Humping the Bush

We passed Mrs. Mundy’s, a slanted-looking house with dirty white clapboards, and the Craddock’s, a squat gray cabin made out of chestnut and pine. After that came the Snider’s, which was really a converted tobacco barn, and then a long field where purple coneflowers and goldenrod grew wild in the summer, but was now just stubble and ice. And then the Jasperson’s snow-covered tire pyramid, the Jasperson’s frozen clothesline, and finally the Jasperson’s mobile home. Lights glowed through the flowered sheets tacked in their windows and a pinkish smoke rose from their chimney. You could tell they had got hold of some wild cherry for burning from the fruity perfume filling the air.

Years earlier, Mrs. Jasperson had that trailer towed from the other side of the mountain after she discovered her husband had gambled their life savings away to a drifter. It took Mr. Jasperson two days to find his way home. A string of worsening luck followed and it wasn’t long  before Mrs. Jasperson lost him  to Central Prison in Raleigh, thanks to a poor decision involving a bank and a finger gun. Ever since, the wheeled house had troubled me. Where would it go next? Would we wake one morning to find it vanished forever, with nothing but an oily patch to mark where the Jaspersons once lived? This thought took me back to our home, permanently sunk in its hollow of red mud. And back to Nate, wrapped in his quilt, alone on the couch. I hoped he was warm enough.

For a good while after that, there were no houses at all, just sagging oaks and maples and forlorn-looking stretches of snow. At last, we reached the pastor’s former residence––a grayish bungalow with chipped lilac trim, from which icicles dangled in glint- ing spikes. A year ago, the pastor had insisted the church buy him a place closer to town, saying it was shameful to force a shepherd to live so far from his flock. Since then, this property had stood abandoned. Our father paused to take it in.

It was a startling sight, really. Nature had leapt at the chance to have its way with that sad little cottage, left alone to fend for itself. It’s surprising how fast things come apart. Hip-high stinging nettles and musk thistles had invaded the pastor’s herb garden. Vines were hard  at work strangling the  fruit trees and shrubs. A colony of bees must have taken up residence in the attic, causing dark streaks of honey to drip from the soffit. Teenagers had shot out the window glass. Someone had even gone so far as to spray-paint a hateful word in thick black letters across the door. I hoped our father hadn’t seen it. Even then, I felt the need to protect him from the viciousness I privately knew the world to have.

Yet, as I studied that lonesome wreckage, I saw someone had undertaken a few repairs, as if hoping to reverse, or at least forestall, the decay. Two of the broken windows had been replaced with plywood and a wicked-looking black tarp covered the holes in the roof. Huge snarls of honeysuckle had been ripped from the pear trees and tossed on the ground, where they lay waiting to be carted off or burned. Most surprising of all, a cord of firewood lay stacked on the porch, as though someone planned to move in.

At last, our father roused himself and quickened his pace up the mountain. You’d have thought from the way he was hustling that the scene held some terrible warning aimed squarely at him. It wasn’t long before he abandoned the road altogether and made straight for a sinister-looking clump of hemlocks. All at once, my voice rose in my throat and I had to fight hard not to cry out. I watched as he receded farther and farther into the distance before disappearing altogether into the woods.