Nashville Chrome (2 page)

In the dusk, however, and in the rain, on the high bluff above, an old man appeared. He was barefoot and stubble-faced, wearing a rain-beaten straw hat that was misshapen now into something that resembled a tuft of moldering hay. The old man was smoking a corncob pipe from which rose, heroically, a wandering blue thread of smoke, so luminous in the dusk that it seemed the smoldering might have come not from mere tobacco but from some oil-soaked concoction of bark and wood chips. The old man was sucking on the pipestem as if drawing from it with each deepened breath the sustenance required to keep him upright in such a storm.

He had heard the car laboring to cross the bridge, had heard Floyd's drunken gunning of the engine and the shouts and cries of the occupants as they lost their way and went over the edge. The old man held a frayed and muddy rope, at the other end of which was tethered a dirty white mule. The mule's head was pitched downward as if in defeat, beaten by the steady rain, or perhaps as if lamenting or grieving already the predicament it was witnessing below.

For what seemed a long time the old man and the mule just stood there, as spectators—while they stood there, the dusk slid farther into darkness—though finally, as if after the most strenuous of mental assessments, the old man started down the steep road that switchbacked its way toward the river, leading the mule behind him as if to sacrificial ritual.

At water's edge, the old man retrieved a rusty section of heavy logging cable that was coiled in a tree, used in older times as a crude ferry-assist for rowboats that had passed back and forth to the moonshiners' territory. After looping this to the mule's neck with no harness or trace, just a metal noose around the mule's muscular chest, the old man walked into the river, straight into the washboard rapids that roughly defined the bridge.

The effect it gave was that he was walking on water. He appeared unconcerned about either the car's or his own situation, never getting in a hurry, but simply walking as if on a stroll, or as if considering that a more hurried approach might somehow disrupt the fragile friction-hold the car and its occupants had negotiated with the bridge. As if believing that if he hurried, he himself—their miraculous rescuer—might frighten them all into spilling into the river, like startled sun-basking turtles tumbling from a log with all the slipperiness of a deck of new cards clumsily shuffled.

The old man reached the car and knelt before it tenderly, as if administering to a wounded animal—a horse or a cow in the throes of a difficult birthing—and looped the free end of the cable around the front bumper. There was barely enough cable to reach and tie off with a knot—had Floyd lost his way only a couple of feet earlier, the cable would not have reached—and the old man had to empty his pipe and submerge briefly to finish tying the knot, taking a deep breath before disappearing beneath the water's surface with the cable.

He reemerged, dripping, made a gesture toward Floyd, indicating he should stay put even when the car started moving, and then he trudged back toward the waiting mule, moving now in total darkness and holding on to the taut cable.

He became invisible to them long before he reached the shore. Birdie had stopped hollering, though the baby was still crying. The children were shivering, their teeth chattering, and they clutched the car and each other and waited for the car to move.

They wondered how strong the old mule was, and whether it would be able to find footing in the slippery clay. They could not help but imagine the mule slipping and the car falling back into the creek and going straight to the bottom, pulling the mule along behind it like a baited fishhook attached to a weighted sinker. The mule eventually bleaching to nothing but an underwater skeleton, still fastened to the wire cable, and the Brown family likewise becoming skeletal, entombed within the old Model A.

Up in the world above, the car began to slip forward ever so slightly. The Browns felt it immediately as an increased pressure by the river, and tightened their grips. The car began to rise, lifting free and clear from its side-tipped position, being hoisted back as if cantilevered. As the car regained its footing, water came roaring out of the windows and from beneath the engine's hood and from the seams of the trunk; and suddenly the Browns were slithering back into their car, and sitting in their seats, still up to their waists in water, but afforded once more the dignity of being vertical.

For each of them, it was even more of a second chance than had been their rescue from the fire. They felt both terror and relief, twin and oppositional currents within them as they were pulled by an unseen force through an unseen medium of shuddering resistance, advancing into the darkness.

They each knew that they were on the bridge once again, though they didn't know for how long; and each was stripped barer than they ever had been before of the thing they desired most,
control.
Never had any of them possessed less of it than on that rainy, creek-swollen night, and they sat quiet and shivering in the waterspouting car as they were pulled into the darkness, with the odor of whiskey still present in the car and on Floyd's body, despite the muddy flushing.

Finally they reached the other shore, with the current no longer vibrating against the car—a quietness around them now, as if they had been delivered into a new world, and dripping, as if from a second birth—and the old man called to the mule to cease his efforts and directed the animal to back up a step, so that the knot could be unhitched. He helped the Browns out of the car, a conveyance with which the old man was so unfamiliar that at first he could not determine how to open the door. And then, rolling up the cable as he walked back toward the mule, the old man ushered them up the bluff, toward his cabin on the hill.

As they drew even with the mule, which was just standing there, quivering slightly, as if in either the ending or perhaps beginning of ecstasy—the mule trembling and appearing somehow to radiate a state of grace, having accommodated the one thing in the world it was made and meant to do—they stopped and petted it briefly before leaving it to its isolate bliss. Then they continued on up the slippery hill, with the rain falling as hard as it had all night, and with the water that flowed over the bridge still surging, a few inches deeper now.

When they reached the cabin, Floyd went into the barn with the old man to have a drink—the man said not to worry about the mule, that he would come home on his own and would not even need drying off but would lie down in the straw if he got cold—and while the men drank and visited, Birdie took the children into the cabin, where she rekindled the ashes in the fireplace, beside which the children huddled, steaming.

They stayed the night there, Floyd drinking again. The next afternoon the old man led the mule back across with the same cable, and though the bridge was still submerged, Floyd navigated the bridge successfully this time. The old man came back and rowed Birdie and the children across in a rowboat—they refused to ride in the car—with each child clutching a length of driftwood to cling to and float should the current capsize them. The old man was a powerful and experienced rower, however, and they reached the other side without incident, while Floyd sat on the slick bank with his brown bottle in hand and called out advice and encouragement.

There were no borders that could not be crossed, then, and no crossings that would ever be easy. They had learned already everything they would need to know for their journey.

T
HE LITTLE SAWMILL
was perched at the edge of the dark woods, resting atop the rich soil, with the workers gnawing their way slowly into the old forest. Some years the workers would bring the logs in to the mill, and other years—depending on transportation logistics and contracts—the mill would pack up and move a little farther into the woods. There were still panthers in the swamps and bears in the mountains, or what passed for mountains in those old worn-down hills.

This was another of the paths of their childhood, the physical and sensual sounds and odors of the mill, with the blades whirring on and off throughout the day—the high whine of the spinning, waiting blade powering down to a deep groan as the blade accepted the timber, the blades sending out a different pitch for rough cut, planing, or finishing, and likewise a different tone based on size, density, even species of timber and time of year, and whether the tree grew on a north slope or a south slope.

Different smells, too, wafted through their lives in ribbons of scent—the green odor of the living wood and the drier one of dead wood, the latter a scent like that of a campfire; the smell of the diesel engines as well as those of the mules and horses that sometimes skidded the logs out of the swamp when gasoline was scarce or could not be squandered; the scent and creaking sound of the leather harnesses and other tack of the mules and horses; the stale alcohol-sweat and the tobacco of the laborers, all of them missing fingers, even hands and arms, sometimes from the blade but more often from the logs themselves, thousand-pound rolling pins cascading off the truck, crushing and pinching anything in their way.

And where the workers had not lost some of the various parts of themselves—where there was still a full complement of teeth and fingers and thumbs, hands, feet, arms, and legs—there were internal injuries: broken bones, alcoholism, rage, and the mute desperation of a poverty unknown by several previous generations.

There were outright deaths, too, accidents sometimes of fatigue—falling off a truck, walking under a falling tree, or any of a hundred other unspectacular possibilities. The mill lost a few workers each year in that manner, like the trees themselves, so that between the dying and the injured, there was always a setback, and always some sort of ongoing or attempted recovery.

Even to those who had never been in a war, it must have seemed that this was what it would be like: that the forest was the enemy and that the workers' task was to try to gain a little stronger foothold and advance into the enemy's territory a bit farther each day.

Only a hundred and fifty years separated these new workers and their families from the straight bloodlines of Oglethorpe's ruffians, the prisoners who had been turned loose into the lawless woods—a hundred and fifty years being an utterly insignificant amount of time for such bloodlines to be filtered out of those workers, washed clean by time and the influence of the forest and its ravines and ridges, the tempering that must always be negotiated between any landscape and any species, any newcomer to the world.

The children knew no other world. The forest—both the injured forest as well as the uninjured—combined with the children's spirits like the gold light that came down through the dense canopy of broad leaves in the morning: each pattern of leaf, each lobe and serration, already accommodated to the specificity of its time and place.

In that forest, the shady dapple of the leaves moderated the temperature of the soil and gave nutrition to the legions of meek insects, the lives of which also helped enrich and process the soil, and each morning in the spring and summer, the forest would begin to hiss with chlorophyllitic excess—a tremendous, thunderous, silent power, a silent energy shimmering above the leaves with such verve that it was almost audible.

The green light bathed the children, infiltrated their lungs, shimmered its golden way up into their minds. They could have stayed there forever—as had the generations before them—but the force that had come into them desired otherwise.

T
HEIR PARENTS' MILL
could in no way afford a kiln. The trees were milled green, the lumber then stacked to dry. The green wood was still heavy and dense. Often it was wood that had been hauled out of the forest only a day or two earlier, and might still be coated with mud and grit from the sledge. Such timber wore down the blades quickly, and the knots where newly severed branches had once grown also chipped the blades. When the blade hit such nicks, it sent out a single squawl of protest. There was no rhythm to these outbursts, but the sound punctuated the days, as did the accompanying lull of the engines when the operator had to idle down, pull the log back, and make another, more cautious approach.

And in that quieter powering-down, that readjustment, the Browns felt a relief and release from the all-day roar and whine. When the mill was running, though, a tension permeated, and shook every atom in the air in the clearing around the sawmill, and in the bones of all who could hear. The vibrations traveled back into the forest itself.

Always, after such a setback, the engines ran harder and harder, powering up to make it all the way through the cut—slabs of lumber peeling away like long curls and shavings of butter—until some new resistance was struck yet again and the peace of near silence returned.

The workers, leaning in close to the saws and the engines, benumbed by years of their labor and going quickly deaf, had become inured to any such momentary releases. Many of them had become lithified to the world, with only the perspiration that sprang from them beneath the bright sun, and the occasional blood that leapt from them when injured, indicating they were still creatures of this world and not some strange half-machine beings themselves.

But the children, with their souls and spirits yet so soft-formed, were still deeply alert to the tension of the engines and sawblades. The loud
ching!
of the blade getting jammed, followed by the groan of the engines shutting down and the quiet cursing of the operator, would have been a part of not just their auditory lives from the beginning, but the pattern and pulse of their every breath, whether they knew it or not: the incessant low-level anxiety of waiting for the sound of disaster, or failure.

The children and some of the adults crept through the days finely tuned to sound; and when the pressure of the revving-up of the engines was released, the children would have been able to hear once again the shrilling of the seven-year locusts, a sound coming from the forest, as if the forest were healing itself.