Look Back All the Green Valley: A Novel by Chappell Fred

Author:Chappell, Fred [Chappell, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2013-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

ON THE TRACK OF THE FOX

The question is not what, but which, time it is.

—Fugio

I sat with my first cup of coffee in Waffle Stop, a chain breakfast bar that offered cat-piss coffee and a soupy haze of cigarette smoke, musing upon the ruins of the morning and penning a few dislocated sentences into my notebook. Ten o’clock already, and I was still tired from yesterday’s journey through west Hardison.

The shock of being catapulted back into present time was unnerving. In Hardison County, there were no Waffle Stops, no Taco Bells, no Burly Burgers, no Hillbilly Heavens, but only a few local cafés—and these were to be found only in the towns of Marshall and Hot Springs. Everything else was quartz-hard country living without our accustomed contemporary amenities—if a Waffle Stop may be fairly called an amenity.

Yet I wouldn’t have been sitting there silently grousing if I’d had a more successful quest into time past. I had learned a few things—well, actually, I’d learned a great many things, but my hard-won discoveries wouldn’t add up to make a whole picture. I’d learned, for example, that the Annie Laurie listed on my father’s map had no last name; that Julia Mannering was not an Englishwoman, as the lady in Featherbed had so ardently desired; and that Marie A., she of the intriguing scarlet initial, was the unlucky Marie Antoinette of revolutionary renown. I had learned that all these names, including the enticing Gold Mine, were but the intimate yet official names of different breeds of rose.

Why had I ever imagined they might be sexual conquests? The notion was even sillier—stupider, actually—than Mitzi had allowed. Was there some deeply hidden part of me that wanted to find out my father as the carefree philanderer, the circuit-riding Lothario? A lot of parents hope that their children will grow up to fulfill those daydreams they could not achieve for themselves. Was it my secret desire to be a garland-laden conquistador of hayseed females, so that I projected this fantasy on my dead father?

O perish the thought.

Truth was, I’d simply been grasping at straws, as mystified by my father’s map as by the strange diagrams and notations and equations scattered throughout his notebooks. I had not possessed the proper key, the knowledge that all these names were the names of roses and that the different dots spotted beneath them on the map made up a simple color chart, indicating the hue of each flower. He had set out the bushes in different locales, trying to see which areas would be congenial and which would be unfriendly. Gold Mine was marked so prominently because it was the most successful of his plantings. And it was spectacularly successful; that image of the sunset oak tree enrobed in a golden splendor of petals still shone in my mind as if I were seeing it through this window before me instead of eyeing dourly the impatient nosings of cars through the dull intersection.

Still, some questions remained unanswered. Why

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