Fat Lightning (4 page)

By now, he had attracted a crowd, watching from a distance through the glass that separated John's barber shop from his father-in-law's grocery store. Minnie Turpin fainted when she saw the red splotch covering the front of Lot's shirt.

John Wampler called over his shoulder for somebody to get Carter while they tried to keep Lot from strangling the man from Wood's Store.

After they finally pulled him away, Lot continued to rant and rave.

“I was in the war, the big war, in 1917,” he yelled at the man from Wood's Store, who was rubbing his neck and telling John Wampler that he was going to have Lot thrown in jail. “Them people want to kill us, and we're a-helping them!”

Carter ran there from his drugstore and somehow persuaded the man Lot had tried to choke not to press charges, told him in a quiet voice off to the side that Lot couldn't help it, that he just got like that sometimes. He gave the man $20 to buy a new shirt to replace the one that Lot had more or less ruined the collar of while trying to kill him. It was a tribute to Carter that Lot had never spent a night in jail.

The man from Wood's Store, with half a haircut and a ripped shirt, took the $20 and walked out through the crowd that had gathered outside. As he got to his car, he turned around and said to Carter, “I ain't planning to press charges, but you ought to do something about that old man. He's crazy.”

Which, of course, started Lot off again. He lunged at the car and had to be pulled off the hood, by three men this time, taking the hood ornament with him.

In early May of 1971, Lot turned what a lot of people in Monacan thought was a corner.

Nobody had seen him for three days when Aileen, who was his and Carter's oldest sister, came out to visit him. She sometimes would take dinner, arriving unannounced, sure that whatever she'd left in the Crockpot before work that morning or picked up at the Barbecue Hut would be better than what Lot fixed for himself.

Coming into Monacan on the way home from her job in the shoe department at Thalhimer's, she passed the semicircular road on the left that led to the town itself, then took the right off Route 17 toward Old Monacan, her girlhood home. The pavement ran out after a mile, then the clay road turned into two ruts at the Jeters' driveway.

Simon Jeter's driveway was a sore point to the entire Chastain family, and to Lot in particular. You couldn't drive to Old Monacan, where Lot lived, without following the Jeter driveway through Jeter's barn, where the one-lane rut road was only sometimes blocked by a car.

The Chastains had used this road for two centuries, since the old Indian trail was turned into Route 17. It was their only link to the state highway that supplanted the river and eventually turned Old Monacan into a ghost town.

But then, in 1966, Simon Jeter, whom the Chastains had all known from when he was their tenant farmer, bought the 30 acres surrounding his cinder-block house, against Lot's wishes. The first thing Jeter did was build a new barn, to which he added a little shed that hung off the side farthest from his house. He built the shed, which had no walls, only a roof, so that it straddled the rut road to Old Monacan, which even then had a population of one. From then on, Lot Chastain had to drive through Simon Jeter's shed to go to and from his home.

Jeter said that he only wanted to use the covered, open-sided space for barning tobacco, so the help could sit in the shade while they tied the leaves onto sticks prior to hanging them in the barn. When he barned tobacco for the Chastains, he claimed that Lot's father made him and the rest of his family work out in the sun, telling them that they'd get lazy if they were allowed to sit in the shade.

The problem was, Jeter had no garage, and he started using the shed as a carport from time to time.

Aileen admitted that her brother didn't help things much. The first time that Jeter forgot and parked his car under the shed so that Lot couldn't get his old red Chevy pickup past, Lot just sat in the road and blew his horn until Jeter finally appeared, and then he cussed Jeter out for blocking him in. Jeter cussed him back, and they fought. Jeter was almost as old as Lot, and neither of them did much damage, but Lot used a different strategy from then on.

If he rounded the only curve coming from Old Monacan and saw Jeter's car blocking the road, he would just drive around the barn and shed, through Jeter's bean field, taking out as much vegatation as he could, blowing the horn as he went past. Jeter threatened to have him arrested, and Lot threatened to have Jeter arrested. Finally, a sheriff's deputy convinced Jeter that using a road for 200 years entitled you to keep on using it, but Jeter still forgot from time to time.

A Jeter grandchild, standing in front of one of the two trailers that now flanked the rut road, seemed to be waving at Aileen, holding back a stray sliver of lank brown hair with her free hand. Aileen started to wave back when she realized that the child, brown as a berry with the dusty look of all the Jeters, was extending her middle finger toward the car. She's probably used to doing that to anybody that comes back here, Aileen thought.

The road past Jeter's crossed a branch that would soon feed into a creek that, a mile away, expired into the river. Just beyond the branch was Old Monacan itself. Aileen drove past mounds that were the chimneys and rotting wood and general substance of houses abandoned as much as a century ago, overgrown with thorns and poison ivy. A snake suddenly slid into her field of vision. She floored the accelerator, but it disappeared into the green, car-high jungle on her right. She thought it looked like a pilot snake.

Slightly shaken, wishing she'd run it over, Aileen drifted into the sand bank and almost got stuck making the 90-degree left turn that came 100 yards before her final destination. She parked in front of Lot's trailer, behind his pickup. The mobile home itself was 10 years old and stood right in front of the old Chastain place; Lot had bought it and moved out of the big house after their mother died. Every two months, Aileen, Grace and Holly would come out on a Saturday to do what they could to keep the big house from falling in, then make Lot leave while they cleaned the trailer, although Grace was always saying she wasn't coming back after what Lot said to her the last time.

From there, on what used to be the second row of houses back from the water before the first row was eventually abandoned and finally caved in or burned down, Aileen could see the river. In the fading light, she could glimpse a flash from the C&O tracks on the other side and could barely make out the electric lights back in the shade that sheltered French Crossing.

The river here played a trick. Just before Old Monacan, it took a wild swing from its eastern course, doubling back toward the northwest. Where it doubled back, it pinched in so tight that a grown man could wade across it most days, the narrowness being the reason for Old Monacan's existence.

From the two-room Monacan public library, Nancy later learned this: Here, before they built the bridge downstream where the river righted itself and headed east again, Huguenot settlers who thought they were bound for the town craftsman's life they knew in France were left to learn how to farm and fight Indians, a buffer for the English to the east. The easy crossing had been used by the Monacan Indians since long before the oldest of them could remember, and the Huguenots seized it for their own, killing and dispersing the Monacans and stealing their name.

From the Huguenot town, farmers on the river's south side could transport their crops over to French Crossing, where the straightest, safest road east was.

A ferry and then a road five miles closer to Richmond began the transition of Monacan to Old Monacan, and the population went from 400 in 1850 to 40 a century later, by which time Monacan Courthouse, the county seat, had become just Monacan. The penultimate dwellers in the old town, the Dances, had left in 1962; their ruined house was the only standing structure left by 1971 other than the Chastain home, Lot's trailer, and the barn, if you didn't count a sawdust pile as a structure.

Aileen knocked on the trailer door and called a time or two for Lot, but she didn't hear anything except Lot's dog, Granger, growling somewhere out of sight. She thought of the snake, and chillbumps appeared on her arms. The old place didn't use to give her the willies, she thought, wondering if her nerves were going bad, like Holly's.

She decided to walk around the side of the trailer to where she could see the barn, and there Lot was, not seeming to pay any attention to anything except the gray-brown back of the building. Aileen's and Lot's father used to tell them why his father said he had built the barn with its backside to the house after he bought the land from a discouraged and departing former neighbor: “So's I can sit on my porch and not see anything to remind me of work.”

The barn was turned a degree or two north of dead west and was catching the sun in that brief instant between its descent below the branches of the sycamores and its disappearance beyond the farmed-level horizon across the river. The back of it, where Lot stood, went long winter months without catching the sun at all. The sight of its illuminated surface on an April afternoon had been a sign of spring for four generations of Chastains, Aileen knew, counting her Stanley, Holly's girls, and Carter's boy. Maybe sometime soon Sam and his wife would let her take them out here so she could tell the story to their boy, and then it'd be five generations.

Aileen had come within ten feet of her older brother and was about to ask him if he had gone deaf when he spoke first.

“I want you to look at that,” he told her, and his face had the purple splotches on it that usually just meant he was about to throw a fit.

Aileen looked at where he was staring, at the barn's side.

“What?” she asked him, and he looked at her for the first time.

“Can't you see it?” he asked her. “Can't you see the head up there, and the arms out here to the side? And the feet? Lookahere. There's even a nail there.”

Aileen moved closer, squinting through her bifocals and staring at the bleached boards, where moss had gathered during the cold, dark fall and winter, until she could finally make out what he was pointing to.

And, she said later, she had to finally concede that what her brother had on the back side of his barn was a fairly believable rendition, done in moss and the vagaries in color that varying sunlight had caused over decades, of Our Lord Jesus Christ, up on the cross.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the four years she and Sam have been married, Nancy has been in the same room with Lot twice, both times the same day. It was Christmas two years past, just before Wade was born. They were in Old Monacan, at Sam's late grandparents' house. There were only two times of year that the house was used any more, Sam's father had told her: Christmas and the family Easter egg hunt.

Nancy watched Carter wedge the unused, wadded-up Christmas Day newspaper between the hearth and the grate, then place the oily fat lightning pine on top of the grate, finally putting on a few small split pieces of oak. The fat lightning ignited from the paper as if it held gasoline inside its nearly transparent shell, and soon the oak caught. Nancy was sitting as close to the hearth as she could, the two sides of her body many degrees apart in warmth, when Aileen heard tires on dirt and went to one of the big-paned windows with its imperfect glass.

“My lord,” she said. “It's Lot.”

The rest of the family went to the window. Lot was getting out of his old red Chevrolet pickup. Tufts of auburn hair hung out from the sides and back of an adjustable baseball cap. He was wearing work shoes, work pants, a tan work shirt and, for some reason, a blue tie.

Usually, Sam had already told her, Lot would go somewhere, nobody knew where, if the family was going to get together. He didn't mind a couple of his sisters coming out, or Carter, but he said he didn't like to be crowded.

Lot walked up the rotting steps to the front porch, and Holly, Sam's youngest aunt, opened the door slowly. Lot looked for a second as if he were going to hug her, but then he just walked in the door, squeezing her arm a little too hard as he went past.

Nancy, who had been looking out the window since the doorway was packed with full-blooded Chastains, saw a man whose eyes seemed to be pure black, making his attempt to smile appear more mocking than kind.

“I don't reckon you all expected to see me today,” he said, in a high, nasal voice.

Although it seemed obvious that this was a rare visit, nobody ran forward to greet him right away. Rather, they approached him cautiously to shake hands or give him a hug or just to be introduced. It reminded Nancy of the way she and Marilou used to try to catch Pat's old Walker hound when he'd escape, fearful that a sudden move or loud noise might make him run beyond their grasp.

“Well, come on in and have some dinner,” Aileen said.

Sam took Nancy's hand and led her over.

“Uncle Lot,” he said, clearing his throat first, “this here is my wife. Nancy, this is my Uncle Lot,” and Nancy thought to herself, “This here?”

Lot just stared at her at first, looking her up and down.

“Looks like you put on a little weight since I seen you in the wedding pictures,” he said. Nancy looked up at her husband's uncle, who stood at least a foot taller.

“I hope to lose it soon,” she said, angry at herself for blushing. And then she saw something in his expression that made her wonder if what she mistook for rough kidding about her pregnancy wasn't just a combination of rudeness and unawareness. But then everyone started scrambling to get dinner on the table, and she didn't have time to think about it.

The Chastains always ate before they opened the presents. Their first Christmas together, Nancy thought it strange that Sam felt obliged to buy something for all three of his aunts, his Uncle Lot, Grace and Holly's husbands, Aileen's son from New Jersey, Holly's daughters, Carlie and Zoe, who were in town from Washington and Charlotte, plus their children, plus Sam's father's first cousin, Pete Bondurant, who always had Christmas with the Chastains. But, the first Christmas they spent at the old Chastain place, she was glad she and Sam had bought everyone something, because everyone had bought them something. The tree was piled high with the token gifts of 18 people, most of them with gifts for the other 17. None of the presents they bought Sam's family cost more than $10, and Nancy tried not to notice that the ones they got back cost a good deal less than that: Whitman's Samplers and scarves and gift certificates at McDonald's.