Home > Free Reads > Excerpt from The Folks by Ray Garton

On the morning of a day when thoughts turn to the dead rising from their graves, I stood by while one of the dead was put into hers. Carla Firth. I had dated her once last spring, just before I dropped out of college. It had been a terrible date, but only because we had nothing in common, nothing to talk about. She was a pretty blonde, funny, and she never hesitated to look me in the eye, never turned quickly away from my face. A nice girl. Of course, she had to be to go out with me. She was a political science major and all she could talk about was the upcoming presidential election. Worse still, she was a Republican and thought George W. Bush would not only win, but would be one of the best presidents the country’s ever seen. She and a few other students had attended the Republican convention in Philadelphia back in July. Her best friend, a chubby Korean girl named Lisa, had been on the news the night before. She’d tearfully told the reporter that the last time she saw Carla, she was still riding on the high she’d gotten from the convention. But on that rainy October morning, she was riding in a black metal box with shiny brass handles, straight down into the ground. Her body torn and mangled by someone, her pretty face mutilated. Happy Halloween.

The sky was the color of rotting teeth and an indifferent drizzle pattered on all the black umbrellas around the open grave. Someone—I think it was Carla’s mother—wailed, and the sound seemed to hover over the gathering even after she stopped.

It had been quiet until then. The sound went through me like steel. The withering sobs that followed were almost worse. My signal to leave. I have never been able to tolerate the sound of crying. Even if I know better, I am always certain that I’m the cause of it.

•••

Everyone called it the village but its real name was Pinecrest. It was halfway up Mt. Crag and overlooked the town of the same name below. The Granite River ran by at the foot of the mountain, and the bridge that crossed it and led into the town of Mount Crag sometimes flooded in the winter. When that happened, many of the college students on the hill—mostly the ones who were there against their will, put there by parents who thought a Christian education would do them some good—were cut off from their supply of beer, liquor, and cigarettes.

The town of Mount Crag was a greeting card. The sidewalks were always clean, lawns and hedges were always neat and green. The old Methodist church in the center of town was over a hundred years old, white with a steeple and bell that rang at noon, six, and midnight. There was a Safeway on one side of town, and a locally-owned market called Shop-Rite on the other. The diner was owned by Carrie Lodge, single mother of two boys, Keith and Evan, eight and ten respectively. It was called the Pantry Shelf, but everyone referred to it simply as the diner.

It had taken awhile for me to muster the courage to go into the diner the first time. I was pretty sure I would not be welcome. People do not want to see me while they’re eating. But Carrie made me feel welcome. I had been eating breakfast and dinner there since Grandma stopped talking to me, and we had gotten to know each other pretty well.

I scared Carrie’s boys at first, but we soon became friends, too. Most kids are scared of me at first, but their fears are much easier to allay than the ones hiding behind the smiles of the perfectly controlled adults. All I have to do with kids is tell them how it happened. I tell them about waking up in the hospital afterward, seeing my new face for the first time months later. I tell it all like a story, and by the time I’m done, they’re smiling and I’m a hero for surviving it all.

Even the ones who cry the first time they see me are fine with it after that, once they understand it.

Adults, on the other hand, see my face and know perfectly well what happened without being told, and yet they see only themselves, because they know it could happen to them. Or to a spouse, a child, a lover. Oh, my God, what would I do? they wonder, and the thought is as plain on their faces as their forced, rigid smiles.

When I first came to Pinecrest to live with Grandma, I used to get stared at a lot. Even laughed at. But I found if I introduced myself to everyone I met, staring and laughing became harder to do because suddenly I had a name, I was a person. Not just a hideous pink face made up of mangled strips of scar tissue. I had no hair on the left side of my head, so I took extra care to keep what I had neatly trimmed and combed. Always dressed as well as I could, tried to present myself well.

I had a lot to make up for.

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(from The Folks copyright by Ray Garton)