This is a Second Amendment place. In the smaller farmhouse where my nephew Danny lived his father Dan keeps two assault rifles, three loaded handguns, several hunting rifles, and the shotgun. Those at least. Other firearms may be stashed in the walls and floorboards. Tables on the back porch are domino-lined with ammunition. Shells are inexpensive and dizzying in their variety. Some bullets can pierce armor and others are made to explode into three hundred fiery pellets on ejection.
Most evenings Dan and Danny sat on the back porch and practiced firing across the creek at a makeshift target range of aluminum cans, glass bottles, and wood cutouts resting on a steel cart. Some nights they hiked upstream to the wooden ruins and shot into them. Just outside the oversize windows overlooking the back porch and the creek beyond and the target range and the pens where Danny kept the golden retrievers for breeding, Dan has hung two homemade bird feeders stocked with sugar water and just enough vanilla to keep the hummingbirds coming back. The smaller bird with the red underbelly is named Meany, and he drives the prettier green-and-gold bird from feeder to feeder, unwilling to share his swill even if it means he will spend the afternoon policing rather than drinking.
We gather by the creek and admire Steve’s dam. The children swim in the deep water, and my father-in-law teaches me to skip stones. Smooth, flat, rounded stones without protruding edges tend to fly farthest. The skillful thrower keeps his hand low to the water and parallel with it, and looses the stone with a slight level flick of the wrist. The old man can skip a stone nine times, for a distance of sixty feet. He has been perfecting his technique for almost seventy years. He believes that all things work together for good and has posted the Ten Commandments on his front lawn in defiance of secular courts faraway.
My wife says when she dies she wants her brothers to cut down strong timbers with their axes and build her casket with their hands. We are to carry her up the mountain, to the high place where she dreamed as a child of building an A-frame log cabin overlooking the valley and where a person with keen eyesight can achieve a vista and survey as much of Appalachia as an olden hill family might have seen in a lifetime. We’ll drive our shovels into the soil and let the dirt mix with our sweat and seep into our pores. We’ll breathe the dust we have stirred up and lower box and body into the ground with knotted ropes, then take our spades and fill the grave with earth, tamp it down with our feet and plant sod in the spring around the simple marker, here lies Deborah Jayne, remembered by those who loved her. She says grieving must be physical, mourning underscored by exertion.
We will bury Danny tomorrow in the more traditional way, in a Lexington cemetery. The coroner thinks Dan unstable and only yesterday cleared him of suspicion of homicide. In the state capital of Frankfort, the autopsy was conclusive. My father-in-law has inspected every well and septic tank on the property for signs of disrepair. His sons inspect every engine of every car, truck, and van gathered on the grasses between the farmhouses. In grave situations, my father-in-law has been known to counsel the Shalom peace of the Lord to passersby, then pass blood in the privacy of his own bathroom.
At the funeral, lies are told in the name of comfort. Speculations. Maybe it’s possible Danny did not mean to kill himself but tripped and discharged the shotgun by accident. The preacher lives by traditions and says we have gathered to celebrate a life and that he’s seen some long faces in need of lightening up. He uses biscuits and the ingredients for making them as a visual aid to let us know that a tasty life is made from bitter parts. He gives an old-fashioned call to salvation and not a hand is raised. The reconstructed face in the casket is not recognizable as anything except poorly cast wax. Later his mother says he would have hated the eyeliner and mascara they’d applied to him.
The lies obscure truths we would like to quiet. Danny heard voices under the ground and daily walked outside with his Glock to find and silence them. Some of the hill people say the mountain is riddled with caves and that the older people knew how to get to them but that the old knowledge is dying away as development encroaches upon the old ways. They say that soon there will be no water witchers with divining rods to approach by foot and point out the best places for well-drilling. Danny spent three months in Arizona with some exorcists who claimed demons were whispering in his ears. I believe in the doctors whose antipsychotic medicines Danny regularly neglected. The mind is sufficiently vast for myriad voices to find a place to hide.
Church and cemetery are separated by the greater part of Lexington. Police cars stop traffic for the funeral procession, which is fifty cars deep and slow, in observance of custom. The endless winding from road to road, left turns through red lights and then rights again until an essentially straight path feels circular, leaves me in mind of a hearse-driver perhaps lost with unrelated sadness and leading without benefit of directions or map. The rain starts with droplets at the church steps and turns quickly to downpour in near-opaque sheets. We navigate by taillight.
We wait in our vehicles at the graveside but the rain does not subside. Matt leaves his van and steps into the deluge and beckons the other mourners to follow. Slowly they emerge with umbrellas and ponchos and newspapers held above their heads. Some young people wade unprotected into the falling water and let it soak their clothing to the skin as if their grief required washing or as penance for sins of omission. Maybe they wonder as I do what time spent or what intervention might have changed the course of things.
The rain does not relent as the body is lowered into the grave, nor does it cease during the ninety-minute retreat into the high places. The storm has battered our mountain, and the road to the farmhouses is blocked by fallen timber (the road is in fact named Fallen Timber Branch Road) and many of the concrete and wooden bridges near the base of the mountain have been swept away by mudslides or washed away by the rising creekwaters.
Nearer the top of the mountain, our cars and trucks dig deep trenches in the open fields. A hundred-year-old cherry tree has toppled and her strong roots point skyward, the ground beneath sucked away by flash flood and gravity. The propane tank has loosed its steel moorings and settled dangerously close to the larger farmhouse. The well is inoperable, its pumps dashed to pieces. The porches are filled with debris spit outward from the rapids. Tall grasses now bend hunched as old men, and the southern field is strewn with loose gravel that once filled a driveway hundreds of yards away. My wife says the mountain itself is grieving. Steve’s dam has broken and the waters rush onward toward the valley.
All the breeding dogs have been sold or given away or run off. In a season of speculation, emus were raised from eggs alongside adolescent shelties and golden retrievers in five electrified pens. A spry golden retriever named Mandy mothered nearly half the puppies who grew here. She was the family pet allowed to run free. One evening last autumn she came home with one crippled leg. She’s grown white in the face but still runs with her limp after treats of dried beef. Dan is watching her run and I can see it in his eyes: Dogs should not outlive children.
Conversation has ceased and my wife and her brothers have resumed their chores. Last month a local hunter and my father-in-law agreed on a price for the rental of the lower level of his farmhouse to the hunter’s daughter and her two college friends. Now the hunter has returned to help clean debris from the common area between the farmhouses and regravel the driveways. All of them strike the ground with their shovels, using more force than their task requires. Mandy cowers beneath an aging car. In the distant woods my father-in-law is alone and talking.