The Marble Orchard

Standing beneath the sycamore tree in the warm shade as it spilled over the thick wind-loomed grass, he watched the rowed and white-clothed picnic tables steeped with dishes and casseroles—deviled eggs, meats and gravies, baskets of rolls and cornbread wedges, bowls of soup beans, fried fish and fried turkey and fried deer tenderloin, the tables curving up the slight hill and beyond it to disappear into the old tobacco barn gone unroofed and useless these many decades before reemerging out the barn’s rear door, the entire dinner swarmed by gnats and black flies that appeared like frenzied dust against the white haze of the sky—and he could believe what he’d heard rumored for years but had never thought possible: that he was not a Sheetmire because some other blood yet howled fast and hot within him.

He stood with his mother and father. No one had spoken to them since they arrived in the family truck, a rusted two-tone beige and olive green GMC his father called Old Dog. Now they waited beside the pickup, Clem stroking the worn bed panel and brooding while Derna leaned against the passenger door, her arms folded over her breasts. Beam held quiet, one sneaker propped against the truck’s slick front tire, staring out at the line of kin as they moved down the row of tables to fill their plates, each Sheetmire a mirrored replica of the others: squat and neckless head with the flat broad cheeks and full lips and bald unbearded chin that suggested a few errant drops of Cherokee or possibly Chickasaw blood. The eyes, sharp and mystical, showed
the squinty wrinkles of those given to hard grim laughter and the teeth, once unleashed, were jarringly white. The women were plain, but not dowdy, and they wore calm Sunday dresses of mute blue or floral print, their handbags riding the crook of their elbows when not in the care of their husbands, who were sedate and loyal in all weathers, men suited to the slow sweaty work of the land and who tried to love the quiet patient women they’d wed, and there stood in their eyes the circumspect gaze common to all survivors of trouble.

Not a one resembled Beam. He saw that plainly. All mirrors showed him the same gaunt face with its sleep-hollowed eyes and the thick blonde hair whorled about his head like a broken hay bale. At nineteen, he’d grown to a height of well above six feet. Straight and thin as a lodgepole pine, he seemed an odd and unlikely child of the stocky and swart Clem who, but for his dingy and unkempt appearance, would fit easily into the line of Sheetmires now feeding at the tables. He more closely favored his mother, Derna. Though she wasn’t tall, she owned the same lean cheeks as Beam, the same drowsy eyes. Her form, though slack and softened by age, still gave rumor to her past beauty, the dress fitted snug and shapely about her hips.

“It’d be something nice for one of them to say hello or ask us how we were doing,” she said. She leaned hard against the truck. Its drab double-tone paint flaked off onto her brown dress and the bondo drummed hollowly when she shifted her weight, though she was still a slight woman. Her black hair appeared scorched and blazed with gray and almost like burned foil as she smoked a menthol cigarette, her white vinyl purse crouched in the grass between her scuffed black slippers like an attack pup she’d sic on anyone fool enough to spit a cross word her way.

“Who was it called and invited us anyhow?” Clem asked. He’d turned away from the potluck and leaned against the truck’s bed panel, facing a glen of green that led into locust trees before it rose into older hardwoods.

“Alton invited us,” said Derna. “I told you that already.”

Clem picked a napkin-covered dish of fried chicken livers out of the truck bed. “Well, it don’t matter,” he said. “I’m going ahead and getting in line and not waiting for them to talk to me.”

He walked to the tables and settled the dish of livers amidst the rest of the spread and then retreated to the end of the line, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his blue cotton Dickies. A few of the Sheetmire women gave him curious stares, but he only nodded and smiled at them in return.

“I guess he’s right.” Derna sighed and dropped her cigarette in the grass, wiping a slipper over it. “We got invited. Might as well go ahead and eat.”

Beam gave a tiny shake of his head. “I’m not going to,” he said.

“Come along now. It’s all right.”

“No. I don’t want to. You go on.”

“It ain’t no way to be, just standing there sulking.”

“I ain’t hungry. You go ahead. Just leave me alone here.”

“You ain’t hungry?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“How is that true? What have you had to eat today?”

“I had a Snickers bar this morning.”

“A Snickers bar.”

“Yeah.”

“That won’t do you. Come on over here and get a plate.”

Again, Beam shook his head. He watched the slide of faces moving along the table to fill their plates, their soft features licked with afternoon sunlight and glossed with sweat, all of them apparently nothing of his kind, and a cold nausea seeped into his guts.

“I just want to stand here a minute,” he said, wiping his lips on the back of his wrist.

Derna gawked at him. “What?” she asked. “Do you think they’re going to eat
you
?”

“No. I don’t think that. I just want to stand here for a spell.”

Derna scratched the dry chalky skin on her elbows. “Well, all right, Beam. I won’t make you eat. Just stand here and sulk all you want to. But don’t start your bitching on the way home because you didn’t get a plate when you had the chance.”

She walked away toward the tables, the wind gusting up and roving through her hair and the folds of her brown dress, the sycamore’s shade jarring loose and withery over the grass so that she strode through flexing light and flexing dim. Beam watched her fall in line. Taking her plate, filling it with stewed tomatoes and macaroni, nodding and small talking with some of the folk. Her cheeks rouged with cheap dollar-store makeup and her hosiery striped with runners, the late sun whetting her shadow so that it fell sharply in the grass, her own body in its worn wash-faded dress like the last recovered remnant of a time gone to legend as she moved through the throng of gibbering kin. He saw her shapeliness. What others had named “her lustful ways.” The slouch of hip, the drip of painted mouth. Even into late middle-age she maintained it.

Beam looked away from her and let his eyes stray over the strangers once more. For years, he’d imagined the stories his folks told him about the Sheetmires—how they turned clannish and tribed up into mere flickers of the old, original blood—as straight lies. Now he remembered how few uncles and aunts had ever come around to visit. How he knew perhaps two cousins well enough to speak to in a county where most kept an acre of memory reserved for family lines. He’d heard a few tales. The stories were mostly grim and unfinished—the drunken ravings of distant grandfathers and the misering of tiny bit-lipped women. He knew a few ghosts as they lurched through his dreams before being swallowed back into the catacombs of forgetting. Beyond this, he figured himself mostly unmoored from history. As hardly any relatives visited, he often wondered if any blood flowed through him at all.

He’d asked his folks about it many times. Standing on the failing porch, his father Clem propped in a peeling rocker and his mother Derna drifting in the swing, the river below smelling muddy and sour as the wind cut over the trees like a currycomb, he’d taken to wondering large thoughts about blood.

“Hell, they’re just uppity,” his father spat, suckling an unlit cigarillo. “Don’t like to associate with folks who run a ferryboat for a living. That’s all there is to it.”

So it was the ferry then. His father had operated it for the past quarter century, toting people and cars back and forth across the Gasping River for long hours and short pay. The boat had a two-car capacity and a small tug motored by a Cummins diesel engine scuttled it across the waters. It rode on a pulley and cable system, the steel hawsers strung over the river keeping it in place against the current. The fare was five dollars. In past years the traffic had been steady, but these times were leaner. What patrons there were came down the Gasping River Trace from the town of Micadoo, which lay due west of the river. These were travelers bound eastward into bottoms sown with corn and soybeans and then the higher country of hills and limestone bluffs. A few fishing villages survived upstream in rickety shantworks, but little brought travel this way anymore other than the occasional fit of slow wandering, the Sunday drive or the visit to an elderly relative. But for the small salary the state paid him to keep the ferry open, Clem would have been sore put to survive. He had his ways, though. Rumors of drunks who rode the ferry at night and awoke slumped over the wheel of their car in some distant field without a dollar in their wallet and a knot swelling on the crown of their skull snaked up from the black boggy woods. Most chocked it up to dumb overindulgence and drove home, happy the maiming had been negligible. Those who returned to the ferry to question its pilot were dismissed with a smile and an offhand joke.

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