had brought him there.
All his life he’d only known one answer to suffering, but that long-held truth had given way to something new. There in those woods with that knife held to Angie Moss’s neck, he’d thought of his brother, thought of all that he’d lost, and that pain festered into a familiar feeling, a rage he could feel at the backs of his eyes. He wanted so desperately to kill her. He wanted to see that horrified, broken look sink across Calvin Hooper’s bloodless face. He wanted someone else to suffer so that he wasn’t alone, so that for once they were all the same, one no better than the next. With that gun in his hand, he was certain it would be so satisfying to kill him. His finger was nearing the trigger’s break and it was almost euphoric. Right at that moment of reckoning, there was a feeling that came into him like molten lead, like he was being poured full, his insides searing with heat. He felt hands clasp on to his shoulders and all thought escaped him and he could hear a voice, a voice that did not speak in any language he’d ever heard though he immediately knew the meaning of what was spoken and did not question.
Let it go, the voice said. All of it. Let it go.
Dwayne sat against that hemlock all night watching the water, his body shivering cold, his heart a burning fire. The night gave way to morning, the stars drawing back and drawing back as darkness surrendered to light. A tangerine sun blushed the sky with a hue so breathtakingly beautiful that he was moved to tears. All that he’d carried all of his life rained from his eyes and soaked into the ground. Sunrise singed trees crimson, lit the lake the color of blood. The word dwelled there amongst him and he wept until he was weightless as dust blown to air.
Right then he knew both everything and nothing.
His mind was wiped clean as a child’s and the former was passed away.
A HARD FROST bit the beautiful that spring, yellowed the willows the color of mustard and robbed the redbuds their bloom. But soon enough the temperatures rose and Dwayne Brewer was thankful.
The winter had been trying and many nights he believed he would freeze. He made shelter inside an earthen cavern carved beneath great boulders by water and time. When he arrived, he had nothing aside from a pair of jeans and a rifle. No shoes. No shirt. No food. Those first few weeks he broke into nearby cabins to scavenge clothes, rummaging through the dressers and closets of retirees, seldom finding anything that fit. A small general store by the marina kept beer and groceries, brightly colored tourist T-shirts with black bears and sunsets covering the front, the words VISIT THE SMOKIES stitched across the chest.
This morning he wore a pair of thin, pleated dress pants that had belonged to a man who was wider than he was tall. Dwayne cinched the brown trousers tight at his waist with his belt, unstitched the cuffs to give an extra inch though they still hit him mid-shin. He’d cut the ends out of a grass-stained pair of white leather Stride Rites, his toes hanging over the fronts, the cotton tube socks he wore were black and damp where they touched the ground. Only the middle letters of the word FONTANA shone on the turquoise T-shirt, a woman’s navy blue trench coat buttoned tight around him. The coat fit him crudely, only the bottom button finding room to close. He was far too broad, so that the shoulder pads made sharp ridges between his neck and arms, the fabric about to pop. All that he wore was dirtied with soil, the colors darkened to earthen tones that blended against the mountainside. His hair was long and hot beneath his toboggan, his beard hanging down to his chest.
Winters were hard to survive as plants died back to nothing and a man was left to hunt small game for meals. But now the world was blooming and soon he’d have plenty: ramps and branch lettuce, maypops and chicken of the woods, dandelion greens and pokeweed, wild strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, muscadine, purslane and chicory, fiddlehead ferns and yellowroot. He walked a hillside covered with white trillium and mayapple that had yet to flower, the lobed leaves circling the shoots like umbrellas. The trapline made an irregular oval through the cove, a series of simple deadfalls and squirrel poles, tiny snares strung from fisherman’s string. Most often he found chipmunks crushed under the stones, though when he was lucky, squirrels and rabbits fell prey.
Up ahead, Dwayne could see a robin thrashing about the ground, its tiny leg snared, its wings beating madly beside a young poplar thin as a cane. He sped toward the bird in great loping strides because sometimes things didn’t hold, sometimes what was right in front of a man’s eyes got away from him. Setting Darl Moody’s rifle on the ground, he closed his hands around the robin’s body, only the head showing from the top of his fist. He looked at its eyes, those black seed eyes outlined by white, the dark gray feathers of its head and sharp goldenrod beak. In an instant, he plucked the bird’s head off like he was pulling a grape from a vine and set the body on the ground, its wings flapping hard, legs pulled inward, movements slowing, slowing, then stilled. He plucked orange feathers from skin, tore the breast free, and ate the tiny gob of flesh raw in a single bite, his fingers stained red and sticky with blood.
At the stream, he balanced the rifle against a tangle of exposed roots, cupped handfuls of water to his mouth and drank, wiping his beard with the back of his hand. He held his hands in the water, the creek ice-cold and clear as crystal. A school of small, olive-backed minnows darted about his fingers. The water held in an eddy and he could see his reflection and he stared at himself for a long time, barely recognizing what had become of him. He scrubbed his hands in the water to wash the blood, and as the surface sloshed about, his reflection muddled into glare and light. A tiger swallowtail landed on his knee, its papery wings swaying softly open and closed. The butterfly sipped water from the wetted fabric of his trousers then lifted and fluttered downstream.
A fleck of color caught his eye and Dwayne turned. Rising from the black soil, a single pink lady’s slipper had bloomed early, its thistle-colored flower hanging from a thin green stem like a human heart. He strolled over and knelt beside it, tracing a petal with the tip of his finger, something so delicate and soft his callused skin could not feel. This world is awash with miracles, he thought. How marvelous to simply bear witness.
Crouched at the top of a knoll overlooking Possum Hollow, he could see down into the cove where a trail followed the stream and continued on around to the lakeshore. A pair of hikers, a young man and woman, had made primitive camp at the edge of the trail beside a thick copse of laurel. Their pale gray dome tent rose from the ground like a boulder. Their packs were leaned against a log. Dwayne had heard them the night before, could hear them laughing, and see the glow of their fire haloing the top of the hill. He knelt behind a fallen tree. The bark was gone and the wood was stained a deep rotted brown. They were cooking breakfast and the smell of it traveled between them, the sweet smoky smell of streaked meat sizzling in cast iron on the coals.
He braced the rifle against the trunk of the fallen tree and watched them through the sights. The hammer was back, the safety thumbed away. The woman had her palms open to the fire as if begging heat from the flames. The man was on hands and knees by circled stones, jabbing a fork at their meal, flipping their breakfast so that it would not burn. With the barrel balanced on the tree, Dwayne bore the rifle’s weight solely with his right hand. He scratched the ridges along the front of the trigger with his fingernail. He had his left hand in the pocket of his pants and he was rolling his brother’s teeth through his palm, Sissy’s smile ticking in his hand like a fistful of marbles.
Dwayne Brewer wanted desperately to go down that hillside and tell them the good news. He wanted them to hold out their hands and he’d gift them the grace of God. There was mercy in the passing of strangers, in what watched from hillsides like ghosts, in the savage running barefoot through the soil. But the hearts of men were hardened things, their eyes not meant for seeing. So few were ready to live forever.
Not yet, sweet Lord, not yet.