Текст книги "A Land More Kind Than Home"

Автор книги: Wiley Cash

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

“It was a goddamned accident,” he finally said. He tried to clear his throat, and he coughed and spattered blood onto my hand and my sleeve. “It was an accident,” he said again.

I held him by the collar and stared down at him until he quit talking. He rolled his head forward, and his body went limp like he’d passed out. I cocked the hammer on my pistol and put the barrel to his forehead. I raised his face to mine.

Sometimes, when I get to thinking about it, I wish I’d have blown his damn head off right there and left him laid up in the snow with his brains hanging up in the limbs of some old pine tree. I didn’t do it, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think about it every day. Every single day. I’ll be damned if I don’t think about how easy it would’ve been just to take care of it all right there.

“Jesus,” he said.

We stayed like that for a while, me standing and Hall on his knees in the snow with the barrel of my gun against his head. It was quiet, but I could hear the heavy flakes light on the tree branches overhead, and I heard the hushed pulse of music coming from the stereo inside the truck. A baying dog wailed in the cove below us.

“Ask those boys,” he whispered.

I lifted my boot and pushed him onto his back and out of the beam of the headlights. I raised my pistol and squeezed the shot into the trees overhead. It rang through the woods and echoed across the valley. A screech owl flushed at the noise and swooped down from the darkness above. I turned in time to see it soar across the road and disappear into the snow-covered boughs of a pine.

Jimmy lay on the roadside breathing heavy. I walked over and stood above him. “Get up,” I said. He didn’t move. I kicked him, but he still didn’t move. I put my pistol back in the holster and reached down and grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled him to his feet. He had trouble standing up, and I leaned him against the front fender and rifled through his pockets.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

“I ain’t decided not to yet,” I said.

I opened the driver’s-side door to the truck and took the keys out of the ignition. The radio went off, and the night was suddenly silent and still. I walked a piece up the road and stopped at the edge of the woods and looked into the darkness where I knew the trees were standing. Then I threw the keys as far as I could, and I listened to them ricochet off the tree branches and trunks until the sound of their falling was swallowed by the snow. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw that the road continued a hundred yards up the mountain and disappeared around a bend. Through the trees I could see a few lights shining in the valley. I went back to the truck and found Jimmy leaning against the hood where I’d left him.

I opened the door and pushed him into the truck. “You can walk home when you sober up,” I said. It was dark and I could barely see him, but I heard him groan as he sprawled his body out on the bench seat. I knew he’d die if he passed out in that cold truck up on that mountain. I didn’t find that to be too bad of an option, and I slammed the door to the truck and walked back down the road.

THE SNOW HADN’T QUITE FILLED HIS TIRE TRACKS IN, AND I WALKED just between them on my way to the car. It was late, and the lights in the valley to my left were beginning to wink off for the night. I turned my collar up to keep out the snow, and I buried my hands deep inside my coat pockets. The wind picked up and blew through the trees off in the darkness on the right-hand side of the road. The creaking limbs and branches sounded like hundreds of squeaky doors opening and closing in an old farmhouse.

When I reached the car, I opened the door and climbed inside. The seat followed the slope of the car and tilted down into the ditch and made it difficult to sit upright. I slid down the vinyl toward the passenger side and settled my back against the door. I started the engine and radioed the station in Marshall and told them where I was.

“How’s the weather up there?” asked dispatch.

I took my finger off the receiver and looked out the windshield. “I’m sweating my ass off,” I said. “What the hell do you think it’s like?”

The line was quiet.

“I’ll send someone up that’s got a wench,” he finally said.

“I’ll be here.”

I set the CB back on its cradle and cranked the heat. Hot air poured out of the vents and my face and ears got warm. I held out my hands and felt the blood slowly creep into my fingers.

I watched the windows fog over, and I pictured Sheila in the kitchen at home, reading a book or flipping through a magazine and looking up now and then to check the window for headlights and listening for the sound of a car door being closed. I didn’t know how in the world I was going to tell her about Jeff, but I kept forcing myself to remember that I knew the routine: the pause on the steps of a stranger’s porch before you knocked on the front door, the awkwardness of answering questions and drinking coffee in the kitchen while you watched a family grieve. I’d broken this news what felt like a hundred times, but now it was my own family, and I’ll be damned if I could remember how to do it.

It almost seemed like payback for all the times I’d sat in those kitchens answering questions, thinking about nothing but the hot dinner and the cold beer I was missing, the warm fireplace and the boots I was ready to kick off and leave on the bedroom floor. But now the comfort of those things was far from my mind, and I couldn’t think of anything except the fear on Sheila’s face while I stumbled through what I had to tell her, expecting any minute to hear Jeff’s keys in the front door, the sound of his footsteps coming through the foyer, his body filling up the doorway in the kitchen. His voice saying, “Mama, why are you crying?”

But the new memory of Jeff’s body smoldering on the roadside forced itself into my head and forced out those imaginings, and just below the noise of the cruiser’s engine and the steady stream of the heat coming from the vents I could hear the sound of steam hissing beneath that blue sheet. I thumped the back of my head against the passenger-side window and tried to keep the tears out of my eyes.

IT SEEMED LIKE HOURS HAD PASSED WHEN I HEARD THE NOISE OF metal striking metal underneath the cruiser. I opened my eyes and saw pale, murky light coming through the fogged-over glass. Somebody’s fist beat hard on the driver’s-side window, and I slid up the bench seat and wiped away the condensation. Bright light poured through the cleared spot, and I squinted my eyes against it.

Jimmy Hall’s face pressed itself against the other side of the glass. Both his eyes were already dark and swollen, and the bridge of his nose was split open and bleeding from where I’d cracked him with my pistol. I sat and stared at him, and I wondered if he had anything in his hands that I couldn’t see.

“Pop your clutch and drop it in neutral,” he said.

I was too shocked to move, and I watched him turn and walk back to his truck, where I lost him in the glow of the headlights. A second later his truck’s engine roared and I felt something tug at the front of my car. I killed the engine and put it in neutral and opened the door and struggled out into the snow. The cruiser lurched in the ditch behind me.

“What are you doing?” I yelled over the noise. His headlights hid his face behind the windshield, and I ran toward his truck and beat on the hood. The snow was near blinding, but I could make out his face once I was through the light. He stared at me through the glass. “I don’t want your help!” I hollered.

Behind me I heard the frame of the cruiser groan as the towline popped from the snow and cinched tight under the strain. Hall slowly backed the truck away from me and the high beams hit my eyes again and all I could see was the bright light through the falling snow. I stood and stared into his retreating headlights.

The cruiser’s undercarriage breached the top of the ditch, and the frame scraped against the packed snow. I turned just in time to see it loose itself and roll out of the gully and into the road. When it did, the towline swung with it and tore through my pants leg and ripped into my thigh. I fell to my knees. My hand went toward the pain, and I could feel where my pants were already warm with blood.

The engine on Hall’s truck geared down, and he put it in park and stepped out onto the road. I scrambled to my feet and saw his silhouette coming toward me in the light. He stumbled past me and bent to the ground and unhooked the towline.

“I had an extra key,” he said on the way back to his truck.

“I didn’t need your help.”

“You got it anyway,” he said. He cranked the winch, and I watched as the line slid along through the snow and came to a stop at his bumper. He fastened the hook to the line. “You broke my nose,” he said.

“I wish I’d shot you,” I told him.

“I don’t expect that to change now,” he said.

“It won’t.”

“I didn’t expect it would.”

He looked up, and we stared at each other and I realized how quiet it was once the roar of the truck and the sound of our voices had died away. I walked to my car and climbed inside and cranked the engine and put it in reverse. My thigh throbbed from where the line had torn into my skin. I heard Hall yell for me to stop, and I turned and looked out the windshield. He stood in the light of my high beams.

“I’m sorry about your boy!” he hollered. I sat and looked at him, and then I turned my cruiser around and headed down the mountain.

WHEN I GOT HOME, I PARKED AT THE TOP OF THE DRIVEWAY AND stared at the house. All the lights were off inside, and it was silent. I stepped out of the car and leaned onto the hood and listened to the engine cool. Snow fell down into the collar of my coat, and my hands felt heavy and cold. A lamp turned on in the bedroom and light slowly flooded the house, and I knew Sheila was inside moving from room to room on her way down the stairs to the door. She stepped onto the porch and called my name, but I couldn’t figure out how to open my mouth and answer her.

She walked down the steps, and I watched her silhouette move across the snow-covered lawn against the bright light of the house. She stopped once to pull her robe around her and kick the snow from her slippers. She reached me and looked into my face.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked, and then she waited for me to say something. She gave me a worried smile. “You’re going to be a snowman soon if you stand out here too much longer.”

I looked down at her and tried to think of what to tell her first, but I felt like I’d been buried deep in the snow and that she’d arrived just in time to dig me out. I opened my mouth to speak, and I felt the cold air on my tongue and saw the heat from my breath rise like smoke before me.

Adelaide Lyle

T

WELVE

YES, I REMEMBER IT ALL: ELIZABETH AND LOTTIE COMING over from the church and showing up at my door just after dark on Sunday evening, Julie right there in between them, hardly able to stand up on her own. Them two getting her to lie down on the sofa in the front room and then taking me into the kitchen to tell me what had happened, and me asking “Why?” over and over, “Why? Why was that boy in the church again?” I tried my best to keep my voice low so Julie couldn’t hear it, but each time the question just got louder and louder because those two women didn’t have no answer for me. “Why?” And then all that fighting out there in the yard.

It wasn’t but Tuesday morning, just two days later, that Sheriff Barefield came back to ask me all about them bringing Christopher over to my house after it had happened, and “Wasn’t it you who always watched those kids?” All I could give him was a “yes” to that question and nothing else, not because I didn’t want to but because there wasn’t nothing else for me to give. But if I’d have wanted to, I could’ve told that story from the very beginning, thinking back years and years ago to a night when I trudged up that mountain in the snow because Ronnie Norman’s truck wouldn’t go no farther. And now the sheriff coming here and sitting down in my kitchen all bucked up like a rooster, staring me in the eyes like there was something else to it, something I wasn’t telling him. Something I didn’t want to say. Like I couldn’t remember the look on Julie Hall’s face when that little boy crowned and I lifted the hood from his eyes: eyes as crystal clear as spring water and not a lick of fear in them. Clear like glass and him staring up at me without ever opening his mouth to cry. It seems like it was so long ago, but I remember it all. I may be an old woman now, but I can remember it all. I remember the very night he was born like it was yesterday.

When I heard it, I sat straight up in bed.

“What’s that?” I said, and wouldn’t you know there wasn’t a soul there to answer. Never had been nobody but me, but still there I was sitting straight up in my bed. “Who’s there?” I called like I expected an answer from a voice that hadn’t ever been there. I’ve lived alone just about all my life except for those years up on Parker Mountain with my great-aunt before she sent me off the mountain and down into town.

There wasn’t a single time when I was little that I didn’t live with her in that old cabin that smelled like dried leaves and lavender in the winter and damp earth and bergamot in the hot summertime. She was a storyteller if there ever was one, and she’d shell beans into a patch quilt she’d spread out across her lap and talk about my dead mama and daddy like they’d just stepped out into the yard to check the sky for rain clouds. My only memory of my mama is a wispy shadow thrown against the cabin wall by candlelight, and in my mind my daddy is a black shadow blotting out the sun in a cleared field. But she brought them back to me and made sure I understood the lives that had come before my own.

Her memory was sharp as a blade. She could remember the exact year of the best burley tobacco crop she’d ever raised, and she could tell you the name and lineage of just about every person up on Parker Mountain, even though most of them folks had less than nothing to do with us. She’d shuck bushel after bushel of corn in the candlelight and tell me the names of all the animals on her daddy’s and granddaddy’s farms. I’d work alongside her and listen to her talk as far into the night as she’d let me. I was just an itty-bitty little thing, even for my age, and she was the oldest person I knew, and I thought she must have been the oldest person who had ever lived.

It was 1919 the year I left her, the year she made me go. Late spring, and hadn’t nothing come up out of the ground fit to eat, and Lord knows we didn’t have no cash money and nothing to trade with. There wasn’t much to go around for none of us then.

“You need to get off this mountain and down to the city and get yourself set up to a job,” she said. “We ain’t going to last the summer through on what we got, and besides, it’s time you lit out on your own. Girls your age been give away by now and laid up with a baby or two and a piece of land all theirs.”

I was fourteen, and I didn’t know any better; I just figured she wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t know we’d have both probably died had I stayed the summer through.

Now, I had me a choice to make between Marshall, which is the county seat, Burnsville over there in Yancey County, and Asheville. Well, I’d been to Marshall once or twice before and back then there wasn’t too much there but the courthouse and a couple of feed stores and the like, and I figured Burnsville wasn’t much better than that, and knowing what I know now it would’ve been a long, tough trip there. I decided I’d go to Asheville, and I can tell you this, and this may surprise you when you hear it, but that’s the farthest away from Madison County I’ve ever been. I ain’t never had no reason to go no farther.

BUT IF I DON’T REMEMBER COMING INTO THE CITY THAT SATURDAY evening in the spring with all those trees budding along the French Broad River, that man on the wagon that carried me in from Weaverville pointing to that brown water and saying “We had us a flood here three years ago,” and then I looked out on the banks and seen some of them market and warehouse buildings all tore up from the river rising like it did and carrying with it all them tree limbs and all that trash and whole heaps of other stuff from downstream.

We came in the city from the north, and if that wasn’t the dangdest thing I’d ever seen, taking that cart through the farmer’s market on Lexington Avenue and all that food looking like it had just been ripped off the vine and all them chippies there wearing their makeup and their powder and waiting on them farm boys to close up their stands and pack up their wagons and spend a little time with them before lighting back out for the country. We rode right through there, and my head almost fell off with all the looking around I done.

“Where you wanting me to stop?” that man asked me.

“It don’t much matter,” I told him. He must’ve thought he had a real mountain yokel on his hands, and I can’t say I much blame him. If I wasn’t the greenest thing he’d ever seen, then I don’t know what was.

“Well, what kind of work are you hoping to find?” he asked me.

“That don’t much matter neither,” I said.

That must’ve frustrated him because that man stopped that wagon right smack in the center of town with all those cars and trolleys whizzing by and me sitting up there all bright-eyed and scared. He sat there with the reins in his hands and watched me get down and dust myself off and reach up for my little piece of luggage.

“What you figuring on doing now?” he asked me.

“I’m figuring on finding me some work,” I told him, and it wasn’t hardly no time at all before I’d done just that.

That night I found me a bed in a little tenement shack for girls, and the next day I took a job as a laundress taking in wash from the summer folks who stayed in the boardinghouses around the square and uptown in the hotels. And Lord, if those folks from places like Charleston and Atlanta and Savannah didn’t have just about the nicest, finest clothes I’d ever seen. But even all that fine fabric didn’t make that job no easier; washing is some hard work on your hands. You keep them wet like that for long enough, and you can just about peel off your skin like an onion. It’ll give you some soft hands, but Lord if they don’t get to hurting you good after you done it awhile. I hated it, but that was about all the work I could find. It was early summer and a good three months before the apple season sprung out there in the south of town and there wasn’t no tobacco coming in yet, so washing was about all the work I could get and about all the experience I had with the kinds of jobs folks did in town.

I washed clothes like the devil all summer long to keep my belly full and my back covered, and the first day them tobacco barns on the river opened up I was down there trying to hustle up a little work. They took one look at me, a skinny little girl from the hills, and they said, “What in the world do you know about tobacco?”

Of course I’d worked burley all my life, and I told them, “I know more about it on both ends than you do on this one. You let me work for you and pay me a fair take, and I’ll show you just what I know.” And let me tell you, there was me at fourteen hustling that market like nobody’s business.

“You there,” I might say to some or other seller, “what in the world did you do, drag that burley through the French Broad on your way here? Y’all going to have to dry that out good before it gets on this scale,” and “Yes, sir, you got yourself a right pretty crop, and we want to make you a right pretty deal to go with it.” I used to carry on like that just about all the time, trying to get those buyers a good price.

They’d say, “Where in the world did you learn to talk burley like that?” and I’d go into some or other long windy about being born with a burley knife already in my hand, and I’ll be doggone if some of them fellers didn’t want to believe it.

But if that wasn’t a tough time for folks with all the boys gone off to fight and then bringing that sickness home. It wasn’t bad enough the city was about slam full of lungers. You could see them sitting up on the screened porches of some of the sanitariums along the road from town and on the way to the tobacco barns. Folks would try and hide it, but you could tell them right off when you saw them. Just sickly looking and trying their best to hide those little handkerchiefs, those little red spots on the cotton. When the boys started coming home from the war in spells, it got a whole lot worse than it was before. The flu they brought home with them just spelled out disaster, and not only in town neither, and not just in this part of the country. Thousands died, thousands. We ain’t never seen the like of it since, and I hope we don’t in my day. Whole families just up and dying in only a week or two. Ain’t never seen the like of it since.

I CAME HOME TO MADISON COUNTY THAT FALL AFTER THE LEAVES had turned and were just about off the trees, and on the road up the mountain I guess I had what you might call a premonition.

“Addie,” a voice said somewheres in my mind, “when you get up there things ain’t going to be the same as they was when you left.” And for some reason, and I can’t say why, I knew I wasn’t going to find my great-aunt alive.

The place was just as still and quiet as it could be—no smoke coming up out of the chimney, nothing but weeds and a shriveled-up crop in the ground. I listened to the wind tumbling through the dead stalks in the field, and I remember that it put me in mind of hearing paper trash blow along the sidewalk in the town I’d just left from. If I’d have closed my eyes I might’ve thought I was right back in downtown Asheville carrying a heap of dirty laundry down a lamplit street instead of lugging my own little piece of luggage and a purse padded with a couple bills and some loose coins up the hill toward home.

Sure enough, I found her in the bed by the cold fireplace covered up to her neck with all the quilts she’d made. I can’t say just how long she’d been dead, but I’ve seen pictures of those Egyptian kings after they find them in their tombs, and I think it’s fair to say she was on her way to that. But she’d took the time to plait her hair, and it’s because of that that I can fool myself into remembering that she looked just like a little girl laying there with those tight gray pigtails splayed out on the pillow beside her. If she’d still been alive and it had been somebody else laying there, even a stranger, I think I would’ve cried just for seeing a dead body. But it wasn’t nobody else but her and there wasn’t nobody else there but me, so I figured there wasn’t much use in all that carrying on.

Then, at that time, I couldn’t believe she’d been laid up dead for who knows how long and there hadn’t been nobody coming up to check on the old woman and the little girl living on top of Parker Mountain. I found out later that folks had in their minds all kinds of no-count ideas about me and her living up there alone. They said she ran a still out there in the woods and had me out selling liquor to men on the other side of the mountain down near Greenville, Tennessee. The kids up there thought we were witches hiding out and eating the fingers and toes of little boys we caught on the land. With people holding truck in ideas like that, I reckon it makes pretty good sense that they’d stay as far away from us as they could.

I’d always known she wanted to be buried with her people up in the field above the cabin where they’d buried family for years. She’d take me up there on Decoration Day, and we’d sweep the stones clean and clear what grass and weeds there was growing up around them. She’d lead us a little service under a stand of oaks up there, sing songs, say a prayer or two. From that high up you could see the county rolling away from you to the east, and if you turned and looked around the other way you could see the range running clear to Tennessee. It was a right pretty place, and I figured that was where I’d lay her to rest.

Now, I didn’t know the first thing about burying a body, and I for sure didn’t know a thing about building no coffin. But I did know how to dig me a hole, though, and that’s just what I did that next morning on top of the hill. I climbed up there just as the sun was breaking good on the ridge to the east, and I laid into that ground with a pickax and an old shovel. I didn’t stop digging until that hole was as deep as I was tall, and even then I knew that it wasn’t quite deep enough, but I was just too wore out to keep on.

After I finished I set off down the mountain and stopped at the first cabin where it looked like people were living. When I got close I seen a woman out in the field, and I called out to her.

“Ma’am,” I said, “I hate to bother you.” I looked on the other side of the field and seen an old man coming up out of the barn. He seemed like he was surprised to see a girl like me walking up the road to his place. That woman looked at him, and then she bent down to her work again. The old man made his way across the yard toward me so slow I thought he might not ever make it.

“What is it you’re needing?” he asked me once he was close enough. He had on him an old pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, and through those glasses I could see how worn his eyes looked, like he’d spent his whole lifetime squinting up at the sun.

“I hate to bother you,” I said again. “I live up the road a piece with my aunt—”

“I know who you are,” he said. I shut my mouth quick, and he just stared down at me. Then he turned his head and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the grass beside his boot.

“Well, I just came in from Asheville yesterday evening, and I found her passed away. I’m down here wondering if I could borrow—”

“What took her?” he asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I reckon it might have been this flu. But I can’t figure out how. I’m sure you know folks up on this mountain here didn’t have too much to do with her. I don’t know how she could’ve caught it with nobody stopping by to see her, her not having no friends that I know of.” He looked at the ground for a minute, and then he spit another stream of juice into the grass and rubbed it in with the toe of his boot. “I need to borrow some tools from somebody so I can fix up something fit to bury her in,” I said.

He looked up from the ground out to where his wife stood in the field. She’d quit working and was looking over at us, like she’d been able to hear us talking to each other from all the way across the yard.

“I’ve got cash money,” I told him. “If that’s what it’ll take, then I’m ready to spend it.” He looked back at me.

“There ain’t no need for that,” he said. “You go on and lay her out. We’ll be up there with it in the morning.” He turned, and I watched him walk back toward the barn. The woman was staring at me from the field. I raised my hand to her.

“Thank y’all!” I hollered.

I BEDDED DOWN IN THE BACK ROOM WITH HER STILL OUT THERE IN the bed by the fireplace, and that night I had me a dream. I can tell you that I ain’t never had such a dream before in my life, and not since have I remembered one so clearly.

It was dusk and I was walking up the hill from down there in the bottomland where the river snakes its way west to Tennessee. In the dream I wore some kind of baptismal robe that was so long that it drug along behind me in that dark, black mud, and I can remember just as plain as day looking down to see where it was still wet around the hem from me being in the river. It looked like I’d only stepped ankle-deep into the water and then changed my mind and walked right out, because in my dream the rest of me was dry and I didn’t have no memory of being dunked under that cold water. No memory of any prayers being prayed over me and no ringing in my ears from the testament of faith I’d have likely been expected to share.

I didn’t know just where I was at first, but the sun had sunk down below the hill that I was walking toward, and the whole country out there was just as quiet as it could be. It was then, with my back to the river, that I got the sense that somebody was following me, that somebody was right there on my heels going up that hill right along behind me. I stopped walking, and I turned around and I could hear my robe dragging over the grass and I could feel my bare feet stepping on that wet cotton hem. When I looked behind me, there was Jesus. He had on him a blue robe that was as dark as pitch where it was soaked through from the waist down, and I knew he’d been all the way out there in that water just waiting on me, and somehow or another I’d decided not to go out and meet him.

I knew it was Jesus sure enough because he looked just like they always said he would: olive skin, soft brown eyes, light brown hair. But in my dream he was much older than what you might find in a picture Bible or in the paintings that might be hanging up in a church. In my dream he was much older than they let him live to be. I could see the years around his eyes and his beard had patches of gray and white in it, and when he walked toward me from the river he had a little hitch in his step like his hip or his leg was hurting him and giving him a little bit of trouble. I just stood there watching him, and when he got within earshot, he hollered out to me.

“Why’d you stop walking?” he asked.

“Because,” I told him. “I didn’t know you were back there.”

“Yes, you did,” he said. “You just forgot. But go on, I’m following you now.” I just stood there not knowing what to say, and Jesus waved his hand like he was shooing me away. “Go on,” he said. “It’s all right. I told you, I’m following you.”

I turned around and faced that hill again, and when I did I felt something heavy in my hands. I looked down and saw that I was holding a plate with a napkin over it that was wet with grease, and when I lifted that napkin I saw that it covered a heap of hot fried chicken. All of a sudden I felt somebody walk past me, and when I looked up I saw it was a woman in a long white robe just like the one I had on, and when I looked her in the face I felt like she was somebody I might’ve known once upon a time. She held a plate in her hands too, and beside her was a man with a guitar strapped over his shoulder and he held a tambourine in one hand and a jug of something in the other. When I looked around that bottomland, I saw it was plum full of people in robes carrying food and instruments up the grassy hillside in the growing dark, not a one of them saying a word, not a one of them making a noise. They looked just like ghosts or haints, and then it struck me that they might just be angels. Jesus walked right up beside me, and we stood there watching them walk past us and on ahead of us, and I could feel that fried chicken cooling under that napkin and that plate was growing cold against my fingers.