John Henry Days

PART FIVE. ADDING VERSES

Even this late in the performance, there is still one more member of the ensemble yet to make an appearance. Standing patiently in the wings, resisting the temptation for one last smoke before the big scene, the steam drill, the heavy in this particular drama, waits for the cue. What’s a hero without a villain?

Much maligned, much vilified, few songs celebrate the struggle of the steam drill. The hand-shy childhood, the ups and downs in the early days of implementation, the sad defeat on the proving grounds. “Ballad of Jo Jo the Steam Drill” is no chart-topper, virtually unhummable by human mouths, and you can’t dance to it besides. Things looked so promising, too, for the Burleigh steam drill, with that sexy new drilling bar. Replacing all the luminaries of mechanical drilldom up to that point, the Brunton Wind Hammer, the Couch Drill, the Fowle, the Fontainmoreau. 240 pounds, 200 blows a minute, nifty pneumatic action. Until the Ingersoll came along, and Charles Burleigh’s baby was just another bunch of obsolete scrap. This is the way the world works.

Progress may be imagined as a railroad line, its right-of-way surveyed through rough plains of trial and error, deep gullies of botched innovation, until the terminus of perfection is reached, the last cross-tie firmed into earth with one final spike. One day’s bustling depot, current pinnacle of human invention, is tomorrow’s skipped-over station, glimpsed in staccato through grimy windows and swiftly banished from consciousness. The Burleigh steam drill is the terminus of a series of inevitabilities, but only terminus until the line is extended, the rails laid farther into frontier, until the next model replaces and advances the heading. The new timetables say that the locomotive stops there only sometimes, at odd hours, and never the express. It’s not like it used to be. Few talk of the Burleigh much anymore, and the ticket window accumulates dust and no one bothers to repaint what the weather has kissed away.

No one writes the songs, no one remembers. Perhaps a quote from the engine itself might shed some light on the situation, explain the events of that day in Big Bend Tunnel, lend some perspective. Let the other side speak.

Steam drill, can we get a soundbite? Silence only greets that quiver of jabbing microphones. No comment, no comment, sweatshirt hood cinched tight for anonymity on the perpwalk. Even if its lawyers hadn’t given strict instructions, it is just a device, it cannot answer. It is only a machine, and it keeps its own counsel.

The purpose of the blackout curtains utilized by hotels and motels throughout the land is to engineer various mental states in the guest. When a guest opens her eyes in a completely dark environment, the first sensation generated is often one of anxious dislocation, which may escalate to modulated panic if the guest is slow to situate, find a landmark, reconstruct the journey to this darkness. Once the guest has oriented herself, reassuring notions introduce themselves. In the case of the guest in room 14 of the Tal-cott Motor Lodge, for example, after the digital display of the bedside alarm clock firmly tethers her to reality, she is relieved that life seems to continue pretty much the way it always does even if one has temporarily been removed from engaged participation by an overlong nap. It is this feeling of relief or reassurance, not the blockade of irritating sunshine, or the excitation of the fear impulse, that is the final aim of the blackout curtain; it is hoped that this feeling of comfort will be permanently associated with the particular place of lodging or chain of establishments, and encourage return visits. For we need our safe places in this world, there are far too few.

When Pamela Street wakes there is nothing beyond her skin but darkness. Deep inside the Talcott Motor Lodge and Sensory Deprivation Tank. She is not the first to be saved from madness by the soothing red numbers of an alarm clock. The cord of the alarm clock, trailing into the wall socket, is a lifeline to a verified world, power plants, standardized time, civilization. She knows where she is, disquiet exhaled. Retracing the events is no problem. Once the taxi dropped her from the fair, she stumbled on the bed, pratfalled into a deep sleep, and now she recovers, sensation by sensation. It is eight-thirty. Men talk in the parking lot. The circulation in her foot is ransomed where the blanket has kidnapped her sneaker. By the time she turns on the light she has forgotten her first thought on waking. She thought J. was lying beside her and something had happened.

She’s not hungry right now. Had plenty to eat at the festival, a periodic table full of concocted nitrates and artificially colored beverages. She’ll be hungry at some inappropriate time in the future, she figures, a couple of hours from now when the entire county has retreated behind screen doors, and her only choice will be stale pretzels from the vending machine. That will have to do. This time tomorrow she’ll be back in New York, coated in a city summer sweat, but currently she’s still in between towns on musty sheets. A big breakfast in the morning will have to sustain her for all she has to accomplish before she escapes on the plane.

Half an hour later she’s smoked the room into an advertisement for cancer (the Compulsive’s Council and League of Lonely Folks perhaps chipping in for this particular media campaign) so she slides back the blackout curtains and shoves the window across its grooves. The breeze wants into room 14 as much as the smoke wants out, and they negotiate border crossings. By the pool the journalists explore a case of the local discount pisswater beer, jiving it up with mosquitoes. J.’s out there, too. He raises a glass and they all toast to something. Did she actually grab his hand in the tunnel. Do anything else out of character. They stood in the tunnel she had heard about for so many years, and the poison that the stories had put in her blood drained from her, leaving her veins frigid and depleted as that stuff disappeared into puddles the earth drank. She felt like saying, my how you’ve grown, as if the rock were a gawky cousin not seen for a long time and now matured into his own person with quirks. Pools of gray water for a floor, an emphysematous gurgle for breath. Everybody else was outside watching the steeldriving contest, Pamela and J. missed the steeldriving contest and don’t know who won. Not that she knows one of those crackers from another, to tell the truth. They heard the cheers, far away in the fairgrounds, but didn’t leave the tunnel until the main event was over and the victor was at the microphone, thanking an extensive genealogical tree for their support. She grabbed his hand and asked if he’d come with her tomorrow. There, that was the dumb part; not holding his hand but asking him to come along. She didn’t know if it was worse that she asked him or that he said yes. He’ll think she’s crazy when she opens up the box. Even from the bed she can make out that laugh of his. It hitches a ride on the breeze.

On the plane she took the box as her carry-on. A white guy in pinstripe pants and power tie came up the aisle when he spied her wiggling the box into the overhead; he didn’t want her to mess up his suit jacket, wrinkle or otherwise mar it. The box fit, tilted a bit, and the latch shut without fret. She rode through the air with the box directly over her head; it perched, corrugated gargoyle, above the air nozzle and light, and this set childish tremors of unease inside her until the landing gear groaned open. At the arrival gate the driver’s spotted hand went for her bag but she thrust the box at him instead. As they drifted down the escalator, with him in front carrying the box, she felt like a fake billionaire, the scruffy taxi driver her chauffeur chained to the briefcase full of bearer bonds. But it didn’t contain bearer bonds. He put the box in the trunk, tilted again, this time over the spare tire and a couple of girlie mags, and when the trunk closed she was able to shut the box from her mind. On the ride to Talcott the mountains claimed her attention. When she unlocked room 14 she put the box in the closet, where it remains. Or the closet area, more properly: there is a clothes rack and handcuffed hangers and a shelf, but no door. She managed not to look at it nonetheless.

On the sides of the box, in the style of a design aesthetic long extinct, the Diego Grapefruit Company falsely describes the contents. That box hasn’t held fruit for a long time. Along the corners of the box silver duct tape pinches, a discontinued brand drawn from the shelves of her father’s hardware store. Miracle it still sticks. Some of her father’s suppliers specialized more in indictments than quality merchandise. The white cardboard has been blackened by a hundred reconsidered situations. Move it over there, make room over there for it, put this in it and take that out.

The first time she saw it was fifteen years ago. She had made plans to go to the movies with Angela; the teenage guys who sat on the right side of the theater smoked cheeba and if she asked they’d give her a hit and she’d hope it wasn’t laced with something and when the credits started she’d have to run out or else they thought they had the right to rap to her. That had been her plan until her father told her she’d have to wait for the package. He was expecting a package from one of his John Henry dealers; he’d wait for it himself but her mother wasn’t letting him off the hook, not this time. It was her club’s Christmas dance and he’d skipped too many. Her mother said Pamela was old enough to take care of something like that, she was big enough, so there was no way he wasn’t going to be her escort. Walk in there without her man on her arm. She hadn’t made a special trip to get his suit dry cleaned so he could back out for John Henry. She knew how to make him behave, sometimes, when she really wanted to. Back then, for a time. He’ll be here in time for you to make your movie, her father said as he put on his fur hat. He better, Pamela said to herself.

When the room was suddenly rocked by a swell of gamey romance, via the title theme of The Love Boat, she knew she wasn’t going to make it out that night. The theme of The Love Boat, in her history, meant that she was staying in for the night. Usually her father met his John Henry pushers at the store and Pamela never witnessed their ridiculous transactions. Just saw the crap when he brought it home, beaming, dying to show it to her as if she gave a shit. Already cluttering the house would be a dozen identical John Henry statues, a gang of shellacked gremlins, and he’d hoist in another one that was exactly the same and try to get them excited about this new piece of garbage. The house brimmed with John Henry. Not that she cared about her childhood toys at that point, but when her father discovered a box of her old toys in a closet one day he made her throw them out so there’d be room for more John Henry. There was no room in which John Henry did not hunch, no wall across which John Henry did not heave and toil and die in paint and ink and charcoal, no tables where smaller memorabilia, diecast and ceramic figurines, did not pose in martyrdom. (She didn’t have friends over because that meant explaining. She met them downstairs when they buzzed.) He made it out like it had been excavated from King Tut’s tomb. He usually got the stuff at the store, and the few times he conducted John Henry business at their home, Pamela beat it upstairs and turned her boombox on real loud, until the latest batch of weirdos got the hell out of their house with their smelly-ass selves.

Her friend Angela called from a pay phone and Pamela told her she wouldn’t be coming out. The street noise made it sound like Angela was in the middle of a big party Pamela was missing. The second she put the phone down the buzzer rang. On The Love Boat, the bumbling white people set a course for adventure, their minds on a new romance. Pamela hustled to the intercom, and it took three tries before the weirdo employed the talk button correctly and she heard clearly, “Mr. Mails.” She rolled her eyes, buttoned the top two buttons on her shirt and buzzed him up.

He looked nasty. Loitering there on their doormat, in his stained tan overcoat, with those fogged-up, big-ass glasses on his face, he looked like a bag lady. Looked like her biology teacher, who was from Yugoslavia, and when he talked about “the genitalia” everybody had to laugh because he sounded like he was talking about his girlfriend. He was the inspiration for vulgar caricatures that bore no resemblance to him yet incited giggles as they passed furtively row to row in sneaky gestures. This man, Mr. Mails, could have been his cousin. Mr. Mails scraped his boots on the doormat too many times, as if it was the first time in years he has been invited indoors. She had no intention of letting him inside. Hell no. She grabbed for the Diego Grapefruit Company box, the envelope tucked into her right hand for implicit handoff. Give him the money, grab the box and with subway luck she could still rendezvous with Angela and the big party at the other end of the pay phone. “My father said to give you this,” she blurted, curt, in undisguised revulsion. They traded goods, but before Pamela could slam the door, Mr. Mails said, “May I use your facilities?”

He could be a rapist. The facilities, the genitalia; now he was her biology teacher’s brother. It would be her father’s fault if he was a rapist. He should have done this himself. From hypothetical stench her nostrils reared. She led him down the hallway, gestured to the room where pink tile shone through the half-open door. He shuffled. The rain had swept the back of his black hair into a duck’s butt. His head swiveled left and right, registering, cataloging her father’s collection of John Henry memorabilia. It was not yet a museum, if it ever was, it was junk on the wall. He paused only at the sledgehammer, which rested on the wall across nails that lacked resolve; periodically they’d leap out of the walls, inevitably when the family was asleep, and the hammer would hammer on the floor. He started to comment but seeing Pamela’s expression, that potent concoction of adolescent contempt, he decided against it.

At least the pervert ran the faucet to cover whatever nasty thing he was doing in there. Luckily under the sink all manner of industrial cleaner, shiftless offbrands that sometimes wandered into Street Hardware, dropped off by shady distributors, were on call. One time a pigeon flew into the bathroom window and shat and hopped and spat on everything in the bathroom for who knows how long. Her mother chased it out with a broom. It was Pamela’s chore to clean up, and for the first time she attacked a household task with meticulous zeal. Every surface could have a cootie on it, so she scrubbed, sacrificing an army of sponges in this tactical engagement. Not that she would tell him to, but her father should repeat that cleansing when he got home. The facilities. This pervert, she didn’t want to think about it.

He wasn’t a rapist, at least not this night. With that overcoat, though, he probably had some flashing to do. As she closed the front door, he said through pink lips, “Tell your father I might have some new stuff coming in next week that might interest him.” She put the chain on, just so he could hear her do it and know what she thought of him. It was too late to meet Angela.

The other thing she did that night was the result of less easily elaborated motives. Revisiting it, she wishes the motel covers didn’t smell so wretchedly; she’d pull them over her head. She doesn’t know why she did it. She slit open the box and pulled out fists of newspaper. The figure wasn’t that heavy, she’d moved figurines like it many times, to sweep away the grit they attracted. It seemed identical to others her father had dragged into the house, a ceramic statue of John Henry with his loyal hammer. It had lost paint in different places than its brothers, and when her father came home he’d explain the minute differences as if she cared, point out that this was from a company out of Alabama in the fifties that specialized in railroad items and had once been owned by a country and western singer, or this was from a small West Virginia house that produced only ten John Henrys before they reconsidered and this was the first of the series, look at the crosshatching on John Henry’s cutoff pants. The statues circulated from room to room in their house. Periodically her father hit upon a new organizing scheme, and rusted drill bits replaced the framed sheet music above the couch, and the Johnny Cash album cover went into the storage room of the store for a time. These were her father’s planets and their interminable trajectories through her space. It took a few tries to break it into pieces. First couple of times it just bounced on the floor. Then she figured out how to break it. The upper body, the arms, were susceptible. She put them back in the box, delicate now as she arranged the pieces in the newspaper, mama bird to baby chicks. Swept up the white dust of its blood.

Her father cursing out Mr. Mails woke her up. Two in the morning. He cursed him out for quite a few minutes; she kept her eyes closed. When he was emptied, she heard him open the door to her bedroom. She didn’t move an inch, the door closed and that was the last time she picked up John Henry stuff for him. He never mentioned it.

A couple of days before she came down here, Pamela looked through the storage space for an appropriate box. She recognized the Diego Grapefruit Company box after all that time. The latest tenants, she saw, were piano rolls. She remembered the day her father got those things. He explained the process to her while she plotted an escape from his vicinity. He ran his fingers along the tiny perforations in the white paper scrolls and told her that when set into a compatible player piano they would tinkle out a version of “The Ballad of John Henry.” Out of the music machine would come the familiar melody, this was before the days of stereos and that’s how they listened to music in the olden days. Now they were obsolete. She said, how do you know it’s the real thing? How are you going to test it out? He didn’t have an answer for that. She put the scrolls in a shopping bag and locked up the storage facility.

Pamela pulls back the blackout curtains. She lifts the box onto the bed and checks her special delivery. None of her father’s ashes have spilled from the urn.

When we finally got the dishwasher, my mother said, you can’t fight progress.” This is Dave Brown as he implodes an empty beer can. “She liked putting her hands in the suds and scrubbing. She said it had dignity, you make a mess you should clean up after yourself. But everybody on the block had one at that point, so what choice did she have? Every magazine, they had an ad for an automatic dishwasher. What was she, the neighborhood fool? Were we a family of fools? So she said, you can’t fight progress.”

“A woman of quiet defiance,” J. offers.

“Did she have a race with the dishwasher and keel over after beating Final Rinse?”

“Rinse Cycle’s gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord, rinse cycle’s going to be the death of me.”

In slumping assembly around the pool, the junketeers loiter and loll. Occasionally they extract beer from a styrofoam cooler and readjust the ice around the dwindling bounty. It is night, above them stars appear fixed yet career imperceptibly, correlative to a certain member of the junketeers, who reclines in apparent sloth while machinations comet through the deep black stuff of his mind.

Crickets on the stump campaign in the near woods.

“Tabling the whole hubris thing here for a moment,” Tiny starts after a volcanic belch, “maybe Johnny’s real problem was a congenital heart defect. You know the religious edicts against eating pig — because if you didn’t cook it long enough you’d get trichinosis. The bearded community fathers gotta come up with some holy reason to get people not to eat pig. So it’s like that. Creating a fable to explain something natural but they don’t have the science yet. Genetics. Johnny knows from childhood Big Bend is going to be the death of him because he has heart trouble. It runs in the family. High blood pressure — you know black people have higher blood pressure than white people. What does he expect to happen with all that hard work? They didn’t know about this kind of stuff back then. Might as well be mainlining pastrami sandwiches.”

“Black people and fat people — high blood pressure,” J. says.

“Good point. Hey, can you pass me some of those chips over there?”

“I’m all into the prophecy thing, you understand,” Frenchie grunts, his arms splayed in a gesture of Gallic expansiveness. “I respect it, I’m a Sagittarius, have been since the day I was born. What I don’t get is, if you read the horoscope and the experts tell you to be careful about financial transactions or look out for Tauruses, what do you do? You keep the purse strings tight and look out for those horns. John Henry has a premonition that Big Bend is going to be the death of him. So you avoid Big Bend Tunnel. Meet a guy named Benjamin Tounelle, he’s a big guy, you avoid him too. He could have avoided the whole situation if he’d listened to his horoscope.”

“There goes Frenchie again, bringing the topic around to fate versus free will.”

“Everything’s a think piece to this guy.”

“Think he had a choice?”

“We all have choices. Look at that atrocious shirt you’re wearing, J. — that’s a choice.”

“Pass me one of those beers, will you, son?”

“I was born with a caul on my face.”

“A what?”

“A caul. On my face.”

“He means afterbirth. He had afterbirth stuck on his face when he was born.”

“It means you have special gifts.”

“It’s true — it’s not everyone who gets to be a contributing writer to six different tax shelter magazines.”

“This is my impression of a contributing writer.”

As the next cricket candidate described his platform, it was the only sound to be heard among the junketeers. After an appropriate time had passed, the junketeers chuckled at the joke.

“Okay, okay. This is my impression of a contributing editor.”

After another interval of silence, shorter this time, as the joke settled amiably into its promising future as an in-joke among their number, the junketeers chuckled.

“Who won the race?”

“John Henry.”

“The steam drill, dummy.”

“Steam drill always wins in the end.”

“I meant at the thing today.”

“That’s right — you were in the tunnel of love.”

“The local boy won.”

“They were both local boys.”

“Exactly.”

“I think it might make a nice article. Pretty butch stuff, it might make a good pitch for one of those new men’s mags starting up. Man against machine becomes man against man, how the times change the nature of the contest.”

“Beer for you, J., or are you still on the wagon?”

“I’m cool.”

“You know the hard thing about being on the wagon?”

“What?”

“So many hours in the day.”

“What time is the grand coronation tomorrow?”

“I think the stamp ceremony is at one o’clock. In the town square. My flight is taking off at five.”

“Mine, too. J. — you going to that paperweight thing next week?”

“Yeah. You?”

“No. Just wondering.”

“He’s trying to protect his investment. Frenchie thinks you’re going to beat the record. Has a hundred bucks on you.”

“You’re betting?”

“Of course we’re betting. We haven’t had this much fun since, well, since Bobby Figgis. In total disclosure, I don’t think you’re going to make it. No offense. I just don’t think you’re in shape.”

“He can do it. Look in his eyes. He’s halfway there.”

“One Eye has spoken, glimpsing into the mysteries of the human spirit. So what kind of party you want to have when you beat the record? I think we should rent out something appropriate to the occasion, like a dive bar downtown. Lock up the place for a couple of hours and have festivities.”

“When it gets to that I’ll tell you. Frenchie — why don’t you tell us a story? What about that incident in Caracas?”

Beset by such idiots, One Eye buttons himself up in smug resentment, a finely tailored item of apparel, every seam stiletto, each stitch bitter. He is beset by idiots, he can see this clearly; his depth perception may have been affected by his wound, but not his moral acuity. Setting his half-full swill to the concrete he takes leave of his comrades without a word. He’s put off this mission for too long, distracted by a game that had occurred to him: to see how many times his comrades could repeat the lines they have said so many times before. Their troupe improvises, of course, each locality has its customs to incorporate, but they respect the spirit of the text. The run of their show is completely booked, far in advance, and there are obligations. Dropping out of the show is no simple matter. Bracing himself he ticks his tongue against his teeth and squares his shoulders.

His progress up to the second floor of the Talcott Motor Lodge is to him a gallows shuffle up stairs to destiny’s waiting instrument. The mechanism up there. Such is the cast of his recent hallucination, extreme, melodramatic. He remembers in Brazil, in Rio on an airline magazine’s dime to help repair crime’s erosion of the tourist trade, he noted the faces of the blinded as he walked the streets. All his far-flung kin. No one wore eye patches. Their wounds were on display, darkened sockets pooling dread from passersby. One Eye covers his wound as much for himself as other people.

From his adventure this afternoon, One Eye finds the key easily. He takes one last look to see if his fellow dogfaces have noticed his disappearance— maybe J. has changed his mind and is halfway up the stairs — but no one sees him. What is he trying to prove exactly? Ridiculous times call for ridiculous measures, and that is enough, he is inside Lucien’s room with a hundred keys in his hand like clanking alms-coins.

Two things register first. The first is parcel of this weekend. Instead of the maudlin drawing of railroad tracks that hangs above the bed in his room, Lucien’s room features a drawing of John Henry. It’s a headshot of the man of the hour, familiar to him from all the hours at the fair: the postage stamp. This version is full color, blown up, bordered by drawn-in perforations for effect. Along the bottom it reads, First Annual John Henry Days July 13, 1996. What strikes him is the fact of today’s date fixed under glass. It implies a series and a division: this day and what has come before from all those fairs to come. Big weekend for the town, of course, that’s why he’s here, to help bring it into being. The little dispatches of his kind contribute. Next year’s guests see the poster and feel part of a ready-made tradition. Seeing the date up there, even on flimsy hooks drilled into cheap plaster, it is monumentalized. Glory attends even to this small affair in the mountains. He takes it as an omen, for today is also the date of his manumission. It is the day he exits the List.

The second thing he notices is that Lucien’s computer is on.

Lucien’s laptop is open in a sleek black L on the desk. References cycle through his brain: L for List; Venus stepping from her big clam. One Eye glances at the bathroom, maybe he’s in there, but no, One Eye saw Lucien and his party leave the parking lot with his own eye, half an hour before, and the p.r. man’s dinner with the local burghers will leave him with more than enough time for the caper. Time enough for a few simple keystrokes. Tap tap. Sliding into the chair, fingers fluttering like a pianist minutes from performance, he notices the screen saver’s joke. A dollar bill roves and glides across the passive matrix screen, arrogantly ricocheting off edges with impunity. Hmm. It’s kind of a bald joke for Lucien, distant from his usual wit; surely the novelty would have worn off after a few days. But maybe it’s not meant for Lucien’s amusement.

There’s no sound outside the door, no detectives to nab the prey of the intricate sting operation. He taps a key, the dollar bill disappears into the machine’s billfold, and he finds himself looking at the List. The file open on the computer is the List.

If Lawrence knew One Eye and J. were in the bathroom when he returned from picking up his boss, why didn’t he say anything? The flunky’s not cool enough a customer to have kept his mouth shut, not by any stretch. If he knew there was someone in his room he’d have shrieked like a tot with a rat in its crib. It’s possible One Eye left the file open when they made their hasty retreat to the bathroom, but he clearly remembers the window closing. Maybe they missed something when they put the room back together. At any rate, Lucien knows someone is on to him, and perhaps he even knew it at the fair, when he and Lawrence strolled up to them. He knows.

What’s a one-eyed man to do in such a predicament. He’s being dared to tamper with it. Delete it, take his name off, take any one’s name off. He scrolls. The names are all of them reduced to vitals, names and addresses and affiliations, tics and predilections. He clicks and clicks and the names march across the information plain, toward ordained engagement, implacable and resolute.

A trap and a test. Lucien doesn’t care one way or the other. And why should he? It’s just a little bit of data. After all One Eye’s scheming and sneaking and extravagant declarations, it’s just a little bit of data.

He spends twenty minutes prowling across the dingy carpet; it only takes him a minute to accept his weakness and defeat in this contest but the expenditure of a few extra minutes of ersatz deliberation makes him feel better.

He can’t do it. Finally he writes a little note for Lucien and deposits it on the keyboard. A two-word message, a verb-noun combo understood across the globe. He shuts the door gently behind him.

It has cooled off considerably from the afternoon. As he hits the stairs his hand absently latches onto the guardrail and slides. Down in the foxhole the junketeers drink and bullshit one another. His chair is probably still warm, it is all the same, nothing has changed. He rubs his eye patch, scraping the stitching across his palm. Frenchie mutters something ribald and they all laugh and their chairs creak. This is all the same. Sitting among his comrades again, he adjusts his eyepatch. It’s itchy under there. No one remarks on his absence. Dave Brown asks if they remember the time at that party. He had the eye patch made special for him in Spain. The slim leather band attaches to the black heart of the patch. It’s a smart little number. Tiny says he knows a trick that allows you to get as much stuff as you want out of a vending machine. He often gets comments on the pattern across the front, an elegant arabesque that approaches a shape, but declines disclosure at the last second. It draws the gaze, draws attention to his accident. J. says he’s going to get a ginger ale. Of course the average person must wonder exactly what is under there. The answer is, the eye patch secrets his fear. He settles in. It will always be the same.

The day in the mountain was almost done. The blood in his arms kept time better than any clock. The stacks of lead in his arms kept track of his labor better than the wheels inside a watch or the foreman’s whistle. It was almost time to lay down his hammer when one of the runners came in telling all of them to come outside and see. The runner clasped his palms to his knees and panted, pushing each word up out of his body. John Henry and L’il Bob and the other team assumed there had been another accident and another death. The work had gone too peacefully for too long and they were due for grief. His partner tossed his bit to the dirt and John Henry slung his sledge over his shoulder and they walked across the planks toward the sun. John Henry was near the mouth of the tunnel when he heard laughter behind him. He twisted his body and saw only the crag of rock behind him, craning down from roof. He had never before seen that the blasting had opened two shiny stones in the crag’s rock face. The stones glinted like cruel eyes. As he stepped out into the thick dusk he knew it would never again taunt him. It had delivered its message.

The bosses and the crews and Captain Johnson stood around a long cart. The planks of the cart were fresh-cut wood and the tarp had seen little rain. Everything the railroad brought to the site aged fast. Years of calluses formed in days, newborn aches immediately felt ancient and lifelong. This thing that had gathered the men was new. The horses were well-fed and handsomely groomed. Not mules. They had never hauled exploded and blasted rock, the insides of mountains. The white tarp draped over a shape that was unfamiliar. It propped up fabric and bulged beneath the tarp but its true shape was impossible to tell. A man talked while his fingers snapped in the air like sparks. He wore the clothes of a city man, a carpetbagger, and was so clean shaven his face glowed like bleached bones. One of the men next to John Henry said it was a man from Burleigh company come to sell the Captain on a steam drill. The steeldriver and his partner shouldered up to the front to hear what he had to say. L’il Bob said, I told you it was coming. I told you it was coming.

The steam drill had been the talk of the work camp for the last few days. After dinner one night, before the men dispersed into gambling or sleep, one of the graders, a red-skinned man named Jefferson, said he knew of one of those things. He had seen it with his own eyes. He had been a blacksmith on the Hoosac Tunnel job in Massachusetts before coming down here to this mountain. Before the steam drill, he said, they could not find purchase in the rock. The work was slow. But then the bosses brought in one of them Burlee machines and the rock was more like sand once that machine got on it. It was powered by steam and it drank more water than a man but it didn’t need food and worked twice as fast as a man. L’il Bob said Jefferson was one ignorant nigger, talking about that rickety thing like he looked up to it. But over the days and nights the talk returned again and again to the steam drill and many of the men were curious. Their speculations swarmed in the air like gnats at twilight. John Henry kept silent with his back to the mountain that was always there.

The salesman talked of tunnels up and down this line. He spread his arms as if he held all between the oceans between his palms. He talked of tunnels up and down railroad lines all across the country. Then he tucked his thumbs into his vest pockets and strummed his chest with thin fingers like spider legs. Captain Johnson reached for his pocket watch when the salesman from Burleigh started talking about feet per day, pennies per inch and advancing the heading. Most of this talk went in one ear and out the other ear of the men but they understood the meaning. They had all dealt with the doubletalk of merchants before. L’il Bob said I told you it was coming. All around them the work had stopped before this talk and even some of the men from the western cut had made their way around to see. Boss and water boy, black man and white man came to see the invention.

The salesman pulled back the tarp to reveal the thing he had ferried there. From the city to the country over those long roads. It was a strange creature. The trunk of it was the engine, and it stood on four slim steel struts. Sticking out the side of it like a broken rib was a handle where a man could control what happened inside. Black hoses like tails came out of the rear end and connected to a big, round boiler. And the snout of the thing, that was the drill. It gleamed. The men shifted on their feet. They did not sigh or gasp in astonishment. It was a curious sight and it kept their mouths shut. In their minds they put it inside the mountain, up against the rock. The salesman hopped onto the cart and rubbed the flank of the engine. He said it was eight horsepower. A device like this made quick work of the Hoosac, he said. A mountain like this will fall just as easily before it. He had been in camps on every line you have heard of and when they saw what the machine could do, they marveled, he said. He talked about the machine as a man would talk about a great man. One who had accomplished great things. Captain Johnson stared up at the steam drill and nodded. Then he looked at John Henry as if he expected the steeldriver to open his mouth and speak.

John Henry looked at the dirt and then back at the thing in the cart. It had steel that was stronger than his muscles and bones. The blood in his heart was nothing compared to the steam of the boiler. It had the power of eight horses. He felt the men around him turn toward him and look at him. He kept his eyes on the thing in the cart. Lord, he had not thought that it would be so soon. But he had known it would come. He looked at the thing in the cart and saw tomorrows. Tomorrows and all the tomorrows after all those tomorrows because he understood as he had always understood that that was what this machine was going to take away from him. He saw the future, the very thing the machine would steal from him. Just as he stole from the mountain every day with his steel that which made the mountain what it was. The three of them were linked like brothers.

The salesman asked Captain Johnson if he wanted a demonstration of the steam drill for him and his men. It’s a simple operation to set up a demonstration, he said. He withdrew a kerchief and wiped his brow. His men can watch him use the machine and learn how to work it, he said. Then Captain Johnson can see for himself what a boon the machine will be in fulfillment of his contract with the railroad and his obligations to the timetable. L’il Bob made a sound from his gut.

John Henry let the head of his hammer fall to the ground softly, easily, like it was the first leaf of autumn. Like it was only the first of many to fall and gliding down on sorrow. In that moment a cloud moved across the sky, taking the mountain into its shadow and in the same moment John Henry’s heart as well. He nudged the man in front of him and walked up to the cart. The head of the hammer carved a line in the dirt behind him. All the men followed him with their eyes. He stood before Captain Johnson and the salesman and all the men and made a challenge. Then he hoisted his hammer onto his shoulder and stared into their faces. He was sure that no one could see him tremble but the mountain.

That spring there were pipebombs and pipebombs. They detonated in the parking lots of abortion clinics, behind the dumpsters of fast food restaurants, outside venerable banking establishments. Some were duds, but others injured or killed people, escalating insurance premiums. Near-victims described to news cameras how if they had only happened by the scene of the crime a few minutes later, it would have been them on the stretcher, while in the background the broken windows gaped, the drywall lay shredded. It was possible to download from the internet the instructions of how to make a pipebomb. During sweeps a newscaster demonstrated how easy it was by having a fifth grader log on to an anarchist website from the computer in his elementary school library. So easy a child could do it. Some of the bombs were twisted pranks but others clearly had a terrorist intent. They were supposed to send a message.

That spring also the disgruntled haunted public places and pulled the triggers of their guns.

That spring Alphonse Miggs ran cable down into the basement and brought the TV down, too. When he wasn’t at work, or at his stamps, he lay on the pullout sofa with his chin against his palm and he watched the twenty-four-hour cable news outlets, waiting. He heard Eleanor walk above, in her new shoes. If he watched prime-time shows he waited for the white scroll along the bottom of the screen that informed viewers something terrible had occurred. Mostly the white scroll related a severe weather warning for his or neighboring counties, or a flood warning. But sometimes something terrible occurred and after the white lettering scrolled along the bottom of the screen, the network cut to a special report on the breaking news. Spectacular and unexpected news. An explosion, a hostage situation. Sudden catastrophe in the middle of regularly scheduled programming. It was what he was waiting for, but he didn’t get through to the switchboard until June.

That summer, in June specifically, he noticed that in America the killers were usually lone psychos, but overseas the killers were generally part of a group with an ideology. In America when someone started shooting in a crowded public square, they were mad at their domestic or work situation, or maybe both. Disgruntled types. Overseas when someone started shooting in a crowded public square, they were mad at the government and specific policies. In the case of overseas catastrophes, after the news network cut to the scene of the tragedy, they would run a brief story on those who had claimed responsibility, describe their grievances and rerun the now-familiar footage of their previous terrorist act. Their violence placed in context. In America, they showed the killer’s high school yearbook picture, which in hindsight invariably portrayed dementia in a bad haircut, no matter how normal they looked. In fact the more normal they looked, the more crazy they seemed, for normalcy is to be distrusted these days. Overseas, the killers lived on to tell the world why they had done such a thing. In America, the killers were taken out by police sharpshooters, or, surrounded by the authorities and spent, they killed themselves. Instead of articulated manifestos, the messages these men gave to the world were small sadnesses.

When the white scroll crept across the screen, or the networks cut to the special news report, Alphonse Miggs leapt for the phone. He had a phone down there and he dialed the numbers he had gathered. In the midst of preparations he had looked up the numbers of the news stations and the major networks. Each time stymied. The switchboard was jammed, or he was put on hold until the moment had passed.

He finally got the message out when a plane went down over water. In the middle of the workplace sitcom, the screen changed to Special Report, interrupting pratfall. He dived for the phone. The newscaster shared what little he knew, the destination of the plane, its departure time, the airport of origin. How swiftly the flight number passed into shorthand for doom. Witnesses on the ground reported seeing a flash or a bright orange light in the sky, and air-traffic control told of a distressingly swift disappearance from radar. Then the newscaster put two fingers to his earpiece and said, hold on a second. He said there has been an unconfirmed report that a group known as the AMLF has claimed responsibility for the explosion on board the plane. He repeated, an unconfirmed report that a terrorist group known as the AMLF has claimed responsibility for the downing of the flight. In the studio, they scrambled to find information on these extremists, these Muslims or militiamen. They found no graphic, no footage. Over the hours, this lead was replaced by deeper, more perfect mysteries, dismissed as a prank and forgotten, but nonetheless the message had been heard and in the basement Alphonse Miggs, founding member and main theorist of the Alphonse Miggs Liberation Front, briefly smiled.

Upstairs, Eleanor passed out hors d’oeuvres to the guests.

Every Sunday morning is a blessing from God. Josie prays, elbows on the windowsill, knees bunching nightgown, hands interlaced so tightly her fingernails slit half-moons between her knuckles. Her bedroom looks out on the river. Through her eyes, the world is charged this morning, livened to an almost audible crackle. The current hustles a little more swiftly, urging the soil of the bank to defect to its movement, as recent converts — serrated leaves, twigs, brainwashed rafts of moss — tumble on the surface committing to memory aquatic slogans of fidelity. The arms of the poplars grope from the shore more aggressively than usual, their daily attempts at embracing the water feverish now, desperate, and perhaps even under roots eyeless insects burrow with a passionate sense of adventure. The mountains still hold greedily to the sun, keeping the treasure to their bosoms for as long as possible, but in an hour that water will be livid with amber shards, full of sunlight that has been shattered and banished downstream. The best time of day. So why the long face? She prays this bountiful day will continue on its gorgeous course and nothing bad will happen.

The enchantment outside her window is what the towns have conjured this weekend. After all the months of arguments, preparations, parleys across red-checked tablecloths, they have brought the new thing into being. It has been a natural progression, first the popularity of the New River, then the motels, the opening of resorts like Pipestem, but this is entirely new. In town the day before, she strolled the streets of the only place she has ever called home and it was like her honeymoon night; every curve and shallow of her love’s face reinvented. It was a new town. Who were the strangers and why were they here. They were here for John Henry, for Hinton and Talcott, for her and all who lived here. Last night Benny, before he passed out mid-sentence with one final hops-soaked wheeze, told her about everything that had gone on at the fair. People he hadn’t seen in years had rallied themselves from whatever side road cranny they called home and said hello, ten years older but still wearing the same clothes. Children clutched the legs of men and women he recognized from here and there and suddenly these people had whole histories, families, descendants. Some of them had booths, so he could see, finally, what they were all about, this guy works at the plant nursery or that guy is a Ruritan secretary. Benny related a joke Freddy had told but he forgot the punchline; Josie stroked his head and patiently waited until he got it right. Matt’s and Tony’s steeldriving contest, and how Matt accused Tony of jumping the gun, so they should do it over. It was a success all around, he said, his voice drifting into a rasp, and they’ll do it again next year for sure, and the year after that. The whole town was there, he said, except for you, why didn’t you come, sweetie?

She didn’t have to stay at the motel; all the guests were going to the fair, they were fully booked, and anyone who did stop by could be placated by a note taped to the office window. She stayed because while the county had planned everything meticulously, they had left something out. Things don’t just happen because you tell them to. They happen because something has been paid. Their motel, for example. The materials had been supplied by the contractors, the mortgage by the bank. But the principal, the guarantee, had been provided by the insurance company. Benny’s mother’s life insurance had given them this place, the room in which she and her husband sleep. Pain is a down payment on happiness. You pay for happiness with grief in this world. This annual fair, the John Henry Museum when they complete it, will bring the world to their town, to the Talcott Motor Lodge. It is a new beginning but by her sights, it hasn’t been paid for yet. There’s some blood to be paid. John Henry spilled his, for the railroad, for his fellow workers, for Talcott and Hinton. Where will this weekend’s come from?

She’s a witch looking into bubbling murk: the land is full of the ghosts of dead men who sacrificed themselves to give this region life. They tremble in every tree, inhabit the wind and dwell in the soil. Surely they have opinions on this weekend’s events.

The pills don’t help much.

When the last taxi departed for the festival Josie started her rounds. She cleaned the rooms, of course, did her duty. But she wasn’t looking for sheets and towels to replace. She was looking for the ghost. She pushed her cart down the rows. It took longer than usual because they were at full vacancy. Room after room, she found no trace, and she grew more anxious. In her hands keys trembled at each new lock, the clacking tumblers shorthand for suspense — what was behind the door? The usual disarray, the usual unremarkable clumps of balled-up socks and tilted area guides on nightstands.

When she couldn’t take the waiting anymore, she ditched her disguise, abandoned the cart and went directly to the black man’s room. Beneath that musty bouquet, particular fragrance of this establishment, she could smell the ghost. It had indeed been in this room. Nothing unfortunate had happened; she saw Mr. Sutter depart that morning without any outward signs of damage. She gave him directions to Herb’s. But the ghost had been there, perhaps just standing over the man as he slept, or whispering into the man’s deaf ears. She fetched her supplies and tidied up the room; in returning the room to its natural state she attempted to put things right, dispel.

She resumed her circuit through the rooms, relieved at the ghost’s mercy. The cars on their way to the fairgrounds pounded down the route; children’s faces smeared up against the windows of air-conditioned vehicles, observing her. There was still time to make it over to Talcott, to the tunnel, but she felt content to swab and tuck. Someone had to take care of the practical matters. Josie was fine until she came to room 12; she had almost put the ghost out of her mind as she retrieved undershirts from their indignant poses on the bathroom floor and folded the edges of toilet paper rolls into triangle points. But when she opened the door to room 12 she knew that the ghost had been there as well. She dropped the new towels to the carpet. There was no evidence that something bad had occurred, but this was terrible news.

Josie ran back to check the register, knocking aside the cleaning cart, dispatching it on a skid that continued for as long as its cockeyed wheels allowed, blue disinfectant sloshing. The guest’s name was Alphonse Miggs, Silver Spring, Maryland, LN# RHU 349. Two nights. She remembered the man; he had been one of the first guests to arrive. A quiet little fellow, and very polite. She had seen him leave for the fair in the last taxi. Didn’t seem out of sorts or otherwise terrorized from a brush with the supernatural. She didn’t know what to make of it. What it meant. But she didn’t have a good feeling about it. She shut the door of room 12 and spent the rest of the day in her bedroom. She didn’t want to know. She took a green and a red from her stash; she has a chemist’s array of pharmaceuticals guests have left behind and each day she mixes and matches. The green-red combo blows a pleasant creeping fog across her fields. When Benny came home and slurred nothing but good news to her, she finally eased into sleep.

Every Sunday morning is a blessing from God but Benny’s snores are a liturgy of obscenity. As she prays before the window they blaspheme, insinuate, warn. She has done all she can. Whatever will happen will happen. Whatever the connection between the men, she has done all she can. Perhaps the ghost doomed both of them, embracing them into its dark territory, or blessed both of them and they would be saved, or perhaps the ghost blessed one of the men and cursed the other. A train enters Big Bend Tunnel; she hears the sound of the whistle as the engineer begs safe passage from John Henry. She trudges slippers into the kitchen to fiddle with Mr. Coffee. As she hovers over the tap filling the coffeepot, she glances through the window and sees five chairs dragged around the pool, empty chip bags that have skittered across the parking lot through the night, empty beer cans in tottering cairns. First thing after her coffee she’s going to have to clean all that up. Then she sees the black couple walk across the parking lot and into the road, headed toward Talcott. It’s that Mr. Sutter and Mrs., no, Ms. Street. Where on earth are they going and why are they holding that box?

The same night as the shooting in Hinton, West Virginia, a beloved star of stage and screen, whom most people believed had died years before, succumbed after a long illness and the story of the tragedy was bumped from the front pages. Nonetheless segments of the public engaged in lively discussions about the John Henry celebration and its tragic denouement. Stamp collectors, for example, speculated about possible besmirchment. War correspondents drew analogies from their own experience. And at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(cupping his hands)

I was on the ground in a compact, defensive position because I knew

what to do. I took that class, remember?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Maybe I should take that class.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(nodding to himself)

It wasn’t cheap but it was worth it. The Don’t Be a Hero Urban Readiness and Preparedness Seminar — covers everything from road rage to hostage situations. Bank robbery and airplane. It’s a one-day thing, I’ll get you the info.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

So he pulls out the gun.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

The mayor was up on the podium and then blam blam like that and I look over and the guy’s standing up just shooting into the air.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

How far away was he?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

He was right there! In the second row. Me and the guys were up in the front row, and the guys who got shot, the newspaper guys, were sitting right in front of him. It could have been us right there.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Dag. Just started shooting?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Didn’t even say a word. Hear this blam blam then I look over and see the gun but I see that and boom, I’m recumbent in a compact, defensive position. Drop, Tuck and Roll. So I didn’t see the cop shoot him or the two guys, I just heard it.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(sipping) Dag.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(demonstrating)

Everybody screaming. See that? Somebody stepped on my hand.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Little vitamin E will prevent a scar.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(nodding)

I been rubbing it on.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Didn’t leave a note or anything.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Had his wife on the news today. He didn’t leave a note or a clue. She said nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Some kind of stamp collector.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Collected railroad stamps.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Christ.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

You said it, brother.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(eyebrows raised)

What, was he trying to raise the value of the John Henry stamp

through notoriety?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Could have picked a better way — how’s he going to profit from machinations if he’s a goner?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Doesn’t it smell fishy? Papers say the guy didn’t have a history of mental illness. Job’s okay, still poking the wife it sounds like. No dismembered heads in the basement. Nothing.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Quiet fellow, kept to himself. That’s what the neighbors say.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

And regardless of what we think, stamp collecting to most of the world is a perfectly innocent pastime. Maybe this will increase awareness.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

So what makes him do it?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Did he say anything?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(turning on the bar stool)

His famous last words? — “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

What, he just wanted your attention? Pulling out a gun. Easier ways of getting people’s attention. No stamp collecting manifesto in his coat pocket?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Who knows what he was trying to do?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

We must ask ourselves, who stands to profit? Any jump in the orders of the John Henry stamp since then?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

I’ll ask Jimmy Say you hear about Jimmy and that new secretary in Quality? The redhead?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Maybe it’s nothing complicated at all. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just snapped. It happens. “He just snapped.”

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Leaving behind this message to the world.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Leaving behind a challenge.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

People just snap all the time these days.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

We peer into the inexplicable.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

And every day are confronted with the unknowable.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Least he wasn’t one of ours. The first reports said he was one of us. Randy looks like he could snap at any moment now that he’s trying to grow that mustache.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

I was sitting right next to Randy! Post Office executives — they’d have a field day with that. Now it’s not just the rank and file but the top brass going—

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Don’t say it!

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

I wasn’t going to say that, I was going to say, going to give us a bad name. Two dead and one wounded, did you hear that? The second guy died today.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Shame. They bringing the cop up on charges?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Just doing his job, really. Taking out the homicidal madman. Sure he hits two bystanders but that’s his job. Sucks that they’re members of the media, for his sake, but he got the guy before he could hurt somebody. Preserving the peace.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Gonna sue like crazy. The journalists’ families. Cop kills two bystanders while trying to get one guy? Gonna sue the town like crazy. (noticing empty glass) Damned shame. You want another beer?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(signaling the barkeep) Sure.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

So tell me about this seminar.

She wore blue. The song said never wear black, wear blue so she wore blue and they had a map. They walked down the road.

AFTER THEY HAD walked a bit, he offered to carry the box for a while. But she refused, shook her head. A mile on he repeated his offer and this time she let him take it from her hands. It was heavier than he thought it would be. The weight was the urn and not his ashes. Probably the ashes did not weigh that much; the main part of him was smoke. They took turns after that, passing the box between them, juggling across arrangements of purchase, cradling it like this and holding it like that against their chests. The cardboard heaved and sank.

THE ROAD WAS a lazy black line after all the busyness of the previous day, slouching and shirking between the mountains under a martinet sun. He wasn’t that surprised when she told him what was in the box and her plan. When she knocked on his door he was already awake. He’d had a strange dream and had been up awhile, already dressed and wishing the motel had one of those mini coffeemakers. They hadn’t clarified their plans after their interlude in the tunnel so he was surprised when she knocked on the door that early. He’d entertained scenarios, most of them ridiculous, about what her favor might be, but none of them held up to scrutiny for more than a few minutes. When he opened the door, he noticed she was dressed all in blue, in blue jeans, in a blue blouse, but he didn’t connect it to the song until she explained it to him.

THERE WAS A lot of time for explanations on the walk up there. East, reversing the trajectory of laid steel and time. It was two or three or four miles, she wasn’t entirely sure. Her father’s map didn’t have a legend or niceties like that. He’d sketched it out on his last trip down here, judging from the box she’d found it in. The box containing the map held, in crumbling strata, copies of the Hinton newspaper from a few years back, awkwardly folded roadmaps of the area, some receipts, and those helped to date the map. He came down here a couple of times over the years, always alone, on his inscrutable itineraries, but the neighboring items in the box clinched it. She told him that when she was in the storage facility a man walked in, opened his space, and in there he had a little living room, with a big armchair, a coffee table. Also a random assortment of stuff, three toasters, a big army bag of clothes, watercolors of canals hung on the cement walls. He sat in the chair, crossed his legs and read the daily paper. It didn’t look like the guy was going anywhere. When she left she asked the manager about it and he said the guy slept nights in a shelter but hung out in his storage room all day. It’s where he kept his clothes and things, and he was a nice guy, weird of course to live like that, but he wasn’t dangerous or anything. The guy basically lived in there, in the storage space. After she finished the story, he made a joke about the size of the average New York apartment. How we all live in boxes.

SHE ASKED HIM if he felt uncomfortable about her request, and he said no. He wasn’t going to have to do anything particularly, just accompany her up to the place, and he didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. He was in his life comfortable with the role of passenger, and he did not mind that today he was a passenger on a tour, as she guided him through this John Henry territory. It was only once he felt the weight of the box that he started to grow a little uncomfortable about this enterprise, her mission. The weight made it more real.

TO END A silent quarter of a mile he told her about the record and the List as a prelude to a description of his dream. So that she could understand the terms. His hands went for the box.

IN THE DREAM he was somewhere downtown and hip. Where old cobblestones broke through asphalt, enduring, resenting centuries, and wheat-pasted posters and slogans shriveled on plywood in evanescent counterpoint to those cobblestones. Everything was closed. He was walking to a destination but possessed only a dim idea of where it might be. And what it might be. A voice called his name. He turned and it was Bobby Figgis, he of the record. In the waking world he had never met the man but in the dream he understood this to be the man’s identity. Far from his imaginings of the man, this apparition of Bobby Figgis seemed healthy and happy. Well fed and well off. The old junketeer was garrulous and well dressed in a fine black suit. Bobby Figgis grabbed his hand and said they were all waiting for him inside, it was just down the alley. He knew then, in the lucent clarity of dreams, that this was where he was supposed to go. His final destination of the night. He followed Bobby Figgis down an alley that only exists in film, full of steam and jumping alley cats and slithering rats. His guide knocked on a beat-up metal door, above which a red light glowed. A bouncer opened the door and welcomed them with extravagant affection. He welcomed Bobby Figgis as one might welcome an old friend, and then welcomed him as well, as if he had been there many times before. Then he suddenly remembered that he had been there many times before, all the time in fact, every night, and for every night after. He went inside.

WHEN HE FINISHED relating his dream, he looked over at her. It didn’t seem like she understood a word of what he was saying. Maybe he didn’t, either. He passed her the box.

SHE SAID THERE are many versions of the song, as many versions as there are people who sing it. Passed between work gangs and families and friends in the old days of folk music, on record, on the radio. You could split the song into so-called official versions, her father used to say, the ones made by established singers and put on vinyl, cassette, and CD, and then there were the songs of the people, entirely different, the mis-sung versions, belted out by people who misremembered the lyrics and supplied their own haphazard verses. Like when you sing in the shower, she told him, and if you can’t remember the right words you make up your own to fill in the gaps. Her father used to say that what you put in those gaps was you — what you inserted said a lot about you, what you grabbed from your personal dictionary and stuck in there was you. You mix it up, cut a verse or two and stick to the verses that you like or remember or mean something to you. Then you’ve assembled your own John Henry, and maybe it’s only the chorus, or a single line, C&O railroad’s going to be the death of me or A man ain’t nothing but a man and you just sing that. That’s all there is to the song for you.

IN SOME VARIANTS, she said, his wife Polly Ann is a big figure and gets the last word. She picks up John Henry’s hammer and becomes a steeldriver herself. Polly Ann says, I’m going where my man fell dead, and then she picks up his hammer and goes, I’m going to die with the hammer in my hand, I’m going to drive steel just like a man, and it ends there. She picks up where he left off. In those ones, she usually wears a red dress, since red rhymes with dead and it fits. Then some versions end with John Henry’s last words to her, John Henry told his woman, Never wear black, wear blue. She said, John, don’t never look back, For, honey, I’ve been good to you, Lord, Lord, For, honey, I’ve been good to you. Blue and you. In some — probably made up by the more family values-minded of the singers — John Henry has a daughter. It goes, John Henry had a little daughter, The dress she wore was blue, She followed him to the graveyard sayin’, John Henry I’ll be true to you, Lawd, Lawd, John Henry I’ll be true to you. In the ones where he has a son, it goes, John Henry had a little son, Sittin’ in the palm of his hand, He hugged an’ kissed him and bid him farewell, Oh, son, do the best you can, Lawd Lawd, Oh, son, do the best you can. In the silence of the road and the morning she was suddenly startled at how loud she sang. Each time she sang a new bit of lyrics it was louder than the time before. Her throat and heart knew more than she did about this enterprise. She looked away from him. He took the box from her hands.

She said her father had come down here three times. She and her mother were not invited along, nor did they wish to accompany him. He took a train and was gone for almost a week. He came back with lots and lots of stuff for his collection, of course. He said the place was beautiful, and of course it was. He said Talcott was nothing like he thought it would be, it was tiny, no real stores but just residents, an unincorporated town. And Hinton was a neat little outpost wedged in between the big river and the mountains. It was like on one side of the mountain people were living scattered all around and then once they got to the other side there was a whole town, so that on the one hand you had nothing and once the mountain was beat you got into a civilization. You had achieved a society. He brought back a lot of pictures and old railroad equipment and a jar full of soil.

THE SECOND TIME he went he said he wanted to interview the residents to see what he could come up with. Neither she nor her mother probed this statement. They were past caring. Who could he talk to. They were all dead, anyone who could have provided insight or tidbit. What little there was to be found had been gathered by other researchers over seventy years before. The second time he did not stay too long, and when he came back, he didn’t really go into what he found here.

_____________

THE THIRD TIME he went she and her mother were gone. Her mother had moved to Arizona to live near her sister’s family. They weren’t divorced, but they had half a country between them and a lot more. As for herself, she was living on her own in her first apartment in the city and saw her father only on holidays, and she did not stay long. She visited him on his birthday one year and he told her he had gone down to Talcott one more time, to find the grave. She didn’t ask if he’d found it, and left as soon as she could. It smelled bad in there.

WHEN THEY GOT to the monument the place was empty. The food stand was closed up and the door of the caboose was locked. All the people were gone.

INSTEAD OF PROCEEDING down the hill to the tunnel as they had the day before, they turned in the opposite direction up the mountain. She consulted her father’s map, interpreting his lines. She found the road. It was overgrown but people had parked there the day before, reassured by the ratchet grind of the parking brake, and wheels had chewed the weeds to the ground. Snapped back slim branches, exposed white marrow and bits of chewing gum foil gleamed like quartz among the ruined green shoots. A black fly dogged them for yards. They left the asphalt and walked up the slope of the jagged road until the mashed-down section stopped being mashed and wildness took over. The road was unpopular, overlooked to wallflower, and seeds and spores had sidled in to seduce the dirt. In tire grooves, yellowish weeds stunted by periodic molestation streamed in parallel lines, between which lithe grass dipped and curtsied, only occasionally assaulted by undercarriage. Then the road simply ceased. He said it’s always funny when you go walking in the woods following a path and then it just stops. You wonder who made it, and why, because there’s never any destination, it just stops. She looked at the map, strode over to an unremarkable pine and moved the branches aside. There was a little footpath. She stood there with her hands on her hips and tilted her head. He was holding the box at this point.

THE BRANCHES OF pine trees flailed at them with delicate points. He said he was glad he was wearing sunglasses. The path maundered and feinted, avoiding inclines and whole clans of rock. It hopped over prostrate trunks and the footing argued for better shoes.

SHE FOLDED THE map and slipped it in the back pocket of her jeans. What she called the graveyard was a clearing of level ground. When they stepped out of the gloom of the woods into the tall, wild grass the susurrations of the insects ceased. He had expected tombstones, but there were none. She said this is where the black workers buried the men who died. The company would tell them to bury them in the fill and then at night the men would exhume them and carry them up the mountain and give them stone markers and proper dispatches. The legend had it this is where John Henry was buried. That’s what her father had been looking for the last time he came down here. But they did not see any graves. They waded into the field, into the green and brown lagoon. They found nothing but burrs and then he tripped. He spread apart the thin blades and crouched. He had tripped over a long flat rock with initials carved into it and he realized he was standing on a grave. With a fingernail he scraped out the dirt so he could read the intials. She came over to see this.

THEY FOUND A dozen graves scattered across the field. None of them bore the initials J.H. It was possible they missed it, in all probability they missed more graves. The grass and weeds were too high, the field too large for them to cover completely. It might have been a minefield for the care of their steps. Anything might erupt from there. When one of them discovered a marker, the other would scramble over and they would kneel down among the brambles and the hardscrabble flowers and scrape the dirt off the dead man’s marker. After that even dozen, she said there was no telling how many men were buried there. The map did not indicate the locations of graves and did not mention John Henry. Just the rough line to this place. They might as well get on with it, she said. Her choice of words, the timbre of her voice, startled him. But he decided he was in no position to judge her after all.

THE URN WAS not handsome, coming up into the sunlight from the box. The brass grabbed the sunlight and turned it into a greasy sheen along the simple curves of the urn. He asked a question about how she wanted to spread the ashes, after wondering for a time on how to phrase it, and she told him she didn’t want to spread them she wanted to bury it, the whole urn, in the ground. She hadn’t spoken to her father about it and he hadn’t left any instructions. It wasn’t his idea, this assignment. After the funeral she put the urn in storage with his collection and turned out the light and locked the door. He might have preferred that his ashes were scattered, she didn’t know, it just made sense to her once they got up there to bury it. She walked out into the middle of the field and without an overlong consideration of where the perfect place would be she stopped and said, Here.

FIRST THEY TUGGED weeds and grasses, there was always this resistance and then the roots gave in, soil dripping from their whiskers. When he realized they didn’t have anything to dig with he thought it was going to take forever and he hadn’t eaten yet. At least he wasn’t hungover. She said, now’s your chance to move up to pick-and-shovel man. He grunted. On their knees trying to figure out how to make that hole.

AT LEAST IT wasn’t a whole body, he thought. She told him that the mayor or his staff had left the plans for the museum at the motel the afternoon before and she had passed hours looking over them. They had obviously spent a lot of time on it and put their hearts into it. She explained about the inventory she had sent them, and they had even marked on the proposed plans where some of her father’s things might go. He had the biggest collection of John Henry in the world, and there was no reason why the town shouldn’t have it. She had tried to find other people, colleges, who might have wanted it, but had no luck. And then something had happened where it seemed like the worst thing to give it away and she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. And then last night after all this resistance she gave in.

HE FOUND A slim rock to stab at the dirt with and that helped. She continued to talk. He would hear a crack in her voice and expect to see her weeping, but it was just a series of cracks. The dirt crawled under their fingernails and pained but they made progress. She said whenever she went to visit him he was so disheveled. He had sold his store to devote all his time to the museum, which no one ever visited. Who would go up to some creepy stranger’s apartment. He always wore the same clothes, he’d had them for years, and on this one pair of pants the fly was broken and he walked around with his fly open, not caring. You couldn’t see anything, so it wasn’t a spectacle, but she was embarrassed by him. On Father’s Day they’d go around the corner to a restaurant and there would be all these families in their best clothes, and her father would be this shambling homeless man.

IT WAS STRANGE to sit there in the dirt. Their hands moved and moved. He was tired out from this one simple task, and in the same dirt he was feebly scratching into lay dead men who did more back-breaking work in a day than he had done in his whole life. And the legendary John Henry, nearby or not nearby in the ground. He tried to think of what the modern equivalent would be for his story, his martyrdom. But he lived in different times and he could not think of it. He dug some more.

SHE SAID SOFTLY,And when she got to where John Henry fell dead, She fell down on her knees, And kissed him on the cheek, and these are the words she said, Lord, there is one more good man done fell dead and her voice got that crack in it again.

SHE SAID THERE was another interesting thing about the song. Before it came into ballad form, the men used to sing it as a work song, to keep the rhythm of their strokes. And in those early songs, they’d sing, This old hammer, killed John Henry, Can’t kill me, Lord, Can’t kill me. They sang it like a song of resistance. They wouldn’t go out like John Henry. But maybe they were condemning him instead of lamenting him. His fight was foolish because the cost was too high. Are they saying they’re not as arrogant as John Henry, or are they twice as arrogant for thinking themselves safe from his fate. You could look at it both ways. You could look at it and think the fight continued, that you could resist and fight the forces and you could win and it would not cost you your life because he had given his life for you. His sacrifice enables you to endure without having to give your life to your struggle, whatever name you gave to it.

SHE ASKED HIM if he had to die to bring this weekend into being. All his life he wanted something like this weekend, a celebration of John Henry. His collection would have been a star attraction, he could have made speeches. Get the key to the Presidential Suite at the Talcott Motor Lodge. The crowds finally would have come to his museum. She asked him, would this have still happened, the fair, the museum, if he was still alive. Or did he have to give up himself for this to happen. The price of progress. The way John Henry had to give himself up to bring something new into the world.

THEY FILLED UP the hole and scratched his initials into a gray stone. She scratched them, he found the stone. They stood over it and it seemed enough.

FROM THE MOUTH of the path, they could not see where they buried him. The brown tips of the dry grass left no sign, huddling back to cover the brief paths they had made. There was no sign to mark any of the dead men in that field. It was an accidental clearing on a mountain that ridged upward. He hooked fingers into the empty box and they started back down the mountain.

As he did every morning to prepare for crowds, he turned the sign in the window from closed to open. The landlord had refused his appeal to hang a larger sign, something more grand and appropriate to the venture, for what he had assembled behind that sooty unassuming brick. The landlord was trying to spruce up the brownstone, people were returning to Harlem, new vigor in the streets of Harlem, and the schemes of the tenant ran counter to the schemes of the landlord. If the landlord had been less busy, he’d have looked up zoning regulations re the legality of running a so-called museum out of a residence. Surely there were laws. But he never got around to it. For now he let the old man put the sign in the window, and figured it was only a matter of time before the old man died and plaster and drywall split the first-floor apartment into two rental units.

At the head of the crimson stoop, up those steps, next to buzzer number one, he had replaced the name of his family with THE JOHN HENRY MUSEUM. The modesty of the sign in the window and the southern exposure’s shower across the panes of that window conspired to dispatch the sign to obscurity. Alternately the sign hid in glare and shadows. Over time the sun drained the lettering, leaving it to specter. Seasons of rain fostered layers of black partic-ulate on the panes. Only from certain angles at certain times of day was the sign completely visible to passersby and its message observable. Thousands walked by the sign, which sat patiently in its roost on the sill of the center window, tilted against the glass for leverage. The vagaries of peripheral vision sorted the people into categories. Percentages did not notice the sign and progressed to corners; smaller percentages noticed the sign and tossed it in mental bins to join the rest of the city’s non sequiturs. A smaller percentage wondered for brief seconds what the sign might mean, but did not stop, progressing to corners and other streets.

In the front hallway on a small table the pen lay aslant, tumbling through the perfect white void of the guest book. There were the names of no one in there. Admission was free but a slim blue dish accepted contributions. He left a dollar bill in the dish to indicate procedure to crowds. On occasion he needed the dollar bill for an errand, leaving the blue dish empty for hours until he replaced it. One day he used the dollar and never returned it. For a while each time he passed the table he felt a pang but as the months passed the pang disappeared. Sometimes the doorbell rang and taking it for crowds come at last he opened his doors discovering a man or woman looking for someplace else.

Depending on the time of day the music for crowds came from one of many sources. In the morning he played the earliest recorded versions of the song on a tape deck. These songs were distinguishable by the faraway cast of the singing and strumming, emanating as if from deep within a pit or tunnel. Music historians had recorded the songs on primitive equipment while they sat on porches, in backyards, in parlors, in country regions, and indeed he had on his excursions recorded some himself, from old men he had sought out. Around noon he switched to heavy 78s, sliding them carefully from yellow flaking sleeves. He cranked up the Victrola and let the needle etch the songs into the air. And so on, through a short history of home music technology, a 33 rpm turntable, an eight-track tape player for the novelty of the gawky machine, more cassette tapes and CDs on their respective playback machines. Through the rooms of the museum work songs, folk songs and the blues resounded, dead voices pinioned across an array of instruments.

It had been his original scheme to present the song to the crowds in concordance with how it shambled through the decades, hopping off a boxcar in this place and reappearing with new boots in that place, but of course it was impossible. Some of the oldest versions in his possession existed only on cassette, throwing off the chronology. A few specialty houses had released versions of compilations of regional folk music, and these he was forced to play on his CD player. He didn’t have a piano, let alone a player piano, and thus could not represent the contributions of sheet music and music machines to the transmission of the ballad except as pieces of paper behind glass. The replacement of one form of technology by a superior form was an exhibit in itself, and he wished he could have presented it to crowds in a better way. Over time as he waited for crowds the accumulation of aches in his body put an end to his daily hustle from switch to switch, machine to machine, and he recorded a master tape that simply and conveniently played the songs in chronological order. He lined up the music devices in a row, with little tented slips describing their impact on the dissemination of the John Henry legend, displaying the stillborn e’s of his typewriter as a subexhibit. In his speech he could elaborate on the theme of the march of technology and the march of progress and the prices paid. In the end what was important was not the machine but the man.

The speech slept in his mouth. He had composed the speech over many years, for each new item required a deep caption to situate it in the collection. Each time his hand touched the new acquisition, a railroad implement, a photograph of the tunnel’s inauguration, the speech extended its heading. Extolling, explicating, making gentle asides. He practiced hand motions and gestures, where his arms swept across exhibits, the panorama of his accumulations, and perfected the timing of puns. In the speech he presumed no prior knowledge in the crowds. He started at the beginning. He would walk from room to room as he delivered the speech and the disposition of each room colored the words of the speech. In the music room, among the exuberant plenitude of the song, as if among all the men and women who had sung it, the ragged American chorus, the speech transformed into a declaration on the power of the legend to draw so much from so many and find in so many souls one name. In the document room the brittle assortment of materials, from old C&O requisition lists to blueprints of the Burleigh steam engine to out-of-print scholarly researches, withered the speech in kind, the ink grew faint, the truth of the tale distant, scattered by contradiction and time, words drifting through the air as mere echoes of something greater. In the art room, over here, where children’s books lay on stands there and there, have a look, pages open for perusal of larger-than-life adventure, the sign says you’re allowed to touch them, the walls have disappeared into thin white lines for all the paintings and posters of martyrdom, triumph and sadness crammed together, see how you can barely see an inch of the walls, the speech trembling with new comprehension, all those artists lending feverish strength to the words, feeding the speech with their labors, all those elemental forces flooding through the aperture of this room. In the statue room, in here, among the figures, some as small as children and others as large as giants, the music now far away in the distance, the speech receded into sighs, into deep aphasiac awe, urging on the crowds’ contemplation of the man and this moment, seeing him for the first time in a way, in this final room after all those previous rooms, palpable, with dimensions, looming, with solid and unimpeachable weight. The speech trickled away as crowds consider John Henry in his infinite masks.

In some ways it was less of a speech and more of a story.

In the long days one after the other he pictured the crowds. The long lines of crowds, announced first by the doorbell and then the shadows of their feet beyond the door. He had seen some of them before, they had passed by his windows, or their parents had passed by his windows, their families and friends, they had patronized his store when he still had the store and he had sold them things, passed them on the street, sat next to them in public places. But if they had been in his store, he had never presented to them such indispensable items as those he had finally gathered in his museum. Those were material items and this was so much more. It had cost him so much and the crowds had finally come, a jostling hungry throng, whole neighborhoods and clans ready to receive John Henry, dawdling before the favorite exhibits that made them return again and again, alone or leading treasured friends by the hand to share revelation. Beautiful children with round faces and wide eyes who were hearing of the legendary steeldriver for the first time and learning possibility, teenagers slouching and cracking jokes to hide what they see in the man but cannot admit, adults, men and women pushed here for so many reasons, getting reacquainted with the story they first heard as children and now connecting it to every one of their hard mornings, these strivers, and the old ones, old as him, who had seen the same things he had, lingering before photographs respectful feet away, understanding the legend as he did now, as a lesson that had finally been learned at great cost, moving from room to room in recognition and resignation, all of them a family he had lost at last returned to him.

Every day he stood like that, with his arms crossed, as he listened to John Henry, and he waited for crowds.

J ohn Henry stood in the work camp with his sledge in his hands. He grasped it as a drowning man might cling to a branch in the currents of the spring thaw. No one saw him. Most of the men had gone on ahead. The camp was nearly empty. It was time to work but this was not an ordinary workday on the mountain. No one stalked the tunnels. The men were not grading or mucking or pounding spikes. They waited for the contest. They gathered at the mouth of the eastern cut to see the truth of the challenge. This afternoon the timetable did not matter, neither the seconds nor the inches, for the line had to be stalled before it could go on. Everything stopped before the words John Henry had said. Tools lay untouched and the horses’ tails whipped lazily in the sun. No hands covered ears to keep out the sound of blasting, the ground did not shake with the violence they made inside the mountain. It was still, and it was time.

As he lay in his bed on his last night he heard the words of the men coming through the walls of his shanty. If John Henry wanted he could have put faces to the voices but he did not try. He knew all the men. Some were friends. Some were enemies. It did not matter where they stood with him as their talk swirled into one talk about the contest. They laid bets on whether a man could beat a machine. All of their wagers on John Henry before this time were rehearsals for this day. One voice came to him saying it was impossible. Another voice said John Henry was no kind of man like you and me but a demon and no machine was going to stop him. One voice laid down odds. The voice said, step right up and make your bet, men. He heard voices raised in anger and then the scrambling sound of men in the dirt fighting. There was more than money on the line. Each wager was a glimpse into the man who made it. There was more than wages on the line in this contest.

On his last night John Henry did not allow L’il Bob to see him. His friend was hurt by the words John Henry spoke to him, one foot on the dirt floor within and one foot on the dirt ground without, and he did not understand why his partner had forsaken him. But I have a plan, L’il Bob said. I can fix that machine so it won’t do nothing but shake and squawk, he said. No plans are going to help me tomorrow, John Henry said. He told his partner to get Adams and L’il Bob asked why but John Henry would not tell him. Just get the man, he said. When the door closed he heard his friend’s voice crying for Adams, Adams. It was not fair to his friend but he could find no other course in himself.

John Henry had wages saved. Even as he collected them through the long months to give to Abby he knew he would never present them to her in person, standing in front of her after so long, to show her what all the time away had brought them. He had lied about his return and the bills he stuffed into his hiding place were hope against the mountain. He did not drink. He did not gamble with money. When he gambled he put himself up as his winnings and in the long time in this place he had saved more money than any of his friends knew. He was the highest-paid steeldriver for what he could do with his arms. Captain Johnson gave him bonuses for steeldriving contests that he won with his arms. He trusted L’il Bob to send it on to her.

Adams could make letters and write. His hands had been chewed up from his labor on the tunnel but he could still write. He was the one the colored men came to when they wanted something written. He put on paper the stories and the lies they posted to their families and their women. When Adams showed up John Henry told him he wanted to write a letter, and the man departed to get his materials. In that time he composed again the words and in the middle of it he remembered that Adams had come to the mountain in the same car as he had. John Henry had first seen the man in the workers’ car, across from him on the journey up here, as they sat on the nail kegs that were their seats and they all wondered what was waiting for them up here. Now John Henry knew. But none of that was going to go into the letter. L’il Bob could give her the details of the contest but he wanted to put other things in the letter. He warned Adams to keep his mouth shut about why he had called him there. When he looked into the man’s eyes he knew he would not say anything. Adams was not one of the stupid and shiftless men the railroad company attracted. He had sense. When Adams left John Henry put the voices out of his mind and wept. With the salt in his mouth he said, never wear black wear blue, never wear black wear blue.

It was almost time. When he ate his breakfast that morning all the men he had worked alongside for so long looked at him over tin plates as they ate. His stare told them not to talk to him so they just looked at him, taking measure of him with their eyes. They wanted to know what was in him that was not in them. One man said that all the people from all around were coming down to the eastern cut to see the contest. The word had traveled beyond the work camps, beyond the hearths of the bosses, and everyone wanted to come and see the contest between the man and the machine. Another man said they were going to charge tickets to see. This was bigger than the black man against the white man and they were drawn by these new stakes. It was once in a lifetime. In this talk some of the men looked at John Henry and changed their wagers. Beating another man, beating twenty men was one thing and this was another. L’il Bob came over to John Henry, scraping food off his plate to give to his partner. He had a ridge of bruises along the right side of his face and John Henry knew it was because of him. L’il Bob had fought someone for saying John Henry would lose. The bruises did not need to be explained, them or anything else except the letter and the money he had saved. L’il Bob would follow his wishes and get it to her. When he finished eating he went back to his bed and waited for the sounds of the men to die out, to drift over to the tunnel.

John Henry stood in the camp with the sun on him. It was almost time. Down there they all waited. He spat at the ground and rolled back his shoulders. He looked up at the top of the mountain, where the treetops stretched with their little points, like a million fingers grasping at Heaven. The mountain was so tall and John Henry was so small. He drew a hand across his brow to put the sun out of his eyes and he looked up at the mountain, past the leaves and down the trunks and into the soil and into the rock heart of the mountain, he looked and addressed. There was no one to hear him but himself. He walked down the road with his hammer in his hand.

J. Sutter stands in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. His stomach is empty. It does not bother him. Even after all the walking and all he did up there on the mountain, he still is not hungry. It is as if he struck into his body and found a secret reservoir within his self. He watches his hands in the sun. He has tiny scratches along the tips of his fingers and dirt hiding under his fingernails. There is a little bit of fire in his legs from the walk and fire in his hands from the digging but it does not bother him. He closes his eyes and the sun falls across him.

She asked him on the way down if he got his story. J. Sutter said yes. He has a story but it is not the one he planned. Before he had been kidding about the story in order to get close to the woman. He had put on paper some of the things she had said the day before but now he thought what happened today was the real story. It is not the kind of thing he usually writes. It is not puff. It is not for the website. He does not know who would take it. The dirt had not given him any receipts to be reimbursed. He does not even know if it is a story. He only knows it is worth telling.

Above cooking tar the air shimmers. It is as if snakes of heat dance on their tails. The sweat on his clothes chills him. After all that walking he stands without moving, coming back into himself. There is still time to take a shower. In an hour or two it will be time for the stamp ceremony and the weekend here will be over. He has time enough to shower and to put his things in his bags. Then it will be time for today’s event, tomorrow’s event and the ones after. They loom over him and he is in their shadow. He has a decision to make in the parking lot. Pamela had stood before him and said to him, I’m leaving before the ceremony. When they reached the motel she said, I think I’ve done everything I needed to do. She looked into his face. The town can have it all and I’m going to take an earlier plane and go home, she said. You could leave, too, she said.

The night before J. Sutter had been in the parking lot with the other men. In the day it is different. In the night they talked and drank to keep away the darkness, the vastness outside the streetlight. The mountain and all that it meant. The talk was the only defense they possessed against the great rock within themselves. The talk shored them up like braces. When the talk finally stopped, J. Sutter went to his room and lay awake for hours. He thought about the challenge he had made to himself. Through the back window he could hear the river and its dark course through the land. Frantic, pushing across distance until it broke free of land and found release. But it is a long course downriver. His sleep when it came did not comfort for the dreams it brought. He lay in his bed and shook. It was only when they were walking up the road to the graveyard that his discomfort eased. In the graveyard, with his hands in the dirt.

Behind him he hears the creaking of a door and he twists his body. J. Sutter sees the crag face of the stamp collector as the man walks out of the room, hunched down as if he carries a mule load on his back. They meet eyes. J. Sutter walks over to the man. He says, I wanted to thank you for the other night. For saving my life, he says. He extends his hand to the other man’s hand. The man’s hand is cold in his and J. Sutter shrivels. He does not mean to but he shrivels as the coldness goes through his palm and enters his blood. The man mumbles something that J. Sutter does not hear. It is like he has stones in his mouth. The eyes of the man squirm away like white bugs under a rock that has been picked up. As if they have been suddenly exposed and are afraid of being seen. He asks the stamp collector his name and the man tells him. The man quickly shrinks away and scuttles back to his room, abandoning his errand. He does not have another chance to thank the man for saving him from choking.

The yellow paint that had divided the asphalt into parking spaces has been scratched away. There are no dividers anymore. Just open space out on the black tar. J. Sutter stands in the open lot trying to decide. If he catches an earlier flight out he will miss the event and fail in his attempt to go for the record. He has been at it a long time, he has put a lot of labor into advancing the unbroken line of events. Each day he makes progress and goes deeper in and the line is advanced. He tucks his thumbs into his jeans and the fabric chafes against the cuts on his fingers. It pains him. His comrades have laid odds on his chance of success. They will joke and trade their wages if he skips the event in town. The winner will hold out his palm and say pay up. J. Sutter will no longer be the man going for the record.

The other men are already in town, eating food and preparing for the ceremony. Lucien will be there too, checking his watch to preserve the timetable. J. Sutter will not get to say good-bye if he leaves early. He and Pamela are on the same airline. It is a simple matter to get on an earlier flight. He knows about airports. The man behind the ticket counter can work his machine and seat them together. He will get the rest of the story, the parts she has not given him yet. Over time he will get the rest of the story. He already knows the ending. He witnessed it with his own eyes. But there is more. When he gets it all it will be done and there is no telling where he will be then. If he does not stay.

Cars round the corner of the mountain. They come more frequently as he stands there deciding. The cars come from the east. It is the final event of John Henry Days and it is what they have all been waiting for. All the people from all around are coming to celebrate the old contest. They have heard about it and they want to be up front when it happens. It is a once in a lifetime thing. It will become part of the legend of this place. One car comes from the east but it does not keep going. The car slows off the road, grinding across dirt and then asphalt, and comes to rest a few feet from him. The sound of the horn is loud above the sound of the river and the occasional cry of birds. It is a taxi. Pamela opens the door of her room. She looks first at the taxi and then she looks at J. Sutter. She waves a hand at the taxi driver. She looks at J. Sutter and cocks her head for a moment. Then she pulls the door a little, leaving him a bit of wall to see inside her room. There is still time. It will not take him long to get his little things together. They will wait if he asks. He stands there with the sun on his face deciding, as if choices are possible.

She asked one last thing when they came down the mountain. When they came down the mountain she asked, what’s the J. stand for? He told her.