Good Hope Road (6 page)

Her shoulders started to shake as she turned away. “There’s no way to know when he’ll be back. There’s no way to know anything.” She didn’t say anything more, just walked off down the hall looking tired.

I stood alone in the kitchen, then walked outside to the bucket of water to clean up. Closing my eyes, I sat in a drift of moonlight and rubbed the cool, fresh water over my arms and legs. I took in a draft of air, smelling the mineral spring, thinking of how I used to love to visit the spring by moonlight.

I smiled at the memory, almost forgetting where I was, almost losing the terrible picture of the day. It didn’t seem possible that such destruction could be real. Everything was so silent now. But even the quiet told me the night wasn’t right. No katydids churring, no whippoorwills singing, no coyotes calling out to the heavy orange moon. Nothing was the way it should of been.

I went inside, slipped off my shoes, and climbed into the sofa bed beside little Lacy. In the moonlight her face looked peaceful, like sleep had taken her away from all that was. I closed my eyes and hoped it would take me away too.

Ivy’s angel come sometime in the dark of midnight, sometime when my mind was drifting through dreams of the old days. She stretched out her hand to me and tried again to tell me something, but the wind started to blow, pulling me away.

In the darkness, breath come rushing into me like the swoosh from a passing train, howling on its way to someplace, the wheels thumping over the track in a rhythm
. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump
.

I thought about Olney, and where he might be on one of those trains, and when he might drive it back to the station here and come on home to me and the kids.

I sat up in the bed, trying to remember what was real. It was all such a blur. . . .

Those thoughts went through me in less than a minute, and then the clock struck nearby, and I realized it shouldn’t be there so close to my bed, and I realized I wasn’t in my bed. I was on a sleeper sofa, and the room around me was Weldon’s living room, and Olney had been dead for fifteen years. The thumping of the train against the track was only my heart pounding and the howl of its passing just a memory. Only the breath was real.

I took in another long, slow draft of air and smelled the oil lamp burning atop the woodstove nearby
. Eudora, you’re seventy-eight years old, and trains don’t run through Poetry anymore, and a tornado come yesterday and blew your house away, and Ivy’s been gone for sixty years.

It was a lot to understand in the depth of night, just waking from a dream.

Beside me, Lacy stirred and made a soft little cough.

“Ssshhhhh,” I whispered. “It’s all right, sweet one.” I knew the sound each one of the grandchildren made when they coughed, and when they sighed in their dreams, and when they laughed. I worried about them, even when they didn’t need it. But lately, Lacy needed it.

I rested my cheek atop her head and whispered to her, even though I knew she was sleeping. “All the babies are all right. Toby, Cheyenne, Christi, and Anna are asleep in their beds down the hall, and their older sisters are far away at college. Your auntie Elaine’s in Michigan with her two girls, and you’re right here with me.” I didn’t mention Lacy’s father, my son Cass, and his wife. I wasn’t sure what to say. They were living somewhere near Tulsa, last I knew.

When I had counted them all and I knew where they were sleeping, I let out a long, slow breath. “That’s what really matters—that all of our babies made it through the storm. Compared to that, an old house don’t mean much.” I whispered the words like a prayer, then sent them to God on the oil-scented smoke from the lamp. I watched it float around the ceiling for a moment, then disappear.

I tried to close my eyes and sink again into the quiet darkness of sleep, but instead I lay thinking of my house. Something my papa used to say come into my mind:
When your heart wants to grow heavy, it is always best to remind yourself of other folks who have got it worse.

“I wish I had my notebook to write that down,” I whispered close to Lacy’s ear. I often wrote them old memories in my notebooks, because sometime after my seventy-eighth birthday, I begun to notice I was getting forgetful, like my mama did when she got old. I didn’t tell any of the kids about it, but the notebooks helped me keep my mind straight. Now even they got snatched up by the wind.

Somewhere there’s a grandmother whose arms are empty tonight
, I reminded myself,
and she’s wishing all she lost
was
her house and some dime-store notebooks. Somewhere there’s an old lady who’s lost everything, and maybe her memory ain’t just a little gone, but gone so completely she can’t even remember what she’s lost. . . .

My eyes drifted closed, and sleep must of come on me. It come in quiet, peaceful, like the moment I looked into the face of Ivy’s angel and saw the door to heaven. The moment before Jenilee Lane come into the cellar, called my name, touched my hand, and pulled my soul back into my body . . .

A noise startled me awake, and I saw someone moving in the shadows of the lamplight. My mind fluttered around like a bird trapped in the barn loft, not quite sure how to find a way out, or whether it wanted one. “Weldon?” I whispered. “Is that you? Is everything all right in town? You been gone for hours.”

“Things are bad, Mama.” He sighed wearily. His shoulders sagged as he opened the old chest by the fireplace and started pulling out blankets. “I just came to get what blankets and medical supplies we’ve got here. We’re still pulling survivors out of the collapsed houses and buildings in town. There should be some search dogs here in the morning, we hope. Nineteen tornadoes touched down all over the tristate area, so there’s damage everywhere. Roads are closed, hospitals are jammed. Help is slow in coming. We’re just doing the best we can to dig ourselves out and take care of the injured.”

“It’s that bad?” I tried to picture it in my head. “Dear Lord, Weldon, how can that be?”

Weldon was too tired to mince words. “The armory is about the only building left standing in town. Doc Howard and I set up a field hospital there, but a vet and a pharmacist aren’t much of a substitute for a real doctor. We’ve got a couple of EMTs from the Hindsville Volunteer Fire Department, and we’re doing the best we can to take care of folks until we can get them to a real hospital. The park out at the lake was full of campers here for the music festival. There’s no telling how many people are hurt out there.”

“My Lord,” I whispered. I wanted to wrap Weldon in my arms and curl him in my lap like I did when he was a little boy, so I could protect him from all that was happening. “My Lord. I’ll get my clothes on and come help.”

“No, Mama,” he snapped, starting toward the door with the blankets. “Just stay here, all right? It’s black as pitch out there—no lights on anywhere in town and rubble everywhere. You just stay here and help Janet take care of the kids. You’d be in the hospital if we could get you there.”

I felt my hackles rise. “Ain’t nothing wrong with me.” It’s a terrible thing to have your own children talk to you like you’re an infant. “I’m fine.”

“Just stay here,” he barked, heading toward the door. “There’s nothing you can do in town, and . . .” He paused as a voice came over the radio on his belt. He pressed it to his ear, trying to make out the words, then clipped the radio back on his belt and turned toward the door in a hurry.

“Weldon, what’s going on?” I tried to get out of bed to go after him, but my body was heavy as lead.

“One of the sheriff’s deputies has found a medical doctor. At least that’s what I think he said. The man was trying to beat it out on the backroads to the interstate as the storm came in, and his car got stuck in the mud. Been stranded at one of the flooded low-water crossings all night, somewhere out past Good Hope Road. The deputy’s going to try to get through the crossing at Ataberry and bring the doctor back to town.” He combed his hair from his face, his eyes flickering in the lamplight. “Pray they make it, Mama. We need a doctor. Now.”

 

 

T
he image of Nate hovered in the doorway as I drifted awake in the gray predawn light. Drew stood beside him, not smiling, just watching, his eyes not blue and sparkling like Nate’s, but dark like Daddy’s, brooding, sad, angry.

I blinked hard, and the images faded like smoke, weaving in and out of the faint glow from the windows.

I thought about the last time Drew came home, after he got out of the army four years ago. The year before Mama died.

He came while Daddy was gone hunting and Mama was at work, trying to make it through the day even though she was sick from chemo. Drew stayed just long enough to get the boxes of his stuff that were stored in the barn. No one would have seen him at all if I hadn’t ditched school that day.

He greeted me as if I were someone he didn’t know and didn’t want to know, as if he hated me as much as he hated that house and Daddy.

“Hey, Jenilee,” he said, standing in the doorway with his ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He looked over his shoulder at his truck, wanting to be gone from there, as if staying in that house any longer would bring it all back. There was a girl sitting in his truck, staring across the pasture at my grandparents’ old house.

Drew looked at the matted orange carpet between us, the ball cap shielding his face. “How’s things?”

“O.K.,” I said, then plopped on the couch and opened up a soda.

“You still in school?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Doin’ good?”

“O.K. I missed a lot last semester, but I’ll still graduate next year, I guess. Mama had to have another surgery and chemo.” I watched closely for his reaction, trying to gauge whether he cared. If he did, he didn’t show it. He just crossed his arms over his chest and looked over his shoulder at the truck again. We stood there in silence.

Finally he said, “I heard Nate’s been ditchin’ school. That’s darned stupid. Twelve-year-old kid shouldn’t be ditchin’ school. I’m gonna talk to him about it.”

“I don’t think it’ll do any good. They kicked him out of middle school football for his grades, and he says he isn’t going back.”

Drew tipped his face upward and gave me a hard look through Daddy’s dark eyes, so black you couldn’t see anything in them. “Probably won’t.”

“I don’t blame him.” I don’t know why I said it, maybe just to tick Drew off, because it hurt me that he didn’t care at all about Mama, that he was five years older than me, a grown-up, yet I was the one stuck home taking care of Mama, when I was only seventeen. “He’s making four-fifty an hour tax-free, helping put in sod for Shad Bell’s daddy’s construction company. Shad got him on there. Shad said he could get me on there filling out construction invoices in their office.”

Drew’s eyes flashed the way they used to when he was about to beat somebody up at school. “You stick with your job at the vet clinic with Doc Howard. You stay away from Shad Bell.”

“Whatever.” I swirled the liquid in the soda can and watched it through the hole.

“I mean it, Jenilee.”

“At least Shad cares what’s going on around here. At least he’s trying to help me get a job that’ll pay some more money.” I knew that would cut deep, and I wanted it to. Drew and Shad had always hated each other. I wanted Drew to know how lousy I thought he was for running away and leaving Nate and me in the middle of Mama and Daddy’s mess.

Drew took a step forward through the doorway and pointed his clenched fingers at me with a key braced under his thumb like the blade of a knife. “Shad Bell is a drug dealer. The only reason he ain’t in jail is because his daddy’s got the money to bail him out of trouble. You stay away from him and don’t get any ideas about going to work for his daddy, either. You need to spend your time catching up in school.”

I looked at him with my mouth hanging open. There was Drew, who graduated high school only by the grace of the football coaches, who had to join the army because he was one step from being hauled off to jail for fighting and drinking, telling me to be a good student.

“Geez, chill out.” I didn’t want to admit it, but something about what he said made me feel good. No one ever asked me about school anymore. When you’re worried about doctor bills and electric bills, and how to pay for food, high school doesn’t matter much.

The horn honked on the truck outside, and Drew took a step backward. “Gotta go,” he said.

I nodded, feeling as if I were sinking into the matted sofa cushions and disappearing. He looked at me like he might say something more.

Jenilee, pack your stuff and jump in the truck. We’re getting out of here. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.
I wished he would say it. For just an instant, I thought he might. Then he turned and left, and the screen door slammed behind him.

I wondered if, as he was driving away, he thought about turning around and coming back, or if he just headed up the road, forgetting us as each mile passed, letting us grow smaller and smaller, until we disappeared altogether.

Funny how after the fact, you always wish your last words to someone were something better. Something better than
Geez, chill out.
Afterward, I always wondered if I could have said something that would have made him come back. . . .

A truck passed on the road, and my body snapped to life. I pushed off the sofa and looked out the window, hope fluttering in my throat. A thick morning fog hid the road from view, so I listened.

It’s not a diesel
.
It’s not them
.

The engine faded and everything grew painfully quiet.

Lowering my head into my hands, I tried to think beyond the throbbing that started where I had hit my head and pounded down my spine. A tangle of images flashed through my mind, images of everything that had happened the day before.
Did it really happen, or was I dreaming?