The first time I saw Nelson I saw him standing on the back row of the choir. He was holding a hymnal in his big right hand and when he sung he lifted his eyes like he was gazing into the eyes of the Lord. He sung the bass line, and it seemed like the lower his voice sunk the higher his eyes sought. He was only seventeen then but already taller than all the grown men. I could always see him even though me and my folks sat near the back. He slicked his black hair straight back. I never saw a man that was beautiful before except Valentino and I didn't know what to think.
That wasn't long after my uncle died and left us his place in Particular, North Carolina. My momma and my daddy and me moved up from Greenville, South Carolina, which was already a good-sized town. Daddy said it was seventy-five miles but it wasn't like going seventy-five miles, it was like going across the world to a little corner no stranger ever found before. This was a few years after The War, but I couldn't tell anybody there had noticed we'd gone across the Atlantic and saved Europe from itself--the mountains was all around like a wall that kept the world out and I felt like it was a place that had never been disturbed. There was a newspaper that came out once a week and cussed out the Democrats in Raleigh. Even if you had a radio like we did there wasn't a station close enough to pick up. I hardly ever saw a car there in them days, not even a T Model much less anything fancier, and there wasn't a picture show in the whole county or I guess anybody who'd ever heard of Hollywood.
There wasn't no school for me to go to--I was already seventeen and had gone through every grade they had around there and then some--so church was the place I made most of my friends. I asked Liddie Roten about Nelson and she teased me and said I didn't want to mess with him. She said he was a momma's boy and everybody called him New Testament on account his initials being N.T. and him acting so good and all. Liddie said his brother Carl was the one to catch, if he could be caught, cause he was already a foreman at the freight yard even though he'd only just turned twenty-one. But I knew better. I could look in them boys' eyes and tell. Carl was almost as handsome as Nelson, just a couple inches shorter, and he could grin big as all outdoors. But he didn't have Nelson's eyes atall, not by a long shot. I don't know how to put it except they had the same look but not the same way of looking. Carl saw what was right in front of him, but Nelson just glanced at that before he turned his eyes to what he was really searching for--and whatever it was was never closer than that wall of hills curving into the sky. And that was what I wanted. A man that knew there was something more than this little corner of the earth, that knew this was no place for us.
On Saturdays sometimes I'd ride with Daddy to the store about five miles towards town. It took almost an hour each way. When the roads was muddy, it took more. The wagon wheels mired up in the red clay and the mules snorted loud gray clouds in the damp morning air like a old truck someone was trying to start. I swore to myself I'd get me a car when I was older, and get somewhere that had roads to drive it on. We winded through the woods that closed in on each side and finally came out into the open again near Silas Craven's general store. Some called it Craven's, but most called it Loafers Glory. It was where you got the news around there, sometimes from the newspaper you could buy there but generally from somebody's talk. That was where Nelson first talked to me. He seemed more at ease talking to me there than he did at church. Maybe he thought it was not right to court a girl in the churchyard. Maybe it just took him time to get the nerve. When he got it, though, he got a big helping. It began to seem that he was there ever Saturday. After that he didn't mind coming up to me at church, either, and sometimes he'd come over for Sunday dinner. Nelson still stayed with his momma, then, and said it was up to him to be the man of the house since Carl had moved out and his daddy drunk hisself to death years ago. Which was good of him, but I worried it would hold us up gettin married.
I was wrong. A few months later he told me him and a couple of his neighbors was going to build a three room house on a piece of his momma's land so he could provide me a home but still be close by to help her out on the farm. I can't say he really asked me. Asking wasn't Nelson's way. I could've pointed that out and told him I wanted to end up farther away from home, but I figured it was a start.
It was in a little hollow snuggled against a hillside of oaks and maples and pines. You couldn't see no other houses from there, and at night there wasn't no lights to see but the ones above. In the country the stars are different. You see the bright ones just like in town. but you see the dim ones too that fill out the sky like someone has sprinkled gold dust in some gauze and draped it over the world. The noise at night is as thick as the stars. Crickets sing, and dogs bark at sounds and smells in the dark, and whippoorwills call out. When you hear that you supposed to turn over nine times in bed for good luck. You don't hear no wagons or people and never any cars. The only sound of human life I ever heard outside was the freight train miles away. In bed, with the window open, and Nelson breathing quiet beside me, I sometimes heard its engine and heard a high-pitched moan. Maybe it was the brakes; maybe it was the wheels screeching against the tracks, hurrying to get away. I don't know. But when I couldn't sleep I laid still and listened to that echo crying in the valleys, and wondered.
Fiction: Holier
Than Thou | Main Map
Theory: Origins of this episode |
Spread of technology
Initial release: October 19, 1995
Last update: July 7, 1996