Chapter 10 - The Unbroken Ridge
The sun was three fingers above the high timber by nine o'clock.
The frost had melted out of the orchard, leaving the fescue dark and slick as seaweed, every blade carrying a drop of clear water that caught the morning light until the whole slope looked like it had been sown with shattered glass.
Ethan was down by the machine shed.
He had borrowed a pair of my old five-buckle overshoes—the ones with the red rubber soles and the iron latches that rattle when you walk—and he had an eight-pound sledgehammer on his shoulder, driving the cedar posts back into the limestone wash where the four-wheelers had broken the fence line three years ago.
Every time the iron head hit the wood, the sound came up through the valley—a sharp, clean clink-thunk that echoed off the rock face of the ridge like an old rifle shot in an empty barn.
Ashley was on the back porch.
She was sitting on an upturned apple crate with a three-gallon galvanized bucket between her knees, her hands red with the cold well water, scrubbing the yellow clay off thirty pounds of late-season turnips with a stiff horsehair brush.
She had her hair pinned up with an old piece of wire she’d found on the pump-house sill, and she was singing something—not church music, not the radio stuff they play in the suburbs, but that old, rhythmic chant the girls in the hollow use when they’re jumping rope on the gravel by the depot:
Two in the middle and one on the line,
You take the hickory, I’ll take the pine...
I stood by the gate with my hand on the top rail.
The powder-coated steel was gone.
Bobby Miller and I had unbolted the hinges with an eight-inch Crescent wrench at seven-thirty, loaded the whole black mess into the back of his four-wheel-drive pickup, and hauled it down to the scrap yard in Buena Vista. The boy at the scales had given us thirty-four dollars for the iron and five dollars for the little zinc box with the blue diodes.
I used the thirty-nine dollars to buy two rolls of two-point barbed wire and a half-keg of galvanized staples from Miller’s General Store.
In place of the gate hung the old cedar pole.
It was four inches through the butt, notched into the post with an iron chain that had been forged out of three horse-shoes by my grandfather when the road was still a wagon track through the laurel.
Linda came down the lane.
She didn't have her grocery bag. She had her hands in the pockets of her grey wool coat, her galoshes making a steady, rhythmic shluck-shluck in the red clay that was beginning to thaw under the noon sun.
She stopped beside me at the post, her shoulder touching mine.
"Tom," she said.
"Lin."
"The boy’s got a blister on his thumb the size of an apricot."
"I saw it," I said. "He’s holding the sledge too close to the balance. He’ll learn to slide his right hand down to the eye before he finishes the three-rod stretch by the creek."
She looked down the road—down where the black car had sat in the ditch all night, down where the church roof showed white through the bare maples in the bottom.
"He told me he’s selling the boat," she whispered.
"He won't get half what he paid," I said. "The market on fancy fiberglass is soft in Roanoke. Everybody’s buying back-hoes and diesel generators before the fuel tax goes up in the spring."
"He’ll get enough to pay the county taxes on the south forty," she said.
"Maybe," I told her.
A red-tailed hawk came out of the timber on the ridge, his wings flat to the draft, banking four inches off the treetops as he turned north toward the gap. He didn't flap; he just held the air with his primaries, steady and wide, letting the cold wind off the limestone carry him up until he was nothing but a black speck against the pale, unclouded blue of the Virginia sky.
Linda reached out her hand.
Her fingers were stiff with the arthritis, the second joint swollen until the yellow gold ring couldn't be pulled off with lard or kerosene, but her skin was warm—warm as an old stone that had been sitting in the noon grass behind the well-house since the timber was cleared.
She laid her hand over mine on the cedar pole.
"Tom," she said, her voice dropping down into that quiet, rhythmic register that doesn't have an argument left within forty miles. "It’s twelve o'clock. The fire’s down to the coals, and the turnips have to go into the pot before the water cools."
May you like
"I'm coming, Lin," I told her.
We walked up the lane together, her feet matching mine two inches at a time, leaving our tracks behind us in the red clay—deep, wide, and heavy enough to hold the road until the frost came back out of the mountain in the spring.
