[A third story in the Mad Art Project series! Our friend Tim Teresias — he has to be making that name up, right? — is remembering his friendship with Jethra Holloway 25 years or so ago. As this story begins, he’s just getting off the phone with Donnie Ross, a utility district commissioner, businessman, and preacher who was assigned to supervise Jethra’s probation for assorted charges related to her mad art project.
If you’re curious about the geography, it’s half real, half made up. Bethlehem is where Orme is — though it’s a lot bigger. Orme Mountain is itself. Bad Oak River is roughly Battle Creek. The 23rd Street Farmers Market in Chattanooga is exactly where it was back in The Day, though I added the Dairy Freez. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop … — Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus
Donnie Ross knelt on the linoleum floor beside his kitchen table. One elbow rested on the cherry-red tablecloth. The other elbow dug into his knee as he leaned the weight of his broad, ruddy-brown forehead into his hand. Bottle-black curls spilled forward from his comb back toward the fingers that covered his eyes.
The sun, moving from afternoon to evening through the eyelet curtains in the window over the sink, touched the telephone on the counter opposite, the basket of apples and pears, the bottles of RC Cola — Donnie ran a beer distribution place but was a teetotaler — the many-times-painted cabinetry, and the lamp-pull with a worn-out funeral home card depicting Jesus holding a lamb tied on.
The light rested on Donnie’s head.
Donnie Ross lifted his face. He hove his hand aloft. Sunset pooled in his palm. Glossolalia streamed from his lips like ribbon unfurling. Somewhere in the mystery of words, he knew, Jesus would tell him how to save Jethra Holloway’s soul.
I never loved her. I swear to you I never loved her. If I had, it would have been easier — even with that impossible kid of hers, the one who banged his head one walls. The one who should have been drowned at birth.
Or so I used to think. But, you know, I only saw him half a dozen times when he was a toddler. When I met him in 2024, he was dragging me out of a river, and I had occasion to be thankful my wishes never come true.
But I digress …
If I could have loved her as Diotima it would have been different. Of course that name didn’t outlast the conversation; we shortened it to Dio, Tina, Tiny Tina … Anyhow. In the normal way of things Jethra would have welcomed Tim and Tina equally. She would have been, in fact, a perfect friend to me in those days if I let her. But I had ruined that by how badly I hurt her feelings that time. In Jethra’s mind I was two people: Tim, who was cruel to her, and Tina, who was kind. It was in her interest to encourage Tina and pour cold water on Tim. So of course she did just that.
And of course, I resisted.
For a quarter of a century that was my mental shorthand for the trajectory of my friendship with Jethra Holloway. Looking back, though, I kept remembering moments, conversations, and as I patched them together, I began to think the whole Tim/Tina dilemma had been a smokescreen. When it came to Jethra, I had been a plain coward.
As vain as I was in my 20s, I knew better than to imagine I was up to returning anything like a tenth of the enormous, all-encompassing love Jethra felt for me. A modest affection, I could have met. But this. It was like a monstrous birth.
We were drinking shakes at the Dairy Freez on 23rd Street, which was then an arrow-straight vista of flea markets, sleazy video rentals, used car dealerships, body shops, and poorly-disguised strip clubs that kept getting busted.
The Dairy Freez stood next to the old farmers market. Shoppers and courting teens would take a break for a dairy shake, which I still remember as the most diabolically delicious concoction ever to be served in a wax-coated paper cup.
I suppose the conversation I’m thinking about happened in 1999. The Dairy Freez was exactly as I remembered it from the 1980s, though. Wrought iron chairs with chipped red paint. Small round table, same. Bit of plywood under one of the table legs to keep it from wobbling, but it still wobbled. Cup full of the richest, eggiest shake you’ve ever had. Frozen custard, I think it was. The texture was creamy, almost the way you’d imagine frozen eggnog. At the same time, each slurp came shot through with ice crystals. You had to work to draw it up through your straw.
I noticed Jethra had stopped slurping. I cautiously lifted my eyelids.
Jethra was looking at me, not into my eyes or anything, but an all-over, encompassing gaze. Hairline to my left arm resting on the wrought-iron surface to the fingers of my right hand steadying the straw. Her lip trembled. She was actively suffering.
I looked back at her and sucked at my dairy freeze. I was learning not do the first thing that came to my mind when Jethra looked at me like that, which was to fend her off like floating rubbish that threatened to entangle a dinghy, usually with the sharpest words I could think of. I didn’t really mind Jethra. I liked her. I liked — by that time — cuddling on her futon watching movies or just listening to music and chilling. I liked how strange and fragile she was. And how terribly strong.
That day she was wearing knee-length denim shorts, cherry-colored jelly shoes, and a peplum top, too tight for her, that exposed her belly lapping over her waistband. The top was white with a cherry print and translucent red buttons shaped like cherries. Jethra wore her hair up in a French twist secured by a plastic claw. She was sunburned and freckled, and her curls were escaping from the hair claw to cling to her neck in damp ringlets.
She had left her job at the accounting place; by 1999 she worked as a teacher’s assistant to better match her schedule to Donovan’s. Of course she lost money, both in her hourly rate and in the number of hours she worked. I have no idea why women choose to keep their brats — I mean back then, when they had a choice — but at any rate between Donovan and the kids she wrangled she was on her feet, and lugging heavy bodies, all day, every day, except weekends when Donovan was with his grandparents. She wasn’t yet 30.
Looking back at the memory from late middle age, I can see what I couldn’t realize then: how her youth and strength flowered at the challenge. She looked like Hebe’s love child with Hercules.
Now I’m back in Bethlehem and seeing the girls I went to high school with around town, I can tell you with certainty that the bloom doesn’t last. The world uses poor women hard — at least Bethlehem, Tennessee, uses them hard. They look 60 by the time they’re 40. When I pictured Jethra at the mercy of Donnie Ross that day in 2024, I saw superimposed on my memory of Jethra blooming like a peony a woman with rough, reddened skin, a squarish body — powerful but stiff with it, probably has a slipped disc and a bad hip — and a couple of missing teeth.
As Donnie Ross stopped talking and I clicked my flip phone shut I lingered on my picture of Jethra as I imagined she looked now, if she was still alive. A hard-working, invisible woman, the kind of woman you see folding laundry in the Wash-O-Mat while half-a-dozen grandchildren run her ragged. The flesh on her upper arms shakes as she snaps the wrinkles out of a pair of jeans. With one hand she snatches MiKaileigh, or whatever the grand-brat’s named, out of a laundry cart —
And all that time her heart’s streaming out in mad art projects —
I pictured that woman and I was immediately, unambiguously at her service, as I had never been at young Jethra’s. Of course my image was probably a mirage, I knew that. People can change all kinds of ways. But it made no difference. Whoever and whatever Jethra had become, ghost or cult prisoner or moon-mad crone on the lam from her probation, I was going to find her and satisfy myself she was safe. Not just safe, but whole, wholesomely environed, in every way all right.
We’re far afield from my story. We were talking about 1999. Being loved takes courage. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but when someone loves you it’s a demand the universe places on you. A challenge. I wasn’t up to that challenge in 1999. I would never have taken advantage of anyone, not even back then, not the way men take advantage of women, but I didn’t know how to say no with kindness, and I was afraid to say yes.
A couple of times, back then, I offered to be her lover — well, what could you do? She wasn’t seeing anyone else. I’m not exactly a nice person, but I didn’t want to be a dog in the manger, either. I’d begun to feel like I was wasting her time without doing her any good, you see. I’ve never felt much like taking a woman, but the thought of giving her pleasure was … captivating.
But she just shook her head. “It’s not really that … ”
This time I said, after she’d gazed at me a while, “Take a bite, it’s free … ”
She blushed under her sunburn and laughed at herself. “No, sorry, I don’t mean to stare.”
“But it really is all right,” I said. “You’re such a sweetheart, and I don’t like hurting your feelings so much. I wouldn’t mind … I mean, I’d like to make you happy some way.”
She interrupted me. “But that’s just it. You’d feel like you corrected a balance.” She made a gesture with her palms up, like evening out scales. “But I would be even more in love with you than ever.”
She shook her head and put her lips around her straw to take a slurp. With her head tipped, making her heart-shaped face even more pronounced, she looked up at me. “I would be lost, and I would never find myself. And I don’t mind that, not really, but I need myself for Donovan.”
Then she reached over, took my hand — my hands are long but half the breadth of hers — turned it palm-side up, and kissed it.
I didn’t know what to do.
Because Bethlehem is a town of about 3,000 people, I couldn’t ask many questions without it getting back to Donnie Ross. As I’d just declined the job of finding Jethra Holloway, I didn’t want him to learn I was freelancing around on the case, at least not too soon.
I say on the case, but of course it was no such thing. I’m not a detective, I’m a forensic accountant who’s lucky to get work preparing old ladies’ taxes anymore. No use at all here. What I needed was someone from Bethlehem who knew everyone and could give me a handle on all the personalities involved, but who no longer lived in Bethlehem.
I spun through my Rolodex and hit on my old classmate Grin Watson, a newspaperman, gothic short story writer and podcast actor who, I remembered, had moved to Chattanooga. We were both strange kids in junior high. I was timid and slender; he was timid and gothic. Out of that bond, though we had nothing much else in common, we became friends. Now I gave him a call and he said he didn’t mind if I came over, as long as I didn’t mind hanging around while he and the rest of the cast recorded the Choo-Choo Chiller, a Southern-fried horror podcast they had going on.
So I told him I’d drive on over. I left my office and walked across the park to the big old pink Victorian house where I’d rented a room. I changed my shirt and ate an apple, then picked up my car keys, got in my 1972 Triumph Spitfire — when I have a client who understands how to use me, I can make bank — and prepared to head out for Chattanooga, about an hour and a half drive away.
It was still early. Looking at the tumble of blue-and-gold April light and ragged-edge clouds, I thought I’d take the scenic way along over Orme Mountain. Being back home again, driving the old route, and especially thinking about Jethra all afternoon, made me contrast the past and the present more than I usually did. As always when I made the comparison, the present didn’t turn out too well.
The youth didn’t have sex, well, I suppose that’s a minor point. Everything irked me. The bespoke pronouns. The coddling of feelings. The emotional support rabbits. The physical softness. Men who went to the rifle range every weekend and planned for the revolution or Fourth Turning or whatever they called it … and had never been in a fist fight. (Hell, I was beaten up every Friday and half of Thursdays in high school until I learned to carry a knife and go for the groin. And I was a delicate boy.) Trigger warnings and hashtags grateful and squeaky-clean monster trucks that never carried anything more robust than a bag of golf clubs and voicemail messages that ended, Have a blessed day.
I wanted the 90s back.
Thinking that, I didn’t notice the storm coming up from the west — behind me, of course — until the rain started hitting.
What a beautiful rainbow, I thought, looking out over the valley.
Then the lights went out.
Big drops, I thought, then realized they were hail.
I was winding down Orme Mountain on a narrow, two-lane road with no shoulder except about a foot of gravel followed by a big expanse of air. My only option for stopping was to park halfway in the road or keep going. So I turned on my hazards and rolled along down.
One hairpin turn after another. Luckily I had good tires and knew how to handle my car. I crunched hail but didn’t skid on it, though lower down in a new-growth pine woods I passed a skew of headlights that told me someone had gone off the road. I slowed enough to see it was two cars, one helping the other. I kept on grinding along downhill until I came Bad Oak Valley.
Well, nowadays you turn left and in two miles you get to the bridge. When I was a boy you turned right on Dawes Ferry Road and got to the ferry over Bad Oak River, there about three miles above the Tennessee River. It stopped hailing, but the rain fell harder. It was now full dark. On I went until I came to a sign: Bridge out. Detour.
Confused, now feeling a little tension at the back of my neck, I followed the arrow. Surely the ferry wasn’t running in 2024 — ?
The road hairpinned left and right, took a rise, doglegged — for once I fishtailed and corrected, avoiding the bluffs that came almost to the faded white line — and descended quickly.
I wasn’t familiar with that little dip. This wasn’t the Dawes Ferry Road I remembered from 1989. I had just enough time, in that blinding rain that only reflected my low beams back at me, to wish I wasn’t such a damned paranoid fool as to eschew a smartphone with that convenient invention, GPS — I would eat crow for sure when I told Grin Watson about this — when there was nothing under the Spitfire’s tires.
The car rose, performed a slow pirouette, and, near as I could tell, began drifting backward away from the dead-end road that I could now see dimly in front of me, half a dozen yards off, already disappearing in the rain.
Then my headlights went out.
I never buckle my seatbelt, and the Spitfire has — had — roll-down windows, so I got busy getting out, little good though that did me. Rain beat around me but the clatter of water was now overwhelmed by the roar of what I presumed was Bad Oak River.
I was clinging to a car that was rapidly sinking in a river in flood. I could see nothing. We were still spinning in slow motion, my dear dying car and I. The bank could have been anywhere. If I held on, I’d go down. If I let go, I didn’t know which way to swim, and the current felt wicked. Likely I’d have no choice which way I went.
I let go.
When the moon calf tumbled into the sinkhole on Orme Mountain, no one heard its wail.
Deathless — or at least fearfully hard to kill — it slithered through roots and loose sedimentary earth until the substrate gave way and it fell free, flailing its arms, for six or eight feet and landed with a wet plop on the floor of an abandoned coal mine.
Earth and rock crumbled in after it, followed by the stump of a long-ago-fallen white oak tree.
Lying on its back amidst the detritus, the moon calf drew breath to cry. Sediment filled its mouth and the collapse of another pocket of earth compressed its lungs under rock and rubble.
Nerves fired to convulse the body, a last protective strategy, but it had nowhere to move, not even to close an eyelid. Its mind flared with the only lovely image it knew: the face of the full moon looking down.
In my dream, I was buried alive.
Let me drown, I bargained with whatever gods atheists bargain with in their last moment, let me drown rather than this.
I felt myself spinning. Water roared. I moved my fingers and toes. Joy flowered into my throat. I have so rarely felt joy that it took me a minute to realize what it was. Roses, I thought, there’s a rose blooming up from my chest.
Somehow in the sightless dream I realized I had traded for this. Somewhere, someone else was buried alive, while I got off — I could draw breath now, despite the water singing in my ears — I got off easy.
I wept out of pure self-pity, knowing what I would say to the gods before I said it.
Take it back, I pleaded. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know how to be happy, I’ve never been happy in my life, but by damn I know how to be a miserable wretch. It’s my gift. I understand now. I won’t waste it.
And then I was being crushed, really crushed, until I found myself slapping frantically at the back of an enormous young man. My hand found dozens of braids. A wet shirt clinging to a fat, muscled back.
My teeth were chattering too hard to speak. I tapped him again, or thought I did. Finally I managed, “Get off!”
He sat up away from me and propped me up like a rag doll. Rain beat on the windshield. We were in the cabin of a utility truck of some kind. The young man had been holding me in a bear hug, and I understood why. I was freezing, shaking all over.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You’re all right. You’re all right! You’re not drowned — you came out conscious and then you passed out. This is just shock. You’re all right.”
Above, no moon shone. The last of the rubble rattled away into the pit. At last only dim sunlight and dust drifted down.
Lightening cracked. Rain poured. Water sluiced, then streamed, into the sinkhole. The earth turned to mud, then a muddy channel.
The moon calf rose, spun around twice, butted up against a support column, broke free, and sailed away, first along the drift, then over an impromptu rapids of breakdown rock, and finally into a passage of smooth-worn limestone. Buoyant, it became its own boat and floated along, blinking in the pleasant dark, until it shot out the karst spring and plummeted a few feet into Bad Oak River.
Again it surfaced, bobbing along as the rain let up. Sometimes it breathed water, sometimes air. It held up its arms to the tree limbs above. After its time in the dark it could see each leaf clearly against the clouds. Finally it caught in some rushes. It dozed there until dawn kissed its marble-pink eyelids.
The moon calf opened its ruby eyes, righted itself in the oily mud among the reeds, and crawled slowly to shore, as always trailing blood. Under a copse of short-leaf willows it found soft earth and shade. It curled up, cheek on last year’s yellow leaves, knees tucked under, and fell asleep not a dozen yards from where Tim Teresias’ car shot into Bad Oak River the night before.