The Dark Corner: a Novel / Mark Powell

Praise for THE DARK CORNER “The Dark Corner is one of the most riveting and beautifully written novels that I have ever read. Trouble drives the story, as it does in all great fiction, but grace, that feeling of mercy that all men hunger for, is the ultimate subject, and that’s just part of the reason that Mark Powell is one of America’s most bril- liant writers.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff “Mark Powell’s third novel powerfully tackles the ongoing curses of drugs, real estate development, veterans’ plights, and other regional cultural banes that plague an Appalachia still very much alive and with us as its own chameleon-like animal. Brimming with fury and beauty, The Dark Corner is a thing wrought to be feared and admired.” —Casey Clabough, author of Confederado “Powell’s work is so clearly sourced to the wellspring of all spiri- tual understanding—this physical world. He is heir to the literary lineage of Melville, Conrad, Flannery O’Connor, Denis Johnson, and Robert Stone.” —Pete Duval, author of Rear View The Dark Corner A Novel Mark Powell THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS / KNOXVILLE l Copyright © 2012 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Powell, Mark, 1976– The dark corner: a novel / Mark Powell. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-57233-930-9 — ISBN 1-57233-930-6 1. Mountain life—Fiction. 2. Environmentalism—Fiction. 3. Right-wing extremists—Fiction. 4. Drug abuse—Fiction. 5. North Carolina—Fiction. 6. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title. PS3616.O88D37 2012 813ˇ.6—dc23 2012017305 FOR RON RASH Most people fear God, & at bottom dislike Him . because they rather distrust His heart, & fancy Him all brain like a watch. —Herman Melville, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne he parish elders approached him on a Friday in early December, just as he knew they eventually would. Malcolm Walker had woken early that day, climbed from bed, and left the parsonage, spreading salt like bird- seed, the sun barely over the treetops and the roads sheeted in ice. Tuesday’s snow was still banked along the glittered sidewalks, and when they were properly salted he walked to his offi ce and opened a bottle of white wine, a good Riesling he’d been holding onto since the spring. He drank from a coff ee mug and a little after nine stepped into the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited over a shattered urinal cake, the fl at cylinder the color of frosting. When he got back to his offi ce the child was waiting for him. Malcolm was not surprised. The child, like the wine, had appeared in the spring, and his presence had been easily understood: here is the incarnation of your failure; here is the consequence of your apathy. Malcolm opened a second bottle, a jug this time, a cheap red pulled from the shelves of the Stop-N-Shop in Lenox. In his pocket he carried a small folded print of Grunewald’s Crucifi xion but did not take it out, not yet. A little after ten, the elders arrived. He had known, of course, that they would come for him—he had consid- ered even the composition of the group that would confront him—and knew what he would do in response. The only surprise was the suddenness of their arrival. Mr. Darton, Mr. Smiley, and Dr. Zukav let into the church by the widow Delalic, the dour and disapproving Lithuanian who had kept the parish books for thirty years. They entered solemnly, arrayed before his desk and convey- ing a respect, he realized, that was merited neither by his age nor his actions. The Dark Corner Then he realized it was not so much respect as propriety, the very thing he had violated—sought to violate—in the preceding months. His church was constructed from slate, a gabled roof and dormers, a two- hundred-year-old fortress folded among the walls of fieldstone that snake through the Berkshires. The men were equities traders and retired diplomats; the women did Pilates and talked of their kids at Williams or Middlebury. Which is to say there were expectations involved, rules of decorum, sumptu- ary practices he had failed to engage. And now was the reckoning. Mr. Smiley spoke first—kindly, Malcolm thought—of a vacation, three weeks at a clinic outside Boston. Three weeks to dry out. Then maybe some time alone. Mr. Smiley had a house on the Cape, nothing special, more a bungalow than any- thing else, but lovely really, pushed back as it was behind the dunes. Come back a new man, come back your old self. Malcolm’s agreement seemed to please them a great deal and he shook hands and saw them out. It was only when they were gone that he realized not one of the three had referred to him as father and for that he was grateful. He thought it a genuine kindness. “Well,” he told the child when they were gone, “I suppose it’s time then.” The child said nothing. The child said: it is time. That evening he drove Highway 7 north through the falling snow all the way to Pittsfield where he bought two bottles of Wild Turkey, a Diehard car bat- tery, jumper cables, and three yards of black wool cloth. The road was nearly empty driving back and snow weighed the fir trees or sat plowed and brown- ing in drifts along the shoulder. It was a lonely night and knowing what was to come made him lonelier still. He found the public radio station out of Amherst and turned up the volume. Chopin’s Nocturne One in B-flat major. The child rode beside him, silent as ever, but had disappeared by the time he got back to Lenox. Mary Ann lived on a secondary road that wrapped the gray bulk of Octo- ber Mountain, a summer cabin winterized with an extra bedroom built on cin- der blocks and overlooking a meadow. She was on the couch drinking a glass of chardonnay, her son Will in the floor staring at the television, when Mal- colm opened the door and stood for a moment to knock the ice from his Doc Martens. She looked at him with glassed eyes and for a moment he thought she might have been crying. 2 The Dark Corner “Where’d you go?” she asked. “Pittsfield.” “I got worried. All the snow.” “Look here.” He held up the Wild Turkey. “Let me get two cups.” She gulped the last of her wine and offered her glass. “Just pour mine right here.” She cleaned buildings, offices or homes, and had been cleaning the parish when he had met her, hands in latex gloves, sponging Murphy’s Oil onto the pews. She would push her hair back with her forearm, smile. Crooked teeth and red hair. Pale milk-white skin. He convinced her to attend services and there seemed something welcome in her presence, no matter her employ- ment; Malcolm was thirty years old then and finishing his probationary year at the church. He was patient and soft spoken, steady if nothing else, and it was felt it was time for him marry. The next year—now the parish priest—he formed a committee on social justice, but within months the group had dissolved: only he and Mary Ann were left. Together, they drank and plotted, and then they just drank. While Will watched television, they would gravitate wordlessly toward her bedroom, black out and wake sweating in her bed, sheets tangled from whatever love they had conspired to make. The child had appeared the following spring. He did not speak, simply occupied whatever peripheral space he might find, a chair in the far corner, a pew along the back row. He was an Iraqi boy, perhaps six or seven, and judg- ing from his pallor Malcolm guessed he had been dead months before his arrival. His right arm disappeared just above the elbow, though he was always careful to cover the upper humerus with his torn sleeve. His nose was obliter- ated and a flap of skin covered the socket of the eye he had lost, but it was the textured skin that drew Malcolm. Pockmarked with bits of shrapnel and soft as overripe fruit, it was a pattern of square bulges, perfectly symmetrical, as if he had spent the better part of his childhood pressed against a window screen. When he had failed to speak Malcolm had done some research and found his injuries consistent with those of a cluster bomb. The bomblets were yellow and shiny. Children often picked them up, thinking them toys. Malcolm carried Will to his bed. He was a lanky child, blond headed with a receding hairline, as seemingly fragile as his mother, and Malcolm moved 3 The Dark Corner slowly up the dim hall, the sleeping child piled over his shoulder, the warm weight of his chest, the pipe-cleaner construction of his arms and legs. He pulled the sheets over him and staggered back to the living room. “He didn’t wake up?” “He’s fine,” Malcolm said. “Fast asleep.” “I should tuck him in.” Mary Ann stood, caught the end table for balance, barefoot and unsteady as a newborn foal. “Bring that,” she said. He took what was left of the Wild Turkey to the bedroom—a little more than a slosh in the bottom—sat on the bed, and took a long pull, heard the door catch shut in the hall.

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