The Homeplace

Abstract

FICTION The Homeplace Sallie Page THE HUNDRED-MILE DRIVE from the Asheville airport had been unexpectedly quick. Whereas it had taken Frank and his father in the Chevy pickup four hours or more, with three or four stops at roadside creeks to fill a Pepsi bottle with icy water to cool the boiling-over radiator, this afternoon's drive was a smooth two hours on a four lane that flattened the ridges and rolled out the curves of the mountains as safely as a racetrack. When they passed a green highway sign that read Marvel, he stepped on the brake, and Linda pulled away from the window she'd been glued to since they left the city limits. "Are we there, Frank?" "No. If this is Marvel... I don't recognize anything." He leaned over the steering wheel and peered down into the sharp valley below the highway, but the concrete crash barrier blocked his view of all but a fleeting glimpse of a white house and rooftop and a narrow vegetable garden alongside abrief strip of tarred road. Could thatbe the Fosters' place whose pond he'd fished in as a kid? Where would the pond be? Under the thousand-foot embankment holding up the new highway? He strained to follow the tiny road far below with his eyes, but the highway curved higher still, and he lost it. Before them the mountaintops lined up in the distance like islands rising out of an ocean of clouds. "It'll come back to you. It's so gorgeous, Frank. Ijustloveit." His wife's hair was a shining blond falling like silk, ruffling in the wind from the window she insisted on keeping open, her nose tilted up as if she could breathe in the scent of the dark forest on the distant hills over the exhaust fumes from the passing traffic. "There's a pull-off," she said. "Get off here so I can take some photographs." She turned and smiled at him, her cheeks glowing and blue eyes dancing, quite unaware of having given him an order. He stepped on the gas, swerving to the inside lane, and passed a station wagon filled with suitcases, pillows and kids making faces at them from the windows. "We'll come back later," he said, not looking at her. Shame and an apology rose and swiftly fell away inside him. In the silence he could sense her studying his profile; then she shifted 36 in her seat, away from him and nearer the spectacular view. He gripped the steering wheel and pressed down on the gas pedal. Mac Bishop, a cousin, had left the gate key to the homeplace at Hatcher's Grocery, a two-story green-roofed building that had leaned over the narrow road to Marvel since before his granddaddy's time. "You remember Waylon Hatcher?" Mac had said over the telephone. Of course he remembered. Mac had questioned his memory about everything during the conversation, as if the vice presidency with a packaging company in Chicago gave a man amnesia about anything that had happened twenty years ago. "I remember him cornering me in his momma's chicken pen when we stole thejellybeans that time and whaling the daylights out of me." "Yeah, you had to build her a new fence. Well, this is the son. Old Waylon's been dead ten years." "Sure. Had to be." Back in Chicago with Lake Michigan rumbling gray out to a cloudy skyline, he'd stood before the window of his office with the receiver to his ear, riding the dips and swells of his cousin's accent, that misunderstood lilt he'd meticulously trained out of his own voice in undergraduate school. They negotiated arrangements about the three-day visit camping on the old family farm, and to allay the suspicions bubbling up through the surface of his cousin's polite conversation that he might be trying to grab back land he'd long ago signed away his interest in, he'd offered to pay rent for the brief visit. "Well, I guess you're making so much now you figure you need to pay family for hospitality." Sometimes you erased...