13. The White Shawl (1992)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to the West Virginia Department of Culture and History for their support of this project, and to Gail Adams, Susan Sailor, Ethel Morgan Smith, Cathy Hankla, Jeanne Larsen, and others whose guidance, vision, and enthusiasm never failed to propel this forward. Thanks, too, to Sharon Hatfield, Deni Naffziger, Reneé Williams, and especially Daniel Canterbury, generous readers, and to Samara Rafert and Rick Huard and the editors and staff at Swallow Press. Earlier forms of “Canning Peaches” and “Gun Season” appeared in Kestrel. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people, events, or places is purely coincidental and not intended to be taken as accurate historical depiction.
ONE
SNAGGED (1967)
THOUGH HE WAS ONLY SEVENTEEN, LUX CRANFIELD knew some things about how to get along in life. He knew how to file and clean a horse’s hoof, so he could ride his dappled gray mare for hours on gas pipeline roads and ridgetop trails without needing to call a blacksmith to have her shod. He knew how to scan the fields to judge where deer bedded down for the night, how to note dimples in the soft dark earth for fresh tracks, how to search saplings for ragged marks where bucks scraped the bark with their antlers, and how to crouch down behind a giant chestnut stump, remain perfectly still, and wait for dawn, so he could take a silent shot with his compound bow, then track it, bleed it out, gut it, and get it home before the local game warden left his driveway to go to work.
Some things came naturally to Lux and some he had to work at. He’d worked hard to learn how to throw a fastball to catch the inside corner of the strike zone, sinking as it sailed by the knees of a batter. He’d practiced this, just as he’d practiced downshifting his Jeep into second gear with his left hand while letting go of the steering wheel, resting his right hand on the knee of a girl next to him, not lugging the engine or spilling an open can of Iron City. He’d learned how to drop a towering red oak by sawing a deep wedge across its base at the correct height and angle, then how to slice down into the wedge, so that the weight of the tree shifted gradually and gravity took over, trunk and crown falling where he wanted it to, downhill toward the skidder.
Lux knew he had a knack for some things and he had good aim, and that these skills had gotten him the job of his dreams, cutting timber for A-1 Lumber, but if that didn’t work out, he could beat the draft by enlisting in the U.S. Army or the West Virginia National Guard and take a couple of years to figure out his next steps. This decision would be his to make in August, his eighteenth birthday, and he was keeping it to himself. But on an early spring morning in April 1967, after his left eye was cut open by a locust snag, Lux began to think his backup plan was no longer an option, and that he had to give serious thought to the course his life should take.
It couldn’t have been a better morning to be out cutting timber. Dense, cool fog kept away the glare of the rising sun. On the forest floor, ferns and wildflowers had begun to leaf out. On the steep hillside, the ground was firm enough for good footing under his steel-toe boots, not slick or soggy like during the March thaw. Lux was out by daybreak as part of a five-man crew, clearing scrub timber that lay between County Road 57 and a stand of second-growth red oak on the steep side of North Fork, when a dead locust limb high above his head dropped out of a tangle of vines, bounced off his hard hat, and slammed into the left-hand side of his face, knocking him off his feet and pinning him on the ground. He came to hearing the scream of saws above his ears and the shouts of men working to get him out from under that mess.
On the hour-long drive to the Fairchance ER, with the left side of his face wrapped in his blood-soaked shirt, after realizing that this was not just a bad dream or something happening to some other guy, and after moving each joint and swelling finger to reassure himself that no bones were broken, Lux realized that some might call him screwed and some might call him lucky, but more likely what his mother had told him for the whole of her short life was correct, the Lord was keeping an eye on him. He’d been called to account, and he did not want to come up wanting. He had to quit running wild and staying out half the night, get more of a grip on his life, and settle down with someone calm and steady, the right girl who would keep him on the right track.
In the last straightaway before town, Lux knew who that girl should be. He sat up for a moment to catch his breath and clear his throbbing head in the passenger seat of Alan Ray’s speeding Bronco. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, brushed dirt and sawdust from around his good eye, and in the fierce, slanting light of the morning sun he saw Dessie Price leaning forward beside her golden retriever while she waited for the school bus at the end of her driveway. “Will you look at that?” Alan Ray called out, waving his A-1 cap at Dessie from the driver’s seat, and Lux turned and squinted as Dessie waved back. He could swear she was smiling right at him. For two days in the hospital, through a haze of painkillers, as the doctors worked to try to save his eye, Lux held on to the memory like a secret keepsake: Dessie’s sudden smile, her long blond hair, and her red sweater flashing by like a bright spark against the long pale green shimmer of her father’s hayfield.
ON A warm spring afternoon a couple of weeks after the accident, when most of the swelling was gone from his face, Lux stopped by the high school. Below his rolled shirtsleeves his forearms were scarred and scraped, and purple traces of bruises could be seen along his left cheek and under the brim of his A-1 cap. He wore new black Levi’s, a new pair of black cowboy boots, a plaid flannel shirt, and over his left eye a black eyepatch partially concealed a wad of gauze bandages. Thick black hair curled out from around his ears and below the rim of his cap. After the last bell, Dessie Price and a few school friends gathered around him for the details.
“How’d it happen, Lux?” asked Billie Price, Dessie’s ninth-grade sister. Her dark hair hung around her neck, and she shook her bangs out of her dark eyes as she looked up at him.
“Well, I can’t say exactly, but I’ll tell you what I think happened,” Lux said, scratching the back of his neck, which had begun to sweat. “It felt like the woods was waiting, like it was set up like a damn trap, and I was the one who sprung it,” he said without a trace of a smile. This would be repeated around the schoolyard and beyond, he knew. He pulled back his shoulders, cleared his throat, stretched his long fingers out, cracking each of his knuckles.
It was right before sunrise when he’d gotten to work, he said, and as the dawn broke he finished sharpening the chain on his saw. The crew spread out in the woods to start cutting. He was downhill, clearing a path for the skidder through an overgrown patch of woods and vines that had been clear-cut years earlier. “It was a nasty setup from the get-go,” he said. “I wanted to take down this one elm first off, so I could see what I was getting into. Set down the lunch pail, took a few steps uphill, and ripped into the tree.” He shook his head slowly, pulled down the brim of his cap. “Something didn’t feel right, the tree was half dead, but I didn’t pay it any mind. ’Bout halfway through the first cut, the damn elm started to shift and fall, way too soon, and that limb slammed down from above, dragging greenbrier, grapevine, Virginia creeper, you name it. Never heard it coming, with the saw so loud.”
He cleared his throat. As he spoke, the small group of students gazed at him, scanning the bruises on his face and arms, the eyepatch. Lux was six feet tall, and the boots made him feel like he was a head taller than the others. Usually height had given him an edge, but today it made him feel distant, more like an outsider, and suddenly the intensity caught him off guard. Talking about it made it more real.
“Damn snag,” Lux said, brushing his forearm over the eyepatch. “A locust branch, maybe twenty
