Into a Far Country, Part I

A work of fiction in two parts

For the six miles through Three Foot Gap, the railroad runs along Sow Creek, and the passing freight trains, some filled with coal, some empty, startle the birds from their roosts in the trees. I used to live on one of the bluffs above the creek because it was quiet and the fishing was good there. A few miles downstream from my cabin, just above where the Sow flowed into the Pocomoke, there was a highway bridge that the state had built a few years earlier to replace the old ford, and a mile or so down that two lane highway was Pokes Junction.

One morning , just after sunrise, I drove my truck into Pokes. On the post office porch, Roy Blanchard sat in a rocking chair holding a chinked mug in one hand and swatting at gnats with the other. I pulled my truck onto the thin gravel strip between the building and the highway and parked. Roy stirred in his chair.

“Who’s there,” he said, leaning forward in his chair.

I stepped out and down from my truck. “It’s just me.”

“You’re up early today,” he said, settling back into his seat.

“Train woke me.”

“Damn train,” he grumbled, “Go inside and get yourself a cup of coffee. You know where the cups are. Coffee’s on the stove.”

“That’s alright. Did anything come for me?”

“I think some more wires came in last week.”

“No mail?”

“Heck, I can’t remember. Go take a look for yourself and, hey, top me off while you’re at it.” Roy handed me his mug, which was still full but had gone cold. There was a thin iridescent film that looked like an oil slick on the surface. I poured the cold coffee off the porch’s edge and went inside.

In my box, there was a thick stack of wires and one thin envelope. I ignored the wires and opened the envelope. Inside was a letter in my brother’s handwriting. I had been expecting a check.

“Dear Will, I know it has been a long time since we spoke last, and even then it was not on the best terms. We both said things we should not have, but I am willing to look past them if that means you will come home. I do not intend to be patronizing and deal instructions where I am not asked to, but I think it is high time you end your little pilgrimage in the wilderness and come home…”

The letter went on, but I stopped reading. I folded it, stowed it in my pocket, and went back outside.

Roy had dozed off in his chair, but the slamming shut of the screen door woke him.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.

“I was awake anyhow,” he lied, “can’t sleep with all these damn flies about.”

He arched his back and rolled his shoulders and neck.

“Where’d you put my coffee?”

I had left the mug sitting on the mail counter, still empty. Roy waved me off.

“Forget about it. I don’t need it.”

I walked down the steps and crossed the gravel strip toward my truck. The sun had started to rise over the mountains. Already I could tell that the day would be a hot one. In the high brown grass the cicadas had started singing. When I got in my truck, I heard Roy yell something from the porch, but I couldn’t hear what he said. I rolled down my window. He yelled again.

“Your head’s not on straight, boy. It ain’t on straight.”

I waved him off. He started to laugh. Roy was a funny man. As I drove off, I saw Roy still laughing to himself in my rearview mirror. He really was a funny man.

I drove back toward my cabin. The flattish yellow farmland around Poke’s Junction rose first into foothills and then into the round, green, densely covered mountains of the Shenandoah. I crossed the bridge over Sow Creek. It had not rained in weeks, and the water was low. The stones of the old ford were dry and cracked above the water’s surface. Passing under the railroad trestle that crossed high above the highway, I saw specks of ballast dust fall from the tracks above. I rolled down my window and heard the drum-like breathing of a train approaching. As I drove along the dirt road that led to the cabin and meandered roughly parallel to Sow Creek and the railroad tracks, I could hear the rumbling sound of hoppers laden with coal passing through the gap below.

From the mines in West Virginia, the coal trains came up through the mountains as they made their way toward Norfolk hundreds of miles away. From Norfolk, the coal made its way up the coast to the industrial cities where it was burnt to power turbines and blacken the air with thick clouds. But here in the mountains the air was clear and clean and smelled of moss.

When I pulled up to the cabin, the train had passed and the woods were quiet and still once again. I could hear Sow Creek flowing below and a woodpecker tapping against a tree nearby. I carried an armful of wood inside from the shed and cooked the last of the eggs I had on the old iron stove. After breakfast the cabin smelled like bacon grease and wood smoke, but the fire had made it uncomfortably warm, so I went out to the porch. In the rafters funnel weavers had spun webs that made me uneasy. I cleared them with the end of a branch I kept nearby and sat in the wicker rocker. I removed the letter from my pocket and read from where I had left off.

“Allow me to offer you some advice as your brother. Whatever answer you failed to find after four years at school, you are no more likely to find in the places you have been calling home. You owe it to Father to at least try to make something of yourself. I know I am not your keeper, but no one else is even trying to talk sense into you anymore. I have your best intentions in mind…”

I replaced the letter in my pocket and stared out toward the trees that surrounded the cabin. A breeze from the creek blew between the thick tree trunks, but it was too soft to move the leaves. The narrow strip of high grass that separated the cabin from the woods danced like water in the sunlight. I dozed off watching the wind move the woods.

I woke up to the sound of a dog barking. The sound came from down along the creek. I knew it must have been Rego, the aging spaniel that belonged to a family spending the summer in a cabin several miles up Sow Creek. They let Rego loose in the morning and called him home in the evening. In the hours between release and return, Rego wandered the woods tormenting rabbits and barking at birds. He never caught anything as far as I knew, but he never stopped trying. I liked that about Rego. Sometimes he would wander up toward the cabin where I was living and fall asleep in the shade of the porch. I enjoyed his company.

“Rego,” I called out.

He kept barking

“Rego,” I called again, this time punctuated by a whistle for emphasis.

Still he kept barking without any sign of coming nearer, so I rose from my seat to see what he was up to. Maybe he had seen a black bear and was goading it, but more likely he had found a snapping turtle down by the creek. The dog I grew up with, a handsome duck-tolling retriever, once lost a piece of his nose to a snapping turtle he had tried to pick it up in his mouth. The encounter gave his face a permanent sneer that mismatched his friendly manner. I figured I ought to intervene to make sure Rego did not suffer the same.

Guided by the sound of Rego’s voice I walked through the woods toward the bluffs that dropped down to Sow Creek. Dry ferns crunched beneath my feet and thick rhododendron shaded the gully I walked through. When it rained this gully became a stream that fed into the creek and I stepped carefully over the stones. Some were ragged others were smooth. All of them shifted underfoot. When I came down to Sow Creek I saw Rego on the other side next to the railroad tracks. He was barking at something I could not see. I called his name again, and he turned briefly, but his attention was focused on whatever he was barking at. The creek was low and large flat stones rose above the surface. Without removing my boots I crossed and climbed through the brambles and ivy that grew alongside the railroad tracks. I could see the outline of what Rego was barking at now.

On the other side of the railroad tracks between the embankment and the cliff walls that rose on the other side was a form lying motionless in the growth. Rego circled it wagging his tail and barking but maintaining a distance from it.

“Rego,” I shouted, “you dumb thing, come here.”

Rego obeyed and came to me with his head down. I scratched him behind the ear and told him to sit. He ignored the command and followed me as I walked toward the form in. I swatted at him to keep him away. Closer up, I could see the what he had been barking at was a body lying face down in the scrub. He looked like some unfortunate hobo who had fallen from the train that passed that morning. No flies had settled on it yet, and something about the way he lied unsettled me. I had seen corpse before, but it was inside a casket and made to look like it was sleeping. This body did not look like to be asleep, nor did it look quite dead. Taking it underneath the arm I rolled it over. Deep wrinkles filled with black dirt scored its face, and white stubble covered its sallow cheeks and bony chin. It smelled strongly of liquor. My stomach turned, and I felt the need to vomit but only dry heaved. Crouching alongside the body once more, I placed my shaking fingers against the soft flesh of its neck to feel for a pulse. The skin was cool and damp and rough. I desperately pushed my fingers deeper and deeper into its neck searching for an artery but found nothing. On my own I could do nothing more.

I drove into town as quickly as I could to find help, throwing up clouds of dust behind me. At the post office Roy helped me place a call to John Barnes, a physician who lived not too far away. A few hours later Dr. Barnes, a calm-faced and quiet man, arrived with his son, a boy of about sixteen, in tow. As we drove back to the cabin, the sun was making its way down toward the mountains, which were already turning amber in the angled afternoon light. We all sat quietly in the cab of my truck.

When we arrived at the cabin, I led them down the bluffs, along the dried streambed, and across the stones that traversed Sow Creek. Water striders hovered on the water’s surface in the stagnant pools along the bank and evaded our passing shadows as we crossed. One by one we climbed the steep bank on the side of the creek where the railroad tracks ran. Lying there still was the body.

Dr. Barnes approached the body and kneeled alongside it, placing his kit on a rotting stump nearby. With his bare hands he probed the neck of the body for a pulse. His facial expression never changed once. His forehead never furrowed, and his mouth never turned to a frown. Listening for breathing, he leaned his ear over the body’s mouth. He remained hunched over the body for what felt like minutes, his face still and unchanging. Then his eyebrow twitched.

“Charlie, hand me the stethoscope will you.”

Charlie went to his father’s kit and after a few moments of rattling through it produced a stethoscope, which he handed to his father. With the stethoscope hanging from his ears, Dr. Barnes unbuttoned the ragged, torn shirt that covered the body and placed the listener on its chest, moving it around from top to bottom, from right to left.

“Good Lord,” he said, pausing his movements, “he’s breathing. I can hear him breathing.”

We carried the revived body back to the cabin, struggling under its weight to balance on the stones and to climb up the bluffs. When we reached the cabin at last, the sun had dropped beneath the crest of the westward mountains and the woods were cooling quickly. The cicadas who had sung so loudly in the morning now murmured in low hums. A soft, constant breeze moved almost silently through the trees.

We placed the body of the unconscious man on my bed, covering him with blankets and propping his head on several pillows. I lit the stove and the room warmed as Dr. Barnes attended to the patient. On the floor, Charlie sat with Rego who had come in from his nap underneath the porch. Dr. Barnes came into the kitchen.

“Will, can I have a word with you outside.”

I followed him to the porch. The sun had set.

“Our friend is still unconscious, but I think he’s alright, or he’ll be alright at least. I think the best thing we can do for him is let him rest, and if he comes to, then well I’ll come back here from Batesville. Other than that, there is not much we can do.

I nodded and turned to go back inside.

“And, Will, one more thing,” Dr. Barnes said grabbing me by the shoulder, “I don’t mean to cause you any alarm, but you should consider notifying the sheriff. I don’t think this here man is in any state to cause you harm, but some of these folks who ride the trains are escapees and such. There’s no harm in being careful.”

I nodded again and thanked Dr. Barnes, offering him a drink which he declined. He had a long drive ahead of him and was ready to leave. I drove him and Charlie back to the post office where they had left their car and watched as they drove eastward until their taillights disappeared around a distant bend.