Teardrop Road
On a Greyhound bus from Arkansas to Kentucky—from his ex-wife and their kids to his new wife and her child on the way—a father battles every “if-only” in his head.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
The gun was a Christmas present to his son.
Four generations of Bridges men had lovingly cleaned and oiled the old Winchester .22. Hulan Bridges could almost feel his grandfather’s and father’s touch in the polished walnut stock, their breath in the burnished steel.
Two Christmases ago he had given the rifle to his ten-year-old son, just as his Pa had done him on his tenth Christmas, a family tradition. It was truly the thrill of his life, putting his great-grandfather’s gun in his own child’s hands. The Winchester was the boy’s first grown-up weapon, and the pride in his son’s smile that morning left him with a rare feeling of satisfaction. Christmas was the one time he never let his children down.
Five hundred miles zigzagged between them and him. His home now was in southeastern Kentucky, but his children still lived in northwest Arkansas with his ex-wife. He got up to see them often as he could. Took less than a day to drive there if he had money for gas and his tires were good. This time, the tires were fine, but he didn’t trust himself to drive. And his current wife Faith was so big, so far along with their first child, she couldn’t hardly fit behind the wheel. So five days ago (could it be only five?) Faith had put him on a Greyhound to Goshen, Arkansas. Today the bus was taking him back home to Kentucky, to the bump-in-the-road town of Cadiz, pronounced Katie’s by its soft-tongued citizens, where he was born and where he and Faith presently lived.
From Arkansas the bus first shot north into Missouri. Long low cliffs the color of dust funneled the highway to the flat grey horizon. To the east, dawn was slowly hemming a fan of clouds with rainbows of red, yellow, green, and blue. Crossing the state line, he felt an irresistible pull back to Goshen, as if his bones were laced with iron and a familial magnet was trained on them, powerful enough to draw him through the metal shell of the bus and deliver him, intact, to his ex-wife and son. How could he leave them, today of all days?
And yet some part of him was glad to be gone. Relieved to be away from the wailing of women and the unspeakable facts regret could not undo. His tired mind leapt toward Faith, his wife of less than a year. Her excitement about their new baby had been impossible to ignore, even if he’d wanted to. He was eager to be home with her.
A knee pushed against his. The knee belonged to a gal who’d plunked herself down beside him just as the bus was departing Goshen. She was drunk or stoned on pills or both. Her short black hair was cut like a bowl with bangs that fell in her eyes. Each time her head tipped forward, she’d jerk back up, causing the can of grape soda in her hand to slosh over, making juicy purple splotches like bruises on her pale bare feet. Then, without warning, she’d nod out. Either way suited him fine. It was easier to keep talking if the other person couldn’t see his face. In the dark on the bus, he might finally be able to cry.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
The boy should of known better than to lend anyone his gun.
He wasn’t saying it was his son’s fault. Fyn was just being generous, the way he’d been taught. If he hadn’t shown the best judgment—well, for Christ’s sake, he was all of twelve! Besides, the boy blamed himself enough. Over the last few days, he’d watched his son retreat into a hull of teenage sullenness. The kid had been sneaking cigarettes in the toolshed for over a year, his mother, Hulan’s ex-wife Elizabeth, had reported. Now Fyn smoked openly, defiantly, on the front porch, as if the burden of guilt had crushed the child in him and left him overnight a hunched-over, acned old man. And no one, not even his mother, could muster the will to tell him to quit.
Fyn had lent his gun to a second cousin thrice removed—like a mole that grows back anyway. It was no secret in Goshen that the Bridges family tree occasionally looped in on itself, as if its branches could turn into snakes. In these backwoods hollers, clans wove together over centuries; time was a loom and sex its shuttle. It wasn’t unheard of for your father to be your cousin or your great-Meemaw to also be a Meemaw-in-law. One especially twisted thread spawned what some mean-spirited folk called the No-Sales. At the garage where Hulan used to work in Goshen, a gossipy customer might remark, That boy was so dumb his eyes was ringin’ up No-Sale. And everybody would nod, knowing who and what was meant.
Cousin No-Sale had borrowed Fyn’s rifle to go squirrel-hunting. Even with a .22 single-shot, he came out of the woods with forty decent-sized squirrels in the bag. That meant squirrel stew at his house for weeks. Which was a blessing since there were seven mouths to feed and his daddy, who dithered in meth, had been unemployed for years. No doubt that was what Fyn was thinking when he loaned his cousin their great-great-grandfather’s gun.
A Chevy Impala, wrung like a wet washrag, had landed squarely on top of a truck. The truck’s cab was crushed flat but the body had hardly a ding.
He might have explained to the woman further, but the bus suddenly came into Joplin and at the same second all conversation inside the vehicle stopped, as if by some hidden signal, like katydids at two in the morning. A ferocious tornado had recently roared through the town, blasting out a mile-wide lane of devastation. Tornadoes were picky; this one had cleft a clean line between tragedy and salvation. An upright tree with a commode in its crown stood beside what used to be a house, smashed to splinters of sheetrock and wood. Twisted awnings, their metal frames bent like plastic straws, were flung on untouched rooftops, or hanging off storefronts still open for business. A Chevy Impala, wrung like a wet washrag, had landed squarely on top of a truck. The truck’s cab was crushed flat but the body had hardly a ding.
The devastated landscape soothed him somehow; it matched the state of his mind.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
Cousin No-Sale brought the rifle back loaded, leaned it up in a corner of the kitchen.
The words were like live coals in his mouth, too hot to swallow. So he kept talking to his seatmate. Who the hell kind of idiot returns a gun loaded? On the day the call came, he could of easily taken Pawpaw’s Winchester and shot every one of them goddamn No-Sales. By the time he got to Goshen, his rage had collapsed under its own weight. He vowed to Miss Elizabeth (Hulan added the “Miss” to his ex-wife’s name, just like everybody else in Goshen) that if that little No-Sale bastard ever set foot in her house again, he would teach him a lesson he’d never forget.
The opportunity came sooner than expected, when the kid showed up at her front door that night, eyes blackened, cheeks bruised, lips split and bloody. Apparently, his daddy had beaten Fyn’s father to the punch so to speak. The boy was crying uncontrollably. The bullet had been left in the gun as a way to say thank-you to Fyn for being nice when so many treated him and his kin like dirt.
Hulan paused. He glanced over at his bobbing seatmate. Had she even heard him? Her eyes were closed, her body rocking gently like an empty swing in a breeze. He didn’t need her to reply, only to listen. No one had to tell him it took guts for that little No-Sale to come to the house. His anger had loosened. Both boys were just trying to do the right thing. That left no one to blame but himself.
Absent father, rogue husband, drinker, rambler, relapsed gambler—why, he could be the poster child for every bad country song that had ever been written.
A roll of barbed shame sat in his gut, slowly uncoiling. Who was he to judge? Absent father, rogue husband, drinker, rambler, relapsed gambler—why, he could be the poster child for every bad country song that had ever been written. But yet he loved his children—oh God, how he loved them! Grief had revealed how much, as if Kay’s loss was a magnifying mirror held up to his heart.
The woman beside him was now sprawled out asleep, her back against his shoulder like he was her favorite recliner. He envied her sleep. There had been none for him the last five nights. Not since Miss Elizabeth had called, screaming into the phone.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
Their daughter and her little girlfriend had been playing dress-up in Miss Elizabeth’s clothes.
On the phone, the mother’s story came out in broken bits, just like his here on this impossible bus ride home. He wanted to tell it, had to tell it, but the words kept getting stuck, escaping in short shocking bursts like methane from a poisoned well. Saying a thing made the thing real.
But it was important that his seatmate understand that his ex-wife was not to blame, either. Miss Elizabeth was doing the best she could, raising two children basically on her own. After the accident, she had taken the rifle out to the backyard and smashed the stock against a tree, collapsing in broken sobs. She, too, had not been home that morning.
Every Saturday, the next-door neighbor kept an eye on their seven-year-old daughter Kay and the girl’s best friend Mavis, while Miss Elizabeth worked the early morning shift at the Goshen Diner. The handsome, hard-working, God-fearing woman had more curves than an Ozark mountain pass. Everybody in town called her Miss Elizabeth, even her ex-husband, from the morning they met at the diner.
Pouring coffee into his cup, she’d glanced down, eying him sweetly. Don’t I know you from somewhere?
I don’t know, doll, he answered, cool as mint aftershave. I get around.
They’d tied the knot in a hurry, watched it unravel almost as fast. They argued about everything that mattered: God, sex, money, smoking. Miss Elizabeth insisted he quit cigarettes; he wouldn’t. She wanted him to go to church with her; he laughed. She begged him to stop gambling and sleeping around; he couldn’t. What bound them were the children, first the boy, Hulan Fyn, named after five generations of short sturdy Welshmen, and then the girl, Philomena Kay, whom they called, simply, Kay.
The new girlfriend from Wildcat Holler was young, feisty, full of fun, always ready for a tumble in the sack. And despite her name, Faith’d never in her life been inside a church.
The divorce came three years after Kay was born. It was harder to leave his kids than he had ever expected. But he took himself back to Kentucky where his people hailed from because in his book when a husband and wife call it quits, one of them ought to move away.
Marriage was a mistake he wasn’t about to make again. It didn’t take a high school dropout to see he wasn’t exactly what you call husband material. The new girlfriend from Wildcat Holler was young, feisty, full of fun, always ready for a tumble in the sack. And despite her name, Faith’d never in her life been inside a church. Faith told him flat out that if he wanted to hold on to her, he would have to get married again.
The woman on his shoulder was snoring now, long slow snorts of animal delight. Listen, he said, shaking her slightly. He was ready to tell her about Kay, his little girl, so blonde and pretty, how she must have looked dressing up in Miss Elizabeth’s big lace hat, the slip that fit her tiny frame like a ball gown, the too-big high heels she tottered around in, the strings of fake pearls draped on her skinny neck and arms.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
A neighbor boy came over to play. He saw the gun leaning in the corner, picked it up, pointed it at Kay. Give me your jewelry or I’ll shoot.
Hulan had been around guns all his life. Every man he knew, and most of the women, too, including Miss Elizabeth, owned at least one. Faith had been packing on their first date to the Cracker Barrel in Hopkinsville. She always carried on a first date.
He considered himself lucky he’d never been shot, not counting the ex-girlfriend who went after him with a pellet gun. Even luckier that he himself had never had to kill anyone. Over the years he’d lost track of how many people he’d seen shot up, some of them near to him as this hapless woman, several of them killed. Nobody had to tell him what a bullet could do to a body. He had carried the wounded to hospitals and the dead to their families.
No, but this was his baby, his darling, his Kay! Over and over, he turned the situation around in his mind, trying to make the ending come out right this time. Nothing could change the fact of his absence. His failures as a father, a husband, impaled him to his seat. Would it be any different with Faith? Maybe the best thing for everyone would be for him to keep on riding the dog and never go home.
Tears scalded his eyelids, refusing to fall. The bus was traveling east on Interstate 44, what used to be Old Route 66. Teardrop Road, some still called it, a reminder that below layers of pavement was the dirt path the Indians trod on their Trail of Tears, not two hundred years ago. Forced to leave their homes in the east, they were marched to Oklahoma, a place they knew nothing about and had not chosen as their own.
Teardrop Road, some still called it, a reminder that below layers of pavement was the dirt path the Indians trod on their Trail of Tears, not two hundred years ago.
He’d never thought much about those Indians before, never taken the time to see them as fathers and mothers with living breathing children. He could picture them now, riding on horseback or walking with bent heads, hearts shattered, leaving dead children in graves behind them as they pushed on blindly toward the unknown. Or the white settlers that followed them west in waves years later, burying kids in their wake, lost to cholera, wagon accidents, and starvation?
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
Kay put a hand on her hip. No way, she replied to the neighbor boy.
He smiled in spite of the pain. Kay was a sassy thing, full of fire, like his Faith. He always told people she could charm the butter off a stack of shortcakes. She could be stubborn, too, like her mother. If he’d been there, he would of made her reply to the neighbor boy, Yes, please. Take them. Take all my jewels.
The bus was easing into Evansville, Indiana, a city curled along an oxbow in the Ohio River. Sunlit beams poked through gathering clouds like legs holding up a ceiling of rain. The vehicle hissed into the station. The woman on his shoulder sat up, gulped down whatever was left of her soda. Evidently this was her stop.
He was sorry to see her to go. She was easy enough to talk to, and the hardest part was yet to tell. But he was already forgotten in her search for shoes, her purse, and whatever remained of her brain. She left the soda can in the seat.
Who would sit here next? he wondered, staring at the can. Would he have to go back to the beginning of the story? If only the seat could remain empty, he would have no reason to speak. But after a few minutes, the space was taken up by a tall, string-muscled Black man with the voice and manner of a carny barker.
Reverend John Fletcher was his name, howdy-do, a manly handshake, and here was his card. Street minister since he was twelve. No house. No car. No wife. No kids. For what woman puts up with a man who leaves her bed any time of night to go help someone in need?
Hulan shook his head. He was in no shape to answer any questions about women.
The bus slid through city streets polished with drizzle before it made the wide turn back onto the highway. Reverend Fletcher stretched his lean arms above him. He moved with a lion’s grace. His great shoulders pushed back against the seat, his countenance bright as a jar of fireflies on a moonless night.
On the bus there’s nobody asking for him, nobody needing him to save their marriage, their sanity, their life. On the bus he’s free to be no one.
Rubbing his hands together, he grinned like the boy who got to eat the whole pie. This is what he loves about the bus, he told Hulan. On the bus there’s nobody asking for him, nobody needing him to save their marriage, their sanity, their life. On the bus he’s free to be no one. On the bus he’s free. He shut his eyes, a man who had finally arrived nowhere.
Deep furrows curved from his eyes to his mouth like disappearing sound waves. Hulan envied him his freedom. He could no longer remember what it was like to have no wives or children to lose. He tried to stay quiet. He hated to trespass on any man’s peace of mind, especially on his day off. But there was no stopping the rush of words now.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
The neighbor boy pulled the trigger.
This was the unbearable thing. The thing he would never be able to accept. The bullet struck Kay through the right eye, killing her instantly. The funeral home wrapped gauze around the shards of her skull to make a faceless balloon-shaped head above her body. He could not bring himself to look at her that way.
Miss Elizabeth had dressed Kay’s body in the girl’s favorite yellow sundress. She pulled white gloves onto her daughter’s small hands and folded them over her heart. Women were so much stronger than men, he realized once again. At times she shrieked and shook, so fragile she couldn’t walk without help. But he knew Miss Elizabeth would somehow go on from this, whereas he could not yet say the same about himself.
Reverend Fletcher offered no words of sympathy. Instead, he reached into his pants pocket and produced a clean white handkerchief, neatly folded. Biting a nick into the rolled edge, his long fingers ripped the cloth in two. One half he gave to Hulan, the other he kept for himself. They cried silently into their hankies, Hulan at last for his poor little innocent girl, the reverend for the neighbor boy who would never be innocent again.
Sybil Rosen | Southern gothic fiction | Greyhound bus
Tomorrow was Kay’s funeral and he would not be there.
Faith had called yesterday. Their baby could come tomorrow, or possibly the next day. He assumed he’d be in Arkansas until after Kay’s burial at the Flat Lick Baptist Church. Shoveling earth into her grave might feel like saying good-bye. Getting his hands dirty might make her death more real.
But Miss Elizabeth had said no. Go home to your wife, she advised him. Be there for her when your child is born. You’ll always regret it if you don’t.
She was right, the reverend asserted. Of course she was, but getting on the bus this morning tore him in two like the reverend’s rag. How could he leave his Kay before she was safe in the ground?
The reverend nodded. For the rest of your life, he told Hulan, it won’t matter what you do. Whatever choice you make, you’ll always be wrong.
The plain truth of that gave him a moment’s peace. He would never be able to make this right; that was the only thing about it that made any sense. Until Faith’s call yesterday, he had put out of his mind the baby in Kentucky getting ready to be born. He had not once let himself think about his young wife’s happiness at becoming a mother. Could he learn to love a new child, knowing now what love cost?
The reverend nodded. For the rest of your life, he told Hulan, it won’t matter what you do. Whatever choice you make, you’ll always be wrong.
At Bowling Green he said good-bye to Reverend Fletcher and caught the local to Cadiz. The reverend’s card nested in his breast pocket. He’d made Hulan promise to call him when the baby was born. Even before Hulan boarded the bus for Goshen five days ago, Faith had made a decision. If the child was a girl, they would name her Fay, after Kay.
The bus dropped him off at the crossroads in Cadiz. The western sky was burning out in a crimson fury while a full moon, white as an egg, floated up in the east. There was Faith, leaning against their old Lincoln town car, her heavy belly low on her still-slender frame. He stumbled toward her.
His wife’s eyes looked him over as if taking inventory, as if making sure every part of him had come home. Red-tipped fingers went around his neck. She pulled him to her, pressing her face to his.
Her hair smelled like honeysuckle. His hands found her belly and rested there, tears mingling on their cheeks.
Sybil Rosen is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and short story writer known for her evocative explorations of Southern identity, family, and memory. Her works include the acclaimed memoir Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley (adapted by Ethan Hawke into the film Blaze). Her 2021 picture book, Carpenter's Helper, was recently selected for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She also wrote the Sydney Taylor Award-winning YA novel Speed of Light, and the celebrated short story collection Riding the Dog, which centers on stories set aboard Greyhound buses. Rosen’s prose is noted for its lyricism, emotional depth, and finely drawn characters. She lives along the Chattahoochee River in Georgia.
Sybil, this story is wonderful.
I remember you and Dep’ty Dog from the times I visited Glyn and Sas waaay back in the day. Reading Living in the Woods brought back so many memories. I remember when Sas first told me that Dep’ty had gone to Austin and taken the name Blaze Foley. I wish that had a happier ending. But it has been special to meet you here again in Salvation South.
You can tell a story a million ways until you find that way to tell it so the heart beats quicker; the back and forth, then and now, here and there, ricochets through the words making the events inescapable even as this reader pushed against knowing what would come. Even hearing the story ahead of time doesn’t protect from the impact. And that coda! Wow. Devastation and redemption. Thank you for this journey, Sybil.