Forever Never Ends (3 page)

She had time for her hobbies and when she wanted a weaving loom, Donnie ran right out and bought one without batting an eye, two thousand dollars just like that. It sat over there in the corner with dusty strings hanging from it like cobwebs but Donnie hadn’t ever said an unkind word about her not using it anymore. She took another glance out the window, at the sky going thick as flies on molasses.

No Donnie.

She let her attention wander from the quilt in her lap to the kitchen. It was cluttered with cookbooks, recipes, and enamelware, bought by Donnie so she could finally win the chow-chow contest at the festival. He’d even bought her a Cuisinart.

“It's
science
,” he’d told her. “Not luck or old mountain secrets, else Elvira Oswig wouldn't be getting the blue ribbon year after year. She got the system down, is all.”

Blossomfest was coming up this weekend and that last batch of chow-chow was going to win for her. Donnie had said wasn't no judge on Earth going to be able to pass up this year's Moody entry.

And here he came now, wobbling down the trail like he'd taken too many samples and holding his head like it was a broken bucket leaking water.

Lordy, girl, get your old bones up and help him into his chair, ‘cause you know he works hard for you and never once asks for thanks, only a little hanky-panky once in a while, but they ALL do that. And anyway, that don't take much time at all, and if it keeps Donnie home, then I'm glad to oblige.

She put aside her needle and scraps. Her husband stumbled up the steps, feet dragging as if his boots were filled with creek mud.

"Hey, honey, are you feeling okay?" she asked, standing and brushing the threads from her lap.

To tell the truth, he looked like heck warmed over and he was nodding, but that didn't mean nothing because he hated to complain. He put his arms around her, but his eyes were only partly open, the whites showing like sick moons.

"Here, maybe I better put you to bed, Donnie."

He leaned on her, heavy, like he wanted some hanky-panky, but it was the afternoon and they hadn’t done it in the daylight since she was barely off her Daddy's knee and, besides, his breath smelled like a crock of sauerkraut that had turned.

"You got the fever?” she asked. “Looks like you're having some kind of spell, took ill with something."

Why wouldn’t he look at her?

"Honey?"

She tried to back away, but his arms were strong and his face pressed closer. The rims of his eyes were swollen and tinged with green, the color of rotted watermelons.

“Say something,” she said. “And you may as well stop trying to kiss me until you get that dead skunk out of your mouth and—”

She finally figured out what was bothering her, besides the smell and his strange eyes. His mouth on hers caused no stir of wind.

Lordy, that ain't right, and you got to get away because he ain't breathing and why don't your legs work and he still wants that kiss and his tongue feels like cold slimy snakeskin and why don't your legs work and what's he putting in your mouth that's slithery and Oh my Lord now you can't breathe and this ain’t real but you can't breathe that sure is real and something's wrong in your bones and guts and God let my lungs work, girl, this must be what it's like to die only why does it hurt so much and now you'll never get that blue ribbon and we’re all sauerkraut and what is this shhhhh oh Lordy Jesus I can’t feel my heartbeat and the whole world’s gone green and white and green and white cause this must be what they call your life flashing before your eyes flashing before your flashing

CHAPTER TWO

A black cloud crawled across the sky, scrubbing the top of Bear Claw as it headed east. Little gray dots of cumulus followed in its trail like deformed cows bound for pasture. At sunrise, the clouds had been spread as thin as apple butter. In the few hours since, they had clumped up like they meant business. And this time of year, raining was the sky’s main piece of business.

Chester Mull rubbed the knots of his hands together, hoping the friction would melt the arthritis away. March in the High Country was always miserable. The cold and damp weather alternated with brief bursts of sunshine to keep his joints in constant agony, one moment shrunk tighter than fiddle strings and the next looser than Eula Mae Pritcher's morals. Now his aching bones told him that the daily thunderstorm was right on schedule.

Static electricity prickled the wiry gray hairs on the back of his hands. He looked out across the yard at the blue banty hens scratching in the dirt. They wouldn't have sense enough to get out of the rain, and Chester was damned if he was going to go down and shoo them into the barn. He was happy right where he was, with his bony hind end parked in the roped-together bottom of his rocking chair.

A concussion sounded over the mountain, echoing off the granite slopes and stinging Chester's ears. Those boys were blasting away over on Sugarfoot again, chiseling that mountain apart one piece at a time. A wonder the whole damned peak hadn't slid down already, the way they stoked the dynamite. Well, that was the price of progress. He only wished they’d do their progressing a few hundred miles closer to the flatlands.

He turned his head and shot a brown stream of tobacco off the side of the porch. The arc came up a little short, the juice hitting on one of the warped pine planks and quivering in the dust before beginning the slow job of making a permanent stain.

"Damn Days O' Work never did make a good hockwad," he muttered to the air. He had started talking to himself about six years ago, a few months after Hattie had left him to join the Lord. But he made good company, even if he did say so himself. And there was nobody around to disagree with that opinion. Plus, this way, he didn't have to worry about no back sass.

Chester scratched the red gorkle of his neck, the neck that Hattie had always said looked like a turkey's. He mashed his gums together, trying to squeeze a little more nicotine out of his chaw. A dark line of saliva trickled down one side of his mouth, adding yet another color to his possum-hide beard. He reached down and scratched his ragged redbone hound, Boomer, behind the ears and looked out over his farm like a king surveying his castle keep.

The barn was almost ready to give up the ghost. Johnny and Sylvester, his good-for-nothing young-uns, had propped long locust poles against the side of the barn where it sagged toward the ground. The rusty tin roof had buckled under the strain of gravity, and there were gaps in it big enough to drop a hay bale through. Chester didn't really mind, because he sure as hell wasn't going to chase no cows around over these hills and put them up of a night. He'd culled his herd down to a half dozen last spring and sold them at the auction house down in Windshake.

As far as he knew, the only things that lived in the barn now were the rats, because the pointy-nosed bastards never seemed to get tired of moldy corn. The chickens were just as likely to roost up on the porch rails, and the bats had been driven out by the winter sleet that played Ping-Pong with their radar.

So, as far as Chester cared, the whole thing could fall over. DeWalt, the California Yankee who lived over the ridge, had already offered to buy the barn for its wormy chestnut beams and planks.

The tool shed had already collapsed, squatting down in the side yard like a bullfrog with a rump full of wet bugs. An old horse-drawn hay rake quietly flaked away at the back of the shed, its tines curving into the brown turf. The barnyard spread out into stubbled pasture, broken here and there by slack barbed wire strung between gray posts. Johnson grass and saw briars covered what used to be the potato patch, and locust sprigs and blackberry thickets had crept down from the forest slopes to lay claim to the hay fields.

The Mull family had once owned land as far as the eye could see, both sides of Bear Claw and a big chunk of Antler Ridge, plus a pie-shaped wedge of Brushy Fork where the headwaters of the Little Hawk River sprang from between the cracks of mossy rocks. The acreage had been chopped up and married off until each branch of the family was now down to a few hundred acres. Chester had inherited a prime spot here in the valley, but his outlands were all granite cliffs and crags bristling with jack pine. He had been lucky to palm a piece of it off on DeWalt.

Chester chuckled at DeWalt’s bid to become a country boy. Some tobacco juice slid down the wrong way and caused him to cough. His lungs caught fire as they worked like bellows to push out the bad air. Thinking about DeWalt always made him laugh, but even a good belly laugh wasn't worth this kind of pain. When he recovered, and his scrawny head had stopped bobbing like an apple on the seat of a moving hay wagon, he ratched his throat clear and spat out the offending gob.

Chester had sold the darned fool twenty acres of rock face, so straight up and down that from an airplane the lot looked barely the size of a football field. DeWalt had given him ninety thousand dollars in California Yankee money, but it spent just as good up here in North Carolina. Better, in fact.

Chester decided to call the new neighbor.

“What you up to?”

“Watching the weather.” DeWalt answered in his educated tone as if expecting the call. The fellow didn’t get out much for a rich man.

Chester squinted up into the sky, trying to place the sun's position in the smear of clouds. “Just a little storm coming through.”

“Does it look a little green to you?”

“Hell, DeWalt, did you finally give in and try some of Don Oscar’s moonshine?”

“Seriously. Something’s odd about it.”

“Don’t give me your ‘acid rain’ lecture. You been reading too many of them books.”

“I’ve been here three years and I’ve not seen anything like it.”

Chester stood on quivering legs and hooked his thumbs under the straps of his blue jean overalls. He looked out from the doorway at the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains that bucked and swooped all around the horizon.

When he was a boy, he'd been able to see clear to Tennessee from right here on the porch. Now he could barely see forty miles on a good day, and sometimes at night he couldn't even make out the little pinpricks of orange and blue light that marked Windshake about twenty miles below.

“Well, three hundred years of Mulls have come and gone, and none of them ever told of green rain,” he said, though the clouds cast a peculiar color. He figured it was the angle of the sun. Or maybe the jar of corn liquor in his hand.

“All that pollution—”

“You ain’t from around here,” Chester said. “You ain’t earned the right to bitch about the ruination of the mountains.”

Over on Sugarfoot, a twenty-story condominium complex rose above the ridge, looking sort of unreal, like something Hollywood dreamed up for one of its outer space picture shows. Below the condo, a gang of bulldozers had gouged a ski slope into the side of the mountain. Thanks to snow blowers, the white strip of slope still zigzagged down the side of the hill even though the last freeze had been three weeks ago.

Most of the prime peaks had summer homes strewn across them. The ones that hadn't been heavily developed were scarred by the bleached bones of balsam that the acid rain had killed off. The blasting crews had been going at it hard and heavy, too, knocking red holes in the mountainsides. And those big silvery slabs of granite weren't all that eye-catching to Chester.

“Besides,” Chester said. “I sold you a chunk, so you’re part of the problem.”

“I was surprised you’d part with your family keep.”

“Simple economics. I was seven when Daddy stuck a hoe in my hands and said ‘Get to work.’ Sixty years later, what did it get me? Knotted-up fingers and a bad back. Since I got your money, I don’t have to strike a lick at a snake if I don’t feel like it.”

“Maybe I’ll come over later and talk about the weather in person.”

“Good. I ain’t heard any good complainin’ since Hattie passed on.”

“Watch the sky.”

Chester hung up and couldn’t resist studying the clouds, but he was more interested in the angle of the sun.

"Close enough to noon, I reckon," he said, settling his trembling varicose flesh in the rocking chair. One of the chair runners pinched Boomer's tail and the hound yelped.

"You old blessid fool, you'd think by now you'd keep your ass end out from under there." Chester smoothed the mange on the dog's wrinkled forehead. Boomer looked up at him with sad, droopy eyes that had chunks of sleep crust tucked in the corners.

The sky was darker now and the wind was mashing the clouds together like lumps of rotten potatoes. The mountains grew shadowy, their features lost. Chester reached into his mouth, plucked out his chaw, and laid it on the porch rail. Looked like one of old Boomer's turds, Hattie always said, but she’d been big on snuff herself and hadn't had much room to talk.

The first drops of rain fell on the tin roof of the porch. The rain sounded like a mess of elves working away with shoe hammers. DeWalt said it was a relaxing sound and liked to sit here on the porch during rainy afternoons. But Chester thought a man might as well have marbles rolling around inside his skull. Chester watched the drops bounce off the Ford's black hood. Rivulets of red clay ran down the twin dirt tracks of the driveway. He'd be going nowhere today if this kept up.

But that was just fine with Chester. That meant nobody would be out to bother
him
, either. That slack-eyed Johnny Mack wouldn't be trying to hit him up for liquor money and Sylvester wouldn't be wanting to take him squirrel hunting. And DeWalt, even though he had a shiny four-wheel drive, didn't like getting his two-hundred- dollar boots muddy. DeWalt liked to keep his things just the way they looked in the catalog.

"About time for a little liquid lunch, Boomer," Chester said. Boomer looked up, thumped his tail a couple of times, and farted.

"You're entitled to your opinion," Chester said.

The rain began falling in thick silver sheets, and Chester could barely see across the yard. But at the edge of the forest, about two miles up the slope, that weird green stuff was still glowing. Sure as hell wasn't foxfire, the glow-in-the-dark fungus that freaked out city folk. The glow had been there a couple of days now, but Chester hadn't yet mustered the energy to walk out and check on it.