Once Beyond a Time Read online

  “So what do you do for fun around here?” I ask, not bothering to get up from the chair.

  For a minute, he just stands there looking stupid, like he has no idea what fun is. I was afraid of that. “Well,” he finally says, “lots of stuff.”

  “What? Like, go to hoedowns and have coon-dog howling contests? Shoot varmints to make stew? Attend public hangings?”

  He looks confused, the poor dweeb. Then he laughs a little. Like he’s not sure he should, but he’s afraid not to. Then he says, “Well, I don’t think we do that anymore.”

  “Do what?” I ask, egging him on.

  “Hang people. Anyhow, I haven’t heard of any hangings around here lately.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say.

  His eyebrows try hard to meet his hairline. “You do that in Pennsylvania? Hang people?”

  “Only during leap years.”

  He doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. He fidgets and sticks his hands in the pockets of his overalls.

  “So,” I go on. “Back to good times in Black Mountain. You folks smoke weed?”

  He finally looks alive. “Oh sure!” he cries. “Yeah, we do that.”

  My head springs up. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. “Really?” I ask.

  “Sure! Corn silk. Grapevines. Rabbit tobacco.”

  I feel my eyes turning into slits. Jeff looks scared.

  “I mean,” I say through clenched teeth, “marijuana. You got any marijuana down here?”

  His eyes widen even as mine grow narrower. “You mean, that illegal drug they do out in California?”

  I don’t bother to answer. Far as I’m concerned, this conversation’s over.

  How am I going to make it through this year? I want to kill myself. No, better yet, I want to kill somebody else. And I can hear him downstairs right now, talking to Uncle Steve about the Chevy dealership. So let’s welcome Sheldon Crane, Birchfield Chevrolet’s newest used car salesman.

  Dad, the big liar, should fit his new role just fine.

  3

  Sheldon

  Friday, July 12, 1968

  FATHER, FORGIVE ME, for I have sinned.

  Father.

  Forgive me.

  For I have sinned.

  No matter how many times I say it, I know I have to say it one more time, because the forgiveness is always just beyond my reach.

  Meg, I know, has not forgiven me. Can I blame her? If the tables were turned, would I forgive her? I’d like to think I would. I’d like to think she will—someday. That’s my prayer, anyway.

  Linda is as angry with me as her mother is. Won’t talk to me, barely looks at me. Is it because she’s seventeen? Would she have hated me anyway, just because she’s seventeen, and I’m a pastor? Was a pastor. Was. Past tense now.

  Carl writes to me from Vietnam, telling me to forget it. “These things happen,” he says. “Just forget it and move on.” It is hard to move on when the one you’re supposed to be traveling with refuses to budge.

  The Birchfields came this afternoon, bringing greetings and food. Casseroles, canned goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, cookies, and other baked goods—all pulled out of the back of their Chevy like it was some sort of welcome wagon. They’ve been good to us. Heaven knows, Steve was good to me, offering me the job. Not that it’s the kind of job I ever imagined myself doing.

  “You look worried,” he said to me after supper.

  “I really have no idea how to sell cars.”

  “Nothing to it!” he said cheerfully. “I can tell you in an afternoon everything you need to know.”

  His smile was full of confidence. He is a man who doesn’t worry. “Listen,” he said, nodding toward the porch, away from the women who were cleaning up the kitchen. Steve and I stepped outside. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one, throwing the match into the grass at the foot of the steps. “Listen,” he said again. “I know things are … tense … right now, between you and Meg. But she’ll come around.”

  I found myself sighing heavily.

  “I mean,” he went on, “you’re not the first guy to ever—well, you know. Women get over it.”

  I looked at him for a long while. I’ve seen Steve only a few times in my life, whenever he and Donna came up to Philly to visit. We never came down here, never could afford a real vacation on my pastor’s salary. So I don’t know Steve well, but he’s my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother, and he’s already extended his hand to me. He’s bailed me out. I need his friendship, and so far he’s been friendly.

  It felt awkward, but I went ahead and asked, “Were you ever unfaithful, Steve?”

  “Me?” He tapped his chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “Yeah. Once.” He shrugged, like he was telling me he’d once gone fishing.

  “Donna know?”

  “Sure. Yeah, she knows everything. It was a few years ago.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was in the doghouse a couple of months, you’d better believe it. I mean, she wouldn’t cook for me, do my laundry, nothing. And as far as …” He paused, looked at me, took a long pull on his cigarette. “Well, let’s just say, I got pretty well acquainted with the guest room before I ever laid my head down on my own pillow again.”

  He said it like he shouldn’t be talking about such things with a pastor, because everyone knows pastors are different. Not quite human. No, more than human. Holy, somehow. Incapable of being human. Incapable of sin.

  I am a used car salesman.

  But for the moment, Steve seems to forget that. To him, I am still a pastor. He must be careful.

  “So what happened?” I asked again.

  “Well,” he said with a smile, “you know, after a while it gets old for both of you. If you just go on working and bringing home the bacon—and a few roses don’t hurt either—you eventually fall back into the old routine. You don’t even have to say anything, you know. She just starts making your dinner again and washing your socks. And then someday it’s almost like it never happened.”

  Like it never happened? For me, it will never be like that. In this house, there are four bedrooms. One for Linda, one for Digger, one for Meg, one for me.

  I am no longer married. What I wouldn’t give to be married again. Not just to anyone, but to Meg, my wife.

  It’s heading toward twilight and I’m in my room now, a spacious square at the back of the house next to Digger’s room. The girls have the front rooms that open up onto the porch. I thought they’d like that. But I don’t know. Obviously, neither of them seems very happy about anything right now.

  I look out the window and see Digger jumping from that big rock in the backyard. His arms are raised toward the sky and he’s holding a stick in one hand. He jumps, he yells, he climbs the rock, and jumps again. Oh, son. You have it all ahead of you. Don’t mess up. It’s easier to make a tangle of things than I ever imagined, but maybe, if you’re very, very careful, you’ll be all right.

  I had prided myself in my goodness. Funny, isn’t it? How can one be proud that one is good? The one negates the other. So yes, maybe I too believed a pastor is somehow more than human. Somehow immune to sin. And yet I did something I thought I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—ever do.

  Her name was Charlene McMurphy.

  “She was engaged to be married, and now her fiancé has gone and called off the engagement,” Meg explained. Meg had come to my office at the church, Charlene’s letter in hand. “Now she wants to leave Des Moines and make a fresh start somewhere else. She says she’s hoping to get a job in Philly. Can she stay with us for a short time, just until she finds her own place?”

  Of course! Of course she can. She’s family after all. Meg’s cousin on her father’s side. Meg’s younger cousin, only twenty-two, but yes, of course she can stay with us. What, with Carl gone, we have a spare bedroom. Tell her to come right away; we’ll leave the light on for her.

  And so she came.

  At first I pitied her because of the bro
ken engagement. None of us spoke of the ex-fiancé by name, though he was always there, hanging around, making Charlene weep at the oddest times. She used to play the piano and cry, tears running down her face, her mascara two black streaks that she dabbed at with crumpled tissues. Meg tried to comfort her—“There are plenty of fish in the sea”—and, who knows, maybe it did some good because as the days passed, Charlene grew less and less somber and occasionally even ventured a laugh. And often, very often, she smiled at me.

  I asked her how she could coax such beautiful music out of an out-of-tune piano, and she said one has to love the instrument, love what it can do in spite of how broken it is. If one loves and respects the instrument it will do great things for you. I told her she was a talented musician, and she said she wasn’t yet, but one day she hoped to be. I told her she could come next door to the church any time and play the organ, and she said she’d like that.

  She was a beautiful girl: young and lithe and blonde and perfect. She didn’t spend much time trying to find a job or a place of her own, but neither Meg nor I rushed her. She had, after all, a broken heart and needed time to mend.

  I should have run, somehow. That was my mistake. I should have helped her find an apartment, but I didn’t. Of course, I couldn’t admit to myself then what I readily confess now: I didn’t want her to leave.

  I still loved Meg, and for that reason I tried at first to toss off the desire Charlene aroused in me. And there was that pride again; I had prided myself on being strong enough to resist temptation. I believed myself impervious to the charms of Lorelei! But, in the end, I couldn’t resist the siren’s song that lures men to shipwreck on the rocks.

  The day came when she found me alone in my office at the church. She approached my desk where I sat reading the sermons of Spurgeon. She wore that orange mini-skirt and white sleeveless blouse, her long hair hanging around her shoulders in gentle waves. She smiled at me as she said, “You know, you don’t look like a pastor to me anymore.”

  And startled, I replied, “I don’t?”

  “No,” she said, touching my arm with her fingertips. “You just look like a regular man.”

  And so as easily as that, I was. A regular man. My grip let go the wheel of the ship, and I was lost.

  Father. Father.

  Forgive me, for I have sinned.

  Forgive me.

  4

  Digger

  Friday, July 12, 1968

  YEE HAW! I’M Daniel Boone! I got my rifle, and I’m going hunting, and I’m not coming back till I got the biggest buffalo ever! I’m not afraid of nothing!

  Oh boy, this is great. This is the best thing ever. I wish we’d had a rock like this in the backyard up home. I never saw a rock this big for climbing on and jumping off. It’s just like flying.

  Yee haw! Pow, pow, pow! This might look like a stick, but it’s the meanest rifle you’ll find anywhere in these mountains. I can shoot a tin can at sixty paces. Pow!

  Boy, I wish Marjorie and them could have stayed a little longer so she could go on playing the Indian maiden I rescue from the bad guys. Aunt Donna said Marjorie had to go to bed, but what I want to know is, who can go to bed when it’s not even hardly dark yet? Yeah, I guess she’s only seven and I’m eight, and I can stay up longer.

  Look out below! Here I come! And I’m the roughest, toughest, rootin’ tootin’est …

  Hey! What’s that?

  I must have said it out loud because some voice behind me says, “It’s a lightning bug. Haven’t you never seen one?”

  I turn around, and there’s a boy standing there with his face all freckled and his bare feet all dirty. Wow, lucky kid! Ma says I got to wear my sneakers in the grass in case of bees.

  “Haven’t you never seen a lightning bug before?” the kid asks again.

  I shake my head. “Nope, I don’t guess so.” Now they’re everywhere, little lights flashing all over the backyard. “How do they light up like that?”

  “Austin says they got little gas lamps in their tails they can turn on and off, just by thinking about it.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Yup. How come you never seen a lightning bug before?”

  “Guess we didn’t have them up in Abington.”

  “Abington? Where’s that?”

  “Pennsylvania. We just moved here. You live around here?”

  “Yup.” He points over one shoulder with his thumb.

  “Here in Black Mountain?”

  “Yup.” He points with his thumb again at the house we just moved into. I think he must mean he lives down the mountain from us somewhere.

  “What’s your name?” I ask him.

  “Malcolm. But everybody calls me Mac.”

  “Hey, that’s funny! My name’s Harrison, but everybody calls me Digger.”

  “You wanna catch lightning bugs in a jar?”

  “Sure! You got any jars?”

  “Don’t tell nobody, but I took some of Ma’s canning jars. Just a couple. I hid them up there in the woods.” He points to the woods that Dad told me was off our property and if I went up in there I’d have to be careful. Aunt Donna said maybe don’t go in the woods at all because there’s black bears all over these mountains. When she said that, it looked like Ma was going to faint, but Uncle Steve said don’t worry because if you bang a couple pots together they run away pretty fast, and anyway, it’s been a while since the last time they heard of anybody being clawed up by a bear. So when Mac says, “Come on! I’ll show you where they are,” I say, “All right!” and we start running.

  I run on ahead of Mac, even though I should be following because I don’t know where we’re going. But I always was a good runner, the fastest in my second-grade class last year, even faster than Marty Higgins, who always bragged he was best at everything. But he wasn’t faster than Digger Crane. No siree!

  I’m running across the grass and into the woods behind our yard, and then I think I better slow down and let Mac show me where those jars are. I stop and turn and start to tell Mac to go ahead, but he isn’t behind me.

  “Hey,” I holler. “Hey, where’d you go?”

  I’m looking everywhere, but he’s gone. I can’t believe it! He went and snuck off without making a sound, the way the Indians do when they’re walking through the woods. I’m sorry he did that because I don’t know where the jars are and now I can’t catch any lightning bugs and besides I wonder why Mac didn’t want to stick around. Maybe he heard his Ma calling or something, but he could have told me he had to go and maybe said good-bye. Oh well. He’ll probably come back. Next time I see him, I’m going to ask him to show me how to disappear into thin air just like he did.

  5

  Meg

  Saturday, July 13, 1968

  HOW QUIET IT is here in the early morning. I step out onto the upstairs porch and hear nothing but birdsong. No voices. No traffic. Only the whistles and trills of a thousand birds.

  In the distance, a mist rises from the mountains, as though the sun is gently lifting a blanket off a sleeping child. Time to get up now. For all I know, this might be the dawn of the world. There is nothing here to tell me otherwise.

  Donna says that in the winter, when the leaves are off the trees, we’ll have a better view of the town in the valley below. But for now, with few signs of human life, we might as well be the only people living in these hills.

  While Sheldon and the kids are still asleep, I go downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee. A large stone fireplace nearly fills the whole of one wall, and there is actually a blackened kettle dangling from a wrought-iron crane on the hearth. I wonder who last used that kettle. No telling. This house is filled with all sorts of odd things. Chamber pots under the beds. Hat pins on the dressers. Framed photos of unknown people on the walls. A spinning wheel in the living room. I am used to living in houses that are not my own, filled with furniture bought by somebody else. But this time I almost feel as though I’m intruding, as though I’ve moved into a house that has never actually
been vacated. The owners will be coming home any minute now and will be surprised to find us here. That’s how it seems to me as I stand at the kitchen sink filling the coffee percolator with water. Perhaps I will hear someone at the door, a key in the lock, and I will know the family who lives in this house has come home again.

  Steve, who arranged for us to live here, said it would be the perfect place for us, since it was already furnished and available to let right away. The man who really does own the house—his name is Ronald Simpkins, or maybe Simmons, I can’t remember now—at any rate, he bought the house in 1959 with the idea he and his wife would retire here someday. For now, he lives over the mountains in Tennessee and rents this place out, as he can. Apparently, he has trouble keeping his renters, though certainly the place is under-priced.

  “What seems to be the trouble, far as renting this place out?” Sheldon asked last night at supper.

  “Don’t know for sure,” Steve responded, “but I suppose people are anxious to buy rather than rent. The price of real estate is always going up around here, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff added, “that and the fact that people say this place is haunted.”

  “Oh right,” Linda said, rolling her eyes.

  Sheldon actually laughed. “Well, Jeff, we don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “We don’t believe in such things.”

  Jeff shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I hear.”

  I was afraid Jeff would frighten Digger, but Digger was so intent on eating, he seemed not to have heard.

  “Well,” Donna rushed to add, “I’ve lived here in Black Mountain almost all my life, and I can tell you there aren’t any ghosts in this town. I’ve never actually been in this house before, but I can tell you I’ve never heard anything about it being haunted. When I was growing up it was owned by a widow who more or less kept to herself and didn’t much welcome company. But now that I’ve seen the place, I think it’s lovely.”