Heading Out to Wonderful Read online

  “I’m Charlie Beale.”

  “Beebo” was all the child answered, shaking his head, looking past Charlie, into that other landscape, dead serious.

  “I know who you are,” said a voice from the back of the shop, as the heavy door to the meat locker swung open. “Everybody knows who you are. Nobody knows what you want, but ain’t a soul in this whole town don’t know your name is Charlie Beale. Not since the day you bought Russell’s land. We know your name, we know what you paid for it. Question is, what do you intend to do with it? Why are you here? That’s the question, Mister Beale.”

  “I’m a butcher, Mr. Haislett. A good one. I’m looking to work. That’s all I want. Just a job.”

  “You see a big crowd here? You see a lot of people just standing around waiting to be served with nobody to wait on them? Cause if that’s what you see, you got a world better eyes than I do.”

  “A good butcher. I have experience all over the place. There isn’t anything I don’t know.”

  The boy never took his eyes off Charlie, just shuffled over to the white-haired man and held on to his pants leg.

  “Hell’s bells, son. I’m a good butcher and I run a nice clean shop, and people come and they go and nobody complains and I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years, ever since I was just out of the army, learned everything from my father who learned it from his father.”

  The little boy laughed. “Beebo,” he said, delighted. “Beebo. Beebo.” His father looked down, rubbed his head.

  “This here, Mr. Beale, this here is Sam Haislett. He is my son and he is five years old and he is the light of my life. Shake hands with Mr. Beale, boy.”

  “Beebo!” The boy laughed again, then stepped forward and held out his hand, watched as it disappeared in Charlie’s broad palm. “Pleased to meet you, Sam. It’s a real pleasure. Call me Charlie.”

  “I’m going to call you Beebo, sir. Okay?”

  “Whatever suits you, son. Whatever you think best.”

  Sam returned to stand by his father’s leg. Will picked up a butcher knife, wiped it down with a clean cloth.

  “I’ll work for free.”

  “Free work is worth exactly what you pay for it.”

  “I’ll work for free for one month. Then you’ll decide what you want to do. If you still want me around. I’m worth it, you’ll see.”

  “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”

  “I mean to settle down here, Mr. Haislett. I’ve seen enough of the world. I just want my own little corner of it. A place to feel at home again.”

  “And where’s home?”

  “Nowhere, now. Came from up north. Born out in Ohio.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “You know the story. Came back from the war. Daddy dead. Mama moved in with relations. Family scattered. So I went traveling. Saw the country, looking for I don’t know what. Yes, I do. Something wonderful, I guess. Someplace special. I saw Brownsburg. I’ve been here thinking hard on it for a week.”

  “Let me tell you something, son. When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand-new penny, but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go. Brownsburg ain’t heaven, by any means. But it’s perfectly fine. It’s all right.”

  “I mean to stay. I’ve got nobody and nowhere I want to be. I need something to do with my days.”

  “And money don’t mean nothin’?”

  “Like I said, sir, I have nobody. I have what’s in my suitcases. I mean to find a house, make a place to lay my head and all that takes money and it takes work, and butchering is what I know.”

  “Slaughtering?”

  “Everything. I can slaughter a cow so fast she looks as peaceful as if she died in her sleep. They say it makes the meat sweeter, more tender when the animal goes quickly and peacefully.”

  “Hell. I don’t know. Tell you what. It’s almost dinner time. Go in there and get some of that beef and cut us off some steaks and come home to eat with us. My wife Alma’s smarter than me. She’s a schoolteacher. She’ll know what to do. I’ll call her now.”

  Charlie stepped into the cool of the meat locker, listening to Will speak in hushed tones on the wall telephone. He picked a side of beef and swung it out and onto the butcher block without even getting his shirt dirty. He opened up the leather pouch holding his knives and laid them out one by one on the counter.

  “I’ve got my own knives.”

  “That I can see.”

  “From Germany.”

  He picked out a knife, tested the blade against the side of his thumb.

  “T-bones? Sirloin? Tenderloin?

  “T-bone. Pan steaks. You know.”

  “Bone in?”

  “Yes. But thin.”

  “How many?”

  “Four.”

  Using a knife and then a hacksaw for the chine, Charlie cut four steaks, pulled on the roll of white paper over his head, tore off a square and wrapped up the steaks as neatly as a Christmas package.

  “That’ll do?”

  “That’ll do fine. Let’s go eat. We’ll ask my wife what to do about you. She’ll know. She knows everything.”

  They stepped into the day, now hot, and Will carefully locked the door behind him.

  All around them, in the hot stillness of Brownsburg at noon, people were sitting down to their dinner. They walked along Main Street. It was the kind of town that had only one of everything it had, and a lot of things it didn’t have at all. They didn’t talk.

  They stopped in front of a tall Victorian house, neat as a pin, with zinnias growing around the steps that led up to a high porch, gingerbread trim fretted and heavy with wisteria vines, the blooms long gone. The buzz of summer noonday flies; the smell of hot black tar about to bubble. The house was a sturdy building where a family lived out its life, its loves, its sorrows, its small everyday inconsistencies and mundanities. All of it Charlie Beale breathed in as though it were the sweet heavy musk of a night blooming flower.

  Will Haislett opened the door, and Charlie Beale stepped into the dark warm hall. With his first breath, he could tell that everything in the house was clean, clean all the time, the tables dusted, the glasses in the cupboards clear and spotless, the sheets on the beds taut and smelling of bleach and fresh air. It was like nothing he remembered, had nothing to do with his own reckless childhood, but it was somehow as familiar as his own skin, like something he had known was there his whole life but had never tasted or smelled.

  A home, something Charlie didn’t have, shelter and kindness to every living soul who slept there, bonded by blood, and every friend and stranger who passed through its doors. It was in a constant state of readiness, a readiness to welcome.

  In those days, there were no antiques. There were just new things and old things, things brought from the home place, things cared for through the years, through the rough-and-tumble of life, things bought when the marriage was new, things bought for a lifetime.

  The furniture in the sitting room where Will Haislett led Charlie was mostly old, covered now by summer slipcovers of chintz and linen, made by Lula Hall, who knew every piece so well by now she didn’t even have to measure when called on to make covers for the sofa or the big, comfortable chairs.

  Will didn’t offer Charlie a seat, and they stood awkwardly, five-year-old Sam holding on to his father’s leg, the face the same in man and boy, the same blue eyes. Charlie could smell things cooking, good rich fresh things, could sense a bustle going on somewhere in the house, even though everything where they stood was perfectly still.

  “Alma?” Will called softly. “Alma, I’ve brought him home for dinner.”

  And with just the slightest movement of the warm summer air, just a sigh, there she was, as she was every day at fifteen minutes past twelve, and all she said, looking at Will, was “Darling,” and th
ere is no earthly way to tell you the sweetness of it, the soft accent, schooled, not country, the voice breathless with the anticipation of his company.

  She was forty years old, just a year older than Charlie Beale was then, and fourteen years younger than her husband. Her red hair was just beginning to go soft, pale like fall leaves in November, and her pale gray eyes seemed expectant, surprised, as though something wonderful were just about to happen.

  She raised herself on her toes to kiss her husband, then knelt on the floor to kiss her son, who wrapped his arms around her neck, hiding his face in her shoulder.

  She looked up. “Of course,” she said. “Charlie Beale,” as though she had known him all her life, “you’re here.” As though he already held a place in her heart as one of the many good men and women who filled her days. Then she stood up and held out her hand to shake his, and said, “You’re more than welcome in our house.”

  “This is my wife, Alma,” Will said. “She came along and saved my sorry ass from ruin and destruction.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Will, don’t be so dire, darling.” Again that word, darling—Charlie felt it and it filled him completely, as tangible and soft as a kiss good night.

  “ ‘Ruin and destruction.’ Forgive us, Mr. Beale, but around here we spend so much time in church we talk like preachers quoting scripture.”

  She let go of his hand. “Welcome to our house. Those must be our steaks.”

  He handed them shyly to her. “Thanks for inviting me in. I was getting awfully tired of sandwiches out there by the river.” He hadn’t talked to a woman in months. He had forgotten how, he realized, forgotten the simple graces. He especially didn’t know how to talk to married women.

  He had turned away from his past, his reckless ways, but he hadn’t turned toward anything new except the restless unceasing driving that had taken him all through 1948, ever since the end of the war, really, until it landed him here, in Brownsburg, Virginia, in the sitting room of people he didn’t know, with nothing to say to them at all, no way to say what was in his heart, to say that he had forgotten, forgotten the pleasure of company, the beauty of children, the smell and sense of clean warm hearts in clean bright houses.

  He wasn’t used to being welcomed. He wasn’t used to being looked at with anything other than weariness or fear or distrust. Suddenly shy, he felt the blood rush to his face.

  She stood close to him, uncomfortably close. She looked into his eyes, her gaze too long, but unexpectedly, too kind. He glanced away.

  “Mr. Beale,” she brought him back. He looked into her gray eyes.

  “Charlie,” he said. “Please.”

  She continued to look at him. “Mr. Beale, are you a Christian?”

  “Not really, ma’am. I used to . . . but that’s been a while.”

  “But are you a good man?”

  “I try. I guess you never know until it’s over.”

  She reached up, touched his skin the way a blind mother might explore the face of her only child. Her eyes never left his. He reddened further and his skin felt hot. She must have felt it with her cool hand, like a fever.

  “He wants a job,” Will said.

  Without breaking her gaze, she said, over her shoulder, “Of course, Will. Of course he’ll do. You could use some help. I don’t know why you needed to ask me.”

  She turned away, knelt down to hug the little boy. “Now let’s have our dinner.”

  And it was done. Whatever it was, whatever Will had wanted her opinion about, it was over and done with.

  And that’s how the story began.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHARLIE STILL STAYED out by the river, except when it rained, and then he would stay after supper and sleep in the Haisletts’ spare room, next door to the boy, who kept a wary distance. Sometimes, on the nights out by the river, an unexpected storm would roll in in the night, and then he would crawl under the truck, and he would think of Alma’s clean sheets, crisply laid, smelling of laundry soap and sunshine.

  He liked it better out by the river. He was used to being alone, and the weight of all those bodies around him gave his sleep an uneasiness that left him tired the next day. Most nights and noons he ate what Alma made for him and was grateful that he wasn’t living on sandwiches and Cokes any more.

  Driving back to the river, in the dark, he would smoke and watch for animals. He liked to fling the burning end of his cigarette out the window and watch as it hit the road behind him, sending up a meteor shower of sparks receding in the distance, a sudden orange flare in all that racing blackness, the flint striking steel, momentary but staying in his eyes long after the speeding truck had left the sparks behind. Such magic in the rearview mirror, his eyes, the speeding road, the sparks of a Lucky in the dark.

  One time he was letting go of his cigarette just as his headlights lit up the still body of a deer, a big doe, hit by a car, dead on the roadside, its eyes frozen in a fixed shock of terror. After that, every time he saw the shower of sparks, he thought of that dead deer, and of the permanence of fear, of how, once it got into you, it never let go. He hoped it never got into him.

  He thought of his brother Ned, who always had that look of a deer frozen in the headlights, stunned. He hadn’t seen Ned since right after the war, but now his face came back so clear and true he might have reached out and touched it. Now every night when he threw the cigarette out the window and watched the display vanishing behind him, he said his brother’s name to himself, and the shower of sparks became inextricably linked to his brother’s face and name. One day, he would think, I’ll see what he looks like now, grown. But then the sparks would be gone, and Ned would be gone, too, until the next night, the next Lucky on the blacktop.

  By the river, on his own land, he woke up every morning before the sunrise, warm in his quilt and the rising heat and his usually pleasant dreams. The days seemed like good ones, mostly, and he rinsed his face and shaved in the river with a light heart.

  He was at the butcher shop when it was just light. The thing he liked about being alone was that you could have things exactly the way you wanted them, with nobody looking over your shoulder.

  He used the hour before Will appeared to clean the shop, sweeping the wood floor and laying down fresh sawdust, every morning. He sprinkled salt on the butcher block, and scrubbed it down with a steel brush, scrubbing away yesterday’s steaks and chops and roasts, yesterday’s blood. He washed the marble counter with bleach and warm water. He checked in the cold locker to see what was there, what was needed, what was selling and what wasn’t.

  It was too early for the radio. The distant, staticky station didn’t come on until nine, so Charlie hummed to himself as he got everything ready, old songs he remembered his grandmother singing to him, and songs he had heard just yesterday on the radio, new songs out of Nashville.

  All this country music was new to him, and he liked it. It felt like home, the thin, high mountain voices singing about heaven and hell and betrayal and loss. There were songs about love and murder. Something about these songs made Charlie remember what it was like to be in love, made him want to feel that way again.

  He laid out the thick strips of country bacon in neat rows, bacon Will had smoked himself, so rich, so salty, and put sprigs of parsley around the cuts left over from yesterday. He made clean butcher’s bows to put on yesterday’s chops, flipped the steaks and roasts so they looked fresh, as though they’d just been cut. Will tried not to have a lot left over at the end of the day, but whatever was left, Charlie made it look brand new.

  Just as the other shops were beginning to open, Charlie uncurled the hose from the side of the building and washed down the sidewalk outside the store, the bricks turning from dusty rose to deep bloodred and drying in the sun to an ancient pink, the same color as most of the houses that lined the streets of the town.

  When Will appeared, always with the boy, he brought Charlie a fried egg sandwich and a few strips of bacon, wrapped in wax paper, and Charlie sat in the one ch
air and ate his breakfast while Will went over the figures, called the slaughterhouse, counted the money in the cash register, sometimes taking a huge roll of cash out of his pocket and either adding some to it from the cash register, or peeling off some of his own to add to the drawer. Then he filled out his bank deposit slip and went across the street, leaving Charlie to eat in peace, while the boy sat on the floor, still in his summer shorts and T-shirt, drawing faces in the sawdust.

  Will always brought two sparkling white butcher’s aprons—he said Alma could get blood out of anything—and Charlie would be just slipping his on when Will came back from the bank, and the first customers opened the screen door, tinkling the bell.

  The black women came first, ages nineteen to eighty, in their thin dresses smelling of hand soap and galvanized washing boards, as though they wanted to get their business out of the way before the white women stirred from their houses. Sometimes they had extra shopping to do for the white women they worked for. They rarely came alone, usually with a friend or a cousin or an aunt, and some mornings, they were all there at once, at the door before the sidewalk dried, and gone just as quickly, their neatly wrapped bundles in their hands. Sometimes they came with children, children who stared at Sam and didn’t speak or say hello.

  They ordered as much, if not more, than any of the white women, and Charlie treated them all with the same respect, although he never learned any of their names, and they didn’t ask his.

  He looked at their hands, looking for wedding rings, and he called them Miss, or Ma’am, depending on how he figured it. They never smiled, and he never smiled back, just looked at them with his honest eyes, and treated the exchange as seriously as they did, watching as they counted out the money for Will, sometimes in bills, sometimes in coins.

  Usually they were gone by the time the first white women came, and if they weren’t, they stepped aside and looked away as the white women entered, then left quickly, silently.