I wanted to chase yesterday's post with something a little smoother, so I've dug up some short fiction I wrote going on seven years ago. I was grooving on Southern Gothic at the time - Faulkner, O'Connor, et al - which may or may not have had something to do with my secretly wanting to live in the woods as a mountain sorcerer.
I'm hoping to start writing a bit in this vein again. A lot of the concepts and themes that I want to explore are better done so through fiction and lyric, I feel.
The Meadowlark
by Joseph Pickert
Tobias would rise each dawn with the other college boys in the summer laborers’
bungalow in the foothills outside Hanover, and if dredging were their business that day
they would ride on the company bus to the reservoir. He operated a slow crane parked on
a rocky abutment facing the sun in the morning and lifted the riverbed up in square heaps
at a pace that, on a cool day, felt like leisure.
For whiskey wages several evenings each month, Tobias and a few others would
walk the Appalachian with a lantern and handfuls of yellow chalk between them, marking
congestions of white oak and birch on the trail for the benefit of a logging crew. From the
reservoir after a day or so, Tobias would distract himself watching the crew set to work
felling their marks in the distant hills, wondering whether their faces were brutal and
sober, as with the men of his father’s season—the ones who never left the West Virginian cinder quarry upon which prospectors had founded Fullerton, an industrial township of
eleven hundred. Tobias belonged to the third generation of Fullerton quarrymen, and had
been the first of the Coverdale family to get away, attending Dartmouth on a union
scholarship to study engineering. His father, thick in the belly and long in the face, from
whom Tobias had inherited a gravel stare, had always suspected that this son of his would
be the one to escape. Yet it never occurred to him that it would be on the union’s dime
that Tobias would take himself north.
He was courting a girl from uptown, twenty-one with chestnut hair cut short over
her forehead. Margaret worked regular hours in the university library and would meet
Tobias in the late afternoon on his day off at the quadrangle. She dressed in a raggedy
wool cardigan and a secondhand plum-colored blouse, wore unpolished nails and would
modestly rouge her cheeks. The niece of a junior Senator from Connecticut, Margaret
concealed her pedigree behind simple tastes and a quiet voice, and Tobias, in time,
learned to forget his poverty when they went out together to Saturday night picture
shows—where she allowed him to pay for her ticket—and to gazebo dance socials to
which he wore a borrowed suede coat and a tie. Margaret turned him on to colored jazz.
She helped him develop a smoking habit. Tobias became enamored with her, and in a
mutely seditious way declared himself to be with her against the world. He took her along
the trail after dark, and into the caves that pockmarked the gradual ridge that ran slick
with overflow from the reservoir during the wet season, and she made love to him there
on a pale sheet of slate against the light of a fire they’d used newspaper to kindle. He
believed this was merely the beginning of happiness. She made him feel like he would
never die.
The sickle moon that night seemed inclined to swing low through the gathering
clouds and cleave the earth. Tobias came out of a dream with a full bladder, and while
Margaret contentedly snored under a quilt by the fire, he stumbled afoot to the mouth of
the cave, naked except for a cotton pullover and an oversized pair of rawhide boots, and
flattened a path upward over thickets of chokecherry and leatherwood to a meager creek
at the crest of the hill that trickled out to the waterfront. The reservoir spanned four miles
wide, and his view from the granite shore encompassed it whole. Tobias scanned its tarcharcoal surface for whitecaps, evidence of high wind or a troubling tide. The water ran
quiet.
On the way down again to the campsite, he crushed a meadowlark in the high
grass under his heel; felt its ribs crunch and its wings snap. He did not sleep at all
afterward. Morning came.
The path back to Hanover led Tobias and Margaret out of the woods to a paved
road beside a strand of rickety townhouses, slick with beads of the morning damp, and
they sauntered its length. She was immune to the gauntlet of lingering porch eyes, but the
dirt of the previous day on their clothes ashamed him.
“You shouldn’t let those people reduce you,” Margaret said. “What right do they
have to put you beneath them?”
She had gotten this way with Tobias before, whenever his caste started to filter
through the layers of politesse he had attempted to cultivate. Tobias wished to be done
with his origins, yet Margaret was constantly pardoning him on their account. “We can
only become what we are,” she would tell him, more often than he could remember.
Tobias would listen and want to believe that by nature he might be akin to her. Yet he was a mimic at best. Trailing her in the street, he studied the way her hands would swing
by her sides. How they bounced to the right or the left as each heel transferred her weight
to the ball of that foot, and how every step in the small dance of her movements seemed
infused with intention because none of it was. This—her vacant ease—was the aspect that
defied Tobias. Margaret’s absence was something he couldn’t fake.
He was with her another three weeks, and then she left him. We won’t divert your
attention by describing in fine detail what she told him that evening. They were words of
mercy, words of love, and we cannot repeat them.
* * *
Margaret had a half-brother, who had been her cousin until her mother’s
remarriage. Margaret had only occasionally seen Virgil in six years, since he'd left the
Shenandoah Valley to attend college in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he now practiced
criminal law. Yet they were always close. In his adolescence, Virgil had shown her a
roughhousing affection, and had accidentally inflicted the scar that cut across her left
eyebrow after pushing her off of a valley trail into a bramble. Lately he'd taken to calling
her frequently, and by August’s end Margaret finally conceded the issue, and invited
Virgil to Hanover over Labor Day weekend.
He made the thirteen-hour drive to New Hampshire in his 1924 Model T and
reached her dormitory apartment that Thursday, an hour before midnight. Margaret
climbed into the passenger seat, and he swiftly disclosed to her a handle of contraband
whiskey. Her heart skipped a beat. Virgil was by no means the only young man Margaret
had known to flout the liquor ban, and more often than not she played the happy accomplice, but her cousin actually made it
feel illegal. Taboo followed him like a
shadow. Yet she adored him.
He took her out. He told her tales, like they were children again. Margaret, more
drunk than her relation, listened with foggy acquiescence to his argument while they
hunkered together on an uptown street corner sometime between the two and three
o’clock bells.
“There’ll be part of this country where God inn’t,” Virgil said. “Them place near
our kin—”
“My kin?” Margaret protested.
“Yours and mine,” he insisted, “down in the valley. Girl I knew, had a friend.
Never laid eyes on her myself. Drove east all her own, middle the day, make for
Richmond but don’t get there. Week and change go by, she come up befoul in a ravine
off the route. Neck broke with ropeburn all around.”
She had known him to brag about his proximity to happenings like these, but
tonight the bravado was absent from his telling. “Sugarplum,” he lamented, “the Lord
make no provision for lynchin’ a white woman. No account meanin’ to make it seem.”
Margaret took his hand in hers and reclined her aching head on his thigh. “Why
would the Lord exempt a woman from such a fate?”
Virgil swallowed. “That inn’t the way he made it, Sugarplum.”
“Say he made it for man to unmake,” Margaret said.
“Say none such a thing,” Virgil said. “I forbid it.”
He was unique among her father’s kin in two respects. John Lancaster, Margaret’s
uncle on her mother’s side, had taken a liking to Virgil in his youth and invested a small fortune in his rehabilitation. They maintained a cordial written correspondence, and
congregated annually around Easter at the Lancaster estate up in Waterbury, Connecticut.
So Virgil was as much a child of Lancaster as he belonged to his own father, Margaret’s
paternal uncle; it was likely at his benefactor's urging that the young man had inverted
bridal custom upon marrying a Richmond tax collector's daughter, and at twenty became
Virgil Byrd.
“How’s the wife?” Margaret asked.
“Tubercular,” Virgil said.
Margaret sat up. “Tubercular,” she repeated.
“Verily,” he declared.
“You mean consumptive,” Margaret said. “You’re saying she’s ill.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” Virgil said, and spat at the bushes.
She hadn’t believed she’d heard him right. Not that she was angry, or outraged,
although conscience mandated that she should be. The news troubled her. Yet Virgil
never had much use for anything like guilt. Margaret knew that. What she felt now, she
felt on his behalf.
“I suppose you won’t be a Byrd for long,” she ventured.
Virgil brushed the hair from her forehead. “What the word on the boy you been
playin’ on?”
“I don't know who you mean,” Margaret said.
Virgil chuckled. “That so? Well, I shouldn’t ask.”
“What do you care?" she said. “I know plenty of boys.”
He shrugged. “Inn’t none of my business, Sugarplum.”
“Plenty of ‘em,” she said. “My mother, Virgil. How is she?”
“Ain’t seen her,” he said. “Pop keep distant his way with her.”
“Shame. I hoped you might send her my love. Mother and Uncle John and the rest
of them, both ways. They’re all very far from me, Virgil. Don’t touch my face.”
“You’re gettin’ your cheeks wet,” he said.
“You’re a scoundrel, Virgil. I’m not tubercular and I don’t need you to take care
of me. That’s not what a bird is for,” she said. “Orion’s looking down on us, and there’s a
word inside of you to tell me. One word, cousin. If you had only one.”
They studied the sidewalk together.
“You were supposed to say ‘sugarplum,’” Margaret said.
“I’m all out of sugarplums,” he confessed.
* * *
Yet Tobias wouldn’t go away. Not that he’d bodily approached or harassed her,
but that his memory resisted her revision, his erasure, and hounded Margaret in her sleep.
At night she lay in her cot by the dresser, bedcovers pulled up over her breasts
while moonlight played on the wall beside her. She felt him as soon as he entered her
room. Margaret turned her head—she did not want him to see her face—and waited for
him to wrest the linens from her grip and climb atop her. Yet Tobias had always lacked
weight enough to bring her comfort this way. He simply had no gravity to offer.
Touching him, Margaret felt nearly a superstitious disquiet, the kind that accompanies a
walk through a graveyard, and now recalled a similar pall that befell her when she’d gone
to a fortuneteller at the county fair some previous spring. “Tobias,” she muttered. “I am cold. Why are you blocking the light?” A deck of cards, a jug o’ wine. The teller cast his
lots into a copper bowl.
Virgil shook her awake. “Jesus and Mary, Margaret.”
She bolted upright. “What did I say?”
“All sort of thing and a lot o’ none.” He lifted himself up off the floor mat and sat
beside her on the mattress. “Sounded particular you were gamblin’, sister.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Virgil yawned. “I become curious about your boy,” he said. “Tommy or Toby or
whomever. Treatin’ you poor, what I gather.”
“He’s treating me fine,” she said.
“You owe your boy money or something?” Virgil loosely pecked her chin with
his knuckle. “Hell, I got money. Other things, beside. You tell me now.”
“Get out of my bed,” she said.
“You ain’t lyin’ down.”
“I mean to be,” Margaret said. “Scoot.”
“Scoot!” he said. “O heavens mine, Margaret. Scoot she say.”
She freed herself from his arm. “You can’t be here,” she said. “You’ll be found
before long. They would eject me. They would send me home.”
“Home high or low?” Virgil asked.
“It’s moot,” she said. “You wouldn’t put me in that position. I won’t let you.”
“Sugarplum,” he cooed. “Course I won’t.”
That eased her a little. “I’ll visit you sometime, Virgil. I promise.” She paused. “I
don’t want anything from you right now. I wish you hadn’t come.”
He inched closer and squeezed her hand. “Don’t mention it no more,” he said.
“I don’t want you to call me like you’ve been calling me,” she said. “Let me alone
for a while. Supposing to tell you that was what brought me to ask you here, Virgil. I
didn’t want you to come.”
“I regret makin’ you say that,” he said.
“I wish I’d said it better.”
“You said fine.”
“I hate it when you say it like that,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”
“I won’t say it no more,” he said.
It was as if he’d told her that he loved her, but what did it matter? There were
footsteps in the dormitory hall. Other girls. They were not like her. They would talk. “It’s
time,” Margaret said. “The window. Get out.”
Virgil abided her command. “There inn’t a thing sayin’ to make it seem,” he
muttered, tying his laces.
“I don’t need it to,” she answered.
He unbuckled the pane and slid it upward. “Well, get out here ‘fore long,” he said.
“For all God’s love and money, little sister, but it ain’t your place.”
“Never was any place,” she said.
Virgil took the last word, but we need not repeat it. He meant it for her, but there
was nothing in it for her.
* * *
Margaret saw Tobias again just a couple days later, weaving his bicycle through a
shuffling crowd. He whizzed right past her. He didn’t look.
“Tobias,” she called out after him, “
Tobias!”
We’ve said too much already. Let us erase these words. Watch the whiskey work
its way into the bottle again. See the clouds recover the moon. We retrace our ways south
over blue hills and granite shores. Every fallen white oak, every birch alights again on its
stump as the riverbed rises. On a clear day with the sun overhead we can look on its face
with the naked eye.
Not too far ashore, the grasses rustle. A little bird rises. It returns to the branch
native to it and then off it flies, into the white.
