The Ninth House

I confess: if a conventional publisher had come a-callin’, you wouldn’t be reading this now.

As I write this, I find myself reflexively attempting to justify my decision to publish Covenant Springстолове here against the inevitable perception that any book published on the Internet probably couldn’t get conventionally published, and for good reason.

That reason being, it probably stinks.

There. I said it.

Now, allow me my justification.

All of the places in this story are real but I’ve changed their names and where they are, so if you follow the directions I give to Covenant Spring you’ll wind up someplace else entirely, past the New Covenant Presbyterian Church and Miz Dori’s neat white house, past the dirt road into the woods by the swamp where Mister Silas lives, over and beyond the little cement bridge, where I held Aaron’s hand and faced down Pastor Lamm, with the storm black and howling over our heads and the world a tick from ruin.  

Some of the events I have changed for certain reasons that ought to be clear by the end.  I’ve also changed the names of everyone involved, for the same reasons.  All of them by now know who they are and they’re pretty much fine with it.  So if you think you see yourself in here, it’s not intentional but you can’t say it’s all that surprising, the world being what it is.

My name is Daniel Ivy and I live in New Jersey.  I’ve lived in Jersey all my life.  I was born and raised in a typical Jersey town, which I know won’t mean a thing to you if you haven’t been here.  There are worse places to grow up, and any place is fine when you’re a kid and don’t know any better.

My hometown is small.  You might find it on a good state map.  It’s about an hour west of New York City, identical to the towns that surround it, like interlocking amoebas in a petri dish.  Millions of squirming souls captured in a drop of dirty water, squished beneath a microscope slide, fighting for parking spaces.  It’s home because it’s where I was born and grew up, and that’s the end of it.  It’s difficult to get sentimental about asphalt and strip malls.

(more…)

I graduated with my class.  My yearbook photo shows me standing in front of a pine tree with my arms crossed, staring up and off into the distance. 

Before he snapped the photo, the photographer said the same thing to me that he’d said to everyone else.  Smile, and think of your future. 

I am not smiling in my photo. 

(more…)

Years went by.  I worked a handful of jobs.  Most aren’t worth talking about. 

I moved out of the house as soon as I could afford it.  I found a little apartment I could manage on my own.  It had putty-colored walls and brown shag carpeting.  The air conditioning carried the damp smell of everyone who had ever lived there.

(more…)

No car salesman I have ever met ever planned on being one.  If you have any kind of personality at all and you can do basic math, you’re qualified.  It doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it, of course.  One of the guys who works at the dealership had done time in a minimum security prison for forging his mother’s signature on her checks.  She’s the one who’d turned him in.  He had turned his life around since, he said.

I spent a week watching training videos and reading pamphlets before my first day on the floor.  The new car manager gave me some advice, which was this: “Buyers are liars.” 

(more…)

We moved one hundred five vehicles the second month Cai was with us.  One hundred fucking five. 

That was more than double the dealership’s best month, ever.  And forty-two of those, Cai sold.  Better than a car a day if he’d had the whole month, and he did it nineteen days, Sundays off.  You can’t do any better and not go to jail. 

I need to tell you the numbers, so you’ll truly understand. 

(more…)

I never forgot that day when Cai stripped the world from me. 

I won’t say it was easy, to tell myself it was just some strange thing, some temporary weakness of flesh, coincidence that Cai happened to look at me then.  But it was enough to dig the memory a shallow grave, until the next time it arose.  It didn’t always work.  Sometimes nothing I did would make it go away.  It would come as I drifted into sleep, it would seize me so that it took everything I had to tear myself free, like struggling to awaken from a dream.

I don’t know if it was death I feared.  I don’t know enough about death to be afraid of it.  But I am afraid of dying, of the very end, that moment when you know your death has arrived, you’re out of time and you’ve missed the point and now it’s too late to go back and get it right.  Knowing that I have failed, imagining that infinite, categorical moment of recognition, and how it will feel.  That’s what terrifies me. 

(more…)

Friday afternoon I left work early and went to my apartment to pack.  I had asked Cai what it was like in Covenant Spring, in the summer.  “You won’t need a jacket,” he’d answered. 

I didn’t have a suitcase.  I’d never traveled far enough to need one.  I stuffed clothes into the knapsack I’d used to carry my books in high school and wondered why Cai had invited me.  I wondered why I was going.  I told myself it was because I wasn’t going to show Cai how frightened he’d made me, which was ridiculous.  I was certain he already knew.

(more…)

The farthest I had ever driven until my trip with Cai was down to Cape May, which is the extreme south tip of New Jersey, right on the ocean, with a big lighthouse there.  It’s about three hours in good traffic.

I went there with Cheryl.  We spent an off-season weekend in a budget motel and did nothing but rut.  That’s the only word that fits.  She’d suggested the trip, two weeks after we’d met, and paid for it all but she let me drive, her car, a year-old VW convertible.  We listened to salsa music on CD all the way down.  She stuck her tongue in my ear at the check-in desk while the clerk’s back was turned and grinned at me like no woman had ever done.

(more…)

We visited the restroom and went outside and drove to the next lot, where the gas station was.  It was self-serve, which was against the law in New Jersey then.  I told Cai I would pump.  I had never pumped my own gas before, if you can believe it.  I had to hold the handle down, otherwise the pump kept cutting out. 

“What do you mean, it’s not good to do what?”

Cai was checking the truck’s oil with a dirty rag he kept in the back of the cab.  He said he’d just had the rear seal replaced at the dealership, he used to have to add a quart every three weeks before that. 

He finished and slammed the hood closed.  He folded the rag and put it back in the cab, in the cargo netting behind the seats with the rest of his road kit.

I told Cai I’d really appreciate it if he’d answer me for once.  I said I deserved an answer.

(more…)

A woman was singing.  It was all around like a warm chocolate bath, low piano notes and rhythm like thrusting hips, a harmonica moaning.  She was riding atop it, pulling it into her and through her with sweat and breath and making it a spell.

I couldn’t see her.  All I could feel was her song.  It pulsed against me in the dark and taunted me, it dared me to come closer, to dare the brush of her lips, the damp kiss of her breath, the hot grinding press of her sex. 

Let those come who would try.  You will burn to flashpaper ashes without her knowing you were there. 

(more…)

Drive south on I-95, look for a billboard advertising log cabin homes, take the next exit.  Turn right at the stop sign, which is west. 

The road is a two-lane state road.  The rain passes, the sun bakes away the wet and turns it gray as slate.  It burns the fog off the fields, around the next curve and the next, miles of gentle sloping land plowed and planted and steaming in the morning’s heat. 

There are no traffic lights, no towns.  Some houses are brick and some are older, wood-framed with porches.  Some are trailers, satellite dishes perched on aluminum-sided corners, late-model pickups and sedans parked in the dirt turn-around out front.  They all sit in their oases of trees well back from the road, as far back as an entire lot back home – some neat as new haircuts, some ragged and wanting for care.  Some have barns and buildings, trucks and tractors and big harvesters painted green or red parked beside them, metal skeletons with bars and blades and tines. 

A dog barks and runs along the ditch, trying to keep up as we drive by.  He stops at some invisible barrier, sending us on our way with a final gunshot warning.

(more…)

I said I felt like a wad of dirty underwear.  Cai laughed, tired, and nodded. 

That was the first thing of the next part. 

A little blond boy emerged from around the back corner of the house, shorts and a tee-shirt and barefooted.  He stopped next to the porch and looked at us.  Cai peered at him through the bug-spattered windshield and swore.  He undid his seat belt and we got out and closed the doors.

Cai said, “How you doin’, Aaron?”  The boy didn’t reply.  “I bet you don’t remember me, do you?  The last time I saw you, you were just a little thing.  You were only two years old.  Do you know who I am?” 

The boy offered a shy nod.  Cai squatted down next to the truck, elbows on knees, and took off his cap.  I walked behind the truck until I was standing next to him.  Cai said, “This is my friend Mister Danny.  Did your mama tell you we were coming?”

Then a woman’s voice scolded, “Who do you think you are, parking on my grass?” 

(more…)

Cai was already gone into the guest room to sleep.  Aaron was playing in the back yard.  CeeCee was in the kitchen, making iced tea.

I sat at the square wooden table in the little kitchen, old yellow cabinets and a faded linoleum floor and photos and things stuck to the big white fridge with magnets.  The windows were open, the morning breeze carried the scent of outside into the house. 

I watched CeeCee, held again by her beauty.  I was afraid to study her too intimately, fearful that at any moment the mistake would be discovered.  That I was a fraud, undeserving of this sweet wonder, and it would be taken from me. 

(more…)

We stuck close to the shade of the few trees on the left of the road as we walked.  CeeCee had brought me an old ball cap to wear against the sun.  She took it out of the basket.  The cloth band was sweat-stained and the words Smith-Douglas Fertilizer were stitched above the faded blue brim.  CeeCee said her daddy had given it to Royal a while ago. 

I asked her who Royal was.  She said he was Aaron’s daddy.  I didn’t ask more.  I’d already noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.  I’d noticed that right away.  I thought of what CeeCee had said to Aaron before he went inside, to lock the doors and wake Uncle Cai if anything happened. 

I put on the ball cap and adjusted it in back so that it fit me, and another nail got driven.

(more…)

We came to the end of the road.  There was mud from the morning rain in the weedy ditch over which the cement bridge sat, its edges crumbling like old sugar cubes.  CeeCee said there was a swamp on the western end of the woods, to our left, Buck Swamp.  It ran around the woods behind her house and then curved behind everything else.  I asked her how it got its name, and she said she didn’t know, she reckoned maybe someone had seen a buck there once, although there were hardly any deer left there at all, now.

I squinted through the blacktop glare and saw the bridge at which she pointed, a flat concrete thing about a quarter-mile down the road, the one I’d seen earlier.  CeeCee said she and Cai used to play in the swamp when they were kids, fishing and catching crawdaddys and king snakes.  She said there were water moccasins there, too, and copperheads, and it was a wonder they’d never been bitten. 

(more…)

We traveled through the trees and emerged with the corn before us, leaves brushing scratchy hands together in the hot breeze.  No one had said anything since Royal’s departure.  CeeCee was someplace else, and Miz Dori was concentrating fully on safe navigation.

I felt as if I had eavesdropped on dirty family business.  I didn’t know what to say. 

We passed CeeCee’s house, and she satisfied herself that it was still there.  I felt something lift from her then.  She upturned her face to the sun and sighed, eyes closed, and returned.

(more…)

There is the dark bedroom.  There is Royal, big and drunk, and there is CeeCee in her nightclothes holding her screaming baby, fighting for her baby’s life. 

She talks to Royal but he doesn’t hear.  She kicks him with her bare feet, she claws at his face and draws blood. 

Cai and their daddy Mister Lorrin Bass come into the room.  Cai bolted from his bed out of a dead sleep and called for his daddy to bring the shotgun as the back porch screen door clapped shut behind him.

Cai and Mister Lorrin come into the room in time to see Royal hit CeeCee hard enough to knock her down.  

(more…)

The swing creaked on its chains.  All CeeCee has told me is that Royal hit her and tried to take Aaron and Cai stopped him, and that the next morning Cai was gone. 

It has been five years.  In that time, Royal has not once dared return uninvited, CeeCee says.  Aaron sees his daddy by arrangement once a week, in the afternoon at CeeCee’s house or at Pastor Lamm’s farm, with CeeCee and Mister Lorrin always there.  CeeCee is certain that Royal would have turned down the road to her house that morning had we not met him, had she not told him Cai was back, had he not seen me, another man, standing next to her. 

I feel glad that I was there.  I have been good for something.  Right that very moment I vow I will protect her and Aaron, and with that vow another switch is born inside me, solid and sure as if it had always been there. 

(more…)

The house in which Cai and CeeCee’s parents live was built before Mister Lorrin married Miz Charlotte. Mister Lorrin built the house for them, with his daddy Cole and Mister Silas and Miz Dori’s husband Raeford and others helping. He and Miz Charlotte have lived there since, and Cai and CeeCee were born there with Miz Dori as midwife. It is a house built knowing exactly who would live in it, with family placing every board and brick and nail, and there has never been anyone inside of it who was not invited, and it will never be sold, never given to anyone who is not family. You can sink your arms into that house as far as you can reach and never find the bottom.

(more…)

Aaron was staying with his grandparents that night.  I told him good-night and shook Mister Lorrin’s hand and hugged Miz Charlotte.  She called me “hon.” 

Cai hugged his daddy.  Mister Lorrin kissed his son’s cheek and whispered something into his ear I couldn’t make out. 

We walked down the front porch steps.  I saw Cai wipe his eyes.  He didn’t speak or look at us all the way back to the house.

(more…)

Cai and Sarabeth drove off together in her car, a cherry ‘78 Camaro, midnight blue. It would never pass the emissions test in Jersey. When they stopped at the lot curb for traffic I saw Sarabeth through the rear window pull Cai to her and kiss him such that I wondered if they’d make it to her apartment.

CeeCee drove us home. The sky hung over our heads like a ribbon above treetops, stars revealed when the trees fell back from the road, broad flat fields opening around us. There were clouds in the east far ahead, piles of indigo mountains with moonlight shining like snow atop them. You can’t see the stars where I live. There’s too much light pollution, too many buildings to feel the space. 

(more…)

There are woods where I live, I played in them when I was a boy, but they’re just wild tall gardens spared the mowing down of construction. There’s always the sound of traffic nearby to follow if you get lost, always the comfort of asphalt and concrete to lead you home.

This woods had never seen a saw or axe. It was as it had been since it first grew from wild seed, thick and dark in its own life. My feet caught every root and my clothes every reaching bramble. I clenched CeeCee’s hand, terrified that she would slip away and leave me lost. I vowed that I wouldn’t move if it happened, I would stand still right where I was and wait for the sun to show me the trail back out. And snakes. The woods was full of snakes, it had to be. CeeCee’s light was the only thing keeping them away from us and if it disappeared I would be marooned in the dark and then I would hear them, slithering in the trees over my head and across the woods floor. I would feel their weight squirming across my shoes and if I moved they would know I was there and they would take me, and no one would ever know.

(more…)

Mister Lorrin bent and whispered into Aaron’s ear. His grandson moved forward and climbed the steps to the porch. He walked over to Miz Dori and waited. She patted his shoulder.

I didn’t notice it until then. There was a well pump on the porch next to where Miz Dori sat, an old-fashioned iron thing with a lever arm. It rose from a squat stone cistern which went down through the porch floor and into the ground beneath.

Miz Dori lifted a metal dipper from where it rested on the cistern rim. She lowered it twice out of sight into the cistern and twice brought it up and poured water from it into the top of the pump to prime it.

(more…)

I startled awake to the thunder.  It was like cracking timbers. 

I was still dressed.  I had lay down on the bed with my mind wrapped around CeeCee, that she was just down the hall.  If I should go to her room, if she was waiting for me to declare myself again.  I lay there, seeking to return to that feeling from the kitchen before we drank, seeking calm. 

Through the bedroom wall I thought I could hear the ticking of the clock in the living room but I knew it must have been imagination.  The rain was drumming too hard on the roof.

That still sense from in the kitchen before eluded me.  Maybe it was the noise of the storm.  My thoughts wouldn’t settle.  The taste of the water was still in my mouth, an alkaline thing like a coating on my tongue and palate.

(more…)

I remember waking there, on the ground, in the rain. 

I pushed myself to my feet.  I sucked the wet air. 

I could not have been home.  I was here.  I couldn’t have done what I had done. 

There was a settling, as if blocks were descending into order after having been shaken from their places.  I leaned against the reassembling world, used it to steady myself.  I held still, drinking sensation, cataloging.  I felt the cold raindrops on me.  I felt the wind, the grit on my skin.  But with every heartbeat, the world seemed to shimmer, like a projection on a spider web into which a twig had been blown. 

The world receded and swelled like breaths.  Nothing around me was real.  Awake or dreaming, there was no distinction now.  And with that, no rescue.

(more…)

I am still connected to it but I am not in it.  It is an image only.  We are linked by familiarity, but nothing else. 

I follow it into the corn, this thing that is me, this thing that is my flesh and the sins it carries.  It is so heavy, I am taken that it can move at all, that its legs do not bow and splinter beneath it like planks.  Its weight dents the soil, a grasping force from the very center of the earth pulls it down, only the compressed matter of the world supports and saves it. 

I want to go to it, to take this pitiful thing in my arms and comfort it.  I feel what it feels but it’s only a curiosity, a flat projection I observe.

(more…)

The morning sun doesn’t enter CeeCee’s bedroom.  The windows face the wrong direction but there was a breeze.  It carried the warm scent of the pines just beyond the west windows to my right, of the creek and swamp beyond them. 

The breeze lifted and lowered the sheer white curtains like gently waving hands.  I lay in bed entranced by their motion, thinking how I was the only person in the entire world here to see it.  I reached through the window and brought the birdsong to me, picked out the distinct voices and held them, released them fluttering into the racket of whistles and chimes. 

The room was lines and colors and shadows and shapes, and sensation – the cool sheets, the press of the mattress, my slow breath.  I was content to lay and let it be.

(more…)

I don’t think I have said, my family is Catholic.  I learned when I asked my mother.  I had to put it down once on a school field trip insurance form.  I spelled it out in pencil in the space for it, C-A-T-H-O-L-I-C.  I didn’t know what it meant.  It was a thing, like how old I was.  A new word I had to know to go to the zoo.

Back then my mother made me go to Sunday school for a time.  I don’t think she was drinking yet.  We would go to mass sometimes, and always on Easter for the passion play and Christmas to see the nativity play.  We stopped going before I was in junior high.  I don’t know why.

Easter is the most important Christian holiday, not Christmas.  I don’t know if you know that.  Easter is when Jesus is supposed to have died on the cross and come back from the dead three days later, if you believe the story.  If you don’t, you’re not a good Christian, even if you believe and practice everything Jesus taught when he was alive.  Those are the rules.

(more…)

The New Covenant Presbyterian Church is a neat red brick building with white wooden trim and a pointed white steeple with a small Christian cross atop it.  There’s a gravel drive that wraps around it, lined with tall trees.  To the right of the church, as you face it from the road, is the cemetery, about an acre of neat green grass with grave markers set flush into the ground, so you can mow over them.  As you follow them farther into the cemetery they disappear into the grass.  Some of them had flowers set beside them, so it appeared as if the vases had been dropped at random onto an otherwise well-kept but rather uninspired lawn.

(more…)

“Good morning,” Preacher Worthy said, and I heard a few people answer him.  “I see we have some new people here this morning, which is always good, we’re glad to have you.”  He looked at each of us, I don’t know who the others were, and last he looked at me, and he nodded and smiled and I smiled back again.  I was glad I wasn’t the only new guy.  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to stand up and say who you are in front of all these people,” he said then, and there was laughter.  CeeCee patted my hand.  She was laughing, too.

Preacher Worthy said that before he’d gotten ready for church that morning, he had been out walking in his garden.  He said his tomatoes were looking good, and his snap peas and squash and cabbage, that the rain the day and night before had done them all good, and his watermelons too, which had just started to flower that very morning.  He’d been worried about them with all the dry weather they’d been having, and he thanked the Good Lord for the rain and said he knew we did, too.  He said the weather report that morning was that there would be more rain coming tomorrow, and I heard a few people say “Amen,” like they meant it. 

(more…)

The service ended a few minutes after that. We all got up and made our way to the door. Neighbors said hello and I was introduced to more people, and some asked if I was coming to the family reunion. Not everyone was because not everyone who attends the New Covenant Presbyterian Church is related to the Bass family, though the Basses founded the church, as I said.

We stood in line on the way to the front door where Preacher Worthy was, greeting everyone as they left. He was so tall I could see him from halfway back in the church. I looked around for Cai but he was gone. I guessed maybe he had gone wherever Sarabeth was. Miz Charlotte and Mister Lorrin were gone, too. CeeCee said they had gone back the house to take care of a few things before family reunion. She was with me, and Aaron too, dressed in his Sunday best with his hair combed. I wondered if he knew I had spent the night at his mama’s house.

(more…)

Most of the people were inside the fellowship hall by now.  It was full of voices and laughing, the scrape of chairs on the floor.  Sarabeth went off to help in the kitchen.  She had brought deviled eggs, which she had made.  I’d never had deviled eggs.  They’re boiled eggs cut in half with the yolks scooped out and mixed into a paste with mayonnaise and mustard and spices and then spooned back in and sprinkled with paprika.  They taste better than that.

I couldn’t believe Cai hadn’t told me he was staying.  I tried to be angry.  I felt I should be.  It was a lousy thing to do, not to tell me, but I wasn’t angry at all.  I figured I could get back home even if I had to fly.  Or I could stay here if wanted to.  I could stay.  Cai could put in a word for me with Mister Len Dawkins and I could rent a van in Jersey and drive back down with my things, now that I knew the way.  I would lose my apartment deposit but I had enough saved so I didn’t really need it.  I could find a place in Waylon, the rent there would probably be half what I paid in Jersey, and insurance too.  I didn’t know if I could sell the volume down here like I did at the Jersey dealership but with how much less it cost to live here I could probably get by. 

But I didn’t want to live in Waylon.  I wanted to live with CeeCee and Aaron.  I doubted Miz Charlotte and Mister Lorrin would be too crazy about me living with their daughter and grandson without being married. 

(more…)

The desserts were going fast. I had some of Miz Charlotte’s peach pie, she had made another for family reunion when she made Cai’s. And I had a slice of Miz Dori’s yellow cake with chocolate mocha icing, made from scratch. They could both get rich selling them.

Sarabeth had brought her guitar. She sang some hymns and some blues and country songs. CeeCee sang harmony on a lot of them. She has a beautiful voice, not good enough to sing for a living like Sarabeth, but good. She and Sarabeth have been singing together since they were little girls and they write songs sometimes, which CeeCee keeps in a little leather-bound notebook that she doesn’t let anyone read but Sarabeth.

(more…)

No one had thought it would happen at church. No one thought he would have dared, not even Cai.

They had taken precautions for years. Every day since the night that he’d tried to take Aaron, CeeCee had lived in fear that Royal might try again, even after what Cai had shown him awaited if he did. Aaron stayed with his grandparents or Miz Dori when CeeCee was gone. She locked the house if she had to leave him alone for even a few minutes. He knew what numbers to dial if his daddy came by when he was alone, or Pastor Lamm. He knew about the trap door in his bedroom closet that Mister Lorrin had made that even Royal didn’t know about, so Aaron could hide quiet under the house for as long as he had to.

(more…)

We passed Miz Dori’s and the mailboxes, the dirt road into the woods on the left.  We crossed the cement bridge over the swamp.  The road’s shoulder fell away weedy on either side to black, algae-slick water and thick cypress. 

CeeCee took the curves fast, navigating the narrow road like the girl born there.

Cai and I sat facing one another, backs against the bed walls, next to the cab, out of the wind.

“I know why you left here,” I said to him.

He didn’t answer.  There was no need.

“I want you to let me handle Royal,” I said. 

Again no reply. 

“If he’s there,” I said.  “Promise me.”

“It’s not me you need to be worryin’ about,” Cai said.

(more…)

We climbed back into the truck. The rain had arrived, cold drops spat by the wind like an inhale before the deluge, thunder growling in the distance, coming closer.

Cai drove now, Sarabeth beside him, CeeCee in the bed with me, standing, leaning over the cab. I wanted to reassure her but there was nothing to say. None of us knew what the next would bring.

(more…)

Later I learned what happened after I left with Aaron. But now I’m driving, and it feels like running away. I tell myself the four I leave behind are enough to handle Pastor Lamm, more than enough. What I want is to see him for myself. I want to meet the bastard who caused all of this. I want to put my foot on his neck and hear him beg. Old habits die hard.

We passed the old Lamm place, a big shadow in the dark to the right. Aaron was kneeling on the seat, looking out of the back glass.

(more…)

I don’t remember all of what happened next. Some of it Aaron told me later, told CeeCee, who is the only person he would talk to about it at first. He’s better about it now, now that some time has passed. But he doesn’t remember all of it either and that’s probably best. Maybe someday he will but it doesn’t really matter. I don’t even care that much about it anymore, that I need to know all the details. I know enough.

This I remember. When Pastor Lamm stepped onto the bridge I got ready to run. We would make for the road inside, to CeeCee’s house, less than a mile all told. I knew we could outrun him, and if he got into his car we’d use the woods. Once in the house we’d call the church. If Pastor Lamm was smart he’d be gone by the time Mister Lorrin got there.

I said I’d forgotten about Pastor Lamm, in the crash, until I saw him. Turning to run, I looked behind him and knew I had forgotten one other thing.

(more…)

Mister Silas sits in his chair on the porch.  Beside him sits Miz Dori.  She has moved her rocking chair away from the well pump, it is in front of the cabin door.  She is smiling and rocking, she is smiling at me.  She’s such a sweet old lady.  I feel her goodness, like constant spring. 

“You know Miz Dori don’t tell no lies, honey,” she says.  She smiles bigger, her teeth white and shining.  I am another of her children, everyone here is her child is how she thinks of us all, and she has love enough for all of us.

(more…)

It isn’t a heavy rain. It falls like a long sigh, a good gentle soaking, not even enough weight to stir the corn.

We’re on the front porch, Cai and I, on his mama and daddy’s front porch. It’s late morning on Monday. My right foot is propped up on a stool, atop a pillow Miz Charlotte made me put there. I’m supposed to keep it elevated until the rest of the swelling goes down. It doesn’t hurt much.

The rain should stop by noon, the forecast says. It’s too wet to go into the fields today but the tobacco won’t be ready to crop for another week and the corn the next month, so no harm. Cai says there’s been so much rain this season they’ve had to sucker the tobacco twice, walking the rows and pinching off the little leaf buds that grow in the notch between the mature leaves and the stalk. The bottom lug leaves are already a foot wide and nearly twice as long.

All this rain, every day I’ve been here. I can get lost in what it means or just let it be rain. I don’t think I’ve ever been as comfortable as I am now, sitting on this porch, listening to the drops fall, enjoying the cool morning. I suppose there are things to worry about but it’s only the world. I’ll walk through it when it’s time.

(more…)

It’s Wednesday morning. The hot blacktop shimmers in the glare. I bought some sunglasses at the gas station by the interstate when I filled the truck. The window’s down, radio on, traffic’s light. I should make Richmond by noon, easy.

#

The body shop did a beautiful job. They had to replace the back quarter panel but they had it in stock, they matched the paint perfectly and even buffed out all the scratches everywhere else, cleaned the interior and threw in an oil change and tune-up. They remembered Cai.

Mister Len Dawkins is retired now, his oldest son Leland runs the dealership. He’s in his forties, round and bearded and friendly. He offers Cai a job on the spot. He does the same for me when he learns I’m moving down.

(more…)

I called Dad the morning I left and told him I’d be back in town that night.  I thought I would go to my apartment and see him tomorrow, after work. 

I kill the engine.  The cooling metal crackles faint in the dusk, the yellow streetlight reflecting off the hood.  I run my hand over the dash, as Cai had done when he arrived home.  It’s a damn good truck.  Bury it when it dies.

Dad has planted the new boxwood under the corner window, like he said he was going to.  The yard’s neat as a new haircut.  It always is. 

My ankle is still a little tender.  Ten hours on the road hasn’t helped.  I left Mister Cole’s cane behind.  It doesn’t belong with me.  I don’t need it anymore.

I can see the television flickering blue through the picture window.  Dad’s car isn’t in the drive. 

I usually knock before I go in.  Dad says it’ll always be my house but I like to let them know there’s someone at the door.  This time I don’t.  It won’t change what’s to come.

(more…)

It happened so long ago no one in Covenant Spring today was alive then, except for him. There was no Covenant Spring, only woods and swamp and a dirt wagon path east to where it joined the Raleigh road, west to the Richmond highway.

Miz Dori heard it from her daddy when she was small, and it was an old story then. There’s no telling how much of it is truth. She doesn’t like to tell it even now, though she’s certain the Good Lord has forgiven him.

This is what Cai told me, that night in the hospital, what Miz Dori told him and his sister when they were old enough to hear, with the Bass family Bible open on the coffee table before them.

(more…)

Telephones came to Waylon, and automobiles. The loggers gave the county money to help pave the roads so their wagons and new trucks could get through.

There was a settlement, thirty miles east of town near Buck Swamp, land covered in old growth pine that the county promised to the loggers. No one had known people were there, there was no deed or title on record but most all of the records had been destroyed in the courthouse fire. The county was deep in the business of duplicating the lost paper, and the old Wayloners were called on to help.

(more…)

It’s easy to look back over the years and say it. It was murder. No one in Covenant Spring denies it.

I wonder if Silas Bass loved his wife as much as I love CeeCee, as Cai loves Sarabeth, as Mister Lorrin loves Miz Charlotte. I try to put my head into that place, to see CeeCee cold and dead, wrapped in a sheet at the bottom of a hole, to drop dirt on her face with no one caring that I am burying my dearest love.

I can’t go there. It’s too terrible, my heart can’t stand it.

(more…)

That’s all. It’s late, and CeeCee is waiting for me to call.

Thanks for the love – Mom and Dad, Nannie and William and Uncle C, Otis and Roxie, Sharon and Lisa, Jackie and Matt.

Thanks for the company – Alison Krauss & Union Station, Kate Bush, Neko Case, Ani DiFranco, The Dixie Chicks, Steve Earle, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Shelby Lynne, Harry Nilsson, Joan Osborne, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Damien Rice, Regina Spektor, Townes Van Zandt, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny By God Cash, Amen.

Thank you for reading and your God bless.