Chapter 7: The Long Way
A dead man calls Cal back.
The message lies open
on the seat beside me.
You remember what Wade done
at the old Monty’s place?
Three miles from the road barn,
the county dump truck
is still behind me.
The pines give way
to a winter soybean field,
shaved down to stubble.
Cold light catches
in an irrigation rig
standing long and rusted
across the rows.
Wind runs the field,
rattling what the combines left.
The dump truck stays close,
its grille filling the mirror.
I ease off the gas.
The truck does too.
I take the right at Bethlehem Church.
This road doesn’t lead toward town.
It slips between pine fields,
passes the cemetery,
then bends south
toward the old Monty place.
Anybody behind me
ought to know
I’m not headed home.
I call the number.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Cal?”
The voice
has twenty more years on it,
most of ‘em bad.
But I know it—
Jude’s mother.
“You sent this?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the one callin’ me?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you
say anything before?”
“I couldn’t make myself.”
“You managed now.”
“They still got my boy.”
I looked again at the message.
“What do you know about Monty’s?”
“Not over the phone.”
“Then why send that?”
“Because I needed you to answer.”
“I answered.”
“I need you to come see me.”
She gives me an address
outside Laurel Bend.
About fifteen miles
south of Hawthorn.
“Tell me what this
has to do with Jude.”
“I said not over the phone.”
“Give me something.”
Her breathing sharpened.
For a second,
I thought she might hang up
again.
“Wade said your name
the night he died.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Said it to who?”
“You know who.”
“What did he say?”
“Come alone.”
Then she ended the call.
###
The highway south
runs straight to Laurel Bend.
Bethany Cemetery
rises through the trees—
white stones shouldering
out of red clay.
A one-lane drive swallowed
at the edges,
and the old iron gate
hanging crooked as it did
when I was a boy.
Wade’s burial notice
was taped inside McCready’s window
this morning.
Saturday.
Larkin family plot.
Wade had his ground
picked out
before Jude had a lawyer.
Hawthorn moves quick
with a shovel
once it decides who’s
going under.
My phone rings.
Della’s name crosses the screen.
I answer.
“Where you at?”
“Driving.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
“Bethlehem Road.”
Della draws a breath.
“Baby, don’t go home.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“You got men asking after you.”
The truck moves closer.
“What men?”
“One from the club.
Other one keeps close to Vance.”
“Names?”
“Not over this phone,” she says.
“Are they there now?”
“No. Came in separate.
Sat in the same booth.”
That sounds like Hawthorn.
Men arriving separate
like that fools anybody.
“What’d they want?”
“They said you ought to stick
to what you remember
and leave what’s happenin’ now
the hell alone.”
Now men are sitting
in Della’s booth,
telling her what I ought to forget.
Whatever Wade’s death broke loose
ain’t staying put.
It’s moved past Jude,
found the people I care about,
and started laying hands on ’em.
“Cal?”
“I’m here.”
“You alone?”
I look into the mirror.
No. But I don’t tell her that.
The truck moves even closer.
Then the truck moves around me.
A passenger in flannel waves.
I wave back.
They speed ahead.
“Come to the bar,” she says.
The road narrows
beyond the cemetery.
Pine limbs close over the asphalt.
“I can’t come there yet.”
“Why?”
“Somebody’s waiting on me.”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you when I know what they want.”
“Cal, that is the dumbest—”
“I’ll call you.”
“Don’t you hang—”
I hang up.
###
Ahead, the old Monty house
lifts between the trees.
Two stories of gray lumber
and black windows.
The porch sags in the middle.
Kudzu has swallowed half the chimney.
I haven’t been there
since I was eighteen.
Told myself I’d never go back.
Last time, I wasn’t in my own truck.
Wade drove me out here
in his daddy’s Oldsmobile,
one hand loose on the wheel,
the other laid between us
on the cracked vinyl.
I watched that hand
every mile.
I wanted him.
That fact has lived longer
than everything I said afterward.
When I told him to stop,
he laughed against my neck.
When I said it again,
he put my face toward the wall.
Wanting Wade
didn’t give him the rest of me.
Took me years
to say it that plain—
longer still to believe it.
That night, old Monty’s
turned me loose on foot.
No shirt. One shoe.
My jeans hanging wrong,
blood drying black
where the denim worried
my skin raw.
I made it as far
as the Cane Creek bridge
before my legs gave out.
Lorene found me folded
against the bridge guardrail,
barely eighteen
and shaking hard enough
to rattle my teeth.
Her headlights held me there.
She took one look
at my face.
Then her eyes dropped
to the torn-open place
where the buttons
had been.
“Cal Mercer?”
I turned my face away.
She crouched in front of me,
one hand held out
without touching.
“Who done this?”
“Nobody.”
“That ain’t nobody’s blood.”
“I fell.”
Her mouth tightened.
She looked back
the way I’d come,
toward old Monty’s place.
“You need a hospital?”
“No, ma’am.”
“The sheriff?”
“No.”
“Jude?”
The answer came too fast.
“Don’t call him.”
She studied me then.
The bare skin.
The one shoe.
My jeans hanging wrong.
Whatever she understood,
she kept to herself.
“All right,” she said.
“Get in the car.”
She took an old blanket
from the trunk
and wrapped it around me.
Then she drove me home
by the long way
so nobody in town
would see us.
She never asked for a name again.
I thought careful
meant nobody knew.
Lorene had seen enough—
and kept it from Jude
all these years.
Nothing beyond
what she found at Cane Creek bridge.
Did Wade say my name
to Jude
the night he died?
Does Lorene know more?
I leave old Monty’s
to its weeds
and blind windows.
The road drops deeper
into Cane Creek,
where the pines lean close
and daylight gives out.
Lorene’s brick house waits
at the end of a county road.
One porch light burns.
The rest has gone black.
I turn beneath
the old pecan tree
and kill the engine.
Before I open my door,
Lorene opens hers.
