His voice cracked with a noise that startled me.
Vernon pressed his hand to his mouth. When he lowered his hand, a silver
thread of saliva hung from his lower lip. “That boy,” he whispered. “Found out
very soon… that the book was a failure. Very soon. He called them. Anything,
he said. I’ll do anything to save it And they said we have the charts and
tables, and numbers on the wall. They said people were tired of murder
mysteries. They said people wanted something different. Said they’d like to
see his next book, though. He had promise, they said. Just come up with
something different. You’re a young man, they said. You have lots of books in
you.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand: a slow, labored movement.
“His daddy was waiting. His daddy grinned and grinned and kept on grinning.
His daddy’s face got as big as the sun and the boy was burned every time he
looked at it. His daddy said you’re not fit to wear my shoes. And I paid for
those shoes. Yes I did. I paid for that shirt and those pants. You’re not fit
to wear what good money buys you. All you know is failure and failure and
that’s all you’ll ever know for the rest of your life, and he said if I died
in my sleep tonight it would be because you killed me with your failures. And
that boy stood at the foot of the stairs, and he was crying and he said go on
and die, then. I wish to God you would die, you… miserable… sonofabitch.”
On that last terrible, hiss-breathed word I saw the tears jump in his
eyes as if he’d been speared. He made a soft moaning sound, his face in
torment like a Spanish painting I’d once seen of a naked saint in National
Geographic. A tear streaked down to his jaw, followed by a second that got
caught in a smear of chocolate batter in the corner of his mouth.
“Oh…” he whispered. “Oh… oh… no.”
“Young master Vernon?” The voice was as soft as his, but spoken with
firmness. Mr. Pritchard had come into the room. Vernon didn’t even look at
him. I started to stand up, but Mr. Pritchard said, “Master Cory? Please stay
where you are for right now.” I stayed. Mr. Pritchard crossed the room and
stood behind Vernon, and he reached out and put a gentle hand on Vernon’s thin
shoulder. “Dinner’s over, young master Vernon,” he said.
The naked man didn’t move or respond. His eyes were dull and dead,
nothing alive about him but the slow crawl of tears.
“It’s time for bed, sir,” Mr. Pritchard said.
Vernon spoke in a hollow, faraway voice: “Will I wake up?”
“I believe you will, sir.” The hand patted his shoulder; it was a
fatherly touch. “You should say good night to your dinner guest.”
Vernon looked at me. It was as if he’d never seen me before, as if I were
a stranger in his house. But then his eyes came to life again and he sniffled
and smiled in his boyish way. “Dust on the tracks,” he said. “If it builds up,
a train can crash.” A frown passed over his features, but it was just a small
storm and quickly gone. “Cory.” The smile returned. “Thank you for having
dinner with me tonight.”
“Yes si—”
He held up a finger. “Vernon.”
“Vernon,” I repeated.
He stood up, and I did, too. Mr. Pritchard said to me, “Your father’s
waiting for you at the front door. You turn right and walk along the hallway,
you’ll come to it. I’ll be outside to drive you home in a few minutes, if
you’ll just wait by the car.” Mr. Pritchard grasped one of Vernon’s elbows,
and he guided Vernon to the door. Vernon walked like a very old man.
“I enjoyed my dinner!” I told him.
Vernon stopped and stared at me. His smile flickered off and on, like the
sputtering of a broken neon sign. “I hope you keep writing, Cory. I hope
everything good happens to you.”
“Thank you, Vernon.”
He nodded, satisfied that we had made a connection. He paused once more
at the entrance to the dining room. “You know, Cory, sometimes I have the
strangest dream. In it, I’m walking the streets in broad daylight and I don’t
have on any clothes.” He laughed. “Not a stitch! Imagine that!”
I can’t remember smiling.
Vernon let Mr. Pritchard lead him out. I looked around at the carnage of
plates, and I felt sick.
The front door was easy to find. Dad was there; from the way he smiled, I
could tell he had no inkling of what I’d witnessed. “You have a good talk?” I
guess I mumbled something that satisfied him. “He treat you okay?” I just
nodded. Dad was jovial and happy now that his belly was full of beef stew and
Vernon hadn’t hurt me. “Nice house, isn’t it?” he asked as we walked to the
long black car. “A house like this… there’s no tellin’ how much it cost.”
I didn’t know either. But I did know that it was more than any one human
being ought to pay.
We waited to go home, and in a little while Mr. Pritchard walked out of
the house to deliver us at our own front door.
4
The Wrath of Five Thunders
ON MONDAY MORNING I FOUND THE DEMON HAD SPURNED ME. She had eyes now only for
Ladd Devine, and her fickle fingers left the back of my neck alone. It was the
birthday card that had done it, and Ladd’s unknowing declaration that he had
sent it. Ladd was going to be a really good football player when he got to
high school; between then and now, he would be getting plenty of practice
running and dodging.
There was one last incident in the tale of the Demon’s birthday. I asked
her at recess, as she watched Ladd passing a football to Barney Gallaway, how
her party had been. She looked at me as if I were one shade short of
invisible. “Oh, we had fun,” she said, her stare going back to the young
football star. “My relatives came and ate ice cream and cake.”
“Did you get any presents?”
“Uh-huh.” She began to chew on a dirty fingernail, her hair stringy and
oily and hanging in her face. “My momma and daddy gave me a nurse kit, my aunt
Gretna gave me a pair of gloves she knitted, and my cousin Chile gave me a
dried flower wreath to hang over my door for good luck.”
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s real—”
I had been about to move away. Now I stopped in my tracks.
“Chile?” I said. “What’s her last name?”
“Purcell. Used to be, I mean. She got married to a fella and the stork
brought ’em a little bitty baby.” The Demon sighed. “Oh, ain’t Ladd just the
handsomest thing?”
God has a sense of humor that gets my goat sometimes.
September dwindled away, and one morning it was October. The hills were
streaked with red and gold, as if some magician had painted the trees almost
overnight. It was still hot in the afternoons, but the mornings began to
whisper about sweaters. This was Indian summer, when you saw those
purple-and-red-grained ears of corn in baskets in the grocery store and an
occasional dead leaf chuckled along the sidewalk.
We had Show-and-Tell Day at our grade in school, which meant that
everybody got to bring something important and tell why it was. I brought an
issue of Famous Monsters to class, the sight of which would probably set
Leatherlungs off like a Roman candle but would make me a hero of the
oppressed. Davy Ray brought his “I Get Around” record, and the picture of an
electric guitar he hoped to learn to play when his parents could afford
lessons. Ben brought a Confederate dollar. Johnny brought his collection of
arrowheads, all kept in separate drawers in a metal fishing-tackle box and
protected by individual cotton balls.
They were a wonder to behold. Small and large, rough and smooth, light
and dark: they beckoned the imagination on a journey into the time when the
forest was unbroken, the only light was cast from tribal fires, and Zephyr
existed only in a medicine man’s fever. Johnny had been gathering the
arrowheads ever since I’d known him, in the second grade. While the rest of us
were running and playing without a moment’s interest in that dusty crevice
known as history, Johnny was searching the wooded trails and creekbeds for a
sharp little sign of his heritage. He had collected over a hundred, lovingly
cleaned them—but no shellac, that would be an insult to the hand that carved
the flint—and tucked them away in the tackle box. I imagined he took them out
at night, in his room, and over them he dreamed of what life was like in Adams
Valley two hundred years ago. I wondered if he imagined there were four Indian
buddies who had four dogs and four swift ponies, and that they lived in tepees
in the same village and talked about life and school and stuff. I never asked
him, but I think he probably did.
Before school began that morning of show-and-tell—which I had been
dreading for several days because of what the Demon would offer up for
appraisal—the guys and I met where we usually did, near the monkey bars on the
dusty playground, our bikes chained to the fence along with dozens of others.
We sat in the sun because the morning was cool and the sky was clear. “Open
it,” Ben said to Johnny. “Come on, let’s see.”
It didn’t take much urging for Johnny to flip up the latch. He may have
kept them protected like rare jewels, but he wasn’t stingy about sharing their
magic. “Found this one last Saturday,” he said as he opened a wad of cotton
and brought a pale gray arrowhead to the light. “You can tell whoever did this
was in a hurry. See how the cuts are so rough and uneven? He wasn’t takin’ his
time about it. He just wanted to make an arrowhead so he could go shoot
somethin’ to eat.”
“Yeah, and from the size of it I’ll bet all he got was a gopher,” Davy
Ray commented.
“Maybe he was a sorry shot,” Ben said. “Maybe he knew he’d probably lose
it.”
“Could be,” Johnny agreed. “Maybe he was a boy, and this was his first
one.”
“If I’d had to depend on makin’ arrowheads to eat,” I said, “I would’ve
dried up and blown away mighty fast.”
“You sure have got a lot of them.” Ben’s fingers might have been itching
to explore in the tackle box, but he was respectful of Johnny’s property.
“Have you got a favorite one?”
“Yeah, I do. This is it.” Johnny picked up a wad of cotton, opened it,
and showed us which one.
It was black, smooth, and almost perfectly formed.
I recognized it.
It was the arrowhead Davy Ray had found in the deep woods on our camping
trip.
“That’s a beauty,” Ben agreed. “Looks like it’s been oiled, doesn’t it?”
“I just cleaned it, that’s all. It does shine, though.” He rubbed the
arrowhead between his brown fingers, and he placed it in Ben’s pudgy hand.
“Feel it,” Johnny said. “You can hardly feel any cuts on it.”
Ben passed it to Davy Ray, who passed it to me. The arrowhead had one
small chip in it, but it seemed to melt into your hand. Rubbing it in your
palm, it was hard to tell where arrowhead stopped and flesh began. “I wonder
who made this one,” I said.
“Yeah, I’d like to know, too. Whoever did it wasn’t in any hurry. Whoever
did it wanted to have a good arrowhead, one that would fly true, even if he
lost it. Arrowheads were more than just the tips of arrows to Indians; they
were like money, and they showed how much care you put into things. They
showed how good of a hunter you were, whether you needed a lot of cheap old
arrowheads to do the job, or if you had the time to make a few you could count
on. I sure would like to know who made it.”
This seemed important to Johnny. “I’ll bet it was a chief,” I offered.
“A chief? Really?” Ben’s eyes got wide.
“He’s fixin’ to make up a story,” Davy Ray told him. “Can’t believe a
thing he says from here on out.”
“Sure it was a chief!” I said adamantly. “Yes, he was a chief and he was
the youngest chief the tribe ever had! He was twenty years old and his father
was a chief before him!”
“Oh, brother!” Davy Ray pulled his knees up to his chest, a knowing smile
on his face. “Cory, if there’s ever a biggest-liar-in-town contest, you’ll win
first prize for sure!”
Johnny smiled, too, but his eyes were keen with interest. “Go on, Cory.
Let’s hear about him. What was his name?”
“I don’t know. It was… Runnin’ Deer, I—”
“That’s no good!” Ben said. “That’s a girl Indian’s name! Make his name…
oh… a warrior’s name. Like Heap Big Thundercloud!”
“Big Heap Do-Do!” Davy Ray cackled. “That’s you, Ben!”
“His name was Chief Thunder,” Johnny said, looking directly at me and
ignoring the squabbling duo. “No. Chief Five Thunders. Because he was tall and
dark and—”
“Cross-eyed,” Davy Ray said.
“Had a clubfoot,” Johnny finished, and Davy Ray shut up his giggling.
I paused, the arrowhead gleaming on my palm.
“Go ahead, Cory,” Johnny urged in a quiet voice. “Tell us a story about
him.”
“Chief Five Thunders.” I was thinking, weaving the story together, as my
fingers squeezed and relaxed around the warm flint. “He was a Cherokee.”
“Creek,” Johnny corrected me.
“Creek, like I said. He was a Creek Indian, and his father was a chief
but his father got killed when he was out huntin’. He went out huntin’ for
deer, and they found him where he’d fallen off a rock. He was dyin’, but he
told his son he’d seen Snowdown. Yes, he had. He’d seen Snowdown up close,
close enough to see that white skin and those antlers that were as big as
trees. He said as long as Snowdown lived in the woods, the world would keep
goin’. But if anybody ever killed Snowdown, the world would end. Then he died,
and Five Thunders was the new chief.”
“I thought a chief had to fight to get to be chief,” Davy Ray said.
“Well, sure he did!” I answered. “Everybody knows that. He had to fight a
whole bunch of braves who thought they ought to be chief. But he liked peace
better than he liked fightin’. It wasn’t that he couldn’t fight when he had
to, it was just that he knew when to fight and when not to fight. But he had a
temper, too. That’s why they didn’t call him just ‘One Thunder’ or ‘Two
Thunders.’ He didn’t get mad very much, but when he did—look out! It was like
five thunders boomin’ out all at the same time.”
“The bell’s about to ring,” Johnny said. “What happened to him?”
“He… uh… he was the chief for a long, long time. Until he got to be sixty
