Salvage This World

by Michael Farris Smith

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Southern

Synopsis

In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.
Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.
At once elegiac and profound, SALVAGE THIS WORLD journeys into the heart of a region growing darker and less forgiving, and asks how we keep going—what do we hold onto—in a land where God has fled.

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

She stood bathed in twilight, the dust in her hair and a kid on her hip and she stared at the approaching storm as if trying to figure how to wrangle the thunderheads and steer them to a distant and parched land where desperate souls would pay whatever ransom she demanded. The acres of sugar cane cut to nubs surrounding the house. A dry autumn turned into an unpredictable winter and then eleven days ago he left and she’d seen no one since. It was a mile walk along a dirt road that separated the acreage and another eight miles to walk to the nearest telephone but even if she wanted to bundle up and make it she wouldn’t know who to call. He was gone. And he had taken the car and the cigarettes and every dollar except for the stash she kept hidden beneath a floor plank in the closet. She had finished the last of the whiskey three nights before. The milk had run out yesterday.

Jessie stared at the storm and the wind began to blow and dustclouds rose like souls awakened and she listened to the wind and welcomed the sound of something else. She shifted the child from one hip to the other and pointed out at the lightning and said look at the light. See the light? One side of the sky was thick with stormclouds and the other side of the sky was wrapped in a rustred belt that bled into the horizon like an open wound and the child lifted his small hand and pointed at the light but it was not the lightning he saw but a gathering of headlights approaching in the distance. The thunder roared and the engines roared and she turned and ran for the house, setting the child down on the porch and hurrying for the bedroom, her footfalls hard against the floorboards and her breath in quick sucks as she took the pistol from beneath the mattress and grabbed the set of keys from the dresser drawer that he had always told her to grab if she had to make a run for it and then she hustled out and scooped up the child. The headlights growing closer and splitting the dusk as she hurried around the house and along the beaten trail through the high grass that led into the woods. She ran and the child bounced in her arms and she had just reached the edge of the woods when she looked back to see the vehicles skid to a stop in front of the house, a pale and powdery cloud rising around them. She heard the engines cut and the doors slam behind her and then she heard the shouts coming in her direction as the last of twilight seeped into the earth.

They called out as they chased her into the woods and the child squeezed her neck and held on but did not cry as she ran. She had gone far into these woods before but never far enough to know if there was anything on the other side and she was seized by the thought that she may run over the edge of the earth and that she and the child would plummet soundlessly into nothing. That thought was interrupted when a shotgun fired into the night, its echo ringing through the trees. She pushed harder. Squeezing the child close to her chest. Praying not to run over the edge or if there was such a thing praying that her fall would be brief and painless. Another shotgun blast. And then another. She knew then they were looking for him. She knew there was a fine damn reason he had never returned. She knew she and the child could never go back to the house. And she knew she would have to keep running.

2

They shivered through the night. Jessie unbuttoned her flannel shirt and held Jace against her skin and wrapped the shirt around them both but it did not stop the shaking. He cried some. Little whimpers of discomfort. Little whimpers of hunger. She sat on a pile of leaves with her back against a white oak and held him tight. Rocked a little. Hummed and sometimes sang and she kept promising that everything was going to be all right. The boy slept in increments, the ragged sleep of distress and discomfort. An owl hooted. Nightbirds sang. Deer moved in the dark and their creeping sounded like monsters in wait.

She nodded in and out of sleep. When her eyes fell heavy she imagined strong arms and strong hands reaching for her through the dark, prying the child from her grasp and she would wake with a jerk to find herself squeezing the child so tightly he was struggling for freedom. She would stroke the back of his head and coax him back to sleep and her eyes stayed opened wide, watching the woods and watching for the arms and hands that approached in her dreams but then closing them again.

Finally there was light. She rubbed her eyes. Felt the warmth of the child’s skin against her own. She did not want to wake him so she sat there and watched the morning come. Listened to the chirps and whistles and the movement of the early creatures. The child lifted his head and coughed. Opened his eyes and looked with question at his mother.

She kissed the boy on top of his head and said it’s all right. It’s all right. She then tucked the empty pistol into the back of her pants and she started them walking south, believing if she kept walking south they would run into Delcambre. Amidst the trees she would stop and listen for the hum of a highway. Set the boy down and rest a minute. Listen. Then he would cry to be carried again and she would tell him to hold on. Hush a second. But he was not concerned and he cried harder and made little mad fists and she would pick him up and start again.

In an hour she came to a clearing and the earth grew soft and heavy. The damp ground sucked at her feet and she set the child down and retied the laces on her boots. He wobbled and plopped down on his behind, a smack as his ass hit the wet ground. He screamed. Something different now from toddler whimpers. He screamed and shook and slapped at his own legs, redfaced and releasing as much anger as his little body could muster. And she propped her hands on her hips and looked down at him and said let it out. Let it all out, boy.

When he was done she reached down and helped him to his feet. The back of his pants muddy. He stood next to her and they both looked out across the marshland. Cranes stood on stumps. A flock of blackbirds rose from a cluster of young cypress and scattered across the low sky. The sun sat on the horizon and lathered the marsh in gold. It seemed beautiful to her in a way she had not expected.

But there was no time to admire. The child was now wet. And hungry and cold. She was hungry and cold. She didn’t know where they were but she knew there was highway somewhere.

3

They circled around the edge of the marsh for at least an hour. Crossed into another wood where the trees thinned. The sun rose higher into a blue and cloudless sky. Their pace had slowed and the child slept with his head on his mother’s shoulder. The pistol was cold and hard against the small of her back and every now and then she touched the pocket of her jeans, feeling the keys and making sure she had grabbed them and it was not part of some hurried dream.

First she saw the smoke and she followed it until she was close enough to smell it. She came to the edge of the woods and stopped. Hid herself behind a tree. Saw the small cabin with the smoke rising from its chimney and a trailer next to it. A truck sat unevenly, propped up by a jack. A front tire missing. The hood raised. Behind the truck a hatchback sat running and the driver’s door was open. A cloud of exhaust from the tailpipe as the heat met the cold.

A woman stood on the cabin porch with a lit cigarette. Then another woman joined her. She held a shovel and she leaned it against the doorframe. They both wore denim jackets with collars pushed up around their necks. Both stood with their hips propped while they smoked. They talked between inhales and exhales in one and two word sentences. When they were done smoking they flicked the butts into the dirt and one of them yelled out toward the trailer. Come on. We got shit to do.

The women then stepped back inside the cabin, leaving the door open.

Jessie sprinted from the woods, the child waking with the sudden jolt and he let out a cry that she didn’t acknowledge as she darted between old tires and a pile of firewood and a smoldering heap of trash and then she heard the growl as a wolf on a chain rose from slumber and lurched at her backside with its bonewhite fangs only to be held fast by a chain. She screamed and the wolf yelped but she didn’t slow down, making it to the hatchback and hopping in just as a man in coveralls emerged from the trailer holding a coffee mug. He sipped and watched dumbeyed before realizing it was a stranger in the car. A stranger holding a child. He hollered and the two women came from the cabin and the three of them came down steps and ran for the hatchback as Jessie shifted into reverse, the car door open and flapping like a wing and then slamming shut when she hit the brakes, shifted into drive and stomped the gas, the tires spinning and the three of them trying to corral the hatchback like some untamed animal and as the car raced away from their cries a coffee mug crashed on the hood as if dropped from heaven, just as the tires caught firm on the gravel road.

4

She drove along the backroads away from Delcambre and toward Lake Peignur, finding a solitary gas station where she stopped and bought a small bottle of milk and honey buns and powdered donuts. Cigarettes and a lighter and a pack of diapers. Then she left the store and drove east along Highway 14, the landscape shifting from swamp to crops and back to swamp. She turned off down a dirt road and she and the child ate and drank until there was nothing left but to lick the sugar from their fingertips. She changed the boy’s diaper. Leaned back the passenger seat and let him lie down while she sat on the hood and smoked a cigarette and tried to figure out what the hell to do.

She would need to get rid of the hatchback and she was ready for that. The upholstery was stained and pocked with cigarette burns and smelled sour and sick. The backseat was piled with wadded clothes and fast food bags and as foul as the hatchback looked and smelled she knew it had been called in. They were not far from New Iberia and there was probably a bus station there and she could leave the hatchback with a nice note that said I was only borrowing it. But also in New Iberia there would be real police made aware of the license plate and given the description of both them and the shitty little car.

And where the hell do you think you’re taking a bus to anyway?

She made a lap around the car. Smoking and thinking. Looking in at Jace who was turned on his side and sleeping. Small hands tucked beneath his small cheek. Powdered sugar on the corners of his mouth.

She flicked away the cigarette. Looked at the heap in the backseat and it didn’t matter if she was going another mile or another hundred miles she couldn’t do it with this smell so she quietly opened the door. Pulled the lever on the driver’s seat and it came forward and she reached into the backseat and grabbed a mess of clothes and trash. She made three trips before she had it all lying in a pile at the rear of the car and then she took the keys from the ignition and she unlocked the hatch to shove it all into the back.

But there was no room.

It was covered in garbage bags and bound with duct tape and it was big and lumpy and she knew what it was. She stepped back, tripping through the clothes and trash and falling to the ground. Up quickly and a hand over her mouth as she moved back toward the hatch and stared at it, wondering if it would jerk if she poked it. She watched carefully for any movement. Any rise and fall of breathing. Any possibility of it being something other than dead as hell. But it was still and the world held still around her as her mind could only find one thought.

Is it him?

She walked back and forth along the side of the car. Mumbling to herself. Rubbing at her face and neck. Wanting to look and to keep away. She picked up a rock and threw it and then another and another, finally crying out in disgust with not just today and yesterday but crying out against the years that had led her to now. All the steps she had taken to arrive on this empty road in the middle of nowhere with her small son asleep in a stolen car and a dead thing wrapped in a garbage bag in the hatch and she screamed out into the void and when she had screamed herself out of breath she turned and saw Jace’s face in the window. Awakened by his mother. His nose and palms pressed against the glass.

She slammed the hatch before opening the car door and lifting him out. Talking to him in a flurry of motherly voice. Did you sleep okay? I didn’t mean to wake you up. Do you feel better with your tummy full? Ready to ride some more?

The child shook his head at her questions. Rubbed at his eyes. Then he put his hands on her cheeks as if to hold her still and gain her full attention. Their eyes were close and the boy pushed at her cheeks.

“Home,” he said.

But I don’t know where that is, she thought. I don’t know which direction. I don’t know what to do. And then he said it again and pressed her cheeks harder with his little hands.

“Home.”

She squeezed him. Walked down the road holding him, singing bits and pieces of songs. Fragments of lullabies and a half a verse of Amazing Grace and ending with both of them quacking like ducks. They sang and walked and she kept looking back at the hatchback as if hoping it had sunk into the earth or maybe never existed at all.

They returned to the car. Nobody would have called it in. She could drive it to the end of the world if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to. She opened the milk bottle and Jace took a swallow and then she took a swallow. She settled him in the passenger seat and then she returned to the back. You have to look, she thought. You know you have to look and see if it’s him.

She opened the hatch again and felt around and found the head. Pulled at the plastic bags and tore a hole and she saw matted hair and crusted blood on the forehead and she turned the face toward her and two bruised and pulpy and halfopen eyes looked at her and she gasped. Taken quickly by the stare of the dead and she stepped back and put her hands on her knees and bent over, drawing deep breaths. Settling herself. Because it was not him and she had been ready for it to be so. But she took a breath and pulled at the body and tried to wrestle it out of the hatchback. It was heavy and awkward and kept flopping back down but she finally got the legs over the side and she lifted the torso and the weight carried forward and the body tumbled out. It lay on its back. The hole in the plastic allowing its swollen eyes one last glimpse of sunlight before she turned it on its stomach and grabbed the legs and pulled it into the ditch. When she was done she turned around and Jace was standing there watching her. Holding the bottle of milk. Pointing at the thing in the ditch as if pointing at an animal in a zoo.

The wrestling and the anxiety had given her a sweat and she wiped her forehead and mouth and then she scooped up the child and began telling the story of the three little bears as she returned him to the car and buckled his seatbelt and she kept telling it as she cranked the car and as they turned back onto the highway. Jace sat silently and Jessie drove with both hands gripping the steering wheel, her forearms clenched and her shoulders clenched as she deepened her voice for papa bear and lightened it for mama bear and the rough road thumped beneath them as she told the story and tried to figure out how many years it had been since she had last spoken to her father.

5

Wade was lying on his back in the dreamy halfworld between sleep and consciousness, the pu. . .