CLAY DREADED GOING through his mother’s box the way some people dreaded sitting with a family that had just suffered a death: he was afraid he wouldn’t know what to say once he got there. He had put it in the center of his coffee table and it sat there patiently until he finally got enough nerve to open it.
He sat on the couch and stared at the box for so long that the paper flowers pasted to its lid began to spin around. He imagined that he could smell their aromas all mixed up in the air above the box. He feared being sucked into the old Bible box like a leaf being drawn into a vacuum, ripped back to a past that he could never return from. He had been chain-smoking since coming home from work and he watched the box uneasily, waiting for it to run out of patience and simply fold the lid back itself.
Inside, he found many small, trivial things that he had no way of comprehending: a dried and crumbling corsage, a quarter with a .22 bullet hole right through Washington’s head, a napkin with a faded phone number written in pencil. He found an old, bone-handled Case knife that he supposed had belonged to his great-uncle who had been killed in World War II, a lid from a bottle of whiskey that he figured was from his mother’s first drunken night, and a cigar that maybe someone had handed out when he was born. There was a small, carved box full of ticket stubs, and on the back of each one she had written the movie it had come from: Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, True Grit, The Last Picture Show.
There was an I LIKE IKE campaign button, which he imagined she had worn proudly as she walked the clean, polished halls of her high school, and a piece of construction paper with WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS IN VIETNAM written in large, Magic Marker letters. He thought that maybe she had grown weary of the war news and had written out the Vietnam placard herself; he could see her taping it up in the front window while she thought about his daddy. There were various news clippings: the JFK assassination, the Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. He pictured her sitting on the floor, cutting out the clippings to put up for him. He figured that she had probably longed to go west and stand in protest with the Native Americans during their long siege of the island.
She had lived through so much history. He could see that, now that he was able to look back on her life. His mind rattled off events that she must have been aware of, and he pictured her reactions to every situation. He saw her standing beneath the night sky, watching for the hydrogen bombs she feared might fall at any minute, turning the solid mountains into ash that would drift away with the wind. Years later, she stood under the same sky and watched the moon, wondering if men were really walking on it. He was sure she had cried about Kent State, danced to the Doors, and gone to the drive-in to see The Godfather.
He dug deeper. A worn copy of Peyton Place, a few Life magazines tied together with a ribbon. A guitar pick. There was a map of Cherokee, North Carolina, and a handful of photographs showing his mother and Lolie in bathing suits, standing on the beach at Blackhawk Lake.
He studied these pictures a long time. He wondered what the air was like that day, whether their hot skin smelled of coconut tanning lotion or perhaps baby oil. He looked at his mother’s eyes, then at the cigarette in her hand, the bracelet on her wrist, the careful way she had applied her lipstick. The way her arm rested on Lolie’s shoulder. Had he stood in that same spot, down on the lake? Had she gotten drunk that day and closed her eyes and smelled the water-scent that only the lake possessed, the way he so often did?
He found an envelope full of fine, auburn hair wrapped in a net. A poem that looked as if it had been ripped from a Reader’s Digest—“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. A brass Zippo with 1970 engraved on the front. Autumn leaves pressed in wax paper, a red Gideons Bible, Clay’s first walking shoes. Wrapped up carefully in a piece of toilet paper was a feather from a redbird, as new and shiny as it must have been the day his mother plucked it off the forest floor while roaming the great mountain. In a square white box that might have held a cool corsage, he found a collection of seashells, and he felt their cold solidity, running his fingers over the rough spots and horns at their edges, wondering where in the world his mother had gotten them. He found her senior class pin, a book of matches from Eaton’s Pizza Parlor in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. Two record albums, in their original sleeves: Pearl, by Janis Joplin, and Neil Young’s Harvest.
He tried to remember her voice, singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” Frustrated when his memory would not serve him, he picked up Harvest and turned the album over to read the names of the songs. He saw that the title of one, “Old Man,” was completely circled in broken red ink. He got up with cracking knees and put the album on his turntable. The sound was grainy, but the record did not skip, and soon the melancholy guitar filled the room. In the song, a son was talking to his father, but to Clay it was as if his mother spoke through the record player.
The words, the pluck of the banjo, the swell of guitars, were all speaking to him, trying to tell him something. He stood over the record player, wondering if she had circled this song so that he might play it someday and try to interpret exactly what she meant. The song ended, and he lifted the needle and put it on its hook.
He thought now he could remember her. He could see her sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire, or standing at the sink peeling potatoes. She put him on her hip and danced around the house when Melanie came on the radio to sing “Brand New Key.” He could recall watching her ironing clothes, sprinkling water from a Dr Pepper bottle. She always kept her fingernails painted. They were a deep, dark red and always reminded him of the color a rose takes on before it dies. He was taken back to a morning when he had stood on the porch and watched her walking down the holler road, dragging her purse on the ground behind her while she cried. They were mixed-up images and scents and tastes, as hard to comprehend as a thousand photographs scattered across the floor.
He saw a velvet jewelry box lying in the box and figured it had once held her wedding band. He clicked the box open and found the Saint Christopher medallion that his father had worn. He gathered it up, and its fine, small links glided snakily over his fingers. The medallion rested square in the center of his palm. The silver chain and the medal—cold against his warm hand—sent sensations, imagined or not, shooting up into his arms. He held it close to his face, as if he might breathe in the scent of his father from the metal. SAINT CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US, it read, the words in a circle around a man packing a child on his back.
He dialed Information and asked for a listing for Bradley Stamper in Laurel County. He could hear the operator scanning her computer, then her dry, bored voice. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have no listing under that name.”
“Well, just give me a listing for every Stamper you have in the county,” he said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling loudly into the telephone.
“I’m only allowed to give out two listings per call, sir,” she said, polite but firm. “But I only have three. Hold, please.”
A computer voice rattled off three phone numbers and Clay jotted them on the inside of a book of rolling papers Cake had left on the coffee table. He clicked off the phone, lay it on his chest, and sat back on the couch. He stalled as long as he could, then finally picked up the phone again.
No answer. He tried the next number and stubbed his cigarette out while the phone rang. After twenty rings, a teenage girl said hello, hateful and quick, in a questioning tone.
“Hello, is this the Stampers’?”
“Yeah, who is this?”
“I’m trying to reach a man by the name of Bradley Stamper. Is this his house?” He heard his own nervousness and was afraid that his voice would crack, like the voice of a boy calling a girl for the first time.
“No.” He could sense that she was thinking about what else to say. “Why would you want up with him?”
“He was a friend of my mother’s. She passed away when I was little, and I was just trying to find out some things about her.”
“That was my uncle,” she said, and paused as if she expected him to say something else.
Was, he heard her say, and didn’t reply.
“He got kilt in Vietnam. They tole my family that he was a MIA, but they finally give up, I guess. My granny still won’t accept it, but my daddy thinks he’s dead.”
Clay couldn’t believe how easily these words came out of her mouth. He felt like he was watching himself from far up in the air. The house was full of winter silence, and it seemed to press in on him. He was suddenly burning up, so he walked across the room and opened one of the windows, letting in crisp air.
“Mister, you still there?” the girl asked.
“Are your people Catholic?” he asked. His mouth was so dry that chalky strands of saliva stretched from the corners of his lips like strings. He couldn’t swallow.
The girl cackled out laughing. “Lord no! If my granny heard you say that, she’d die stone-hammer dead. My granddaddy was a Holiness preacher for ages.”
“Well, thank you. I appreciate your help.” He hung up before she said good-bye, and put his face into his hands. He felt guilty at his lack of grief, but still felt like crying. No tears would come. He held his palm up, studying the medallion, and realized that he had never even missed his father. Only now that he realized that he was a part of two whole people—their creation together—did he feel this new emptiness.
He put the Saint Christopher necklace around his neck, felt the cold of the medallion on his skin spreading out over his chest and down into his arms, and lay his head back on the seat of the couch. There was no intense sensation issuing from the medallion now—it was just cold. He wished for some feeling, prayed that his father’s spirit might enter him, but nothing came. Things of the spirit never came when you asked for them. He looked up at the ceiling, one hand flat on the floor, the other running a finger over the raised figures of the medal: a man packing a child on his back.
CLAY AWOKE THE next morning on the couch, curled up with his knees under his chin. He could see his breath seeping out white on the air and jumped up quickly, as if someone were watching him. He closed all of the windows, wondering how in the hell he had slept in such cold. He looked at his hand to see if the medallion had left an imprint on his palm, but it hadn’t.
He showered quickly, the hot water stinging his cold skin, and dressed while his coffee brewed. Then he was heading down the highway with the radio turned all the way up. He held a cigarette between the fingers of his driving hand and balanced the coffee cup with his other. A light snow fell like flour across his windshield. The mountains were very gray and the river did not move.
He drove through the town, which hadn’t awoken yet, and up over the high, winding road to Victory. He turned down into a short holler and saw Evangeline’s small rented house sitting there, pushed back into the mountain.
ALMA HADN’T GONE to bed at all the night before and was still standing in the middle of her room sliding the bow over her fiddle. A new tune had come into her mind late in the night, and she had not been able to go to bed for trying to make music out of it. Evangeline didn’t care—she could have slept through a full orchestra, and besides, she hadn’t gotten home until nearly five o’clock, just two hours ago.
When a song came to Alma, she couldn’t do anything until she had picked the right sound out of her mind. The fiddle seemed to take control of her, but only when the music was just right, only when Alma’s fingers were able to find that ancient, singular place on the neck. Now, as she played with her head tilted to the side and eyes shut, it seemed she stood above the floor, dancing about the room without moving her feet.
The song intensified, becoming wild and uncontained, and the fiddle took over. It pushed her arm up, pulled it down, made her fingers go where they needed to be.
Evangeline knocked open the door so hard that the doorknob banged back and left a mark on the wall. “Can’t you hear, dammit? He’s knocking so long he woke me up.”
“Who?”
Evangeline breathed out hard. She couldn’t even open her eyes, they were so heavy, and she leaned against the door frame as if she were about to drift back to sleep. “What about who?” Despite her grogginess, she managed to mock Alma in a little girl voice. “It’s Prince Charles, for all I care. Go see your own damn self.”
Evangeline padded down the hallway with Alma close on her heels, still holding on to her fiddle. Alma considered Evangeline’s short concert T-shirt with her Looney Tunes panties showing beneath.
“I hope to God you didn’t go to the door like that,” she said.
“Well, I did,” Evangeline said, and fell onto her bed.
Clay stood in the door looking like a cigarette ad. Tight Levi’s, a corduroy jacket, straight white teeth, and that clean, wavy hair. He held a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
• • •
THEY DROVE TO LONDON and ate at a truck stop by the interstate, where coal trucks and eighteen-wheelers slid off the ramps onto I-75, speeding toward Lexington and Cincinnati, Knoxville and Atlanta. They ate breakfast and fed quarters to the jukebox. Finally, Clay got up and went to the pay phones at the front of the restaurant. Alma watched as he flipped through the phone book quickly and then came back to the table with a thin, wrinkled page of the book in his hand.
He smoothed the page on the table and pointed at a name. “Lookee here. They’s only three Stampers in the London directory, and that girl said my grandpaw was a preacher. Look.”
Alma leaned very close to the table and read aloud: “‘Stamper, Reverend Lee and Belle, Thirty-five Slate Ridge Road.’”
“Reverend,” Clay says. “That has to be them. Them’s my grandparents. Lee and Belle Stamper.”
“You ought to go there, Clay,” Alma said, and put her hand atop his.
“Naw, I wouldn’t know how to go about something like that.”
The waitress approached, holding a pot of coffee high in the air. Alma scooted her cup to the edge of the table. “If you don’t want to talk to em, just drive by and see where your daddy growed up.”
“You want some more coffee, honey?” the waitress asked Clay.
“One more cup,” he said, and looked across at Alma to let her know he didn’t want to talk about this in front of a stranger.
The waitress pulled a green ticket pad out of her apron pocket with her free hand. “You all interested in pie?” she asked.
“I’m not,” Clay said.
“Ma’am, do you know where Slate Ridge is, here in London?” Alma asked, before Clay could stop her.
The waitress set the coffeepot down on the table, as if she was used to giving directions and knew that it usually took awhile to explain. “Lord, yeah. It’s down the road a ways, little place called Hawk. Easy to find.”
“How easy?” Clay asked.
“Just turn right out of the parking lot here and go straight on the main road. You’ll pass an old coal tipple that’s been shut down awhile. And two or three little jottemdown stores. Go over the bridge and you’ll be in Hawk. They’s a big sawmill soon as you get into Hawk—you’ll smell it before you see it, the way it’s been raining. Sawdust stinks worse than anything in the world when it sours.” The waitress paused long enough to nod and wink to a man who had come in and tipped his hat to her. “Right there, you’ll turn and go up Slate Ridge. That mountain goes way back up in there.”
It was easy to find. As soon as they started up the mountain, Clay had Alma looking for mailbox numbers. The boxes bore neither addresses nor names. They saw an old man stacking firewood up against his house, and Alma leaned out the window to ask where Lee Stamper lived. The old man refused to holler out the information and took a long time about walking away from his rick of wood to lean on the truck door and ask Alma to repeat her question.
“Now, old Preacher Stamper is dead, but his wife still lives up here,” he said, and spat tobacco juice into the ditch beside the road. He gave them directions and added, “Hope you all wasn’t trying to find him and ask him to marry you all, cause he’s sure been dead two year.”
The house sat back away from the road, but it was close enough for Clay to take in every detail. He stopped right in the road, leaned on the steering wheel, and sized up the place. The house was built in the old way, with two front doors coming out onto the porch, which most likely meant that it had no hallways within and each room led into the next, making a U from one front door to the other. The porch was crowded with a dozen plastic chairs that could be stacked atop one another. There was a porch swing whose chains had been gathered up so that the arms of the swing touched the porch ceiling. A thin line of smoke made its way out of the chimney, as if a fire had just been started in the grate. The yard was wide and flat, with a huge snowball bush to one side and a row of apple trees lining the driveway. The snowball bush had a large circle of worn-away branches that suggested children had used its fragrant, flexible limbs to make a playhouse beneath the cover of summer foliage. An older-model Ford truck with a camper shell sat in the driveway. There were two stickers on either side of the bumper. One read JESUS IS SOON COMING, and the other announced NRA. Beyond the truck, he could see a car house sitting behind the house, an old metal Nehi sign nailed to its side. Two small mountains came together behind the house and sloped down toward each other like the place where a woman’s hip meets the side of her belly.
“That’s it,” Clay said. “That’s where my daddy growed up.”
“Clay, won’t you go to the door? You ain’t got a thing to lose. If you don’t, you’ll wonder about it from now on.”
Clay said nothing and acted as if he had not even heard her. He kept his eyes on the house. He knew his own grandmother was sitting inside, but there was no use in going in there and introducing himself. He saw no reason to start a relationship that had no beginning.
“I just can’t do it,” he said. “One of these days I might, but not now.”
“It’s what you ought to do,” she said. “You bound to have wanted to, or else you wouldn’t have come got me so early this morning and come to Laurel County. I’ll go right in there with you.”
Clay shifted the truck back into drive and pulled away. “Not now,” he said. He spoke carefully, afraid she might hear the tremor in his voice. “I just wanted to see where my daddy growed up.”
They drove home without speaking. Alma sat close to him, one hand on his leg, listening to the hum of the tires on the blacktop. All the way home, he tried to picture what his father had looked like. He never had seen a picture of him and was certain that he never would.