Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Ella
Jolene Caudill meets me at the barn with the usual two flats of eggs and four pounds of butter wrapped in the wax paper she uses, and we talk for a few minutes about the price of feed and the calf she lost in August and the weather coming.
She's a practical woman who doesn't waste sentences and I appreciate that more than I could have explained at twenty.
At twenty I thought plain speech meant a person had nothing to say.
Now I know it means they've sorted through what they have to say and kept the useful parts.
I'm loading the truck when I hear a car in the lane.
The woman who gets out is somewhere in her sixties, compact and deliberate in the way of someone who has always been deliberate, with gray-threaded hair pulled back and the kind of face that's been weathered by something longer and more complicated than just sun.
She sees me and nods in the easy way of someone who knows the landscape well enough that another person in it doesn't require explanation.
"Ella Sutton," she says. Not a question.
"Yes ma'am."
"Dovie Sturgill." She shakes my hand. Firm, brief, no performance in it. "I'm Martha's cousin. I'm down for the week."
Martha Caudill, Jolene's mother, who is eighty-three and runs the farm's books from a chair by the kitchen window. I've met her a dozen times. "She's well?" I ask.
"Mean as a wet cat, so yes." Dovie looks at the truck bed. She looks at the boots.
I have the boots in the truck bed because I've been meaning to re-oil the leather for two months and this morning I actually did it.
I sat on the tailgate in the gray before the sun cleared the ridge, with the tin of neatsfoot oil my father kept for exactly this and a cloth gone soft from years of the same use, and I worked the oil in the way he taught me, with the heat of my own hands, slow, until the dark of the leather came up rich and the dry places drank and went supple again.
It took the better part of an hour. I wasn't in a hurry.
And then I didn't put them back in the box before I left.
I don't know why I didn't put them back in the box. I don't examine it.
"Those are beautiful," Dovie says. She says it the way people say things they mean and don't need to explain. "Haven't seen work like that in thirty years. Who made them?"
"Man in Harlan. Long time ago." I close the tailgate. "My father had them made for me."
She nods. She looks at the boots a moment longer, the particular look of someone who is seeing more than just the object. "Ray Sutton's girl," she says.
I look at her. "You knew my father?"
"Knew of him. I went to school with a woman who worked his lunch counter, early days, before it was a diner proper.
She talked about him the way people talk about someone they were glad to know.
" She looks up from the boots to me. "She talked about the daughter too.
Said he lit up when he talked about you. "
I don't say anything. I put my hand on the tailgate and I look at the boots and I breathe through the tightness in my chest that appears without warning when someone says my father's name like it means something.
"I'm sorry," Dovie says. "That he's gone."
"Thank you."
She doesn't add anything to that. She just lets it be what it is, and I'm grateful for it in the way I'm always grateful when people don't try to improve on an honest statement by following it with another one.
And then, because she's made the space and there's no one else who ever does, I surprise myself by filling it.
"He built the counter in the diner himself," I say.
"Salvaged the wood off a barn that came down past Coldiron and planed it and joined it over a winter in the shop behind the house.
There's three knots in the grain near the middle.
He left them in on purpose. He said a board with no flaws in it was a board that hadn't been anywhere yet.
" I haven't said any of this out loud in three years, because there's been no one to say it to.
Darlene didn't know the man and doesn't ask.
Becca and Lena came in with their mother at the very end, the last year of his life, and he was never theirs to miss.
Dovie listens the way Martha listens to the farm's books, like the information matters and will be kept. "Sounds like a man who knew what he was about," she says.
"He was." And there it is again, the tightness, and under it the thing I don't let surface most days, which is not only that the man is gone but that the having of someone who knew the whole story of you is gone with him. "He'd have liked you," I say, which is forward, and true, and not like me.
We stand in the yard for a moment in the ordinary quiet of a farm morning, the chickens going about their business, the hills above us and the valley below.
"You coming to the Rally?" she asks. Same tone as everything else, practical, no particular weight on it, just a question.
"I haven't decided."
She looks at me. Not pushing, not reading anything into it.
Just looking. "The night I almost didn't go changed my life," she says.
"Not the Rally specifically. But the thing I almost talked myself out of.
I'd been talking myself out of things for years and that was the one where I finally went.
" She pauses. "I couldn't tell you why that one. Sometimes it's just time."
"What happened? When you went?"
"Met my husband." She says it plainly. "He was standing by the bonfire arguing about fishing with a man he'd never met and losing badly, and I thought, that's a man who knows what he thinks and doesn't mind saying it, and I went and introduced myself.
" A brief pause. "He died six years ago.
I'd take every minute twice, and I'd take the version where I almost stayed home over no version at all. "
I look at the mountains.
"I'm not sure I can go," I say. "It's complicated."
"Most things worth doing are."
She goes to the barn, and I think she's done with the conversation, which is fine.
It's already been more than I expected when I pulled into this lane.
But she comes back a minute later with a leather jacket folded over her arm, a soft baby blue, the color gone deeper at the cuffs and the elbows where it's been worn, the kind of thing that took years to break in right.
"My daughter outgrew this," she says. "She's in Nashville now, doesn't ride anymore. It's been hanging in Martha's barn since 2019 and it'll be hanging there in 2029 if somebody doesn't take it." She holds it out. "You look about her size."
I look at the jacket.
I look at her.
"I can't take your daughter's jacket."
"It's a jacket, not a kidney." She shakes it slightly. "Take it. Let it be useful."
I take it. The leather is warm from the barn and it smells like the good kind of old, like something that's been somewhere and remembers it.
"Thank you," I say.
She waves a hand. Already moving back toward the farmhouse. "Call Martha if you have questions about the Rally. She'll know who to talk to about parking." She pauses at the door. "And Ella."
I look up.
"Wear the boots," she says, and goes inside.
* * *
I drive back down the mountain with the jacket on the passenger seat and the boots in the truck bed and Dovie Sturgill's voice in my head saying sometimes it's just time like it's simple, like time is a thing that simply arrives and you either meet it or you don't.
I think about my father going to the Rally, once, before I was born.
I think about him describing it to me when I was small, the bonfires and the bikes and the people from six counties in one field for one night, the way the ridge looked lit up from below.
He made it sound like a country that existed for one night a year and then went back underground. I always wanted to see it.
I stopped wanting things like that after he died. Or I kept wanting them and stopped acknowledging it, which is its own kind of stopping.
The diner comes into view below as I round the last switchback, the chrome roof and the lit sign, familiar as my own hands. I pull into the lot and sit in the truck for a minute.
I take out my phone. I look at it. I put it back.
I get out of the truck and I bring the boots up first, and then I go back down for the jacket, and I hang it on the hook behind the apartment door where I hang my good things, the few of them.
The sky blue of it is bright against the wall in a way that makes the rest of the apartment look like what it is, which is a place I've been surviving in rather than living in.
I don't put the boots back under the bed.
I set them by the door, beneath the jacket, where I'll see them.
I look at the two things together, the jacket and the boots, like a question somebody's asked me and is waiting on, and I think: October.
The Rally is the last Saturday in October, and closer than the last time I let myself look at it.
I go back downstairs and I open the diner for the afternoon and I make three cherry pies because I have the ingredients and the afternoon is slow and my hands need something to do.
The lattice on the third one comes out even.
Both directions, actually even, and I stand there looking at it for a moment before I put it in the oven.
He said it looked even. The first one, that Tuesday. It didn't, but he said it.
I wonder if he knew it didn't or if he just meant the sentence differently than I took it.
I think he knew.
I think he said it anyway.
The oven hums. The afternoon light comes through the front windows at the angle that turns the barn-wood counter gold for about forty minutes every day at four o'clock, which is my favorite thing about this building that nobody knows is my favorite thing.
I stand in it for a minute, the gold light and the smell of baking and the jacket upstairs on the hook, and I think about a woman who almost didn't go somewhere and met her husband arguing about fishing by a bonfire.
Sometimes it's just time.
I don't decide anything.
But I stop talking myself out of it, and that's close enough for now.