“L.Q. Navarro used to tell me there’re two kinds of friends you can have by the tote sack—the kind that find you when you’re in tall cotton and the kind that find you when they’re in trouble.”
“Boy, I wish I was smart and had all them things figured out.”
“You know what heartwood is?”
“Sure … What is it?”
“Some trees add a layer of new wood under their bark each year. The core of the tree grows stronger and stronger, until it’s almost like iron. Old-timers say they used to bust their axes on it.”
“Yeah?” Lucas said, his eyes wandering away from me now. Esmeralda was hanging her wash on the clothesline, her hair wrapped in a towel. “What’s that have to do with what we’re talking about?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll study on it and let you know,” I said.
“You’re a mysterious man, Billy Bob.”
I walked back to my car and did not reply.
My father was a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas, and when I was nine years old he took my mother and me with him on the line into the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. It was early fall and the canopy of the hardwood trees had already started to ruffle with red and gold all the way to the massive outlines of the Ozarks. My father wasn’t an overly religious man, but he made an effort to tithe and he wouldn’t normally drink except on Christmas and July 4. By chance the pipeline was shut down our last Sunday in the Winding Stairs and he took me with him to a camp meeting on the banks of a pebble-bottomed stream whose water was the color of light green Jell-O.
The choir was a string band, the preacher a rail of a man who opened his Bible as though to read, then looked heavenward with his eyes squeezed tightly shut yet never misspoke a line. The congregation shook and trembled and spoke in tongues and in the next breath ate dinner on the ground and off the tailgates of farm trucks. But those were not the images that defined for me that seminal afternoon of my childhood.
The banks of the stream had eroded sharply during a spring torrent, and the root systems of the overhanging trees trailed in the current like brown spiderweb. The trunk of each tree looked swollen and hard, the bark glistening and serrated, as though the root system had drawn the coldness of the water into the wood and filled it with a hardness that would blunt nails.
The preacher stood waist-deep in the current and dipped a fat woman backwards, the current sliding across her closed eyes, her white dress tied around the knees with a blue slash so it wouldn’t float up from her thighs.
“You up to it?” my father asked.
“I ain’t afraid,” I said.
“Don’t let your mother hear you using ‘ain’t.’ That water’s like ice, bud.”
“I been in a lot worse.”
I felt his large hand cup on the top of my head.
A few minutes later I stood barefoot on the pebbles, the coldness of the water sucking around my thighs and genitals, my palm clutched in the preacher’s. He leaned me back in the water and a vast green light seemed to cover my face and steal the breath from my lungs and invade my clothes and burn my skin.
Then, just as the preacher raised my face from the water, I opened my eyes and saw the trees arching overhead and the leafy green and yellow design they formed against the sky, and without knowing the words to circumscribe the idea, I knew I had entered a special and inviolate place, a private cathedral suffused with stained light that I would always return to in memory when I felt I was unworthy of the world.
While my father dried me off by a fire and put his old army shirt on me, the one with the Indianhead Division patch and sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve, I glanced back at the stream and it looked ordinary now, apart from me, dotted with half-immersed people whom I did not know.
“What kind of trees are those?” I asked.
“Heartwood,” my father said. “They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That’s what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you.”
His jaw was filled with a ham sandwich, and it seemed to swell into the size of a softball when he grinned.
20
One night every summer the town held a celebration for itself in our small amusement park and beer garden on the river. At sunset a brass band composed of musicians in straw boaters and candy-striped jackets struck up “San Antonio Rose” and someone switched on the Japanese lanterns in the trees, and the hedges and pea-gravel paths and concession stands and carnival booths took on the bucolic and softly focused qualities of a late-nineteenth-century painting. The social distinctions of the town were put in abeyance, and working people, college students, farmers, the business community, the mayor and his family, even Hugo Roberts and his deputies, all mingled together as though the following day held the same promise and opportunity for each of them.
Temple Carrol and Pete and I rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the bumper cars and ate cotton candy and strolled out by the dance pavilion that overlooked the river. The three of us sat on a green-painted wood bench at the top of a slope that was terraced with cannas and hibiscus and rosebushes and a rock-bordered pond whose goldfish were molting into the albino discolorations of carp. It was Pete who first noticed Peggy Jean Deitrich out on the dance floor with her husband, Earl, and when he did, he waved at her.
“There’s Ms. Deitrich, Billy Bob,” he said expectantly.
“Yeah, it sure is,” I said, glancing over my shoulder.
“Ain’t yo