The Marble Orchard (9 page)

The scrape of a screwdriver against the white oak log woke him. Beam didn’t know how long he’d slept, but when roused by the noise, he found the sun stood blank and white overhead. An old man was on his hands and knees digging at some plant beneath the log, using the screwdriver to prize the roots loose from the soil, his hands groping through the black humus, sweat
darkening the blue pearl-snap shirt he wore.

Beam lay motionless and watched the old man. He worked quietly, levering the screwdriver into the hole he’d dug until the plant emerged, its pale hag-wig of roots dripping wet soil. Then he took a plastic Sunbeam bread sack from his pocket, snapped the leaves and stems from the plant, and placed the roots inside. When this was finished, he groaned into standing and wiped the dirt from his pants and breathed deeply.

“Best place I ever seen to get some rest,” he said, looking off through the trees, “was in a bed under a roof somewhere.” He drew a red spotted rag from his pants pocket and tugged it over his forehead, then balled it in his fist and winked his filmy blue eyes at Beam. “Anyway, I sure wouldn’t be one to take a nap in the woods like you’re doing. Man’s liable to wake up dead.”

Beam raised himself off the ground and sat on the oak log. He rested his palms on his knees and watched as the old man toed the dirt back into the hole he’d dug. “What is that you’re digging?” he asked.

The man glanced at the bread sack and then hoisted it up higher so that Beam could see it better. “Sang,” he announced.

Beam scratched a mosquito bite on his elbow until he felt the warm blood between his fingers.

“This sang in through here is kindly puny,” said the old man. He lowered the bread sack and knocked it against his leg. “Course, I’ll take what all I can get. These days you got to look awful hard to find any sang whatsoever. Why? Cause everybody’s damn greedy, that’s why. They snatch up all the sang there is and don’t leave none to bear on the next year. It’s like they think another year ain’t even coming.”

Beam knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “Maybe it ain’t,” he said.

The old man did not remark on this. He propped a boot on the log, and stood staring off through the trees. His form was lean and cut by years of labor, Beam could see, and the hands dangling
from his arms were large and crossed with blue varices, his face brown and dried as an apple core.

“I’ve dug sang most my life,” he said. “Dug it in times when it was thick as carpet under the trees. Look on a north hillside where there’s plenty of shade because sang likes shade. And digging it after August is best because it’s got the berries on then. And where you find sang you’ll find bloodroot and goldenseal, though those don’t bring a dollar the way sang does.”

Beam yawned. “Where are we?” he asked.

“You’re right about that,” answered the old man, mishearing him. “You can’t hardly raise sang from seed. Not if you want quality. It’s a tender plant that’s careful about where it takes root, but once it finds ground it likes it’ll be there forever if some damn fool don’t dig it all up. I’ve always thought folks would fare a sight better if they behaved a little more the way sang does. But they don’t. They’ll just root in one spot for a time and then be gone with scarcely a trace if they think there’s better ground somewheres else.”

The day was warming steadily, and the light sliced down from the poplar boughs overhead in sharp obliques that stood amid the trees like corbels of fresh blown glass. The hay field Beam had crossed at dawn colored quickly, the shorn fescue turning a stubbly blond as the dew burned away. There was no wind and somewhere, very distant, Beam thought he heard a highway.

“What is this place?” he asked.

The old man turned and regarded him, his eyes like two holes awled in leather. “This place don’t really have a name,” he said.

“Well what’s it close to then?”

“The Opins farm. Their old home is just over this rise here. Course there ain’t been no Opins round these parts for thirty years.”

“I think I hear a road.”

The old man nodded. “You would. Can’t hardly stand nowhere in this country anymore without hearing one. People are always
after it, ain’t they?” The old man looked at the soil beneath the oak log and shook his head. “Whatever
it
is,” he added.

Beam strained to listen. He heard a truck, the steel belts of its tires coughing on the road’s rumble strip. “What road is that I’m hearing?” he asked, pointing through the woods.

The old man wiped a hand over the log, clearing a place for himself, and then sat down with a grunt. The slight paunch of his belly pouted over his belt. “That’d be the Natcher Road,” he said. “It goes on many a several mile between here and wherever it is you’re going to.”

Beam stood and hoisted the duffel onto his back. “I got to get on to that road,” he said.

“What’s your hurry?” The old man’s eyes gaped at Beam, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It’ll still be there in the morning. You can sit a spell, can’t you?”

Beam shook his head. He sensed that the old man was lonely, as he knew most old people were, but he didn’t have time to chat. It was impossible to know who might be looking for him and he wanted to put as much distance between himself and whoever it was as he could.

Beam cinched the duffel’s straps tight over his shoulders.

“I best get on,” he said quickly.

“Well, you might be back around sometime,” the old man replied. Beam gave a slight nod and then tramped off through the trees that stood still and quiet in the vaporous light, his shoes snapping over windfall branches and crackling leaves. He did not look back.

Reaching a clearing, Beam came to a house that must have once been the Opins place. The peaked roof reared through the branches of blight-killed elms, and the tin peeled back in spots to reveal the black rotted joists and rafters underneath. Jonquils grew in green clutches of stems beside the footstones, their yellow petals long wilted away for the year. Beyond the house was a barn
with a gambrel roof and slouching walls, and at the far edge of the grounds sat a crumbling smokehouse.

Beam crossed through what once had been a yard. Rusted paint cans and food tins were strewn in the sorrel, and pokeweed grew beside a stoop rock limed with bird shit. Sections of the porch boards were splintered or missing. Water plinked somewhere and wind flumed through the windows that stood glassless and black. The sky grew suddenly overcast so that the abandoned farm appeared like a landscape charcoaled and grim.

Beam took hold of one of the chicken-leg support posts on the porch and pulled himself onto the boards, which grieved his weight with a low moan. The hinges were empty of a door and he walked through the front entrance, his boots knocking against the dusty puncheon floor.

Save for mounds of dried possum scat, the house was empty. The fireplace held brass andirons and cold ash. The large hearth had been built from smooth fieldstones, and water had leeched down the chimney to draw finger streaks in the soot. Beam stood beside the hearth and ran his hands over the rocks, listening to the wind tremble in the flue. He imagined what it would be like to be lord of this manor, the fire crackling on cold evenings as he stood sipping straight bourbon from a highball glass, musing quietly on wealth and the wild straying ways of life and how easily a man could descend from the height of joy into the chasm of misery like a spider falling on a single thread of silk.

He was running his hand along the ridged slope of the fieldstones when he heard the hissing. A kind of gravelly snarl leaked to him from one of the back rooms, and he followed the sound down a hallway into what had perhaps once been a bedroom. In a corner of the room, two vulture chicks lightly downed with white fuzz sat on the floor blinking their black leaden eyes at him. They lifted their wings and hissed raggedly when he stepped closer into the room, but they were still fledglings and could not fly. A stink of putrefied meat suddenly rushed at Beam so that he
staggered back to the doorway clutching a hand to his nose.

And then a huge shape fluttered into the room’s empty window. There was a brief stalled moment of shock as Beam stared at the buzzard, and then it launched itself at him, its wings buffeting his head as he ran down the hallway, the bird vomiting on him until he fled from the house and sprawled face down in the dry grass of the yard.

Beam rolled onto his back. The sky was a white patch of rain clouds. He began to drag the puke from his hair so that he appeared like a strange creature birthing itself, the vomit draping him in a foul amniotic sheet. He sat up, and the smell caused him to retch violently upon the ground. When the spasm passed, he managed to stand and spit.

The buzzard looked down at him from its perch in one of the blighted elm trees, its wings spread in black cruciform, its feather tips glistening in black dihedrals so that it appeared in the pose of one gifting silence unto the world, its red nodulose face jerking wildly.

Beam stared back at the bird for a few moments. Then he wandered away into the trees again. When he stopped to look back, he could see nothing of the house. A halo of vultures circled above him in the blank sky.

VII

THURSDAY

For close to an hour, Beam had waited in the rain at the edge of the Natcher Road, a few cars and cattle trucks the only traffic that had passed by, all of them ignoring him. His hair dripping, his clothes damp against him, he had nearly fallen asleep when a Peterbilt with a blown tire slumped onto the shoulder a quarter mile down.

Beam raised himself from the guardrail where he’d been sitting and hurried to meet the driver as he stepped down from the cab. Strangely, he was dressed in a tailored three-piece suit of navy blue, though he wore a pair of scuffed steel-toed boots. When he moved to inspect the blown tire, he had a slight limp that caused him to list to one side, the thin blades of his shoulder bones scissoring under the taut fabric of the blazer.

“I guess you picked up a nail or a screw there, didn’t you?” said Beam.

The trucker spun and glared at him. His face was puckered slightly, and he wore a coating of pomade in his blonde hair, which was flung in a loose marcel over his scalp, a few curled strands hanging in dirty ropes over his ears and down his neck.

“Now see, that’s not it at all,” he said. His eyes were a dim blue color and they seemed to jump around a bit inside his skull when he spoke. “These tires are too bald to be driving on.” He reached a boot out and kicked at the blown radial. “I’ve been telling Lawrence to put another set on, but he don’t listen to me.”

Turning to Beam, he said, “What happened to you anyway?”

Beam pushed his thumbs under the straps of the duffel. He
was suddenly unnerved by the trucker, who seemed to pay the rain no more mind than if it were a slight breeze. He didn’t even blink as the water collected on the thick batts of his eyelashes and dripped onto his cheeks.

“Ain’t nothing happened,” Beam said. “Not to me.”

“You sure don’t look like somebody that ain’t had nothing happen to them.”

“Other than getting rained on, I’m fine.”

The trucker adjusted the lapels of his blazer and sniffed the air. “Do you smell something?” he asked.

Beam thought of the vulture that had spewed on him. He’d hoped the rain had washed some of the stink away, but it hadn’t.

“No,” he said. “I don’t smell anything.”

The trucker turned back to regard the limp tire again. “I smell something,” he said. He kicked the tire and the rubber flapped loosely on the alloyed wheel. “Can you hoist a jack?”

“Sir?”

“I asked if you could hoist a jack. If you can fit my spare on, I’ll give you a ride to wherever it is you’re going.”

“I didn’t say I needed a ride.”

The trucker spat through a space in his teeth. “Oh, I guess you just enjoy standing on the shoulder of the highway with that canvas bag in the rain.”

Beam looked up the highway to where the rain passed in wind-tossed swarms over the graying slope of the hills, and shrugged the duffel from his shoulders. “Where’s your tools?” he asked.

The trucker gestured toward the cab. “In there,” he said. “Under the sleeper bunk, you’ll find my box and the jack.”

Beam nodded and lifted himself up into the rig. The cab smelled of mildew. Sprouts of smoke grew from an overburdened ashtray, and there were maps and stray porno magazines strewn over the dash. In the sleeper cab, he found the metal tool box and a huge bottlejack that had been spray-painted silver. He gathered
these implements and stepped down from the rig.

The trucker sat on the guardrail rolling a cigarette. He licked the paper, flashed a Zippo, and then smiled through a veil of smoke at Beam as he approached with the tools.

“Let’s see what kind of hand you are tire changing,” he said.

Beam silently sat the tools beside the burst radial and set to work. He took a four-way wrench from the toolbox and budged the lugs with it, then slid the jack under one of the rig’s tandem axles, smelling the black scorched stink of diesel and road tar. When he’d jacked the axle, he sat on his rear and, grasping the tire with his hands, slowly moved it off the spindle, using his toes for leverage. When he had the bad tire off, he unsettled the spare from its carriage under the trailer, and placed it flush over the greasy spindles before torquing the nuts into place with the tire wrench. He lowered the jack and stood, wiping his smudged hands over his jeans.