Page 130 of The End of the World As We Know It
“I wanna see New York. I wanna walk down Madison Avenue. I wanna drink coffee on a street corner in Paris. I wanna feel the sand from Egypt with my toes, Daddy,” Joshua had said when he announced he was joining the army.
“All you gonna see is the barrel of a gun,” Mae had said. Woodrow had found himself in the middle of the two great loves of his life. A place he was familiar with intimately. He loved all his children, butJoshua was his first born. He was smart and strong and had a kind heart and a smile that hinted at the foolishness in his heart. A pleasant foolishness that never failed to make Woodrow laugh. Joshua was just like his mother and that meant they couldn’t set horses for nothing.
Woodrow smiled. It was a rare occurrence these days but the darkness that had enveloped him since the sickness the newscasters called the superflu could not snuff out the memory of his son’s smile or his wife’s bemused exasperation.
Then the darkness reasserted its dominance and the smile disappeared.
There was a bucket sitting upside down near the corncrib that Woodrow filled with corncobs before heading to the pigsty. The sows were squealing and snorting but the big ol’ boar was sitting in the mud studying him with flat brown eyes that looked like dirty pennies. Woodrow had taken three pigs in trade for his truck from his nearest neighbor, Langston Jones, after the bottling plant had closed.
“We trying to go to California. Hear tell it ain’t so bad out there. Some folks trying to go up to Minnesota, but Della can’t stand the cold. I think California is the place, but my old Pontiac ain’t gonna make it. If you planning on slaying them hogs, be some good meat in the fall,” Langston had said, spinning a yarn that neither one of them really believed. But Woodrow didn’t begrudge the man his hope. Sometimes hope was just a life raft in the middle of a hurricane, but it was better than drowning.
This was after Mary-Ellen had passed.
Woodrow took the pail full of corncobs over to the pigsty and leaned on the rough-hewn wooden rails. He grabbed a handful of corncobs and tossed them into the pen. There were eight pigs in total. Seven sows and the boar. Two of the sows were the offspring of one of the original sows. He tossed the corncobs to break up the crowd. Otherwise, they fought and bit each other when he filled the trough.
He watched three of the pigs go to work on the corncobs. The gnashing of their teeth and the furious motion of their heads remindedhim of the scene inThe Wizard of Ozwhere Dorothy falls in the pigpen and Zeke rightly loses his mind and pulls her out as fast as he can. He remembered having a conversation with Joshua when they’d gone to visit Langston once when Joshua was a child.
“Pigs don’t care that you been feeding them for years. They don’t care you done known them since they was on their momma’s teat. You fall in that pen on a day they hungry all you is to them is meat. You hear me boy?” Woodrow had said.
“Would they eat me?” Joshua had asked.
“Bones and all. Bones and all.” Woodrow had said it twice for emphasis.
The boar got up and stomped over to the trough. The sows gave him room. His floppy ears lent him a somewhat comical appearance, but Woodrow locked eyes with him again and saw a feral cunning there that made his stomach lurch.
He’d traded for the fall, but two weeks after Langston had hit the road Junius was dead, too. He’d buried them in the backyard. Then Mae had died, cursing her daddy, wishing he was burning in hell and Woodrow tried his best to comfort her while trying not to consider her dying words too closely. He didn’t need those images in his head. If they had found a place to take root, he might be tempted to go dig up Francis Pettigrew and set what was left of him on fire.
After Mae passed, he was alone.
Except for the pigs.
As spring moved into summer, he found that they comforted him. Their snorts and squeals and grunts broke the silence that wasn’t really silence and kept his thoughts from speaking to him too loudly. At least during the day. At night he worked on a wood carving he was going to treat with some shellac and put out back as a grave marker. He’d carved Junius and Mary-Ellen’s names. He was working on Mae’s name now. During the day he studied the wood grain after he’d worked in the garden. He turned the length of wood over in his hands, feeling its weight and its length. Before he’d started carving it,he’d sanded it down to a finish as smooth as the skin on the backside of a newborn.
At night he studied the space between Mae’s name and the children. He measured with his thumb and forefinger. He thought about adding his name in that space. He still had his double-barreled shotgun in the closet. Some steel shot would punch a hole in the back of his head the size of a grapefruit. He had figured out how he’d do it, too.
He’d dig himself a grave between Mae and Junius. He’d stand on the edge and put the two barrels in his mouth. Reach down and pull the trigger and then let his body fall into the empty hole. The only flaw in his plan was there wouldn’t be anyone to cover the hole to keep scavengers from dragging his bones to the four winds, but he was coming around to the idea that didn’t really matter.
Woodrow sat the pail down near the entrance to the pen.
It was the dreams of the old woman that stayed his hand. Woodrow wasn’t a man that was given to wild flights of fancy, but he had a healthy respect for what his mother used to call the “old ways.” He’d lived on Brown Otter Mountain his whole life. A mountain that was one of many in the Appalachians. A chain of mountains his mother had told him were older than the trees whose roots grew deep along their ridges or the fish whose seas would never touch their rocky shores.
“Things that old have learned to speak without words,” his mother used to say. The other day he’d heard a song on the radio that talked about the Shenandoah Valley and how life was old there. Older than the trees just like his mother used to say. Woodrow knew his mother and the white boy who had sung that song were right. Life was indeed old here.
He knew mountains here talked to him in his sleep. The old woman, darker than his mother with a shock of white hair as pure and bright as fallen snow, came to him in his dreams. She said her name. She did her best to comfort him. And she called to him. Called himand bade him take up his pack and come west. But not to California and not to Minnesota and absolutely not to Las Vegas.
She wanted him to come to her and take her to Boulder, Colorado. And Woodrow would wake from these dreams confused and unquieted. He’d never left Virginia. How was he supposed to find this old Black woman? How was he supposed to get to Boulder, Colorado? How was he supposed to leave his goddamn wife and his children for a dream? For a fucking dream? Never mind the old ways. Never mind the voice of the mountains. How was he just supposed to leave? How?
“HOW?!” he yelled. His voice ricocheted through the valley, bouncing off the trees and the rocks and then fading away into nothingness like an exorcised ghost. Woodrow took the pail back to the corncrib. He was about to turn and go back in the house when he heard a familiar sound that filled him with fear.
There were voices coming up the road.
His driveway, or the road that led to his house, since he’d given Langston his truck, wound down the mountain for about two hundred yards until it hit the main highway that led you out of the county. Most of the people left in Lee County were keeping to themselves. Quarantining the way the government had asked them to do when Captain Trips first hit. That’s what Joshua called it in the last letter they had received from him. That was before Captain Trips had made his way up the mountain. Before they lost touch with Joshua, who said he was being deployed in Washington, D.C.
“To protect the president. He’s a good man, Daddy. You’d like him. But I don’t think they tell him everything. Y’all best stay up on Brown Otter. Safer that way. I think,” Joshua had said in his letter.
But of course, people hadn’t stayed up on Brown Otter. Woodrow thought if the government had really wanted them to stay quarantined, they should have told folks to go into town and dance in the goddamn street.
So, hearing voices coming up the road set his nerves on edge. His shotgun was in the closet, but his bowie knife was on his belt. Hereached down and touched the handle and felt the polished wood and the weathered leather scabbard. The blade was wicked sharp. His own daddy had taught him the magic of a whetstone and concentration. He figured he could cut a man’s throat with that knife and the man wouldn’t know it until he tried to drink a glass of water.
