AN UNACCUSTOMED MUSIC
Jonathan closed his eyes and listened to the water. Whenever he crossed Dark Fork on the big chestnut log his grandfather had felled over the stream, Jonathan stood halfway across in his self-imposed darkness until he imagined he was falling into the roiling creek below and the water spoke to him. He would be on the brink of understanding the liquid language at the point he was sure he was toppling into the flood, then he opened his eyes to find himself still quite upright above it, and the water just noise again with sunlight flashing from its surface and glimmering among the rounded stones in its depths.
Dark Fork was named not for the shadows that cloaked it except at the height of a summer day, but for Jonathan’s great-grandfather, Edwin Dark, who first claimed the steep and stony land along its upper reaches where the creek roared and tumbled and plunged down a narrow, bouldered gorge, so sequestered from the sun by the high shoulders of mountains on either side, that most who knew of the place called it simply, The Dismal. The original human inhabitants of the area believed the Dismal was a way into the underworld, a place inhabited by ghosts and demons. Most would not even drink the water from the stream that flowed out of it, so they suffered Edwin Dark, pale and solitary, an outcast even among his own kind, to occupy his chosen acreage unmolested. When he seemed to thrive in a place where there was scarcely enough sun and soil to grow a scraggle of corn, they decided that Edwin must be himself a devil.
It was a mystery, even to his own descendants, how he ever persuaded the woman named Dream Eater to share his exile, or why her people would have allowed their improbable union. Each Dark generation made up their own stories about Grandmother Dream Eater, but the stories were more revealing of the imaginations of a clan of inveterate storytellers than of any verifiable history. Edwin’s children had children before the Darks knew by name the nearest neighbors of Edwin’s own race and saw little of them but chimney smoke on a winter morning when the trees were bare and one could see for miles down their cove. The Darks preferred their own company above all others, and unless they were in search of necessities like tools or wives, the Dark men tended to avoid places where humans gathered in numbers. They were honest, hard-working, not mean nor cruel nor greedy, but by no definition sociable. They were to a soul passionately contrary to anything ordinary. Their forbidding, inhospitable slice of the earth seemed to suit their perverse natures, and for generations the broader world left them to it.
Jonathan Dark, his elders decided, would be the first of his clan since Edwin to stay long and far from the forbidding country of their hearts. He had a scholarship to the state university in Asheton, two ridges away across the mountains south and east. Jonathan thus became the first among his kinsmen to be burdened with great expectations beyond discovering and becoming fully himself. He did not protest, but he did not wear his load easily. He suspected he might be about to participate in a life where he was passably good at all manner of things he’d just as soon not be doing.
Jonathan never anticipated the complications Starblossom Dorn would bring to his young life. She came to their homestead with her father who was inspecting a small tract of timber he considered buying from the Darks. Jonathan, as boys will do, made fun of her name. She told him her mother had named her after the weed that grew around their steps the morning she was born.
“What about you, then?” she said.
Jonathan puffed himself like a lovesick toad.
“I was named after the son of a king.”
“You’re too scrawny to carry around such a heavy name,” she said, all solemn and serious. “I bet I can beat you to that tree yonder.” She pointed toward an old pine across the yard and Jonathan took off for it. Despite his head start, the girl touched the scaly trunk first. Star laughed, and Jonathan stalked off into the woods, breaking any branch within reach he thought he could damage. He never looked back. He was afraid she would see his defeat glistening on his cheek.
Jonathan didn’t see Starblossom Dorn after that until he rode the bus down to the county high school at Drovers Gap and glanced covertly at the dark-haired girl assigned the seat next to him. By then she had blossomed into a ripening young woman. The sight of her slender neck curving up between her collar and her hair rendered him as breathless as their childish race.
Starblossom caused Jonathan to be suspended from school in his junior year, though she didn’t know it at the time. He watched her from afar, never daring to speak to her, or of her, to anyone. She for her part, appeared to him oblivious to males. Her only observed conversations were with friends of like gender. Jonathan knew that boys were watching her. It rankled him that some would speak of her as if she were a young ewe or heifer awaiting inspection at a stock auction.
When Jason Embers nodded toward Starblossom in the lunch line one day and snickered, “My boys, would I like to poke around in that now,” without a thought Jonathan hit him square in the face. Jason was by good measure the heavier. He would have doubtless wiped the floor with a Dark mop but his tray flew at the blow. Jason slipped in the wet of his spilled milk and went down, cracking his head on the corner of a bench and rendering himself unconscious. Fortunately, no lasting damage was done. Jason spent a few days at home recuperating from a mild concussion, and both combatants were suspended from classes for a week. When they were allowed back, after stern warning and threat of permanent expulsion in the event of recurrent hostilities, neither ever mentioned the incident again, and their friends feared to bring up the subject in their presence. The altercation only ensured that Starblossom remained studiously incognizant of both participants. When Wallace Keller, son of Drovers Gap’s only practicing attorney, took a polite fancy to her, she encouraged his attention, and Jonathan gave up whatever hopes he might have nurtured to ever find her favor.
~
No real road led to Dark Fork from anywhere. A rough track barely fit for a tractor provided their tenuous connection with the larger world. The school bus stopped where this trail met the county road two miles down the mountain, and Jonathan and Starblossom walked home from there. Every day, she would charge ahead, daring the boy to keep her company, and Jonathan would hang back, content to catch a glimpse of his heart’s desire at every bend. After a mile, he passed her house, and his long legs made better time the rest of the way. One rainy September afternoon, Starblossom slipped getting off the bus and fell sprawling in the mud, ruining the new dress her mother had made for her, and sending her books and papers flying across the puddles. The driver, a scrawny old bootlegger named Silas Sykes, looked out the door,
“Youns all right there?”
Starblossom limped to her feet, wiped futilely at her muddied dress, and with tears tracing down her face, answered in a voice trembling with more rage than hurt,
“Don’t you mind, Sykes, I’m fine.”
Jonathan stepped down behind her. Silas closed the door, and the younger children pointed and laughed as the bus pulled away. Without a word, Jonathan gathered up the scattered books, put them back into her bag. When he saw she was in pain, he shouldered the bag himself and held out his hand.
“Don’t you touch me, Jonathan Dark,” she spat at him, angry for no reason except he had been witness to the spectacle she had become.
“Touch me, then. You’re hurt,” he answered. Starblossom put her hand on his shoulder, and they hobbled away up the path until Jonathan saw a sapling small enough for him to cut with his pocketknife, but stout enough to keep his companion upright.
“Wait,” he whispered. When he handed her the walking stick, carefully cut and trimmed, they went on. Starblossom didn’t protest when he put out a hand to steady her on a rough patch, or when, once they reached her house, he carried her books to the porch.
“If you’ll wait up on me Monday,” he said, “I’ll tote your bag for you to the bus, only if your foot ain’t better, understand.” Starblossom offered no word at all but met his gaze and nodded. Jonathan went on his way back to the Fork, sensing that something had changed between them, without any vague notion of exactly how or what. The two days between Friday and Monday stretched longer than long. He thought Starblossom, muddy and lame and angry at life, more beautiful than ever he’d seen her.
Jonathan Dark never meant to hurt anyone. Even after it was over, he could not have said who took advantage of whom. When Starblossom invited him on a picnic, an afternoon in her company was all that was in his mind. They spread their food on a flat boulder beside the little waterfall above the crossing log over Dark Fork, just beyond sight of the path. The first kiss was Starblossom’s idea. The second was Jonathan’s. Their swim in the pool at the foot of the fall was a conspiracy. Afterward, they lay in the sun drying on the warm rock. Starblossom’s taut breasts and flat belly drew Jonathan’s gaze until he could see nothing else.
He reached over and lay his hand in the hollow just beneath her ribs and felt her life under his palm, throbbing and surging like the stream beside them. When she took his hand in hers and pushed his fingers down to the moist nest between her thighs, they turned to one another and lost themselves in mutual exploration and ecstatic discovery.
Jonathan Dark was walking Starblossom Dorn home one last time, although this trip, there were no books to carry. “What have I done wrong, Star?”
“It’s Starblossom. You know that. My name is Starblossom.”
Jonathan, frustrated almost to tears, willed his voice steady as he answered, “but you were my Star, and I was your Jonny until graduation. Then all summer you treat me like a stranger. What did I do?
Starblossom’s face flushed. “You’re going off to college. I’m staying here. Everything will change now.”
“But I’m coming back. We talked about that. We’ve given ourselves. I’ll always come back to you.”
Starblossom shook her head, looked away, wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Go and forget about me. I would only hold you back.” Jonathan would have said more, but Starblossom ran on ahead. “Go. Leave me to myself!” she shouted at him without looking back lest he see her terror streaming down her face.
Jonathan threw up his hands like a plea for heaven’s intervention, but he did not run to catch the fleeing Star. It wasn’t anything you did, my dear foolish boy, Starblossom screamed inside herself as she ran. It was what we did that day. It was our only day. I wish now there had been others, that I could carry more sweet memories to my end.
When she reached her house, Starblossom kept running. Nobody was out to see her pass and call her back. She ran until her chest ached and her stomach hurt. She pressed against it with her hand. Her stomach always hurt of late. She kept it bound tightly so the life growing inside her wouldn’t be public. She walked on until she came to the log across Dark Fork, and once across, she left the path and made her way up to the little waterfall that had witnessed her undoing. She was still sitting there, adding her own dark tears to the flow of the Fork, when Jonathan crossed the creek later. She heard him stop and call her name. She didn’t answer, though she half-wished she had after she heard him walk on up the path toward his own Darks.
Starblossom was not ignorant of her own body. When the moon had turned twice without drawing her blood, she confided her fears to her friend Martha. Martha whispered the name of Lizzie Charon. The old herb woman lived up on a high bald accessed by no road at all, just a single trace for two-legged or four-legged beings afoot. Starblossom knocked on the door and waited. While she summoned nerve to knock again, it opened, and a wizened face appeared out of the shadows beyond. Starblossom would have turned and fled away home, but two eyes bright and sharp as a hawk’s nailed her fast where she stood. Lizzie’s thin mouth shaped something resembling a smile, radiating unfathomable calm while she held out her hand. When Starblossom took it, Lizzie led the girl into her dark little house and sat her by the fire, then sat herself before her guest, their knees nearly touching.
Against the silence, the flickering fire sizzled and cracked and sighed like a flock of starlings taking flight. Other eyes than Lizzie’s were watching her from the shadows in a corner, throwing back at her the hot glow from the hearth. A large hulking bird, an owl perhaps. She couldn’t tell. Her heart raced and her breath shallowed on the verge of panic, then slowly she began to settle into Lizzie’s peace. She stilled and waited, patient beyond expectation. After a minute or an hour, the Herb Woman spoke,
“Was it love or lust? Did he force himself?”
For no reason she could think, Starblossom wasn’t surprised that Lizzie seemed to know without asking why she had come. She felt that she was seen through and through by this old crone, that there was no way now to be but honest. “I invited him in. Had he not been so willing, I might have begged him for it.”
“And has young Dark refused his child?” Starblossom had left all her secrets at the door.
“He doesn’t know, and I can’t tell him. He would come to hate the burden of us.”
When Lizzie reached out and touched her knee, a warm current welled through Starblossom, resolving in tears. Lizzie leaning close enough that Starblossom could feel her breath, whispered, “and will he love you longer if you pluck from life the fruit of all his longing for you?” Starblossom stared at the old woman. Lizzie drew back and shook her head. “That is what you want from me, isn’t it? I can’t give you what you’ve come for. You took to yourself a right-hearted young man. He wants no more than to be true to you. Deny him that, whatever you think it might cost him, and there will be no end in this life to his hurt or yours.”
“But you don’t understand,” hissed Starblossom. “He’s leaving Dark Fork.”
“Then you best go with him if he does. Go or stay wherever, you will be together.”
Starblossom stretched out her hands, knelt like a supplicant at a chancel rail. “Please help me. Please?”
Lizzie took the young hands in her old ones and stood, her own eyes glistening with tears when she said, “I’ve given you what I have. Let your Jonny give you what is your right and his.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I will not hold him back from his life.” Choking on her sobs, Starblossom ran out the door. As she fled across the yard toward the concealing trees, she heard Lizzie’s door slam behind her. Whether it was the old woman, or the wind that closed it, Starblossom didn’t know or care.
Lost in the song of the little waterfall, Starblossom played her visit to Lizzie over in her mind. The old woman had helped others, why not her? She knew Lizzie was right. If she told Jonathan about their child, he would abandon his dreams and stay to care for them both. But his family would judge she had ruined his life. The Darks kept long score. At every given opportunity, they would remind Jonathan of all he had sacrificed for love and pity’s sake, until at last he would come to agree with them that Starblossom, or any woman, was unworthy of such cost.
“No. I can’t,” she whispered to the gathering dusk. She took off her dress and folded it neatly on the rock beside her. Her sister had envied her for it and could have it now. Then Starblossom slipped into the pool, and when she had accustomed to the chill, lay back into the dark water.
When he felt his vertigo build to certainty, Jonathan Dark opened his eyes. As he expected, he was still upright on the chestnut log. Below him, flashing amid sunstruck waves and ripples, the bright stones of the creek bed, and among them, brilliant under the morning, an object he recognized even before he fetched a branch from beside the stream and snared it to his hand. He held it a moment, dangling from its broken chain, the locket he had given Starblossom for her birthday, back in the spring. “So, she thought no more of me than that,” he said aloud to the day, and threw the trinket as far down the creek as he could.
This seemed to be Jonathan’s day for rejection. He had planned to tell Star today what he told his family the night before, that he had never wanted to go to university, and wouldn’t. After a long silence, his father said, “You’re old enough to be your own man. But you’ll have to do it someplace else.”
Jon had anticipated this turn. Jason Embers was working on a carpentry crew in Poplar Spring, building summer houses for rich people, and said there was a job there for Jonathan if he wanted it. Jonathan broke into a loping run. He didn’t want to miss the bus to Poplar Spring.
Drowning turned out to be not so easy as Star imagined from the picture of Hamlet’s Ophelia in her literature textbook. She heard thunder from a storm somewhere beyond the ridge as she settled into the cold creek. While she contemplated her final act, the water was rising. Somewhere up the mountain the deluge had already commenced.
As soon as the cold became tolerable, Star held her breath, closed her eyes and slipped beneath the surface. She thought it would be quiet underwater, but she could hear the rush and tumble of the stream loud in her ears. She opened her eyes, let out her breath, watched the last of her life bubble past her face and sail away on the current. Her world reduced to a green murmur. A vacant peace blossomed in her mind. She was ready now.
But the first flood of water through her head and throat propelled her sputtering and gasping toward the light. If she wanted to die, some soul within her pined to live. Star scrambled and grasped, fell and floundered, barking hands and feet, elbows and knees. She fixed her eyes on the blue dress by the shore and plunged toward it, but the quickening stream swept her feet out from under her and hauled her downstream. Something snagged her birthday necklace, and by the time she reached for it the chain had parted, and it was gone. The footlog across the fork passed over her like the shadow of a huge bird, wings spread wider than her vision.
She might have drowned as she had plotted had not a mossy boulder midstream stopped her short, stealing her breath as it impacted her back. Star flailed blindly. Her hand caught a limb of a fallen maple tumbled crown-first into the water. She held on, found a purchase among the tangle for her feet, and as soon as she could see again, made her way branch to limb, until she gained the trunk. She lay with her face resting against the rough bark while the rain washed all her sins away. When the rising water touched her dangling palm, she inched along the nearly horizontal trunk until she reached the bank.
Shivering, gasping from the cold, all but naked to the elements, Star was nevertheless alive and glad of it. When she reached home, she climbed into the barn-loft and hid in the hay until she saw her father leave. Then she came down and limped toward the house to face her mother’s wrath and beg her mercy, having already abandoned all hope of forgiveness and restoration.
Showers slathered the windows off and on while the bus swung and strained between close hills along a road hugging a silty river, still high and boisterous from last night’s storms. By the time the dozen or so passengers were jostled to stillness in front of the courthouse in Poplar Spring, the clouds had broken and run away down a sky blue as a robin’s egg.
Jonathan filed off the bus with three other strangers to stand like mourners at a burial, waiting for the driver to retrieve their luggage from underneath the coach. A young woman with a little boy and a solitary old man received their belongings and walked away. The driver secured the luggage hatch, climbed back behind the steering wheel, and when he was satisfied the town was not going to grant him any paying passengers, closed the door and carried away the souls remaining in his custody who had better places to go.
Jonathan stood with his rucksack watching the bus swerve off through the town toward more mountains beyond. Then he turned and stared at this place where he could claim no belonging. He had no idea what he was supposed to do next, or why he had talked himself into coming here in the first place. He pulled from his pocket the wrinkled envelope bearing the scribbled address of Jason Embers. Clueless as to where to find his purported friend, Jonathan hoped it wasn’t too far to walk. He didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to waste on a cab.
He was still pondering where to start asking directions when the blast of a car horn provoked a momentary mingling of panic and annoyance. Behind him, a muddy Ford sat muttering in place next to the sidewalk. Through the cracked windshield, Jason’s sunburned face leered at him, the mouth bowed in a satisfied grin. Not for the first time, Jonathan suppressed an unreasoned urge to push that smile as far down Jason’s throat as his arm could reach.
“No, Ma, you don’t understand. I invited this. Jonny only did what I wanted of him. If he knew, he would throw his life away for me. I couldn’t bear that.”
Irene Dorn shook her head, “It wouldn’t be throwing his life away to take his responsibility for you. You have a life, too, one more than your own. You didn’t get into this fix without his help.”
“I can’t tell him, Ma. Not now. He’s just left for college.”
Irene held Star’s face between her palms, gazed intently into her daughter’s eyes, “You know what your father will do when he finds out.”
Star wondered now if her drowning would have caused less suffering than her life. “He would kill Jonny, Ma. Oh, what am I going to do?”
“For now, you’re not going to do anything. I’m going to write to your Aunt Margaret in Asheton. She will write back and tell me she is not well and needs someone to stay and help her cope for a while. I’ll show the letter to your father, and he’ll likely suggest that we send you to Asheton to watch after my sister. If he doesn’t, I will. My sister has experience of the world. You will be useful to her while you are there, and she will assist you through your present difficulties. But, Star…”
“Yes, Ma?”
“Sooner than later, you are going to tell Jonathan Dark what he has done for you and give him a chance to be a proper man. Do you understand me, girl?”
“I understand, but Ma…”
“No buts and maybe’s left to you, daughter. You’ve played away your choices. All you’ve left is necessity. Now go clean yourself up and get on some proper clothes before your father gets back here and sees you so ungathered. While you tend to your state, I’ll make you some soup. You’re shivering, pale as a bone. It wouldn’t do to have pneumonia achieve what the creek didn’t.”
Starblossom Dorn pulled the old quilt tighter around her shoulders and stared at the fire. She was emptied now of all will and questions and hope. “Yes, Ma,” was all she had left to say.
~
Jonathan Dark opened his eyes and stared at the rose vines twining up the wallpaper for a full five seconds before Jason Embers’ snoring from the bed across the room confirmed his situation.
Charlene Edgerton, their landlady, seemed skeptical at first, when her sometimes boisterous and perpetually late-paying boarder introduced his friend from over the mountain. Jonathan’s shy charm eventually wore down her caution. Jason had a spare bed in his room. For an extra twenty dollars a month, they could share the room.
“Remember,” the old woman said, struggling to look sterner than she was accustomed to presenting herself. “No liquor, no girls, no loud music. I keep a quiet and restful house for hard-working decent people who need their night’s sleep. Breakfast is at seven. If you’re late, I can’t promise more than a cold biscuit.”
Jonathan looked at the big clock ticking on the dresser. He had fifteen minutes to prevent a cold biscuit. When he turned the faucet in the bathroom, air in the pipes set a grand thumping in the walls, immediately answered by a shoe or a fist pounding against the other side. When his face was clean, Jonathan stared through his headache at his reflection in the mirror. He’d have to shave after breakfast. Clothed and on his way to sustenance, he passed Jason, still sitting groggily in his bed.
“Save me some,” he said as Jon closed the door behind him.
Last night, Jason had been intent on showing him the town, even though Jon was more eager to get acquainted with his bed, and Jason had insisted on buying Jon a few drinks at the bar down the street. Jon wasn’t a drinker. Two drinks had been enough to make him wish he’d kept his throat dry. Jon’s headache now was his sole souvenir of the evening’s festivities. He couldn’t remember what sort of concoction he’d imbibed but made a mental note to avoid it in the future.
Whatever it was, Jason had consumed in greater quantity, and it had put him in a hilarious mood, although he turned suddenly sullen when Jon tried to shush him coming into the house so they wouldn’t disturb Mrs. Edgerton. By the time Jon found the key in Jason’s pocket and unlocked the door to their room, Jason was leaning against the wall, snoring softly to himself. Jon guided him to his bed, and Jason collapsed face down to lie like a dead dog until morning.
Starblossom Dorn waited by the road nearly an hour before the bus rounded the curve, and when she raised her hand, slowed and sighed to a stop. She picked up her suitcase, heavier than when she left home that morning, and climbed aboard, grateful her father had not been there to see her leaving. He would have been full of admonition and questions, would never have spoken the blessing Star wanted to hear, the blessing he would have bestowed freely had she been his son. It was easier to be gone without goodbye.
“Where you to, Missey?” said the driver, speaking as if she were a child rather than with child. For now, her secret was still hers to keep.
“Asheton,” she said, handing over a wrinkled ten-dollar bill from her mother’s cornmeal jar.
“You’ll have to switch buses in town, but you won’t need to wait long. Everybody’s on time today,” the driver said, handing Star her change. “I ought to stow that bag, but it ain’t far now, just keep it by your seat.”
Star folded her money in her purse, scanned the eight other passengers, nobody she knew. She took the nearest seat, had it to herself, and pulled her suitcase in beside her as she sat by the window. Before she had time to think on her transgressions or contemplate her future, the bus was jolting through the town, past the school where she would never set foot again, past the Methodist church and Owens Hardware and Sundries. For an instant, she thought she saw Jonathan Dark going into the store as the bus swept by, but she knew it couldn’t have been him. He’d be away at State College by now. A part of her life that she’d best pretend to herself she’d forgotten, although she knew she never could. The memory was growing inside her now day by day, becoming her future.
After the bus deposited her in Drover’s Gap, Star sat on the bench in front of the post office, courting the scant shade of an ailing maple, waiting for another bus to Asheton, and praying nobody she knew would see her sitting there. The driver said her wait would be about thirty minutes, and after twenty, Martha Thompson, her sister from another mother, the only living soul on earth who knew all Star’s secrets, waved from across the street, calling Star’s name loud enough for the whole town to hear.
“Blossom. Blossom, honey, how youns been, girl?” Star was glad there would be nobody in Asheton prone to call her Blossom.
At the first break in traffic, Martha darted across to Star’s bench, hugged her so tight Star wondered if she could feel the roundness below her ribs. “Where you off to? Martha blurted, without waiting for an answer. “You still sweet on that Jonny Dark?”
“I ain’t seen Jonny in a while, Martha. He’s off at State now, I reckon. Probably forgot all about this little mountain child already.”
Martha’s face clouded with puzzlement for an instant, then brightened, “I can’t say what he’s forgot, but he didn’t go to college. Jason Embers told me Jon might be working with him building houses for Cliffbilt yonder to Poplar Spring. You really haven’t seen him in a while, have you?” Martha eyed the suitcase, leaned close and lowered her voice, even though nobody else shared the bus stop, “You ain’t still in trouble, are you, Blossom?”
A bus turned the corner and started up the street toward them. The sign above the windshield said, Asheton. “I have to catch my bus now, Martha,” Star said. holding her suitcase with both hands in front of her, like a shield.
~
“Hey, Jonnyboy, You ready to go yet?” Jason Embers hollered even in the quiet. Jon thought his roommate might burst if he ever had to whisper.
“I’m going to stay in tonight, Jason. I have a letter to write.”
Jason hooted, slapped Jon hard between his shoulders, “I bet you’re writing to that Blossom Dorn, begging her to take you back.”
“I told you, there’s nothing now between Star and me. I’m writing to my ma. There’s no phones up on the Fork.”
Jason snickered. “You’re always writing to your ma. Why don’t you write to your dad sometimes?”
“He wouldn’t be interested.”
“Come on,” Jason said, “We haven’t done anything lately worth writing home about. I’ll buy the beer, unless you think you’re too good to drink with me.”
Jonathan sighed, finally looked up from the book he was holding, “I’m not the least bit good. I’m just tired. We go out every night and drink and talk to girls I don’t want to know, and I go to work next morning hung-over. That’s no way to live.”
Jason’s laugh sounded like rocks falling into a wheelbarrow. “You get to know them better, you wouldn’t have to talk so much. You ought to have been a preacher, Jon. You think it’s a sin to have a good time.”
“There’s lots of ways to have a good time, Jason.”
Jason put a hand on each shoulder, put his face close and stared hard into Jon’s eyes. “You know what, Mister Dark, sir, I think you just don’t want to be seen in my company.”
Jon pushed the hands away. Jason’s breath smelled like he already had a head start on the evening. Jon reached up, patted Jason on the cheek, a gesture calculated to irritate. “Let’s go, then,” he said.
~
The bus crossed the mountain only thirty crooked miles to Asheton, but to Starblossom Dorn, it looked and sounded and smelled like another world. She had been here twice before on school field trips, once to an exhibit at the art museum, and once to tour a stately castle proclaimed to be the largest private residence ever built in America. It was a grand and glorious ostentation, but Star’s reaction had been that it must be lonely to live in such a big house.
Aunt Margaret was waiting at the bus station. Star had been a child the last time she saw her aunt. She’d thought Margaret Boone the most beautiful and exotic human she’d ever encountered. Margaret still looked beautiful, but to Star, she also looked old. One Day, Star thought to herself, You’ll look just like that. The thought didn’t frighten Star at all. Old or not, Aunt Margaret looked like a woman who owned her life, and if family gossip was to be believed, she did.
Margaret took hold of her, hugged Star mightily, squeezing the breath out of her, then stepped back, beaming as if they were on their way to a party. “Look at you now. What a grand young woman you’ve become. You must be starving.” With that, Margaret took possession of Star’s suitcase and strode away, beckoning the younger woman to follow, “Let’s not stand in the hot sun all day, we’ve places to do and things to go.”
Margaret stopped behind a tan Plymouth, lifted the trunk and tossed in Star’s suitcase, then unlocked the passenger door and held it while she ushered Star inside, as if she were a chauffeur. “Watch your toes and fingers,” she lilted, and slammed the door hard enough to rock the car. Star sat bemused and unspeaking while her aunt went around and slid in behind the wheel.
“You have a car?” queried Star, finding her voice at last.
“No dear,” said Aunt Margaret, turning the key in the ignition. “But it’s too far to walk and this one looked nice. I thought we’d just borrow it for a while.” She glanced at Star, who clutched her seat and stared straight ahead as if she expected to be ejected from the vehicle. “Of course I have a car, dear. One has to get around, don’t you know. Everyone has a car.”
“We don’t have a car,” said Star, almost in a whisper.
“How quaint,” Margaret said, “why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess there’s just no place to go. Pa has an old truck, but it doesn’t run half the time. If we need to go to Drovers Gap, we just take the bus.”
Margaret kept her eyes on her road, reached across, patted Star’s hand and chatted on brightly,
“Well, Darling, in Asheton there’s more places to go than any sane mind would ever wish to. You’ll be wanting to learn to drive. I’ll get Robert to teach you.”
“Robert?”
“Robert is…well, Robert is a business associate and my closest friend. You’ll be seeing a lot of him. He’ll like you and you’ll like Robert. Yes, I think Robert would be an excellent driving instructor for you.”
“Why can’t you teach me, Aunt Margaret?
Margaret hit the brakes suddenly, stopping a foot short of the van halted just ahead. Star got her hands in front of her just in time to prevent her chest colliding with the dash.
“Because, dear one,” Margaret continued as if nothing had happened, “I’d very much like us to still be friends after you’ve learned to drive.”
~
“Don’t you want to talk to me?” the dark-haired young woman said, a declaration more than a question.
Jon looked up from his warm glass, still half full of beer, “Sorry,” he murmured, as much to himself as to the woman, “I don’t have a lot to say.”
She sighed, patted him on the arm, slid off her stool and wandered away through the smoky haze, trolling for more profitable prey. The cloudy air swirled visibly around her as she moved. Jon thought for just an instant of the mist drifting over Dark Fork after a rain. The smell here was different, though. Stale tobacco smoke, day-old sweat, rancid cooking oil and cheap perfume.
A chemically rendered blonde perched just down the bar, who had come in with Dark Hair, whose name Jon had already forgotten if she’d ever told him, apparently was still enraptured by Jason Ember’s extended exposition on all his heroic adventures in the building trade. Jon suspected she made a concerted effort to appear more interested than she was, and that she would continue doing so as long as Jason kept buying watered-down drinks for her.
Across the room, Dark Hair already sat at a table with another man Jon knew from work, bending close, hanging on his every word. Only she knew if she was laughing with him or at him. John was contemplating if he should have another beer or go back to Mrs. Edgerton’s house and finish his letter to his mother, when a womanly voice broke his concentration, “You don’t look happy to be where you are, Jonathan Dark.”
Jon jumped, nearly knocked over his glass, then almost toppled it again when he tried to grab it as it teetered on the verge of shattering disaster. He looked up into the deepest gaze he could recall, and Starblossom Dorn rose clear in his mind, near enough to touch, to smell. Jon felt the pieces of his broken soul spill out of him and fall tinkling into his glass, like ice.
“How do you know my name?” when he found his voice.
A slow smile that warmed his heart and chilled his soul. “I listen,” said the woman behind the bar. The eyes held him benignly enough, yet harrowing in their intimacy, knowing and oracular. The hair that might have been black in some forgotten day shone in the light like burnished pewter, long and dense, immune to gravity, caressing its owner’s face in a luminous cautionary cloud. The face itself, touched but not diminished by time, bespoke mysteries and adventures and secrets and powers. It might have once been a pretty face. Now it was simply beautiful. And for no reason he could name, looking at it made Jon afraid.
More accurately, it was the way she looked at him that unsettled. She gave him her attention without reserve, without judgment, without promise or expectation. She was simply and profoundly there, completely present and revealing. Jon found himself seen, knew all his secrets were escaped and discovered. If he was fearful then, he was also glad.
The woman behind the bar set two cups between them, took a battered metal coffee pot from someplace he couldn’t see, and poured them full. Jon watched the steam waft up above the twin darks, thought again of the mist above his river, and lifted his cup to drink. The coffee, rich and spicy, with a hint of bittersweet that might have been cocoa or chicory. Hot to the tongue but not scalding. He took a sip,
“But I don’t know your name,” he said.
“My name is Laurel,” the woman answered.
“Is that your real name?” he asked.
“That’s what you can call me. Nobody in this place could pronounce my real name.” She raised her cup, inhaled the vapor from the ebony brew, gazed at Jon over the rim, “need to talk?”
There was a lot then that Jon needed to say, but until this moment, he could never have found the words.
Aunt Margaret piloted her Plymouth away through downtown Asheton, along streets already thronged with tourists and nature pilgrims, between imposing art-deco buildings, survivors from a more illustrious and affluent era when the elite of arts and commerce congregated in the mountain city to enjoy the scenery, the moderate climate, and to hatch their capitalist plots. The writers and movie stars and millionaires had left with the onset of the Great Depression, and found more luxurious hideouts by the time it was over, but Asheton still drew the tourists, who were as enamored of her mountains and rivers as their parents and grandparents before them.
To Star, the town seemed as exotic and foreign as London or Paris or Rome.
What on God’s green Earth am I doing here. Aloud, she said, “Why did you come to Asheton, Aunt Margaret?”
Margaret stopped at a cross walk as a flock of uniformed Cub Scouts swarmed past, herded with small success by two frazzled den mothers. She laughed. Star wasn’t sure if at the spectacle before them or the memories in Margaret’s head.
“I’d have gone anywhere to get away from the Fork,” Margaret said, “Asheton was just the first stop on the way. But the bright lights caught my eye, and there were interesting people here in those days. Before I knew it, I’d caught the eye of one of them, and Asheton became the last stop on my journey.”
“Did he catch your eye, then?” asked Star.
Margaret laughed again. “It wasn’t a he, Dear. Robert came along later. By then, I’d become more pragmatic in my outlook. He didn’t catch my eye so much as his money, but there was more to him than I could see at first.” Star sat silent, gazing at the shop fronts passing by, the people clustered to them like bees to blossoms.
“Do I shock you? I hope you’re not disillusioned with your old aunt.”
“No,” said Star, “I haven’t had enough money to know much about it, but I’ve had enough love to realize it can’t be counted on for sustenance.”
Margaret laughed again, “a woman after my own heart. If you stay, we’ll try to find you enough of both to satisfy.”
Jason Embers hung his head over the edge of the roof and vomited. “Watch it up there, man,” a voice shouted from below. “Hey, that’s nasty.”
“Feel better now?” Jon said without looking up from the shingle he was nailing down.
Jason didn’t answer, just crawled across the slant of tar paper, picked up a shingle from his bundle, and added it to his row. After he’d secured three more, he muttered, “damn, I’m hot.”
Jon swallowed his laugh, “That’s what you kept saying to that girl at the bar last night. She might believe you now.” He regretted the impulse as soon as the words were out. Jason didn’t like to be teased about anything, and Jon knew from experience that he could carry a grudge for days.
Jason swiped his crimson face with a soggy sleeve, “I didn’t spend the whole night confessing my sins to an old lady,” he said dryly.
“I didn’t confess anything. We were just talking.” Jon kept working as he spoke. “Besides, Laurel isn’t that old, but she is a grown woman.”
“Laurel is old enough to be your grandmother,” Jason said, with a snicker, apparently feeling better now that he could focus his innate anger on someone in particular. “Did she give you milk and cookies?”
“She didn’t give me a hangover,” murmured Jon, “but she did offer me a job.”
Jason stopped his work, stared at Jon. “She need somebody to sweep floors?”
“She might. I don’t know. But she asked if I’d be interested in tending bar.”
Jason laughed at that, went back to his shingles, “what do you know about keeping bar? You won’t hardly even drink a beer.”
“Laurel said that anybody who likes to drink shouldn’t be keeping bar.”
Jason’s voice began gathering an edge, “Missy Laurel was just pumping you full of wisdom, she was. Did she offer you some lessons in bed?”
Jon’s face reddened in the shade of his hat brim. The thought had not occurred to him, but now that Jason had put it in his head, it seemed like a not unpleasant prospect. He answered, more loud and sharp than he intended, “she’s not that kind. I’m not sure she even likes men that way.”
Jason snorted, “maybe she prefers little boys.”
“We were just talking business, mostly,” Jon said, ignoring his friend’s baiting.
“Well, you be careful of Laurel,” Jason said, sounding all at once sincere, almost sympathetic, “things I hear, She’s been in some pretty strange business along the way.”
They worked silently for a while, then Jason said, “Jon boy, you going to take her job?”
Jon smiled to himself then, “Well, I tell you, I’m starting to think about it.”
“Drink your juice,” Aunt Margaret said, “And eat your eggs.”
“I’m not really hungry,” Star murmured, “but it does look delicious.”
“It is delicious,” Margaret affirmed. “Helen made it just for you, and you are hungry; your stomach is just still asleep.”
“Maybe a biscuit,” said Star, picking one up, weighing it in her hand. It might have been a feather. Then she broke the biscuit open with her fork. The moisture steamed in the cool air until she laid a pat of butter into it. Star watched it melt away, turning the white insides the color of dandelion. She tasted. She was hungry after all. She took a sip of her juice, decided she might be up to Helen’s omelet.
“This is good, Aunt Margaret. Really good. I’ve never tasted eggs like this. What is the green stuff?”
“Cilantro,” Margaret informed. Helen makes the lightest biscuits and the best omelets on earth. That’s why she works for me. She’ll be happy you approve.”
A telephone rang in the hall just beyond the door. Margaret went to answer it while Star communed with her groceries. She couldn’t hear what her aunt was saying, but she caught the tone, not harsh but quietly commanding. Helen brought in a pot from the kitchen and without asking filled Star’s cup. She expected coffee, but the dark liquid proved to be some sort of tea, the taste unfamiliar but not unpleasant, vaguely nutty.
“Maté,” said Helen, “it’ll settle your stomach and make you hungry. You need to eat.” Before Star could compliment her omelet and biscuit, Helen turned and glided swiftly away into her kitchen.
Margaret returned from her phone, sat down at her place, looking decidedly pleased with herself.
“You have a phone,” Star said, not sure that was at all what she’d meant to say.
“I have three in the house,” said Margaret, managing to look amused without appearing patronizing. “I also have a brand new television receiver.”
Star didn’t try to hide her surprise. She’d only seen pictures of television consoles in magazines, tiny screens and knobs set in massive wooden cabinets begging large rooms. Her family had only had electricity in their house for two years. There still weren’t enough people on Dark Fork to convince Summit Utility Cooperative to run a phone line into their corner of the county.
“I didn’t know there was a television station in Asheton,” she said.
Margaret nodded. “There will be soon, and we’ll be ready for it.”
“How do you know?” asked Star. “I haven’t seen anything about it in the news.”
“You will.” Aunt Margaret beamed, as if announcing a birth. “We’re about ready to make it public.”
“We?” said Star around her biscuit bite.
“Wallace Hoover, Robert and I own the station.”
When Jonathan Dark came down the steps at Falls Street Room and Board, Charlene Edgerton stood in her front hall in conversation with a young man he’d talked to enough at breakfast to know his name was James Smeltzer. They’d had brief conversations over eggs and biscuits about James’ work and ambitions as a photographer, and about Jon’s momentary satisfactions and continual frustrations as a carpenter. Jason didn’t like Smeltzer, called him Pictureman.
When Jonathan hesitated before going out the door, Charlene looked at him, flashed her smile reserved for boarders who paid their rent on time, and lilted, “can I help you, Jonny?”
“When you have time, Miz Edgerton,” Jon said, a little embarrassed to interrupt a conversation, “I’d like to talk to you about getting a room of my own, if you have one open.”
Charlene glowed with delight, “just happens I do, Jonny. Jim’s running off from us to work for the newspaper over in Knox. If you’re ready to move right in, I can refund his deposit. It’s a really nice room. Gets the morning light. Let me clean, and I’ll show it to you after supper.”
“Thanks. Don’t let it go. I want it for sure,” said Jon.
“You and Embers parting ways?” asked Smeltzer. He didn’t sound surprised.
“I’m changing jobs,” answered Jon. “Different hours.”
James had apparently finished his business with Mrs. Edgerton, as he started out the door with Jon. “Can I gift you a lift, Jon? I have to go gas up my car.”
“No thanks. I’m just going down to The Dreadful Dram to accept my new job.”
“You going to tend bar for Laurel Charon, are you?”
“I hope so.”
Smeltzer laughed as he opened the door to his black coupe, “you’ll still be seeing your old roommate every day then, won’t you?
“I’ll try to keep the bar between us,” Jon said.
“You really want to be a barkeep, then?” Smeltzer queried.
“It’s a job I can do well, I think,” John said. “Can’t everybody be a photographer like you.”
“You could come with me to Knox,” Smeltzer said, “plenty of jobs there, that pay better than this. I could teach you photography, if that’s what interests you. You see things as they are. I think you might have a talent to suit the newspaper business.”
“Well, that’s a notion,” Jon said, “When would I need to let you know.”
Smeltzer laughed. “If you want a ride to Asheton, now would be the right time.”
“What are your plans now, Star?” Margaret queried over her morning coffee.
“I’m going to keep the child,” Star said, rubbing her belly, rounding now to the life inside, “he’s all I have left of Jonny.”
“You’re sure of that?” said her aunt with a glint of a smile.
“Sure as I can be. He’s gone. I don’t see him back for the likes of me.”
“I meant, are you sure he’s left you a boy?” Margaret said with her little laugh that could serve either merriment or distress.
Star took it for merriment, smiled despite herself. “Feels like a boy. Feels like Jonny there inside me.”
Margaret shed her laugh, spoke with a stern edge, “but you never told him. Don’t you think he would want to know, has a right to know?”
Star answered solemnly, but not sad, with calm acceptance, “I about spoiled his life once. This isn’t his burden. I invited him. Wherever he is now, I want him free to choose his own way.”
Margaret shook her head. “I don’t think you give your Dark man enough credit. One day, your child will ask about his father, and what will you tell him?”
“I’ll tell him his father was a fine man, a splendid man, and I hope he’ll grow up to be just like him and find someone to share his life who will have more sense than his mother.”
Margaret’s laugh sprinkled the air between them again, “and assuming this child is a boy, what will you name him?”
Star didn’t hesitate, “I’ll name him after his father, of course. I’ll name my son Jonathan.”
“And if you’re wrong, and it’s a girl?”
Star laughed now, sounding just like her aunt, “I’m not wrong, but If I were, I’d name her Margaret.”
Jon wasn't sure if he was on his way to find his life or if he was running from one he had lost. Either way, he reckoned he would remember Laurel Charon for the rest of his tenure on earth. She had heard his story, as best he could tell it, and trusted him to be what he said he could be. Jon's last night tending bar, Jason Embers came in spoiling for a fight with anybody who might give it to him. He tried to conjure an argument with several he knew from work, who had the good sense to laugh him off and bribe him quiet with a drink. Late in the evening, drink had pretty much gained his full attention, Jason ordered a whiskey, then accused Jon of watering it, though he'd seen it poured straight from the bottle.
“If you don't like it, Mister Embers, you don't have to pay for it, but that's the last drink you’ll get here tonight. You’ve had enough,” Jon said, his voice quiet and steady.
Jason roared like a wounded bear and tried to crawl over the bar. Jon stood his ground, not sure what he would or could do about the escalating situation. The other patrons simply stared, either afraid to intervene or not wanting to spoil the show. Jason, atop the bar now on hands and knees, too enraged or too drunk to speak, spat into Jon’s face and reached for his throat.
Jon had not seen Laurel come in from her office, but suddenly, there she was behind Jason. She reached up, laid her palm between his shoulder blades, and whispered, just loud enough for Jon to hear, “sleep.”
Jason whimpered like a puppy, crumpled and folded, his face flat against the polished wet, his eyes open and staring at nothing. His glass rolled off the bar and shattered on the floor. Laurel patted his face tenderly, beckoned to one of the regular customers sitting across the room. “Willis,” she said, “Come help Jon carry this boy to his bed and your next drink is on the house.”
Willis’ prompt response testified to his thirst, and it only took a few minutes for them to hoist unresisting Jason down the street and deposit him in his bed at Charlene Edgerton’s boarding house. On their way out, Jon paused to turn out the light, and heard Jason’s slurred voice in the dark,
“Jonboy? You still here?”
“Yup, Jason, I’m here.”
Jason’s next words sounded sober as a judge. “She’s a witch, Jon. Laurel Charon is a witch. Get away from her and save your soul.”
“Good night, Jason.” Jon closed the door. As he started down the hall after Willis, he heard the muffled sound of a man weeping.
Midnight came and, in accordance with the city ordinance, Jon and Laurel ushered the die-hard drunks out into the fog-bound street. Jon began turning off lights. He and Felix, the chief cook and bottle washer, would stay and put the place to bed. Laurel began putting on her coat. John held it as she slipped her arms into the sleeves.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. We’ll be closed.” She said, as if Jon didn’t know that. “What are your plans for the weekend?”
“I’ll write a letter home, I imagine.” John said.
“You’re fired, Jon.” Laurel said softly, as if comforting a mourner.
Stunned, Jon prayed he’d misheard. When he found his voice, “I thought you liked my work.”
“You do good work and you are a good man, Jonathon Dark. That’s why I’m firing you. You have an interesting life ahead and it isn’t here.” She handed him an envelope too weighty for a letter. “Here’s your severance. Before you leave tonight, borrow the phone in my office and call your friend James Smeltzer. Come Monday morning, buy a train ticket and get yourself to Knox.”
Laurel turned then and walked away into the night, leaving Jon standing open-mouthed in the doorway. Whatever happened to him now, Jon reckoned Laurel Charon would be the second woman in his life he would always wish he had known better and longer.
Charlene Edgerton was disappointed her favorite boarder would be departing so precipitously. Since he was leaving without notice, John offered to pay an extra week’s rent, which he could do, thanks to Laurel Charon’s generosity.
Charlene pretended to be offended. “Keep your money, young man, she snapped. “You’ll need every penny to stay afloat in that big city.” Then she sent him off with a kiss on his forehead, and a motherly hug, and before he could feel embarrassed, or notice the tears in her eyes, turned and disappeared inside her door.
Jon had not made the phone call to Smeltzer, as Laurel Charon instructed, but he did buy a train ticket to Knox, and once again found himself being jostled through the night to some strange place he never hoped nor feared to be. Lights passed through the dark beyond the windows, some bright and near, some dim and far. Occasionally, he caught a glimpse of the moon riding down the current of the Long Broad as it flowed on, skirting the railbed toward the Shaconage, and beyond into Tennessee. Stars winked in and out of clouds, and once, one streaked across the sky, gone almost before it startled. Jon wondered if it was a sign that his life had some plan and purpose after all, or if it was a portent of one more incompletion. Or if it was just a flash in the night, God’s little joke on Jonathan Dark.
Over the grumbling mutter and rattle of the train, faint conversations filtered through the dark, voices that didn’t quite jell into words, conveying varying intonations of weary anticipations and half-hearted forebodings. John tried to listen, wanted for some distraction and escape from his own thoughts, which after all that had happened, still dragged him back, only half unwillingly, to Starblossom Dorn. He’d asked about her in letters to his mother. Is she well? Have you seen her, by chance? He tried to disguise his veiled inquiries as idle curiosities, though there was no reason anyone who had known them both would think so. His mother’s responses were all in the same vein. No. I never see the Dorn’s. Mr. Dorn told your father that his daughter had gone off to care for his sister-in-law who was ill. How is your work? Do you have any friends there? Your Father would never say so, but he would welcome a visit if there is ever a time for you that you can come to us.
~
“How was your lesson with Peter Murphy?” Margaret asked over supper.
Star put down her spoon a bit too abruptly. Robert flinched at the clash, glanced at Margaret, shook his head in silent disapproval before he wiped his mustache.
“Terrible,” blurted Star. “I can’t sing a measure without making a mistake and Mister Perfection makes me do it over.”
“That isn’t what Peter told me,” Robert put in. “He says you have a fine voice but are afraid to use it.”
“You have a beautiful and powerful voice,” Margaret agreed. This fall, we’ll arrange a recital.”
“I can’t sing in front of other people,” Star protested, her face pouted like a child.
“You sing in your room. You sing in the bath. You sing in the garden. You can sing anywhere you want,” Margaret insisted.
“Why can’t I just sing for myself, then?” Star said, her voice clipped and sharp, not at all musical.
“You should sing for yourself, no matter who else is listening,” Margaret said, like a teacher addressing a recalcitrant pupil. “But understand this, Starblossom Dorn, you do not live just for yourself, but for the life that is growing inside you. You must make a way in the world for you both. You are a lovely woman, but it is your voice that will sway men to your will. Your looks render you a fine ornament to any social occasion, but this town is full of decorative females. Your voice is your power. It is your weapon. Murphy will train you to hone it and use it to effect.”
“Aunt Margaret, you make me sound dangerous,” Star said, intrigued and vaguely flattered despite her protestations.
“Yes, Miss, you certainly are that,” murmured Robert, as if he believed it, and rose from the table to fetch their desserts.
The train burrowed through the night like a mole through spring soil. Jon slept and woke and slept again. Sometimes lights sparked the dark, lonely and solitary, occasionally paired, never more than a few. Where there were no lights, the mountains rose up steep and close against a barely less dark sky, for one mile leaden with cloud and over the next aswarm with stars. At Shelton Crossing, the train stopped on a siding, while a fast freight roared past in the opposite direction, rattling whatever and all that was not tightly fastened down. Freight was more profitable for Transmountain Rail Lines than were passengers, so freight claimed the right-of-way.
While the train waited at Shelton Crossing, the kitchen crew must have taken on provisions, because when the sun emerged above mist-shrouded heights, an aroma of coffee permeated the dining car, where Jon ordered a cup to go with his eggs and biscuit. He ate, readied himself for a big day in a strange place, and sat watching buildings emerge from the wider morning beyond the tracks until the train swung on a high bridge across the Long Broad and descended in a slow and slowing crawl before coming to rest with clanks and groans between two long platforms where people and baggage waited to be carried away deeper into the wilds of Tennessee.
Jon retrieved his bag, said a polite farewell to the pleasant lady in the seat opposite, and emerged into the bright morning air filled with the unaccustomed music of a genuine city already intently pursuing the brand-new day. Before Jon had time to consider immediate possibilities, a familiar voice called out of the transient crowd,
“Jonathan Dark, there you are, only ten minutes late.” It was Smeltzer. Jon’s surprise wrestled with his delight at finding a friendly and familiar soul in this alien city. Small, as cities go, but to Jon it appeared and sounded like a metropolis.
“James Smeltzer, you leaving town already?” he said as they shook hands. “What are you doing here, waiting to catch a picture?”
“Believe it or not, old salt, I’ve been waiting for you,” the photographer said cheerfully, clapping Jon’s shoulder hard enough that he almost dropped his luggage. James made a mild attempt to take the suitcase, which John refused to relinquish.
“How did you know I’d be on this train?” Jon queried, encouraged and irritated in roughly equal measure.
“Laurel Charon phoned me, because she knew you wouldn’t,” Smeltzer confided smugly.
“Wherever I go,” Jon muttered, “people are trying to plan my life for me.”
Smeltzer laughed. “Don’t knock it. Being on your own can get lonely. Take it from one who knows.” He waved his arm like opening a door and led the way through the aggregate commotion.
“I have a car,” he confided in a whisper, almost as if he were ashamed to admit it.
Days passed, added up into weeks, became a month, then some more. Starblossom Dorn watched her belly grow, developed strange tastes for vinegar and dill, as well as marked aversion toward anything that smelled or tasted like fried fish or fresh-brewed coffee. Her awareness that she did not inhabit her body alone became constant and intense. Finally, one day the expected happened unexpectedly, in the middle of a song she was practicing, pain, immediate and hungry for release. Margaret wasn’t there. Robert, unruffled and efficient as ever he was, drove her to the hospital.
Margaret was there afterward, when a nurse brought the baby to Star’s room, and as the two women looked on, Star brought him to her breast and murmured, softly, like a summer breeze, as she held his head to her, “Jonny, oh, Jonny, my beautiful, beautiful boy.”
What would have been scandal in the rigid, stratified moral matrix of Drovers Gap, in the wider and wilder cultural climate of Asheton was regarded as delicious spice for the social stew. Dawn Starr, the professional name Robert had concocted, had evolved into a singer of talent, an artist of growing repute, thus not expected to abide by the sensibilities of more mundane mortals for whom respectability meant survival. The wags and witches of that wicked town speculated endlessly about who the father might be, since the singer seemed to cultivate a vast indifference toward any local male that might be deemed worthy of her affections. The more inventive among the gossiping elites suggested that Jonathan Dorn might not be the singer’s son by birth, but a servant’s or an unseen relative’s offspring, or even, as one or two extremely imaginative tale-spinners insinuated, Margaret’s, who everyone agreed was younger than her years, ripe as a summer peach ready for peeling, and even more generous with her affections than she was with her money.
As for her money, several local grand causes had basked from time to time in her benevolence, rendering the movers and shakers of Asheton tolerant of her personal vices and desirous of her esteem. Margaret Boone was an institution. She could do no real wrong and actually accomplished a lot of good in their fine town, so all whose opinion was important agreed. All anyone knew for a fact was that she and her musical niece had gone off to an exclusive inn in the High Balsams on a spring retreat and returned before winter with a wee babe among their luggage. This was not deemed anything extraordinary, for everybody said Margaret had always exhibited a penchant for bringing home strays.
As for young Jonathan, if he was doted upon and spoiled, he was also loved and guided. If his faults were generally ignored, his best tendencies were consistently encouraged and praised. He was an intelligent child, like his father of whom no one other than his mother rarely spoke. And in answer to his childish inquisitions, she seldom answered more than, “your father was a fine and wonderful man. You’re growing up to be just like him.”
It didn’t bother Jon in the slightest that his friends had resident fathers. He had Uncle Robert, and in that privileged household, where all affairs were discussed and debated freely in his presence, as if he were a miniature adult, he grew to know about all the foolish cruelties loosed in the community around him without being personally wounded by them. By the time he was seven years old, he was as worldly-wise, or perhaps wiser than many human males of seventy.
The course of Jonny’s life would take a drastic change in direction when his mother announced that to celebrate his seventh birthday, Jonny and Aunt Margaret would accompany her to her next concert in Knox. Although Jonny had heard his mother singing since before he was born, he had never seen her perform on stage before an audience. As they boarded the train to Tennessee, in Jonny’s mind, another world entirely, he was feeling very grown-up indeed.
Jonathan Dark had no ambitions to be a music critic. He had not spent the past several years convincing the Editor-in-Chief of the Knox Record that he was a hard news writer just so he could spend two hours sitting among rich strangers listening to a woman he didn’t know singing in languages he couldn’t understand; not the sort of music he was accustomed to at all.
Normally, Ed Long, chief editor and self-proclaimed opera fan, would have covered the event himself, but Ed was in bed with the influenza that had been wracking the city of late, and Jon had not been able to invent a convincing excuse in time to avoid being tagged for the assignment.
“And behave yourself,” Ed had commanded. “You’ll be sharing a box with one of the major broadcast people in Asheton, television, no less. Convince her the Record is a real newspaper, that their little screens will never be able to compete with timely print for a news audience.”
As he drove his almost new car to the theater, Jon marveled at the unlikely turns in his life since he stepped off the train in Knox into James Smeltzer’s custody. He recalled the unsettling ride across town to Smeltzer’s apartment, with James driving one-handed, waving the other out the window as he said blithely, as if they had discussed it already, “there’s an opening on the Record for a feature writer. I told Ed Longstreet- he’s our chief editor- that you’re just the man for it. He’s willing to give you a trial. Part time, you understand, but show him your good and he’ll make a proper place for you on staff.”
When Jon could get a word in edgewise, “I don’t know anything about writing for a newspaper.”
Smeltzer went on, unfazed, “you have a good eye for details. You don’t use big words, and you can spell. Just fake it until you make it. Pretend you are writing letters to your mother.”
That was essentially what Jon had done, finally, after two weeks of trying to find “normal” work and feeling guilty because his friend wouldn’t let him pay rent. “When you’re working,” Smeltzer would say, “you can buy me a steak dinner at Riverside Inn and we’ll call it even.”
Jon’s job search was hindered by his having no idea what he wanted to do. He knew he didn’t want to tend bar which accounted for most of the work experience in his brief employment history. He might have accepted an offer to join a logging crew up in the High Balsams, had not Smeltzer told him horror stories about the short and risky lives of timbermen and insisted one more time, “go talk to Longstreet. What can you lose by it? If he hires you, he might buy your lunch.”
Although the Editor-in-Chief of the Knox Record immediately grasped that Smeltzer’s recommendation was not based on the applicant’s experience, he led Jon to a vacant desk in the newsroom and queried, “how did you get to this town, Pilgrim?”
“I rode a train all night from Poplar Spring, Mister Longstreet,” Jon confessed.
Longstreet gave no sign he was impressed, but said, “sit down here and write me a story about your train ride. Six hundred words. You have thirty minutes.” He turned and walked back to his office. Thirty-eight minutes later Jon knocked on the office door and handed over as many words as he’d been able to write. Longstreet read them while Jon stood in front of his desk, hat in hand, coat folded across his arm, ready to leave upon hearing the inevitable verdict.
Finally, the Editor looked up, appeared surprised, as if he had forgotten Jon was there, handed back the pages.
Only Longstreet’s eyes were smiling when he said, “that’s your desk out there.” He pointed through the glass door. “Get Doris over yonder to show you how to type. She will if you offer to buy her lunch.”
Doris turned out to be a good teacher of typing and other things pleasurable and interesting, and Jon proved himself to be a quick learner, and now, seven years down his road, he was in a theater box introducing himself to a tastefully-dressed and handsome woman of indeterminate years from Asheton, accompanied by a male child lively and quick, who for no reason Jon could discern, seemed startlingly familiar.
The boy introduced himself, “my name is Jonathan. My mother says I was named for a prince.”
“So was I,” Jon said. “Our parents must have read the same book.”
The lights in the hall dimmed. The crowd below quietened. The boy reached up to take the hand of the woman in charge of him. “Aunt Margaret and I came to hear my mother sing tonight,” he informed Jonathan Dark. Little Jonathan pointed at the stage, “there she is,” he whispered, and the curtains began to part as the audience applauded.
Parts of An Unaccustomed Music originally appeared under the title Dark Fork in the anthology, Fall, published 2018 by Dark Ink Press.
About the author
Henry Mitchell reads and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He has written six novels and three collections of short stories. Before he began writing fiction in 2012, he worked for fifty years as a painter and sculptor.
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