They puff-chested over to us.
“Skeeter, gwon get that arrow out the tree.” Skeeter went and put a shoulder into Buzzy as he passed. Buzzy braced and the boy bounced off him like a bird hitting a brick wall. He raised his fist, but Buzzy didn’t flinch. “Jus get the fuckin arrow, Skeeter,” the boy said. Skeeter went to the tree and pulled the bolt out of the bark.
“Where’d you get that crossbow, Tilroy?” Buzzy asked. “That’s badass.” He knew flattery would ease the situation.
“My uncle give it to me for my birthday. Sucker is deadly.” He brought it up to show us. The handle was burled wood and lacquer, the bolt guide and bow were gunmetal gray, the bowstring a hundred fibers tightly woven into a single high-tensile filament. “Already got a possum an a coon,” he said proudly.
Buzzy whistled. “That is seriously cool.” Tilroy was lost for the moment, just gazing at his new weapon.
Skeeter looked up at the tree house. “Where’s the ladder at?”
Buzzy started moving away. “We gotta get on home. Chores an stuff.” He walked past me, grabbed my shirtsleeve, and pulled. I followed.
“Fuckwad. Where’s the ladder at?”
“I ain’t seen no ladder. It’s Cleo’s tree house. He don’t let no one up there.”
At the mention of Buzzy’s brother, Tilroy and Skeeter went silent, looking up at the nested structure. While they whispered and pointed up, we walked down the trail.
“Hey, faggots!”
I stopped and turned. Tilroy lowered the crossbow to me.
“Jus keep walkin,” Buzzy hissed.
Tilroy and Skeeter laughed. I turned to catch up. Once down the slope I grabbed Buzzy. “Let’s get out of here.” I started to run.
He shook me off. “I ain’t runnin from that asswipe.” Buzzy’s forehead was hunkered, lips pushed out in a scowl. “I swear, I hate that mutherfucker.”
“Is he a big bully in school?”
“He’s the one who gets bullied cause he’s so fat. Seniors mostly. Then he goes an takes it out on the freshmen. I seen him do some crazy shit in the parkin lot. Doesn’t mess with me, though. He knows Cleo would kick his ass.”
By the time we got to the trail fork, afternoon was closing out. We said our good-byes and agreed to meet up again the next day, maybe for a trip to the Telling Cave. I made my way down the mountain, over the train tracks, and up Green Street to Main.
Chapter 4
THE AERODYNAMICS OF FLYROCK
Arthur Bradley Peebles was born to Missiwatchiwie County on January 3, 1919, in sideways snow and wind that flailed Jukes Hollow for three days, cresting and spilling frozen waves against the southern edge of the timber cabin his father, Oriel Peebles, had built ten years before. The Peebles clan had been scraping a life from the dirt and rock and walled sunlight of the hollow for sixty-five years by the time Arthur was born. The Peebleses were broadaxed and sure. Drum chested and stubborn, with thick hands cut for hard work; laughter like the crack of bowling ball on pin.
Jeb and Hershel, two years apart, followed their father into the mines at fifteen. Arthur Bradley, however, was a thinker and a questioner and a reader. His mother, who could read and write better than most of the county, taught him his letters from the book of Genesis, spelling out words on a pine board with elderberry chalk. Within eight months, Arthur was into Exodus, reading aloud to his mother, following her ponylike as she labored to run the house in Jukes Hollow.
At eight, Arthur was walking five miles every other Tuesday to Mrs. Robert J. Taylor’s in Glassville to borrow a book from her considerable collection of eighty-five volumes. He was Robinson Crusoe sneaking through the jungle, scouting for ambush. He was Gulliver negotiating the fleshy landscapes of the Brobdingnags. He was Ahab, substituting green moss boulders for the white whale and losing his leg a thousand times. For Arthur, the words gathered in waterfall thoughts that spilled off the page into the pools of imagination collecting in his head.
Oriel was concerned about his idleness and Jeb thought he was weak and yellow. He entered the University of Kentucky to study philosophy the year his father was killed by a fertilizer bomb in the back of the union offices in downtown Medgar. The murder in 1936 touched off the bloodiest union uprising in the region, the Sadler Mountain Wars, which lasted nine months, until federal marshals took control of the town and the mines, gradually restoring the peace.
(Oriel’s funeral service was a caution. The union wanted a full casket despite the fact that the only piece of Oriel available for burial was his left hand. His wife, a clear thinker even in grief, thought it a shameful waste of timber and opted for a foot-square polished wood box with a gold handle on top. It made for a sight as half of Missi County followed the family up the hollow from the church, a single pallbearer in the lead carrying the gilded box as if they were burying the most popular hamster in the county.)
After the Sadler Mountain Wars, Hershel returned to the mines and Jeb bought a farm on the other side of Cheek Mountain. Arthur went back to school on tuition earned selling shoes door-to-door in Lexington for the Emory Grove Shoe Company. It was on his third call of the morning that he met Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe.
“Hello, my name is Arthur Bradley Peebles representing the Emory Grove Shoe Company; we make the most comfortable shoes in the entire South,” he announced. “So comfortable, in fact, that if you ever get a blister or a bunion as a result of our shoes, we will gladly give you double your money back. You see, each shoe is custom-made to the exact measurement of your foot so our shoes feel as comfortable as your stocking feet.”
The woman at the door, granite faced, severe dress, and graying hair screwed to a bun, looked him over dismissively. “Young man, we don’t need new shoes,” she said, beginning to close the door.
Then footsteps down the stairs and a voice in the hall. “Just a minute, Gertrude. I would like to hear more about the gentleman’s shoes.”
Gertrude glared at Arthur and wordlessly ushered him into the sitting room—red velvet and mahogany, tasseled and warm.
Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe swept into the room on air and light that dissolved Arthur’s practiced speech into fragments.
“Um, I sell shoes, and uh, they are very much like your stocking feet, these shoes… because they are comfortable and… uh… if you get bunions we will gladly give your money back because we make the most comfortable shoes in the entire South… uh, miss.”
“Is that a fact, then—the most comfortable shoes in the entire South?” She gave him a half smile.
Arthur brightened, remembering his lines now. “Absolutely, Miss…?”
“Winthorpe, Sarah Winthorpe.”
She extended her soft, exceptional hand, and its warmth made Arthur want to run. Her long chestnut hair played against her neck and shoulders, taking the tired sunlight from the front window and turning it electric. He forgot his speech again. Gertrude stood in the doorway, arms across her chest, eyes folded in a shriveling stare.
If proper Emory Grove Shoe Company procedure had been followed, Miss Sarah Ryder Winthorpe’s shoes would have been delivered via post within three weeks; however, Arthur felt that special handling was required in this particular case and delivered them himself. Special handling was also required for the next four pairs of size-seven shoes he delivered to the Winthorpe residence.
Arthur’s sales for the following six months fell precipitously; however, the waves that spiked through him every time he saw Sarah did not. They married on June 18, 1940, to the shattering disappointment of Mr. Winthorpe, who believed “if Jesus Christ himself came from Missiwatchiwie County he wouldn’t be good enough for my Sarah.” (The fact that Jesus was Jewish would have eliminated him from contention in Mr. Winthorpe’s mind long before county of origin was ever discussed.)
After a weekend at Glaston Lake, they moved into Arthur’s one-room apartment above Stack’s Butchery half a block from campus. Arthur went back to his school and his shoes; Sarah went back to her particular state of effortless grace.
He spent six more months at the University of Kentucky, then started as assistant professor of philosophy at Maryville College in Tennessee, when the war broke. He joined the navy and soon was oiling the Bofors antiaircraft guns of port broadside turret number two on the carrier USS Enterprise in the Pacific.
It would begin with the low, airy rumble of distant engines, the frantic scouring of the horizon, then contact. The kamikaze always arrived in proud formation and, as if from the hand of some phantom conductor, broke off expertly in threes and fours. Fascinating and terrible. Once kamikaze entered the kill zone, the gunners had exactly seventeen seconds to down the plane.
The May morning in 1945 burned clear, as the sun flushed from a following sea. Arthur was hitting baseballs to the Enterprise’s star shortstop when the alarm started slow and shrill against the nearing drone of the kamikaze.
The attackers swarmed like sweat bees. Eight to a ship. Three on the middle portside. Two high, one low. Guns screaming. Seventeen seconds. First kill immediately. Swinging right, middle portside number one down, fourteen seconds, second kill. Twelve seconds left.
The third bomber flew true off the churning water. Arthur turned the guns, firing immediately. Tracers spinning soundlessly past. Closer. Nine seconds. Arthur spraying the air with shot, each one missing the plane. Five seconds. The face of the pilot coming into focus now. Three seconds. His plane parting the chaff like a car through morning mist. Closer. Two seconds. Salt and sweat in Arthur’s eyes. As the plane flew under his sight line in the last half second before it slammed into the hull, the pilot looked up at him. Their eyes locked in a terrible instant. The pilot was smiling.
Everything erupted in thunder and death, shaking the thirty-two-thousand-ton carrier to its bolts. He left the gun to his partner and ran down three flights into the aircraft elevator, where the plane had struck the ship. Heat from the firestorm blistering his face. Screams and burning flesh. Into the hold and out with the first man. Black smoke. Up the stairs and onto the deck. Back again four times until the hold exploded, sending flames through the wooden deck, showering burning splinters and steel around them.
For his bravery, Arthur was awarded the Navy Cross, the service’s highest honor. The ceremony in Washington, D.C., four months later was the proudest his mother had ever been. She took the bus to Lexington and bought a dress for the occasion—the first store dress she’d ever owned.
There wasn’t much work in the county for war-hero philosophers, unless they happened to be miners, so Arthur took a full military scholarship to the veterinary college at Auburn. After three years he was in Ned Pike’s old barbershop in downtown Medgar listening to the palpitations of Mrs. Biddle’s nervous cat.
Sarah was determined to bring Lexington zest to small-time Missiwatchiwie County. She started the Medgar Women’s Club and Literary Society, organized the county’s first-ever rendition of a Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gave up her Lexington bus seat to a pregnant colored woman, let their maid eat with the family.
After years of trying, Sarah finally became pregnant and the trouble started. The difficult pregnancy became a harrowing birth, with the baby breeched and Sarah losing blood fast. The infant survived, but Sarah died three hours after delivery.
Then weeks of darkness and garroted sobs. Months in smothered sadness. A year of black guilt and dimly lit rooms. And from it, in the ash of death and broken expectations, came a little girl on air and light with chestnut hair named Anna Ryder Peebles.
My mother.