The World Made Straight. Ron Rash
window units, for God’s sake. I got you enough new business to afford it.” Dena slumped deeper into the couch, weary from the effort of speaking two whole sentences.
“I could afford a lot more things if you weren’t eating my pills like they were jellybeans,” Leonard responded. He couldn’t help but wish that they did have a window unit, because hot as it was he wouldn’t sleep well tonight.
“Anyway, you owe me a gift,” Dena said, her eyes still on the TV.
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s our anniversary, sweetheart. This time last July’s when we first met.”
Leonard retrieved another beer from the refrigerator and left her on the couch, knowing he’d find her there in the morning. He undressed and turned on the bedroom’s ceiling fan, noticing the watermark on the ceiling as he did so. He went to the closet and pushed aside the thick leather-bound ledgers one at a time to reach the picture album in the far back corner. Leonard briefly contemplated taking down the 1848 ledger as well. He lay in bed, the album propped on his stomach as he turned the pages slowly, counting the pictures. Fifty-seven, and only two in Illinois.
Kera had believed they had no choice but to go. Two high-school teachers finding jobs in one county was hard enough, much less at the same school. Every morning for four years, they’d each driven thirty minutes away from their apartment in Asheville to opposite sides of the county. In Illinois they would work at the same school. There would be more time to be with their child, with each other. Less stress as well, fewer arguments fueled by that stress. The problem was the long commutes, Kera argued, but Leonard believed the long commutes, like the sleep-deprived year when Emily’s ears and lungs had been welcoming harbors for infection, had not created but revealed fissures in their marriage, fissures that would be all the more apparent in a landscape where nothing remained hidden. He’d finally agreed to go, but Kera noted his sullenness. An English teacher, she’d accused him of living in the passive voice, letting others make choices so if things went wrong he didn’t have to bear the blame.
The hottest day of the year, the radio announcer had predicted as they’d started the all-day drive to Illinois. He and Kera had been up past midnight loading the U-Haul, already exhausted come daybreak as they buckled Emily in her car seat and headed north. An hour out of Asheville Leonard and Kera were already bickering, about when to stop and feed Emily, which radio station to listen to. The Ford Fairlane struggled in the higher mountains. As they approached the eastern continental divide, the orange and white trailer swayed and dragged behind them like an anchor someone forgot to raise. The temperature gauge rose, and it seemed the mountains and summer day had collaborated to keep them from getting out of North Carolina. Leonard cut off the air conditioner. They rolled windows down but Emily still whined she was hot. Kera told him to turn the air-conditioning back on, but Leonard was afraid the car would overheat. When Emily began to cry, Kera reached over and punched the ON button herself.
They had almost made it. EASTERN CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, ½ MILE, a blue-and-white sign proclaimed. The temperature indicator wavered like a compass needle in the red part of the gauge but the car kept moving, and their continued ascent seemed a small miracle that might harbinger the possibility of even greater ones. For a few moments Leonard believed luck might stroll into their lives and announce itself, that he would be wrong about the car overheating, maybe wrong about some other things as well. He was about to reach for Kera’s hand when the radiator hose burst.
He’d managed to pull the car onto the shoulder, then hitchhiked across the mountain, leaving Kera and Emily by the roadside. He returned two hours later in a tow truck. Kera and Emily waited where he’d left them, both dehydrated and sunburned. The driver chained the car and trailer to his truck, and the four of them had crammed into the front seat, crossing the divide like a family fleeing a fire or flood.
They’d waited inside the hot, grimy service station for the radiator hose to be replaced. Emily hunched in Kera’s lap, whimpering from her sunburn. No door dimmed the racket between office and garage. When a rivet gun battered their ears Emily pressed her bent forearms to the sides of her head and shrieked.
You’re glad this happened, Kera said, then carried Emily across the street to a café. On the cinder-block wall opposite where Leonard sat, a nail crookedly hung a photograph of a father and son fishing from a wooden bridge. Under this bucolic scene the coming days of August were numbered and lined up like rows of boxcars, headed for a future he told himself had been derailed by a five-dollar piece of black rubber.
Leonard opened his eyes and stared at the watermark last week’s downpour had formed on the trailer’s ceiling. The stain had reminded him of something for days but only now did he recognize that what he saw above him evoked the rhinoceros-head outline of Australia.
September 12, 1856
A.M.
Joe Woods, age 58.
Complaint: Sore back.
Diagnosis: Lumbago.
Treatment: Heated poultice applied to afflicted area first thing in morning and before bed. Sassafras tea three times daily. Refused to cup afflicted region despite patient’s insistence.
Fee: One dollar. Paid in cash.
Ruth McKinney, age 6.
Complaint: Earache.
Diagnosis: Inflammation of inner passage of right ear.
Treatment: Rabbit tobacco vapors blown in afflicted ear. Two drops castor oil in afflicted ear. Repeat both treatments three times daily for three days. Have child sleep with right ear on warmed pillow.
Fee: One dollar. Paid with half sack of salt.
Summoned to Revis Farm.
Billy Revis, age 28.
Complaint: Left arm mangled by threshing machine. Violent bleeding.
Diagnosis: Severed artery. Ineffectual tourniquet. In Articule Mortis.
Treatment: Cauterized artery. Sealed with hot tar. Lead acetate to arrest further discharge.
One P.M.
Some recovery but pulse dismal. Chalky pallor.
Four P.M.
Pallor improved. Pulse full. Left family with sanguine assurances of recovery.
Treatment: Fomentations to balm pain. No exertions for three days. Rare beef every meal for next week.
Fee: Four dollars. Paid with one dollar cash. Fifteen pounds tobacco at harvest.
THREE
It was the second afternoon when Lori Triplett came to Travis’s room, dressed not in white like the nurses but in a pink and white striped skirt and blouse. Girls at the high school who wore these outfits called themselves Candy Stripers. Travis knew they did something at the hospital but wasn’t sure exactly what. Shank called them candy strippers.
Travis had been feigning sleep, because until now no one who came through the door had brought anything good. The doctor had dismissed his waterfall story, saying he’d heard more convincing lies from first-graders and if he had the time he’d get the sheriff and find out what really happened. His daddy was no better. He’d driven Travis’s truck back from the bridge and found the six-pack stowed in the cab. The old man spent his first visit lecturing about the beer and Travis’s climbing the waterfall. His mother sat in the corner while his daddy went at him for half an hour. The next time his parents came all the old man talked about was how much the hospital bill would be. You’re seventeen years old, boy, his father had said. When I was your age I was making my way alone in the world. If you don’t straighten out real quick you’ll be on