A Country Rag Country Reckoning

Across the road from the porch, lying by the side of his trout pond, the muskrat Grady had just shot was quivering and dying. Resting the back of his split oak chair against the wall of the house, Grady smoked a Lucky Strike and coughed, a deep retching hack, watching Loy's progress up the road, at the same time keeping a close eye out for Clemmie Ward.

Whenever he saw Clemmie out in Ward's upper field, moving through the corn, Grady made sure he did not step over the creek, the one fixed boundary between their land, which he was sure Clemmie was stealing, moving fences at night, little by little as he expanded his holdings and shrank Grady's.

Several times a week he would say to his wife, Essie, "If he could move it, Clemmie'd be out there pushing that damn creek toward our house just as hard as he could."

He regarded Clemmie the same way he regarded the muskrats in his trout pond. He was at constant war with them. Clemmie was after his land, moving fences on moonless nights, darkened by shadows from the steep hills and mountains surrounding them. The muskrats wanted his pond, undermining it with holes in their attempts at getting to his trout. As much as possible, he watched Clemmie's every move, his rifle always nearby, and battled the muskrats by shooting them and stuffing their holes with his torn, faded bib overalls and Essie's old cotton dresses, part of his fight to keep water in the eight by ten foot pond, which he stocked each spring and by which he had built a picnic table and stone fireplace where he'd cook and eat a pan fried trout breakfast once or twice a week.

Grady would sit on the porch every afternoon, his thirty-thirty within easy reach, resting against the wall next to his chair, blasting away at the muskrats as soon as their heads appeared, waiting for Clemmie Ward to step across the creek.

"Bastards even look alike," Grady said one morning.

They had been sitting quietly at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating biscuits and bacon, Essie thinking about the visit from their daughter Barbara and her children coming up next Sunday. Grady, who had been looking out the window, watching Clemmie in the field below, stood up, ready to start his weekly hoeing in their tenth of an acre tobacco allotment.

Startled from visions of her grandchildren, she cocked her head, frowning at him. "Who looks alike?"

"Them damn muskrats and that fence shifting rat down the road."

"Clemmie?"

"Clemmie, with his buck teeth and shifty eyes. Son-of-a-bitch looks like he ought to be living in a damn hole in the side of my trout pond."

"Clemmie doesn't have buck teeth."

Grady shrugged. "It doesn't matter if he's got them or not, he ought to have them. Little buck teeth and a twitchy nose and shifty goddamn eyes I could put a bullet right between. He's got them, you have to admit. He's got shifty eyes from looking around all the time to see if I'm watching him move my fences."

"I don't spend my time studying Clemmie Ward. It's not like he's a regular dinner guest or anything. I don't think I've ever seen him close enough to really study his eyes.

Grady grunted. "If you'd have seen his eyes, you'd know they're shifty, and he's got a twitchy nose too. And how in the hell would you know whether or not he's got buck teeth if you never seen him close enough to study his eyes?"

She shook her head, wondering how he'd pulled her into this, like he always did.

"I'd know because you can tell if a person's got buck teeth when you're driving along the road past them. If they've got buck teeth you'll see them hanging over their lip. But you can't see shifty eyes when you're just driving by. You got to study someone to see their eyes shift. It takes some time."

Grady shrugged again and walked out the door toward the tobacco field. He'd like to catch Clemmie moving fences of a night. If he'd lay in waiting behind a haystack, sooner or later, if the night was dark enough, he'd see Clemmie sneaking through the corn on his side of the creek, moving toward the fence line with his shovel. He'd be planning on digging a new hole, maybe two, and moving the fence posts into them.

Clemmie would be clever about it. Hell, he was always clever about it. Grady had yet to detect his fence moving, because Clemmie was so damned sneaky and clever, drifting like some kind of haunt through the far side of the field as he moved one or two posts at a time, and them only inches. He was too careful to make a big move. It would take a surveyor to prove what he'd been doing all these years, and Grady was damned if he was going to pay good money to prove that Clemmie was a crook. Why in the hell should he have to spend his good money to prove what the little sneak was up to? It wasn't fair.

But if he hid behind the haystack, Grady was sure he could catch him this time. He'd wait until the new hole was dug and Clemmie was working the post out of the ground, sweating and grunting in the night, and come up behind him, jamming the business end of the thirty-thirty hard into his back.

He could imagine the whites of Clemmie's eyes, wide in the dark night, staring away from him.

"Who's there?" Clemmie would say.

Grady might be silent for a moment, or he might laugh; he'd make it a mean laugh if he did. Then he'd say, "the man who's going to blow your goddamn spine clean through your belly for stealing his land, that's who it is."

And he could imagine how Clemmie would react. "Oh Lord Jesus, you can't shoot me now. You shoot me now, caught in the act of stealing your land, and I'll go straight to Hell. You got to let me get over to the church and make my prayers. You can shoot me then, Grady, while I'm praying in the church built on land I gave to the Lord."

"My land, probably. No doubt but you gave the church land you stole from me."

Grady knew how Clemmie would protest. He'd say something about the Free Will Baptist Church being built on land no Clarke had ever owned and Grady would have to tell him it didn't matter whether or not that particular piece of land had belonged to him. What mattered was Clemmie stealing land, and he and his family had sure as hell stolen enough over the years to more than equal the half acre plot he'd given to the church.

"And one other thing," Grady would say. "I sure as hell ain't going to kill you while you're hunkered over the Âéâìå praying your ass off in the church. Then I'd be the one to go to Hell and I ain't about to go to Hell for punishing your land stealing ways."

Not that he was afraid of going to Hell. It was just another way to rattle Clemmie. Clarkes weren't particularly religious people. They never had been. Stories passed from generation to generation in Valle Crucis told how preachers had come into those mountains a hundred years ago, trying to save the souls of the people who had fallen into old pagan ways. They hadn't had much success. One of them had left saying for all he cared the Devil could have the whole valley. That was all before the Wards came in.

Then Clemmie would start to shake, begging him not to shoot him, and maybe he'd decide not to. Maybe he would tell Clemmie he could live on one condition.

"Anything, Grady, just tell me what you want me to do. I'll take care of it right away."

There'd be such fine fear in Clemmie's voice, and in the look on his face, even though his back would still be to him, the rifle end dug a half inch into Clemmie's flesh.

Grady would grin. "Move your fence over to the road and maybe I'll call it even." Clemmie would howl with rage over that. Grady knew just how his voice would sound. "Hell no, Grady Clarke. I ain't moving no fence off my property so you can have it. I'd rather you shoot me dead then give up what's mine."

"What was mine, until you and your damn fence moving ways stole it from me."

And that would be the end of it. Grady would have to shoot him and bury his body under the fence. He didn't ever carry the fantasy much further. He never thought of how Sheriff Roby Winkler would come, alerted to the trouble by Clemmie's wife who would have heard the shots. He never thought about how the sheriff would arrest him and put him on trial for murder. He never thought about the electric chair at the State Penitentiary in Raleigh, and him sitting down in it to be executed for killing Clemmie Ward.

He never thought about it because he was at war with Clemmie. Just like he was at war with the muskrats. Just like he'd been at war with the phone company over the snoops on his party line. Just like he'd been at war with his leukemia for ten years, ever since the doctors down at the hospital in Winston-Salem had given him six months to live, and he'd sure as hell shown them a thing or two. He'd shown it to them good. When you're at war, you do what you have to do and damn the consequences, if there are any consequences. You do it because it's right, because it's what's necessary for survival, and that makes everything all right.

Nobody had ever come after him for shooting the telephone, and he'd called the people at Skyline Telephone Membership Cooperative, giving them plenty of warning he was going to do it if they didn't give him a private line.

"I'm damn tired of everybody on the Creek listening into my telephone conversations," he told a Mrs. Triplett at the co-op's office.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But that's just part of having a party line. There's nothing we can do about it."

"You can give me a private line."

"I'm not sure we can do that."

"You do it or I'm going to blow this damn telephone into Avery County."

"I'll look into it, Mr. Clarke."

Two days later she called him back. "We can put a private line in for you, Mr. Clarke."

He smiled into the receiver. "Fine. Do it."

"It's going to cost two hundred dollars to run the line up the Creek to your place. We've got nothing but party lines running up there now and this would be quite an additional expense."

He choked. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money, but it would be worth it to get rid of the snoops on the party line. His mother. Loy Harmon. Clemmie Ward and his wife Lucy. All the rest of them. It would be worth it.

"I still want you to do it."

She paused for a moment, then he heard her speaking, a smile in her voice.

"The monthly charge will be somewhat higher than you're paying now."

He stiffened, waiting for her to finish.

"It will be fifty dollars a month."

"Then I don't want your goddamn phone anymore." He slammed the receiver down, pulled the phone out of the wall, threw it in the back yard and blew it apart with his thirty-thirty, sending the remains to the co-op's office in care of Mrs. Snotnose Triplett.

He went without a phone for several years after that, until his son, Bobby, had his disconnected for failing to pay his bill. He gave his useless phone to Grady, who had Essie call the co-op and have their service restored.

"I beat them sons-of-bitches. I showed them good," he said. "They'll never get a damn penny out of me for shooting that phone."

He'd won his war with his doctors in Winston-Salem, who now pointed him out to all the other doctors as the toughest rooster in all the Carolinas, everytime he went down there for a check up. Not one of them could understand why he was still alive. But he was alive and he was goddamn going to stay alive and he was goddamn going to keep every inch of land that was his.

He watched Loy coming up the road, as he did every day, stopping by the walk leading from the gravel road to the porch, where Grady sat relaxing in the cool Appalachian air.

"Hidy, Loy," Grady said.

Loy, small, round and nearly blind, squinted through his quarter inch thick glasses, his head tilted slightly to the left, brow wrinkled in confusion, as though he wasn't sure who it was and was trying see the speaker's face, even though this was part of their daily ritual and Grady's voice hadn't changed in sixty years.

"That you, Grady?"

"Who in the hell else would be sitting on my porch saying hidy to you?"

Loy shrugged and Grady asked him to come sit a spell. Loy accepted, as he always did, and they sat on the porch talking about the weather and gossiping about the other people living along Clarke Creek, who was drinking too much, who wasn't taking good care of their crops, who owed H. Mast, down at the store in Valle Crucis, and wasn't paying up. Grady, as usual, found an excuse to rant briefly about Clemmie and his land stealing ways, and Loy nodded, saying he was exactly right, you never could trust those Wards. Why, he could remember his daddy, Calvin Harmon, saying that Clemmie Ward's daddy, Jack, was a liar, a chicken thief and a card cheat.

Grady knew it all was true. His own daddy, Ben Clarke, had told him stories about Wards going back three generations, when the first Ward moved on to Clarkes Creek. Before that, the story went, only Clarkes had lived in the holler. Then, one day, the Wards had mysteriously come. Nobody knew from where, or why, but suddenly there had been Wards on the Creek, looking at everybody's land. They notched up log homes and declared war on the Clarkes by disputing their land boundaries, trying to claim as their own, land the Clarkes had owned since Watauga County was settled.

Since then, Clarkes had been talking about shooting any Ward who set foot on their land. No Clarke had fired a shot, even though many Wards had crossed the creek and been yelled at, threatened and, on one occasion, picked up and thrown back to the Ward side of the creek. Shooting was something to talk about, not to do. If there had been shooting, everything would change and life on Clarkes Creek could never be the same.

They talked on, until Essie came out on the porch and announced dinner.

"Well, I guess I'd better get on up the road towards home," Loy said, as he had said every night that summer.

"Now Loy," Grady said. "You just stay here and have dinner with us."

"I couldn't do that, Grady. Why don't you and Essie come on up to my house tonight and I'll fix us all dinner."

"Essie's got dinner all fixed," Grady told him. "You just stay and eat here."

"No, I guess I'd better get on home."

"I won't hear of it," Grady said. "You stay here and eat with us."

At Grady's third invitation, Loy nodded. "I thank you Grady, Essie. I reckon I will stay, since you ask."

They went inside and sat down to a fine dinner with fried chicken, corn, biscuits and gravy, fresh red tomatos, lettuce, and greasy beans. Afterward, they returned to the porch, Grady chain smoking Lucky Strikes, cursing the muskrats and watching the stream at the end of his field.

It was a soft evening, a light breeze blowing up the holler, stars clear and bright above the surrounding ridges. Grady and Loy drank a couple of beers, then Loy thanked them again for dinner and continued up the road toward the house he shared with his sister, Buna, a nurse at the hospital in Banner Elk, who came back home only on weekends.

When Loy was out of earshot, Grady got himself and Essie a tumbler of white whiskey he'd been saving. Sipping it, he slammed his fist into his thigh.

"Son-of-a-bitch," he said. "Every damn night that Loy Harmon stops by here just at suppertime. I'm damn tired of him and his mooching ways. Tomorrow I'm getting rid of him."

Essie looked at him, barely able to make out his face in the light coming from the living room. She smiled, sighing softly. Another small war to keep him going.

The next night Grady watched Loy walk up Clarkes Creek Road, raising his small red clouds of dust. Clemmie stood in the middle of the field, thirty feet on his own side of the creek. He hailed Loy, who stopped and walked over, leaning on the fence running along the road. Clemmie joined him and they talked for a while before Loy started again toward Grady's house.

When he came even with it he stopped to say good evening, standing on the gravel road near the edge of the walk leading across the lawn to the house.

"I saw you stopped down the road talking to your cousin, Clemmie," Grady said.

Loy squinted up at him, his voice soft. "He ain't no cousin of mine, Grady Clarke, and you full well know that."

"You calling me a liar, damn you?" Grady stood as he spoke, leaning on a porch pole, pushing his long skinny body as far toward the road as he could without falling.

"Now Grady," Loy began, walking toward the lawn and porch.

Grady leaned out further, his body balanced on a seemingly impossible axis, poised between the porch and the empty air, Essie's border of white hosta below him. Loy, nearly blind though he was, saw the arrow of Grady's body ready to launch at him. He stopped, squinting toward the porch.

Grady's voice echoed against the hills.

"You stop right there, you son-of-a-bitch, calling me a liar. You put one foot on my lawn and I'm coming down off this porch and stomping three yards of that government relief peanut butter out of you."

Loy didn't move until Grady sat. Then his right foot came up, and turning, began moving his body on up the holler toward a house in which dinner had not been served for the better part of a year.