Chapter 8 - The Morning on the Mountain
The frost was white as lime on the cab of the Dodge when the sun broke over the gap at six-fifteen.
It wasn't a soft frost; it was a black freeze that had killed every dahlia in Linda’s border and turned the leaves on the big silver maple from yellow to the color of an old brown paper bag in twelve hours. The creek had two inches of clear, rubbery ice along the edges where the water was quiet behind the willow roots.
I went out to the road in my Red Wings, my denim jacket unbuttoned because the third mile of a morning walk will warm a man up better than three cups of chicory.
The black car was parked three hundred yards down the county blacktop, sitting on the gravel shoulder across from Wayne’s sawmill.
The motor wasn't running. The windows were fogged from the inside, grey with the breath of two people who had spent five hours in eighty-dollar linen trousers while the mountain dropped to twenty-six degrees.
Ethan was leaning against the steering wheel, his forehead resting on the leather rim, his jacket pulled up around his ears like an old sheep in a fence corner.
Ashley was sitting with her back against the passenger door, her coat wrapped tight around her shins, her three-ring binder on the floorboards between her feet.
I didn't knock on the glass with my fist. I used the flat of my thumb against the rubber channel of the driver’s window—three slow, steady taps that brought Ethan’s head up like he’d been hit with an electric prod.
He rolled the glass down two inches. The cold air came out of the car smelling of stale peppermint, expensive perfume that had gone sour with sweat, and the damp, metallic reek of an air conditioner that had died in the night.
"Dad," he croaked. His voice had no grease left in it. It was thin, cracked at the bottom like an old dry-cell battery.
"The lane’s open, Ethan," I said.
He looked at me through the gap in the glass. His eyes were red, the whites yellowed at the corners where the fatigue had settled into the fat behind the sockets.
"The bank called the mobile at five," he whispered. "The automatic underwriting system flagged the corporate registration. They canceled the closing."
"I know," I said.
"They... they put a freeze on the operating account for the logistics company, Dad. They said if the residential conveyance wasn't verified by an officer of the court by eight o'clock, the credit line on the warehouse in Roanoke reverts to prime plus nine."
"That’s sixteen percent," I said.
"We can't pay sixteen percent, Dad. The lease on the trucks... the fuel cards... they’ll attach the personal accounts by Monday."
Ashley didn't look at me. She had her eyes fixed on the dash clock—06:22. In forty minutes, the junior partners in Richmond would be walking into their offices with their cardboard cups of coffee and their little leather folders, looking for the wire confirmations that weren't going to come.
"Ethan," I said.
"What?"
"Your mother made biscuits."
He blinked. A single tear—dirty, grey with the soot from the car’s heater core—ran down through the stubble on his chin, stopping at the collar of his three-hundred-dollar shirt.
"Biscuits?"
"She used the lard from the old can," I told him. "And she put four pieces of that salt pork from the smokehouse into the iron skillet. If you sit down at that table before the church bells ring for seven, there won't nobody ask you about the holding company."
He looked at the steering wheel. He looked at Ashley’s cold, thin shoulder.
"Dad... the papers. Vance has the power of attorney."
"Vance doesn't have a damn thing," I said, reaching into the pocket of my overalls and pulling out the three yellow sheets I’d taken from the lard tin forty minutes ago. "I gave Bobby Miller the revocation at midnight. He drove it down to the circuit clerk’s house in his cruiser, had her sign the docket book on her kitchen table in her housecoat, and then he tacked the certified copy to the front door of the courthouse with four galvanized roofing nails."
I dropped the paper through the two-inch crack in the glass. It fluttered down into Ethan’s lap, white as a fresh-picked cotton boll against his dark grey trousers.
"The land belongs to Linda," I said. "Every post. Every stone. Every bushel of dry apples between here and the ridge."
I stepped back from the car, my boots crunching on the frost-bitten chicory along the ditch.
"You can drive that German thing up to the house," I told him. "Or you can leave it here by Wayne’s sawdust pile and walk up the creek bed on your own two feet like you did thirty years ago when you had the croup and couldn't get your breath."
I turned my back on the car.
I didn't look over my shoulder to see if he turned the key.
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A man who has built forty rods of dry-stone wall doesn't look back to see if the rocks are holding; he looks at the next stretch of line and he looks for where the ground rises toward the timber.
Behind me, thirty yards down the road, the starter on the black car gave that long, European whine—whir-whir-whir-vroom—and then the dual exhausts began to rattle on the gravel approach, slow and unsteady, like a young steer that had been out in the frost all night and had finally found the gap in the pasture fence.
