The Sadness That Lie Just Beyond Our Door

“Wars of nations are fought to change maps, but wars of poverty are fought to map change.”

• Muhammed Ali

Dan “Honey” Sturtevant sung “I’m holding up a blood-stained banner for my lord” softly under his breath as he stood rocking on the balls of his feet at his front door, the giant man’s opal hued eyes fixed like damn granite on the mangled carcass of the coyote at the bottom of the stairs. The last four days of his life had rained down stress like hellfire, and this mutilated poacher of all-things-not-nailed-down bleeding into the disturbed earth around it was anything but a welcome sight on this particularly icy November morning. The bespeckled enameled tin cup of coffee in his hands shook ever so slightly while he stroked his gray beard that fell all about his chest, and then lit his first cigarette of the day with an exasperated, raspy sigh that echoed off of the forest that lay before him, and floated directly back to his own ears. Ears that were ringing with anger.

The breeze smelled of pine smoke and loneliness, and mornings like this one were generally Honey’s favorite part of his day. A sullen quietness enraptured the whole cove from the holler to the ridge, and everyone seemed to slow down as if someone was pumping warmed molasses into their veins. It was usually the time of day he’d be able to breathe the easiest, sitting with his wife in their rocking chairs, drinking his coffee while she sipped her tea. Existing as if tied together on a string, in that quiet love that may damn well be the most envied thing in this big old world.

When she departed from this earthly plain, everything seemed to become tighter at the corners. The world becoming much more sharp and squared plumb all of a sudden, leaving none of the roundness and ease that it was once afforded. Bills stacking up in the far back corner of his Walnut desk his cousin Ernie had built him one summer, a thick layer of dust covered all of the pinecones, oddly shaped rocks, random assortment of animal bones, and the other things he’d excitedly picked up from the forest floor to bring home to Ida and show her. He was still much like an excitable child in this way, and it thrilled her so. No new tokens of appreciation from this natural world found their way atop his desk anymore. There wasn’t anyone to hurry home to. There wasn’t no more show & tell over tomato sandwiches they’d make together on those late summer days, picking the tomatoes straight from their garden, special for the auspicious occasion. Special for each other, and no one else.

Nowadays, apparently Honey took his coffee breaks with a mangled, furry bastard that probably had been the same exact one that knocked off his chickens like a Dickensian pickpocket, he thought to himself. This same moronic descendent of the legions of the damn fool coyotes that Ink, Arkansas had been redolent with for generation upon generation. A town replete with fowl thieving dogs that brought with them a nightly hellish cacophony of high pitched moans and cadences, eventually exploding into a crescendo that would make the devil himself shudder.

In the kitchen, the 1980 era olive green phone hanging above the mail holder chimed out in it’s sing song tones, dulcet and warmed over with age. He sat there for a whole moment, not breaking his enraptured gaze on that coyote. “Oh for crying out loud…” Honey mumbled under his breath, spinning his lumbering frame back through the front door and into the kitchen, bumping his elbow against the protruding wall like he always did. He slowly raised the receiver from its cradle, and lifted it to his head. Eyes darting around the kitchen, looking for that goddamned bill.

“This is Honey.”

“Mr. Sturtevant, this is Gerald Parkins down at Mena Savings & Loan. I was calling you this morning to let you know that your…”

He slammed the phone back down onto its cradle, creating a noisy, discordant boom of jangles that made his skin crawl and spun right back out of the house, taking care to not let his other arm meet the same fate to the protrusion. As he crested his doorstep, he shot his hand out and grabbed a fat key ring off of the hook he’d screwed onto the underside of the coatrack. Honey walked down his porch steps like there was a ghost waiting at the bottom, shifting to the left side to guide himself over the coyote.

He climbed into the serape lined seat of his 1986 Ford F-150, thought to himself quickly about how much technology has evolved and how he should probably find seat warmers if this consistent barrage of Midwestern weather was going to keep up gait, and thrummed on his radio as he clattered down the pockmarked driveway, spinning gravel and arcing it down onto his newest yard ornament like a summer rain.

G-Ray Hark was running his stupid mouth about some sort of notion surrounding Illegal immigrants and their tie in to the COVID epidemic on 1540 — The Truth, and the mere sound of his nasally rattle of a voice made Honey want to steer his car straight off the side of Whilimena Road, soaring into the expanse that lay beyond the thin line of trees and piecemeal railing protecting the bluff side from the road. He cursed himself silently for forgetting to bring some coffee with him for the ride, and moved his radio dial away from that man’s verbal horsefuckery until he landed on the Country station. Travis Tritt’s “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” warmly rose from the right side of his truck’s cab, but the right side only.

Reason for this being the case was, about four years ago Honey had gone out to Turtle’s Saloon on the Oklahoma border to see his cousin, and they’d tied on a mean one. Ernie got off his shift bartending at Turtle’s around 8pm on his work nights, so Honey had shown up promptly then to catch up with him. They’d been planning it for weeks, this family reunion of sorts. They’d not seen each other in the months following Ida’s funeral. Honey hadn’t seen damn much of anyone for a good piece after that day. The rain had poured from the sky like the angels themselves were grieving his wife while they huddled beneath the tiny canopy, of which they had discovered was sporting a beautifully placed smattering of rips in one corner as soon as the skies opened.

The two of them had got to laughing and catching up, and some old boy named Seminole had ordered up shots for the bar while he threw a string of Wille Nelson and David Allen Coe crooners. The shots had kept pouring from behind the tattered pitch pine bar the whole night, the music getting more and more of an edge to the selections as the bourbon and Old Milwaukees grew a warmth of over their chests. 1am in the morning, and Seminole was hammered drunk, singing along horribly off-key to George Jones’ “The Race Is On” while cradling his bottle of Busch in his hand in front of him like a microphone. It was about when he started adding the pelvic thrusts and David Lee Roth antics that Honey and Ernie were plumb falling out of their chairs from laughing so hard and simultaneously realizing how drunk they’d let themselves get in the whirlwind of guffaws and stories. By the time Honey was puttering out to his truck, he slipped getting up into it and planted himself directly into the door’s quarter panel that housed the speaker.

He’d been cursed with a one-sided sound from that day on as penance for getting drunker than all hell and driving home over those wet and gleaming roads, he had figured. One-sided. Just like that leaping jackass and all of his rabid followers, he thought to himself. Just like these mountains grow more one-sided in their dimension every day that passes. Just like looking into the water of the Big Fork or Butcher Knife Creek, and seeing nothing but yourself in all your flaws after a Summer Rain.

As he maneuvered down past Board Camp, out through his family’s ancestral land, up above Sulphur Creek on the Pokineye Ridge, and across the old iron bridge that held every good memory from his childhood he still possessed, all he could think about was his wife, and that goddamned coyote. He had reason to believe that the neighbor kids, now full grown, had dragged it over across their rock fence dividing their parcels in the dead of night, long after the whiskey had taken hold of Honey and lulled him into a siren’s sleep. They’d been keeping up tradition mighty well in their later days. A tradition of being miniature terrorists. He pulled over and shook a cigarette loose from the pack in his coat’s pocket, climbing down the embankment to the creek. He sat atop one of the boulders that were deposited all along the edge, and let the midday breeze wash over him. An eternity slipped by then, but in reality it was only about forty five minutes. Forty five minutes of solitude, and thinking on those Simpkins boys.

The Simpkins and the Sturtevants had shared property lines since before he and Ida had even been married. He had bought this parcel and raised his cabin out here with money he’d made working for Terwilliger Creek Rock in town. Literally doing the job prisoners do behind guard towers and walls, and in old cartoons. Parchman Farm work, he always thought to himself. He had started this back-breaking endeavor when he was only sixteen years of age, and had saved up enough to buy a modest piece of holler-side heaven by twenty five.

He remembered those first night out there. He remembered the violence that family begat to all their generations. Donna and Len Simpkins had married at seventeen and inherited the land from Len’s Grandpa. They’d had a brood of three boys that were always just itching for a fight from the time they were in diapers, and the caterwaul could always be heard through the entire blessed holler. Boys beating on each other when the folks were gone, folks beating on the boys when they were home, Len beating on Donna when the boys were gone. It seemed the air that sat just on the other side of that fence was static with violence. With a peculiar hill sadness that bore that violence. An air of poverty that everyone in these hills always felt deep down in their chests and carried around with them. These folks though, the Simpkins, they had a mighty strange penchant that went along with it.

Honey remembered the first time he’d heard it happen.

The sound of glass breaking, the eldest boy and youngest screaming while Len chased the pair out of the ramshackle house, belt in his hand. His whipping of the eldest on their shoddy front porch, beholden to god and the rocks. It was like watching some biblical reenactment of child rearing, and Honey had to turn away from it for fear of coming unhinged and beating Len to death where he stood. There were some things in these hills you just didn’t involve yourself in those days, and a father’s anger towards his teenage boys was one of them. Unless of course, you’d like to get yourself shot.

As ashamed as it now made him, he’d turned around and walked back into his cabin that day. That’s when he’d heard it, and brought him almost undone. A fiddle crying out into the cerulean sky, the refrains of “Kingdom Come” crashing through the Basswood and Shortleaf Pine trees and falling all around Honey like bits of broken glass. And then a banjo. And then an accordion. He’d taken in this moment and seemed to drown in it, head still hazy from a hard day’s work and the three beers he’d quickly drank once he climbed into his truck. He had spun on his heel to face the music after a dumbstruck minute, and there it was. The three boys and their father were no longer tied up in a paternal explosion. They were all sitting on geriatric looking folding chairs and one nylon weave lawn chair in a circle, playing this old time worship hymn together. Not ten minutes ago, there was a meanness streaked hard across the sky. Now it seemed there stood nothing but a whisper of jubilance resonating over the acres that lay between them. Coming down from the sky a silken waft of grace and hope for a better tomorrow without violence.

It was then Honey had realized that there was a common thread that tied those hills together, and that thread was ever more apparent every day he woke up. Not that it managed to cease the meanness anyhow, but that it seemed to put that same roundness on a hardened people. An everlasting lilt of sadness that brought with it a strengthened grace. A gritty redemption. Even if just for a sun-soaked afternoon on a cedar slatted porch underneath towering pine trees.

He guided the truck into town, and saw the police surrounding the bank before he had any idea what was going on. Saw Officer Gearhart with his pistol drawn, eyes affixed on something Honey couldn’t quite make out just yet. He crested Depot St before he saw what lay before him, and when he did, his blood ran cold as an iced over creek.

Timmy Simpkins lie on the ground before the officers, crumpled in on himself like he was made of a collection of brown paper bags. There was blood everywhere, and it only seemed to be growing, flowing from the broken backwards body of the youngest of the Simpkins boys. He slowed his truck alongside the opposite corner, and made a quick eye contact with one of the officers. He must have been a new addition to the police force, because Honey didn’t recognize him from Adam. There were tears welled up in his eyes, and Honey had figured that the weight of felling that boy, probably just a few years this officer’s junior, would be a hurt that he carried in his heart for the rest of his sad, blue life. There was chaos up and down Mena Street, people either rubbernecking or clamoring to get away from the violence that had bursted from the front doors of the Mena Savings & Loan Bank and into the street. Exposing before all of them the physical manifestation of the violent fog that lay heavy in the air all around them.

Figuring there wasn’t no way he’d get into that bank today to talk to that cheap suited conman, Honey turned his truck around towards home, a sadness and pert near a guilt washing over him. What had happened? What had caused this? He knew that Donna had fallen ill and no one in those hills could afford proper medical treatment, even if by some miracle the town’s hospital could even provide it in the first place. He thought back to Ida, and how quickly she’d been taken from him in the wake of all of these facts, and how he’d beaten his fists into the red dirt of his land, screaming at the sky when she had finally closed her eyes for the last time. He thought back to the first time he’d seen that boy, and how he’d called him a “fat, old man”, even though he’d only been aout 40 at the time. How for the years that connected them, they’d never uttered a kindness to each other. About how poverty and anger strips certain places of the neighborly qualities people used to reminisce on, before the world became plumb.

He pulled back up his driveway, all of these thoughts spinning circles in his head. As he got out of the truck and eased himself to the ground, his heart sank a mile below the shale. The coyote was gone. Only a small pool of blood remain, and on his front door a note taped to the window read:

“I am truly sorry, Mr. Sturtevant.

• Tim”

There was always going to be a thread that tied all of them together in those hills.

A sadness that lie just beyond their doors.

He looked up at his door, down at the spot the dog had lay again, and through the Shortleaf Pines, he once more heard refrains being thrown upwards towards the sky. The opening lines of “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow” coming from a pawn shop fiddle stilled all of the blood running through him, and he looked up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and let the thread that fell all around him overtake everything. He knew then. Knew it would be all that had been, that was, and all that would come to be. The rain the day’s sky had been threatening finally began to fall, and he was grateful for it. A cleansing rain that washed away the blood.

“I’m holding up a blood-stained banner for the lord”, he whispered to himself, and crested his doorstep, elbow bouncing off that damnable corner yet again.