my daddy went back to the mountains every chance he got. And once we kids come along we went, too, and those were the times we were happiest as a family, especially in summer.
“I remember it’d be suppertime and we’d all be outside, either at my grandparents’ or some other kinfolks’. Or it might be a church supper that night. And there’d be games, like sack races or darts, and there’d be singing and banjo playing, and the sun’d be going down behind the mountains, and of course there’d be good eatin’—though I remember one time there was this dish that gave me the heebie-jeebies: a whole hog’s head on a platter of white bread slices.
“My granny was a great cook, though. She didn’t need a pile of money to put cuisine on the table. All she needed was some fish from the creek or a chicken or a couple squirrels and what she gathered from the earth. She taught my mama to cook the food my daddy loved.
“Right before he passed, he couldn’t swallow, but he kept ordering Mama to cook his favorite dishes. She’d stand at the stove with tears dripping into the pot, and when she brought him the food all he could do was smell it and maybe hold a bite in his mouth before spitting it out.
“Mama couldn’t stand it. She said it felt like she was torturing him. But I think it must’ve been a good thing. That smell and that little-bitty taste did the trick, so he could feel like he was back in the mountains that he loved again.
“Once you had a taste, you never forgot Granny’s chicken and dumplings, and her biscuits and gravy were even better than that. Hey, we got any more of them sandwiches left? I’m making myself hungry, talking like this.”
It was the most Cole had heard PW say about his family at any one time. In general, neither he nor Tracy talked much about the past. It made Cole wonder if maybe sometime during this trip PW would end up talking about Delphina. Cole couldn’t ask about Delphina, because when he’d asked about her before, PW had said, “If I tell you the story now, do you promise never to bring it up again?”
He couldn’t ask Tracy about Delphina, either, though he once overheard her tell Adele: “That girl come a hairpin close to assassinating Wyatt.” Which turned out to mean she had waved a gun at him.
PW had kept the story short. They had met when he was in community college, studying business administration and working part-time in her father’s stable. They had eloped right after his graduation. They had fought a lot. She had been untrue. But she was the one who walked out. PW had tried to stop her. This was where the gun came in. Wresting it away from her had somehow involved dislocating her shoulder and cracking a bone or two.
An accident, but she told the police—and later the world—a different story.
PW was so distraught over what he’d done he almost turned the gun on himself.
(“Lord forgive me, Adele,” Tracy said, “but if I’d been around then there wouldn’t have been one bone in that girl’s body left uncracked.”)
Cole has heard it said that one of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to love a woman more than he loves God. This, of all things, appeared to have happened to Pastor Wyatt.
“I’m not saying she was a bad person. She was in many ways the sweetest woman I’ve ever known. She was spoiled, was all. Her mama and daddy had spoiled her but good. They were kind of fancy, her folks—horse breeders—and they had just the one child. That child didn’t get her way, she’d about lose her mind. She had a wicked temper, and enough tears in her to float Noah’s ark. But the man is the head of the woman. Wife goes wrong, you look first to the husband. Where’d he go wrong?
“I was an arrogant man. Make that fool—arrogant fool. I thought I could handle everything myself. I was too blinded by my pride to pray—not that I was much into praying back then. And the longer I was with Delphina, the further I fell from the Lord.”
Cole had expected the story to end with something bad happening to Delphina. He thought maybe she was dead, and that’s why it was so hard for PW to talk about her. In fact, she