Scorched Earth

Book by Robbins David L

One

The place where they lie making the child is beautiful. They lie on a bed of ferns, which like a cushion of feathers tickles them. Only a few strides off the old dirt road, they are beneath a tall red oak, thick as a chimney, bearded with gray bark; the tree is a gentle old presence. The leaves of the oak bear the first blush of whistling autumn.

If they were to stand on that spot they could see the fields. South lie forty acres of beans, leafy and ripe for the harvest machinery resting now after church on this Sunday afternoon. High pines and turning sugar maples make this field a green leafy loch where every breeze riffles. North of the road, beyond barbed wire and honeysuckle, is a cleared pasture for the cows, which are out of sight behind hills that rise and roll down, suggesting by their smooth undulation the couple lying under the oak.

He is a black man, blacker than everything, blacker than the soil of the road, everything but the crows. His name is Elijah, named by his mother for the loudest of the Hebrew prophets, though he has not grown into a loud man. He is as silent as his skin, as the dark of a well.

Beneath him, wrapping him like roots seeking water, is his wife, Clare. Her green eyes are closed behind white, blue-veined lids. Waist-length blond hair spreads over the ferns and under her back. She kisses him and their tongues twine.

A band of starlings crisscrosses the field. The ebon birds strike something invisible in the center of the field and disperse, to clot again and circle some more, somewhat aimlessly. Clare and Elijah, tangled together, white and black, are absolutes, the presence and absence of all colors at once, sharing a smooth, perfect motion.

Two

Clare and Elijah Waddell live in a shotgun shack two miles down Postal Delivery Route 310. Their small house stands five miles east of the town of Good Hope, the county seat for Pamunkey County. Local wags call these single-story, slant-roofed homes shotgun shacks because if you stood in the front doorway and fired a shotgun blast, you’d kill everyone through the whole house. Elijah and Clare bought the place last year, just after they married. For five months they sanded the heart-pine floors, put in new kitchen cabinets, and painted the clapboards. Clare wanted the exterior painted pink and got dusky rose, their compromise. The house came with ten acres; all of it except Clare and Elijah’s vegetable garden is leased to a corn farmer who cultivates four hundred acres on both sides of the road down to the river. The house and yard and the dusty lane are walled in by rising corn from May through October, until the crop is harvested. Elijah and Clare enjoy the isolation. Coming home once from their jobs at the paper mill, Clare took Elijah’s hand and stood beside their mailbox, the silks’ tassels higher than their heads.

She said, “It’s like being Hansel and Gretel coming up on the gingerbread house, isn’t it?”

Elijah is ten years older than Clare; she is twenty-two, but they share the same wiry build and long frame. His is a face of circles, pliant, with wide nostrils, long earlobes, and arching brows over dark pupils. Clare’s features are round too, but resemble the roundness of an infant’s.

When it can be, theirs is a sweaty, dirty love. They groom their big summer garden and work on the house. They bring each other iced tea. They make love in the rope hammock at nightfall in full sight of the road, daring the path to bring them an intruder. In winter they chop and carry wood. Elijah has knocked down a wall to take the space from a closet and add it to a baby’s room. Clare carries the detritus outside in a wheelbarrow, shoveling chips and scraps into the pickup to be hauled to the dump. They pull off their clothes to laugh at the dirty regions, hands, arms, necks, and faces, her whiteness showing the grit most, his grime blending into his skin. They make love that way too, with the dirt of home chores or the stink of the paper mill in their hair and clothes. Work seems to make them want each other, like thirst.

Clare and Elijah have a dog, a gray cocker named Herschel. It is Herschel who in this first year of their marriage shows Clare that her husband contains in him places she has not yet entered.

On a summer Saturday Herschel lies heaving on the back stoop of the house. His breath grates in his throat. His tongue lolls from his mouth onto the boards. The dog’s neck is swollen terribly, as though bees have built a hive inside it. Elijah finds him on the stoop and shouts for Clare to bring the truck around. Herschel has been bitten by a snake.

Elijah lays Herschel on the seat, the dog’s head in Clare’s lap, his tongue on her bare thigh. He drives fast to the vet, who confirms Elijah’s diagnosis and gives the dog antivenom. The vet tells them to leave Herschel overnight.

Returning to the house, Elijah walks away from the pickup to the backyard shed. Clare remains in the yard. Elijah emerges with his rubber fishing waders over his arm.

“There’s another pair,” he says. “Come if you want.”

Clare watches him enter the house. In a minute he exits carrying his old side-by-side shotgun and a box of twelve-gauge shells. She runs to the shed for the other rubber coveralls.

Elijah slowly drives the quarter mile to the end of the dirt road where he turns left up the farmer’s tractor path. He stops the truck at the foot of the trees and looks at Clare. His face is blank as slate, as though all purpose has been drained from it to better fuel his will. He climbs out and Clare follows. The cornfield stops here, the rim of it barbered neat. The air tastes musky along the riverbank in the shade. These trees were left in place two centuries ago when the land was first put under the plow, to hold the bank together. The roots of the trees closest to the river stick out of the bank, exposed by times of high water. Elijah pulls on his waders, then breaks the shotgun, slips in shells, leaves the barrel open over his arm and clambers down the bank holding on to the roots. Where the roots meet the water, spreading like arteries, is where the copperheads make their nests.

Elijah moves into the water as though he were himself reptilian, without ripple or sound. Clare puts on the second pair of rubber bibs, they go on easily because they are too big. She eases herself into the water but still makes a small splash stepping in. Thirty yards ahead, Elijah does not turn. He snaps closed the shotgun and raises it. He lets go with one barrel, then another, the branches overhead shake with the report and where he has aimed smoke whorls on the water. Something thrashes. Elijah unsnaps and reloads. He fires again into a cascade of roots, leaving another specter of smoke as a marker.

He wades the river the length of the field, almost a half-mile, firing the shotgun into the water, against the bank, under roots. Green plastic shells and shredded bits of snakes and bark float past Clare on the slow current. She is surprised the water is not redder with blood. After most of an hour, when an empty cardboard shell box drifts past her, Elijah stops walking, the shotgun under his armpit. He does not turn to Clare but stands watching the current slide past his thighs. Clare clambers out of the river and walks back to the truck. She removes the overalls and sits in the cab. Elijah does not appear. She considers honking the horn but does not. She sits alone for another hour eyeing the yellow palisade of corn. I had no idea, she thinks, no idea how much my husband can love.

Three

Crossing the Mattaponi River your eyes are not on the bridge or the car ahead of you but on the mill. This plant is the giant, smoking, multitiered centurion of the town. Employed here are thirteen hundred people from the five thousand residents of Good Hope and twelve thousand total in the county. A stench issues from the tallest structure, the new boiler, which always sports a cone of steam the entire town uses to gauge the direction of the wind. The smell is sulphurous, the by-products of wood fibers being separated from each other in order to turn logs into cardboard and bleached white top. “It’s the smell of money,” say the townfolk, and just an egg stink to those driving through on their way to summer cottages elsewhere in the river country. Two red tugboats are tied at the massive pier, waiting to guide waterborne shipments of timber. Rail tracks cross the road leading into the wood yard. A sign welcomes you to the town. good hope, the sign reads. a good place to work, live, and play.

In July the heat and river humidity bear down on the town, pasting the odor to the ground day and night regardless of breeze. Clare is thirty-six weeks pregnant, so she has transferred from her forklift in the warehouse stacking giant rolls of bleached paperboard. She is in the office handling paperwork, sidling up to desktops and cabinets as best she can. She worries about the smelly air her baby is getting through her umbilicus.

Inside the plant, the Number 3 machine is down. Number 3 is longer than a city block. While it is down, mechanics and maintenance workers swarm over it. Elijah climbs a ladder at the wet end where virgin craft pulp is dumped into the machine’s maw. Brown paper mud splats onto a wire screen and is swept through the machine’s heat and pressure and rollers, forging a three-ply paperboard at the dry end 150 yards away where men wait for it with blades and pneumatic lifts. Elijah climbs with his tools into the spot called Hell. The metal ladder he mounts is slick with the congealed scum of pulp fibers and steam. Brown dregs hang from the rungs. One lightbulb glows, silhouetting the bits floating on the steam. Elijah hunkers low to fit under the beams and pipes, also ugly with dangling pulp drool. He squats beside a massive shaft and unhinges the coupling to inspect the cogs. He spills kerosene over the bearings to degrease them, then adds fresh grease. In July in this spot in the mill, you cannot wipe the sweat from your brows fast enough. Elijah’s drips fall on the bearings under his slippery, glimmering fingers.

When he is finished and has cleaned his tools in the shop, his foreman approaches.

“Elijah.”

Elijah looks up. He says nothing.

“There’s a meeting this afternoon at three o’clock at the chip-yard trailer. I want you to go to it.”

“I’m on ‘til four.”

“That’s all right. I need you to go.”

“Why?”

Elijah pours kerosene over his hands to dig the grease from his nails with a rag.

“They’re forming a Diversity Committee. This is the first meeting.”

Elijah draws in his lips.

The foreman leans his backside against the counter. He lifts a hand to help conjure the point he wants to make.

“What, with you being married to Clare and all,” he says, “I figured, well . . .”

The foreman brings his hand down on Elijah’s damp back.

“. . . you know, you might could shed some light, is all.”

Elijah blinks at his hands and makes no answer. The foreman springs away from the counter. He says over his shoulder, “We all got to get along.”

At three o’clock, Clare is one of the twenty-five at the meeting. Elijah enters the trailer. She drops her jaw comically at him in mock surprise. She draws from him a head shake. He does not sit beside her.

Men and women, black and white, two Asians and one Hispanic, from departments across the mill sit in four rows of folding chairs. Coffee and doughnuts are on a card table. Most of the people from the machine floor and the wood yard still wear their hard hats and safety glasses. The few office workers fidget in their seats, especially the heavy women from customer service and the suited men from management. Clare watches Elijah, who has knit his hands in his lap and lowered his head. He has removed his green hard hat and safety glasses and sits gathered to himself.

She thinks of the other plant-wide committees formed in her three years at the mill: excellence, international quality standards, cleanup, collective bargaining, safety. She’d seen them come and go and they never stuck and they never before invited her or Elijah. Now it’s diversity and here the two of them are at the table.

Clare thinks of her mother Carol buried not too far away at the Victory Baptist Church. She wonders what her mother would think of this meeting. Her mother was a godly woman, Gran Epps has told her that many times. Her mother died of breast cancer eighteen years ago in North Carolina. Gran went down there and held her only child on the hospital bed, rocking her, singing a Jesus song. Gran Epps made arrangements with a funeral home in Winston-Salem for a long-distance hearse for her thirty-year-old daughter. She packed up her four-year-old grandchild and put her own child in a casket and ferried them both back to Good Hope, Gran’s hometown, where Gran’s husband, Granpa Charles Hutto Epps, is buried. If Clare’s mother were here, she would feel what? What would a godly woman read into this diversity meeting? She wouldn’t feel creepy, the way Clare does. More than likely she’d pity them, that they need to be organized and drilled just to get along with each other. But her mother is dead, and it’s easy, Clare understands, to make the dead wise.

A man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt stands from his chair at the corner of the first row, revealing finally who will run this meeting. His name is Sipe, a crane operator in shipping and receiving. Sipe is tan and robust, his shirt sloshes over his belt line like a water balloon. He wears khakis and loafers. Today is his day off. He’s come in just for this meeting.

“How’re y’all?” Sipe asks. He raises his thick hand quickly and uncomfortably. Clare cannot figure if it is in greeting or to ward off responses.

“As I hope you all know, this is the first meeting of the plant’s new Diversity Committee.” He grins hastily and a comradeliness flashes across his face, implying, Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to be here either.

“There’s been a situation here at the mill that management has said needs addressing. Each of us has been nominated to be on this committee. From the looks of things, we got a pretty well-rounded representation.”

Mother, Clare decides, would lean forward and touch Elijah on the shoulder lightly and whisper to him, Lift your head, sweetheart. They mean well.

Plaid-striped Sipe crosses his arms to ask everyone in the room to identify themselves, and they do. The first few shyly stand to say their names and departments, then others rise only halfway from their seats, holding the backs of their metal chairs and plopping down when finished. Elijah is the first one to stay seated, and the rest follow suit.

When this is done, Sipe tells the story of what happened at the mill to create in management’s mind the need for a Diversity Committee. Two days ago, a woman wore a T-shirt to work that read: it’s a black thang, you wouldn’t understand. Yesterday, in response, one of the woman’s co-workers walked in wearing a T-shirt on which he’d drawn with Magic Marker a burning cross, under the scrawled slogan: it’s a white thang, you wouldn’t understand.

One of the black women in the meeting volunteers, “We thought it was funny.” Clare figures this is the woman who wore the original offending shirt.

Sipe nods. He says defensively, “We did. That’s right. But a few others didn’t. So,” he clears his throat, “here we are.”

The room settles for a moment on the stupidity of these two people, and there is the sense that it is a very stable and big platform, their stupidity. The blame is not that these two should have known better than to taunt each other that way, even as frien...