Viola Tackett opened the heavy curtains a crack, just wide enough so she could see out between them. They was so old and dusty she had to hold her breath or she’d have a sneezing fit.
She and the boys had come into West Liberty Middle School through a door on the north side that opened into a space beside the building you couldn’t see from the street. The auditorium and the little gymnasium inside the school still remained functional for public use. The school mirrored the architecture of the courthouse and the two buildings sat like bookends in the middle of the block, one on either side of the street, with wide steps and tall white columns and big oversized double doors, inlaid on both sides by leaded glass windows. Parking for the courthouse was out front along both sides of Main Street, each space with its own personal parking meter that hadn’t been nothing but lawn art since the Eisenhower Administration. Parking for the school was behind it, where there was a lot, a wide drop-off lane for buses and an overgrown playground where the swing set didn’t have no swings, the basketball goal didn’t have no rim and both seesaws was broke in two. The monkey bars was still there, though. Set in concrete like they was, they’d have survived an atomic bomb blast.
The school building had been spared the vandalism that’d chewed up the other abandoned structures in the county due to its strategic location across the street from the courthouse that housed the sheriff’s department. There were plenty of other windows to break out, walls to spray paint, and bridge abutments to deface without risking getting caught by the law. So the building stood mostly untouched, by people, anyway. But time and age and the elements had done plenty of touching, had touched the roof with leaks that’d made huge brown circles on the ceiling high above the auditorium floor where the seats had been removed years ago. The doors were padlocked shut, but anybody’d wanted to get in bad enough coulda done it because the wood in the doors and the jambs was rotting away.
You could hear the crowd out there, but wasn’t no gaiety to the sound. Onliest time there was ever that many nowhere people all together in one place was at whoop-ti-doos, and there hadn’t been one of them here in twenty years. They’d been a good time, though, them whoop-ti-doos. Mountain folk from all over would gather in some hollow that had a good-sized piece of flat land. Somebody’d dig a big pit, fill it with the right kinda wood — oak and hickory for the heat, cedar for the seasoning — with charcoal on top and there’d be an animal carcass on a spit over the pit, with a crank on the end so’s you could turn it slow-like, get it done even on all the sides. There’d also be a bucket with a mop in it so’s you could slather what was in the bucket on the meat as it cooked — some special kinda barbecue sauce some granny up in the hills had a recipe for that’d died with her and couldn’t nobody ever make it again.
There’d be tables set up somebody’d snatched out of the basement of one of the closed churches, piled high with all kinda food — fried okra, grits, greens, beans cooked with a ham hock, blackberry cobbler — mountain food, and the nature of a “covered-dish” social was such that every cook wanted to out-do every other one, so whatever they brung was the best thing they knew how to make and the whole of it was a feast fit for a king.
Or a queen.
The queen of Nowhere. That’s what Viola Tackett was gonna be. Not yet, but soon. Yeah, very soon. Tonight was the beginning of it all.
Tonight’s meeting had been called by Sebastian Nower, but the idea’d been Liam Montgomery’s and if he hadn’t come up with it like he done Viola woulda had to orchestrate that part, too. It was better this way, her not having nothing to do with the meeting, just come here like ever’body else to try to put they heads together and figure things out. And anything else that happened … well, it was just — what was the word? Spontaneous. Yeah, spontaneous,
She’d come in the door that led to the stage in front of the auditorium so she could make sure all the pieces was in place, all the folks was where they was supposed to be, wanted to check now so’s she could fix it if one of the dumb-as-a-brick hillbillies wound up on the wrong side of the room.
Nower was preening like a peacock, so glad to be in charge of something he was like to wet his pants.
Sebastian Nower, who lived in the big three-story house on Hawthorne Lane in the Ridge. One of the last remaining fancy homes that’d once been scattered all over the Ridge and into some of the other communities in the county. Back when things was going well and the Ridge had been a real town and the county wasn’t sliding down a greasy slope toward nowhere at all.
She’d set her heart on that house first time she ever seen it more than half a century ago, all decked out like it was for Christmas, with candles in all the windows. And her outside on the street ‘cause Mama’d brought the little’uns in so the church could give them Christmas presents their parents couldn’t afford. They done that for several poor families … made them grovel and say thank you and kiss everybody’s butt and be properly grateful that them high-and-mighty folks had taken the time out of their busy, important lives to go buy a junk toy from the Five-and-Dime to give to kids who needed a pair of shoes and a warm coat a whole lot worse.
She’d stared up at that house, hadn’t never seen nothing in all her six years of drawing breath so grand as it was. And she felt a yearning she didn’t even know how to feel because until that time she hadn’t never seen nothing in her world worth the wanting of it. But she wanted that, she wanted to be a little girl dressed in a lacy white dress, putting on airs with the kinds of folks who told folks like her what to do.
She’d slipped away then, couldn’t help herself, went around the back of the house and peeked in one of the windows where the drapes was open. Just had to get a look, only a peek into such a marvel that she couldn’t imagine real people lived there.
Then that fella grabbed her by the ear, worked for the Nower family he did, and yelled at her for trampling the flower bed though it was wintertime and wasn’t no flowers growing there. He’d hauled her out to the street and called out,
“This one belong to any of you?”
Her mama had stepped forward to claim her and the man shoved Viola at her, then looked down at his own hand and said, “That child needs a bath!”
He’d glanced around at the handful of people who’d happened to be on the street. “It’s no sin to be poor, but soap’s cheap.”
And they all grinned at each other and at him, signifying that they knew the likes of her could have afforded to be clean if they’d chosen to be, and were dirty because they was just dirty people, that was all. Lowlifes.
The man had informed her mother all haughty-like that she could take her brood and leave, clearly undeserving as they was of the generosity of their betters. They didn’t have no Christmas whatsoever ‘cause of what she done. It just passed like any other day, and they lived through it like any other one, cold and hungry.
The Nower House was a symbol of all that Viola Tackett shoulda had in her life but didn’t, but was gonna finally have now at the end of it, no matter what she had to do or who she had to step on to do it.
Gratified that her peek through the auditorium curtains had revealed that nobody was out of place, she let the curtains fall shut and motioned for the boys to come with her across the stage and out the little door to the auditorium off the side so wouldn’t nobody notice. They would make their way to the back of the room so’s she would be in place when the show started at 6:30.