The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover Read online

  “A dog that’s hurt will bite whoever touches it,” Mama said. “A dog that’s hurt ain’t at itself.”

  “We’d better carry her to the porch,” I said. It would take two of us to lift Old Pat she had growed so big.

  “Best not to move her; she may be all broke up inside,” Mama said.

  “They kilt her and didn’t even stop,” Troy said. It had all happened so fast I couldn’t even remember what the car looked like except it was black, like the mailman’s car. Troy put his arms around Old Pat’s neck, but just then she woke up and growled and snapped at him, raking his wrist with her tooth. Troy jumped back in surprise. “Don’t you know me?” he said.

  “A dog that’s hurt only knows it’s hurt,” Mama said. “She must be hurt bad inside.”

  I tried to think what we could do for a dog as big as Old Pat that had bones or other things broke inside. I hated to think how much pain she must be in and she couldn’t talk and tell you about it.

  Troy reached out to caress the top of Old Pat’s head, but it must have been terrible sore there for she jerked away growling and snapped at him again. With a yelp she pushed herself away and dragged herself along, getting to her feet.

  “Come here, Old Pat, here,” Troy said. There was tears in his eyes. He slapped his knees and called her again, but Old Pat walked with a lurch, dragging her left foot. She limped away from us, along the road, and then fought her way through the weeds on the bank by the hawthorn bush and passed between the chicken house and the walnut tree. Troy run after her still holding his drawing pencil, and I followed. Old Pat run into the weeds at the edge of the orchard. By the time I got up on the bank she was already beyond the Winesap and Ben Davis trees.

  “See where she goes,” I hollered to Troy. When I got to the upper side of the orchard both Old Pat and Troy had disappeared into the pine woods. Briars had growed up thick at the edge of the woods and I had to look for a place to get through without scratching myself. It was cool and dim when I got into the pine trees. Needles fell from the white pines like hairs and piled up on twigs and limbs near the ground. Trees crowded so close you couldn’t see far.

  “Where are you?” I called, but all I could hear was the breeze sighing in the pines overhead and the drip of needles all around. It seemed like Old Pat and Troy had both disappeared into the shadows.

  “Where did you go?” I yelled. I picked my way past a hole where the roots of a big tree had been tore out of the ground when the tree fell in an ice storm. There was a kind of rabbit trail or fox trail and I followed that. The trail led out of the pine trees and into oak trees farther up on the hillside. It was more open there, but still I couldn’t see Troy or Old Pat.

  And then I seen Troy standing beside a big rock all covered with moss. Tears run down his cheeks.

  “Where did she go?”I said.

  “Don’t know.”

  We looked around the woods but couldn’t find no sign of Old Pat. Troy called out to her again and again, but the only sound was squirrels in the tops of trees and wind stirring the branches. We looked back in the pine woods but didn’t see nothing there. After a while we had to give up and go back to the house.

  “A HURT ANIMAL will go off and lick its wounds,” Mama said. “It wants to be left alone.”

  “But what if Old Pat needs help?” Troy said.

  “I don’t reckon there’s much help you can give a dog that’s all busted up inside,” Mama said.

  After dinner me and Troy decided we’d try again to look for Old Pat. I got two pieces of corn bread and smeared bacon grease on them and wrapped them up in waxed paper. If anything could help Old Pat, it would be something to eat. I tried to think where a hurt dog would choose to go. She wanted to hide away because she was weak and in pain. She wanted to be at some place where she could feel safe. And she might want to be where there was water. Something hurt or sick would need a drink of water.

  “Let’s go over to Kimble Branch,” I said.

  “That’s the opposite direction from where she went,” Troy said.

  “We don’t know where she went. She run into the pine woods and she went up the hill. But we don’t know where she went from there.”

  We walked out along the road and then down across the field below the pine woods. Kimble Branch run out through the level woods beyond the field. It was a big branch that went all the way to the river. On the other side of Kimble Branch there was laurel thicket, and a spring come out of the thicket. Between the spring and the branch was thousands of chips of white quartz, milk quartz, where some Indian must have made arrowheads. There was not a perfect arrowhead there, just pieces of broke ones.

  When we got to the branch and crossed it we didn’t see nothing at first, and then I heard something stir in the leaves and seen a tail. It was Old Pat’s tail that moved a little. She laid under a laurel bush not far from the spring, all curled up. The blood on her nose had dried and one of her eyes was bloodshot. She growled a little as we got close. “Go slow,” I said. I unwrapped the bread and broke off a piece and handed it to Troy. He reached the bread toward Old Pat’s mouth. I thought at first she was going to snap at him, but instead she snapped up the piece of bread.

  She must be better if she can eat, I thought. But you could tell it hurt her every time she moved. Troy took off his hat and filled it with water from the spring and brought it to Old Pat. She lapped up the water like she was parched inside. She drunk more water and eat more bread. Troy said he should carry her to the house, but I didn’t see how we could tote a dog that big all the way to the house even if she would let us. She needed to lay still and heal up.

  “I hate to leave her out here,” Troy said.

  For the next four days we come back to the place by the spring and brought Old Pat something to eat. Except for the cut on her shoulder that turned into a scab, all the places she was hurt was inside her. There wasn’t much we could do for her except bring her something to eat. We come back two or three times a day with scraps of meat and bread. Troy would stay out there for hours with his dog.

  It was about a week after Old Pat was hit by the car that we got up one morning and seen her on the porch. The wounds inside her had healed up enough so she could walk. Troy run out and hugged her and she whimpered and yelped.

  Six

  It wasn’t until after Papa started building houses around the lake for summer people that he begun to think about buying a truck. He’d always walked to work, and sometimes he took us to town in the wagon. And sometimes him and Mama would ride in the buggy he’d bought from one of Mama’s Johnson cousins. But he wanted and needed a truck to haul things and to go back and forth to work on the other side of the lake.

  The new model of Ford, the Model A, come out about that time and Papa saved up enough money for a down payment and went up to the car lot in town and bought one. He didn’t tell us he was going to do it. Now he’d never drove a car in his life as far as I know. The salesman showed him how to work the starter and clutch and brake, and told him where to go to get a license, and he just drove away.

  First thing we knowed about it was when we heard the rattle of a truck on the road and the oogah-oogah of the horn. And Papa drove up into the yard in this shiny black pickup truck. We all gathered round to look at it.

  “How much did that thing cost?” Mama said.

  “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” Papa said, and laughed.

  He told Velmer and Effie and me to climb in the back and him and Mama and Troy got in the front and he took us for a ride up the river. The truck jerked and hiccupped when it started but he got it going. I stood holding the green sideboards with the wind in my face. We drove up the road pulling a train of dust behind us. I hoped people along the road seen us, and knowed that we had a new Model A Ford truck.

  Now the truth is that Papa never did learn to drive good. I reckon he was too old when he started, and he never did have lessons. He could get where he wanted to go and that was good enough for him. But he neve
r did learn to use the brakes right. He didn’t slow down to go around curves, so when he turned the tires squealed and you felt the truck was going to skid right off the road and swap ends. He just couldn’t remember to push in the brake pedal. One time I heard him holler “whoa” when he went around a curve, like he was driving a horse instead of a truck.

  It was a good thing Papa bought the truck when he did for the next year the stock market crashed, and after that the banks started failing. And then there wasn’t any work to be found. By then Papa had paid off the mortgage and the well digger and the truck. He had two hundred dollars in the bank, but when the bank closed he lost all of it.

  It was just when things started looking grim and the banks started failing that Papa said we needed something to cheer us up. There was so much bad news we needed to forget it for a day. He said we’d drive down to Chimney Rock and climb up to the top of the cliff and have a picnic at the park in Hickory Nut Gorge. We kids had never been to Chimney Rock and neither had Mama. We was all thrilled. Mama fixed up a basket with fried chicken and coleslaw and pickles and cookies and a jar of lemonade. We got our hats and sweaters for the ride to Chimney Rock and Effie took her dark glasses for the bright sun hurt her eyes.

  But as soon as we climbed into the truck—Troy asked to ride in the back with Velmer, Effie, and me—Papa said no, we couldn’t go today. The truck wasn’t running right and he had to get it fixed before we could go off on such a trip. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say.

  “The truck was running fine yesterday,” Velmer said.

  “Lord gosh,” Effie said.

  Mama got out of the cab and took the picnic basket from the bed. “We’ll just eat our picnic here,” she said. She got almost to the steps when Papa called, “April Fool!” And he started laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over and rested his arm on the fender of the truck.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” Mama said, and put the basket back in the truck bed.

  “You should have seen your faces,” Papa said, and wiped his eyes. “Let’s go to Chimney Rock.”

  I DON’T RECKON anybody could see the Depression coming on, unless it was the preachers. Preachers kept saying the world was coming to an end or coming to a terrible punishment for the sins that people had done. It was a terrible time of bootlegging and gangsters and wild parties in the cities, and girls that cut off nearly all their hair and acted like they’d gone crazy, wearing lipstick and rouge and smoking cigarettes in public. But preachers talk that way, don’t they? Preachers always see doom and tribulation. That’s how they get people to come up to the altar and get saved and join their church and give their money to the collection. They get them scared and then they keep them scared.

  But nobody I knowed could tell what was going to happen when we heard the stock market way up north crashed and people jumped out of windows. I thought a stock market was a place where they sold horses and cattle. It sounded like a whole building that had burned and fell down. I was in my last year of high school and everybody seemed to be talking about the Wall Street Panic. Papa said Wall Street wasn’t about horses and cattle at all, that stocks was about money invested in business. He said the whole problem was about debt, about people that owed more than they was worth.

  But it seemed that everybody had more than they had before. Papa was building summer houses around the lake for rich people from Spartanburg and Charlotte, and he had paid for the well and Velmer’s doctor bills and the new Model A truck. But most people had learned to buy things on credit and all up and down the river valley you seen new cars and trucks and even a few new houses. You seen new farm equipment, and two or three people we knowed had bought tractors. There was talk that electricity was coming out to the country. People would have electric lights the way they did in town and around town.

  The first hint I got of what was about to happen was one day I come home from school and Papa’s truck was already in the yard. He usually didn’t get home from work until five or later. My first thought was that he’d got sick or Mama had got sick and they’d called him to come to the house. And then I seen Papa’s toolbox on the porch, and Velmer’s toolbox too. Velmer had been working with Papa since he quit school. They usually left their tools in the bed of the truck when they come home in the evening.

  Now I knowed Papa didn’t like to be asked questions when he was riled, so when I got in the house and seen him sharpening his pocketknife by the fireplace I didn’t say nothing at first. I put my books down on the table and went on into the kitchen. Mama was standing at the sink, and I reached into the bread safe for a piece of corn bread.

  “Why is Papa home?” I said. Mama turned and looked at me and shook her head. A chill went through me. I figured Papa had got sick or there had been some bad trouble.

  “What is wrong?” I said. But Mama turned back to the sink where she was scraping carrots. I’d never seen her act so mysterious. With my mouth full of corn bread I stepped back into the living room. Papa was still rubbing his knife blade on the little stone he kept on the mantel.

  “Why is your toolbox on the porch?” I said. I couldn’t keep myself from asking it.

  “Cause that’s where it belongs,” Papa said. He kept on whetting his knife on the slender stone and I seen he wasn’t going to say nothing else.

  “Shell some corn for the chickens,” Mama called from the kitchen. Shelling corn for the chickens was something I done every evening, and there was no reason for her to remind me except she wanted to get me out of the house. I crammed the rest of the bread in my mouth and stomped out.

  The unshucked corn was piled in the loft of the barn and to get chicken corn I had to climb the ladder in the feed room to the loft. But when I opened the door to the feed room there was Velmer standing by the bins of crushing and dairy feed and cottonseed meal. I didn’t know what he was doing in the feed room.

  “Why did you and Papa come home?” I said.

  I could hear the scribble of mice running along the walls of the barn and stirring shucks at the edge of the pile in the loft above. Velmer looked like he was ashamed of something. I seen he was holding a steel trap, which he was wiping with a tow sack. I guess he was getting ready for the trapping season come winter.

  “Why did you all come home?” I said.

  “Cause we was fired.”

  A nerve somewhere inside me shrieked like a sick hornet sting. “What did you do?” I said.

  “We didn’t do nothing,” Velmer said. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said Mr. Bishop from Spartanburg that owned the house they was working on today had told them to stop. But Papa had told him the house wasn’t even half done.

  “Mr. Bishop said his investments in the stock market had been wiped out, and because he couldn’t pay his debts, the cotton mill was closing down. The work on the cottage by the lake would have to stop. The house won’t be finished.”

  “There’ll be other houses to build,” I said.

  “But that was not the worst of it,” Velmer said. “Old Bishop said he wouldn’t be able to pay us what he already owes us. When Papa told him he had to pay the help their wages Bishop laughed at him and said he was declaring bankruptcy and there was no way he could pay. Papa knocked him down right there in front of the half-finished porch. Then he seen what he’d done and helped Bishop up. Bishop didn’t say no more; he got in his car and drove away, back to Spartanburg, I guess.”

  “Can’t Papa sue him?”

  “What good would it do to sue if Bishop ain’t got any money?”

  Velmer’s story was so strange I felt light headed. Papa had been building houses around the lake for several years. It was the way he made money to pay off the mortgage, to pay the doctor, to pay for the well. He hired his brother Russ and his brother-in-law Elmer to work too. He paid them out of what he got for building the houses. Now he had to pay his help even though he wasn’t being paid.

  I climbed up into the gloom of the barn loft and shucked ten ears of corn and shelled them
in the corn sheller. Mice trickled along the cracks of the barn walls, but I didn’t pay them no attention. My mind wasn’t on what I was doing. I took the bucket of corn and climbed back down out of the loft. It seemed like the world had changed since I got home from school. We’d been doing better and Papa had paid his debts and I was a senior in high school starring in the school play. And now Papa had no way to make a living.

  The light seemed changed when I walked to the chicken house and scattered the corn for the chickens. Everything was the same, but the tilt of the land and the curve of the sky seemed different. The chicken house, the roost poles inside, the smell, was the same, but it was like the world had turned sour and lost its balance. Can’t be as bad as that, I said to myself. The world ain’t changed. It will always be the same old world. I emptied the bucket and gathered eggs from the nests which was boxes full of pine needles nailed to the walls. When I got to the house I put the eggs in the basket Mama used to carry eggs to the store.

  “Careful with them eggs,” Mama said. “That’s all we got to sell for money.” Mama took the bucket and rinsed it. She had to milk the cow before supper.

  It was my job to fix supper while she was milking and I poured buttermilk and water and corn meal into a pan and stirred them all together. I thought: Things can’t be as bad as they seem. Papa will find another house to build. He always has. I will graduate from high school. The typhoid has gone from the river valley. The sun will come up tomorrow morning.

  BUT THE WORLD had changed. And nobody guessed at first how much it had changed. The first thing that happened was that all the money disappeared. It was like one day there was plenty of money and then the next day it was all gone. And I never was able to tell where it all went. Had somebody took all the money and hid it? Did the government and the bankers all call the money in? Was it buried somewhere under a government building? Or was all the paper money burned up? I just didn’t see how so many thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, could disappear over night. You could see the buildings and cars and things that had been bought. But there wouldn’t never be any more bought because there wasn’t any more money.