CHAPTER ONE

John Harris rumbled his tractor up the steep hillside behind his barn. A Red Tail Hawk hovered in slow circles above the tree line at the top of the mountain. Its tail and wings pivoting against the updraft that keep it suspended in the sky.
He had come to the hillside in search of a missing cow and calf, hoping that they were just lingering by the pond. He heard the distant call of the cow as he dressed on his back porch and hoped that he would find the two alive. Earlier in the summer, the Surrat boys from down in Douglas Hollow had deliberately cut a huge section of his fence releasing the majority of his herd into the T.V.A land behind his property. After several days of searching, John managed to recover all but one heifer. A wildlife management officer found it on the red clay bank of Parsons Lake lying amid broken beer bottles and empty cigarette packs with a bullet in its head.
John found the distressed cow standing alone underneath the drooping branches of the willows, the rumble of the tractor catching her attention. She watched as the old machine stopped across the pond from where she stood, staring at the rider as he slid out of the hot metal seat, and walked around to where she waited. Stretching forward the thick muscles of her thick black neck, the cow bawled low and long, moisture oozing from her flared nostrils.
In the water, John saw the reason for her persistent calling; the white face of her calf was visible just beneath the surface of the pond, the thin folds of its ears bobbing above the water like the heads of two turtles sunning in the cool morning. John deduced that the calf moved near the edge of the pond and the earth had given way under its weight sending the young bull sliding down into the deep water.
“Well, shit.”
John walked around to the willow, the cow standing watch over her calf refused to move. Grabbing a handful of the long thin willow branches, John flicked them like a whip smacking the mother on her haunches. She bawled one time and trotted to the opposite end of the pond.
“Right there’s where you should have been all along, stupid.”
John looked down at the eyes of the dead calf, which were open and frozen in panic. The water was clear enough for him to see the right front leg of the animal wedged between a large limestone rock and the root of the willow, which emerged from the soil.
He lay down on his stomach in the tall damp grass and slipped his hand down into the cold water. Grabbing the dead animal by the neck, he tried to pull the ankle free from the root. Its head rose toward the surface, nostrils coming up just enough to send ripples across the surface of the pond. John wondered how many times this young one tried to reach the air before succumbing to the water that invaded his lungs.
The leg was wedged between the root and the stone, refusing to give.
“Don’t it just figure? Ain’t nothin easy?”
His primary chore for the day had been to clear the thick patches of honeysuckle vines and cedar saplings away from his fencerows, but the unexpected events of the morning forced a change in his plan. Frustrated at the prospect of spending the day trying to extricate the animal, he rose to his feet, picked up a rock and threw it toward the mother who ran away as the stone splashed into the muddy bank where she stood.
Climbing back on the tractor, John turned and headed back downhill toward the barn. He drove through the field and up to the gate, crossed over to the barn, and walked into the first stall. The small space, walled in with thick pegboard, created a tool room for the eclectic assortment of implements he obtained over time. Hanging by hooks attached to the boarding were devices for carpentry, masonry, engine repair and fence mending, purchased when the job at hand called for something specific. Some were old hand-me-downs; relics covered in rust and tarnish that held no practical use for him other than the sentimental connection to their history. Old mauls, planes, and axes last used when his Grandfather built his house hung like museum pieces. Among the collection were implements used to butcher hogs. One of the butchering tools was an old bone saw. Trusting that the teeth of the blade were still useable, John pulled the archaic blade from the wall and ran his thumb down the tarnished edge. Satisfied that the antiquated device could do the job, he grabbed a length of rope and headed back out into the sunlight, smacking out a cadence against his thigh with the saw blade.
A shrill noise coming from the direction of his house drew John’s attention and he turned to see the back door slam and hear his wife, Sarah, yelling her way through an outburst as she stormed across the back yard shooing chickens with a yardstick. She swatted at the hens with wide sweeping swings as if she were using a scythe and moved behind the fluttering white feathers that drifted round her like snow. She fought through the hens, disappearing into a pop up camper John had taken in trade for a rebuilt lawn mower and a box of spare bush hog parts. He nailed plywood to the sides and converted the collapsible structure into a hen house.
He shook his head as he watched her and crossed the gate back to the pasture, the sound of the panicked hens and Sarah’s ranting drifted from his thoughts as he fired up the tractor, and headed back out to the open field.
The dull witted Angus stood where he left her waiting for his return. He left the tractor and walked back around the pond and into the willows; huge green flies attracted by the cattle followed him, the dry whir of their flight circling around his head in the shadows.
He knelt down and peered into the water at the leg he was preparing to cut. Kneeling, he wrapped his hand around the handle and made cutting motions in the air before he lay back down in the grass he flatted earlier and lowered his arm into the water. Angling the saw blade against the calf’s leg just above the edge of its hoof, he pressed the teeth against the thick tuft of black hair, and drew his arm up toward the surface. Blood drifted out around the blade and mingled with the cold water as he finished the first cut and lowered the saw back down. Again, he pulled and felt the blade grind against bone, sending a chill up his spine. The saw blade was dull and he had to push his weight against the firm young leg bone as he worked the dead animal free.
Fifteen minutes of long, slow, draws with the blade and he was through the bone. He lowered the saw to finish his work when the oiled wooden handle slipped free from his hand, and he watched the wide blade rock like a pendulum, reflecting the light of the sun into his eyes as a part of his families history drifted to the bottom of the pond.
“Dadgummit!”
Angered, John grabbed the dead calf by the neck and jerked. The body and the hoof, connected by tendon and thick hide, refused to give.
“You ARE comin out of there!”
Bridging the full of his weight against the calf, he snapped the animal free, lifting the body to the surface. He gripped the animal by its soggy tail, pulling it around the pond to shallow water.
John walked back to the shade and sat down against the trunk of the willow, and watched the cold water as it cascaded down the mountain and into the pond.
Harris’s Mountain is a dank place shadowed by the canopy of Oak and Elm trees and moss covered boulders, unchanged in the many years since the drought. Everything around the springs is damp to the touch, dark stains covering the ancient stones that separate the springs. The cool mountain air is rich with the smell of decay.
Two springs slosh up through the dark earth at the peak of Harris’s Mountain, and in the drought-plagued summer of 1804, these springs were the only sources of fresh water in Douglas Hollow and Almos Harris defied anyone cross into his property to pilfer a single drop. Throughout the countryside that summer, buzzards grew fat on dead livestock, and the ground turned hard as if the whole of the world were made of hot brown stone. Harris built an arbor of white oak and cedar branches, perching himself above the two springs; watching for any who would dare venture near his farms salvation.
It was atop the huge sandstone and limestone boulders dividing the spring that Almos Harris killed his brother Nathan with a pickaxe. Almos’ younger sibling came climbing up the steep slope to talk his brother into giving him a access to the water for his family, but Almos had grown crazy. The fear of loosing his crops and his livestock pressed upon his mind so severe that he began to drink, the pangs of panic wound up within him like the the spring on a cocked gun. Nathan was no longer his brother as he pushed his way up the summit, In Almo’s eyes the young man was a thief, and death was the only to insure that he would not return.
Nathan Harris vanished that day. Legend in Douglas Hollow says that Almos disemboweled his brother and tied him to the trees between the two springs as a warning to anyone who came seeking water. Almos carried the truth of what happened between the two men to his grave.
Several hundred feet down the mountain, the springs converge, pooling in wallows created by wild pigs that roam the ridges tearing up the thin bark of poplars with their thick yellow tusks and digging their cloven feet into the soft ground.
The created stream rolls downward through the Laurel and Rhododendron, dammed in places where limbs and leaves have fallen, rotting, and turning slowly to humus. Hellbenders lurk in the cold water, lying in wait beneath smooth stones and drooping ferns, their thick, knotted bodies lay motionless until the opportunity for food draws them from hiding. Striking with their wide mouths, the fine teeth of the behemoths pierce the slimy flesh of toads salamanders, as they settle back into the safety of the shadows.
The water rushes over the fallen limbs racing toward daylight; the tree line thins opening rays of sun that dispel the darkness, glistening in the stream along its path downward into the high pasture tended by John, Almos Harris’s only surviving ancestor. The clear fresh water follows the rugged contour of the hillside, filling a pond that provides a source of fresh water for his cattle. Six generations removed and this water is still the life source of this place. The back lot was Johns favorite place to work, a secluded knob full of good shade with a full view of the Douglas Hollow as it cuts down into the earth toward Parson Lake, the high ridges on either side rolling in jagged waves as if the entire landscape had been created with a plow.
Across the pond from where he rested, a short square wall of concrete bordered with wrought iron, surrounded by dogwoods and poplars marked his family cemetery. The burial ground had been a part of his family’s history since Washington Harris’ body returned to after he died of consumption in a field hospital overlooking the battle of Franklin. Along side Washington’s grave and that of Almos, generations of the Harris family lay at rest. A people remembered only in the stories handed down through generations, the history of their lives reduced to a name and two dates chiseled into rows of moss and mold covered headstones. Among the old graves is a small stone with an engraving of a baby cradling a lamb in its lap. The words ‘Maggie, beloved child of John and Sarah Harris’ were chiseled above the child’s name and the dates honoring the short time she lived.
Closing his eyes, John listens to the wind hissing through the dry and dying leaves of the hardwood up on the knob, swirling in an endless dance as the warm air blows up the hillside from the lake. He knows that there is work remaining with the calf, but he is tired and so he sits and smokes and watches flies gather, buzzing over the carrion in the shallows of the pond. The Mother has wandered off and is scratching her neck against a black wrought iron post at the family plot.
“Wish I could just walk away from my troubles like you. Just walk away and scratch a spell and by the time I was done scratching, I’d have done forgot what it was I walked away from.”
He stands and stretches knowing that he must dispose of the calf and try to forget about the money he lost in its death. He pulls the calf from the water, ties a rope to its neck, and drags the carcass behind his tractor through the dry grass to a sinkhole beyond the pond in a place where the hill descends down into the T.V.A. property. His muddy boot pushes the body underneath the barbed wire, he crosses after it, scooting the calf the last few inches, and it tumbles over the edge disapearing into the dark. The rattle of old bones from previous deaths roll up into the sky as he slips on a pair of canvas work gloves and begins pulling vines away from the fence, working his way back over to the pond.
John moves down the fence finding a steady pace in his work. The sun is well into the sky, his body covered in sweat, his clothes clinging to him. He works past lunch, carrying armloads of weeds and vines up next to the pond, stacking them to dry.
Taking the baseball cap from his head, he submerges it into the pond and returns it, the water cool and satisfying as it runs of the fabric of the hat and rolls down the back of his shirt. He is hungry, but the thoughts of going down the hill to the house and facing his wife press him forward into his work. Within the walls of the house built by his ancestors is a trouble he tries to avoid, so he remains in his labor dreading the time of his return and the woman that will be waiting for him.
A nervous breakdown, schizophrenia was what the Doctors called her condition, has left him with a wife that is nothing like the woman he married. She rules over him with her psychosis and he moves through their home like a mouse afraid of discovery, changing himself to insure that his actions do not agitate her. Sarah’s unpredictable mood swings, and her wild delusions grew in severity each day, and he knows that unless Sarah changes, he will have no choice but to have her recommitted.
With the worry of Sarah and the financial burden of her care pressing down upon him, he returns to the fence line for the remainder of his day, wishing that the line of posts and barbed wire stretched on forever. Walking along the row, he pulls clumps of honeysuckle from around the posts and uproots a multitude of saplings, until he has a huge mound of vegetation wilting in the sun, which is now low and in his face as it descends in the direction of Lathansburg.
“That ought to do it till tomorrow”, he says wiping the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. Tired and covered with mud and deep green stains from the vines, he walks away from the pond and the waist high pile of weeds.
He climbs up into the hot metal seat of the tractor, drives down through the steep pasture, and heads toward the barn. He imagines how sweet the smoke will smell coming off the honeysuckle, the white and yellow flowers rolling up in the heat of the flames.
Weary of the rough ride of his tractor as it rolls over the uneven land of his bottom field, he watches the elongated shadows of he and his cattle stretch out before him. A few cows raise their head and watch as the huge back wheels push into the sod.
When John and Sarah first married, he worked as a house carpenter and kept no more than ten head of cattle to use as food and to supplement his income, but since his daughters death and Sarah’s breakdown, he has needed to be closer to see after his wife. Immersing himself fully into the land, he now keeps as many as seventy head of cattle grazing, as well as his garden, chickens, and hogs.
John was glad to reach the last small rise in the pasture, and longed for the refreshing satisfaction of a cold shower, when the shining tin roof of his house came into view. The house is a tall narrow place with a kitchen jutting out twenty feet behind connected to the rest of the home by a long narrow hallway. When his grandfather was a boy, the kitchen stood separate from the house to keep the heat contained in the summer, and remained separate until John built the hallway before he and Sarah were married.
Sarah stares out at him through the bare kitchen window; she is rigid at the sink, her eyes fixed upon him, the light from the evening sun slashing across her face in long lines as shadows from the maple trees in the back yard dance across the panes. Out of habit, he raises his hand and smiles as their eyes meet, but Sarah turns away, her image disappearing into the glare of the glass. He shakes his head in disgust, fans his arm at her as if he wanted shoo her away, he removes her from his mind and turns the old tractor into the open doors of the barn.
Turning off the ignition, John lets the machine coast to a stop in the darkness. The sputter and choke of the pistons urge the engine on for a moment, and falls still. Trotting up behind him, with tail wagging and head bowed low is Roscoe, a tri-colored hound of mottled pedigree given to John and Sarah when their daughter Maggie was born. A creature of habit, the old dog knows that quitting time for his master is feeding time for him and he shifts from one side of John's huge frame to the other as his master slides his huge body out of the seat and walks over to a large bag of dog food. He pours the dry chunks from the huge green bag into a cracked Pyrex mixing bowl Sarah intended for the trash. A tender pat on the dogs back and John walks out of the barn, squinting as the final bright rays of sun fall across his face.
Sometime during the day, Sarah hung a pair of sweat pants and a tee shirt across the rail of the back porch. Beside the flannel blanket his hound used as a bed, was an old pillowcase Sarah set out for him to fill with his dirty work clothes. To Sarah cleanliness had become an obsession and she forbids him to come inside with the day's dirt falling about him as he walks through the house.
Fatigue caught up with him and he sat his tired body on the top step. He pulled off his soggy cap and ran his large fingers through a thick mat of black hair, flecked with a hint of gray around his temples. It seemed that because of the greasy film of sweat and soil that covered his body, he could scratch and rub for hours. The exhaustion that comes from hard work pressed upon him and as he wound down from the events of the day, he thought again about the money he lost in the young bull, and made a mental note of the jobs that were waiting for him tomorrow. The work was a strain on his body, mind, and spirit, but he found satisfaction in the husbandry of the farm. Tough as it was, this place defined him.
The transition was difficult when he began farming full time. He knew the constant gamble of farming; no guarantee of a steady paycheck and a tug of war between helplessness and faith as he fretted over the uncontrollable things like weather and the fickle movements of the seasons. To be home watching over Sarah was the most logical thing to do and he felt good about his choice if not the struggle of his relationship with her. The land became his therapy and he could not imagine his work consisting of anything else.
Standing, he eased his legs straight, his knees felt as though they were dry bone against dry bone and he used the handrail to steady his huge frame. With some effort he managed to peel his huge body out of the sweat soaked blue jeans, stripped down to his underwear, and fumbled with the navigation of his legs into the sweat pants.
"Shame that a man's gotta humiliate himself strippin off naked in his own yard after a hard day of work. I guess it could be worse, I could be in somebody else’s yard."
Feeling as if someone were watching him, he glanced at the small portion of the main road that shown through a gap in the pine trees at the corner of the house. Roscoe sat just inside the open barn door his eyes fixed in the direction of his master.
"Well, I reckon that if it’s just you a lookin, it ain't too much to be ashamed of now is it?"
The dog wagged his tail across the powdery dirt of the barn floor sending clouds of dust drifting up behind him.
Having redressed, John turned and opened the back door. The strong smells of ammonia and bleach engulfed him as he stepped inside.
"Smells like a damn hospital in here." He said, and then regretted that he had allowed his tongue to break free from his better judgment.
Sarah stooped over the kitchen sink, digging dirt from the molding around the white porcelain basin with a toothpick. Her fingers red and raw gripped the frayed piece of wood, her thin frame lurching back and forth with each stroke. She seemed oblivious to John’s presence in the room, so he resigned himself to head down the hall and upstairs for a much-needed shower, regretting that he had come through the door.
"I want that thing out of here John!” Sarah said as he walked past. She did not look in his direction.
"What are you talkin about?" John felt the familiar nervous roll of fear in the pit of his stomach. She was agitated and John was the target of her rage.
Sarah stood up, laid the toothpick on the counter, walked around the kitchen table opposite of her husband, and made her way over to the hallway. Her eyes stayed on him, untrusting and fearful.
John watched her as she moved to the closet below the stairs and flung open the door. With her long thin finger, Sarah pointed into the dark space.
"That gun is what I am talking about!"
"I've told you before Sarah, I ain't getting rid of that shotgun. Daddy gave that to me and I ain't parting with it. Besides, theys been groundhogs digging under the house, and if they go unchecked, the foundation is as good as gone. Besides they are about to drive Roscoe out of his mind. I need a gun if I'm gonna kill 'em."
"Kill that dog is what you ought to do. I have half a mind to poison him myself. Every time I walk out into that back yard, he looks at me and I know he is planning to eat me if he gets half a chance. You love that dog more than you do me anyway."
"Sarah, we were given that dog for Maggie."
Sarah stood rigid and silent, the rage shown like a wildfire in her eyes. They looked at each other in the stillness of that moment and both stood bare to the source of their division. The difficulties that brought such a change in their marriage led directly to the death of their daughter Maggie. He was certain that if she were still alive, the nightmare that had taken control of his life would never have appeared.
"Don't you dare bring my baby into this."
"Honey, she was my baby too."
"She was my baby! You don’t understand. You can’t see what her death really means. You aren’t the one who has to live with the truth that you killed your own child. You just think that we will heal, move on, and everything will be fine, but I know better. You hate me and you got that gun cause you’re gonna kill me. I’ve been watching you John, and I know that God has been tryin to get you to kill me for what I done. You just haven’t got up the nerve to go through with it. You don’t hear what I hear, John. All the voices that are calling my name all hours of the day and night, and the things that wander through this house when you are gone. God is going to use you John. He’ll have you take me from this world when the time is right. Hell is under our house and God is going to put me there for what I have done!"
Sarah pushes past him and sobbing, runs down the hall to the kitchen, her hands digging at her blouse as if she were trying to rip the pain from her chest. John wants to go after her, to sweep her up in his arms and hold her, but the woman he longs for is long out of reach. Maggie was their only child and her death sent Sarah into such a spiral of grief and guilt that her nerves finally gave way. The breakdown has left her a different person.
Men with schooling on the subject, but with limited knowledge of their situation convinced him that she was on the path to wellness. Sarah had only been home for three months and life seemed to be getting back to normal, but one morning he woke to find her looking for Satan in the front yard. He managed to calm her down and get her back into the house, but from that moment nothing has been the same.
John knows he is reaching a point where he can no longer take care of her and that the best thing is to have her recommitted to the mental hospital in Knoxville. He was hopeful, but they did so little for her the first time, and he has captivated himself to the idea that he can help guide her back to wellness, clinging to the optimism of her recovery. Sarah’s mind has encapsulated her within the belief that she is to blame for Maggie’s death and she walks through the day consumed by memories and visions that are painful and run to deep within for her to shake.
Sarah’s footsteps move across the kitchen floor, and John hears the splash of cleaning chemicals on the counter around the sink. Consumed by the hopelessness of the situation, John goes over to the closet and pulls his Fathers shotgun from where it is leaning just inside the door. Standing with it in his hands, he entertains the thought of turning its long, dark barrel on himself.
"Don't be foolish old man. Nothin justifies doin that. God ain’t brought you this far for you to go and take a step like that."
Walking into the living room, he listens for Sarah in the hallway. Hearing her mumbling to herself in the kitchen and the course sliding of a scrub brush, he walks to the middle of the living room where he can see down the hall and slides the shotgun underneath the couch. Moving quickly, he walks back down the hall to the kitchen and out the back door where his dog rises from its red flannel blanket wadded up next to the steps. Sarah, manic in her cleaning, ignores him as he closes the door behind him. Outside, John sits down and drapes his arm across the back of the dog that has met him at the top of the stairs, standing guard beside him, leaning his weight against his master.
"I've always got you, ain't I buddy? Sometimes I get the feeling that I'd be better off if I was you."
A breeze brushes across his face, full of the earthy smells of the farm. He looks out across the fields behind his home and at the tops of the tall trees swaying in the wind at the top of the knob. The pace of the farm brings peace to him and he finds himself starting his days earlier and working later in an effort to avoid the conflict that awaits him. Tears well up in John's eyes and the weight of his life, as it has become, presses down on him like a yolk. His marriage has become a burden that he never thought he would have to carry. In times past, his life with Sarah was all he wanted, and there are still days that the former joy, for an instant, is fresh enough in his mind that he can imagine the elation of its returning.

John did not see what happened to his daughter. Unable to avert the tragedy, or make a single move to save his child, he has replayed the events of that day many times in his mind, searching for something that he could have done differently as if he could somehow change the outcome. One change of plan, one slight deviation from the normal routine of the farm, and perhaps his daughter would still be alive.
He had just stopped for lunch and was coming back up to the house from the mailbox. It was a hot, muggy Saturday morning and his clothes were already damp and gritty, his inner thighs chaffed by the constant rub of his sweaty blue jeans. The front fields needed mowing for hay and John tried to decide if the weather would hold out until he could get it done. It had been an unusually rainy summer, and though no dark clouds threatened, they could move in fast. Better by his estimation, to go ahead and get the work done than to sit looking out the window all night worrying about how the weather would be tomorrow.
His plan had been to start his mowing, but that morning his day’s itinerary changed when Bascomb Douglas found one of John’s cows that the Surrat boys had freed grazing in his front yard as he left for work that morning. After he returned the runaway cow to the pasture, John spent the remainder of his morning looking for the break in the fence before another one wandered off. By the time he discovered the break, cut clean by human hands, the majority of his herd was gone.
He was within sight of the house when he heard Sarah’s scream. Looking up the hill, he could see Sarah running wild round the back yard searching in all directions for him, Maggie hanging limp in her Mother’s arms.
John ran up to the house, the cattle that remained looking up from their grazing as he sped past. He allowed the truth to descend upon him before he reached Sarah; the child she held was dead. John’s huge body vaulted over the gate and into the back yard entering the surreal world found only during moments of unfathomable tragedy.
Normally when John came home for lunch, Sarah and Maggie would be outside waiting for his arrival, his meal ready at the kitchen table. He would eat, play with Maggie for a few minutes, and then head back out and finish his day. However, on this day the future of two people broke free from the stable life they established. The passage of this moment leaving a scar that would never heal, one that only the two of them could see, their love forsaken with the better of their days.
Often after supper, when the weather was warm, they would put Maggie to bed and go out to the front porch swing, talking until the sun had finally fallen behind them and across the distant crest of the Cumberland Mountains.
Sarah would bring out a quilt John’s Mother made them as a wedding present, and they would wrap up together. John would drape his huge arm around her fragile shoulders and hold her close. He would point out constellations in the night sky and recall stories of pioneers who traveled through the hollow years ago, using the stars as their only guide.
Lulled by the gentle rocking of the swing and the security of her husbands arms, Sarah would drift off to sleep. John would fish a cigarette from his pocket and sit smoking in the darkness of the porch for a while before carrying her upstairs and putting her to bed.
After Maggie’s death, a change fell over Sarah. John was quiet with his sorrow, pressing through his grief by finding healing in his work. Sarah saw the tragedy as reason for her to believe that God created her for His own sadistic pleasure and that he was disengaged from any element of joy that she could find. She began hearing voices and hallucinations would send her chasing unseen vagrants through the house.
“I just can’t find a way in my mind to reach out to somebody who would let so much bad happen.” she said to Chester Pruitt, one of the deacons from the church John attended, when he came by on a ministry visit after Maggies death. John was appreciative, but the fact that Chester had never been to their house before and would never come again did not escape his memory.
The quiet of the house without the sounds of their child, left John and Sarah with only each other. They moved in avoidance of one another, making a conscious effort to preserve their own soul from the pain.
“John, how can you believe in Jesus?” Sarah asked him one night as he passed her in the kitchen; she glared up at him as he stopped short of the back door. He had two packs of cigarettes in his hand and was on his way to visit his friend Carl.
“I recon the question ought to be, how can you not.”
“Easy. Try living the life I have lived and it would be real easy to wonder whether he cared or if he was really out there somewhere.”
“You have got to have faith honey, you know that. Sometimes you just have to reach out even if it doesn’t always make sense.”
“Does God ever speak to you John?”
“What do you mean?” John stopped, laid his cigarettes and keys on the counter, and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Well if God does speak to his children, I guess I believe because he has been speaking to me. I thought at first that it was you in the house, but now I am pretty well convinced that it was him.”
John shifted in his seat and looked close into Sarah’s eyes. She smiled through tight lips and looked down at her hands as though she were ashamed of what he could see if he searched her to deeply and that he knew what she was about to say.
“He has been talking to me a great deal lately and has rubbed it in my face on more than one occasion that he doesn’t really care about me and that he hates me. God wants me to suffer and he took Maggie to get into my head. He also said that you are possessed and rule over the demons that live under the house.”
“My God Sarah, that’s crazy talk. You know better’n to say things like that.”
She burst into tears and stood quickly from the table. Agitated she began pacing, her body trembling, sobbing in deep, forceful wails that sent chills down Johns back.
On the third day of her emotional crash, Sarah cried so long and with such force, that she had become too weak to walk. She lay curled up in a heap in the doorway of Maggie’s room and moaned with pain, her eyes red, swollen, and matted. Reluctantly John called for help and the next morning an ambulance lurched up the long gravel driveway. Two young men came to the door; John signed all the necessary paperwork and motioned with his head in the direction of Sarah’s sobbing. The men went about their task and John sat on the couch burying his face in his huge calloused hands.
Sarah, much to John’s deep regret was committed to the East Tennessee state mental institution in Knoxville.
In the following weeks, John went through his days trying to live as if nothing happened. Entering the kitchen after work without changing clothes was liberating and he made it a point to go down the hall and up the stairs to the bathroom before he disrobed.
Carl and Juanita Massengale had John over for supper every night and lunch on Sundays. She would go up to John’s with Carl on Saturdays and do all of his laundry, making every effort to help him through the weeks without Sarah.
After lunch on Sunday, John would drive to the hospital and visit Sarah. They met in a common area, a few scattered card tables and metal folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle around a black and white television bolted to the wall. Orderlies brought Sarah to him, she shuffled in her pale blue housedress and shoes to a small table, and the orderlies who led her sat at a table across the room, sneaking whisky into their Pepsi’s and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on television while John and Sarah sat across from each other not knowing what to say. John would try and talk to her, but as the visit lingered she would cry and scream. The orderlies would take her away and he could hear her yelling, incoherent, down the hallway. One of the Doctors treating her recommended that it would be best if he not come to visit Sarah. Her mental and emotional wounds had proven to go much deeper than the death of their daughter, issues surfaced regarding her father and seeing John would slow her healing process.
Eight months passed before she was well enough to visit with him again; another three months would pass before Sarah was stable enough to leave. When she came home, Sarah moved as a stranger. She entered the house looking through the living room and kitchen as if she were a guest and had never been there before. Many days passed before she spoke the first word to John.
In the evenings, Juanita would drive supper up to them; the two would sit at the table, divided by casserole dishes, and an array of desserts that lined the white Formica counter next to the sink. The two ate, with only the occasional clink of their silverware against the plate cutting the silence. After dinner, Sarah would get up and go to their bedroom and she would remain behind its closed door until well into the next morning after she heard John get up from where he slept on the couch and leave for the day. Then she would go to the window and watch him until the evening came and they would be together again as foreign to each other as if they never met.