THEY WERE IN a car going over Buffalo Mountain, but the man driving was not Clay’s father. The man was hunched over the steering wheel, peering out the frosted window with hard, gray eyes. The muscle in his jaw never relaxed, and he seemed to have an extra, square-shaped bone on the side of his face.
“No way we’ll make it without getting killed,” the man said. His lips were thin and white.
“We ain’t got no choice but to try now,” Clay’s mother, Anneth, said. “We can’t pull over and just set on the side of the road until it thaws.”
Clay listened to the tires crunching through the snow and ice as they moved slowly on the winding road. It sounded as if they were driving on a highway made of broken glass. On one side of the road there rose a wall of cliffs, and on the other side was a wooden guardrail. It looked like the world dropped off after that.
They met a sharp curve and the steering wheel spun around in the man’s hands. His elbows went high into the air as he tried to straighten the car. The two women in the back cried out “Oh Lord!” in unison as one was thrown atop the other to one side of the car. Anneth pressed her slender fingers deep into Clay’s arms, and he wanted to scream, but then the car was righted on course. The man looked at Anneth as if it were her fault.
The women in the back had been carrying on all the way up the mountain, and now they laughed wildly at themselves for being scared. They acted like going over the crooked, ice-covered highway was the best time they had had in ages, and the man kept telling them to shut up. It seemed they lit one cigarette after another, so many that Clay couldn’t tell if the mist swirling around in the cab of the car was from their smoking or their breathing.
The heater in the little car didn’t work, and when one of the women hollered to the man to give it another try, the vents rattled and coughed, pushing out a chilling breeze. Clay could see his own breath clenching out silver in front of him until it made a white fist on the windshield. The man wiped the glass off every few minutes, and when he did, he let out a line of cusswords, all close and connected like a string of paper dolls.
Anneth exhaled loudly and said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t cuss and go on like that in front of this child.”
“Well, God almighty,” the driver said. “I ain’t never been in such a mess before in my life.”
Clay knew that his mother was getting mad because a curl of her hair had suddenly fallen down between her eyes. She pushed it away roughly, but it fell back again.
“They ain’t no use taking the Lord’s name in vain. I never could stand to hear that word,” she said. She patted Clay’s hands and focused on the icy highway. “Sides, you ought to be praying instead of handling bad language.”
“Yeah, you’re a real saint, ain’t you, Anneth Sizemore?” the man said, and a laugh seemed to catch in the back of his throat. He pulled his shoulders up in a way that signaled he was ready to stop talking. Clay watched him hold tightly to the steering wheel and look out at the road without blinking. He knew this man somehow, but couldn’t figure how exactly, and he didn’t feel right with him. He wished that his father had been driving them. He reconsidered and simply wished he could put a face to the word daddy. He was only four, but he had already noticed that most of his cousins had fathers, while his was never even spoken of. He wondered if his father would smell so strongly of aftershave, like this man, and have a box-bone in his cheek that tightened every few minutes. He started to ask his mother about this but didn’t. He had so many questions. Today alone, he couldn’t understand what all had gone on.
Clay looked out at the snow and wondered if the world had stopped. Maybe it had frozen, grown silver like the creek water around the edges of rocks. They had not met one car all the way over the mountain, and the few houses they passed looked empty. No tracks on the porches, no movement at the windows. Thin little breaths of black smoke slithered out of chimneys, as if the people had left the fires behind.
The windows frosted over again, and Anneth took the heel of her gloved hand and wiped off the passenger window so they could look out. The pines lining the road were bent low and pitiful, full of clotted ice and winking snow. Some of the trees had broken in two. Their limbs stuck out of the packed snow like jagged bones with damp, yellow ends bright against the whiteness. There was not so much sunshine as daylight, but the snow and ice twinkled anyway. The cliffs had frozen into huge boulders of ice where water had trickled down to make icicles.
“Look,” Anneth said, “them icicles look like the faces of people we know.”
She whispered into Clay’s ear and pointed out daggers of ice. The one with the big belly looked like Gabe. One column of ice looked like a woman with wigged-up hair, just like his aunt Easter. There was even one that favored the president, who was on television all of the time. Clay put his hands inside hers. The blue leather gloves she had on were cold to his bare hands. He didn’t move, though, and hoped the warmth of her fingers would seep down into his own.
“I need to get this baby some mitts,” Anneth said, to no one in particular. The women were singing, and the driver was ignoring every one of them. “His little hands is plumb frostbit.”
She undid the knot at her neck and slid the scarf around her collar with one quick jerk. The scarf was white, with fringes on each end. She shook out her hair and picked at it with one hand. The car was filled with the smell of strawberries. She always washed her hair in strawberry shampoo, except on Fridays, when she washed it with beer. She took his hands and lay the scarf out across her lap, then wound the scarf round and round his hands, like a bandage.
“I’m awful ashamed to have on gloves and my baby not,” she said as she worked with the scarf. “There,” she said. There was a fat white ball in Clay’s lap where his arms should have met.
One of the women in the back put her chin on the top of the front seat. “I hain’t never seen a vehicle that didn’t have a heater or a radio. This beats it all to hell.”
The man shot her a hateful look in the rearview mirror.
She fell back against her seat and began to sing “Me and Bobby McGee.” The other woman joined in and they swayed back and forth with their arms wrapped around each other’s necks. Their backs smoothed across the leather seat in rhythm with the windshield wipers. They snapped their fingers and cackled out between verses.
“Help us sing, Anneth!” one of them cried out. “I know you like Janis Joplin.”
Anneth ignored them, but she hummed the song quietly to Clay, patting his arm to keep in tune.
The man said that he would never make it off the downhill side of the mountain without wrecking and killing them. There was more arguing over the fact that they couldn’t pull over. They would surely freeze to death sitting on the side of the road. They were on top of the mountain now, far past the row of houses. There was nothing here but black trees and gray cliffs and mountains that stretched out below them. Everybody started talking at once, and it reminded Clay of the way the church house sounded just before the meeting started.
Clay looked over his mother’s shoulder at the women. One of the women was looking at herself in a silver compact and patting the curls that fell down on either side of her face. She snapped the compact shut with a loud click and looked up at him happily.
“Don’t worry, Clay,” she said. “We’ll make it off this mountain.” He could see lipstick smudged across her straight white teeth.
The other woman stared blankly into space, and it took her a long moment to realize that Clay was studying her. She was beautiful, much younger than his mother, but as Clay looked at her, she aged before his eyes. Her face grew solid and tough, her skin like a persimmon. Her eyes looked made of water, her nose lengthened and thinned, and her mouth pinched together tightly. He caught a glimpse of what would never become of her, because she was killed that day, alongside his mother and the man driving the car.
The man’s voice was suddenly harsh. “Well, I was good enough to take you over there, now dammit. I need to pull off and calm down some,” he said loudly. “My nerves is shot all to hell.”
“I’ll never ask you to do nothing else for me, then,” she said with disgust. “I ain’t worried about myself—I have to get this baby home.”
“Hellfire, I’d rather be home, too, but this road is a sight,” he said. “You ought not got that child out in this. I’m pulling over, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Go on, then,” Anneth shouted in a deep voice. She turned toward the window and didn’t speak to him again.
“Let’s just set here a few minutes and figure something out,” the driver said.
The shoulder widened out and they could see the mountains spread out below. The white guardrail was wound about by dead vines that showed in brown places through the thick snow. The mountains looked like smudges of paint, rolling back to the horizon until they faded into one another in a misted-over heap.
Anneth wiped the icy window off once more and said, “Look how peaceful. Look at them mountains, how purple and still.”
Clay knew that the mountains looked purple under that big, moving sky, but they didn’t look still at all to him. They seemed to be breathing—rising so slowly, so carefully, that no one noticed but him. He watched them, concentrating the way he did when he was convinced a shadow had moved across his bedroom wall. It seemed to Clay that they rose and fell with a single pulse, as if the whole mountain chain was connected.
Everyone had grown silent looking out at the hills, and later this struck Clay as strange. They were all accustomed to seeing hills laid out before them, but there was something about this day, something about how silently the mountains lay beneath the snow.
It was so quiet that Clay was certain that the end of the world had come. Everybody on earth had been sucked up into the sky in the twinkling of an eye. He was used to hearing people talk about the End and the Twinkling of an Eye; his Aunt Easter constantly spoke of such things. She looked forward to the day when Jesus would part the clouds and come after His children. “Rapture,” she called it, and the word was always whispered. Easter said if you weren’t saved, you’d be left behind.
He pressed against his mother and felt the warmth of her body spread out across his back. She ran her fingers through his hair and began to hum softly again. He could feel the purr of her lungs against his face. It was the same song the women had been singing. Clay knew it by heart. He’d watched his mother iron or wash dishes while she listened to that song. Sometimes she would snatch him up and dance around the room with him while the song was on the record player. She had sung every word then, singing especially loud when it got to the part about the Kentucky coal mines. The vibration in her chest was as comforting as rain on a tin roof, and he fought his sleep so that he could feel it. She must have thought he was asleep, too, because finally she took her hand from his head and stopped humming.
She pressed her face to the window, leaning her forehead against the cold glass. “I ain’t never seen it so quiet on this mountain,” she said.
That was the last thing Clay was aware of, but afterward, he sometimes dreamed of blood on the snow, blood so thick that it ran slow like syrup and lay in stripes across the whiteness, as if someone had dashed out a bucket of paint.