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Chapter 6: Half of the Past

"So faint, the walls behind me now.
I know where they stand, I know the way home.
And if my scars were tattoos, I could hide them in plain view
If these ghosts let me go, I would set fire to them all."
-Big Wreck, Ghosts

The gravel crunched beneath his tires as Enos pulled up in front of the farmhouse. He cut the engine, but hunched forward and rested his arms on the steering wheel instead of getting out. Why he had come here, he couldn't say. Calculating the distance between himself and the place he called home, he knew he wouldn't make it back until Thursday evening now, no matter how much he wanted his own bed and to be alone. The front of the old tractor peeked out from the open door of the barn, and seemed to glare balefully at him as though it could read his thoughts.

With a sigh, he tossed the keys into the cup holder and opened the door. The scent of drying corn hit him. The smell of the mountains. They had taken away more than a few people he'd loved in his life, and they always seemed to be keeping him in their sights - their lost child, the son of a ridgerunner. For all intents and purposes, they had claimed another, and this one he couldn't forgive. They stood on the horizon, their peaks shadowy in the midst of low-lying clouds.

He hated them, and in the grief he'd held in since Atlanta, he wished he could hate her, too. He had hoped that some part of her had missed him during the two years he'd been away. Now, she couldn't even remember him. The distance in her eyes today had cut the deepest - even deeper than her running off to marry 'What's-His-Name' six weeks after she had almost been his.

On nights when the storms beat against the windows of his cabin, and the snows came with a fury he had never believed possible, his memory would travel the long road of their past, and he would wonder what had come between them. How two people who had once been so close could have drifted so far apart. Now, their memories were his alone, and he might as well have made them up.

He ran up the porch steps before he could change his mind and walked into the empty house.

The kitchen stood untouched by time; the same faded wallpaper; the same cabinets, stove, and fridge; the same table where he had sat, not as a guest but as family. Happy memories of bygone days pressed close around him. He thought of Aunt Lavinia, who had been like a mother to him...more so than his own. He had been eleven when she passed away, and Daisy nine; old enough to understand death, but too young to realize how their lives would change because of it. There were times he still missed her terribly, even after all these years.

In the living room, a line of dog-eared cardboard boxes sat, fill with Daisy's things. It seemed unbearable that it could all be stashed away so easily, like Christmas decorations. Even her journals were in a box labeled "burn". He stepped over them and pushed open the door to her room to find it had been stripped bare of everything personal.

Turning to leave, his foot caught the edge of the closest box and upended it, spilling its contents across the rug. He crouched down, setting the box aright and tossing in various knick-knacks and high school mementos - then stopped. In the pile of odds and ends, was a letter addressed to him. It had been mailed and the postage cancelled, but it was unopened and stamped "UNDELIVERABLE" in bold, red ink. The cancellation mark bore the date of December 12th, 1985. By then he had left Los Angeles.

With a sigh, he folded it in half and slipped it into his pocket.

"Y'all look as anxious as a couple of cats in a room full of rocking chairs," joked Daisy, as Bo and Luke filed back into her room. "Didja figure out who the cop was who came to visit me?"

"Well, you know, Daisy," Bo said, giving her a winning smile and nervously ruffling his hair, "we ain't sure where he came from. If he comes by again, tell him to wait around until we get back."

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "I can't believe you two were worried about a police officer coming to see me. Y'all ain't running shine no more, right?"

"Nope, we sure ain't. Not for a long time." He looked over at Luke. "Ain't that right, cuz?"

Luke was staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts. Bo elbowed him, and his jerked his attention back to the two of them. "Uh...Yep, that's right, Bo."

Daisy frowned. If she knew them better, she'd think they were trying to hide something. Her ruminations were cut short by a woman in a smart business suit who knocked politely on the door before she came in.

"Hi, Daisy? I'm Dr. Looper, one of the sociologists here at Grady," she said, with a bright smile. "We're going to run some memory exercises today. How would you feel about getting out of this room for a while?"

Enos was sitting at the kitchen table woolgathering when a vehicle pulled up to the house, and he groaned to himself when he heard Uncle Jesse's footsteps on the porch. Bo and Luke would have been easy to get away from, but Uncle Jesse had never neglected to have a heart-to-heart with someone he thought needed one. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples where a headache was already settling in, reminding himself that he could have been halfway to Knoxville by now.

The chair next to him scraped the floor and Uncle Jesse dropped into it with a sigh.

"You're a hard man to track down, Enos." He paused, then continued when he didn't get an answer. "I'm wagerin' you thought twice about coming, but I'm glad you did."

"You knew I would." There was no point in playing the clueless deputy anymore; Uncle Jesse could see through him like a cellophane bag.

Jesse nodded in agreement. "That's a mighty fancy ride you've got out there," he noted, gesturing towards the door.

Enos couldn't help but grin at that. "The State of Michigan was buying."

The truck hadn't been his idea, it had been the former sheriff's idea,but after the state made them wait 50 years to become a county, the whole township had insisted that their little slice of heaven deserved whatever it could wring out of Lansing. The locals were having a good laugh at the State's consternation over their courthouse plans, as well. They still had the original blueprints from 1937 (with a couple of modern conveniences, of course). Quarried redstone and all.

"I can't stay," he continued. "The former sheriff's filling in for me, and if he misses opening day of deer season, he ain't gonna be happy." Doc Fletcher was a soft hearted, jovial guy, but everyone took hunting seriously up there. Opening day was an unofficial state holiday, the kids even got out of school.

"When's that?"

Enos hesitated. "November 13th, but we're supposed to get snow this weekend," he added. "If I stay, I'm libel to be driving in it."

It was supposed to snow Friday night and into Saturday, but only an inch or so. Compared with what he'd experienced over the last two years, that was akin to running through a sprinkler in the summer, but in the deep south, even flurries were met with trepidation.

"You want a ham sandwich?" he offered. "I've just about had all the hospital fare I can say grace over."

"I wouldn't turn one down, thanks Uncle Jesse." He couldn't remember having pork outside of bacon or a pasty since he lived in Hazzard. A moment later, a plate with sliced ham on white was in front of him, along with a glass of buttermilk.

Uncle Jesse sat back down in his seat with a sandwich of his own, and they ate in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Halfway through the second half, the older man took a swig of his iced tea, wiped his hands, and said, "We figured it was you who went to see Daisy this morning."

Enos pushed his plate away. "She thought I was there about the accident," he said. "Told me to go talk to Rosco since she couldn't remember what happened, then asked me to leave, in not so many words." His next question stuck in his throat, as though if not spoken, it could never be true. "Is it permanent, the memory loss?" he asked, remembering how evasive she'd been about it at the hospital. "She said the doctors didn't know."

Jesse sighed and shook his head. "Her last MRI scan showed more damage than they originally thought," he answered. "Not a lot, but I guess it don't take a lot to scramble things. Dr. Haglen, the neurologist, called it 'focal retrograde amnesia'. Gave us a pamphlet that didn't explain much, but he said it ain't very common. Everything else seems to be there - facts, figures...she can make new memories. He thinks she'll probably still be able to drive when she's ready to try, but anything personal that's not there now - episode memory, he called it, he doesn't expect will come back. Told us we needed to get rid of all her personal items to help her start over. He said it's hard to know whether her brain just can't find the memories, or if they were destroyed, but either way..." He gestured impotently.

"Either way, they're gone."

"The doctor tried to explain it to her, but she's convinced herself it's only temporary."

"Still stubborn."

"She's still Daisy, Enos," he said. "You talk to her for five minutes and you can tell she's still herself. More naive in some ways, it seems; keeps forgetting she's not ten. Life throws a lot of trash at us in between ten and thirty-two." He studied the ex-deputy. "But, there's gonna come a time when she can't run away from it, anymore. She needs someone here who understands her, especially how she was when she was younger. She needs you."

He laughed at that. "She needs me even less now than she did before. At least then she knew who I was." He crossed his arms and glared darkly at the red checked tablecloth until he felt Uncle Jesse staring at him, and he began to fidget.

"You don't wear bitterness well, son," he told him, gently. "She never meant to hurt you like she did."

His words stole the remaining anger away, leaving only an abysmal sadness. "I know she didn't," he sighed, marveling how the man could cut through all the clutter to get right at the heart of the matter. "And I'm not angry, not anymore." He looked up, into the man's careworn face. "I'll always love her, but I can't stay. I can't make more memories with her. It hurts too much." He stood up, sliding the chair back underneath the table. "I wish I could stick around to see Bo and Luke, but I really do have to get going," he apologized. "I wasn't planning on stopping as it were, but I thought I might run into someone here since you weren't at the hospital."

"You left right before we got there."

"Thanks for tracking me down," he said. "I don't know when I'll be back around."

"Or if, you mean to say."

Their eyes met, but Enos dropped his first. "Don't tell her about me, Uncle Jesse. Not unless she remembers on her own." He turned to leave, but as his fingers closed around the doorknob, Uncle Jesse's hand fell on his shoulder, stopping him. He looked back up, surprised to see tears.

"You're too old for me to lecture, Enos," he said, "and, I understand why you felt you had to leave. But you should know...if you ever need one, you'll always have a home here, and you can always come back."

Enos nodded, his throat too tight to speak, and gave the man a hug.

"You be safe out there," Uncle Jesse whispered. "We love ya'."

"I love you, too, Uncle Jesse."

Sitting upright in the wheelchair, Daisy was able to get a better grasp of her own height and weight. Her body felt right, but she didn't remember getting to the size she was.

"We'll go slow," Dr. Looper was saying as she wheeled Daisy through the halls to a classroom of sorts and up to a table.. "After being in bed for a few days, it can take a while for moving to feel normal again. Today, we're going to start small and work on some of the shorter tests that don't take as long," she explained. "As you get your strength back over the next few days, we'll switch to some of the more complex tests."

She lay a sheet of paper and a pencil down on the table in front of Daisy, then took a drawing from a nearby folder. "In the first part of this test," said Ms. Looper, "I'd like you to draw as much of this figure for me as you can, while looking at it."

It wasn't really a picture at all, Daisy saw, just some rectangles and other shapes stuck together with a smiley face in one part. She thought it looked a little like a spaceship. The pencil felt familiar in her hand, and she thought of the pencil sharpener in the school library and the smell of graphite shavings. "I'm not sure how good I am at drawing," she said, "but I can try."

"Just do the best you can," she encouraged. "That's all that matters."

It took about five minutes for her to draw all the lines and boxes and triangles, plus one smiley face. When she was finished the woman put it aside, face down on a different table.

"We're going to come back to that test, but first, I have some questions I'd like to ask you." She opened a folder, and Daisy tried to steal a peek at the list of questions, but it was hard to decipher upside down. "Some of these questions you'll probably think are very easy," she was saying, "and others you might have trouble answering. Every answer is okay, even if it's 'I don't know'."

For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Daisy answered questions much like Dr. Haglen had asked her after she'd just woken up; questions such as her name, address, and phone number; but different ones, too, such as 'How did you get to this hospital?', 'What day of the week is it?', and 'What is the last thing you can recall before your accident?'. By the time the questions were finished, she felt like she had run a marathon.

"You've done great today, Daisy," the woman said, finally, "and I know you're getting tired. I just have one last thing for you to do, and it's the second part of the drawing test you worked on." She placed a blank sheet of paper down on the table with the pencil. "I would like you to draw as much of the picture from earlier as you can remember, but this time without looking at it."

She thought about the picture in her head, how it looked like a spaceship. That would be a good start, she decided, with the main rectangle for the body of the ship. After she finished, Ms. Looper put her before and after side by side.

"Did I do okay?" she worried. "I forgot a couple of parts."

"You did great," she told her. "This test checks your short-term memory. People who have problems forming new memories usually won't be able to reproduce much, if any, of the figure. It's normal to miss a couple of parts after fifteen to twenty minutes." She stapled Daisy's first and second drawings together beneath a form with her information on it and stuck it in the folder. "We'll do some more testing tomorrow, but for now, you look like you could use a nap."

Daisy yawned and laughed. "I didn't realize drawing could be so exhausting!"

Ms. Looper tucked the quilt back around her legs. "You'll start to feel stronger everyday," she assured her. "It won't be long before they'll have you walking around all over the place."

"I hope so," she said, sleepily. "I just want to go home."

It was after 8:00pm by the time Enos pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Dayton, Ohio. Even though he would have been comfortable in a less expensive motel, he knew from experience that it was better to pay the extra money than to leave a police cruiser in an unguarded parking lot overnight. While working on a VICE sting on the outskirts of Los Angeles, his cruiser had been spray painted with vulgar graffiti. He'd had to tell the guy from impound to bring a can of paint with him the next morning before they could even tow it through the city.

It had been an eye opening lesson, to say the least.

He checked in and asked for a room on the ground floor, then moved the Bronco around to park next to his window. There was no sense in taking chances, and he wasn't in the mood to deal with vandalism tonight. Besides, Uncle Jesse was right. The truck was pretty nice, and he liked it.

After a shower, he dressed in a pair of old, ratty sweats and collapsed onto the bed. He was almost asleep when he remembered the letter from Daisy he had stashed in his pocket. With a groan, he rolled off the bed and went through the pockets of his slacks and pulled it out. For a long time, he simply looked at it, flipping it over in his hands, not ready to face whatever might be inside.

The cancellation date of December 12th had been after L.D. had left her; that much he knew, but only because he'd called Rosco to ask for a reference in mid-October.

Four months.

That was how long it had taken the roadie to decide that Hazzard, and Daisy Duke, weren't what he wanted. He'd up and left one night while she was working late at the Boars' Nest; Rosco said he hadn't even told her good-bye.

Enos had at least managed that.

He blew out a deep breath and tore off the end of the envelope. With a heavy heart and an aching soul, he began to read.