Lyda sleeps in the bedroom next to his. They share a wall, their heads at rest in proximity. She has her philosophies, too. Lyda says people arrive in the world with a unique part of it readied to welcome them into its limits and expectations—that is why we have to be ripped screaming from a mother’s womb.
She grew up poor when Pirtle Country was horse farms and lease lots seeded to sharecroppers for tobacco, alfalfa, hay, and corn, the county seat of Renfro Station nothing but a few developed blocks around the rail line, its city hall reconstructed from the burned remains of a Baptist church. Her father kept a dry goods store that had folded inexplicably during the boom years after the Second World War, when most businesses could not help but thrive. Not even boom years could bring fortune to a man as difficult as Ernst Newcome, Cole’s grandfather. He preferred horses to people, though no one could tell if the horses returned the feeling. He scraped by via sharp jockeyship and boarding the beasts on rented land, in flush times exercising a handful for wealthy farm owners who traveled too often to give them steady runouts. The way he told it to Lyda, he was doing right well again before she came along—screaming into her part of the world in 1951—though her mother told her this was not true, their kitchen had had the same dirt floor before Lyda was even thought of.
That dirt floor was the stuff of family legend. Lyda believed the fact of it led directly to Fleece getting born. Each morning she had to sweep the floor in one direction to her mother’s satisfaction, and then sweep it again the opposite direction after supper. If it became too dry and powdery she had to sweep the plumes of it out the door before dampening the floor with a rag. Ernst had himself a radio and then a TV he’d managed to find on a fantastic deal before ever setting a floor to Eudora’s kitchen. He worked less once they plugged in the TV. Not long after buying the thing they watched Kennedy’s funeral and Ernst was hooked—calling the assassination of that Catholic impostor one of the best moves the country had made since VE day. Lyda didn’t know what to say about Kennedy, and she didn’t know even if her father might be wrong. By then she’d learned to assume he was.
She had not been farther than Montreux and Cincinnati except for one foiled family trip to D.C. in October 1967—the city writhing, its avenues clogged with protesters intending to levitate the Pentagon. Her father gave up on finding a hotel and in a rage swung the station wagon around on the beltway, crossing the grass divide as if it were county fairgrounds. They camped in freezing cold in the Shenandoah and shivered miserably as Ernst proclaimed his new conviction that, after the mess of the capital and the mindless inferno engulfing it, he no longer saw sense in ever leaving home.
Bethel Skaggs lifted into Lyda’s view as the worldly traveler who enjoyed the outright disapproval of her father. He had been everywhere, seen the globe, Bethel said, drinking from a pewter flask in dry Pirtle, twenty-five years old and talking up a teenage girl at a dance in a high school gym. Stationed for a year in Berlin during the missile crisis—he said—and got out the second they let him; raised blue-eye huskies in Nebraska until wolves cleared out his stock; painted barns in Georgia, and then took a chance on his fiddle skills, which allowed him to see every inch of this country to help him decide where he didn’t want to be. Her father suspected a man couldn’t play fiddle worth a damn without deceit and immoral leanings in him and that was enough to confirm Bethel as a person of interest for her.
She was sick of sweeping that kitchen floor twice a day and she was ready for a new pair of shoes. And the only thing anyone could agree on about Bethel Skaggs was that he certainly took the strain off a girl’s eyes.
He never did tell her why he came to Pirtle County or Lake Holloway; he had no people there. His littered the mountains in the eastern towns of Tomahawk, Inez, Watergap—places he swore he would never step foot in again. He had a solid job at the fertilizer plant and so she got the new shoes and moved into the small house in the woods behind the lake—where first thing she did on entering was stamp her heels on the kitchen’s linoleum floor tiles—and before their first anniversary Fleece slid screaming into his part of the world. And for two or three months Lyda thought her life exhausting but happy. And then Bethel announced he was leaving. Service rung up, he said, mentioning he still had commitments to the Army Reserves for the first time. In days he was gone, and no one except himself ever learned where he got up to; she knew only the man never served in Vietnam. She checked with the Army herself out of curiosity years after any of this mattered. Her father believed Bethel wanted away from a wife and squalling baby, damned if it be boy or no, and who could blame a man for that, I raised her myself (she could recall Ernst speaking this to young Cole, eyes dancing beneath white brows long enough to braid). Bethel disappeared and sent no word, not a phone call or note, for well over five years. The next time he rounded the lake and walked back up the hill, he found little Cole Prather.
Lyda wished she had a picture of Bethel’s face the day he found her holding the toddler—stricken, she said; sincere confusion scattering his eyes. As though he could not understand how his son had not grown a tat since he left. Then Fleece ran in through the back door (Fleece ran everywhere then, never walked, his feet scamper-wild from the day he discovered them) and the argument began. She thought, He thinks it’s no different than if he stepped out moments ago, like my life could be stuffed in a footlocker for him to pull out whenever he wants.
She dared her husband to explain her wrong. Five years without word—it wasn’t like she moved to Whore Holler after he left (though she could have, she reminded him, for all he left her with; no one who knew her story would have blamed her). Lyda had been a teenage mother trying to do right, one who went to church on Sundays like any girl trying to do right would. Despite the nature of her effort she still met Mack Prather there, at First Pirtle Baptist. Now he was a man everybody liked, once they noticed him; quiet at first, he didn’t jump into conversation but stood ready with a grin and some funny comment to prove he had been listening close. He was not rascal-handsome like Bethel but he wasn’t ugly, either, though his thin hair, a dun brown like crispy leaves, was already moving to a combover at twenty-four. His eyes were nothing to cry over and his jaw was soft, but he did like to talk once he felt comfortable, and more importantly he liked to listen to Lyda talk. They first started talking and listening to one another at an after-service brunch, he made her laugh on a day she was feeling blue, they were looking over the table spread with bacon and eggs and Mack said from just behind her shoulder, Well I see the chicken made a contribution, but it looks like the pig gave us his full commitment. Then he tumbled her coffee while reaching for cream.
Bethel had been gone two years by then and she was lonely. She wasn’t looking to park her shoes under anyone’s bed; she was trying to be good. Sex had got her into this tough spot and she wanted a future with fewer spots as tough as this. But it helped to have a man around the house whether one lay with him or not. Mack could frame a door; he connected PVC pipe from the house to the county water system instead of the lake’s, which did not use filters and made the sink smell dingy. He played ball with Fleece as well, setting him up with the basketball goal where the hill flattened out near the road until some laker boys stole it away or threw it into the lake, they never knew which.
Mack called himself a developer but that was only ambition talking. Truth was he did construction, a carpenter willing to take on more than he could handle, certain he stood only a loan or two away from drastic and enviable success. Sometimes he helped Lyda by picking up Fleece from her parents’ house before she finished her shift at the clinic. Sometimes he picked her up, too. Her mother Eudora was a practical woman and did not blame her girl when she finally landed in bed with Mack after so long with a wandered-away husband—no, Eudora got upset only when Lyda got knocked up again so quickly. Eudora did not take gossip unless it covered somebody else’s family, and Lyda getting pregnant with her husband gone gave everyone at First Pirtle Baptist much to chew on happy. Her own mama asking if she didn’t know