I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues

I HEARD A WHIPPOORWILL last night, the old man said.

Say you did? Rabon asked without interest. Rabon was just in from his schoolteaching job. He seated himself in the armchair across from the bed and hitched up his trouser legs and glanced covertly at his watch. The old man figured Rabon would put in his obligatory five minutes then go in his room and turn the stereo on.

It sounded just like them I used to hear in Alabama when I was a boy, Scribner said. Sometimes he would talk about whippoorwills or the phases of the moon simply because he got some perverse pleasure out of annoying Rabon. Rabon wanted his father’s mind sharp and the old man on top of things, and it irritated him when the old man’s mind grew preoccupied with whippoorwills or drifted back across the Tennessee state line into Alabama. Scribner was developing a sense of just how far he could push Rabon into annoyance, and he fell silent, remembering how irritated Rabon had been that time in Nashville when Scribner had recognized the doctor.

The doctor was telling Rabon what kind of shape Scribner was in, talking over the old man’s head as if he wasn’t even there. All this time Scribner was studying the doctor with a speculative look on his face, trying to remember where he had seen him. He could almost but not quite get a handle on it.

Physically he’s among the most impressive men of his age I’ve examined, the doctor was saying. There’s nothing at all to be concerned about there, and his heart is as strong as a man half his age. But Alzheimer’s is irreversible, and we have to do what we can to control it.

Scribner had remembered. He was grinning at the doctor. I’ve seen you before, ain’t I?

Excuse me?

I remember you now, the old man said. I seen you in Alabama.

I’m afraid not, the doctor said. I’m from Maine and this is the farthest south I’ve ever been.

Scribner couldn’t figure why the doctor would lie about it. Sure you was. We was at a funeral. You was wearing a green checked suit and a little derby hat and carrying a black shiny walkin stick. There was a little spotted dog there lookin down in the grave and whinin and you rapped it right smart with that cane. I hate a dog at a funeral, you said.

The doctor was looking sympathetic, and Scribner was going to try to lie out of it. Rabon was just looking annoyed. Who were you burying? he asked. This confused Scribner. He tried to think. Hell, I don’t know, he said. Some dead man.

I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, the doctor said.

Scribner was becoming more confused yet, the sand he was standing on was shifting, water rising about his shoes, his ankles.

I reckon I have, he finally said. That would have been sixtyodd years ago and you’d have to be a hell of a lot older than what you appear to be.

In the car Rabon said, If all you can do is humiliate me with these Alabama funeral stories I wish you would just let me do the talking when we have to come to Nashville.

You could handle that, all right, the old man said.

Now Scribner was back to thinking about whippoorwills. How Rabon was a science teacher who only cared about dead things and books. If you placed a whippoorwill between the pages of an enormous book and pressed it like a flower until it was a paper-thin collage of blood and feathers and fluted bone then Rabon might take an interest in that.

You remember that time a dog like to took your leg off and I laid it out with a hickory club?

No I don’t, and I don’t know where you dredge all this stuff up.

Dredge up hell, the old man said. I was four days laying up in jail because of it.

If it happened at all it happened to Alton. I can’t recall you ever beating a dog or going to jail for me. Or acknowledging my existence in any other way, for that matter.

The old man was grinning slyly at Rabon. Pull up your britches leg, he said.

What?

Pull up your britches leg and let’s have a look at it.

Rabon’s slacks were brown-and-tan houndstooth checked. He gingerly pulled the cuff of one leg up to the calf.

I’m almost sure it was the other one, Scribner said.

Rabon pulled the other leg up. He was wearing wine-colored calf-length socks. Above the sock was a vicious-looking scar where the flesh had been shredded, the puckered scar red and poreless and shiny as celluloid against the soft white flesh.

Ahh, the old man breathed.

Rabon dropped his cuff. I got this going through a barbedwire fence when I was nine years old, he said.

Sure you did, the old man said. I bet a German shepherd had you by the leg when you went through it, too.

LATER HE SLEPT FITFULLY with the lights on. When he awoke, he didn’t know what time it was. Where he was. Beyond the window it was dark, and the lighted window turned the room back at him. He didn’t know for a moment what room he was in, what world the window opened onto. The room in the window seemed cut loose and disassociated, adrift in the space of night.

He got up. The house was quiet. He wandered into the bathroom and urinated. He could hear soft jazzy piano music coming from somewhere. He went out of the bathroom and down a hall adjusting his trousers and into a room where a pudgy man wearing wire-rimmed glasses was seated at a desk with a pencil in his hand, a sheaf of papers spread before him. The man looked up, and the room rocked and righted itself, and it was Rabon.

The old man went over and seated himself on the side of the bed.

You remember how come I named you Rabon and your brother Alton?

Yes, the man said, making a mark on a paper with a red-leaded pencil.

Scribner might not have heard. It was in Limestone County, Alabama, he said. I growed up with Alton and Rabon Delmore, and they played music. Wrote songs. I drove them to Huntsville to make their first record. Did I ever tell you about that?

No more than fifty or sixty times, Rabon said. But I could always listen to it again.

They was damn good. Had some good songs, “Deep Elm Blues.” “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” “When you go down to Deep Elm keep your money in your shoes,” the first line went. They wound up on the Grand Ole Opry. Wound up famous. They never forgot where they come from, though. They was just old country boys. I’d like to hear them songs again.

I bought you a cassette player and all those old-time country and bluegrass tapes.

I know it. I appreciate it. Just seems like I can’t ever get it to work right. It ain’t the same anyway.

I’ll take Brubeck myself.

If that’s who that is then you can have any part of him.

It’s late, Papa. Don’t you think you ought to be asleep?

I was asleep. Seems like I just catnap. Sleep when I’m sleepy. Wake up when I’m not. Not no night and day anymore. Reckon why that is?

I’ve got all this work to do.

Go ahead and work then. I won’t bother you.

The old man sat silent a time watching Rabon grade papers. Old-man heavy in the chest and shoulders, looking up at the school-teacher out of faded eyes. Sheaf of iron-gray hair. His pale eyes flickered as if he’d thought of something, but he remained silent. He waited until Rabon finished grading the paper he was working on and in the space between his laying it aside and taking up another one the old man said, Say whatever happened to Alton, anyway?

Rabon laid the paper aside ungraded. He studied the old man. Alton is dead, he said.

Dead? Say he is? What’d he die of?

He was killed in a car wreck.

The old man sat in silence digesting this as if he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Finally he said, Where’s he buried at?

Papa, Rabon said, for a moment the dense flesh of his face was transparent so that Scribner could see a flicker of real pain, then the flesh coalesced into its customary opaque mask and Rabon said again, I’ve got to do all this work.

I don’t see how you can work with your own brother dead in a car wreck, Scribner said.

SOMETIME THAT NIGHT, or another night he went out the screen door onto the back porch, dressed only in his pajama bottoms, the night air cool on his skin. Whippoorwills were tolling out of the dark and a milky blind cat’s eye of a moon hung above the jagged treeline. Out there in the dark patches of velvet, patches of silver where moonlight was scattered through the leaves like coins. The world looked strange yet in some way familiar. Not a world he was seeing, but one he was remembering. He looked down expecting to see a child’s bare feet on the floorboards and saw that he had heard the screen door slap to as a child but had inexplicably become an old man, gnarled feet on thin blue shanks of legs, and the jury-rigged architecture of time itself came undone, warped and ran like melting glass.

NAKED TO THE WAIST Scribner sat on the bed while the nurse wrapped his biceps to take his blood pressure. His body still gleamed from the sponge bath and the room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Curious-looking old man. Heavy chest and shoulders and arms like a weightlifter. The body of a man twenty-five years his junior. The image of the upper torso held until it met the wattled red flesh of his throat, the old man’s head with its caved cheeks and wild gray hair, the head with its young man’s body like a doctored photograph.

Mr. Scribner, this thing will barely go around your arm, she said. I bet you were a pistol when you were a younger man.

I’m still a pistol yet, and cocked to go off anytime, the old man said. You ought to go a round with me.

My boyfriend wouldn’t care for that kind of talk, the nurse said, pumping up the thingamajig until it tightened almost painfully around his arm.

I wasn’t talking to your boyfriend, Scribner said. He takin care of you?

I guess he does the best he can, she said. But I still bet you were something twenty-five years ago.

What was you like twenty-five years ago?

Two years old, she said.

You ought to give up on these younger men, he said, studying the heavy muscles of his forearms, his still-taut belly. Brighten up a old man’s declinin years.

Hush that kind of talk, she said. Taking forty kinds of pills and randy as a billy goat.

Hellfire, you give me a bath. You couldn’t help but notice how I was hung.

She turned quickly, away but not so quickly the old man couldn’t see the grin.

Nasty talk like that is going to get a soapy washrag crammed in your mouth, she said.

WITH HIS WALKING CANE for a snakestick the old man went through a thin stand of half-grown pines down into the hollow and past a herd of plywood cattle to where the hollow flattened out then climbed gently toward the roadbed. The cattle were life-size silhouettes jigsawed from sheets of plywood and affixed to two-by-fours driven in the earth. They were painted gaudily with bovine smiles and curving horns. The old man passed through the herd without even glancing at them, as if in his world all cattle were a half-inch thick and garbed up with bright lacquer. Rabon had once been married to a woman whose hobby this was, but now she was gone, and there was only this hollow full of wooden cattle.

He could have simply taken the driveway to the roadbed but he liked the hot astringent smell of the pines and the deep shade of the hollow. All his life the woods had calmed him, soothed the violence that smoldered just beneath the surface.

When he came onto the cherted roadbed he stopped for a moment, leaning on his stick to catch his breath. He was wearing bedroom slippers and no socks and his ankles were crisscrossed with bleeding scratches from the dewberry briars he’d walked through. He went on up the road as purposefully as a man with a conscious destination though in truth he had no idea where the road led.

It led to a house set back amid ancient oak trees, latticed by shade and light and somehow imbued with mystery to the old man’s eyes, like a cottage forsaken children might come upon in a fairy-tale wood. He stood by the roadside staring at it. It had a vague familiarity, like an image he had dreamed then come upon unexpectedly in the waking world. The house was a one-story brick with fading cornices painted a peeling white. It was obviously unoccupied. The yard was grown with knee-high grass gone to seed and uncurtained windows were opaque with refracted light. Untrimmed tree branches encroached onto the roof and everything was steeped in a deep silence.

A hand raised to shade the sun-drenched glass, the old man peered in the window. No one about, oddments of furniture, a woodstove set against a wall. He climbed onto the porch and sat in a cedar swing for a time, rocking idly, listening to the creak of the chains, the hot sleepy drone of dirt daubers on the August air. There were boxes of junk stacked against the wall, and after a time he began to sort through one of them. There were china cats and dogs, a cookie jar with the shapes of cookies molded and painted onto the ceramic. A picture in a gilt frame that he studied until the edges of things shimmered eerily then came into focus, and he thought: This is my house.

He knew he used to live here with a wife named Ellen and two sons named Alton and Rabon and a daughter named Karen. Alton is dead in a car wreck, he remembered, and he studied Karen’s face intently as if it were a gift that had been handed to him unexpectedly, and images of her and words she had said assailed him in a surrealistic collage so that he could feel her hand in his, a little girl’s hand, see white patent-leather shoes climbing concrete steps into a church, one foot, the other, the sun caught like something alive in her auburn hair.

Then another image surfaced in his mind: his own arm, silver in the moonlight, water pocked with light like hammered metal, something gleaming he threw sinking beneath the surface, then just the empty hand drawing back and the muscular freckled forearm with a chambray work shirt rolled to the biceps. Somewhere upriver a barge, lights arcing over the river like searchlights trying to find him. That was all. Try as he might he could call nothing else to mind. It troubled him because the memory carried some dark undercurrent of menace.

With a worn Case pocketknife he sliced himself a thin sliver of Apple chewing tobacco Rabon didn’t know he’d hoarded, held it in his jaw savoring the taste. He walked about the yard thinking movement might further jar his memory into working. He paused at a silver maple that summer lightning had struck, the raw wound winding in a downward spiral to the earth where the bolt had gone to ground. He stood studying the splintered tree with an old man’s bemusement, as if pondering whether this was something he might fix.

SAY, WHATEVER HAPPENED to that Karen, anyway? he asked Rabon that night. Rabon had dragged an end table next to the old man’s bed and set a plate and a glass of milk on it. Try not to get this all over everything, he said.

Scribner was wearing a ludicrous-looking red-and-white-checked bib Rabon had tied around his neck, and with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other he was eyeing the plate as if it were something he was going to attack.

Your sister, Karen, the old man persisted.

I don’t hear from Karen anymore, Rabon said. I expect she’s still up there around Nashville working for the government.

Workin for the government? What’s she doin?

They hired her to have one baby after another, Rabon said. She draws that government money they pay for them. That AFDC, money for unwed mothers, whatever.

Say she don’t ever call or come around?

I don’t have time for any of that in my life, Rabon said. She liked the bright lights and the big city. Wild times. Drinking all night and laying up with some loafer on food stamps. I doubt it’d do her much good to come around here.

I was thinkin about her today when she was a little girl.

She hasn’t been a little girl for a long time, Rabon said, shutting it off, closing another door to something he didn’t want to talk about.

PAST MIDNIGHT Scribner was lying on top of the covers, misshapen squares of moonlight thrown across him by the windowpanes. He had been thinking about Karen when he remembered shouting, crying, blood. When he pulled her hands away from her face they came away bloody and her mouth was smashed with an incisor cocked at a crazy angle and blood dripping off her chin. One side of her jaw was already swelling.

Where is he?

I don’t know, she said. He’s left me. He drove away. No telling where he’s gone.

Wherever it is I doubt it’s far enough, he said, already leaving, his mind already suggesting and discarding places where Pulley might be.

Don’t hurt him.

He gave her a long, level glance but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t. Crossing the yard toward his truck he stepped on an aluminum baseball bat that belonged to Alton. He stooped and picked it up and went on to the truck, swinging it along in his hands, and threw it onto the floorboard.

He wasn’t in any of his usual haunts. Not the Snowwhite Café, the pool hall. In Skully’s City Café the old man drank a beer and bought one for a crippled drunk in a wheelchair.

Where’s your runnih mate, Hudgins?

Bonedaddy? He was in here a while ago. He bought a case of beer and I reckon he’s gone down to that cabin he’s got on the Tennessee River.

Why ain’t you with him? The old man did not even seem angry. A terrible calm had settled over him. You couldn’t rattle him with a jackhammer.

He’s pissed about somethin, said he didn’t have time to fool with me. I know he’s gone to the river though, he had that little snake pistol he takes.

The night was far progressed before he found the right cabin. It set back against a bluff and there was a wavering campfire on the riverbank and Bonedaddy sat before it drinking beer. When Scribner approached the fire, Bonedaddy glanced at the bat and took the nickel-plated pistol out of his pocket and laid it between his feet.

Snake huntin? the old man asked.

These cottonmouth hides ain’t worth nothin, Bonedaddy said. Nobody wants a belt made out of em. Too muddy-lookin and no pattern to speak of. I mostly shoot copperheads and rattlesnakes. Once in a while just whatever varmint wanders up to the fire.

Scribner was watching Bonedaddy s right hand. The left clasped a beer bottle but the right never strayed far from the pistol. The hand was big and heavy-knuckled and he couldn’t avoid thinking of it slamming into Karen’s mouth.

You knocked her around pretty good, he said. You probably ain’t more than twice her size.

She ought not called me a son of a bitch. Anybody calls me that needs to have size and all such as that into consideration before they open their mouth.

The old man didn’t reply. He hunkered, watching, the stippled water, the farther shore that was just a land in darkness, anybody’s guess, a world up for grabs. He listened to the river sucking at the banks like an animal trying to find its way in. He saw that people lived their own lives, went their own way. They grew up and lived lives that did not take him into consideration.

I don’t want to argue, Bonedaddy said, patient as a teacher explaining something to a pupil who was a little slow. Matter of fact I come down here to avoid it. But there’s catfish in this river six or eight feet long, what they tell me. And if you don’t think I’ll shoot you and feed you to them then you need to say so right now.

The hand had taken up the pistol. When it started around its arc was interrupted by Scribner swinging the ball bat. He swung from the ground up as hard as he could, like a batter trying desperately for the outfield wall. The pistol fired once and went skittering away. Bonedaddy made some sort of muffled grunt and crumpled in the leaves. The old man looked at the bat in his hands, at Bonedaddy lying on his back. Bonedaddy’s hands were flexing. Loosening, clasping. They loosened nor would they clasp again. His head looked like something a truck had run over. Scribner glanced at the bat in mild surprise, then turned and threw it in the river. Somewhere off in the milk-white fog the throaty horn of a barge sounded, lights arced through the murk vague as lights seen in the muddy depths of the river.

He dragged Bonedaddy to the cabin then up the steps and inside. There was a five-gallon can of kerosene and he soaked the floors with it, hurled it at the walls. He lit it with a torch from the campfire. With another he searched for blood in the leaves. Bonedaddy’s half-drunk beer was propped against a weathered husk of stump, and for a reason he couldn’t name Scribner picked it up and drank it and slung the bottle into the river.

He stayed to see that everything burned. When the roof caught, an enormous cedar lowering onto it burst into flames and burned white-hot as a magnesium flare, sparks rushing skyward in the roaring updraft, like a pillar of fire God had inexplicably set against the wet black bluff.

Hey, he said, trying to shake Rabon awake.

Rabon came awake reluctantly, his hands trying to fend the old man away. Scribner kept shaking him roughly. Get up, he said. Rabon sat up in bed rubbing his eyes. What is it? What’s the matter?

I killed a feller, Scribner said.

Rabon was instantly alert. What the hell are you talking about? He was looking all about the room as if he might see some outstretched burglar run afoul of the old man.

A feller named Willard Pulley. Folks called him Bonedaddy. I killed him with Alton’s baseball bat and set him afire. Must be twenty years ago. He had a shifty little pistol he kept wavin in my face.

Are you crazy? You had a bad dream, you never killed anybody. Go back to sleep.

I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said.

Rabon was looking at his watch. It’s two o’clock in the morning, he said, as if it were the deadline for something. The old man was watching Rabon’s eyes. Something had flickered there when he had mentioned Willard Pulley but he couldn’t put a name to what he had seen: anger, apprehension, fear. Then it all smoothed into irritation, an expression Scribner was so accustomed to seeing that he had no difficulty interpreting it.

You know who I’m talkin about?

Of course I know who you’re talking about. You must have had a nightmare about him because we were talking about Karen. He did once live with Karen, but nobody killed him, nobody set him afire, as you put it. He was just a young drunk and now he’s an old drunk. It hasn’t been a week since I saw him lounging against the front of the City Café, the way he’s done for twentyfive years. You were dreaming.

I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said, but he had grown uncertain even about this. His mind had gone over to the other side where the enemy camped, truth that had once been hard-edged as stone had turned ephemeral and evasive. Subject to gravity, it ran through the cracks and pooled on the floorboards like quicksilver. He was reduced to studying people’s eyes for the reaction to something he had said, trying to mirror truth in other people’s faces.

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, a dull rage possessed him. Nor would it abate. He felt ravaged, violated. Somewhere along the line his life had been stolen. Some hand furtive as a pickpocket’s had taken everything worth taking and he hadn’t even missed it. Ellen and his children and a house that was his own had fallen by the wayside. He was left bereft and impotent, dependent upon the whims and machinations of others. Faceless women prodded him with needles, spooned tasteless food into him, continually downloaded an endless supply of pills even horses couldn’t swallow. The pills kept coming, as if these women were connected directly to their source, so that no matter how many he ingested there was always a full tray waiting atop the bureau. He pondered upon all this and eventually the pickpocket had a face as well as a hand. The puppeteer controlling all these strings was Rabon.

At noon a nameless woman in a dusty Bronco brought him a foam tray of food. He sat down in Rabon’s recliner in the living room and prepared to eat. A mouthful of tasteless mashed potatoes clove to his palate, grew rubbery and enormous so that he could not swallow it. He spat it onto the carpet. This is the last goddamned straw, he said. All his life he’d doubled up on the salt and pepper and now the food everyone brought him was cooked without benefit of grease or seasoning. There was a compartment of poisonous-looking green peas and he began to pick them up one by one and flick them at the television screen. Try not to get this all over everything, he said.

When the peas were gone he carried the tray to the kitchen. He raked the carrots and mashed potatoes into the sink and found a can of peas in a cabinet and opened them with an electric can opener. Standing in the living room doorway he began to fling handfuls of them onto the carpet, scattering them about the room as if he were sowing them.

When the peas were gone he got the tray of pills and went out into the backyard. The tray was compartmentalized, Monday, Tuesday, all the days of the week. He dumped them all together as if time had no further significance, as if all days were one.

Rabon had a motley brood of scraggly-looking chickens that were foraging for insects near a split-rail fence, and Scribner began to throw handfuls of pills at them. They ran excitedly about pecking up the pills and searching for more. Get em while they’re hot, the old man called. These high-powered vitamins’ll have you sailin like hawks and singin like mockinbirds.

He went in and set the tray in its accustomed place. From the bottom of the closet he took up the plastic box he used for storing his tapes. Wearing the look of a man burning the last of his bridges, he began to unspool them, tugging out the thin tape until a shell was empty, discarding it and taking up another. At length they were all empty. He sat on the bed with his hands on his knees. He did not move for a long time, his eyes black and depthless and empty looking, ankle-deep in dead bluegrass musicians and shredded mandolins and harps and flattop guitars, in old lost songs nobody wanted anymore.

Rabon was standing in the doorway wiping crushed peas off the soles of his socks. The old man lay on the bed with his fingers laced behind his skull watching Rabon through slitted eyes.

What the hell happened in the living room? Where did all those peas come from?

A bunch of boys done it, Scribner said. Broke in here. Four or five of the biggest ones held me down and the little ones throwed peas all over the front room.

Do you think this is funny? Rabon asked.

Hell no. You try bein held down by a bunch of boys and peas throwed all over the place. See if you think it’s funny. I tried to run em off but I’m old and weak and they overpowered me.

We’ll see how funny it is from the door of the old folks’ home, Rabon said. Or the crazy house. Rabon was looking at the medicine tray. What happened to all those pills?

The chickens got em, Scribner said.

THE GOING WAS SLOWER than he had expected and by the time the chert road topped out at the crossroads where the blacktop ran it was ten o’clock and the heat was malefic. The treeline shimmered like something seen through bad glass and the blacktop radiated heat upward as if somewhere beneath it a banked fire smoldered.

He stood for a time in the shade of a pin oak debating his choices. He was uncertain about going on, but then again it was a long way back. When he looked down the road the way he had come, the perspiration burning his eyes made the landscape blur in and out of focus like something with a provisional reality, like something he’d conjured but could not maintain. After a while he heard a car, then saw its towed slipstream of dust, and when it stopped for the sign at the crossroads he was standing on the edge of the road leaning on his stick.

The face of the woman peering out of the car window was familiar but he could call no name in mind. He was wearing an old brown fedora and he tipped the brim of it in a gesture that was almost courtly.

Mr. Scribner, what are you doing out in all this heat?

Sweating a lot, Scribner said. I need me a ride into town if you’re going that far.

Why of course, the woman said. Then a note of uncertainty crept into her voice. But aren’t you … where is Rabon? We heard you were sick. Are you supposed to be going to town?

I need to get me a haircut and a few things. There ain’t nothin the matter with me, either. That boy’s carried me to doctors all over Tennessee and can’t none of em kill me.

If you’re sure it’s all right, she said, moving her purse off the passenger seat to make room. Get in here where it’s air-conditioned before you have a stroke.

He got out at the town square of Ackerman’s Field and stood for a moment sizing things up, getting his bearings. He crossed at the traffic light and went on down the street to the City Café by some ingrained habit older than the sense of strangeness the town had acquired.

In midmorning the place was almost deserted, three stools occupied by drunks he vaguely recognized, bleary-eyed sots with nowhere else to be. He sat down at the bar, just breathing in the atmosphere: the ancient residue of beer encoded into the very woodwork, sweat, the intangible smell of old violence. There was something evocative about it, almost nostalgic. The old man had come home.

He laid his hat on the counter and studied the barman across from him. Let me have two tall Budweisers, he said, already fumbling at his wallet. He had it in a shirt pocket and the pocket itself secured with a large safety pin. It surprised him that the beer actually appeared, Skully sliding back the lid of the cooler and turning with two frosty cans of Budweiser and setting them on the Formica bar. The old man regarded them with mild astonishment. Well now, he said. He fought an impulse to look over his shoulder and see was Rabon’s rubbery face pressed to the glass watching him.

You got a mouse in your pocket, Mr. Scribner? a grinning Skully asked him.

No, it’s just me myself, Scribner said, still struggling clumsily with the safety pin. He had huge hands grown stiff and clumsy and he couldn’t get it unlatched. I always used one to chase the other one with.

I ain’t seen you in here in a long time.

That boy keeps me on a pretty tight leash. I just caught me a ride this mornin and came to town. I need me a haircut and a few things.

You forget that money, Skully said. I ain’t taking it. These are on the house for old time’s sake.

Scribner had the wallet out. He extracted a bill and smoothed it carefully on the bar. He picked up one of the cans and drank from it, his Adam’s apple convulsively pumping the beer down, the can rattling emptily when he set it atop the bar. He turned and regarded the other three drinkers with a benign magnanimity, his eyes slightly unfocused. Hidy boys, he said.

How you, Mr. Scribner?

He slid the bill across to Skully. I thank you for the beer, he said. Let me buy them highbinders down the bar a couple.

There was a flurry of goodwill from the drunks downbar toward this big spender from the outlands and the old man accepted their thanks with grace and drank down the second can of beer.

We heard you was sick and confined to your son’s house, Skully said. You look pretty healthy to me. What supposed to be the matter with you?

I reckon my mind’s goin out on me, Scribner said. It fades in and out like a weak TV station. I expect to wake up some morning with no mind at all. There ain’t nothin wrong with me, though. He hit himself in the chest with a meaty fist. I could still sweep this place out on a Saturday night. You remember when I used to do that.

Yes I do.

I just can’t remember names. What went with folks. All last week I was thinkin about this old boy I used to see around. Name of Willard Pulley. I couldn’t remember what become of him. Folks called him Bonedaddy.

Let me see, now, Skully said.

He’s dead, one of the men down the bar said.

Scribner turned so abruptly the stool spun with him and he almost fell. What? he asked.

He’s dead. He got drunk and burnt hisself up down on the Tennessee River. Must be over twenty years ago.

Wasn’t much gone, another said. He ain’t no kin to you is he?

No, no, I just wondered what become of him. And say he’s dead sure enough?

All they found was ashes and bones. That’s as dead as I ever want to be.

I got to get on, the old man said. He rose and put on his hat and shoveled his change into a pocket and took up his stick.

When the door closed behind him with its soft chime, one of the drunks said, There goes what’s left of a hell of a man. I’ve worked settin trusses with him where the foreman would have three men on one end and just him on the other. He never faded nothin.

He wasn’t lying about cleaning this place out, either, Skully said. He’d sweep it out on a Saturday night like a long-handled broom but he never started nothin. He’d set and mind his own business. Play them old songs on the jukebox. It didn’t pay to fuck with him though.

THE OLD MAN SAT in the barber chair, a towel wound about his shoulders and he couldn’t remember what he wanted. I need a, he said, and the word just wasn’t there. He thought of words, inserting them into the phrase and trying them silently in his mind to see if they worked. I need a picket fence, a bicycle, a heating stove. The hot blood of anger and humiliation suffused his throat and face.

What kind of haircut you want, Mr. Scribner?

A haircut, the old man said in relief. Why hell yes. That’s what I want, a haircut. Take it all off. Let me have my money’s worth.

All of it?

Just shear it off.

When Scribner left, his buzz-cut bullet head was hairless as a cue ball and the fedora cocked at a jaunty angle. He drank two more beers at Skully’s, then thought he’d amble down to the courthouse lawn and see who was sitting on the benches there. When he stood on the sidewalk, the street suddenly yawned before him as if he were looking down the sides of a chasm onto a stream of dark water pebbled with moonlight. He’d already commenced his step and when he tried to retract it he overbalanced and pitched into the street. He tried to catch himself with his palms, but his head still rapped the asphalt solidly, and lights flickered on and off behind his eyes. He dragged himself up and was sitting groggily on the sidewalk when Skully came out the door.

Skully helped him up and seated him against the wall. I done called the ambulance, he said. He retrieved Scribner’s hat and set it carefully in the old man’s lap. Scribner sat and watched the blood running off his hands. Somewhere on the outskirts of town a siren began, the approaching whoop whoop whoop like some alarm the old man had inadvertently triggered that was homing in on him.

ALL THIS SILENCE was something the old man was apprehensive about. Rabon hadn’t even had much to say when, still in his schoolteaching suit, he had picked Scribner up at the emergency room. Once he had ascertained that the old man wasn’t seriously hurt he had studied his new haircut and his bandaged hands and said, I believe this is about it for me.

He hadn’t even gone in to teach the next day. He had stayed in his bedroom with the door locked, talking on the telephone. Scribner could hear the rise and fall of the mumbling voice but even with an ear to the door he could distinguish no word. It was his opinion that Rabon was calling one old folks’ home after another trying to find one desperate enough to take him, and he had no doubt that sooner or later he would succeed.

The day drew on strange and surreal. His life was a series of instants, each one of which bore no relation to the one preceding, the one following. He was reborn moment to moment. He had long taken refuge in the past, but time had proven laden with deadfalls he himself had laid long ago with land mines that were better not stepped on. So he went further back, to the land of his childhood, where everything lay under a troubled truce. Old voices long silenced by the grave spoke again, their ancient timbres and cadences unchanged by time, by death itself. He was bothered by the image of the little man in the green checked suit and the derby hat, rapping the spotted dog with a malacca cane and saying: I just hate a dog at a funeral, don’t you? Who the hell was that? Scribner wondered, the dust of old lost roads coating his bare feet, the sun of another constellation warming his back.

He looked out the window and dark had come without his knowing it. A heavyset man in wire-rimmed glasses brought a tray of food. Scribner did not even wonder who this might be. The man was balding, and when he stooped to arrange the tray, Scribner could see the clean pink expanse of scalp through the combed-over hair. The man went out of the room. Scribner, looking up from his food, saw him cross through the hall with a bundle of letters and magazines. He went into Rabon’s room and closed the door.

Scribner finished the plate of food without tasting it.

He might have slept. He came to himself lying on the bed, the need to urinate so intense it was almost painful. He got up. He could hear a television in the living room, see the spill of yellow light from Rabon’s bedroom, the bathroom.

His bandaged hands made undoing his clothing even more complicated and finally he just pulled down his pajama bottoms, the stream of urine already starting, suddenly angry at Rabon, why the hell has he got all his plunder in the bathroom, these shoes, suits, these damned golf clubs?

Goddamn, a voice cried. The old man whirled. Rabon was standing in the hall with the TV Guide in his hand. His eyes were wide with an almost comical look of disbelief. My golf shoes, he said, flinging the TV Guide at Scribner’s bullet head and rushing toward him. Turning his head, the old man realized that he was standing before Rabon’s closet, urinating on a rack of shoes.

When Rabon’s weight struck him he went sidewise and fell heavily against the wall, his penis streaking the carpet with urine. He slid down the wall and struggled to a kneeling position, trying to get his pajama bottoms up, a fierce tide of anger rising behind his eyes.

Rabon was mad too, in fact angrier than the old man had ever seen him. He had jerked up the telephone and punched in a series of numbers, stood with the phone clasped to his ear and a furious impatient look on his face, an expression that did not change until the old man struck him in the side of the head with an enormous fist. The phone flew away and when Rabon hit the floor with the old man atop him, Scribner could hear it gibbering mechanically at him from the carpet.

The hot clammy flesh was distasteful to his naked body but Scribner had never been one to shirk what had to be done. With Rabon’s face clasped to his breast and his powerful arms locked in a vise that tightened, they looked like perverse lovers spending themselves on the flowered carpet.

When Rabon was still the old man got up, pushing himself erect against Rabon’s slack shoulder. He went out the bedroom door and through a room where a television set flickered, his passage applauded by canned laughter from the soundtrack, and so out into the night.

Night air cool on his sweaty skin. A crescent moon like a sliver of bone cocked above the treeline, whippoorwills calling out of the musky keep of the trees. He stood for a moment sensing directions and then he struck out toward the whippoorwills. He went down into the hollow through the herd of plywood cattle pale as the ghosts of cattle and on toward the voices that called out of the dark. He came onto the spectral roadbed and crossed into deeper woods. The whippoorwills were drawing away from him, urging him deeper into the shadowed timber, and he realized abruptly that the voices were coming from the direction of Brown’s Ferry or Deep Elm. Leaning against the bole of a white oak to catch his breath he became aware of a presence in the woods before him, and he saw with no alarm that it was a diminutive man in a green plaid suit, derby hat shoved back rakishly over a broad pale forehead, gesturing him on with a malacca cane.

They’re up here, the little man called.

Scribner went on, barefoot, his thin pajama bottoms shredding in the undergrowth of winter huckleberry bushes. Past a stand of stunted cedars the night opened up into an enormous tunnel, as wide and high as he could see, a tunnel of mauveblack gloom where whippoorwills darted and checked like bats feeding on the wing, a thousand, ten thousand, each calling to him out of the dark, and he and the man with the malacca cane paused and sat for a time against a tree trunk to rest themselves before going on.