Road to Nowhere (15 page)

The words went on, and Eliza felt her attention move from them.

The room was strange—old as any building, carved and ornamented, but neglected. The ceiling had images, unfamiliar to her, but broken in places, and patched and covered. One large corner was covered entirely. Even the room was in conflict with itself.

Then Joe Esterhouse spoke, and the discord ended. The anger remained. The conflict was between forces too great, and it was plain that the time for peace was still far off.

“We’ll get on with our business. You all have your agendas, and they include the items left from the last two months.”

“Joe?” Wade was speaking. “I’ve got a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Is there any official estimate of what the traffic on Gold River Highway would be?”

“There is,” Joe answered. “Estimates were made in 1987.”

“Anything recent?”

“That would be the most recent.”

Wade spoke again. “I want to make a motion that we get some kind of new estimate. How does that work?”

“We can request it from the state or pay for it ourselves,” Joe said.

“Mr. Esterhouse?” It was a voice from the audience.

“I’ll recognize Mr. Stephen Carter of the Planning Commission.”

It was the young man from the other meetings.

“I know a person in the Department of Transportation district office in Asheville. I could get him to work up some quick estimates.”

“I object to this.” This was the man who always spoke first, Everett Colony. “He’s from Gold Valley. He’ll manipulate those numbers.”

“We are not accepting public comment at this time,” Joe said. “If you can do that, Mr. Carter, we’d certainly appreciate it. Lyle.”

What a strange man this Lyle was. So nervous. “Yes, Joe?”

“Work with Mr. Carter on that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I don’t think we’ll even need a motion for that. Now, let’s get on with the agenda.”

Joe Esterhouse led them on. Eliza listened for direction, but she only heard the echoes from before,
Do not desecrate, do not defile, do not violate.

The words rang in her ears!

She had nothing to say, nothing of her own and nothing given to her. The time for her to speak would come, but not yet.

And she watched the man next to her, Wade Harris. There was danger; the powers now in conflict were very strong.

“What a crackpot!” Wade stuffed his coat into the closet and made for the kitchen. “What do I want to eat?”

“Heat up an enchilada.” Cornelia was at the kitchen table reading a magazine.

“I figured I’d about seen it all,” Wade said, squinting at the shapes in the freezer. “But good old Eliza takes the cake.” He found the enchiladas. “She takes the fruitcake. She
is
the fruitcake. The whole meeting she doesn’t say a word but, ‘I vote no,’ in this solemn wheeze.” He closed his eyes and held his nose up in the air. “I vote: noooooo.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“What difference does any of it make? Change a zoning, appoint some bozo to the Recreation Commission. None of it makes a difference. So it’s all four to one, four to one. ‘I vote no.’ ”

Cornelia giggled. “I want to meet her.”

“Sure, do it. I don’t think she’s contagious. The one thing . . .” He punched the button on the microwave and sat at the table to wait. “The one thing is Gold River Highway. That makes a difference, and she might make
the
difference.”

“What about Louise Brown?”

“Yeah, exactly. She’s wavering.” He finally got himself slowed down to where he could look his wife right in the eye. “Corny, I want that road. I don’t think I’ve cared about anything since we moved here, but I want that road.”

“So Charlie Ryder can sell more houses?”

“Not for him, and not for what I’d make out of it, either. I don’t know.” The food was hot and he dumped it on a plate. “Maybe I just need to care about something once in a while. It’s almost . . . like I’ve found something that’s . . . that’s right.”

“Right, like in right and wrong?”

“That’s it, Corny. The road is right. All those Mountain View nazis are wrong. I want right to win. We’ve lived here for four years on this dead-end Gold River Highway road to nowhere, hating every minute. Now it might go somewhere.”

“Wardsville.”

“Right. Wardsville. But if that’s where it’s going, you know, I don’t mind. That’s where we’ll go with it.”

She smiled. “Then I’m with you, Wade. On to Wardsville.”

He raised a forkful of enchiladas as a salute. “On to Wardsville.”

April 10, Monday

Time to start.

The soil was dark, like he’d always remembered it. Always brought back a lot of memories.

He remembered plowing with a horse, walking beside his granddaddy. Would have been seventy-five years back. Pretty soon after that they’d got the first tractor.

That’d been the hard times, not that he’d known it. Chickens, the milk cows, the horse for riding. Big kitchen garden. They hadn’t known they were poor. They had all they needed.

Joe started the tractor. The blade bit the ground.

Turn over the soil, turn it over like everything got turned over. It was good soil, now, with years of fertilizer. Back then it’d been worn out with a century of tobacco taken from it. If his granddaddy or his daddy could see how much grew out of it now.

But those times were turned over and buried and the memory of them withering. It was only roots that dug down and back. No one saw roots, but they were there, pulling out from what was buried.

He was half done before he knew it. He knew this field, and the others, to where he could be doing this in the dark, hardly thinking. He could have plowed just by the smell of the soil.

Once it had been forest. Cherokee had lived on it. There were still arrowheads to be found, even in the fields. No telling how long they’d hunted up and down the creek before the settlers came.

They had a deed, signed by Thomas Jefferson himself, dated 1806. That family had been the Hardisons, and they cleared the fields and built a cabin by the creek, and then a house. Then the North had burned it and no one of that family had come back from the war. Jacob Esterhausy had bought the land when he came from Austria in 1868. It took all the money he had.

Into the next field, cutting into it.

That had been a big family. Dozen children and a big house that Jacob built for them, real big for the times. Joe’s own granddaddy had been one of the dozen.

Big empty house now for two old people. And no one after them.

Fields that would grow grass and scrub if no one plowed them. Then saplings and then the fields would be back to forest and the house gone and the memory of it withered. His own children left with the only living memory of the land as a farm and after them nothing.

Into the last field, tearing at the ground and leaving it scarred behind him. But the scars would be gone by fall, forgotten after that. Who would have known, twenty years ago, forty years, seventy years ago, he’d be here at this far end of time still plowing.

Leaves fallen in the creek from some lost autumn, and now one left, miles downstream, still riding the water, in unknown times so far from where it had grown.

He was on a long road with not much left ahead, and no going back, and it had been hard and a man might wonder what the use of it had been. What was the use of a road, when a man didn’t know where it was going? Or even if he thought he did. Was it any good to be godly, to try to be? A church sermon had good words, but at the end of life, it wasn’t words. It was what was true, and had the life been lived by what was true.

He let himself think about seventy years of plowing, as there wouldn’t be many more, or any.

The earth had so much life. It was the source of so much, of all life.

Pull the hoe through the dark dirt, open it to light, plant the seed. The life of one year reborn in the next.

Eliza worked the hoe, one slow row and then another, pulling and working, then planting and covering.

Give to the earth and it gives back so much, each turn of the circle.

Every beginning came from an end before it. There was no beginning or end. Every road returned to where it began because there was no beginning or end, only the appearance.

She understood this in part. She saw it each spring, when the seed became a plant, and each fall, when the plant became a seed. There was coming forth and returning, there was opening and closing, but they were only appearances of beginning and end.

Birth appeared to be a beginning, and death to be an end, but there was no beginning or end.

The Warrior had no beginning or end. If a man or woman did, it was only the appearance of it.

But thinking of her own husband, long dead, made her often wonder.

“That about does it, Gabe.” Randy tapped the papers on his desk to even them all up. “And I hope I see you again next year.”

It was funny with Gabe, how easy and friendly he was in his garage, and how uneasy he was with business details such as insurance.

“You’re sure it’s okay, Randy?”

“Just right. You don’t have a thing to worry about.”

“Thank you so much. It’s all above my head, you know.”

“Well, that’s my job, Gabe.” He was glad to be doing it, too, and now just a little light conversation to erase the nervous feelings. “And now tell me, have you had many more broken windshields to replace?”

“Broken windshields? Oh—hah! Yours is okay, isn’t it?”

“Not a single problem with it.”

“Good. You know, I did have another one just like it a few days ago. Roland Coates, in fact.”

“Mr. Coates? His window got broken, too? Well, I wonder if it was one of his own trucks that did it.”

“Might have been,” Gabe said. “It was just like yours, the exact same way. Except I still don’t think it was a truck. Never saw a pebble do that.”

“We’ll call it a freak accident. And it’s business for you either way.”

“Sure thing, Randy. Well, thanks again. Appreciate it.”

Gabe left and Randy set to filing and doing his own forms to send in the renewal, but he hadn’t got two minutes into it when he looked up.

“Randy?”

“Well, Jeremy, come right in. Sit down.” Randy wasn’t sure if he should be leaning forward or back for this exchange, as Jeremy wasn’t much of one to shout and scream, but he likely wasn’t here just to buy some insurance. Jeremy didn’t sit, though. He just stood in the door.

“Just up from Asheville for the afternoon,” he said. “I heard what happened at the meeting.” Then he kind of tilted his head, like they both knew something together. “You’re against the road, aren’t you?”

The desk felt solid enough. “Well, I’m just waiting awhile longer before I make up my mind. I’ve been hearing quite a few people’s opinions.”

Jeremy did not seem pleased by the answer.

“I was thinking people were pretty much against it.”

“Some are and some aren’t, and maybe more are against it, but it isn’t unanimous, including a certain mutual acquaintance, if you know who I mean.”

“The old fool? You aren’t listening to him, are you?”

“I’m listening to everybody, and there’s still months to go.”

That made Jeremy stop to think. “Aren’t you, um . . .” He seemed to be looking for just the right word. “Um,
worried
about what might happen if you do vote for the road?”

“I know what it’ll do to the neighborhood, and all the other concerns, as I’ve heard them all very clearly.”

“I mean, to you. Aren’t you worried about what might happen to you? Because of what’s already happened?”

Randy wasn’t too sure what Jeremy seemed to mean, especially as his tone didn’t sound natural.

“Well—when the next election comes around, I’m sure people will remember how I voted, one way or the other. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Jeremy stood looking at him, frustrated about something, and Randy didn’t know what to say. “Well, see you later, Randy.” And then he was gone.

April was the month. May, June, September, October, they were all good, but April was the big one. Wade had appointments stacked up for three weeks and the phone ringing off the hook. Corny working mornings to keep up with paper work.

Call the boss.

“Charlie, it’s Wade.”

“What do you want?” Charlie said.

“More money.”

“Forget it, I’m busy.”

That took care of the pleasantries.

“I heard something a couple weeks ago,” Wade said. “There’s a furniture plant in Wardsville, right where Gold River Highway would come into town. Somebody’s buying the place. And what I hear is that it might be so they can put in a grocery store.”

“Say that again. I didn’t get it. What about a grocery store?”

“Somebody might build a store in Wardsville where Gold River Highway would come into the town.” There. It always took at least a couple of times for him to get it.

“What? A grocery store?” Make that three times.

“It’s a rumor,” Wade said. “I think you should find out for sure.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

Did it have a name? “I don’t know. There’s no sign. I don’t know who’s buying it, either.”

“Wait a minute. You say it’s in Wardsville?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not in Gold Valley?”

“No.” One-syllable answers. He should be able to handle those.

“Then something’s wrong. I thought it was going to be in Gold Valley. Is this a done deal about the factory getting sold or just talk?”

“I think it’s a deal. And I need to go, I got a customer.”

“Why is it in Wardsville?”

“Talk to you later.” He hit the button. The man was going crazy.

The front door opened. Maybe he really did have a customer. He put on his happy face.

Then he put on his for-real happy face. “Man, I’m glad you’re here.”

“What a morning,” Corny said. “The bus never came. I had to take Lauren all the way to school.”

“I figured it was something. Hey, I had a couple in first thing from Charlotte. They came because they heard about Gold River Highway.”

“How did they know?”

“Some cousin in Asheville called them. The word is getting out. Look at this.” He tossed her the newspaper, the
Wardsville Guardian
. “Believe it or don’t, we have an ally in Luke Goddard.”