Ride three, a Caddy Deville. It was that dark brown color they call doeskin, and so was the man driving it. Another preacher. Suit and skinny tie, neat-cut hair, not young and not old. His car, definitely old. He had this way about him like whatever you’ve seen, he’d probably seen it too. He asked what was my burden and I told him: eleven years old without a dime, running away from nobody that gave a damn, probably headed for more of the same. He kept his eyes on the road, nodding his head, sometimes running a hand over his hair, while everything came out of me. Fighting with Stoner, Mom dying on me, getting sent to Creaky Farm, right up to two nights ago where I’d cursed a junkie hooker to die for stealing my money. He listened, now and again rubbing that hand back over his head like sweeping off the tears of heaven falling on us.
He’d heard of Murder Valley. He said he traveled pretty wide over those parts looking after his folks, and I could believe it. If he was in charge of my church, I would go. He never put on the hard sell about Jesus or anything. His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time. He said if I was ever in a library to look it up, but try not to look at the photos because the sight of an elephant hanging was not an easy thing to forget. It was a circus elephant that got fed up and finally ran off after its drunk trainer whipped and tormented it to the point of going on a rampage, which, I could relate. But in the process of running off, it accidentally trampled somebody in town, and those folks were not going to be still until justice was done. Christ. Imagine the size of the noose. Plus what all they’d have to build, to hold it up.
The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance. I thought of Mariah Peggot carving her no-takebacks on Romeo Blevins. The preacher said this big type of hurting was the principal cause for prayer being needed in this world, as far as he’d seen, and he would sure pray for me. Then he gave me a dollar.
I got out at an empty crossroads and felt so sad watching that Caddy drive away, wishing for something I couldn’t put a name to. Also a mini-mart where I could buy a dollar’s worth of anything at all to put in my stomach. I’m sure he went out of his way some to drop me off there, at a little road he said ran straight on to Murder Valley. I didn’t doubt that a graveyard lay at the end of it, because nobody alive was coming or going. I walked the whole afternoon into evening, with my shoes starting to come apart and blisters on both feet. I found an empty bread bag in the ditch that I tied around one of my Walmart tennis shoes so the sole wouldn’t come off. I passed farms with pickups in their drives but nobody out and about except kids out tearing around on ATVs. I’d lost track of what day it was, maybe Saturday, if the kids weren’t in school. I passed fields of tobacco in flower, and tried to feel happy that it wouldn’t be me cutting it. A farmer came along and let me ride in the back of his pickup for a few miles before he turned off again. He reminded me of Mr. Peg by driving not a lot faster than I could walk, but my feet didn’t mind the break.
I slept that night in a barn. The hay was put up, so I climbed on top of the stacked bales where I wouldn’t be seen or shot at, if anybody was to come around. I was tireder than death, and fell asleep thinking of Tommy curled up in the hay, drawing skeletons. My stomach was too empty to let me float off entirely. Three or four times I woke myself up talking to Tommy, or hearing him talk to me. All mixed up in the pitch-dark, thinking I was back at Creaky Farm.
The next day was a Sunday for sure. I could tell by the people coming out of everywhere driving to church in their good clothes. Kids all washed and buttoned up in the back seats. A few families offered me rides, but I saw their faces as they got close and saw the hay-headed filthy mess I was. I said I was fine to walk, and asked how far to Murder Valley. Turns out I was there. It was a valley. Farms. And cemeteries, sure enough. The first I came across was small, in back of a little white church. I combed it from one end to the other but there was not a Woodall to be found. Everybody there had died in another age, 1950s or before.
I sat down in the middle of the graves and listened to the singing coming out of the church. The people inside sounded so glad of somebody looking out for them, never to be alone, so sure that promise was real. I’d have given an eye to be one of them.
I probably asked a dozen people if they knew any Betsy Woodall. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. In Lee County if you were looking for some person by name, the odds are you’d hit a cousin or an ex by the third try. Not so in Murder Valley. Some gave me the brush-off, some jerked me around. A guy at the diner ran me off, thinking I was begging. There was a town with some stores still alive and lots more dead, boarded up. I don’t think they got a lot of strangers through there. But I had no steam to go farther, so I kept asking. Even if treated like a pest.
“I got a wood-awl in my toolbox,” one joker told me. Another one said sure, he knew the lady. Last seen riding a broom. This was at the feed store and hardware that wasn’t open because of Sunday, but had quite a few guys hanging around the loading dock. The one that made the riding-a-broom crack was standing in the back of a pickup pitching hay bales into the back of another, with an audience of guys in overalls chewing their cuds. They all laughed. One of them piped up. “I’d say a boy that size, she’d put him on a spit and roast him for his brisket.”
I was already walking away, but that made me turn around. It was like they were discussing a lady they knew, even if she was nobody you’d want to run into.
“Are you saying she’s real? Like, a human person?”
They looked at each other, then me. Leery. A whole lot of pigeons were lined up on the wire overhead, all facing my way, and it felt like they were staring too. The guy up in the truck bed answered. “She’s real, yessir. Reckon the jury’s still out on the human part.”
They all laughed. Other than the birds.
“Where would I find her?” I asked.
It was so still. I could smell hay and sweet feed. Everybody waiting.
“Bottom of Watauga Lake, if you’re lucky,” one of them finally said, laughing. But the others didn’t. He was a younger guy, string bean. Acne that looked painful.
“You needn’t to be disrespecting an old lady,” I said. “What if I’m her kin?”
The jaws chewing tobacco all stopped at the same time. Damn. All these men with their hands tucked into their overall bibs, looking at me like some unheard-of type of fish on their line. Finally an older guy said, “If that’s so, I’d say you come honest by that red head of yourn.”
But she didn’t have red hair. According to Mom. “How do you mean?”
Now they all looked at him instead of me. Two guys headed to their trucks, wanting no part of this. One said, “Go on, Slim, give ’at boy what he’s after.” And Slim, which was a fat guy, said, “Look here, don’t nobody say I done what I oughtn’t to have,” and the other ones said their opinions on feeding me to a man-eater, until my head was fixing to blow up.
“You all can go to hell!” I yelled.
That did it, they told me. All at the same time: take a left after the place that used to be the furniture store, or else used to be the schoolhouse, on a road that was called Janet Lane or the old donkey road. They didn’t agree on a thing except that I would come to a yellow two-story. I left them fighting it out. Blisters be damned. I covered that last mile at a gallop.
There was no sign on the road, but a yellow house there was, lone and tall on a hill like it didn’t want company. The place was kept up very decent, big windows, the yard crammed with flowers, a fence around it with a wire gate that I didn’t dare open. I was filthy enough to scare the birds out of that yard. Looking at all the color and buzzing bees got me sort of dazed. That plus having not much to eat lately. For whatever reason I didn’t right away see the lady pulling weeds, till she straightened up and put a hand to her back. Dang. Possibly the tallest old lady I ever saw, tanned dark, like a tobacco hand. Hard-looking in her features. No sign of the guys at the feed store being wrong. She had on a man’s hat and shoes, a stout skirt. Lumpy legs in her stockings, like bagged walnuts. If she hadn’t moved, I might have taken her for a scarecrow.
She saw me. Raised up her hand trowel like she was fixing to throw it. “Go away!”