The World Made Straight (10 page)

Travis walked back into the meadow, waited for Leonard to see him and take off the headphones.

“Why are you trying here?” Travis asked.

“Because this is where Keith's soldiers piled them after the killing. The guy I got the detector from knew they were placed here as well, but he may have missed something.”

“So I guess he tried it where they killed them too?”

“Yes,” Leonard said, pointing near where Travis had stood earlier. “Over by the creek. That's where he found a minié ball, or so he claimed.”

“But you've never used it up here?”

“No.”

“You swept between here and the creek?” Travis asked. “Maybe something fell out of their pockets while they were being dragged.”

“I hadn't thought about that,” Leonard said.

“You mind if I try?”

“Go ahead,” Leonard said, handing the machine to Travis.

“How does it work?”

“Sort of like tuning in a radio station. Just listen for a humming sound and move the disk to where it increases.”

Travis put on the earphones and aimed the metal detector in front of him. He swung the disk back and forth, the machine
heavier than he'd imagined. He took a step forward and did the same thing. Leonard motioned for him to take off the earphones.

“Lower,” Leonard said. “You want it skimming the ground.”

Travis began again, moving slowly toward the creek. He had covered only a few feet when the machine's hum increased.

“I got something,” he said, trying not to sound too excited.

“Let me hear,” Leonard said.

He placed the headphones on his head.

“Just a rock with a lot of minerals,” Leonard said after a few moments.

“How do you know?”

“Experience. There's more sound if it's something worthwhile.”

Travis moved across the heart of the meadow tentatively. Twice the machine made noises worth investigating, but both times it was a soft drink can. His arms tired but he kept searching. The machine's hum increased again, the same sound as the cans had made, but Travis laid down the detector and dug.

At first they didn't know what it was, a crust of black dirt barnacling the metal.

“Careful,” Leonard said. “Put it in the water to loosen the dirt.”

They walked over to the creek and soon scabs of dirt began falling away, what Travis held becoming thinner, lighter, then revealing a straight wire laid across a second straight wire. He rubbed harder, his thumbnail worrying free the dirt under the
wires. Soon he saw two perfectly round frames, a coin of glass embedded in one. The silver brightened in his hands as more dirt fell away. Travis was amazed that something so long in the dark could retain such luster. He rinsed the glasses a last time and rubbed them with his handkerchief, then pulled each silver temple slowly from the frames and just as tenderly refolded them.

“I guess they rightly belong to you,” Travis said.

Leonard shook his head.

“I'd have never thought to look there. It's your find so you keep them.”

“You sure?” Travis said.

“Yes.”

A few yards upstream something rippled the surface. Travis studied the water intently and soon found the fish drifting with the current, a quick shudder of its caudal fin propelling it back to a feeding position. The fish rose again, curving back into the water, a flash of red dots and orange fins. I'll be back for you another time, Travis thought.

He held the glasses carefully as they walked into the meadow, the same way he might a bird egg or tobacco seedling. An idea settled in his mind, quickly became belief.

“These glasses belong to one of them who was murdered,” Travis said. “If they belonged to one of Keith's men he'd have picked them back up. The dead don't need to see.”

Travis opened his palm, let the sunlight fall full upon the silver.

“I think they belonged to David Shelton,” Travis said.

“How can you possibly know that?” Leonard replied.

“It's the size of them. They're a more likely fit for a boy than a man.”

“Where did you read that David Shelton even wore glasses?”

“Nowhere,” Travis said. “But I ain't read where he didn't wear glasses neither.”

“They could have belonged to a small man,” Leonard said, “or to someone before or after the war.”

Leonard sounded irritated, and Travis supposed there was enough schoolteacher left in him to want the last say-so on things.

“Do you think if we showed them to Dr. Hensley he'd know when they were made?” Travis asked, making it sound like a question instead of an idea.

“Possibly,” Leonard said, but his tone was skeptical.

“What about the other lens?” Travis said, voicing what he'd been thinking for minutes now. “Do you think they shot it out?”

“I don't know. How could anyone know?” Leonard said brusquely. “Let's go. It's near noon and I'm getting hungry.”

Sweat trickled down the back of Travis's neck. Warm even up here. He felt the glasses in his hand, solid and real like the arrowheads. He would take them by Dr. Hensley's office tomorrow, see if the optometrist knew when they'd been made.

Leonard picked up the metal detector and shovel.

“What ridge they buried on?” Travis asked.

“The one we came down, near where we parked.”

“I want to see it before we go back to the trailer.”

“Only for a minute,” Leonard said, and led Travis up the hill and into a stand of white oaks. It was like entering a darkened theater. Leaves seined out much of the sunlight, the trees themselves pressing close. Travis stepped carefully, holding the glasses behind him in case he tripped over a root or rock. The loamy soil was soft and moist despite it being late summer. He felt his feet settling deeper into the cushiony ground and waited for his eyes to adjust. The names on the oblong block of granite slowly became clearer, as if rising out of a dense fog.

“I'd of thought they'd each have a grave.”

“Hard as the ground was that day it's a wonder they got one dug,” Leonard said.

“And it was their own people who buried them?”

“Who else would have done it?” Leonard said. “They were trying to get them to the Shelton graveyard, but the oxen gave out. It was bury them right then and there or risk animals getting to the bodies first.”

What was left of them lay in this earth, Travis told himself. He wondered if any of their bones remained. Maybe something made of metal like a belt buckle or boot eyelet. Nothing else.

The dying had their lives flash before their eyes, or so folks claimed. Travis wondered what David Shelton had seen. Maybe just happy things like Christmases and birthdays, or a day when he'd caught a big trout or a pretty morning he'd gotten to go outside and play after days of rain. But maybe bad things too, like his daddy getting after him with a strap or fussing with his brothers. Travis rubbed his thumb over one of the
wire frames, wondered if whatever David had seen he'd seen through these glasses. Wondered also if David had felt his heart constrict like a slipknot pulled tight in those last moments, as Travis's heart had seemed to when the Toomeys discussed whether or not to kill him.

“Time to go,” Leonard said.

As they drove back Travis read each mailbox,
SHELTON
appearing with the regularity of a last name in a family cemetery. They passed an old man plowing his field, back and head bent toward the steering wheel. Travis was surprised the man wasn't in church. Maybe he'd been sick and gotten behind in his farmwork. Travis slowed. The tractor was an old 8N Ford, what farmers called a
redbelly
because of its colors. He studied the man's face, trying to find something of himself under the wrinkles.

“Why do you reckon people don't talk much about what happened up here?” Travis asked.

“The men who shot them were also from this county. Even after the war some folks got killed because of what happened that morning. People believed it was better not to talk about it.”

They passed the white clapboard church. The windows were open and Travis heard a blur of piano, the slow cadence of a familiar hymn. A dim guilt settled over him. No matter how late he'd stayed out Saturday nights, his parents had made him go to church the next morning. I'll go next Sunday with Lori, he told himself. The road plunged downward. Travis looked in the rearview mirror and watched the steeple disappear into the landscape.

“You'd think they wouldn't have done such a thing to their own neighbors,” Travis said.

“History argues otherwise. Lots of times people do worse to people they know than to strangers. Hitler and Stalin certainly did.”

“Most of the men in Madison County fought Confederate, I guess,” Travis said.

“No. That's what a lot of folks think, but it was like most mountain counties, half Confederate, half Union. That caused Jeff Davis a lot of headaches. Bad enough for the South to fight the rest of the United States, then add to that a bunch of homemade Lincolnites. Of course, men like Colonel Allen used the term bushwhackers, which made it easier for something like Shelton Laurel to happen.”

“How is that?”

“Because a bushwhacker's a criminal, not a soldier.”

The mountains leaned back from the road edge and Travis shifted gears. Sunlight poured through the windshield, but the light seemed softer, less concentrated than in the meadow. The metal detector and shovel shifted in the truck bed, clanged against each other, and resettled. The glasses lay in the glove compartment, wrapped in a handkerchief. They could be worth money because they were old, like the butter churns and kettles tourists bought in Marshall, but Travis knew he wasn't going to sell them. It wouldn't be right somehow.

“You got any books about what Hitler and Stalin done?”

“Yes.”

Halfway down the mountain they passed a car parked on the road's shoulder. A fly fisherman stood midstream, his orange line whipping back and forth before it unfurled a final time, settled on the water soft as a dogwood petal. Travis had never
fished that way. Something about it had always seemed too fancy, like wearing a suit to hunt rabbits. He wondered if Lori might like to go fishing with him sometime. He wanted her to see him do something he was really good at, better than Shank or Willard or any of the other guys he knew.

“So what kind of student were you in school?” Leonard asked.

“Not too good.”

“Why not?”

“What they taught didn't seem important, except for shop class.”

The road veered right, the kind of curve that was so sharp you could almost meet yourself coming the other way. Travis spun the wheel hard, leaning his body the way he imagined Richard Petty or Junior Johnson would coming off a banked turn at Rockingham. He had to swerve to stay on the road as the detector and shovel banged against the sides of the truck. He waited for Leonard to get on him about driving too fast, but he didn't.

“But you do like to read,” Leonard said.

“Yeah, but just about things I'm interested in.”

“Did you ever take any college prep classes?”

“No. I did pretty good on some tests in eighth grade. The teachers told Daddy and Momma I should do college prep in high school, but Daddy said I didn't need college to farm tobacco.”

“That happened to me,” Leonard said, “except my parents did what the teachers suggested.”

Travis couldn't imagine his daddy taking advice about anything, much less on how to raise his own son.

“You glad that happened,” Travis asked, “them putting you in college prep classes?”

Leonard paused.

“It enabled me to get a scholarship to college.”

His question hadn't really been answered but Travis didn't press. He held his left hand out the window, turning it like a weathervane as air buffeted his palm. He didn't need to check his watch to know it was past noon now, could feel the early-afternoon air clabbering up like butter. Tail end of the dog days, the worst time of year to be working in a field. No breeze, everything dry and dusty. Mornings weren't so bad because the mountains kept the sun at bay awhile, but come midday the sun sizzled directly overhead. The only thing that made it bearable was having someone else out in the fields with you, knowing they were feeling just as frazzled. Travis hoped these last few dog days bristled up good, made the old man so miserable he'd feel like he'd stepped into a whole barrel of yellow jackets.

“You ever thought about getting a GED?” Leonard asked.

Travis glanced over at Leonard, wanting to see how serious he was.

“No. I don't know much about them. Is it sort of equal to graduating high school?”

“Just as equal,” Leonard said.

“You have to take classes at night?”

“You don't have to take any classes at all, just pass the test.”

For a few moments they rode in silence. They passed a cow pasture where three dead blacksnakes lay draped on the barbed-wire fence. Some farmers believed killing blacksnakes
helped bring rain, but his daddy had always sworn that was nonsense. The snakes' bellies were the same milky blue as the old medicine bottles Travis's grandmother used for vases.

“I could find out what you'd need to do,” Leonard said, sounding casual, like he was talking about nothing more than looking up a baseball score.

They were silent until the truck bumped up the drive. Beside the trailer Dena lay on a tattered quilt. Her eyes flickered open for a few moments and then closed. All she wore was the bathing suit's bottom. A pale stripe like a lash mark crossed the middle of her back.

“You'd figure she'd have enough sense not to do that after getting boiled the way she did,” Travis said.

“You'd think so,” Leonard agreed.

The dogs crawled out from under the trailer, their long red tongues unfurled.