I passed out as soon as the truck took off, lying on the bench seat in the back of the Ford cab, and when I woke up just after we crossed the Georgia line on 95 I was lying in the backseat of a Chevy Suburban. I checked to see if it was still him driving and it was so I drifted back into sleep. I didn’t ask any questions. I was so tired of knowing stuff and having to figure out what to do next.
It was a fourteen-hour drive all told. When he stopped for gas and food in Valdosta I took a handful of aspirins with my Coke. I wasn’t hungry, nauseous in fact, and returned to the backseat and heavy sleep. When I awoke it was late afternoon and we were off the interstate on a two-lane blacktop in mountains heavy with summer growth. I had never been in mountains before. I was hungry now and said so and he said we’ll be home soon. At this word I was filled with a feeling of happiness such as I hadn’t known for a long time, not since my daddy held me before I could read. The devil can gin up all the sweetest things to turn us from God. But it is true sweetness, not false, because itis of God, although we don’t know it. Satan himself got nothing in his pockets God didn’t put there.
We left the blacktop after a while and began to climb a steep gravel road, switching back and forth past ravines full of honeysuckle and deadfalls choked with kudzu and on the ridges tulip trees, mountain ash, dogwood, pin oaks, hickory not that I knew all the names then it was all a blank to me before I studied the land. We went through a swing pole stretched across the road with a sign on it: KEEP OUT PRIVATE. He asked me to get out and close it behind us and when I did I heard him talking into a portable radio. Then up an even steeper road with the big V-8 straining in four-wheel and when we rounded this one big slatey boulder Orne stopped us and shouted and in a couple of seconds a man in camo gear holding an assault rifle appeared like magic out of the brush. Orne introduced me, Wavell this’s Emmylou she’ll be staying with us. He nodded and disappeared back where he came from. We crossed a wooden bridge over a little bubbly branch and then we were in the place. Orne said this is Bailey’s Knob, the last piece of free America. It was like a little town, old houses and a couple of small trailers, smell of wood smoke and a deeper animal smell, which I recognized too well. Pigs I said sniffing and he said no just pig shit. I got out of the truck and suddenly the pain came back in full force the light was too bright and then it shuttered out to black like an old-time movie fade-out.
When I woke up I was in a small room, in a big old-fashioned high wooden sleigh bed, the dark lit by a yellow glow from a bug light outside the window. My head hurt so much it was making me nauseous and showing sharp colored lights every time I moved it. When my eyes adjusted I saw there was a woman in the room with me, small, slight with some kind of white headdress on that covered all her hair. I thought of the sisters in Miami and I said are you a nurse? But she didn’t answer and I asked where’s Orne? But she didn’t answer that either she just looked at me and smiled in a funny way. She had a long nose and strange long eyes like willow leaves. I asked her if I could have an aspirin or codeine and some water, but she just sat down on the bed and took my hand or that’s what I recall happening but then I must have blacked out again and then I woke up again and the woman was gone and so was my pain.
I felt well enough now to rise from the bed and leave the room. There was a narrow hallway outside and I stood still for a moment and tried to get the feel of the place. It reminded me of Gran’s house, that smell of dust and old paint and cooking you get in a wood house that’s been around for a while silent now except for the usual creaks and the wind outside and crickets. I could almost have been in Wayland except for the cool of the night and a kind of sulfur smell and a distant rumble of some engine. I found a bathroom and used it, washed my face and tried to straighten out my tangled hair, what a mess, bruises and smudgy rings under my eyes. Then I followed the light out to the front room.
Orne was lying on a cracked brown leather couch reading. I could just see the top of his yellow-haired head and the book’s pages and his feet in gray socks up on the other armrest and I just felt so good watching him that I didn’t say a word just looked around. There was a square enamel stove over in one corner of the room and a big scarred table and some chairs and a rag rug on the floor, a fireplace and a mantelpiece, an old rocker with a quilt on it, and the rest of the room was all books, thousands it seemed like, on shelves covering every wall from floor to ceiling except for where the windows poked through. And everything was neat as a pin, no clutter, the floors swept and mopped, and no books jammed anyhow into odd spaces in the shelves like they were at Gran’s, more like at the library.
I took a step and a plank creaked and up Orne shot like a snake, on his feet and the book gone flying a.380 tight in his hand. Shit he said and took a couple of deep breaths and put the little pistol in his pocket and he said I’m not used to other people in the house at night and I felt glad because it meant he didn’t have a girlfriend. He asked me how I felt and I said fine and asked him who the woman was who tended me. He looked at me funny then and said there was no woman it was I tending to you and no one else. And we agreed it must’ve been in a dream. He said I had been out more than twenty-four hours and he had been worried and if I hadn’t got up pretty soon he was going to take me down to the community hospital in Bradleyville.
My stomach growled just then astonishingly embarrassingly loud in the quiet room and we both laughed and he said come on we’ll get you fed. He had a big pot of stew, venison, we ate a lot of venison on Bailey’s Knob, the deer were swarming in the state forest and God knew we had plenty of guns and no respect for the hunting laws, although I didn’t learn that until later. He warmed some up and watched me eat like a hog, tipped back in his chair drinking a glass of murky beer. I had some too, malty and bread-tasting, homemade like most of the stuff we fed on. I asked him what the throbbing noise was and he said the generator, we’re off the grid here.
The question foremost in my mind then?actually the next foremost, since the first was when I was going to get into bed with him?was why he had come looking for me but I didn’t know how to say it, but then he seemed to read my mind and said the question and answered it. He’d been looking for a woman, young, trainable?he didn’t actually say that but that’s what he meant?bright, capable, and he thought I was the one. It was time for him to start a family, past time really but he had been so busy with his Work. Capital letters here because that’s what it always sounded like when he said it. I had heard some of this when he came and talked to me at Hunter’s place but now it all came out in a spate, me listening while I ate and nodding agreement. The great collapse was not far off, they were running out of time to prepare, the Bastards had ruined the world with their money and manipulations and thought control and there would be a blowup pretty soon, engineered plagues and nuclear war and anarchy, just like in those African countries, all the assholes thought we were immune but no and we had to prepare. Billions would die as the control systems collapsed and all those people who only knew how to manipulate symbols, who thought that symbols were real and thought the food came from a supermarket and energy came from the walls and water came from a tap and wastes just vanished by magic, they’d be helpless. The only people who’d survive would be the ones who understood the Real Stuff, who weren’t moral cowards whining to a dead god, no, after all the loser and dirt people were swept away we would found a new race and its foundation stone would be the people that the Bastards had disdained as white trash. Why? Because they were the best stock in the world, the descendants of Vikings and warrior Celts and Teutonic tribes, they’d come here with nothing and built here in these mountains the only decent civilization that had ever existed in America yeoman farmers proud and independent, free of social garbage from Europe and Africa and Asiatic hordes, until the Bastards had come to the Appalachians and destroyed everything decent with their commodity capitalism and their man-eating coal mines and now they were eating the land itself ripping mountains apart in their greed turning everything on the planet into money well let the Bastards try to eat their money and their fucking data when the day of doom arrived!