Drifting South. Charles Davis

and directed it at him.

      I pulled Amanda behind me and felt like my heart had quit beating. When it started again, it pounded in my ears and was the only thing I could hear until Uncle Ray yelled.

      “Stop where you’re standing, mister!” he said.

      I’d never heard Uncle Ray say anything over a normal talking voice. He’d yelled so loud that most of the people watching the fight just down the street turned to look. And then a Shady elder who was watching the fight to make sure it didn’t get too out of hand saw Uncle Ray holding that black revolver, and he came running up the street, pulling two guns from hip holsters.

      Uncle Ray kept hurrying until he got about ten feet from me, trying to get between me and the man I was almost sure was the same man who worked for Aunt Kate. That close to those eyes, there was now little doubt.

      I even remembered his name. It was Mr. Charles. I didn’t know if Charles was his first name or last name, but that’s what Aunt Kate called him.

      “Empty your hands!” Uncle Ray yelled at him.

      I raised one of my hands to try to say something to stop whatever was about to happen from happening, and tell Uncle Ray everything was all right and to simmer down whatever it was that was boiling up in him.

      “Drop that gun, Ray!” the Shady elder ordered.

      Uncle Ray paid no attention to Elder Butch Sarver but kept his gun leveled on Mr. Charles. The odd thing was, Charles didn’t even act like he’d heard a thing or knew a gun was pointed at him.

      I was turning to Amanda Lynn to see if she could figure out what was going on and do something to settle everybody down. I figured her and Mr. Charles had traveled up together. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walking toward me now even faster, so I turned back and in one quick motion, he raised the front of the newspaper he was toting a couple of inches, and two explosions came out of that paper so loud it sounded like cannons had shot from it, and the paper caught on fire.

      Uncle Ray flew backward toward me and Amanda Lynn, and Ma screamed.

      Charles dropped the newspaper and started leveling a silver pistol in my direction and I froze still like I was dead already. I was sure I was, looking down the barrel of that big gun. Then a shot came from behind him.

      He turned and fired three quick shots and one of the elders, Butch Sarver, fell forward, dropping one of his guns. Butch tried to raise his other revolver from where he was lying and the man with the ice-water eyes, who I’d known the year before but only a little more than I could claim knowing a complete stranger, took a careful long aim with both hands and shot him again.

      Butch’s face, or what was left of it, dropped into a mud hole and didn’t come back up.

      When Charles turned back to kill me, I’d picked up Uncle Ray’s gun and I was already squeezing the trigger slow and steady, just like he’d taught me as I kept the front sight in the middle of Mr. Charles’s chest.

      Chapter 5

      It was early morning now, and as orange colors started taking over the sky and the bus made its way through the bottom end of the Shenandoah Valley, I kept wondering again like I’d had a thousand times if Uncle Ray was following his own nature that terrible evening.

      Uncle Ray had always told me that the time would probably come when I might need to fight for my life or run for my life, and I’d have to choose quick and wise or I might never leave those mountains whether I wanted to or not. That was the sort of thing that made me think of the choice he made that day so long ago. I remembered how he told me once that I wasn’t born with two feet to just stand on and get killed.

      And he told me that cowardice was a much misunderstood thing by most—those of the weaker stock. The same bunch who may talk loud around like weak ears, but stand to the side and become quiet men and steer clear of actual situations where they may have to come face-to-face with such a thing.

      As the bus headed south toward Roanoke and then Shawsville, I couldn’t think of a single lesson of Uncle Ray’s that didn’t come in handy at some time or another. Looking around at the children keeping their mommas awake and having a time of things on that bus at such an early hour, I wondered if most boys from other places got lessons on fighting and running so young, and do so much of it, like boys in Shady Hollow did. I reckoned they probably didn’t.

      When the bus neared Christiansburg and started having a hard time going up those rugged old mountains, I felt like I was home already and I wished I had a window that would roll down so I could smell it. It’s hard to describe such a feeling that I had that early June morning as the sun was just starting to blaze up the hills and ridges. It was one of those full, peaceful feelings that comes so seldom and sits way deep down inside a person. It made me hopeful, like there was more going on than just another day had come. I wondered if maybe my long spell of bad luck had finally come to an end.

      My anger wasn’t gone from me, I knew that, but it was being stilled the closer I got to home. I’d never figured that would happen, but I was starting to feel good and young again in ways you only get when it comes natural like it was doing.

      I knew I couldn’t ever get back the years I’d lost and that fact still set in a fiery bad place in me like it always had, but now it looked to me that maybe some answers and a sunny day or two were ahead of me. I didn’t feel like I was just taking a breath to take another one maybe, to only then be able to take another one. It felt real good inside is what I’m saying, and that was a new thing for me. I didn’t feel so dead inside anymore. I felt alive in all ways, many of them I’d forgotten that I even could or ever had felt before. My stop was coming up soon, and I’d never been so dang anxious about anything.

      I kept wondering what I’d say after being gone for so long, if Ma still had my old fiddle and other things I’d known as a boy, what I’d holler walking into Hoke’s, and especially, all of the things I needed to say and ask Ma and my brothers when I first saw them after we’d had a chance to fellowship and get to know one another again, if I could do that without facing the most serious of things with them first. Truth was I didn’t know what I’d do or how I’d act when I stepped foot there. As loud as the things were inside me, the years had grown me silent on the outside and I might not be able to say nothing.

      I’d been either worried about or had been mad at Ma for a long time. But the closer I got to her, I just wanted to see her and hoped to find some peace between us somehow because I needed to feel something like that in a terrible way. I wondered about her for a long time on that trip and then somewhere on the road, my thoughts went to my brothers and where the winds may have taken them.

      I thought about each one of them, and was curious to find out if they’d stayed in Shady, and how many of them now had families of their own, and if over time they’d left to find their own places and fortunes somewhere else, which I figured they all did.

      I hoped luck had been good to them because, besides being my brothers, they were a good bunch of boys even if none of them ever came to visit me. I’d missed each of them more than they’d ever know, and I tried to figure like I’d done countless times what they’d aged to look like and such things because the last time I had seen them, most were just half-grown or less.

      We were the closest of close growing up, sharing that one bedroom and generally one mattress, unless one or more were too young and slept in a bureau drawer or a pasteboard box beside Ma’s bed.

      I was the oldest, and then there was Milton, James, Bernard, Franklin, Theodore and little Virgil. We were all kinds of different colors but we all carried the same last name Ma had, which was Purdue. Her first name was Rebecca, even though almost everybody in Shady called her Violet, which was her working name. Her closest friends called her Becca, which is the name I guessed she favored most to be called. Ma didn’t carry a middle name back then that I knew of.

      Me, Frank and little Virgil were white-looking, mostly. Jimmy was shaded just like Ma, Milton was a red-brown color and Bernie was dark with slanted eyes. But Teddy was the one who stuck out the most from the rest of us, like the time when Ma let