Furnace Mountain: or The Day President Roosevelt Came to Town Read online

  Two women from the church had come by the day before and cleaned her house. One had even helped her wash and comb her hair. She’d sat there in a chair in her front room, smiling listlessly while the younger of the two had gently run a comb through the tangles, smoothing as she went. She’d hummed a song as she worked and chattered about a movie star or singer Ruth had never heard of.

  She had been too tired to feel humiliated. When she’d asked why they were there, the younger one called Lottie had said that Sam was the town hero and that it was because of him that the president was coming.

  “Since we was already friends with you and everything, we wanted to come by and do something for you’uns,” Lottie had finished cheerfully.

  Ruth had never seen those two women before in her life, she didn’t think.

  Perhaps it was having clean hair and a clean house, but the cloud had lifted for awhile that day. Ruth had even allowed herself a few smiles. Once the ladies left, however, she was alone. As she’d sat by the old stone fireplace and gazed at the polished furniture, the scrubbed floorboards, and the shining windowpanes she’d burst into tears, brought on by embarrassment and shame.

  “It should have been me,” she’d cried. “I should be the one doing this. Why can’t I do these things? What is wrong with me?”

  There were days when she couldn’t even look at Sam. What must he think of her? Did he even remember a time when she wasn’t like this? She knew that he must, but he was really so little. She let herself think back to a time when her husband had been alive and Jonathan had still been at home. Sam wasn’t much more than a baby then, although at five years old he had still been serious and thoughtful.

  Those had been good days. They had assembled on the porch together in the summer evenings, sometimes eating popcorn drizzled with molasses. Jonathan had used one of her canning jars to teach Sam how to catch lightning bugs and they had put the jar in their bedroom. She’d heard them giggling, even though Jonathan was nearly sixteen years old back then.

  She herself had taught the boys that if you removed the light from the bug as soon as they lit up, it stayed lit for a while. She, not afraid of movements or decisions, had shown them how to “paint” with the lightning bug residue and they’d made a glowing mustache on their daddy. Everyone had laughed and laughed…

  There had been music and laughter. She still caught faint whispers of it when she was alone during the day with nothing but memories to keep her company.

  It was another reason she couldn’t leave the house; everything was still there–bad and good.

  Nowadays, she heard from Jonathan only every few months. He sent money down to them from Cincinnati and it was always too much.

  “Now Mama,” he’d argue in his letters, “you and Sam need it more than me. I’m doing just fine here with the other fellows. We get along.”

  Ruth put some of it back and gave the rest to Sam because she knew that he would know what to do with it and she couldn’t make those kinds of judgments anymore. She couldn’t even go to the store.

  It was evening now; she could tell it was nighttime by the air. There was a stillness to the nighttime that the daylight hours didn’t own.

  Suddenly, the screen door swung open and she heard Sam’s heavy little-boy feet stomping around the kitchen linoleum. The sounds of cabinets being opened and closed and then she heard the back door open and slam shut. He might have been going out to the chicken coop. she could have at least done that for him. She knew that soon he would bring a plate in for her supper. She would do her best to eat it so that she didn’t disappoint him.

  In the meantime, Ruth closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

  ***

  Sam felt good. He’d worked real hard at the school, even though he didn’t have to go to school anymore, and Miss Casteel had been proud of him.

  “That sign looks real fine, Sam,” she’d said with her nice smile and kind eyes. She’d also ruffled his hair like his mama used to do before she got sick. “It looks like something made by a real and true artist. Maybe that’s what you’ll be when you grow up–an artist!”

  Miss Casteel had brought him paint, and Sam had worked very hard on getting the letters just right. The paint was old and dry but he’d mixed lots of water in it and stirred real hard. In the end, it hadn’t looked bad at all.

  “You need any help Sam?” Miss Casteel had asked. “You’re working awfully hard.”

  “No ma’am,” he’d shyly replied. “I kindly like working on it by myself, if that’s alright with you.”

  “That’s just fine Sam,” she’d replied with another smile.

  He knew his friends would have been glad to help, but this was his project. Miss Casteel had but them to work picking up the garbage around the train tracks instead. They’d liked doing that; he’d heard them outside the school, hollering and laughing to one another.

  Sam had visited Mr. Homer after working on the sign. He had seen Mr. Homer in town before because he was the mayor and all, but he’d never spoken to him.

  Miss Casteel had sent Sam down to the train depot, to give Mr. Homer a note. Before he’d left, he’d made sure that his britches were straightened and that his shirt was properly buttoned. He’d also poured drinking water on his hands and ran them through his hair to smooth it down, too.

  Mr. Homer had been very polite to Sam. He’d shook his hand and even walked around the building with him, pointing out what they were going to do to try to fix it. He’d spoken to Sam just like he was an adult and afterward, had even patted him on the shoulder and said that he and the rest of the town were proud of him. Then he had asked Sam about Ruth.

  “Your mama and I were friends a very long time ago,” he’d winked at Sam. “We were in school together, not too much older than you are now. She was one of the first friends I made here in Furnace Mountain. How is she doing?”

  Sam had hesitated, not knowing how to reply. He knew he wasn’t supposed to lie but it felt disloyal to tell him the truth–even if he was the mayor. Finally, Sam had answered, “Well Sir, she’s been awful sick but I believe she’s starting to feel better.”

  He hadn’t been able to look directly at Mr. Homer when he’d said that, but he thought it had been okay because Mr. Homer had then told Sam to give his mother his regards and no other questions were asked.

  Sam spent longer in town than he’d planned because Linden McIntosh’s mother had invited him to supper. He’d wanted to say no and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell him that his mother was cooking something special and expecting him, so that they wouldn’t know the truth, but in the end his hunger won out. Besides, that would have been another lie.

  In the end, he gladly gone to Linden’s house and ate two whole bowls of soup beans, a slab of cornbread, and a slice of apple pie.

  His walk home had been dark, but Sam knew the way. He was never scared of the dark, mostly because Jonathan had taught him that there was nothing to be afraid of–that dark was just the opposite of light. The moon was full, too, and it lit up the lane even when the road turned to dirt.

  He’d walked along, feeling full in his belly and light in his heart, and had even sung some–pretending the trees and bushes were his audience.

  Sam’s heart dropped, though, when he reached his house and saw the darkness. He worried that perhaps his mother had gotten up and cooked after all and had then gone back to bed when he hadn’t come home.

  She must be so disappointed, he thought. For her to go to trouble and me not even be there!

  Sam had worked himself up a good bout of guilt by the time he let himself inside. He half-expected to see food getting cold on the table, maybe even a pie, and the images were so bright in his mind that he could nearly smell supper waiting for him. When Sam entered the kitchen, however, and saw the table looking the same way he’d left it, his heart dropped.

  For just a moment, Sam let himself feel pity. He thought about his dinner with Linden and how Linden’s mother had promised everyon
e that by the end of the week they would be able to eat blackberry cobbler. Blackberry cobbler sure sounded good.

  Sam knew he’d need to make his mother something to eat or else she would get sick, or sicker than she already was. He decided on eggs again. That was something that he could make taste pretty good. Not prone to crying out load, he choked back a small sob and went out the screen door towards the chicken coop.

  Chapter Twelve

  RUTH AWOKE FEELING as though she had drunk a pint of whiskey the night before. The early morning sun filtered in through the tattered blanket nailed across the window and it swathed her grimy bedroom walls with a cheerful pattern. The first thing she noticed upon opening her eyes was that her wallpaper was peeling.

  “I should get that fixed,” she said and then jumped at the sound of her voice.

  The house was uneasily quiet; she knew she was alone. A glance at the watch that had belonged to her father told her that it was 8:00 am. She hadn’t been up that early in ages.

  Grimacing, Ruth swung her feet over the side of the bed and let them land with a thud on the hardwood floor. The wood felt hot under her feet already; it would be humid today.

  Ruth waited for the panic, the fear, the overwhelming desire to hide to hit her. She stood, used her pot, and returned to the bed and waited some more. When it didn’t come she fell back to her pillow and stared at the ceiling. She didn’t want to tempt the fates. If she tried to get up and leave the room, it was sure to hit her hard and then she might not make it back to bed. She might find herself hiding in a corner or under the table. She’d done that before.

  Something felt different today, however. The cloud in her brain was still there, of course, but the grogginess was not from sadness but from weariness. In short, Ruth felt hungover from thinking.

  She had spent a good deal of the night thinking about their situation, thinking about Sam. She hadn’t eat much of the eggs he fixed. She couldn’t, not after seeing the tear stain he’d tried to hide. Neither one spoke about it, but both knew it was there.

  Her dirty plate was still on the floor. Ruth picked it up and unsteadily made her way into the kitchen. It was spotless and empty. Sam was not home. A look out the window showed that he was not in the garden, either.

  She felt worry creeping in as she looked past the chicken coop to the barn. She couldn’t go out there. She hadn’t been in the barn since that last morning she’d gone looking for her husband and found him there, slumped over his work stool, the blood running from his face like fresh molasses.

  Ruth thought that she maybe was supposed to know where Sam was but had forgotten. She put her plate in the sink and then walked into the front room. It was still clean from the church ladies, except for a pile of papers on the coffee table. Sam’s designs.

  Intrigued, Ruth picked up the pile and surveyed the room. It looked foreign to her, not like hers at all. It was then she realized that she hadn’t seen it that early in the day in a long time. The morning sunlight made it look bigger somehow. Ruth shuddered from the overwhelming vastness that threatened to engulf her and she backed up against the wall. She needed to feel something solid against her skin. She wished she could crouch down in one of the corners of the room and be surrounded on two sides, to feel their embrace, but to do that she would have to move and she didn’t think she could.

  After a few minutes, the feeling passed and she was able to walk again. Instead of choosing one of the living room chairs, Ruth moved slowly to the front door, uncaring of the fact that she was still wearing the same night dress she’d worn for a week.

  Outside, the air was thick but clean feeling. The hills rolled gently around their little farm and Ruth was glad they were close. Their nearness made her feel safe and contained.

  In the distance, she could see Furnace Mountain watching her. Its familiarity made her smile. It never changed–one of the few things that didn’t. She could always depend on its bright colors in the spring and summer, its naked, skeletal limbs in the fall, and the bleakness of the gray snow and fog that settled on it in the winter.

  Still holding onto Sam’s designs, she sat down in one of the nearby chairs and began looking through them.

  Oh, he really is talented, she thought.

  When had her baby learned to draw like that? On at least half a dozen pages he’d drawn pictures of Main Street, the train depot, Furnace Mountain, his schoolhouse…She went through all of them, giving each one careful time and consideration.

  When she reached the last one, however, she paused.

  It was a simple sketch, not one of the “welcome” signs he was designing but of their own home. He had depicted their simple cottage, the rickety chicken coop in the back, the old barn, and the path that led down to the pond. These things were beautifully clear and illustrated, but it was the two figures on the porch that caught her eye.

  There, plain as day, were Ruth and Sam, sitting side-by-side in the chairs. Ruth was holding what looked like a bowl of green beans. She seemed to be stringing them. Sam was tilted back in his chair, his father’s old guitar across his lap. Both figures were laughing.

  Ruth looked up and didn’t take notice of the tears that were running down her face. Like Sam the night before, she let herself feel a moment of pity and then she caught the garden from the corner of her eye. Dusty green tomatoes, still damp with dew, hung from thick vines and sparkled in the sunlight. They looked like a sign.

  Jumping from her chair, Ruth ran off the porch, her bare feet hitting the warm grass as her nightdress flapped around her knees. She bent over and plucked the four closest tomatoes from the vine, paying no mind to the ants that crawled across her toes.

  I can make fried green tomatoes, she thought wildly. He would eat those, and she would eat those, and they would be all right.

  She panicked at the thought of looking for the flour, turning on the oven, and remembering how to fry them, but she tried to push those thoughts from her mind. Balancing them in her arms, she headed back to the house.

  “Tomatoes,” she repeated. “I can do tomatoes.”

  ***

  Shoes off, lukewarm water dripping between his toes, Nicholas rested on Alice’s front porch. The gloves were doing little to protect his hands from the bleach. His palms and fingers were red and sore, but they were almost finished. Alice sat on the other side of the large metal tub, happily babbling on about the tablecloths.

  “They’re going to look pretty, I think. Look at how well this one turned out! I can’t believe you were able to get so many. Tell me again, where did they all come from? Who all give ‘em to you?”

  “I got ‘em here and there,” Nicholas mumbled, embarrassed.

  He couldn’t tell her the truth–that he’d been unsuccessful in his attempts to secure tablecloths. That it had been Louella who’d delivered them to his front door, much to his mother’s dismay. He still shuddered to think of the speech his mother had given him, the way she’d gone on about his “duties” and the things he should be doing over the summer–none of which included spending any time with Alice, even if it was for a good cause.

  Nicholas had knocked on doors and asked for spare sheets or tablecloths, but he’d been turned down every single time.

  “Sorry,” each person he’d asked had told him. “Don’t have anything to spare. We’re using all we have here. Don’t have any money to buy any new ones so we’re using the old. Have you tried next door?”

  It had been humiliating.

  Alice held up the last piece, wrung it over the side of the porch, and then walked it into the yard where she hung it on the clothesline. Nicholas watched as she stood back, hands on hips, and gazed at the three lines of sparkling white sheets. They were already drying quickly in the blistering sun.

  Nicholas wasn’t looking at the clothesline, though. He was studying Alice. He couldn’t help but notice how her hair was getting lighter from her time in the sun and how even though it hung limply on her shoulders from the damp, it still shone brightly. Her dr
ess was old and shabby and now discolored from the bleach, but it fit her snugly around her tiny waist and her not so tiny chest, and he felt himself wondering at what point she had grown up. She looked pretty, even without the makeup the other girls wore.

  With a little skip, Alice scrambled onto the porch and leaned against the wall. “It sure is hot today. I bet it’s going to be one-hundred degrees. It’s good, though. It means those will dry quicker. I still have to go out to the garden, too. We’ve got beans and peas now. Does your mama need any peas?”

  “Huh?” Nicholas thought he had heard the word “peas” and possibly “Mama” but he was currently fixated on the span of thigh that was exposed when her dress had ridden up. Alice rambled on, oblivious to his distraction, and began fanning herself with a loose piece of brick siding. The harder she fanned, the further up her dress rode, until Nicholas could see the faint edge of her cotton knickers.

  To get his mind off of what he was seeing, he looked up, but this time his eyes landed curiously on the buttons in the back of her dress. One had come undone, showing a small patch of her smooth, white back. His mother would be dismayed that Alice wore buttons on her dresses still, when zippers were so much easier and more modern, but as this wild thought crossed his mind he felt even more embarrassed. Alice didn’t care about Good Housekeeping or zippers or styles. She wasn’t that kind of girl.

  “So do you want to take some peas home with you? You’ll have to help pick them.”

  Jarred back to the moment, Nicholas quickly rose to his feet. The thought of working out in that sweltering garden with the sun beating down on him was too much.

  “Sorry, Alice, but I think Mom has enough. She just, uh, bought some the other day when she was in town.” He was confused by the hurt look on her face. “Anyway, I need to be getting home. I’m supposed to help Dad out this afternoon at the paper. He’s doing most of the work himself these days you know.”