“You ain’t hungry?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“How is that true? What have you had to eat today?”
“I had a Snickers bar this morning.”
“A Snickers bar.”
“Yeah.”
“That won’t do you. Come on over here and get a plate.”
Again, Beam shook his head. He watched the slide of faces moving along the table to fill their plates, their soft features licked with afternoon sunlight and glossed with sweat, all of them apparently nothing of his kind, and a cold nausea seeped into his guts.
“I just want to stand here a minute,” he said, wiping his lips on the back of his wrist.
Derna gawked at him. “What?” she asked. “Do you think they’re going to eat you?”
“No. I don’t think that. I just want to stand here for a spell.”
Derna scratched the dry chalky skin on her elbows. “Well, all right, Beam. I won’t make you eat. Just stand here and sulk all you want to. But don’t start your bitching on the way home because you didn’t get a plate when you had the chance.”
She walked away toward the tables, the wind gusting up and roving through her hair and the folds of her brown dress, the sycamore’s shade jarring loose and withery over the grass so that she strode through flexing light and flexing dim. Beam watched her fall in line. Taking her plate, filling it with stewed tomatoes and macaroni, nodding and small talking with some of the folk. Her cheeks rouged with cheap dollar-store makeup and her hosiery striped with runners, the late sun whetting her shadow so that it fell sharply in the grass, her own body in its worn wash-faded dress like the last recovered remnant of a time gone to legend as she moved through the throng of gibbering kin. He saw her shapeliness. What others had named “her lustful ways.” The slouch of hip, the drip of painted mouth. Even into late middle-age she maintained it.
Beam looked away from her and let his eyes stray over the strangers once more. For years, he’d imagined the stories his folks told him about the Sheetmires—how they turned clannish and tribed up into mere flickers of the old, original blood—as straight lies. Now he remembered how few uncles and aunts had ever come around to visit. How he knew perhaps two cousins well enough to speak to in a county where most kept an acre of memory reserved for family lines. He’d heard a few tales. The stories were mostly grim and unfinished—the drunken ravings of distant grandfathers and the misering of tiny bit-lipped women. He knew a few ghosts as they lurched through his dreams before being swallowed back into the catacombs of forgetting. Beyond this, he figured himself mostly unmoored from history. As hardly any relatives visited, he often wondered if any blood flowed through him at all.
He’d asked his folks about it many times. Standing on the failing porch, his father Clem propped in a peeling rocker and his mother Derna drifting in the swing, the river below smelling muddy and sour as the wind cut over the trees like a currycomb, he’d taken to wondering large thoughts about blood.
“Hell, they’re just uppity,” his father spat, suckling an unlit cigarillo. “Don’t like to associate with folks who run a ferryboat for a living. That’s all there is to it.”
So it was the ferry then. His father had operated it for the past quarter century, toting people and cars back and forth across the Gasping River for long hours and short pay. The boat had a two-car capacity and a small tug motored by a Cummins diesel engine scuttled it across the waters. It rode on a pulley and cable system, the steel hawsers strung over the river keeping it in place against the current. The fare was five dollars. In past years the traffic had been steady, but these times were leaner. What patrons there were came down the Gasping River Trace from the town of Micadoo, which lay due west of the river. These were travelers bound eastward into bottoms sown with corn and soybeans and then the higher country of hills and limestone bluffs. A few fishing villages survived upstream in rickety shantworks, but little brought travel this way anymore other than the occasional fit of slow wandering, the Sunday drive or the visit to an elderly relative. But for the small salary the state paid him to keep the ferry open, Clem would have been sore put to survive. He had his ways, though. Rumors of drunks who rode the ferry at night and awoke slumped over the wheel of their car in some distant field without a dollar in their wallet and a knot swelling on the crown of their skull snaked up from the black boggy woods. Most chocked it up to dumb overindulgence and drove home, happy the maiming had been negligible. Those who returned to the ferry to question its pilot were dismissed with a smile and an offhand joke.
“Why sure,” Clem would say, “you rode up here sauced to the gills. I’m surprised to see you again. Thought sure I’d be reading your obituary by now.”
So maybe that was the reason the rest of the Sheetmires kept their distance. More than the scorched stink of diesel buried in Clem’s clothes, it was the legend of his violence that made them wary.
“I take it you ain’t eating.”
The voice startled Beam. He turned. His cousin Alton stood propped against the pickup’s tailgate twisting a toothpick between his lips.
“I ain’t hungry,” said Beam.
Alton shrugged and lifted the tailgate down. “Suit yourself,” he said, settling himself onto the rough metal. He wore khaki trousers and polished loafers and a collared short sleeve yellow shirt, though his chin was barbed with thin bright-black whiskers and he kept glancing down at himself as if surprised and somewhat disgusted by his current state of dress.
“I’m glad y’all could make it anyhow,” he said, his voice a deep baritone. “Even if all you’re going to do is sit over here by Old Dog and not take one bite of the blackberry cobbler I fixed.”
“You didn’t fix no blackberry cobbler,” said Beam.
“The hell I didn’t. Baked on it all morning. You better go get a piece.”
“You didn’t fix no cobbler.”
Alton craned his neck and looked at Beam. His jaw hung open, the toothpick balanced on his bottom lip. “Shit. What kind of feller you think I am? You think I got so little sense I just go around telling lies about cobblers?”
“That sounds about like what I think.”
Beam looked past the picnic tables, but felt Alton come sidling along the edge of the pickup. A bright and piney stink of cologne wafted off him.
“Hey, there’s something else I got,” he said. “Follow me on up to the cemetery and I’ll show you.”
Beam turned to him. Alton’s cheeks were dried and blazed with pale dust from his job hauling rock for the crusher out at Dundee, and his skin seemed to always keep a ghostly film of powder. He was married, a father of two small daughters, and he’d grown paunchy.
“What have you done? Stole a car?” Beam asked.
Alton waved at the air. “Just follow me and you’ll see what it is.”
He paced away from the potluck and on through the thorny locusts and then up into the beginning hardwoods, red oak and scaly bark hickory that cast a cool murk over the ground.
Beam followed him. Up into the trees, he found loblolly pines grew here as well, the earth carpeted with their soft brown straw, the air honeyed with their sap, and he heard the clatter and talk of the potluck fading to distant drowned murmur as he followed Alton deeper into the woods.
The cemetery sat on a side of the hill in what had once been a clearing. Sapling cedar and dogwood grew amid the stones now, and the tangled grounds were ferny and sown with jagged weeds and an undercover of nitric green moss. The markers were crumbling, the names faded, and lichen spread over the broken marble and granite that appeared as fissured bone in the stark light pouring through the trees.
“What is it you got up here?” Beam asked.
Alton