From "The First Day It Felt Like Spring"
It happened when Vernon was just getting to the point he felt confident. When he’d first been hired, the shop foreman had watched over Vernon like a stern guardian angel, helping him learn to measure the space between drillings by sight, watching him load the clampings to make certain there wouldn’t be any give when the bit strove into the wood. A stick of lumber not properly clamped could lead to a broken drill bit or, worse, a slung piece of wood. Either meant almost certain injury if not death for any man caught in the way. With the Depression’s effects creeping further and further south, the company could afford to replace a worker pretty easily, but things weren’t as easy for those injured.
Vernon had left home with his father’s blessing. Even with the TVA stringing electricity up into the hollows the farm hadn’t been producing what it once did, and besides, it had been decided a long time before that the farm would go to Vernon’s oldest brother when the time came. Not that he was complaining. His father had raised him up hard, but Vernon couldn’t say he’d been unfair. He’d let Vernon go to the valley school when he wasn’t busy with farm work. He’d taught him that a man couldn’t afford to worry about much other than himself and his family and that God made no promises that life wouldn’t test how much a man could handle. So, in the fall of his sixteenth year he’d taken a room at a house in town and found work apprenticing on the drill press, guiding a three-eighths-inch bit in its rise and fall for six to ten hours a day, depending on the orders.
And Vernon felt pretty good about the situation after the first eighteen months or so. He could guide a sanded table leg into the clamps and drill the dowel holes in less than ten seconds, all with hardly a glance at his fingers.
More importantly, getting on at the plant proved to Lucy’s daddy that Vernon could be trusted to care for a wife and family. He’d been courting Lucille Coffey ever since he got old enough to notice the little girl who liked to spend her idle time in the far corners of the Coffey farm, where a common fence was all that separated the two plots. He spent his days at the factory daydreaming about the way her hair looked like flax in the sun and how it fell in waves across her round shoulders when she felt free enough to let it down, and about how damn pretty her eyes were, like mirrors at first light.
And while living in town, Vernon still drove the forty-five minutes across the old wagon roads to the valley just to see her for a few hours on Sunday afternoons and the occasional summer evening when he could borrow the old Model A from his landlord. He’d almost saved up enough for an apartment to put their marriage bed in when the accident happened.
As much as he’s thought about it, Vernon still doesn’t remember throwing that wood. He remembers the day, remembers how it was just at the tail end of the summer of nineteen forty-one. It was upwards of ninety degrees in the open air, which would’ve put it at well over a hundred and ten under the rafters in the machine room. Even with all the windows open for ventilation and the fans running full, the entire room seemed choked with sweat and sawdust. He recalls how just in front of his drill, the dark sweat stain on the back of Fat Joe Miller started spreading like a bloodstain and the air seemed to swirl. Vernon remembers a particular sliver of dust, a splinter he saw in such detail that he was able to pick out each fiber in its natural weave against the gun-metal of the drill.
And then he was on the floor with bodies and faces pressing against him, and his leg was a knot of fire.
From "Strangers All"
The crash happened on a Saturday in June. Anne was sitting on the veranda sipping coffee with her copy of As I Lay Dying in her lap, waiting for Mark to call. She’d meant to open the book immediately, to make good progress that morning so she wouldn’t make a fool of herself when the Book Club met on Tuesday, but the truth was she’d been having trouble getting into it. There were too many characters, too much going on. It was like standing in a room amid a torrent of echoing voices, all dimly menacing.
It was the first book she’d read since coming back to the club, and a part of her wished that she’d waited until after they were finished with Faulkner. But David and the counselor were right. It was time to begin socializing again, to return to the clubs and her volunteer work. After all, hers wasn’t the only child who had run into difficulties. Karissa Frey had been expected to graduate as valedictorian of Mark’s class before getting pregnant, and now she cut hair for a living when she wasn’t down in Asheville doing God-knows-what. Yet that hadn’t stopped her mother from being elected to the Friends of the Library board. And while she wouldn’t admit it out loud, she was grateful that Mark wasn’t in Iraq, even if she still hadn’t seen him since the last time he’d been led from the courtroom. There had already been one casualty from Tucker earlier that spring; the local newspaper ran a front-page tribute complete with color photograph of a young man she hadn’t recognized smiling in his dress uniform in front of a backdrop of red and white stripes, dead of a mortar attack in Baquba.
Still, Anne couldn’t escape the lethargy that set in whenever she thought about fighting through another few pages of incomprehensible Mississippians, so instead she gazed at the trees growing up the face of Killdary. It was something she found herself doing more and more often, just looking at nothing in particular and letting thoughts come in and out of her mind like neighbors waving hello as they walked around the block. She watched the sun make its way above the side, and from where she sat it appeared almost like God’s face peeking over the mountain’s shoulder. Mark was supposed to call that morning as soon as the phone became free, but Anne had learned while he was still in the treatment ward at Morrison that it could sometimes take hours before that happened, a trend that had continued now that he was at Marion.
“Anne?”
Anne sat up and turned, causing the book to slide off her lap and land on the concrete with a noise that seemed much louder than she thought it should. “Yes?”
“Were you asleep?” David took a few steps towards her but stopped before he was within reach. In his hand was a file folder with the white edges of someone’s loan application peeking out. He’d been working a lot more ever since Wachovia had decided to enter the subprime market, spending hours sequestered in the study if he wasn’t downtown.
It was an opportunity; Anne understood that. David had survived the merger while simultaneously dealing with Mark’s trial, and if the branch turned a profit in this venture it would mean a promotion to the regional headquarters in Winston-Salem at least, possibly even a position at the big headquarters in Charlotte. He’d explained it all – the oak paneled office with a view of the city, the ability to pay off all of Mark’s legal expenses at once, a retirement home on the Outer Banks.
“No. Just waiting for Mark to call.”
“Well,” he said. “I’ve got to run to the office real quick. I’ll have the cell if you need me.”
“What about Mark?”
He exhaled in a way that, if he had been five years old Anne would’ve called a huff. “I’ve waited long enough,” he said. “Besides, I just need to run in for a few things I forgot to bring home yesterday.”
She nodded. Arguing wouldn’t make any difference. “Be safe,” she called as he slid the door closed behind him, the sun’s reflection changing the glass from transparent into a solid rectangle of white.