The Haint Road

DAY FIVE — FRIDAY

She submits her survey on Friday morning. The drainage plan, the sight-line data, the right-of-way measurements. It is thorough work, precisely done. The project will move forward in the spring — the grading, the shoulder extension, the new guardrail on the curve. The stone wall will come down. The cedar row will be trimmed back twelve feet on the east side. There will be more light on the road and more room on either side of it and the accident rate, the models suggest, will improve by forty percent.

Before she leaves, she drives the road one more time. Morning still, which is the wrong time, the ordinary time. She drives the whole length from the painted sign to the crossroads at the far end and back again, and nothing happens and nothing looks at her from the fence lines and the road is, all the way through, simply a road.

She does not stop at the curve. She accelerates through it, slightly, in the way you accelerate through a place you are done with. The theodolite is already in its case in the trunk. The clipboard is in the passenger seat. The folder of surveys is closed.

She is on the interstate by eleven.

DAY FOUR — THURSDAY

She does not go at four o’clock. She tells herself this is because four o’clock is inefficient — the light will be wrong for documentation photography. She tells herself this while getting dressed at six-fifteen, in the cedar-smelling room, in the still-dark morning. She tells herself this while loading the theodolite into the trunk.

She drives the long way to the site.

That evening, she eats at the diner again. Vera is behind the counter, wiping it down in slow circles. The place is nearly empty.

“The road had a different feel before,” Vera says, unprompted. “Or so I’ve been told.”

Della asks what she means by a different feel.

Vera is quiet for a moment in the way that people in this town, Della has noticed, go quiet before saying something they have said many times and always inadequately.

“The road knew it was being watched,” Vera says, finally. “When people used it all the time — traveled it, lived by it — it was like it stayed present. The last few decades, without the traffic, it’s like it’s been somewhere else most of the time. And it only remembers to come back at dusk.”

Della nods.

DAY THREE — WEDNESDAY

The farmer’s name is Harlan Pruitt and the road bisects his land — forty acres on the east side, sixty on the west — and he has farmed it for thirty years and his father before him and his father’s mother before that. He meets Della at the fence line with his hands in his pockets and a look of resigned courtesy.

“Understand we’ll be losing another eight feet on the east,” he says.

“Six on your side, more likely. The right-of-way acquisition will—”

“I’ve been through it before,” he says. “I know how it goes.”

They walk the fence line together. He is not unfriendly, only careful, in the way of men who have learned that the world keeps coming and the only question is how to stand when it does. He shows her where the drainage will have to be rerouted. He shows her the old stone wall that predates the road itself, the one that will have to come down.

“Your animals,” Della says, consulting her notes. “There’s a report — county complaint, nineteen ninety-eight — about livestock refusing to cross the road. That’s relevant to the project. We’ll need a livestock crossing at the—”

“They cross fine,” Harlan says. “In the morning. It’s the evening they won’t do it.”

“What happens if you try to move them across in the evening?”

He is quiet for a moment. Behind them, a stand of yellow trees stands perfectly still in air that should be moving.

“They go back,” he says. “Every time, they just go back.”

She writes it down: livestock behavior — possible sensory/olfactory factors. Investigate drainage for carrion, standing water. She underlines it twice, which is not something she usually does.

As she is getting back in her truck, Harlan says, without quite looking at her: “You’ve been out there in the morning, haven’t you. Try going at four o’clock. See what your instruments do.”

She drives home. The evening settles over the county in the ordinary way. And yet she finds herself, for reasons she doesn’t write down, already planning a different route to the site for the morning — longer, around the north side, adding eleven minutes she cannot justify to anyone who asks.

DAY TWO — TUESDAY

She drives out at seven. The road is called County Route 9 in the state database and it is called Haint Road by everyone else, the name painted on a board that has been nailed to a telephone pole so long ago the wood has fused with the bark.

The first mile is ordinary. Fenced pasture on both sides, one collapsed barn. She sets up her equipment at the first survey marker and works methodically south. The sky is an unremarkable gray.

She eats lunch at a diner in town and the old man behind the counter — Cecil, he offers, unprompted — asks if she is with the transportation department.

“You know what a haint is?”

“It’s not named for a ghost,” he says, before she can answer. “It’s named for the light. There’s a word — my grandmother used it. The particular color the air goes right at dusk, right there on that stretch, in the fall especially. Like the light can’t decide if it’s leaving or staying. She called it haint light. Blue-gray. Like looking through still water.”

“It’s an atmospheric effect,” Della says. “The way the road runs in relation to the ridgeline catches the last of the sun at a particular angle. It’s probably consistent because the landscape hasn’t changed.”

Cecil stirs his coffee. “That’s one way to put it,” he says.

She asks him about the accidents. There have been eleven in twenty years on that two-mile stretch, a number that is statistically notable though not inexplicable — the curve, the low light, the lack of shoulder.

Cecil listens to her account of these contributing factors with the patience of a man who has heard many explanations for things that haven’t needed explaining.

“Nobody runs off that road in the day,” he says. “Only ever happens coming home in the evening.”

“I know what you’re going to say.” He looks into his cup. “It’s just that the road has a quality to it, in that light. Like it goes somewhere else for a little while.”

Della thanks him for his time and leaves a good tip.

DAY ONE — MONDAY

Meridian County, Tennessee. Late October.

The motel is called the Crestview, though there is no view and the road that runs past it is perfectly flat. Della Okafor pulls in at half past four, the last of the afternoon still burning orange in her rearview. She is thirty-one. She works for the state. She has a clipboard, a theodolite in the trunk, and a folder of topographic surveys that show this particular two-mile stretch of county road as a simple dotted line running northeast through farmland, unremarkable in every measurable respect.

The woman at the front desk has a long braid going gray at the root and she hands over the key without Della finishing her sentence. Room Seven. Down on the end.

“You here for the road,” the woman says. It is not a question.

“Survey work,” Della says. “Road-widening project. Probably start grading in the spring.”

The woman nods in a way that means something Della doesn’t try to read. Her name, a small placard announces, is Vera.

“Diner’s open till nine,” Vera says. “You’ll want to eat before you drive out there. The light goes fast.”

Della thanks her and takes the key. Room Seven smells of cedar and something older she doesn’t investigate. She unpacks her bag, sets her work folder on the desk beside the lamp, and opens her laptop to log her arrival time. She is precise about such things. It is, she feels, the better part of the job.

AFTER

The widening happens in April. The new shoulder is clean and wide and gray and the guardrail catches the light on clear days in a way that is visible from the county road that runs parallel, half a mile east. The accidents do decline. This is measurable and true.

Cecil dies the following winter, which has nothing to do with anything. Harlan sells the east forty in the spring. The sign that says Haint Road falls down in a storm sometime in the second year after the widening and no one puts it back up, partly because the road doesn’t need a name anymore, not really, now that it goes somewhere and comes back like any other road.

Vera, alone in the motel some evenings, looks out toward where the light used to do its particular thing at dusk. She looks for the quality her grandmother described — that blue-gray pause, the light not knowing whether it was leaving or staying.

The cedar row, trimmed back, never fully recovers. The trees grow in the wrong directions for a while, reaching toward where they used to reach, and then over a few seasons they adjust.

The stone wall is a memory and then not even that.

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