Around six, pink sun dwindled in the sky behind the fringe of bald sweetgums and scrawny eighteen year old Charlie Gallagher walked down the slight slope of the hill kicking up stale dirt with his work boots slow and steady like a plow except the earth was cold and nothing was growing this time a year not with the acres being turned over and what not. He ventured just to be out there in the moody sky in case it meant something, kneeled down, brushed the dirt with his fingers. All he had. Mom's gone, Pa's gone, too. No more trips to the rich parts of the county where golf courses and radiology were right next to each other. Rich part of the county was creeping this way too, into Carthage where rich people hadn't lived since Antebellum times. Round the corner where Mr. Johnson's peanuts used to grow new houses popped up, big and whitewashed, impossibly big and whitewashed, clearly for the military folk who liked that sort of thing, officers and such from Fort Bragg too 'fraid of Skeebo Road.
This really wasn't much of a place anymore. Sure, there used to be nothing to do but even in the nothing to do, this little area looked different from other places where there was nothing to do and especially from places with something to do, only commonality being a WalMart, McDonald's, Golden Corral. Not in Carthage but a half hour outside. Now down there they built a Kohls and a TJ Maxx and everyone was happy 'cause there was more stuff to buy even if it meant Moore County looked like every place in the world, no more of those big pines and the tobacco farms and the humble houses unchanged since before and after the carpet industry landed in West End where all the doctors live now. Way things were going, the only two jobs in the county were fixing up to be soldier and doctor.
Even as a kid he knew there was no place for someone like him or for his Pa and their brown fingers from picking tobacco, hanging it in the old shed to dry, driving it all the way to Kannapolis after it'd done so. Two years of turnover, then soybeans. Better for the hands but with less ritual and less money. Monsanto seeds. The house looked untouched since Pa died and just as it did when Mom died, too. Only thing missing was her clothes which went to Goodwill. And people and their voices. Same house. Lace curtains, old kitchen with the dusty corner cabinets, breakfast bench, Formica counters. TV in the living room, big orange couch, crochet blanket and upstairs two bedrooms and that was about it. Filled with normal stuff, dishes, mugs, newspapers. A box of old photographs. Cross-stitch. Only saving grace was Mom not letting a soul smoke in there. She didn't want stains.
Since Pa died, Charlie kept running through the same thoughts about the way the world was going. Used to be nothing but fields out here, over and over again, that thought. That's where it starts. Used to have to drive quite a ways to get something to eat or a beer. One direction was Aberdeen and the other Carthage. Aberdeen had all the stores. Carthage had the courthouse and the library, too far from base to be worth it to every army man asshole who bought lifted trucks with their base pay only to drive them to Food Lion. Anyone who worked for a living knows it's too hard to load a bed that's five feet off the ground. But the trucks weren't about work. Even the songs about the trucks weren't about work. Unlike the kids in his woodshop class, Charlie bought nothing Big Country was selling. No Yeti coolers or parties with Miller. Turn on the radio and everything seems like a joke. All that yeehaw posturing while he'd lived all brown fingered, nicotine-addicted, working the land since childhood, son of someone who did the same. No internet in the house still. A dying breed and everyone laughed. The Gallaghers were poor. (Voices: Why're your hands brown? You Black?) Pa told Charlie that if the school ever asked if he worked on the farm to tell them no. But Charlie worked from ten years and assumed nothing else was possible. Pa's farm would become his farm even as the world changed around him, slow as it did around Carthage where most of the library books were from the '70s. Guess what? Pa's dead. Farm's broke. Only choice now was leaving. Can't run a farm alone. No woman to have a kid with. No job since high school, too busy dealing with Pa and the Medicare office.
Shit used to be easier on a farm. You could fix your own shit, do things all small. Now some guy from John Deere has to come out and reprogram the tractor every year. Not so many folks smoke cigarettes anymore. Charlie himself was on the gum after seeing Pa all hooked up to a breathing tube. Point was, two acres of tobacco just ain't worth the trouble they used to be. Pa never had the money to hire nobody, no reason to expand. They made enough to stay in the little white house, Charlie's granddaddy's house and his granddaddy's. Whole lives worth nothing and not remembered. That's how it goes.
If he wasn't gonna keep a farm, that left not much to do at all with the land which belonged to him. Couple months ago, some developer came over and offered to buy it to build some shit called Goose Creek Acres. Wasn't such thing as a Goose Creek. They'd turn the farm into a cul-de-sac full of those big houses. Charlie said he'd think about it. He wanted to be a thorn in the Goose Creek man's side. A hold-out. They'd have to build the whole neighborhood aroud him. Pa'd like that. Other options proved slim. Get a job maybe down in Aberdeen working retail. Contract some Mexicans to work the farm. But Pa left his papers a mess and the land wouldn't be due for seed 'til spring and it was November. In lean times, welfare, Mom's job as a cleaner, then Social Security got them by during the turnover years. After all was said and done, the old man left Charlie a thousand dollars. The rest went to debt. Proves you could live a whole life and end up with nothing. Just a thousand dollars and a rickety old house and a tractor some asshole in a polo shirt had to come and reprogram. Charlie sat in the dirt. Craned his neck over his shoulder to look at that house, a single light on in the kitchen. Dinky white box, antenna on its roof right off Niagra Carthage, and why the hell they'd called the road Niagra Carthage? The fuck was Niagra?
Sun went down and no tears came. No point in thinking about how things used to be even though that's all he thought about. Rabbits squeezed out of a warren, Pa'd say. Charlie had a high school diploma. More than Pa had. Mom died a few years before. Stroke. On each patch of land a lot of grieving's done. Used to be in school you had to learn all about how the pines needed fire to survive because their needles smothered the ground keeping seeds from germinating. To people, fire's just grief. Fire's a cycle that'd been going on for hundreds of thousands of years until folks started building all the houses and shopping centers. Now we can't lose shit. Pa always said in God's world, we weren't supposed to stay here forever. Charlie got up from the dirt and went inside, slamming the screen door on the way in. It clattered a few times.
Next day Charlie called a realtor. Round noon, a tall skinny man drove up to the house, did some poking around and said the land alone was worth five-hundred grand. To buy a house two minutes down the road in Whispering Pines cost just about that now. Half a million dollars and still not enough to live in these same parts he was born in. Back twenty years ago those houses sold for ninety-grand. He remembered the billboards back when most of them were still plots of turkey oak, pines, grasses, and sand good for growing tobacco and not much else. From below, he listened to the realtor walk back and forth across the second floor. Charlie felt sick. He couldn't stand being here anymore. Ain't no more here to speak of. Didn't want to live with his house being turned into someone's driveway.
Two days later he called the developer from the business card on the fridge, queasy as shit doing it. Told him he'd sell for five-fifty which got whittled down to five-fifteen. Man came out the next day in a big suit with a wide tie. He smiled too much. The papers got finalized on the oak kitchen table. Two weeks later and after taxes, Charlie was a rich man. Dumber kids would've gone apeshit but a lifetime of having nothing taught Charlie discipline. He traded the beat up Isuzu truck for a Hyundai Sonata. Bought an iPhone. Kept sixty grand and put the rest in a mutual fund like Mom told him to do if he got a good job. He gathered up what was worth keeping of his parents' belongings, birth certificates, the photos, the keepsakes, a few Christmas ornaments. Stuff worth something only to him. Pawned the guns, sold the decent furniture on Craigslist. On the last day, he hired junk haulers to clear out the house. There was no one to tell he was leaving. No one at all. He slept on the wood floor with the crochet blanket. Day after, he got in the car with the boxes and a suitcase of clothes, pulled out of the driveway and headed north. Somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere, which was the same thing as anywhere.
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