The following afternoon Verchel did not return to his perch by the wild hydrangea in order to look down at the old shack and wait for the stranger to reappear, because now he knew all he needed to know. That evening, when he returned home an hour or so earlier than usual, he explained it by the slow day at the store and the slower day behind the dope wagon. And then he sat on the porch steps and brooded over his lone cigarette while Miss Myra went on and on about the good, county-wide work the Ladies’ Improvement Society was doing.
“We’ve started calling on the homes of the ill and the ill-bred,” she said, explaining how one of the wives in her group had convinced her husband to let them commandeer an old wagon and two even older mules for the purposes of gallivanting around the county to pay visits upon unsuspecting wanton souls. “It’s amazing how many people need the assistance of a group like ours. It’s amazing how many dark souls need the light of Christ to shine upon them.”
Verchel sat and listened, concentrating only on his cigarette and the palpable darkness that clouded both his lungs and heart.
It was behind the counter at the store on Friday that Verchel made the kind of decision he’d never made before: the decision to take action instead of waiting for action to take him. The man who stumbled into both machinery and marriage with his eyes closed would no longer stumble blindly, but would instead move with calm conviction toward wherever his heart led him, and it was back to the dogtrot where he was led that afternoon on his way home.
Once he assumed his familiar post by the hydrangea, there were a number of decisions that needed to be made: Which door to knock on? How to go about discussing what he’d come to discuss? How to broach a subject that a stranger might be too suspicious to broach? How to remind a man of who you were when he might not remember having ever laid eyes on you?
These questions were answered—or more clearly put, these problems were solved—when Verchel did not see the stranger appear but instead felt something of the stranger’s presence: the cold steel tip of a rifle’s barrel pushed up against his spine.
“So,” the stranger said, his voice sounding both familiar and foreign, containing something of the mountains that rose toward North Carolina on the northern edge of the county, “you a revenuer or a snoop?”
“Neither,” Verchel said. “Neither. I’m a friend.”
“I don’t got no friends,” the stranger said.
“Me neither,” Verchel said.
After that introduction Verchel knew he’d finally stumbled upon a spirit that would elucidate his own. That day he made the first of what would become regular visits to the stranger’s house on his way home. The time he’d once spent hiding behind the hydrangea was now spent sitting in the cool, dark recesses of one of the two rooms that comprised the dogtrot shack. Sometimes Johnny Wiggins would let Verchel hold the baby girl named Lilly in his lap, and the little babe would turn her head toward the ceiling and stare backward at Verchel as if she were looking into his past and didn’t know quite what to make of who he’d been or who he’d become.
Often, the two men would talk: Verchel telling Johnny about how his hand had come to be the tiny, shriveled thing resting on his lap after one wrong step at the mill; about how his life had been changed, brightened, and saved by Pastor Olyphant and specifically by the man’s daughter—Miss Myra—the greatest woman and human being he’d ever known. Johnny’s side of the conversation was always less romantic. He complained to Verchel that he’d grown tired of humping his product out to the highway thrice a week in the middle of the night to meet his distributor, and he wanted to know if Verchel knew anyone who had a car. Johnny nodded at little Lilly where she sat on the floor, playing with a pinecone, and told Verchel that another baby figured to be on the way and that times were about to get tough and money tight.
Verchel was doing his part to assuage Wiggins’s fears of financial ruin: the few dollars a week that Miss Myra gave him for lunch at the store now found their way into Johnny’s upturned and expectant hand, and instead of crunching on pork rinds and using his tongue to scrape white bread and bologna from the roof of his mouth, Verchel now knocked back and nearly coughed up the crystal-clear rotgut that Wiggins had been cooking creekside at the bottom of the holler.
As the weeks passed and the spring turned into summer before waning toward autumn, Verchel opened his pocketknife twice to notch new holes in his belt so his pants could be cinched tighter around his shrinking waist.
“Are you feeling all right, dear?” Miss Myra asked on more than one occasion, doing her best to look into Verchel’s eyes for any kind of sickness. For it was late 1919 and the Spanish flu had proven more powerful than the war.
“Aw,” Verchel would answer, “I’m as healthy as a man can be.”
“Your clothes fairly hang on you,” Miss Myra would say.
“I’m feeling fine,” Verchel would promise. “Mighty fine. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt finer.”
And, aside from stomachaches brewed by the wild mint and sassafras he ate by the roadside on the way home from Wiggins’s house in order extinguish his liquor breath, Verchel did feel fine. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t think of a time when his mind seemed clearer, freer, more all-seeing than it did these days, especially on the long weekday afternoons he spent inside Johnny Wiggins’s shack. For Verchel’s waist wasn’t the only thing shrinking; the dope wagon profits were getting smaller as well. Verchel now zipped through the mill at near-breakneck speed. The only thing that would stop him or slow him down were the few brave souls who’d leap in front of the cart in order to enjoy an ice-cold soda or reach out their hands in an attempt to grasp the cart as it passed by so they could fork over a few cents for some sweet or savory treat.