The World Made Straight by Ron Rash Page A

need to do.”
    â€œThanks,” Travis said. He looked down at his cereal. “Would you help me study if I was to make a go of it?”
    Leonard didn’t answer.
    â€œI reckon that to mean no,” Travis said.
    â€œI guess I can help you some,” Leonard said.
    Soon after Travis left for work, Leonard followed Highway 25 down to Marshall as well. The dogwood trees had begun to turn, stipples of russet now under the green canopy. Dogwoods were always the first to acknowledge that widening between sun and earth. In another week the tulip poplars would yellow, followed by the purpling of the sweet gums. Then all green rubbed off the mountains but for the resolute firs and pines on the high ridges, that and the club moss scabbing the understory’s brown skin. The morning shadows transforming as well—deeper, more pronounced. Laying heavier on the ground when cool weather comes, his mother claimed, as though shadows had a corporeal reality.
    When he was a child, Leonard’s mother had often sat on the steps of their farmhouse, at times half an hour passing as she stared at the mountains rising beyond their pasture. The prettiness of it takes me away from myself, she’d once explained to him, her voice soft as if sharing a secret. She’d told him that sometimes a Bible or church wasn’t enough. That’s why there’s need for a world in the first place, son, she’d said. In the days right after Emily and Kera had left, Leonard had tried to see the world the way his mother had. He’d drive out to the Calumet River, the one place with enough trees to hide a landscapethat looked like it had been leveled by a huge rolling pin. He’d sat on the bank and stared at the cottonwoods and birch, the black alders and witch hazel huddled beneath the bigger trees, the slow brown water, trying to find the same inner peace his mother had years earlier on those farmhouse porch steps.
    When he arrived at the vocational center, Leonard almost turned around and drove back to the trailer. He didn’t owe the boy this. He could tell Travis the person in charge of adult education hadn’t been in. Tell the boy if he wanted a GED he could find out about it himself. Minutes passed before Leonard finally walked through the main door.
    Even blindfolded he’d have known he was in a high school. Cheap perfume and cologne clogged the air, a smell of linseed oil on the waxed wood floors. The secretary gave him a room number and Leonard walked down the hallway. Students were changing classes, lockers clanging shut amid a muddle of voices. He moved around clots of teenagers, and each time one brushed or bumped against him his stomach tensed as if expecting a blow.
    Mrs. Ponder had been his high school’s guidance counselor, but now she was the county’s GED director. She’d helped Leonard apply to colleges the fall of his senior year, but when he said his name she didn’t appear to remember him. He told her why he’d come, mentioned the reading Travis had done during the last month.
    â€œAll that’s good,” Mrs. Ponder said. “This test is more about interpreting what’s read than specific subject matter. Of course it will be different with the math. He can probably dothe multiplication and division, but he’ll need an understanding of fractions and decimals, a few formulas as well.”
    Mrs. Ponder turned to the bookshelves that flanked her desk. One afternoon after school she had helped Leonard fill out forms for Chapel Hill and NC State. She’d been thinner then, her hair longer and unstreaked by gray, only a few years out of college herself. He was one of many male students with a crush on her. They had sat at a table in the library, the applications and transcripts spread before them. Close enough that he could smell the soap on her skin and see the bared rise of her collarbone, the fine blond hairs on her forearm. I’d bet a