His homeplace was to the south, but he avoided looking in that direction. He knew he didn’t have the heart to go see it. He continued on toward the old gristmill at the very end of Finley Shoals Road on the banks of the Oogasula, only a quarter mile from the crossroads. He’d made this trip back as a boy when his daddy farmed and there was corn to be ground into grits. But his daddy had been gone a long time, twenty years, and the mill had been closed down almost ten. Finley Shoals’ mill was like most of the gristmills and the cotton gins in Achena County these days, empty sagging buildings along the rivers and creeks, ghostlike structures of dried, rotten boards popping loose from their framing. Only the sawmills still thrived.
He parked by the gristmill at the end of the road, the macadam ending about fifty yards from the river where the route took to dirt, weeds growing high in the path that had seen very few travelers as of late. Only the oncoming cool of winter kept the wide path from vanishing altogether. Wild privet had sprung up around the loading dock where once corn had been loaded in and then shipped back out as bags of grits.
He got out of his truck and walked through the brush and surveyed the dock before stepping up onto the old wooden planks. The boards creaked underfoot. He carefully checked his steps and tried to judge where the joists below provided for more support. The boards were dusty and dry and brittle. The broad slanted tin awning over the dock blocked out any sun and made it seem dark despite the early afternoon sunshine. The door to the mill was gone from its hinges but the room was very dim since the one window high above the floor had been boarded from the inside with a sheet of plywood. Only a slant of sunlight in the shape of the doorframe cut into the darkness.
He went through the doorway into the mill’s large front warehouse room with the open ceiling reaching to the rafters and paused to let his eyes get adjusted. A strong smell he took to be a dead animal, or possibly shit from a dog or a coon or some other kind of varmint, rose up on him, odiferous like feces but also sharp and pungent, not unlike that of a skunk or stale urine in a neglected outhouse. Paper littered the floor, shreds of yellowed newspapers and magazines and feed sacks chewed by mice. Small round, dry turds dotted the floorboards. A hodgepodge of footwear was lined up neatly together in a corner. He paused a moment, studying on brogans with the soles gone, a pair of fisherman’s hip waders and three black Army boots without laces, the tongues hanging awry.
He crossed the cavernous room toward a closed door. He remembered it as the office where the mill boss kept the cashbox. He put one hand on the doorknob and another over his nose and mouth and pushed it open, a cloud of dust drifting down from the doorframe and another puffing up from the floor when the rusty hinges creaked and the door opened, cracking the tomblike seal. A powerful stench and the glare of sunshine rushed at him simultaneously. The rectangular little room had a source of light, a small window on the end, and he covered his eyes at the brightness and then looked down waist high to see the bottom of a man’s withered foot, toe bones protruding through black skin. He moved his hand down to cover his nose and mouth to keep from gagging at the smell and pushed the door wider and stood there and took in the decomposing body supine on an old metal table. He looked for only a second or two but the image etched in his head as though he’d gazed on it for an hour: the man had died in his overalls on top of a makeshift mattress of old sacks on the tabletop. His skin was molded black like a bad banana and was rotting away in patches revealing bones. What remained of his waist-length white beard was dry and yellowing and piled on his chest and fell down by his right side. One overall strap was loose but the other still fastened and he had one arm raised over his head but the other down by his side, the black deteriorating hand relaxed with long curling yellow fingernails. The man’s eyeballs were missing, either decayed or plucked out by a coon or a king snake, and his teeth were bared in a ghoulish grin where the lips had sagged and the face rotted to reveal part of his jawbone and skull. Elmer darted his eyes to the other side of the room where a metal folding chair faced the window and a four-foot high stack of Progressive Farmer magazines and Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogues stood piled neatly in the corner.
He turned and pulled the door shut. He walked swiftly across the dark main room and out, stepping lightly across the creaking floor of the dock and down through the wild privet to his truck parked in the low dry weeds at the dead end of Finley Shoals Road.
He squatted for a minute until his inhalations returned to normal, taking deep breaths of the fresh air. He stood and faced the river and leaned back against the right front fender of his truck and pulled a cigarette from his pocket and snapped open the Zippo and lit it and inhaled deep, holding the smoke and closing his eyes as he did.
It had been at least three, maybe even five years since he’d seen that old hermit, supposedly from Tennessee, who had taken up in the mill and lived there after it closed. If he had thought about him at all he had assumed he was long gone. Elmer remembered coming home after the war and seeing the man with the long beard walking into town with a goat on a leash to buy tobacco and newspapers. He heard stories from folks in Finley Shoals about the man swimming naked in the river and sunbathing in the rocks along the shoals, and that he never talked to anyone except his goat. While out in the patrol car Elmer had waved at him many times, and the man with his goat had waved begrudgingly back, but they had never spoken. The closest he’d ever been to him was today, finding his corpse.
Elmer smoked three cigarettes and turned as though to walk to the river’s edge to look down at where the big water-powered wheel had been, the hydraulic force that had spun the gears of the mill’s grist crusher, but he changed his mind. Finley Shoals’ mill wheel had been sold to an antiques collector up north earlier in the year and there was nothing left to see except the steel axle jutting out over the edge of the river. He got in and cranked his truck, turning around in a long circle in the wide dead end of the road. Holding the cigarette in his lips, steering with both hands, he drove slowly back down the road a quarter mile to the Finley Shoals crossroads.
He crossed over Sills Road and pulled off in the dirt lot next to where the Finley Shoals Baptist Church had been. Its sign, a six-foot high portable billboard purchased by a preacher about seven years ago for posting Bible verses and messages of his own making, was blank, all of the letters gone, as were the small tires used for hauling it behind a truck. Somebody had unscrewed the wheels and carried them off, leaving the sign for lake bottom.
The sanctuary was gone except for the busted foundation. About three months prior the county had tried to move the old A-frame structure on a wide flatbed, jamming supports of heavy beams underneath, lifting it with a giant crane from the sawmill and then tying it down with heavy ropes. It hadn’t gone far when the gables began to crack and the trusses broke loose and the roof ultimately gave way and the white clapboard structure collapsed on its side, just sagging right off the flatbed into the ditch, its insides chewed up by termites, more little bugs in one church than there were people in the world. The county left the remnants of the church on the side of the road, and after darkness fell scavengers on mules came by and busted up the plank boards for firewood they piled in a wagon. They tied ropes to some of the old heart of pine joists that were still solid beneath the thin coating of bug-gnawed rot and dragged the beams away.
Elmer parked in what had been the preacher’s spot. The foundation was cracked and littered with trash and broken wood from the process of ripping loose the sanctuary. A stand of pokeweed withered in the busted masonry beneath where the choir had sat.
He got out of the truck and slammed the door and walked around the church foundation into the violated burial ground. The coffins had been raised up and hauled away and the tombstones moved down to the dry ground near the dump, south and far from the impending lake. He saw a short-handled shovel in the weedy fringe that the chain gang must have left behind when they were digging up the graves. He picked it up, the metal flat head heavy and the wood handle starting to warp with weather. He pressed his heel on the blade and took a shallow stroke at the dry earth. The shovel was sturdy, worth keeping. He carried it over and set it down in the bed of his pickup.
He returned to the old graveyard, walking between the empty graves, about one hundred in all, past the Hawkins and Shepherds and McKibben plots, and, of course, the Finleys, his people. The dirt piles in the early afternoon sun were a rust-colored hue beside the rectangular holes in the red clay. Dents in the ground