Nickel Mountain

1

After the death of Simon Bale, Henry Soames took a turn for the worse. Doc Cathey said, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his suitcoat, wholeheartedly meaning every word of it, at least for that moment (in the muggy, baking heat of August more impatient than ever with the mere humanity that always finally eluded his craft), “The hell with you.”

Now, perhaps partly because of the heat — weather unheard of in the Catskills, a sure sign of witchcraft at work, or miracles brooding — the nervous eating that had troubled Henry Soames all his life slipped out of control, became a mindless external power against which it was impossible for him even to struggle, a consuming passion in the old sense, a devil (but blind, indifferent as a spider) in his guts. When he talked with customers in the diner he seemed on the surface as cheerful as ever; too cheerful, if anything, shouting over the drone of the fans in that high, thin voice of his like a goat’s, banging the counter-top, whinnying with laughter; and he seemed at least relatively cheerful, considering, when he drove out on still, hot Sunday afternoons to look at the hills, the green-brown river, the corn going yellow for want of rain. He’d sit sweating behind the steering wheel, pulled over beside the triangular white concrete posts at the edge of the highway, looking down at the valley that gasped away toward brown-blue mountains as if he owned it, for what it was worth, owned all the Catskills as far as the eye could see. Because of his fat he sat tipped back like a medieval baron, and he surveyed the world over his heavy shoulder as if with imperatorial disdain. Sometimes if the heat was unusually bad he would get out of the car and open the door for his wife and child — the dog would be back at the house, asleep — and lead them over to the shade of a pine grove. They were fair-skinned, Callie and the boy, and the heat made both of them nauseous and light-headed. Henry would lower himself onto a large, dusty surface root (the grass beside it bristly brown) and would fan himself with his hat. His hair was dark with sweat where the hat had been, and the folds of his neck were gritty. At last he would say like a king pronouncing judgment, “Hot.” Both his son and his wife would nod, solemn. The pine needles over their heads were whitish from the heat and drought. But wherever he walked or stood or lay, Henry Soames had food with him, and he ate. He ate steadily, calmly, his small teeth grinding on and on, like Time setting out to fill all the void with Space.

(“Like an elephant,” Old Man Judkins said, with more insight than any of them guessed, though even in his own mind the idea was obscure. He was thinking, vaguely, being old and tired, of the time he’d stood for an hour-and-a-half at the Coliseum in Buffalo — that sick-sweet chemical stench in the air — looking through the bars at a gigantic lean old African bull whose left hind leg was chained to the floor: he would lift the leg a little and find the chain still there, and he would be — as it seemed to Old Man Judkins, who knew about elephants only what he saw — so enraged that he couldn’t even trumpet, could merely set down his foot again and stand there hopeless, like an Indian waiting to die. After an hour or more of this he’d begun to walk around and around in a circle, sideways, each step a great, slow shifting of unspeakable weight. Old Man Judkins thought of Henry Soames’ father walking by the roadside, enormous and placid as a saint, singing in his reedy voice, Every time it rains it rains … pennies from heaven. “Terrible,” Old Man Judkins said, but no one paid attention.)

Henry Soames’ wife would say, more cross than usual, in this weather, “What’s the matter with you, Henry?”

“I’m sorry,” he would say, and he would seem to mean it, rolling his eyes up toward her; but he would go on eating, taking it in like a combine, or like a cutting-box, or a silo. She watched the weight he had lost coming back, pound by pound. He began to need his little white pills more often; he seemed to her to eat them like candy. It was not frightening to her but acutely annoying, one more irritation among a thousand — the movement of clothes on chafing skin, the piercing pinpricks of the bell on the diner door in front, the dust that lay over everything, no matter what you did to get rid of it — on the piano keys, on every flange of the old carved picture frames on the walls, on the soup cans and tops of boxes in the diner. One night she exploded, “Henry, you act like a crazy person.” As the words came out (she had said them many times before), she saw the truth. It was no matter of locked attics, burning churches, ice-cold hands around one’s throat — the kinds of madness she’d heard stories about and seen in movies at Athensville. That kind of madness she hardly believed in, accepted merely as she accepted technicolor movies of, say, San Francisco; but this was real, not a matter of poetry but a study for her country rules — the rules that a child should have a father, that a wife should have a husband, and that a man trying to kill himself should be stopped.

She must act, she saw (wearily and angrily, flushed and spent, past all endurance), but how she must act would not come clear. With a part of her mind she wished him dead, the whole world dead; the heat coming up to her from the grill and flooding out into the heat of the room made her want to break free into violence. And yet even now, though abstractly, now, she “loved” him, for lack of a better word. She could think about her love — still there, she knew perfectly well, but dormant, an emotion locked up, waiting for September — as she might think about a pain she’d felt long ago and would one day feel again. It was the most vital emotion she had ever felt, on one hand, but, on the other, an emotion partly revolting to her: She had not seen much sign of it in her mother and father; it was an emotion they shrank from, lashed out against as they might at something obscene. She understood. But Henry, like her cousin Bill, or like Cousin Mary Lou, had accepted that feeling, had in a way made it into his identity, hugging her in his great loose arms, womanishly patting some truck driver’s shoulder, bending down to kiss the forehead of their child as he slept. He was obscene to her, to tell the truth. His whole gross being, the very possibility of his existence at the height of a weedy, rainless summer was obscene. When he stood at the kitchen door watching her with eyes like an infinitely gentle pig’s, his face thrown forward, leaning against the warm (she imagined) edge of the door, he would smooth the paint with absentminded fingers; and sometimes he would turn his face and touch the wood with his lips, this, too, absentmindedly, trying the texture with his mouth as a child would, and Callie would look down, revolted. Once she had said, “Henry, you’re kissing that door!” and he had looked ashamed. Instantly she’d thought she shouldn’t have said it, though she wasn’t sorry. She’d never caught him doing it again, and, almost below thought, in the dark of her mind, she’d been annoyed at her pettiness and his, for paying attention.

“Crazy,” she thought, coming suddenly awake, toying with the word’s dull echo in her head, standing over the hissing grill and staring through the grill’s blackness at the pitch-dark center of things. She thought of George Loomis, sitting alone in his unlighted, funereal old brick house on Crow Mountain, watching television in the kitchen, his eyes like a murderer’s. Henry respected George, and George had a kind of sense: He could talk to Henry if anyone could, and George could do it without making them all feel like worms. She set her lips and, as though someone else had suggested it, she nodded.

And so George Loomis sat down grinning in the armchair facing the davenport late one night and stretched out his legs, his left hand over his belly, relaxed, the empty right sleeve pinned up to the shoulder of his shirt. He smelled of whiskey. It gave her a turn, but she said nothing. She thought of her father, the car parked down in the creek below the DL&W bridge where he’d pulled to sleep it off. When he brought in the smell of whiskey with him, her mother would sometimes cry. “You never think of anybody but yourself,” she would say, “that’s truly all you think about.” And he would nod, scowling, not offended by what she said but outraged by the maudlin vulgarity of her saying anything at all. Once, long ago, he’d hit her. When Callie was little, she too would cry, and her father would wince, looking at her, and then he’d shut his eyes with disgust and sit down and cover his face with his hands and wait for them to go. His verdict was right, she knew, and she knew that all women were evil. When they were loading hay he would lift her in his arms, laughing, and would throw her up onto the load. She was terrified — the load was high and round, and she was sure she’d roll off on the other side from the force of his throw — yet she would wish he would do it again and again, hoist her up in his arms and laugh, looking at her face for just a second, and throw her up at the white clouds and the deep blue glodes between. Her mother would say, “She’ll be hit by dry lightning up there, Frank Wells. You know what happened to Covert’s boy.” “Crap,” he would say. He would lift his arms and say, “Ok, scout,” and Callie would half-slide half-jump and he would catch her. Her mother said someday he would break her leg, and Callie thought, Evil, evil! Once he had turned his back and let her fall. She was fourteen. He and the two hired men had laughed, leaning on their forks, showing their dark yellow teeth. That night she had run away, intending to drown herself, but beside the creek — Prince running up and down joyfully, yipping at shadows — she’d found herself too cowardly and base for even that; there was no hope left for her but forgiveness. It was the troopers that had found her, and when she got home her father was asleep in his chair, snoring like a horse.

George Loomis said, “How things going, boy?”

“Oh, so-so,” Henry said.

Still no relief from the heat had come. Her head ached, and their voices sounded hollow, like voices in a dream.

George Loomis looked down for perhaps a minute, then cleared his throat and looked over at little Jimmy, playing with a truck on the davenport arm. George’s hair was going prematurely gray, but across from Henry he looked like a high school boy. He had a boy’s face, a boy’s way of sitting — except for the one boot locked rigid in its iron brace. He had a look of innocence like a boy’s, too, vaguely associated in Callie’s mind with virginity.

“Sure dry,” George said.

Henry nodded. “Things burning right up.” His voice was mechanical, like his words. Even his eating looked mechanical, and George was doing nothing to help.

Callie looked toward heaven in despair.

(The Preacher would come to see Callie’s father and would go out to the barn where he was milking, and Callie would go with him to show him the way. He’d step gingerly, behind the cows, worrying about getting manure on his pointed black shoes — good honest shit, her father called it and when her father saw him he would nod politely. In front of her mother, her father would mock religious people, but he was always polite to them otherwise. He was not a cruel man — she had learned that only lately, from Henry, or rather had only lately discovered by way of Henry that that was what she’d always known. He too was like a boy, her father — in a different way from George Loomis, though. Her father was easygoing, open, free with his money, a storyteller people would listen to for hours. He didn’t believe or disbelieve in God, he said; he just didn’t like churches. He didn’t like hearing what he had to believe and what he mustn’t believe — the very word believe made him curl his lip as he would when he listened to tear-jerking poetry or talk about flowers or songs about faraway places — and above all, he said, he didn’t like grown men standing up and confessing in front of everybody, like drunks or like young lovers. But that was not what he said to the Preacher. He said, “Evening, Reverend,” and nodded, and when the Preacher talked about what a fine herd of cows he had (it had chronic mastitis and there wasn’t a cow in the barn that gave more than a gallon) he would agree. Rightly, Henry said. (That too she had always known but had realized only when he said it.) If you told the Preacher the truth he would soon have control of you, would milk you dry. The Preacher would say, “We’ve missed you lately in church, Frank,” and her father would say only, “I haven’t been going very regular, that’s true.” He hadn’t darkened those doors in fifteen years. The Preacher would talk to him sadly, man to man, high-tone Biblical language that embarrassed Callie, and after her father had heard him out he’d look thoughtful and say, “There’s a lot to what you say, Reverend.” She would want to laugh, and only later had she come to see that she’d wanted to laugh with fury. There was something vile in her father’s arrogant detachment. She wondered what her father would say if someone smarter than he was had come to talk about religion to him. Henry’s father, for instance, when he was alive, who’d read hundreds and hundreds of books. But she knew what her father would have done, of course. How could even arguments have touched him?)

All of that came back to her clearly, in the odd vagueness that had captured her mind — those nights in the barn with the milkers chugging and the Preacher straddling a spatter of manure, huge gray moths batting at the whitewash-caked bulbs, the cool sound of pigeons in the mow overhead. She stood in the living room doorway listening as if in a trance to Henry and George Loomis, and when her mind came alive again her heart sank. They were equals, they would be honest with each other; and there was nothing George could do. (I loved him though, she thought, giving way again, seeing her father in her mind as before, his eyes cocked up at the sharply protruding hipbone of the cow. She’d been older than her father all her life, and even as she’d struggled to be the boy he wished she was, because the idea of her being his daughter was for both of them unmanageable, she had known the futility of it and had forgiven him. For an instant that seemed timeless but which nevertheless passed, she did not care whether George succeeded or not.)

For an instant she knew with a part of her mind that behind the house, motionless, oblivious to the deadly heat, Simon Bale’s ghost sat listening in the dark, solid as granite, hearing all they said and thought and hearing the noise still miles away of something (wind?) bearing vengeance toward them: some change, subtle and terrible. They were caught. She concentrated. It was gone.

2

George Loomis knew well enough that he’d come for nothing. When he looked up at Callie in the doorway — pretty, in a tough-jawed, persecuted-looking way, her face flushed, prepared for wrath — he had a feeling that in Henry’s position he might do the same damn thing.

Henry sat unmoving — as still as the enormous old sleeping dog by the door — huge, like the dog, and spent — huge and dark as the centuries-old pile of boulders and shale and crumbling mortar looking down Crow Mountain at the bottom of the shadow-filled glen. (It was a lookout tower from before the Revolutionary War, his grandfather said, and it was built by one of his ancestors, a Loomis. “Nimrod’s Tower,” his grandfather said. “So much for the pride of man!” And he, ten years old, had looked up at the tower, baffled between pride and inexplicable shame at the pride he felt — like his grandfather.) Henry Soames’ forearm stood straight up, resting on the arm of the davenport, holding the box of gingersnaps, and his arm was so thick (it seemed for that moment) that if the boy were to pass behind it he would vanish from sight as though passing behind a tree. Callie gave George a meaningful look, something she’d learned from TV, he thought, and dropped back into the kitchen, out of sight. There were only two dim bulbs that worked in the gilt, Max Pies Furniture chandelier that hung by a chain from the middle of the ceiling. (That was Callie’s work, he knew. Henry would never have chosen the thing.) He could see one of the bulbs reflected in the picture directly across from him, high on the wall over Henry’s head, above the clock on the mantel, a brownish picture (a gift from Callie’s mother, one of them had told him) of Jesus praying. The Soames’ TV was on, over in what Callie called the music corner — radio, record player, television, sagging homemade shelves of records and old TV Guides—but the sound was turned off and the picture was flipping. It gave you a feeling of endless falling in space.

He said, “What’s eating you, Henry?”

Henry smiled, gloomy. “Oh, I’m all right, George.” He put a gingersnap in his mouth whole and let it dissolve there. “How things with you? Seems like we don’t see you much any more.”

George got out his cigarettes with two fingers, slipped one from the pack, and fitted it between his lips. He got out his matches. “Now don’t change the subject, Henry.” He looked at the matches, considering, and decided on directness. “You quit eating all the time or you’ll kill yourself. You know it.”

The little boy was down on all fours on the rug, running a black and yellow dump truck along the dark outlines of the faded flowers in the pattern. His face was unhealthily red, as his mother’s had been. The line he was on led to his father’s foot and he ran the truck up over his father’s shoe and down again. He looked up at his father, half-smiling, sly. He looked like an elf, the way his bushy blond eyebrows tipped up. Still Henry said nothing.

“How you think Jimmy’s going to feel?” George said.

Henry shook his head and let out a little heave of breath. He sat now with his hands limp in his lap, what there was of his lap — three, four inches, then his knees. His shirt was unbuttoned in two places, showing clammy gray skin and curly gray and black hairs. There were sweat rings under his armpits.

“Damn it all, Henry. I came here to talk with you, and I mean for you to talk. I asked you a question.”

Henry looked anxious. He always looked anxious, because of the way the rolls of fat fell away like the wake of a rowboat from his nose, but now he looked more so. He said, “I’m sorry, George, I’m afraid I’ve forgot what you asked me.

“I said,” George began grimly, hard-jawed — but by now he had forgotten too, and he had to think a minute. “I said, ‘How do you think Jimmy’s going to feel when you’ve killed yourself?’ ”

It sounded in his own ears like something out of Loretta Young. As if out of kindness, Henry said, “I don’t know, George.”

“Well, you’re a damn fool then,” George said, doing his best with a bad start, looking just over Henry’s head. “I mean it. Listen. All you do is stop that blame eating all the time.”

Henry studied the floor, politely not eating the ginger-snap he had now in his hand. George listened to the clock. Outside the open window it was very quiet, bright with moonlight. Nothing moved. At last Henry said, “Maybe that’s the answer, George.”

“Oh, hell,” George said. He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, “Where have you been till this hour, young man?” knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing, as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie — a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers. He sometimes believed he had known all his life that he’d end up maimed, a brace on one boot, no arm in one sleeve, and no doubt worse yet to come. Once, lately, it had occurred to him that maybe he’d given up his foot and arm voluntarily, sacrificing up pieces of his body like an old-time Delaware to ward off destructions more terrible. It had seemed an interesting idea at first, but thinking about it an instant later he’d seen it for the paltry ruse it was, mere poetry, and, like all poetry, so irrelevant and boring he wanted to smash things.

He came partly awake. A movement of the drape, then stillness. A line from a tedious movie: Maybe that’s the answer, George. Not even patronizing: pure filler. Or it was like the chatter at one of his mother’s old-fashioned teas. Exquisite, they were always saying. Everything was exquisite. (He’d buried his mother in the way she’d wanted to be buried, in an iron casket with a window looking in at her now incorruptible face.) Because Henry knew perfectly well he had come because Callie had asked him, and knew there was nothing to talk about, that either he’d work it out alone or he wouldn’t, and that all the sympathy on earth wouldn’t change it by a hair, because Henry was no moron, after all. He would know without George’s being here that George was pulling for him. (No meaning even in that, really: the prejudice of people who by accidents of place and time were friends.) What more? You had friends, and that was useful to remember, and Henry Soames was not a self-pitying fool who’d forget it, and there it was.

He lit the match, surprised that it worked, since the matchbook cover was soft from the dampness inside his shirt pocket, and raised the match to his cigarette, thinking about cancer. When he’d put the matches away he said, “It’d be easier if you were stupider. Even stupider than you are, I mean.” And now he really did feel a twinge of anger, at nothing specific.

Henry smiled and for a second he was himself again, not working automatically like an old man playing checkers at the GLF.

George said, “I’d be very serious. Grim, you know what I mean? I’d get a glint in my eye, and I’d say—” He became still grimmer, theatrically. “Listen, Henry Soames, you’re feeling guilty, right? You’re saying it was your fault he fell, you might as well killed him outright, and it was wrong. Well, listen, I’ve been through all that myself. Truth. Over in Korea I used to think, ‘Some poor bastard comes at me, he no more wants this war than I do, they took his name from some crumby file and that made him a soljer and here we are.’ But I’ll tell you something. One day there was a Korean sergeant — South Korean, one of ours — tore off the fender from one of our staff cars with his jeep. That afternoon — this is the truth, now — that afternoon a couple of Korean lieutenants and this sergeant drive off with a shovel in the back of their jeep, and when they come back to the base, no sergeant. That’s what they think of human beings. Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, but when one of them comes after you, you shoot.

“Now you take Simon Bale. Screw, I’d say—” He remembered that the boy was there, but Jimmy didn’t seem to have heard it. He sat leaning his head from side to side, forming motor sounds with his lips, barely letting them out, vrooming the motor as he pushed the toy truck up his legs to his knees and over them and down in a rush to the rug once more to careen along the labyrinth of roads to the higher mountains, the elephantine legs of his father. (That was how Henry had driven in the old days, George remembered — before he’d married Callie.) Henry ran his forearm across the stubbly underside of his chin. The gingersnap that had been in his hand was gone. George leaned forward.

“I’d say, full of righteousness — because I would be right and you would be wrong—‘Simon Bale was the same as one of them Koreans, not civilized. You took him in out of the cold when his house burned and he scared your kid with his talk about the devil and you yelled at him, and out of his own stupidity he fell down the fucking stairs. You ought to have buried him like a cat and forgot it!’ And there we’d be: I’d have you.”

Henry smiled, only his lips, his eyes unfocused. “And what would I say to that if I was smart?” He spoke with his mouth full, and George puffed at the cigarette a minute, uncomfortable and yet half-enjoying the senseless game.

“You’d wipe your forehead and say, ‘Sure is hot.’ He made his voice high and thin, mimicking Henry’s.

Henry nodded, pleased.

George said, “I’d say, ‘Pay attention, damn it. It wasn’t your fault. Face up to it. It’s just the way things came out.’ ‘Oh, it was my fault all right,’ you’d say. ‘Well all right, your fault then,’ I’d say, ‘but you couldn’t help it.’ ‘Oh, I know I couldn’t help it,’ you’d say.”

There was no movement out in the kitchen. Callie would be standing by the sink, listening, hopeless, feeling betrayed — not by George Loomis, exactly. Or by the open door, pressing her forehead to the screen. Betrayed merely by the nature of things, or the nature of men. He looked up at the clock. Five-to-twelve. Henry sat looking out the window, his head tilted, the gingersnap box standing upright in his hand like something up a tree. His nose and mouth and eyes were small in that wide, shiny face. His hair looked thinned by age, like the mohair on an old, old couch, or the hair of a dog with mange.

George said, “You’d say, ‘Now you listen a while.’ You’d tell me, ‘I’d been waiting to kill him a long time — him or somebody or something. People don’t know what they’ve got inside them. Except that Simon Bale did, or he wouldn’t have gone around handing out pamphlets and preaching doom. All right. I’d been waiting all my life like a loaded gun and he’d been waiting to drive me to it, and neither of us is to blame for that; a lion’s a lion and a cow’s a cow. But people aren’t only animals. When it’s over, a man gets to judge. After he’s found out, he can say Yes to it, or No. He can say Yes, it was right—no matter who it happened to or where or when — or No, it was wrong.’ And you’d sit there like a grieved hippopotamus.” He realized abruptly where the queer play was taking him and leaned forward farther, feeling sweat prickle on his back as he shifted position. “At last it would hit me, and I’d say: ‘You think you’re God!’ And you’d say, ‘Yes.’ I’d be stopped. Cold. What can you say to a man that’s decided to be God?” His voice cracked. He laughed suddenly, furious.

Henry squinted, thinking about it, or put off by that laugh. Callie stood now in the doorway to his right, the yellow kitchen walls shiny behind her, making her face very dark. Jimmy stood watching the television picture flip. He stood perfectly still now, spent. His face too was dark red, the eyebrows white.

“It would have taken me longer to say,” Henry said. He smiled to show he meant it as a compliment. He was as far away as ever.

George ground out his cigarette in the ash tray from Watkins Glen on the table beside him. “What I can’t understand is how a man with ideas as crazy as that can just set there, chewing away like a cow.”

“Why, they’re your ideas, George,” Henry said.

It startled him. “That’s not true,” he said. He looked at Callie and saw that she too believed it. “Well, shit!” he said. He hit the chair arm with his fist. “They’re not! That just isn’t true!”

The clock began striking, a whir of gears, then twelve sharp, tinny notes. To Callie the strokes of the clock sounded like a voice, bored and scornful. After the last stroke the whir of gears stopped with a click and the room was unnaturally hushed. She waited, but George said nothing more. He went into a new, even queerer act, and Callie suddenly knew as she watched him precisely what George was going to be like when he was old. He cocked his head as if straining for the exactly right word, drew back the corners of his mouth and raised his hand, half-closed as if around an invisible rock. He held that position for a moment, tensely, then smiled, grim, with his head tipped as if to duck something; then, as if realizing there were no words for what he wanted to say, he lowered his hand again, letting the invisible rock roll out between his thumb and index finger. She knew (standing remote as the clock) that there was something he’d been trying to say, something that both she and Henry had missed. And she knew with equal certainty that he had no intention of hunting for a way of saying it now. They’d demanded of him already more than was decent. He was standing up, smiling, shaking his head, saying he had to leave.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” she said.

He shrugged as if sadly and said good-night to Henry. At the door Prince opened his eyes but didn’t move. George stepped over him.

Outside it was even hotter than inside. The air was lifeless, heavy as dust. She felt faint. “Surely is dry,” she said softly. Something nagged at her thought but refused to come clear.

George Loomis nodded politely. “Keeps on like this it’ll burn up all the corn.”

She looked at his face. He had his head bent now, trying to see his watch in the dark of the porch. The tilt of his head made her think of a raven. Beyond the porch, the moonlight made everything it touched unnaturally sharp: the lines of the diner, the garage, the burdocks, Henry’s old black Ford up on blocks in the high brittle weeds. The mountains seemed very close, right over your head, stifling. She thought as she had thought before, at the kitchen window, looking out and listening to their talk in the living room, Something is coming. Nothing was, she knew. She felt tense, as if walking on a high ledge above dark, fast water. She was sorry for George Loomis, annoyed as she was at his senseless retreat. She should have expected it, of course. Maybe she had.

“Well, sooner or later it’s bound to rain,” she said. “It always does.” She laughed.

“Aeyuh,” he said. He was thinking about something else.

“Thanks ever so much for coming by,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, “it’s been my pleasure.”

They shook hands, and he went down the steps and limped over the moonlit path to his truck. His hair needed cutting — dark shadow against the bone-white of his ears. Dust rose from the path and hovered like granary sift behind him.

“Good-night, George,” she said.

He half turned, smiling again, nodding, almost bowing.

She thought of her father, then of Henry’s father as he stood in the picture they had upstairs, huge and placid, with a cardigan sweater that was buttoned wrong and under his arm an absurdly small violin. With a part of her mind she heard George Loomis’s truck start up, saw the lights go on, and saw him backing away. Something flew soundlessly past, between the garage and where she stood. She knew what it was, but she couldn’t remember for a moment what it was called.

At last, looking over at the gray-white bench in the garden, she saw the ghost of Simon Bale. He was staring mildly, patiently, at the house. He was bent forward slightly, his knees together, the Bible closed in his lap. One of the bookmark ribbons hung over his knee. When he saw that she was looking at him, he gave a start and reached toward his hat-brim, perhaps about to stand up. But then he vanished, leaving only the shadows of tamaracks on the empty, moonlit bench.

3

It was the next morning, at the crack of dawn, that the Goat Lady — otherwise known as “Mother”—reached New Carthage. You could tell where she was by the smell from a half-mile away, and if your nose wasn’t working you could tell by the noise. She had homemade tin-can bells all over her homemade pink and purple cart, fixed on the sides with fencepost staples and baling wire, and her goats bleated like the seven angels of death. She had a shaggy, dun-colored billygoat and a square, black, six-year-old nanny up in front, pulling as though the rig had no wheels, and there were four more nannies behind, dragging along Indian-file on braided binder twine. Alongside the last of the four was a six-months’ kid. The four nannies in back were the milkers. One of them had tits so big she’d have stepped on them if the Goat Lady hadn’t had them up in a kind of sling made out of some kindly farm-woman’s bedsheet. On top of the cart she had a sign like a housetop — which in fact it was, the cart being the Goat Lady’s house, the rear wall an old tarpaulin — and on the sign, in lettering that looked like a joke from some children’s cartoon book that no child would think funny: MOTHERS GOTS MILK.

The Goat Lady sat up in front like a midget stagecoach driver or a burlesque of the fiery charioteer, her legs splayed out like an elderly madam’s, her skirt hiked up over her dust-specked, yellow-gray thighs, on her head a dusty black bonnet like an Amish woman’s. She had on, despite the muggy heat, every stitch of clothing she owned — a couple of coats, a sweater, three or four dresses, a dark red shawl. She had iron-toed shoes. People that passed her on the highway would run off onto the far shoulder from staring, and when she pulled up onto some farmer’s front lawn to eat her dinner or strip out her goats or try to peddle her goat’s milk and cheese, women would call in their children from outdoors. She had a face that caught the eye and held it, amazing and revolting, flatly inhuman: yellow teeth like an old sick dog’s, eyebrows like a badger’s, an enormous wide-bridged nose very much like — a goat’s. She looked about sixty but she said she was thirty-six, and no doubt it was true. It was unthinkable that the Goat Lady should lie, as unthinkable as that she should cheat or steal or plan. Most people thought she was part Indian; the Indians said she was a Gypsy. If people took her in, nights, fed her, clothed her, provided her with orange pop or root beer, it was not so much out of charity as out of impotence in the face of her boundless gall. The first place she stopped when she reached New Carthage, the Bill Kelsey place, they called the troopers; but there was nothing the troopers could arrest her for. In her old black purse inside the cart (the troopers said after she’d gone for good), she had three hundred dollars and a gun that was missing a firing pin. People were surprised that the Goat Lady had three hundred dollars, but how she came by her savings was no great mystery. She could no more make change than fly, or if she could she didn’t; she would merely pocket whatever you gave her, accepting it as a mother’s right, up to and including a twenty-dollar bill, and if you had nerve enough to ask for change she’d merely hold out her money, with magnificent disgust — wadded-up bills and dimes and quarters and three or four brand-new galvanized nails — and you could take whatever you wanted, including the nails. No doubt people gypped her from time to time — and perhaps worse. When a pack of small boys came close to her cart her eyes would awake like a chipmunk’s, and she’d begin to squeeze her hands together in an agitated, fierce-looking way. But finally she was ungyppable and untormentable: charmed. She seemed not really to understand the value of whatever money she lost, though she could count when she absolutely had to, and her fear of small boys was manifestly impersonal, like other people’s fear of snakes. She had more pack rat than human in her: She collected and jealously guarded her utterly meaningless treasure, and if in the end she lost all she’d saved, she lost it as pack rats lose their bits of bright cloth, old bobby pins, and tinfoil to large, inscrutable movements in space. At the same time, she was herself a large, inscrutable movement — as George Loomis said, though he knew her only by report, he said. She’d started out twenty-four days ago (this she had counted, marking off the days with a nail on the plywood wagon seat) from Erie, Pennsylvania, in quest of a son who’d left home in July to find work where the drought hadn’t hit so hard, and who had loyally sent for her at last, telling her to come to a place she had never heard of, didn’t know where to find and no longer remembered the name of. (It sounded like Fair.) She’d set out in an arbitrary direction, taking the only highway out of town that she knew (so that for her it was not arbitrary), and she’d been helped and hustled along (not even really knowing she was helped or hustled) in a generally north-eastward direction to the heart of the Catskills — through coal country and oil country and timber country — heading on in full confidence, saying only, when people tried in vain to break down the walls of her faith, “It’s a small world.” Now she was back in farming country, and she knew — though in fact her son may have been in, say, Blair, Wisconsin — she was getting there.

It was two in the afternoon when she reached the diner. The sun was a white ball of fire, and across from it the moon hung clear as could be. Callie Soames stared at the woman’s rig as people had been doing now for twenty-four days, watching the woman pull up to the pumps, bells clattering, as if to gas up her goats, then on second thought turn short and pull her pink and purple wagon over to the door, blocking it neatly, as if by plan. Starlings careened in the baked sky. In the dust below there were sparrows and cow-birds by the hundreds, picking up grain truck spill. The Goat Lady got down and came over to the window and pressed her face to the screen, shielding both sides of her face with hands as gritty as a miner’s. Then she came to the door and peered through the screen as she’d peered through the window. Finally she came in. Prince lifted one ear, then drifted back into sleep. There was oat chaff on the woman’s hat and shoulders from fields where combines were at work. “Hi,” she said. She stood four-feet-tall, with her big square brown fists on her hips — legs wide apart, mouth widely grinning, her nose like an elbow coming out of her face — so pleased to be here that for a moment Callie was sure the woman was someone she ought to recognize and struggled in her mind to place her.

“Honey,” the woman said, “I was wondering if you happen to sell ice cream.”

“Oh,” Callie said. As if the words hadn’t sunk in, she looked over at Henry where he sat in the corner booth picking at a piece of apple pie. (Jimmy was back in the house, taking his nap.) The woman turned, following Callie’s glance, and Callie looked back at her quickly. The woman was still smiling. She was fat, in an unhealthy, poor woman’s way, especially below the belt. It was possible that she was pregnant.

Henry said very solemnly, like a minister, “We do have ice cream. Yes’m.”

“Why, that’s your hubby,” the woman said, delighted — even proud, one would have thought, as if she’d mistaken Callie for one of her own. When she laughed, her mouth seemed to slip right up behind her nose. “He’s sure nice and plump!”

Henry scowled.

The goat smell and the stench of her sweat were everywhere, and Callie had to concentrate to keep from being sick.

“Apple pie!” The woman rolled her eyes at Callie, suddenly coy as a schoolgirl. “I ain’t et apple pie in years. When I was six years old I was out in the orchid one time where my daddy was picking — my true daddy: he was a deputy sheriff — and you’ll never guess!”

Callie waited.

She leaned far toward Callie, leering. “I set down on a bushel crate and wee-weed all over ’em!” She wrung her hands and drew her tan, flat face back and sideways, giggling, and above the motionless, patient-looking layers of clothing the fat, cracked and shiny flesh of her throat rippled. Tears washed down her cheeks and into the curls sticking out in front of her bonnet and then, when she threw her head forward in her ecstasy, rolled down her nose and hung in a great gray drop at the end, like a pearl. Henry leaned his forehead onto the heel of his hand.

“What kind of ice cream did you want?” Callie said.

The woman climbed up on the counter stool, still giggling, turning again, after she was settled, to look over at Henry as before. She got herself into control and looked up at the ice cream flavors sign hungrily, sniffing, wiping the tears from her eyes with the backs of both hands, then went off on a giggling fit worse than the last. “I wish you could of seen his face,” she said. She turned again to giggle at Henry. Again she got herself in control. “I’ll have choc’late,” she said. The decision appeared to surprise and please her. Callie turned away.

“Honey,” the woman said behind her, coy again now, “did you ever hear the name of Buddy Blatt?” She was lighting a cigarette.

Callie hesitated, the goat smell and cigarette smell mingling unpleasantly with the ice cream smell in the freezer.

“Buddy Blatt’s my boy,” the woman said. “I been looking for him.”

Callie put the scoop back carefully, as though it might blow up in her hand if she jarred it, and covered the freezer again. She slid the dish of ice cream onto the counter-top, along with a napkin and spoon, then remembered to fill a water glass. “I don’t think I’ve heard that name,” she said, and after a minute, “Henry?”

Henry shook his head and looked out the window.

“He sent for me,” she said. She coughed, and smashed out the cigarette almost untouched. She dipped her spoon into the ice cream and lifted her lips away from her teeth, then sucked a little off the spoon and let the rest slide back for the next bite. “Mmmm!” she said. She reached down inside her collar and half-scratched, half-rubbed. Callie listened to the fans. No air stirred.

Then for the hundredth time, because like everyone she met they were the kind of people that would understand a mother’s feelings, she told her story. Old Man Judkins came in in time to hear the last of it. It was the second time around for him. He’d heard it secondhand from Bill Llewellyn in New Carthage less than an hour ago. But it was only this time, hearing it from her own mouth, that he believed it.

“They all been real kind,” she said. She tucked her chin in and giggled. “Down in Olean the police helped me strip out my goats.”

“The police?” Henry said. It was the first sign he’d shown that he was listening.

“They was a green place right in the middle of the city, it was just as green as anything, with flowers in the middle, and I pulled up there. It was milking time. And the p’lice come over and talked awhile and then helped me.”

Henry looked out the window again, and Old Man Judkins picked his teeth.

“I got the cart fixed up so I can sleep in it, but I ain’t had to yet,” she said. “Every night but one I’ve slept in somebody’s house, and the one night I didn’t was because down in Endicott they let me sleep in the jail. They been very kind.”

Callie said matter-of-factly, “And you really think you’ll find him.” She wondered whether the woman would pay for her ice cream.

The Goat Lady smiled, her upper lip vanishing again, her few teeth jagged and yellow in her black mouth. “It’s a small world,” she said. Perhaps the question made her nervous, or perhaps it merely reminded her of her business. She got down off the stool and gave a grotesquely formal little bow, smiling again. “I surely appreciate your kindness.” Then, to Henry: “It’s been real nice talking to you.”

Henry turned, covering his mouth with his hand, studying her. At last he nodded. He said, “Good luck.” It was as if for him she was gone already.

Callie stood at the door with Old Man Judkins, watching her climb up into her seat and start up the goats. She didn’t pay, she realized at last. The cart was halfway up the hill by now, the clank of the bells far away enough to be pleasant.

Old Man Judkins said solemnly, tipping his head to one side, “It’s like a pilgrimage. A mother in search of her son.” He pulled at his ear.

Callie said, “I better go see if Jimmy’s awake from his nap.”

4

That was the last Henry Soames ever saw of the Goat Lady, though it wasn’t by any means the last he heard. She was gone from the county the following day: some people said she’d moved on north; some said they’d seen her heading east, toward the resorts where the Jews were. Wherever she’d gone, she’d gone completely; it was as if she’d been swallowed up by a mountain, like any other gnome. Lou Millet wondered if maybe she hadn’t run into foul play, and they speculated on that for a time; but after a week certain word came, by way of a letter George Loomis said he’d gotten from a relative, that she’d been given money by the Methodist Church in Remsen.

For a week more people swapped stories about her when they came to the diner. But gradually the talk died out.

Henry Soames was the first. He would go whole days without saying a word about the Goat Lady or anything else to anyone, even Callie. Often he wouldn’t bother to get up in the morning. Doc Cathey would find him propped up on six pillows, in his undershirt, his eyes shut behind the steel-rimmed glasses, and his hair, what there was left of it, pasted to his scalp with sweat. If his mouth was closed and he wasn’t snoring, it was hard to tell at first glance if he was living or dead. On the spindly table between his bed and the glass-knobbed dresser he had a red plastic glass of water and his little white pills. Beside him on the bed he had Oreo cookies.

“Are you trying to die?” Doc Cathey said. (Despite the weather he wore the black suit he always wore, his neck and head rising out of his collar like a brown, withered stalk.)

“No,” Henry said. He was grumpy as a bear these days. It was pretty near worth your hide to ask him the time, Doc Cathey said. Henry said, “Something’s wrong, that’s all. I’m all right. Just leave me alone.”

Doc said, staring fiercely down into the clutter of his medical bag, “My advice to you is, see a psychiatrist.” He’d said it twenty times before, after Callie’s mother had nagged him into believing that was the only hope, and once he’d shoved a pamphlet at Henry about mental illness; but mostly Doc kept off the subject for fear of starting an attack.

“I know what’s wrong with me,” Henry said. “I just need to work it out.”

Callie said another time, unnaturally sweet, putting her hand on Henry’s forehead, “Doc says it might be something chemical, Henry. He says there might be some pill you could take.”

“No,” Henry said. He sat forward to say it, as if trying to drive it through Callie’s skull by physical force, and she looked at the curtains and drew her hand away.

It wasn’t that he wanted to be contrary or that his sickness had made him a different man — irascible and spiteful — and certainly, despite their settled opinion, it wasn’t that he was afraid of hospitals, doctors, pills — or afraid, even, of whatever more severe treatments the pills might give way to. He didn’t like hospitals, true enough, but he would do more for the sake of his wife and son than any of them guessed. It was one of the few things he knew about himself for certain. He’d be willing to shoot himself for them if he had to. But this was something else. Neither was it that he didn’t believe what Doc Cathey said. It was probably true that something went wrong with your chemistry and if you took some pill you’d be able to work the thing out calmly, the problem still there but not white-hot in your mind: manageable. But true or not, he had to do it his own way. He couldn’t explain it because there was no explanation. About this, though, he was wrong. George Loomis could explain it.

Henry was sitting in the chair he had out by the gas pumps islands for hot summer nights, and George was sitting down on the curb of the island, smoking cigarettes, as always, one after another. There were rainclouds in the sky and the leaves had their backs turned and the wind was coming from the south gently, but the thermometer stood at ninety-four and they knew there would be no rain. Callie was leaning on the ethyl pump watching the drab, quiet sunset, not seeming to listen to their talk. The dog lay across the doorway to the diner, asleep.

Henry said:

“I keep seeing it over and over, George. I see it clearer even than it was, slowed down, like a movie. I see that look on his face, and me moving toward him, shouting at him, and it seems to me I have a choice, whether to keep on shouting or not, and I choose, I keep shouting, and then all at once he falls.” The muscles in Henry’s face were all out of control, and again, as before, his arm was rising uncontrollably to hide his eyes and he was twisting away a little in his chair to block the vision that stood before him closing out the hard reality of highway, trees, blue mountains in the distance. But George Loomis was looking at the asphalt, not noticing his face.

Henry said:

“I hear his head crack, George. And then I see him lying there jerking like a chicken. Jimmy didn’t see it, I don’t think, but I saw it. I sit up in bed and try to think of something else, but right away it comes back, the whole thing over again. You double up against it and go through all the movements as if your whole body was thinking it, and you see that choice coming and you can’t change it, and then there’s that movement of his feet toward the stairs, no way to stop it under heaven, like the movement of a train.” He felt tense all over, as if for a long time now he’d been holding his breath. “It’s like drowning,” he said. “I feel as if anybody comes into the room it will be just too much, I feel like I need to be somewhere out in the middle of a field, in the dark.” He was quiet a moment, sweating big drops. Suddenly he said: “We’re riding in the car on a narrow road and it comes to me in a sort of daydream I could reach out and slam my head against the truck we’re meeting, or I could reach out my hand, and then all at once there it is again, Simon Bale and me at the top of the stairs, and I’m shouting at him, and my hands tighten up on the steering wheel — it’s like a wound in your soul.” Again the memory was upon him, and he clamped his eyes shut, concentrating on thinking nothing, but it was useless and he waited for the memory to be over. When he opened his eyes again George was looking at him, distant. Henry fumbled for the cheese crackers he’d brought with him, somewhere down under his chair.

George Loomis said, “You need some kind of a pill.”

“Hell!” It came out like the bellow of a bull. “I know I need a pill.”

Still Callie pretended to be paying no attention, vaguely watching the sparrows on the highway, but she stiffened, making the others be still. Jimmy came around the corner of the diner on his tricycle, red-faced, vrooming the motor quietly. He glanced at them shyly, as if conscious of the dividing line between himself and them, then looked back at his handlebars. He came over toward the gas island and at the last moment veered away and headed back where he’d come from. Where the asphalt ended the dirt was cracked in small squares and as hard as cement.

“But pills are beneath your dignity,” George said.

“No,” Henry said, quietly this time, not expecting them to believe it, not asking even George Loomis to understand how he felt. Callie looked at the birds.

But George said, “Yes, they are.” He was nodding to himself as if he not only saw how it was but partly agreed. “The trouble with taking a pill is, you might feel better. That would be the worst thing could happen. You wouldn’t be human any more.”

“Crap!” Callie said fiercely.

It was the first time Henry had ever heard her say it, and when he looked up, he saw that her lips were shaking.

George reached over, not even looking up, and put his hand on her shoe. “No, wait,” he said. “It’s true. He says he made a choice, the choice to go on yelling, which makes him to blame for Simon Bale’s dying. But he knows that’s only word games. He didn’t know Simon would fall downstairs, and even if he did, it’s one time in a thousand you kill yourself that way. It was an accident, Henry was the accidental instrument, a pawn, a robot labeled Property of Chance. That’s intolerable, a man should be more than that; and that’s what Henry’s suffering from — not guilt. However painful it may be, in fact even if it kills him, horror’s the only dignity he’s got.”

“That’s stupid,” Callie said vehemently. But Henry saw she’d understood.

“Right,” George said. He looked at her, expressionless, and for a long moment they watched each other. Callie looked away first. She scowled at the woods across the road (the starlings were settling in the trees now) and she fiddled with her belt buckle, tightening it. She said:

“Why do men think they have to have dignity?”

“A word, an empty word,” George agreed.

Henry said: “Why can’t we just be like the Goat Lady?” He laughed.

He wasn’t prepared for the way it shocked George. Callie looked disgusted, but George Loomis blushed dark red. Henry looked down, away from George, at once. After a minute he said, “I didn’t know you even saw her, George.”

“I didn’t,” George said. “I only heard about her.”

Callie too saw that something was wrong. She said, “I’d better get Jimmy inside. It’ll be dark soon.” She left them quickly.

Henry and George sat there by the island for another ten minutes, but neither of them said a word. After-chores customers began to arrive. In the gray of dusk the figures of Henry and George grew less substantial, it seemed to Callie, watching from the diner. At last Henry pushed up out of his chair slowly and came in.

5

They came to the diner night after night when the chores were done, and sometimes they talked about the drought and the heat, sometimes they merely sat, quiet, preoccupied-looking, like men listening for something in the back of their minds: some voice out of dried-up hills, a sound of water moving down under the ground. Sometimes they played cards; other times they did nothing at all. Ben Worthington, Jr., would stand by the counter drinking his beer and studying the punchboard for hours at a time, as if the whole secret of the universe lay under one of those dots. Once as Callie was passing him with a tray he caught her arm and said, as if continuing an old conversation, “There’s got to be a way to figure it.” He pointed at the punchboard with the top of his bottle. “There’s a way to figure everything.”

Callie pulled away. “You tell me when you figure it out,” she said.

Old Man Judkins said, “All the same, I can tell you where the clock is.”

“The hell,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said.

Old Man Judkins tipped his head back, so he could look through his glasses, and pointed at one of the dots without a moment’s hesitation. It was as if he could see through the paper.

“Here’s what,” Ben said. “I’ll give you five-to-one the clock ain’t there.”

Judkins shook his head. “No, sir. You pay for the punch and the clock’s half yours, half mine, because I showed you where it is.”

Ben looked at him, and slowly he reached in his pocket for change and paid for the punch. The clock wasn’t there. Old Man Judkins stood with his head back, holding his old straw hat in his hand, looking surprised, and when he was sure the clock was really not there he shrugged. “Hunch was wrong,” he said.

Days went by and it still didn’t rain, and all of them grew more edgy. Old Man Judkins said, as though Callie Soames had not lived in farm country all her life (and yet she listened, remembering hand-loaded wagons of hay, thrashing crews, wheat standing on the hillsides in shocks): “It never changes. They bring in all them new machines, put all them chemicals into the ground, get dairies with a hundred cows, but they still got to wait on the land. Progress, they say. But th’ earth don’t know about progress. No rain, that means no corn and no hay, no feed in the winter. The old days, they might have trucked it in, but not now. Fifty cows was a real big barn in the old days, and two men could clean the gutters in half an hour. Now they got gutter cleaners — seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don’t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can’t compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he’s in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can’t even sell it.”

She shook her head.

“No chance any more of winning,” he said. “They just try and survive.” Old Man Judkins looked at her with his head cocked; then down at his hands. They were gnarled and liver-spotted and scarred, and she remembered suddenly what Jim Millet had said, the day of George Loomis’s accident: “The goddamn cylinder was going around and around. You could see slivers of bone — I never see nothin’ like it — red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away.”

She said quickly, “I guess the oldtimers had their troubles too.”

Old Man Judkins looked at her, and after a minute he smiled again. “You talk about the old days and everybody gets impatient. Things are getting better and better, that’s what people have got to believe. Say it ain’t so and they know for sure you’re an old codger, not right in the head. Prophet of doom, they say.”

Callie said, “You have to have faith.”

The old man bent his head, drawing a square with one finger on the counter-top, moving the finger around and around the square. She said it again, as though it were important, louder this time, to penetrate what she knew was not mere deafness. “You have to have faith, Mr. Judkins.” She glanced at the sleeping dog, and her heart caught.

Fred Judkins’ finger stopped moving, and after a long time he looked up again, lips puckered. “No,” he said. “You have to have the nerve to ride it down.”

But at least about this much Old Man Judkins was right: If it didn’t rain soon every one of them would be finished. Henry said so, Doc Cathey said so, even Jim Millet said so. One night — Henry wasn’t there at the time — Jim Millet said, joking, the tobacco cud bulging in his whiskered cheek, “You want the truth, it’s all Nick Blue’s fault. He could’ve done a rain dance for us a month ago if he’d wanted to, but you think he’ll do it? Hell, no!”

They all laughed except Nick Blue, sitting straight-backed and solemn-faced, smoke going up from his nostrils past his small sharp eyes, and Ben Worthington, Jr., said, as if fiercely, “He’s trying to get his land back, that’s what it is.”

Jim Millet slapped the counter. “You hit it on the head! That goddam redskin’s got it in his mind he’ll break us all and get back his heritage.” He chewed fast, like a rabbit.

“Now, Jim,” Callie said.

But they liked the joke too well to leave it.

“Nick Blue’s a smart man,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said. “He don’t talk a whole lot, but he thinks.” He tapped his temple.

The two truckers at the counter grinned without turning.

Lou Millet said, “Ah, you’re too hard on him, Ben.” He smiled, though. Even Lou was capable, these days, of going further than he’d dream of going some other time.

Jim said, “I bet you couldn’t get him to dance. I bet he wouldn’t do it for nobody!”

The truckers glanced at Nick and smiled. Nick sat as still as ever, as if made out of wood, moving only his cheeks when he puffed at the cigarette.

Then all at once they were standing up, Jim Millet and Ben Worthington, Jr., and Emery Jones’ albino hired man, and the trucker by the cash register was watching them, smiling, as if half-thinking of getting up too.

Callie pursed her lips.

Nick sat quietly smoking as though he were deaf, and when they were standing behind him, leering like monkeys, he put the cigarette down and squared his shoulders more.

“Now, that’s enough,” Lou Millet said.

Old Man Judkins watched calmly, as if he’d seen it all many times.

“Come on now, Nick,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said, “have some mercy, eh?”

Nick turned his head like a man bothered by a fly on his shoulder, his yellow-brown forehead wide and smooth, slanted like an ape’s, and for a long moment everything was still, as if even the wind had suddenly stopped to listen. Then, for no reason, it was over. They laughed — even Nick Blue was smiling — and they slapped his shoulders and told him, by God, he could take a joke, and then they went back to their counter stools, still laughing. Callie leaned on the counter. She said suddenly, as if to all the room, “What ever became of the Goat Lady?”

They seemed to think about it. Nobody knew.

“Do you think she ever found him, heading off blind like that?”

Nobody knew.

Late that night, in the kitchen (Jimmy not asleep, as they thought, but standing on the stairs, in the dark), Callie said: “Henry, I saw Simon Bale.”

“What?” he said.

She frowned, realizing for an instant that perhaps it had not really happened.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said. “What if Jimmy was to hear you, talking like that.”

She felt sick, and the absurd conviction came over her that if she let herself turn to the window Simon would be there, his face yellowish-gray against the dark of the mountains. But she knew he wasn’t there, and to prove to herself that she knew, she kept from turning.

“He wants to tell us something,” she said. It came to her that that was not so. He had nothing to say to them.

Henry said, “He spoke to you?” His eyes were slits, and she knew what he was thinking. He said, “Callie, you dreamed it.”

She thought about it.

After a long time, as if by accident, as if not having meant to say it aloud, he said, “What does he want to tell us?”

“You’ve seen him, then?”

“No. Of course not.”

The round white pain came under her collarbone.

“What did you think he wanted to tell us?”

“I don’t know.”

After that they were silent again for a long time. When Callie finally spoke, her words came out in a rush. “It’s simple. He was an evil man and now he’s tormented. He lived with us all those weeks passing out his pamphlets to people in the diner and scaring Jimmy with his talk of the devil, and now he knows. He’s afraid he poisoned us. It wasn’t true.”

“You need to get more rest,” Henry said. “You’ve been worried lately. And this heat.” He looked at the table-top, biting his upper lip and squinting. He got one of the little white pills out of the bottle in his shirt pocket. He was remembering how he would sit in his car up on Nickel Mountain, in the old days, and the fog would be there all around him like a sea, and strange thoughts would come into his mind. He would think strange thoughts, knowing they were not true, strange, and knowing he could suspend the knowledge that what came into his mind was unreal, and he would savor that queer freedom the way he savored the smell of Catskill air at night or savored the obscure, continually shifting patterns in the fog around his headlights. When the night was clear he would push the old rattletrap Ford as hard as it knew how to go, and turning into a curve he would know exactly where the line lay between making it and not, and he would ride that line as he rode the line down the center of the highway, conscious every second of the choices on either side. He’d gone to stock car races once with George Loomis, and he’d been surprised: George Loomis wanted them to hit, wanted somebody killed, and he’d said, “Admit it, Henry, so do you.” “No,” he’d said. They’d looked at each other and they’d understood — as though everything had suddenly snapped into focus, past, present, future: They profoundly disagreed.

“He’ll destroy us,” Callie said, wildly now, no longer knowing what she was saying.

She thought of the Preacher, carefully avoiding the spatters of manure, her father carefully avoiding the Preacher, the milking machines chugging regularly, and she remembered: “You never think of anybody but yourself, that’s truly all you think about,” her mother struggling against him futilely, stupidly, as once, wrongly, he too had struggled, hitting her for it, forgetting the truth that you had to ride it down. She remembered the day No. 6 died. They had to saw the stanchion off to get out the corpse, and they dragged it out of the cowbarn with a log-chain that peeled the dead hide off the leg; they tipped it over the bluff with crowbars, and when it rolled down over the tin cans, boxes, buggy-wheels, bedsprings, rusted fencewire, kettles, crocks — the corrupting record of seven generations — her father and the two hired men had yelled like Indians, with glee. It was natural that cows die, and fitting. One had no need for faith in what was reasonable, because they would survive. Faith was for what made no sense. She said again, with conviction: “He’ll destroy us.”

But Henry shook his head, squinting at her, “No, he’ll save us.”

And instantly Callie knew, in the mind-fogging heat, that he was right.

He got up early, the following morning, and most of the day he helped her in the diner. But he went on eating, and nothing she did was any use.

6

All Old Man Judkins knew was this: that in George Loomis’s barn, among spinning wheels and casques and antique farm tools, half-hidden under an old tarpaulin, there stood a pink and purple goatcart, the rear end shaken or smashed to bits, the spokes of the left rear wheel broken. Maybe someone had run into it, maybe it had gone over a cliff; he couldn’t tell. And he knew, too, that whenever anyone asked him about her, George Loomis said he’d never seen the Goat Lady — which sounded reasonable enough, except for that goatcart he had in the barn. For what would even the Goat Lady want on Crow Mountain? She’d have had to pull off the main highway and travel two miles up steep, winding gravel road, beechwoods on either side of her, an occasional sharply sloping haylot, ahead of her nothing but more steep road, beechwoods, haylots, one or two abandoned-looking houses and, off in the woods, out of sight from the road but marked by a blue and white state historical marker, a crumbling pre-Revolutionary lookout tower.

He’d stumbled on the cart by accident. The odds against anybody else’s stumbling onto it, or knowing what it was in that barnful of junk — especially since nobody ever came here — were a thousand-to-one. He’d been out walking one morning, as usual, because of a theory he had about arthritis — a theory he’d picked up from Albertus Magnus’s Egyptian Secrets years ago — and, as he did sometimes, he’d decided to turn up Old Joseph Napoleon Road, for the red raspberries and the view of the valley and to see how the tower was holding up. He was thirsty when he got to George Loomis’s place, partly thirsty for ginger water, partly for talk, so he went up to George’s door. There was nobody home. He went out to the cowbarn but that was empty too, the stables swept clean and powdered with lime, the rear doors wide open to let in the sun and air, and so he went on through the cowbarn and over to the old horsebarn, now storage-shed, and there he saw the goatcart. He was tired from walking, every blamed bone in his body aching, and he sat down on the flat rock by the door and pulled a timothy shoot and chewed the end. When the timothy shoot got stringy he took out his pipe, stoked it, and lit it. On principle, he did not speculate, merely looked around him at the farm.

It looked like a nigger’s place. The fences were bad, the barbwire strung loosely, toggled to the fenceposts with baling wire — because, no doubt, you couldn’t both nail and stretch with just one arm — and the weeds along the fencelines hadn’t been cut in at least three years. The hayfield dropping away from where he sat was eroded and pitted, too rough to get over with a tractor by now, and the hay in it was brown, with bright patches of mustard weed, and long past prime, no good even for pasture, even if he somehow got a fence around it. The beehives at the foot of the hill looked abandoned. And the place was dry, of course. To the right of where Old Man Judkins sat, up the slope to the cowbarn from the tractor-shed, the barnyard was so dry it was powdery, like a hogpen that hasn’t been used in years, or like ashes. Birds had overrun the place, both good and bad, pigeons, sparrows, woodpeckers, starlings, chippies, swallows, finches, robins. The beanloft would be caked with their droppings, the granary thick with nests, even down in the oats. There was no water at all in the big iron tub, and no gutting of the ground below from spillover, which meant George Loomis was taking it easy on the watering these days, maybe because his well was low, maybe because it was dry already and he was hauling his water in in milkcans, paying money for it, or promising to pay with labor — if he had that much nerve.

He waited for the pipe to grow cool in his hand, then got up, stiff from sitting so long, his rear end numb, and went over to the burdocks growing by the side of the tractor-shed. He picked four leaves and laid them out inside his hat, with excessive care, then he put on the hat and started home.

That night he went up to George Loomis’s place again, not walking this time but driving his truck. He wore the same clothes he always wore, bib overalls, frock, the disintegrating straw hat, his pipe in his teeth. The lights were all out, as usual, but in the high, rounded kitchen windows he could see the flicker of the television. Old Man Judkins knocked, then leaned one hand on the cool brick of the wall and waited. The air around him was breathless and muggy, and the music from the TV sounded unnaturally loud, like water rushing down a gorge. “You’d better sit down for this,” a man’s voice said, and then a woman’s voice: “Something’s happened to Walter! Oh, please! You’ve got to tell me!” Old Man Judkins knocked again and, abruptly, the sound went off but not the picture.

George Loomis called from the middle of the room, “Who is it?”

“Fred Judkins,” he said. He took his pipe from between his teeth in case he should need to say it again, more clearly. But he heard the clump of George Loomis’s boot-brace coming. The door opened.

“ ’Mon in,” George said.

Old Man Judkins took off his hat.

For maybe fifteen seconds they looked at each other in the near darkness as if George had been expecting him; then Old Man Judkins went past him and over to the table. There was only one chair that looked safe to sit on, the wired-up, straight-backed chair facing the television, and George went into the living room for another, one of his mother’s antiques, spindly and black, with flowers and birds painted on it. When he came back he said, “Whiskey?” He had a glass of his own on the table.

“No thanks,” Old Man Judkins said. “Milk, mebby, if you got it.”

George went over to the icebox, carried the pewter milkpitcher over to the sink and took a peanut butter glass from the drain-rack. He brought over cottage cheese and jam and two china dishes and two paper-thin, tarnished spoons. Then, formally, they both sat down.

“Long time since you come up here,” George said.

“Yes it is.”

They looked at the table between them. They’d traded work in the old days — not George and Fred Judkins but Fred Judkins and George’s father. Old Man Judkins could remember when George Loomis was no bigger than Henry’s boy was now — and exactly as much like an elf or an angel or any other natural thing — crawling around on the floor while his mother worked bread dough right here at this table. Long time, he thought, and nodded. In the corner of the living room that he could see from where he sat, he could make out the shiny arm of an elephantine, old-fashioned couch, a table with a bird cage on it, and a lamp with Tiffany glass.

“How have you been?” George said.

“I still get around,” he said.

Their faces were white, with no light but the flicker of the television. They looked like dead men returned after a long time to an empty house to say some trifling, insignificant thing they’d forgotten to say in time. But they didn’t say it. Old Man Judkins relit his pipe, and George Loomis said, “Still living there with your daughter, Jud?”

“No, didn’t work out. Got a room over Bill Llewellyn’s now. Better all ’round.”

“I bet you miss the old farm, eh?” He lifted his glass and waited, respectful.

Old Man Judkins nodded. “ ’Deed I do.”

George grinned. “You give me about three dollars and you can have this place.” He drank.

“Ain’t worth it, George.”

“That’s the truth.”

The pipe had gone out again and Old Man Judkins lit another match, but he forgot to hold it over the bowl; he was watching the silent television — a man in a cavalry uniform looking through field glasses at a hill. George looked over too.

The quiet made Old Man Judkins remember something, but for a long time he couldn’t think what it was. Then at last it came to him. Steam. The old black steam tractor made no sound at all, sitting there opposite the thrashing machine, headed up. When they threw in the pulley the thrashing machine would begin to move, slowly at first, like something alive just beginning to wake up, the feeders rising and falling in a kind of sawing motion, utterly soundless, and then the team would bring the wagon over, that too almost soundless — the click of harness buckles, the creak of a wheel — and by now the feeders would be moving fast, a kind of whir like a ball on a string, and the crew would start working, a man on the bagger and one on the platform, two more men up on the wagon, pitching, a couple of boys hauling the grain off and bringing up new bags, no sound but from time to time the not-loud shouts of the men telling stories, joking while they worked, and the steady whir and the feeders catching the unthrashed wheat with a chìg-uff, chig-uff, chig-uff.

“I ought to come see you sooner,” Old Man Judkins said. “Folks get out of touch.”

“My fault as much as yours,” George said.

Not speculating, on principle, raising no questions, making no suggestions, Old Man Judkins watched the picture on the television, wondered vaguely what was happening, and finished his glass of milk. Out of a clean, cool waterfall came a pack of cigarettes. At last he stood up. “Long time, George,” he said.

“Too long,” George said. He stretched out his hand and the old man took it.

Then Fred Judkins went home.

In his room, sitting down in front of his turned-off coal-oil heater, the window-fan roaring, Old Man Judkins got out his pipe, cleaned it, stoked it. He knew that from time to time he would wonder again why the Goat Lady’s cart was up in George’s shed; he knew that despite his principles he’d be molested from time to time by doubts. Maybe the answer would come up some time in a conversation, or maybe someone else would stumble onto it, some loudmouth gossip or righteous fool from town, and he would find out. But probably not. No matter.

After a time he said, pointing his pipe at the reflection of himself looking in, dubious, through the nearer window, “Maybe there’s such a thing as a heaven and hell. If there is, a man has a right to go where he’s contracted for. I wouldn’t mind going to hell if I thought I’d earned it. Better than getting a last-minute pardon, as if everything you did was no account, any more than a joke.”

He glanced over his shoulder as if thinking he might have been overheard. The room was empty. “There is no heaven or hell,” he said. “That’s a scientific fact, and there’s the end of it.”

He set his teeth down firmly on the pipe stem.

7

He lay in bed on his back in the muggy night heat, his hand under his head, smoking without ever touching the cigarette except to change it for a new one, the radio on the commode playing the American Airlines all-night concert, far away and tinny, interrupted once every hour for news, the same news over and over, the same voice: Albany. Tonight eight counties have been officially declared disaster areas. In his press conference this evening, Governor Harriman said—

There were flies in the room, the screens all shot. Beside the radio, a stack of paperback books, the loaded ash tray.

George Loomis lay perfectly still, as if tranquil. He was clean-shaven and combed, and the sheet was drawn over his bad foot, the good foot lying in the open, as though in this isolated mountain house he expected some visitor. But his mind was in a turmoil, struggling against thought.

“There are no disasters,” his grandfather had said, “God moves in strange ways.” But his mother was dying, so he’d gotten home from Korea on leave, shocked to find himself moved by her dying. He’d been young then, a romantic. Her face was sunken, and she drooled now, an effect of the stroke, and her ugliness made him see that she had been beautiful once and that he’d loved her. When she died his father said, “What shall we do?” and he had said nothing. Bury the dead. When she was embalmed, though, her face filled out and she wasn’t as bad as she’d been before, almost beautiful in the casket with its ridiculous window for the worms to look through. In carne corruptible incorruptionem He had not wept or wanted to, even at the graveside, but afterward he had gotten drunk, or rather sick, and had stood on a table at the Silver Slipper intoning Ovid:

Exitus auspicio gravior: nam nupta per herbas. …

For in those days there was still poetry. Still music, too. You would listen all night to the music your friendly American Airlines brought to you for your listening pleasure, and you would be pleased. Yet it was sound, even now; more comforting than silence. God bless you, friendly American Airlines. Into your hands I commend myself.

Then the memory flushed through him again, his headlights dipping over the crest of the hill as they’d done without harm ten thousand times, the incredible circus cart there in his road, straddling the crown, and again in his mind he hit the brakes with all his might and yanked at the wheel and heard the noise resounding like thunder through the glens. When that memory was over he saw Fred Judkins at his door again, nodding, sucking on the pipe, and after a minute the old man took off his hat. (But too late now to tell anyone, and no doubt too late from the beginning. An accident, one in an infinite chain.)

The American Airlines had chosen Scheherazade for him. He tried to listen, or rather he pretended to try to listen, consciously playing an empty role … no emptier, he thought, than others.

He ground out the last of his cigarettes and snapped out the light. In the darkness the music, like the heat, drew nearer, coming from all parts of the room at once. He rolled over on his stomach, the side of his head on his hand now, and closed his eyes. There had been birds circling above the back ravine. He’d been alarmed, seeing them, wondering who else might be seeing. Before that he’d been alarmed by the knock of the Watkins Man. But all this would pass.

(At the Dairy Queen in Slater there had been two young girls, strangers to him. One of them had smiled. She had long hair — both of them had long hair, one blonde, one dark, and they wore no lipstick. They were pretty, poised between child and woman, so pretty his heartbeat had quickened a little, and he’d imagined how they would look in those pictures you could buy in Japan, coarse rope cutting their wrists and breasts and thighs. The instant he thought it, his stomach went sour. They were young, pure: beautiful with innocence, yet corruptible. The one who smiled invited it. She was hungry for it. Serpentis dente.)

He twisted onto his back suddenly and sat up, soaking in sweat. “Please us,” he whispered. He could feel the memory of the accident coming over him, and he got up to look for a smokable butt in an ash tray, and some bourbon.

8

They’d all heard somehow (this was three nights later) of Nick Blue’s prediction. There was no more sign of rain now than there’d been all day: The clouds were piled up like tumbling mountains, blocking out the stars, but the dry breeze still blew, light. If the crickets were still it meant only that all signs fail. They talked though about how Nick Blue had a kind of sense (Nick Blue wasn’t there), and about how he’d known three weeks beforehand when the blizzard was coming, the year before last. If he’d said the rain would come tonight, then it was coming. Eight-thirty passed, and then nine-thirty, and the talk went on, more tense now — sharp against the dull moan of the fans — as though they were talking to keep themselves from noticing. Around ten-thirty George Loomis came in, and as he came over to the counter, the brace clumping on the wooden floor, the empty sleeve hanging free, they said, “Well, what you think, George?” “I didn’t throw on no raincoat,” he said. “That ought to bring it,” Jim Millet said. George said, “I’ll tell you one thing for certain: if it comes it’ll hit every farm in this country but mine.” They laughed — howled like wolves — though each of them had said the same thing in one way or another, taking pride in his singular bad luck — and they went back to their talk of Nick Blue and the blizzard two years ago and then to the time when it didn’t rain till the middle of September, in 1937. The talk got louder and at eleven-thirty the breeze was still blowing. Then Lou Millet said, “Henry, you old devil.”

Callie looked up. He was standing in the doorway, filling it, able to pass through it all, it seemed, only by a trick of her vision. Jimmy came out from behind his father’s right leg and around the counter, and she picked him up and put him on the stool by the cash register. “What are you doing up this time of night?” she said. But she kissed his cheek, holding his head to keep from pulling away.

“Daddy let me,” he said.

“Henry, you ought to be ashamed,” she said. But she dropped it. He was looking out into the darkness, and she knew why he was here. Nick Blue had been wrong, and they’d all believed him, and when the disappointment, embarrassment came, Henry wanted to be here. Because they’re neighbors, she thought. All at once she knew how it was going to be when they realized what fools they’d been. She understood for the first time (but wordlessly) Henry’s rage: It was not a little thing they’d come here expecting, and not something unduly fine, either (“No chance any more of winning,” Old Man Judkins had said. “They just try and survive”). That much, surely, they had a right to expect. And so they’d come here with high spirits, expecting not salvation but merely rain to recover the corn and a little of the hay; but they were going to see they’d made fools of themselves, that any dignity they thought they had was a word, empty air, and to act on the assumption that they had any rights in this world whatever, even the rights of a spider, to survive, was to turn themselves into circus clowns, creatures stuffed with old rags and straw who absurdly struggled to behave like human beings and who, whether or not they succeeded, were ridiculous. All this Callie knew, not in words but in the lines of Henry’s face, and she wanted to leave so she wouldn’t have to watch it when it happened.

It was quarter-to-twelve. Emery Jones’ hired man lit up, his buck-teeth gleaming, and he said: “Nick said it would come today. That means it’s going to be here in fifteen minutes.” He seemed to have no inkling of what a crazy thing it was to say. But they did. Old Man Judkins looked at his empty cup as though he’d just noticed a bug in it, and Jim Millet put his hat on and stood up. Ben Worthington, Jr., laid down the punchkey he was playing with and calmly, thoughtfully, pushed his fist through the board, then drew out his wallet. It was bulging with the money he’d gotten for his wheat and would be needing all this winter. “I’d like to buy that clock,” he said.

“Ben, that’s crazy,” Callie said. “Forget it. We’ll tell them it was an accident. Please.”

But he shook his head. He threw the coat he had no need for over his shoulder and went to the register. Callie stood helpless a minute, then pulled the square, green check-pad from her belt and leaned on the counter to figure how much it came to, and then Henry was standing at her elbow. “Let it go, Callie,” he said. Then, with a grim laugh, “It’s on the house, Ben.”

Ben glared as though it wasn’t August he hated after all, but Henry Soames, as if Henry had denied him the vote.

Henry was saying, “The same for all of you. Tonight it’s all on me.”

“Some other time, Henry,” Lou Millet said.

But Henry was possessed, dangerous. “I mean it,” he said. “Tonight we’re not taking a dime.” He hit his chest three times with his thumb, his face incredibly serious; none of them laughed. “I mean it,” he said again. “Today’s my birthday.” He yelled it as though he were angry. “Truth. Callie, give everybody cake.”

“Hear, O Israel,” George Loomis said, “today is the day he takes upon himself. …” But Henry’s face was dark red, and George shut up.

“We’re going to sing ‘Happy Birthday, Dear Henry’,” Henry roared, not smiling at all, forgetting to smile, his fat fists clenched, and Callie was saying in a whisper that cut through Henry’s roar, “Henry, stop it!”

“All together,” he yelled, putting a cookie in his mouth, raising his arms.

And all at once, probably out of pure shock at first, they were doing it, cold sober as they were. And then a vast and meaningless grief replaced the shock. Tears streamed down Lou Millet’s face, and he was choked up so badly he couldn’t bring out more than every fourth word. In the beginning there were only three voices — Henry’s, Old Man Judkins’, Jim Millet’s — then more: Emery Jones’ hired man singing tenor, almost soprano but in harmony; Ben Worthington, Jr., whining out baritone, sweat running down his throat; even George Loomis more or less singing, with a pained expression, droning like the bad note on a banjo. Lou Millet stood up. They were singing it through again, but it seemed to have come to him that he had to get home, it was foolishness sitting here half the night, his wife at home alone with the kids. He left, hurrying, and after a minute Ben Worthington, Jr., picked up his wallet and followed him out. Old Man Judkins stood up after that, and then Jesse Behmer. Henry stood in the middle of the floor like a giant, slowly bobbing up and down waving his arms. His forehead shone and the belly of his shirt was pasted to his skin.

Behind him, his face as solemn as his father’s — but solemn without weight, like a serious toy — Jimmy bobbed up and down too, quickly and lightly, waving his arms.

When midnight came, only George Loomis was still there. Henry sat down, panting, sucking air in and out through his mouth. Callie brought him a pill. “Well!” he said. He tried to laugh, but he couldn’t get his breath.

For a long time after that nobody spoke. Finally George Loomis said solemnly, “Whooey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Henry said.

George Loomis looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

Then George said: “But I’ll tell you something. I’m beginning to believe in the Goat Lady.” He said it lightly, but a hint of uneasiness came over him as soon as it was out.

“You saw her, didn’t you,” Callie said at once, knowing the direct accusation would shock him but suddenly not caring.

George went white.

“What happened?” Callie said.

They sat like people precariously balanced over a chasm, and everything depended on what George decided. Henry sat blankly, pulling at the fat below his chin, not eating the cookie he held in his left hand. George Loomis stared at his cigarette. He could tell them and be free (she saw what he was thinking) but then he would never be free again, because then there would be somebody who knew his guilt, shame, embarrassment, whatever it was. Except that maybe that was what it was to be free: to abandon all shame, all dignity, real or imagined. She remembered the funeral for George’s mother, how they’d lowered the coffin carefully as if to preserve even in death her decorous, more than bodily virginity, and how they’d put the dirt in gently to avoid cracking the window through which the blind earth stared at her face.

At last George said, “No. I never saw her.” He stood up.

Henry looked at him, pitying him, George Loomis no more free than a river or a wind, and, as if unaware that he was doing it, Henry broke the cookie in his hand and let the pieces fall. She realized with a start that it was final: George had saved them after all. She felt herself going weightless, as though she were fainting. And something said in her mind, as though someone stood behind her, whispering hurriedly in her ear: Nevertheless, all shall be saved. She thought: What? And again: All. Everything. Even the sticks and stones. Nothing is lost. She thought: How? Why should sticks and stones be saved? But the waking dream was passing quickly, a thing so fragile that she would not even remember tomorrow that she’d had it. The room was suddenly filled with ghosts, not only Simon, but Henry’s father, huge as a mountain and gentle as a flower, and Callie’s great-great-grandfather, with his arm suspenders, an almanac closed over one finger, and Old Man Kuzitski, drunk as a lord, and Mrs. Stamp, irascible and pretty, with a blue-black umbrella, and arthritic, bushy-browed old Uncle John, and there were more, a hundred more she didn’t know, solemn and full of triumphant joy; and the space in front of the diner was filled, from the door to the highway to the edge of the woods, and the woods were full, an enormous multitude solemn and triumphant, and she saw in the great crowd the pink and purple (transformed, magnificent, regally solemn) of the Goat Lady’s cart. They vanished. Henry stood out by the gas pumps now, gray-looking and old in the pinkish glow of the neon. She saw the lights of George Loomis’s truck go on and watched him back down toward the road, then pull forward, turning. She watched his taillights move up the hill and, dipping over the top, snap out. Henry came back.

“What did happen?” she asked in the amazing stillness.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you think the Goat Lady—?”

“I don’t know.”

Jimmy lay asleep below the cash register, like something (a bag of potatoes) turned in as a trade. Henry lifted him gently, without waking him, while Callie locked the door and turned out the lights.

Sometime during the night, while they all slept, missing it, or missing anyway the spectacular beginning that they’d surely earned the right to see (but the dog saw it, rising slowly to his feet and tilting his gray, giant head), thunder cracked, shaking the mountains, and it rained.