The Long Home

1

William Tell Oliver came out of the woods into a field the Mormons used to tend but which was now grown over in sassafras and cedar, the slim saplings of sassafras thick as his arm, but not as thick as his arms had once been, he reminded himself, he was old and his flesh had fallen away some. He didn’t dwell on that though, reckoned himself lucky to still be around.

Oliver was carrying a flour sack weighted with ginseng across his shoulder. His blue shirt was darkened in the back and plastered to his shoulders with sweat. It had been still in the thick summer woods and no breeze stirred there, but here where the field ran downhill in a stumbling landscape of brush and stone a wind blew out of the west and tilted the saplings and ran through the leaves bright as quicksilver.

He halted in the shade of a cottonwood and unslung the bag and dropped it and looked up, shading his eyes. The sky was a hot cobalt blue but westward darkened in indelible increments to a lusterless metallic sky, the color he imagined the seas might turn before a storm. A few birds passed beneath him with shrill, broken cries as if they divined some threat implicit in the weather and he thought it might blow up a rain.

Standing so with his upper face in the shadow, the full weight of the sun fell on his chin and throat, skin so weathered and browned by the sun and aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years that it had taken on the texture of some material finally immutable to the changes of the weather, as if it had been evolving all his life and ultimately became a kind of whang leather impervious to time or elements, corded, seamed, and scarred, pulled tight over the cheekbones and blade of nose that gave his face an Indian cast.

He hunkered in a shady spot to rest. He had been smoking his pipe in the woods to keep the gnats away from his eyes and now he took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the fire from it against a stone, taking care that each spark was extinguished, for the woods and fields had been dry since spring and he was a man of a thousand small cautions.

Below him Hovington’s tin roof baking in the sun, the bright stream passing beneath the road, the road itself a meandering red slash bleeding through a world of green. He sat quietly, getting his breath back, an old man watching with infinite patience, no more of hurry about him than you would find in a tree or a stone. The place was changing. A new structure had been built of concrete blocks and its whitewash gleamed harshly. New-looking light poles followed the road now, electrical, wires strung to the end of the house.

Yet some of strain of second sight from Celtic forebears saw in the lineaments of house and barn the graduations of hill and slope and road, something more profound, some subtle aberration of each line, some infinitesimal deviation from the norm that separated this place from any other, made it sacred, or cursed: the Mormons had proclaimed it sacred, built their church there. The whitecaps had cursed it with the annihilation, with the rows of graves their descendants would just as soon the roads grew over.

All his life he’d heard folks say he saw lights here at night, they called them mineral lights, corpse candles. Eerie balls of phosphorescence rising over the money the Mormons had buried. Oliver doubted there was any money buried or ever had been, but he smiled when he remembered Lyle Hodges. Hodges had owned the place before Hovington bought it for the back taxes and Oliver guessed that Hodges had dug up every square foot of the place malleable with pick and shovel. It had been his vocation, his trade, he went out with his tools every morning the weather permitted, working at it the way a man might work a farm or a job in a factory, studying by night his queer homemade maps and obscure markings, digging like a demented archaeologist searching for the regimen and order of elder times while his wife and son tried to coax crops from the soil that would ultimately produce only untaxed whiskey. Even now Oliver could have found the old man’s brush-covered mounds of earth, pockmarked craters like half-finished graves abandoned in hasty flight. Hodges worked on until his death, his dreams sustaining him. Oliver reckoned there was nothing wrong with that though his own dreams had not weathered as well.

In the upper left quadrant of his vision a car appeared towing a rising wake of white dust along the drybaked road. As it drew nearer he recognized it as a police car and some intimation of drama touched him, the prelude to some story, and he seated himself to watch.

It was a silent tableau that unfolded below him: the car stopped in Hovington’s (Hardin’s, he thought) frontyard and a deputy named Cooper got out, stood for a moment in the timeless way cops stand, sauntered to the porch with a halfarrogant and halfdeferential. Hardin came out. They stood talking for a minute while the deputy gestured excitedly with his hands, apparently conveying some information of importance though no word of it reached the old man’s ears.

He didn’t need it anyway. Hardin took out his wallet and counted money into Cooper’s waiting hands. Well, well, Oliver thought, he just might see a show here. Oliver was never surprised anymore and sometimes thought he’d seen all there was to see, but nonetheless he remained beneath the cottonwood watching. He took a flat pint bottle out of his pocket and rinsed his mouth with the tepid water, spat, drank. He thought vaguely of the cold spring behind his house but he was loath to leave.

The police car left. Almost immediately the hollow was vibratory with activity, a hornet’s nest slammed with a stone: Hardin loped across the yard to the sleek black Packard and cranked it and backed it to the porch’s edge, got out with the motor running, all four doors standing open, and unlocked the turtledeck and raised it. Pearl came through the door of the house with a case of half-pints, stowed it in the car. Hovington’s daughter, her long dark hair swinging with her motion, hurried out with a cardboard carton. Above the throaty idling of the Packard he could hear the almost constant slap of the screendoor and occasional voices, Hardin giving orders.

The back door sprang open and two uniformed soldiers and a woman staggered into the yard across it towards the thickening greenery around the abyss. One of the soldiers stumbled and fell into the branch and arose swearing and bright shards of the woman’s laughter fell on Oliver’s ears like a gift from a dubious source.

When the car was loaded Hardin and the girl got in and the car pulled away, going east, away from town.

After a while the breeze tilted the sedge toward him and dried the sweat on his face to a salty glaze he could feel drawing and tightening on his skin. Swift clouds chased shadows across the field. Here a bottleneck of sky showed between the hills, dark and light clouds lay in alternating layers like varicolored liquid that would not mix. The air chilled and he got up stiffly and took up his homecarved walking stick. As he arose he saw like some byproduct of imminent storm three cards pacing themselves along the roadbed, the sheriff and two cars of the Tennessee state troopers. As they wheeled into the yard there was a brief squall from the siren and they out and started walking rapidly towards the house. Thunder rumbled, faint and far off. Pearl came out and stood leaning against the porch support with her arms crossed, just waiting with an air of stoic forbearance. The old man shook his head and grinned to himself before he turned back toward the woods.

The trees were in motion, and the wind murmuring baleful in the clashing branches. Past their waving green tops what he could see of the sky was lowering, the air taking on a quality of depth, of weight, a world under roiled water. He moved through a heightened reality now, imbued with the urgency the air conveyed. Lightning flared silent and sourceless, eerily phosphorescent in the unreal green of the woods, and he quickened his steps, his movement stiff and jerky, a comic figure resurrected from an oldtime film.

He turned down a footpath, slowing his descent tree to tree, and warily crossed a barbed-wire fence into a flat bottom tangled with weeds and went up a path past his corncrib. As he came out into the barnlot he could see beyond the worn gray of his house the rain begin, past the pale dust of the road where a pastel field stretched to a darker border of woods he saw the horizon dissolve in a slanting wash of rain and the jerk of weeds advancing toward him portentous with motion.

He went hastily in the back door just as the first drops were singing on the tin. The room was dark and cluttered, shapes softly emergent like benign familiars from the cool ectoplasm of shadow. He emptied the flour sack of ginseng into an enamel washpan and turned to the stove, took from the warming closet a pan of beans. He dipped some onto a plate and too bread left from breakfast and set the plate atop the stove reservoir and filed an earthenware mug with cold coffee. He took up the plate again and with it and the coffee crossed from the long kitchen to the living room, stepping down where the level changed, through a room almost as dark as the kitchen, mismatched oddments of furniture, random debris beached by time.

He kicked open the latchless screen door and crossed onto the porch. The noise intensified, the porch was unceiled and the drumming on the tin precluded any other sound, even the wind whipping the trees seemed to do so in silence.

He ate in a swing hung by lengths of chain from the porch rafters and set the plate by his foot on the board floor when he had finished and slowly drank the coffee, staring past the earth yard where the road had gone to mud. The rain fell in sheets, sluicing off the unguttered tin, dissipated to spray the wind took. Thunder boomed almost directly above him, a few scattered pellets of rain fell and lay gleaming white as pearls in the mud. The trees were in constant motion, all the world he could see was animate. The chaff-filled air seemed electrical, unreal.

For a time he sat and listened to the soporific rain and when he had drunk the coffee he set the cup down atop the plate. The end of the swing nearest the yard darkened with moisture and drops of spray dampened the old man’s clothes but he did not move. The frenzy of the storm subsided and the intensity of the rain leveled off, the woods across the fields gained clarity like a scene viewed through clearing glass or turmoil constrained to stillness. They grew drowsy. Finally he slept, scarred big-knuckled hands resting on his knees, head leaning against a length of taut chain. From time to time his eyelids quivered with the progression of bits of dreams, dreams of when he was young, fiery dreams of iron furnaces and trains, dreams of walls and bars and time built as carefully as a mason might erect a structure in stone.

He awoke late in the afternoon, a dull drizzle leaden on the roof and the air smelling fresher and cooler. He took out a pouch of roughcut tobacco and began to pack his pipe. He lit it with a kitchen match and sat bemusedly smoking and letting the balance of the afternoon wear itself away. He had the air of someone used to waiting.

All there was to show he had ever farmed was a motley collection of old equipment about the yard, castoff discs and haymowers and archaic-looking scratchers like something abandoned by early man, all slowly dissolving into rust. It had been years but still he felt some affinity for the earth and the clocking of its seasons. There was something reassuring about the rain, what grass there was in his yard had been dying in circular patches and even the trees had begun to look stunned and wilted. He’d secretly suspected some turning away of the gods, unconcern or incompetence in high places.

Between four and five o’clock the Winer by came by and Oliver was still out to watch him pass. In actual fact he had been awaiting him. Time sometimes weighed heavily on his hands and there were weeks that passed when the only words he spoke were to young Nathan Winer. He watched the boy approach with obvious affection. He had had a son once himself and though the boy, had he lived, would be in middle age, he always thought of him as being Winer’s age.

When Winer was parallel with the house Oliver hailed him: “Boy, you better get in out of this mess.”

Winer was sodden, his outsize shirt and pants flopping and his hair plastered thinly to his skull. He obediently turned from the road and crossed the yard to the porch’s edge. In places the mud was shoemouth deep and sucked at his feet.

“Get in here out of that.”

“It’s too late now,” Winer said. “I don’t see how I can get any wetter.” But he stepped onto the porch and leaned against a support. He pushed his hair back out of his face and wiped his eyes on a dripping sleeve. There was a curiously temporary look about him as if he must soon be off. “It’s fell a flood, ain’t it?”

“Like a cow on a flat rock,” Oliver agreed. “You been workin out in this today?”

“No, we’ve been inside cleaning out the poultry house. Just shoveling it up and loading trailers.”

“Looks like old man Weiss could’ve run you home.”

“I guess he just didn’t think about it.”

“He’d’ve thought of it if he had to walk two miles through it,” the old man said. “You want somethin dry to put on?”

“It’d just get wet again. Anyway, it don’t bother me. I don’t reckon I’ll melt, I never have.”

“Still, it wouldn’t’ve hurt him. I had a car I’d take ye myself but I never owned one.”

“I don’t mind walking.”

“Well, I don’t reckon it hurts a man, I’ve done it all my life. Or so far anyway. You want me to heat up the coffee?”

“I got to get on. It’s getting dark early tonight. Cooled off some too.”

“Maybe a man can sleep then,” Oliver said. “Here lately, it’s been so hot I ain’t been able to get to sleep till two or three o’clock in the mornin.”

The boy rose. “Go with me.”

“I guess I better set around here.” Oliver seemed to be scrutinizing the boy’s feet. He got up stiffly from the swing. “I got somethin I been aimin to give you if it wouldn’t make you mad. You reckon it would?”

“I doubt it.” Winer grinned.

The old man went back into the house, Winer following. “I bought me a pair of shoes through the mail a year or two ago and then couldn’t wear em. I expect my feet’s about through growin too. I been kindly keepin a eye on them feet of yourn and I believe they’ve growed a size or two since spring.”

They passed through the front room past the dead stove the old man kept up winter and summer and stepped down into the long, narrow lean-to that served as the old man’s bedroom. The room was dark and lowceilinged and Winer stood uncertainly for a moment letting his eyes adjust to the cloistered gloom and watching shapes gain outline and solidity, ephemeral shapes halftransient lock themselves into recognizable form: an old chifforobe whose dusty mirror presented him with a warped sideshow representation of himself, an old rustcolored iron bed, boxes stacked on boxes nigh to the ceiling, old lavender and gray Sunday dresses fading and shapeless on their hangers, faint scent of lemon verbena out of some other time, or life. Oliver fetching up from the bottom of the chifforobe a newlooking pair or black hightop shoes, freshly removed from their box and tissue paper like some memento covertly hidden from time.

“Here we go,” the old man said. He handed the shoes to Winer. “Hold em up agin ye shoes there and measure em.”

“I believe they’ll fit. How much do you want for them?”

“Nothin.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Take em on. They ain’t doin nobody no good settin there. I don’t need em noway.”

“I’d rather pay you.”

“I may get you to sell my sang for me some Saturday. Either my legs ain’t what they used to be or they keep scootin town a little farther west ever year.”

After the fetid room the air outside seemed fresh and clean. With the shoebox turned upside down and tucked under his arm Winer stepped into the rain. He crossed under the pear tree through the spate of discarded scrapiron that lay like mutant fruit and onto the road. Oliver sat back in the swing. The chain creaked, tautened. He watched Winer out of sight beyond the hedge broke in a curve of the road and the road ascended. The road crossed the creek there and he could hazily see the wooden bridge. Then dusk moved in unnoticed with the rain and a little wind blew chill out of the west and stung him with spray. Winer disappeared in blue dusk. Dark gathered in the shadow of the pear tree and crept toward the porch and Oliver rose and went into the house to light his lamp.

These evenings Winer’s mother would be in the front room awaiting him and she would be sitting motionless on the rocker before the dead fireplace. Tonight she had the lamp lit on the mantle and she sat at the repair of some garment made soft and nigh shapeless by repeated washing and she did not even look up when he came in. A sallow young-old woman whose highcheeked face looked somehow androgynous, nunlike perhaps or resembling an ascetic priest at some vague rites. Coronaed by the yellow halo of light she looked unreal, a ghost at some vigil, faded sepia image on a funeral-home calendar.

His room was in the attic and he climbed a ladder to it, she did not even ask him about the box. He stowed the shoes in a wooden trunk then sat at the foot of his bed a moment looking at them. He figured Oliver could wear them. He sat staring at them in a curiously hopeless way and then closed the lid.

The loft room was unbearable during the summer and Winer had taken to sleeping wherever the heat would let him. Tonight the window was open and the attic cool. Winds had blown the curtains off and they lay on the floor, gauzy specters twice lifeless and crumpled. The floor was damp with blown rain. The roof formed an A above him, with the tin that comprised both roof and ceiling pockmarked by nails that had missed the rafter, and when he laid a hand against the tin it felt cold and damp. He changed hurriedly into dry clothes and went back down the ladder.

She seemed long taken by some vow of silence or a malfunction of whatever produced words or inspired them. He didn’t speak either. He knew she would talk sooner or later, conquer momentarily whatever had closed her lips, anger or simply boredom with one day the same as any other.

She’d left his plate on the table with another upturned over it and he lit the kitchen lamp and sat down to eat. He ate hurriedly, seemingly without tasting the food, fried okra and greenbeans and new potatoes, fending away onehanded moths and bugs drawn by the light or driven in the open window by the windy rain. A candlefly guttered in the quaking heat above the globe, plummeted to the orange flame, convulsed, died in silent white agony behind the hot glass.

She was standing in the door watching him eat. “Did he pay you?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s Friday. He pays off every Friday.” He pushed his plate back.

“I keep lookin for him to cheat you. You just a boy and him in a position to take advantage.”

It was an old argument and he didn’t care to reopen it. “If he does it’s just me,” he said. He arose, fumbling the money from his pocket, offered it to her. She took it wordlessly, he watched it disappear into her apron pocket.

When he had first gone to work for Weiss she had raged against it: a boy shouldn’t have to do a man’s work for a boy’s pay. All she said now was that if he had a proper father to look after him things would never have come to this. To such a desperate pass. She looked at him now as if all this was some contrivance of his own.

“Just walk out and pull the door to,” she said with an old bitterness. “Gone and never a word to nobody.”

That was an old argument too and if he had any words or refutation now he kept them to himself. When he was younger and easier to hurt he had said, “He never run off.”

She had gestured around the room with an expansive arm movement halftheatrical and halfdemented and shouted, “Well, do you see him anywhere? You reckon he’s behind the door playin a prank on you?” He had just watched her with eyes that were no longer child’s eyes and he had had nothing to say.

When he went up the ladder at bedtime the rain still fell and it was still cool. Feeling carefully in the dark he found a box of matches and lit the lamp and then sorted through books in a cardboard box under his bed. The bedclothes were slightly damp but after the day’s heat they felt comfortable. He lay down, positioned the lamp, and began to read, barely hearing the sibilant murmur on the tin. After a time he heard her come up the ladder and cross the floor with a kind of ratlike stealth.

“What are you doin in there?”

“Reading.”

“It’s getting late,” she said. “You blow out that lamp. Coaloil’s high.”

“All right,” he said. He got up and took a quilt from the bed and laid it across the bottom of the door to block out the light. He could hear her, satisfied, retreating back down the ladder. He read awhile longer then blew out the lamp.

He lay for a time in a weary torpor, aware that he was in bed and yet still feeling the endless motions of the shovel, scoop and throw, scoop and throw. In another part of his mind he was still occupied with acquaintances real as the denizens who peopled his day, corporeal as Weiss or William Tell Oliver. He felt a vague anticipation of Saturday and town and at length he fell asleep.

The storm sometime in the night reversed its course or its brother passed for he woke in a lull of the rain, the air leaden and motionless and the night holding its breath. Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryflies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine into wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then thunder came uttering balefully down the wall of ridges and a cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying away like roiled water.

He could not sleep. He stood at the window for a time, watching across the bottom where the storm was forming, banked lighting pulsing and limning the landscape with a black-and-silver nightmare quality.

Downstairs the windows were raised to the cool night and the house was a house of winds. It seemed enormous and barren in the dark, something abandoned to the windy reaches of space. He crossed the porch and went into the yard. The wind was stronger now and wove against the heavens a patternless and everchanging tapestry. Where three trees formed a triangle he had built a treehouse from old salvaged bridgetimbers and he climbed the ladder to it. The trees leaned their disparate ways, the treehouse creaking and popping, the branches above him a steady rushing sound.

It still was not raining. The storm passed to the south, the sky in a constant flux of electricity, sleek metallic clouds burnishing orange and pink. Ovoid and tracking west they look composed of some gleaming alloy, a vast armada visiting upon the world a plague of fire then fleeing on to some conjunction of all the world’s storms.

The treehouse rocked and yawned and here in the dark it seemed a craft adrift in roughening water, its decks tilting and sliding to the caprice of the seas, sails shredded and mast tilted and clocking like a gyroscope gone berserk: beyond it the night was unstarred, nothing for a mariner’s glass to fix upon.

Rain came like an afterthought. A belated kindness rapping at the makeshift roof. Resting on the deck with his head against the listing bulkhead he watched through the cracks the lightning grow faint and fainter, the thunder dimming away, muted by the rain. Winer half dozed, listening to the rain intensifying, spreading surcease across the dark and sleeping land.

William Tell Oliver awoke sometime in the night. The storm had passed and smoothed out to a steady downpour with an air of permanence about it. He went back to sleep and when he arose at five it was still raining. Day came halfheartedly to a grim and sunless world. It kept raining all day.

2

Motormouth Hodges had in mind specifically a radio he had seen sitting on a bedside table. By standing on tiptoe and peering through a crack in the venetian blinds he could just make it out, it had a wooden case and an expensive look about it and it was a small radio that would be easy to carry through the woods.

He had found it by accident. He’d been squirrelhunting here back in the spring and come up for a drink of water and there had been no one about, the intense craving to possess that radio had not come until later. Watching the house from his makeshift shelter of windbrought tin he had no doubt there would be other knickknacks he could use as well and he has visions of himself sitting before a cozy fire next winter listening to the wonders the radio unfolded for him.

Knowing the habits of country folk he had waited until Saturday. Through the slanting rain he had watched the pickup leave. Taking into consideration the cornerstanding and talking and lunch, then buying groceries, he figured he had about all day. He hurried anyway. He came out of his shelter in the stand of pines and down a sawbriarchoked gully to the blacktop. He walked up the highway toward the house, elaborately casual, whistling to himself, hands in pockets, only removing the right hand when a car passed him, raising it then in a perfunctory greeting. They’d think he lived here, who knew.

There was a look of well-kept prosperity about the house. It was a white two-story with a steeply gabled roof and neat green trim. An enormous hiproofed barn painted red loomed behind it and it was surrounded with newlooking farm equipment, cultivators and combines, an outsize orange tractor. A small yellow Caterpillar bulldozer he’d have started up and driven had he the time and clement weather. Beyond the barn a field of soybeans followed the curve of the road.

Prior reconnaissance had shown there were no dogs and no children so he scrambled down the embankment from the blacktop and across the drive. He followed a line of closecropped hedge to the front door, moving with some haste now, purposeful, fumbling the screwdriver out as he came.

The storm door was locked from the inside as he had known it would be. He had the hinges off and the door set aside before he noticed that the hinges of the front door were not accessible from the door jamb, apprentice burglar fallen afoul of the intricacies of doors and locks. He stood listening. All he could hear was the rain.

The back screendoor was not even latched. He came into a screened-in back porch used for the storage of a freezer and an aggregation of junk. Here he fared better. One side of the hinges was beneath the doortrim but the side screwed to the door was visible. He hurriedly backed out the woodscrews. He could feel a line of sweat moving down his ribcage. He set the door aside and glanced once toward the road, his vision of the outside world darkened by the filtering screen. A line of shade trees all but blocked the house from whatever traffic might pass on the highway. Satisfied he pocketed the screwdriver and ventured inside.

He was in a hall. The floor was some richly gleaming wood not of his acquaintance and the house smelled like furniture polish. He concentrated on a mental floorplan, trying to remember where the radio had been. He turned into a bedroom and saw immediately that he had been right: there it sat as if it had been awaiting him all this time. He unplugged it, peering about the room as he wound the cord around the radio. A great profusion of red roses climbed the wallpaper. From an oval picture frame an old hawklike man watched him with fierce and impotent anger.

Small baubles on the dresser, old, heavy, awkwardlooking jewelery he judged worthless. Feminelooking gewgaws and jars of curious potions he stood smelling. A smell of lilacs. Tubes of bright lipstick like highpowered rifle cartridges. Some of these he pocketed, telling himself his wife might use them.

He was taken with a felt fedora he found dangling on a bedpost. He tried it on, turning it this way and that, flattening the brim. Eyeing himself in the mirror, he squared his shoulders, worked his face into a sneer, made his eyes cold and implacable. “Hell no I won’t talk,” he told the face in the glass. “You just wastin my time, cop.”

Wearing the hat and carrying the radio tucked under his arm he went out of the room and up the hall and stepped into the kitchen just as a heavyset middleaged woman turned at his step from the sink. She had a plate in one hand and a soapy rag in the other. She cried out and dropped the plate.

Motormouth reeled back in shock, his eyes grown saucerlike and disbelieving in his freckled face. He made some terrorstricken sound deep in his throat and he was already whirling to run. Brandishing the dishrag like a weapon she started after him.

“They shitfire,” he cried.

He went fulltilt down the hall in a rising crescendo of sound from his tennis shoes on the polished floor. He went out the hall door and through the screened-in porch without moderating his pace. He felt the radio slip from his hands and tumble, he grasped desperately for the cord, felt the radio wedge itself between door and jamb. “Broke my radio,” the woman shrieked and he redoubled his efforts. He went through the hedge without slackening, bent over and his feet pumping madly. Ascending the bank he was running almost parallel with the ground. He crossed the blacktop swearing at a carload of startled faces that almost ran him over and went into the rainglutted bracken toward the hillside where the dark spruce beckoned.

He went into the woods running in silence save the ragged tear of his breathing and the rain in the trees. When at length he ceased he fell to earth and lay gasping for breath. For some time he lay inert and then cautiously rose to a crouch and strained for any noises of pursuit. All there was the sound of raincrows jeering at him from the sanctity of the treetops.

He looked ruefully at his fist, still clutching the plug and four or five feet of electric wire. He threw it disgustedly from him and sat for a time on a stump, still wearing the hat. A dark, inklike stain was seeping down his temples. He just sat listening to the wild hammering of his heart slowly begin to subside.

Monday Winer loaded the manure spreader and listened to the rain beat on the tarpaper roofing, for the rain to slacken so they could unload it, but it did not. In the middle of the morning Weiss came down to the chickenhouse. Herman Weiss was a short, thick little man with crinkly black hair shot through with gray. Winter and summer he wore a pith helmet and clean-pressed khakis and walking boots as if perpetually ready to join a safari should the opportunity arise. Folks said he was impossible to get along with. Hardly anyone would work for him but Winer thought him not a bad employer. Weiss had a clipped, brusque way of talking that folks didn’t take kindly to and no one knew where he had come from. They said he was a rich Jew, a hunky, and Italian. He was a white slaver, or a doperunner, or a retired motion-picture photographer, and his own tales were so convoluted and absurd that perhaps he no longer knew himself.

Winer didn’t care who he was. To Winer he was just a poultry farmer. He had three enormous chickenhouses and each housed six thousand chickens. Winer fed them twice a day, watered them morning and night. When they were nine weeks old Weiss hired a few extra hands and the chickens were caught and crated on a trailer truck and hauled away. The houses were cleaned out, a new crop started.

All Winer knew was that he halfliked Weiss. Weiss had a wry, ironic amiability that amused Winer. He did get excited. He was full of stories about far places and easy women and huge amounts and with the rain drumming on the roof, and Winer a willing audience, he told of them again.

He had a thousand tales to tell and perhaps one or two of them were even true. He was a consort of presidents and kings. Generals sought his advice on military matters, he and Blackjack Pershing had been just like that. (Taking the chalk of Pershing’s uncertain fingers, turning to the green chalkboard, signifying with dots and dashes the movement of troops across terrain contested by the maimed and the dying: No, the Germans’ll expect you here. If you’ll…) Had it not been for a crooked business associate he would have been a millionaire a hundred times over, for he had invented Coca-Cola. The formula had been stolen and sold out from under him.

“I bought one for a nickel in Topeka, Kansas,” Weiss said. “In a drugstore. It was my drink, right down to the secret ingredient. I could have wept.”

“I imagine so,” Winer said. “Did you ever see your partner again?”

“As a matter of fact I did,” Weiss said. “I saw him on State Street in Chicago in I believe it was 1922. He was driving a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and he had a blondhaired woman with him who would have altered your heartbeat. Moseby just threw up a hand at me, casual, how do you do. And kept on going…but that woman. I’d have taken her on the White House lawn had the opportunity ever presented itself.” He fell into a ruminative silence. “Or any other reasonable place of her choosing,” he said after a time.

Weiss and his wife subscribed to several magazines and once a month or so they’d bundle them up and give them to Winer. Sometimes they’d give him books they’d accumulated. Once Weiss’s wife, Alma, gave him a new copy of Sandburg’s Complete Poems. Winer’s mother viewed this habit with suspicion, she kept thinking the gifts would be held out of the boy’s pay or someday they would be tallied up and retroactively accounted for, annihilating an entire paycheck.

Another habit Weiss had that the boy liked was that about nine thirty he looked at his watch and said, “Well, let’s drink one,” and they walked to the porch of Weiss’s house. Weiss opened the old icebox he kept stocked with Coca-Cola and homemade wine. He opened Winer a Coke and poured himself a glass of strawberry wine.

Winer studied his Coca-Cola, the slow rivulets of icewater sliding down the green bottle. “Did you bottle this one?” he asked innocently. “Or just buy it at the grocery store like everybody else?”

“What?”

“I thought maybe you just ran off a batch every two or three weeks.”

Weiss studied him above the rim of the upraised wineglass. He drank lowered his glass. “Respect for your elders is a trait not to be sneered at,” he told Winer after a time.

“You might amount to something someday if you didn’t work so damned hard.” Weiss told him that morning. “A man works as hard as you do doesn’t ever have time to make something of himself.”

“Do you want your money’s worth?”

“I’ll get my money’s worth. You go at every job as if it were the last one and you’re trying to finish up. You’ve got to get out of that. There isn’t any last job. You finish one and there’s another one waiting for you. You’ve got to pace yourself.”

Winer leaned on his spade, resting. Through the screened window the sky had darkened, clouds arisen in the west.

“Most folks around here are a little different,” Weiss was saying. “You must be a throwback or something. A mutant. Those woolhats or rednecks, whatever…I’ve lived here twenty-five years and I’m still a foreigner. I guess they’re waiting to see if I stay or not.”

“I guess some of them are peculiar all right.”

“Peculiar? Trifling is the word I had in mind. I had that shack up by the mouth of the creek and rented to a fellow named Warren one time. Boy, he was industrious. He liked to sit on his front porch and watch his garden grow. Only moved when the shade did or his wife yelled supper. Used to brag about that garden. ‘Fine garden,’ he’d say. ‘Fine garden.’ I was up there once when it all come in and I think he had maybe four head of cabbage. I could have carried off the stringbeans in this helmet and only made one trip. He only had about eight kids so I don’t know what in hell he planned to do with the excess. Can it for winter, maybe. Truckcrop it out.

“And honest? While I built this house I lived over across the creek in a little place I threw up temporarily. When I moved I hired a couple of these fellows to help me. I lost a Browning automatic shotgun I wouldn’t have let go for three hundred dollars. A pair of riding boots I bought in Spain and a silver-inlaid handgun my wife gave me. You understand we’re talking about two or three hundred yards here. I hate to think what would have happened if I was moving to the west coast.”

That night Weiss took him home. “There’s nothing else do to inside,” he said. “If this mess is still going on in the morning don’t even bother to come out. I can feed myself. There’s no point in soaking yourself getting here just to wait until feeding time.”

The creek was already yellow and ominiouslooking and had picked up speed and small sticks and debris that spun in gouts of foam. The branch behind Oliver’s house came out of its banks and fanned into his piglot, festooning fenceposts and saplings with drifts of dead brush and cartires that looked like buoys left to navigate a world going to water, and from where he stood in the hall of the barn he could see it lapping upward out of the hollow.

A disgusted Dallas Hardin counted two days’ receipts and grew tired of the company of Pearl and the girl Amber Rose and went out into the rain and stood on the lip of the pit and it seemed to him that he could hear turbulent waters deep in the earth. A change in the earth’s pulse, a quickening, a curious occult change. He looked up at the leaden sky. He looked west and there was just more of the same as if the earth’s weather had coalesced in this mode. “Then rain some more, by God,” he told it.

It did. The third day the bridge between Mormon Springs and town wrenched free of its concrete pylons with shrieking of timbers and lurched into the canefield at the creek’s edge spinning lazily in the calm eddies, drifting into the swift mainstream of the creek, where it picked up speed and went spinning crazily downstream like a calliope snapped free of its moorings. Half the road was underwater now and Oliver could sit on his front porch and look off into a vast wet world, a stretch of muddy water reaching all the way across the field to the creek unbroken save by the treetrunks and the tips of the brush. He’d had to move the goats to higher ground and set pans and tincans under leaks he hadn’t even known his house had. He sat on his porch like some grim and hopedrained survivor awaiting rescue or the ultimate cessation of the waters.

Winer had followed the ridge down through the woods. “Did you ever see it rain like this?” he asked the old man.

“I expect I have,” Oliver said. “I don’t know as I’ve ever seen it keep it up this long though.”

Hardin watched the water in the branch rise. A thin line of foamy spray strung over the rim of the pit and increased even as he watched. When he came back out an hour later the hollow was filled with a rushing perpetual thunder and he could not even approach the abyss. A stream of muddy yellow water six or eight feet wide cascaded out of the hollow and he could hear it boiling and churning far down in the pit.

Later on the fourth day Hardin looked up toward the hillside where a quartet of dark and sodden figures hailed him. Four foolhardy souls driven by challenge or thirst to walk the six miles made twelve or more by twisting and turning required to keep to the ridges and out of the waterglutted roads and hollows.

These travelers were the three De Preist brothers and a young whore named Bledsoe they had picked up somewhere. They wanted something to drink.

“Wolf ain’t got a drop,” they told him. “Sold out to the last dram and can’t get no more.”

They drank up what money they had and then a halfpint. Hardin set the De Preists to gather firewood for when the day grew chill. While they cut lengths of rotten planking and last year’s beanstalks and old sodden rails deposited by floodwaters the whore sat steaming by the fire and plaited her hair with a kind of demure and drunken dignity.

The kept saying they guessed they’d better get on but they never left. Like cats they slept on the floor before the fire and like cats fell to fighting over the whore sometime deep in the night. Great thumpings arose, overturnings of furniture, chairs thrown against the wall. Outraged and squalling and swearing to Hardin leapt naked from the bed and drove them to the last brother into the rain at gunpoint, not even letting them shelter on the porch but backing them down the steps into the gray drizzle and going back inside thumbbolted the door.

They made peace among themselves and conspired to burn Hardin out but possessed not a dry match amongst them. The youngest spent a drunken hour trying to strike sparks with a pocketknife and piece of flint. At last they gave up and retreated to the barn and left at first light, sullen and hungover, the whore abandoned.

The old man was asleep worrying some old dream when the rain ceased and when it did he awoke immediately. Water was dripping sporadically into a coffee can he’d set under a leak, then that ceased too he could hear the creek. He arose from the swing he’d been catnapping in. In the west a band of clear sky lay above the treeline, a thin crescent of sun gleaming on the clouds above it. The clouds were the color of gold and they gleamed like something hammered from burnished metal.

Wearing an old black coat and a straw hat he’d resurrected from somewhere Oliver looked like a scarecrow made clumsily animate. Carrying an enamel waterbucket he crossed his juryrigged system of planks spanning the stream’s meanderings, at last just giving up and wading in, the water swirling cold as ice about his thighs. “Waistdeep in water and havin to tote a bucket for more,” he complained to himself. “If that ain’t the beat.”

Chestnut boards nailed in a V and shoved into an orifice in the limestone bluff fed the water into the springbox. The water was cold and virid. Mossgreen, it swirled against the lichened cedar planking of the springbox. Oliver stood immersed in the roar of water, the thousand seepings and drippings of a veritable mountain of water loosely contained by the fissured limestone, the continuous roar of the falls above him. It was deep shade here, cool, and dark. The perpetually wet earth was a ferment of watercress and the air drugged with peppermint. He set the bucket down by his feet and leaned forward, his hands cupping his knees. He peered into the springbox.

He’d caught a flash of white, not gleaming but dull like the old discolored ivory. It was like peering into deep seas. From the shadows of the springbox slow strands of moss and fern waved like seaweed, echoed the slow circular movement of water. In these dark depths the object turned, winked a bright and momentary gleam of gold from beneath the near-opaque surface. He reached into the water.

He held in his hands a human skull. It was impacted with moss and mud, a salamander curled in an eyesocket, periwinkles clinging like leeches to the worn bone. Bright shards of moss clung to the cranium like perverse green hair. He turned it in his hands. A chunk of the occipital bone had been blown away seemingly by some internal force, the brain itself exploding and breaking the confines of the skull. He turned it again so that it seemed to mock him, its jaw locked in a mirthless grin, the two gold teeth fey and winsome among the slime and lichens.

It was concrete, irrevocable. Tangible vestige of old violence from chasms and channels so far beneath his feet light was not even rumored. To his hands. Mute sacrifice from the well of the world. He felt besieged by knowledge he had not sought and did not want. The past eddied and swirled about him as the waters had beleaguered the skull. For a bright moment he felt omnipotent, the years rolled by had opened a door and permitted him momentary passage through it, he knew he possessed knowledge denied all the world, save one other, but he had no idea what to do with it.

The wagon had stopped in the yard. Pearl turned, the gauzy window curtain strung from her hand. She was heavier these years and her placid face bore few traces of her former bovine prettiness.

“They comin in,” she whispered.

“Then let em come,” Hardin said. “I don’t reckon the roof’ll fall in on em.”

She turned back to the window. Two women stood by the wagon in the earth yard, a third climbing down awkwardly from the wagonseat. Sunday finery, lavender and blue and green catching the summer light and flicking it away, a trio of radiant peacocks approaching halfquerulously this den of iniquity. Parasols clung along though the sky held no hint of rain. A knock.

“Reckon what they want?”

He made no reply save a gesture toward the bed where Hovington lay.

A knock, more assertive.

“Well, let em in.”

He arose, standing his glass by the edge of his chair. He crossed the room and turned the wooden latch and opened the door six or eight inches, peered down into a smooth country face beneath a gathered bonnet. He didn’t speak.

“We come to see about Brother Hovington,” the woman said.

He opened the door wider and stood aside. Pearl turned toward them, awkward gracelorn. “Come in,” she said.

“How is he?”

Hardin took up his glass, drained it. “You can see for yourselves,” he said. “Yonder he lays. Brother Hovington has fell on hard times.

Hovington lay under a comforter, an electric fan whirring the listless air toward him. In truth he seemed to know no times other than hard. He was skin and bones, his knees drawn against his chest. His skin was sallow, the bones delineating the yellow flesh. All that seemed alive in this face was the quick black eyes darting about. When he opened his mouth the teeth were long and wolfish and yellowed.

As the visitors entered the austere room Hardin went through the kitchen door with his glass. The women stood uncertainly looking about. All these decadent wonders. The silent jukebox. Stacks of cased brown bottles.

“Get yins a seat,” Pearl told them. “Rose, you get some more chairs out of the kitchen.”

The darkhaired girl arose silently and went through the doorway. She came back carrying three ladderback chairs and aligned them by the bed. Her longlashed eyes were downcast. Pearl fussed with the chairs, realigning them to her satisfaction. “Set down,” she said. “Can I get yins bonnets?”

One of the women touched the girl’s shoulder in a gesture of fleeting kindness. “Ain’t she a little lady? And ain’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

The girl seemed not to notice. She seated herself in an armchair by the window and sat staring out at the yard, remote, as if in some manner she was able to will herself somewhere else.

The women subsided into chairs and took out cardboard fans and began to wave them about. Pearl stood behind them, harried, distraught, as if she were the uninvited guest here. “Can I get yins a cold drink? We never thought about no company.”

The woman in the middle loosened her bonnet strings, let the bonnet fall onto her shoulders. Her gold hair lay in intricate rococo plaits. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, a glycerinous mustache. “Nothin for me, thank ye.” The other two shook their heads. “We just come up here from church. Brother Hovington’s name come up in the service as one afflicted and we prayed for him. We come by to see did he need anything.”

From where Brother Hovington lay he seemed past the need of anything they might have about their persons. His eyes were closed, he might have slept. Or yet he might have been dead save the soft, liquid movement of the eyeballs beneath the near-translucent lids, the slow, hypnotic blue pulse of his throat. For Brother Hovington lay in agony, in an alteration of time juryrigged so by pain that its passage seemed scarcely discernible. In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accretions of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time’s next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman’s mutterings from a snare in the world.

“Pearl?” Hardin called from the other room, and she arose, smoothing her skirt with her big hands, hesitated.

“I’ll be with yins in a minute. Let me see what he wants.” (As if Hardin were the husband, the women would tell each other later. Not this frail vessel already faulted, life seeping from every fissure. Hovington might have been some stranger, or worse, an unwanted relative come to visit, remaining to die).

Then voices, his mocking, conspiratorial, hers interrogative, faintly protesting, both made at once indecipherable and unmistakable through the thin walls, laughter vague and androgynous, and they all felt rather than heard the descension of flesh onto flesh, timeless, the protest of the bedsprings, an involuntary gasp, sounds they seemed to have possessed all their lives as inherent knowledge. Silence then save the whirr of the fan tracking in its mechanical orbit and then, unbelievably, the creak of the bedsprings commencing in earnest, intensifying, attaining the desired rhythm. The front door opened and closed and they saw that the girl Amber Rose had gone out.

The women sat in a hot, aghast silence. Color crept into their faces, they did not look at each other but all stared at the dying man who seemed charged with the performance of something that might break the furious agony of silence, propel them on to whatever their next action might be. When he made no move the woman in the middle rose, peered at the wasted face. “I believe Brother Hovington’s gone to sleep.” The other two arose with a thick rustling of silk, turned to the door. “Poor soul. I expect he needs his rest.” The door pulled to when they crossed the porch and passed into the sun, parasols fluttering open, their foreshortened shadows darting attendance like dark fowl underfoot.

The horses turned to watch them come, moving a little already in anticipation, the wagon creaking, the traces rattling musically. The girl watched them clambering into the wagon, their faced flushed and flat with revulsion. “Come around here,” one of them yelled peremptorily to the horses, snapping the lines. The wagon turned itself laboriously in the yard, dust billowing up from beneath the horses’ feet, rising in a palpable cloud that had them at their fans again, turning the wagon then onto the road in a sigh of prolonged noise.

Amber Rose smoothed the dark wing of hair from her eyes. It seemed to her the world was full of things she had no control over, and she watched them go with no look at all on her face.

Weiss parked the car in front of the Utotem Market and cut the switch off. “Say he works in here?” he asked Winer.

“He did the last time I was in there. He was picking chickens and cutting em up.”

“A man of experience then,” Weiss said dryly. “Just what we need. I don’t know whether I remember Hodges from the last time we caught. Was he the tall, redhaired one with the shifty eyes?”

“He’s all right.”

“Then get him. But if you can’t, call me so we can get someone else.”

“All right.”

Winer got out of the car and crossed the sidewalk to the front of the grocery. It was hot on the street but inside the Utotem a fan whirred somewhere above him and he could feel cold air blowing from somewhere. It was almost closing time and there were few customers in the store. He walked past the checkout counter and down the aisle to where the drinkbox was. He had the lid back and was peering inside making his selection when a voice hailed him.

“Hey Winer.”

He turned but couldn’t see anybody he knew. It had sounded like Motormouth but he was not about, only two women shopping, making their selections from shelves and putting them into shopping carts.

“Hey Chicken Man,” the voice said. A chicken was ascending slowly past the chrome rim of the meatcase. Winer stood clutching a dripping Coke and staring at it. The chicken rose until its feet rested on the chrome rail. A human thumb and forefinger gripped each yellow foot. The chicken pranced across the length of the metal lip with delicate little mincing steps. It pranced back. It was halfplucked and its head lolled drunkenly on a broken neck. Its eyes seemed to be leering at Winer through their blue eyes.

The two shoppers paused before the meatcase the better to consider this wonder. Perhaps warming to its audience the chicken began to dance, slowly at first, kicking out first one drumstick, then the other, a fey, loosejointed sort of shuffle to no audible music. Above the trays of hamburger meat and liver and the packages of its own dissected brothers it began a macabre country buck dance, its loose head whipping back and forth, its feet fairly flying on the chrome lip. A demented cackling sound issued from behind the meatcase. The two women stared at each other in awe or disgust when the chicken began a slow, lascivious bump and grind. They shook their heads and wheeled their buggies away.

Rapidly approaching footsteps across the waxed tile drew Winer’s attention. He turned away from the chicken to see old man Christian coming down the aisle, taking off his apron as he came. His face was flushed and angry.

Winer judged the floorshow about over and he left. He paid his nickel at the counter and went out the door with its small chime and into the sun white and blinding off the tops of parked cars. Motormouth’s Chrysler was parked down the block in its bristling array of antennas and lights and he got in and rolled all the windows down and sat in the heat and waited. He didn’t figure he’d have long to wait and he didn’t.

“He fired your childish ass, didn’t he?”

Motormouth leapt and swore when his neck touched the hot plastic seatcover. “Old Christian was supposed to’ve been in Nashville till tomorrow. I been cuttin up like that all day. How’s I supposed to know the son of a bitch was back?”

“I guess you weren’t. Did he not think it was funny?”

“That whorehopper can’t take a joke. He said it was disrespectful or somethin.”

“What’s your old lady going to say?”

“No tellin,” Motormouth said. “I guess she’ll up and go home to Mama. She’s been lookin for a excuse and this is made to order. She’s always throwin up I can’t hold a job. She thought I was clerkin anyway. She didn’t know I was jerkin feathers off damn chickens and such as that.”

He stared the car and studied the sporadic traffic through the back glass. “I don’t know. Seems like I squander myself huntin a job and then I ain’t got the energy left to do it after I get it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

He began to back the car into the street. When he was turned to his satisfaction he barked the tires of the Chrysler and then squalled them again braking for the red light.

“Weiss catchin chickens tonight?”

“Yeah. He said if you want to catch be there before dark. I figured I’d ride up with you.”

“I might as well I guess. Money’s money even if you do have to breathe chickenshit to get at it. You want to ride out to my place awhile?”

Winer thought about Motormouth’s wife. “Not really,” he said.

“I’ll show you all my carparts.”

“I’m really not much on carparts. Besides, it’s liable to get squally around your place when she hears you got fired.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Listen, when you see Ruby don’t say nothin about me makin that chicken dance. She’s got even less of a sense of humor than old man Christian does.”

“It’s nothing to me.”

“It’s early yet. Want to shoot a game or two of pool?”

Late in the afternoon they drove up the road toward Weiss’s place. Passing Oliver’s gray clapboard Hodges said, “There’s a feller lives there you don’t want to fool much with.”

“Tell Oliver? Why, that old man don’t bother nobody.”

“He may not now but he used to be rough. Back fore my time his old lady took up with some Ingram feller off at Jack’s Branch. This was a long time ago. Anyhow, she sent Ingram back with a wagon and team to pick up her stuff while Oliver was at work. He come in early and caught this Ingram feller draggin a chifforobe across the yard. They took to scufflin I guess over the chifforobe and he pulled a gun on Oliver. They was fightin over it and somehow Ingram got shot through the heart.

“They locked old man Oliver up and then let him out on bond. I guess he’d a got off, justifiable homicide or whatever, but the Saturday after he got out Ingram’s brother jumped him in Long’s store. Ingram come at him with a pocketknife and Tell Oliver jerked a axehandle out of a barrel and like to took his head off. They give him some time over that. I reckon two in one week was a little hard to take. Or else they figured they better get him out of the way while there was still Ingram breedin stock left.”

“That old man’s had a lot of bad luck.”

Hodges glanced at him curiously. “I don’t reckon you could say them Ingrams exactly come up smellin like roses.”

A tractor-trailer rig sat parked before the long chickenhouses. A muscular black man dozed behind the wheel, a checked gold cap pulled over his eyes. Seven men or boys were grouped before the truck telling jokes and lies and waiting for dark to make the chickens drowsy enough to facilitate catching. A floodlight set in the eaves of the chickenhouse washed them with hot bright light.

Hodges walked from the group toward the corner of the chickenhouse and unzipped his pants. He stepped around the dark corner. Out of sight of the men he leaned to avoid the lowering branches of sumac and went at a dead run toward the far corner of the building where it intersected the woods.

He worked rapidly, chuckling to himself. Beneath a window he constructed a makeshift cage of chickencoops. Two high and six square. Standing atop them he took from his pocket a pair of cutters and scissored a triangular cut in the white mesh covering the window and then leapt down. He pocketed the cutters and went back up the ammonia-smelling alley into the light.

He came back into view blinking his eyes and zipping his pants ostentatiously under the acerbic eye of Weiss and his frail wife. Weiss fixed him with a hawklike look of suspicion but Hodges paid it no mind. It was a known that Weiss was suspicious of everybody and besides Hodges was busy computing his money and planning the trip to Lawrenceburg tomorrow to sell his chickens. He fell to thinking of a pair of cowboy boots he had seen in a shop window, a pair of low beam foglights from the pages of a part catalog.

With good dark Weiss awoke the packer and gave the men the word to proceed. “Be easy with my babies,” he told the catchers. Though they were already doomed to the meatpacker’s knife he could not bear to see them handed roughly or maltreated. The packer took his place halfreluctantly on the truck and opened the first row of coops and prepared the onslaught of chickens.

Four chickens in the left hand, three in the right. Groping in the musty dark where the chickens huddled, rising, out then into the white glare of the floodlights where the packer waited and Weiss watched the proceedings with a critical eye. Weary arms loaded with somnolent chickens upraised for the packer to take. Fourteen chickens to the crate, an inordinate amount of empty crates to be filled. Six thousand divided by fourteen, Hodges thought wearily. The precise figure eluded him but he knew it was a lot.

The packer would fill the crate and slam the lid closed and whirl with it to stack it on the rear of the truckbed. Empty crates at the front of the truck, full ones behind. Coming out with their armfuls of chickens the catchers would glance surreptitiously at the number of full crates, the number of empties left to fill.

In the hot, fetid dark the air was full of down and small feathers drifting in the windless air and they stuck to the sweaty skin of the catchers and in their hair and eyelashes and in the white fluorescence the catchers took on a look curiously alien, like vaguely sinister folk lightly furred.

Winer’s arms grew weary. He was used to working and he knew to pace himself but even so six thousand chickens is a lot of chickens and the pace they had to keep was numbing.

Motormouth fared far worse. He grew hot and sweaty, his face so infused with blood he looked flayed. When he stood with his chickens aloft waiting for the packer to accept them his thin arms trembled spasmodically and he had a panicky look in his eyes as if he worked always a few degrees past the limits of his endurance.

“What the hell’s Hodges doin with those chickens?” Buttcut Chessor asked Winer. Buttcut was a friend from school who had been an athletic hero on a scale almost mythic and he had never quite gotten over it.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Winer said. “With Motormouth you never know. He may have another truck parked around there.”

Every few loads Motormouth would make a sidetrip to the window he’d rigged and dump his armload of chickens unceremoniously into the night. They lit in his homemade cage with soft, quarrelsome mutters, their chicken dignity affronted, their tickets punched for someplace they’d never been.

The only thing that kept him going was the boots. He’d about decided on the boots. They had cunning silverlooking chains draped about the ankles that had a Mexican look and when he’d hoist up the chickens he’d think of the musical clinking the chains would make as he strode into the poolroom.

At last they were through. The driver booming down the coops while Weiss passed among the stunnedlooking catchers with his thin sheaf of dollar bills.

Motormouth shoved his carelessly into a shirt pocket and went to watch the truckdriver, giving him unwanted advice and meaningless handsignals. “Pull up, back a little now. Cut ye wheels hard to the right.” At last the driver rolled down the glass and called, “Fella, would you kinda get the fuck out of the way so I can turn this damn thing? I ain’t got all night.”

“Turn the motherfucker over then for all of me,” Hodges said, but the driver wasn’t paying any mind. “Uppity up north nigger,” Hodges told the rolled glass, the racing motor, the big wheels crushing sumac.

He went and hunted Winer. “You want to go over to Hardin’s and get a sixpack?”

“Not me. I got to get up again tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s old workday.”

“Well, it ain’t for me. I aim to get me a sixpack and ride around awhile.”

“If you're set on riding around you can drive me home. I've got to take a bath and get to bed.”

“We’ll do her.”

“Before you get the sixpack.”

Motormouth drove back up to the Mormon Springs road and turned left to Weiss’s place and parked in a sideroad below the house. He opened a bottle of beer and listened to the wall of night sounds start up again around the silent car. Through the trees he could see no light from Weiss’s windows. He turned the radio on and listened by its warm yellow glow to the halffamiliar jocularity of disc jockeys and to plaintive music and then after a while to a seemingly demented preacher ranting and raving and pleading for money. “Send me that foldin money,” he cried. “The Lord’s work don’t get done with them old clackin’ nickels and dimes. The Lord likes that quiet money.” Listening, Motormouth pondered what sort of radioland congregation of mad insomniacs this postmidnight preacher might have and as he ranted the preacher began to make spitting noises into the microphone, so choked with emotion was he. Motormouth began to wonder could this spit possibly short out his radio when this preacher calmed himself and began to tell Motormouth of a wonderful cloth he could have for a ten-dollar donation. It was a prayer cloth and spread over any afflicted area it did wondrous things. It had cured cancer, made whole an exploded appendix, repaired ruptures. Crutches and trusses thrown away hundredfold by folk cured by this miracle fabric.

“Reckon it would make my dick grow an inch or two?” Motormouth asked the preacher.

He drank beer and waited. he knew he should be at home and he guessed his wife wondered where he was but he wasn’t even sure of that so he sat and cradled the bottle and listened to the incessant crying of whippoorwills. He knew that it was not just the chickens that kept him here and he knew subconsciously that some vague hunger for doom drove him, kept him tightrope-walking the edge, and he knew he was consumed by some fatal curiosity as to what nature of beast lurked beyond the abyss. Some affinity for ill luck that fed the grocery money nickel by nickel down the mechanical throats of pinball machines and drew and bet to inside straights.

Faint thunder came from somewhere behind him and turning he saw lightning bloom above the western horizon and flicker there bright and soundless and after a moment thunder came again. He got out and unlocked the trunk and took out the burlap bags he’d been hauling around for this occasion and climbed down the embankment and went up a concrete tiling higher than he was tall, his feet echoing strangely on the subterranean floor. He came out through a clump of blackberry briars ascending toward the head of the hollow. It was very dark save when the lightning came. He increased his pace, an anticipatory exhilaration seized him. He could smell the leather of the new boots, feel the crinkly tissue they came in.

He’d decided to bag all the chickens and move them into the woods to safety and then carry them down to the car two bags at a time. He only had two bags filled with the querulous chickens when the light hit him. He leapt up glaring wildly toward the source of the light but all he could see was the white glare and he stood for a moment frozen as if the light had seared him to his tracks. In that moment various excuses crossed his mind but none seemed adequate. Found them where they lost them off the truck. That nigger stole them and I took them away from him and brought them back.

“I’m armed,” Weiss called. “Don’t make a move.”

But by the time the voice came he had a series of them. He threw one bag across his shoulder and sprang into the sumac dragging the other. The chickens began to squawk angrily and brush and brambles tried to wrest the bags from him. A report came and a bright blossom of fire and short rattled off in the trees like hail falling. Bits of chopped leaves drifted unseen. He released the bag he was dragging and increased his pace, running blindly into the dark while intermittent lightning showed him stumps to dodge and deadfalls to leap. The sack bounced madly on his back and he ran constantly through an outraged din of protestation. Lightning bloomed and died and in the inkblack pause of thunder he ran fulltilt into the bole of a tree and went tumbling into the hollow in a riot of squawks and curses.

He sat stunned for a moment clutching his spinning heart. The sack had opened and chickens were running into the night. He held his breath and listened for Weiss. All he could hear was an angry muttering from the pullets. He arose and took up the empty sack and began to stalk the chickens, trying to lure them back into the sack. They wouldn’t come. Then he began to run after them one at a time but they fluttered away, cackling and flapping their wings, and finally he threw the sack away and began to curse them. He went shambling on down toward the mouth of the hollow and all about him chickens were taking to the trees like pale spirits rising.

3

Over the years Hardin had taken on the lineaments of evil. You would sometimes see him on a Saturday streetcorner, the center of a group of men itemizing the faults of the world. When he spoke men listened. He seldom laughed but when he did the rest of the men laughed too in sporadic bursts of mirthless noise. No one wanted to be in his disfavor, it had come to seem that being in his disfavor was tantamount to being homeless.

There were folks in the bootlegging trade who had decided they might be in the wrong line of work. The Moon family had been at it for three generations and within a fortnight of Hardin’s decision to shut them down two of them were in Detroit bolting doors on carbodies and the third was logging for Sam Long. That was Bud. Bud was the first one to the still after the explosion rocked the hills and when he got to the head of the hollow the still was just not there. It was scattered over a larger area than Bud would have thought possible and there was no piece of it that would not have fitted comfortably into a shoebox. A week or so later they attempted to sell off what stock they had on hand and Bud’s house mysteriously burned.

Hardin’s vulpine face was leaner and more cunning than ever, the cold yellow eyes more reptilian. Or sharklike, perhaps, lifeless and blank save a perpetual look of avarice. And he went through life the way a shark feeds, taking into its belly anything that attracts its attention, sucking it into the hot maw of darkness and drawing nourishment from that which contained it, expelling what did not.

There was a gemlike core of malevolence beneath the sly grin, beneath the fabric of myth the years had clothed him in. In these myths he supplanted the devil, the tooth-and-claw monsters of childhood darkness. “You behave yourself or I’ll give you to old man Hardin,” women told their children. “You better get to sleep,” they cautioned them at night. “If you don’t mind, he’ll slip in that winder and carry you off so quiet we won’t even hear him.” His spirit moved in the night, rustled the branches outside their window, his familiars crouched in the brush where the porchlight faded away.

“He shot and killed old Lester Sealy just as sure as I’m settin here,” a man might say in the poolhall.

“Why, shore he did. Everybody knows he was goin with Lester’s old woman. But how you goin to prove he killed him? Bellwether tried that hisself.”

“Well, the kids of Lester’s could I reckon. At the first. You know they first told Hardin done it but I reckon they might’ve been persuaded Lester done it hisself. Old Mrs. Winsor told that that oldest girl of Lester’s said that Hardin was there with her mama when Lester come in and caught em. He cut for the bathroom and was halfway out the winder when Lester busted in on him. Said Hardin shot him though the heart and climbed back in and Lester’s wife fixed it so it looked like he shot hisself.”

“Course, Hardin birdhuntin with Judge Humphries ever few days didn’t hurt nothin.”

“I spect not. Nor all that money passin under this table at that.”

He prospered during these years. The war brought him a seemingly endless supply of thirsty soldiers and their women. The lights stayed on all night at Mormon Springs these years, the jukebox he brought from Memphis sang sad songs to closedancing couples, bereft or lonesome women, men touched by the shadow of war, the shadow of something dread that was creeping up on them.

Shifting hues of red, white and blue neon dissipated the shadows, bathed the dancers in the romantic hues of the unreal. The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy. Overalled farmers side by side with furloughed or shellshocked stateside soldiers, momentary virgins from godforsaken hollows where the owls roosted in the shade trees, old painted women washed up like refugees from the poolhalls, the all-night cabstands, the shotgun coaloil shacks. Old stringy women with ribald mouths and furious, outraged eyes as if life had done them some grievous wrong. Among these demifamiliars Hardin moving like some perverse host, eyes watchful for the salesman on his way to Memphis, the cattleman back from the auction, the fat leather wallets on plaited fobs hanging like fruit for the harvest. For those with high tolerances for alcohol he had envelopes of white powders folks did not resist so well and he had knuckles fashioned from the handles of a galvanized washtub and what he called his Sunday knucks made from brass. An amorous drunk might step into the bushes, Pearl’s arm about his waist, or he might just ease out into the bracken to relieve himself. Where Hardin would relieve him as well, rising from the brush like some grim specter, the handkerchief-wrapped knucks finding just the right spot, quick hands to the pockets and fading back into the dark.

Morning. A hot August’s sun was smoking up over a wavering treeline. Such drunks as were still about struggled up beneath the malign heat slowly and painfully as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber. The glade was absolutely breezeless and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific. The sweep of the sun lengthened. Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire. Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbered as the whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed from the foxglove and nightshade. Strange creatures averse or unused to so maledictive a sun, they were heir to a curious fragility as if, left to the depredations of the sun, their very flesh would sear and blacken, their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.

The cool breath of the abyss drew them through the undergrowth like a magnet aligning iron filings on a glass slide. Hardin went down with his morning coffee. Silent, unjocular. In fact the glade seemed permeated with silence and appalled hush in response to the night’s bedlam, as if ultimately all things must balance. The air rising from the pit seemed to emanate from some reversal of the seasons at the earth’s core. The far-off voices were murmurous, vaguely placating. The undergrowth was more luxuriant here, darkening perceptibly toward the pit, the earth mounding in a fashion vulval, the cleft in the rock mysterious, enigmatic.

And how would you lock him out? Short of killing him, how would you ensure the sanctity of your home, your family? Doors will burn, windows melt and slide viscous and flaming down the sills, locks blacken and lie unrecognizable among the ashes. If you expect him you can prepare, but he is cunning. When will he come, what will be the hour? He has all the time in the world, he can pick and choose, all the time you have is the moment of his arrival. He is a bearer of grudges, trifles drive him to limits an ordinary man only reads about.

“Wood will burn,” the note he sent the widow Bledsoe said. It was unsigned, ambiguous yet final. She carried the note into town and laid it on the high sheriff’s desk.

The high sheriff that year was a young man named Bellwether. Bellwether had been wounded at Pearl Harbor, badly enough to be discharged but not badly enough to prevent him from performing the duties of a sheriff. He was discharged just in time to be elected in an early wave of patriotism. Bellwether was a hero. He had a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross to prove it. He had a series of scars climbing the length of his right leg and a starshaped explosion of scartissue on his back where shrapnel had struck him. He was a local boy. The best thing you could say about him was that he was honest, the worst that he was a sorry politician. He washed his hands all by himself. He did not work well with the local judges, both of whom Hardin carried folded like banknotes in his pocket. He had been born poor and doubtless would so remain.

Bellwether had light wavy hair going prematurely gray. His mild eyes were gray as well and his smooth face calm and reassuring. He had the note unfolded on his desk. The three words were blockprinted on a leaf of foolscap from a nickel tablet. They looked like the work of a child. Bellwether shaking his head.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want him put away.”

“There’s no way I can even arrest him on the strength of this. His name’s not on it. It’s not even a direct threat. Even if I sent it to Nashville no expert could tell me anything about that printing. It may just be a prank. What did you get into it with him about?”

“My daughter went out there with them DePreists and took to hangin around down there at Mormon Springs. Runnin wild, layin drunk down there. I went after her a time or two and the last time Hardin cussed me and run me off. I told him what I thought of him. I told him I was going outside the county if yins wouldn’t do nothin.”

“And then you got this.”

“In the mailbox but it wasn’t postmarked or nothin. He just slipped it in the box. It’s scary, somebody sneakin around like that, peepin in your windows, spyin on you.”

“What happened to your daughter?”

“Last I heard she was still down there livin with Hardin. Her and that Hovington trash too. God knows what kind of devil’s nest of meanness they’ve got down there. But I’ve give up on her. All I want is not to be burned out.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“What good’ll that do?”

“Maybe none. But it’ll let him know you know who wrote the note and that if anything does happen we’ll know where to come lookin. It might scare him.”

She arose, an angry, heavyset middle-aged woman clutching a shiny black pocketbook. “If you plan on scarin Hardin you just might as well set here in the courthouse,” she told him. “I knowed all the time it wouldn’t do no good but I come anyway. All right. You go talk to him. And I’ll tell you what I aim to do. I’ll lay for him with a shotgun. And the next time I need you it’ll be to gather him up out of my back yard.”

“I’ll talk to him anyway,” Bellwether said.

Bellwether talked but as he did he got the distinct impression that Hardin was not even listening. His eyes looked abstracted and far away as if he were already experiencing what he knew he was going to do and perhaps could not have been deterred from doing even if he had been willing. They sat in the shade on Hardin’s porch and as Bellwether talked a slight, pretty girl with violet eyes that in the shade looked black as sloe came out and stood leaning against the screen door. No sound came from the house save the constant whirr of an electric fan. A drunk man naked to the waist and wearing army O.D. pants and dogtags reeled around the corner of the house. His mouth was already open to speak but when he saw Bellwether in his neat pressed khakis and badge he veered suddenly back out of sight. The girl smiled a small, secret smile and said nothing.

When Bellwether appeared finished, Hardin said, “You care for a little drink?”

“I reckon not. I ain’t ever been much of a drinkin man.”

“I didn’t mean nothin illegal, Bellwether. I got two-three cases of Co-Colas icin down in there.”

“I reckon not.”

The fell silent. Hardin’s hands were composed. He kept studying his shiny wingtip shoes. “Damned if I know what to tell ye,” he finally said. “That old woman’s crazy. And that girl ain’t even here no more. She took off with some soldier from Fort Campbell. But that old mother hen…you know how some women gets in the change of life. Some goes one way, some another, and I reckon she went crazy.” He paused, seemed to be in a deep study. “I hate to say this about southern womanhood,” he said. “But she got to horsin. You know how some of these women gets to where they got to have it. Well, she got to horsin and kept comin around here tryin to put it on me. Hintin around. Finally she spelled it out to me and I turned her down flat. Hell, I can pick and choose.”

Bellwether did not believe one word of this story but at the same time he divined that Hardin didn’t care if he believed it or not. He was spinning out the tale for his own amusement, just something to pass the time. Just keeping his hand in.

“Everybody knows she’s about half a bubble off plumb,” Hardin said. “Didn’t hang a Co-Cola bottle up in her that time and had to go to Ratcliff and have the bottom busted out of it fore they could even get it out? They tell it on the streetcorners. Ain’t you heard that?”

Bellwether stood up. He felt an intense need to be elsewhere, he’d stayed not only past his welcome but past the limits of his endurance. “It don’t matter if I’ve heard it or not,” he said. “As far as I know there’s no law against it. There is a law against threatenin people, and torchin off their property, and my job is to enforce it.”

“Shore,” Hardin said thoughtfully. “Folks always got to do their jobs. You got yours to do, I got mine.”

“It might be easier on both of us if they never overlapped,” Bellwether said.

“I was thinkin that very thing,” Hardin told him.

From the edge of the wood Hardin watched her get out of the truck, heard the door slam. The widow Bledsoe crossed in front of the old pickup, a square, unlovely woman with a masculine walk. She opened the door on the passenger side and a few moments later reappeared burdened with two grocery sacks, going up the walk to the front door. He unpocketed and glanced at his watch. “Go on in,” he told her softly. “It’s time for ye stories. Time to see what’s happenin on the radio.”

He sat in silence for a time seeing in his mind her movements about the house, a vivid image of her before a cabinet, arm raised with a can of something. Folding the empty bags, laying them by for another time.

When he judged her finished and listening to the radio he arose, followed the hillside fence as it skirted the base of a bluff. It was very quiet. Once a thrush called, in the vague distance he could hear the sorrowing of doves. The timber here was cedar and the air was full of it, a smell that was almost nostalgic yet unspecific, recalling to him sometime past, incidents he could not or would not call to mind.

He waited until she had her hay cut and stored and the loft was stacked with it nigh to the ceiling. A good crop, it looked to him, for a year so dry. The barn was made of logs and situated in the declivity between two hills and it sat brooding and breathless under the weight of the sun. The hills were tall and thickly timbered and the glade was motionless Not a weed stirred, a leaf, heat held even the calling of birds in abeyance.

Lattice shade, the hot smell of baking tin and curing wood and dry hay. Eyes to a crack in the log, he watched the hose. It lay silent as the barn. Some old house abandoned by its tenants, reliving old memories. Drowsing in the sun. “I guess you thought it was all blowed over,” he told the house. Eyes still to the unchinked crack he urinated on the earth floor, spattering his boots with foam-flecked bits of straw and humus. He straightened and adjusted his trousers. A core of excitement lay in him like a hot stone. He ascended through dust-moted light a ladder to the loft. Under hot tin dirtdaubers droned in measured incessance, constructed their mud homes along the lathing. Hardin was already wet with sweat. He turned toward the house, he could see the sun wink off the metal roof, instill in the wall of greenery a jerky miragelike motion as if nothing were quite real. Near the end of the roof the wind had taken a section of tin and the bare lathing showed, he could smell the hot incendiary odor of the pine. Harsh light trapped in a near-translucent knothole glowed orange and malefic as if already an embryonic fire smoldered there.

He underestimated the dryness of the chaff and last year’s hay: when he threw the match it very nearly exploded. An enormous wall of heat assailed him, knocking him backward. He scrambled down the ladder swearing and feeling to see was his hair afire. There was a fierce muttering above him and he could smell the clean scent of the hay burning. He wasted no time. He went past the tractor parked in the hall of the barn and through an eight-foot wall of pokeweed and through the fence and began to climb the hill, his breath coming harder, the white shirt plastered to his sides and stomach.

He paused halfway up the hill and watched through the gap in the cedars. The glade below danced with heat, a fierce quarter acre of hell consigned here shimmering and vibratory with menace, smoking bits of lathing falling into the dry sedge and small, bright flames darting playfully into the lot, a growing tide of fire that rode the crest of sedge toward the house like a wave on water. A landscape from a palette of fire. The tin curled and was blown off smoking into the wilting pokeweed and he could hear the enormous Whoof Whoof of the fire sucking, drawing off air from the hollow flue.

When she finally did come out he knew it not by seeing her but by the screech of her voice and even that seemed strange in the glassy air, something grating and mechanical, a shrieking of metal on metal. The voice through the fire came distorted and fragmented, foreshortened then elongated. When he heard the grinding of the truck motor even that sounded like nothing he’d heard before. Filtered so by the fire it intercut with her voice, became surreal, a garbled electronic shrieking there was no one about to hear.

A warrant was sworn out and Bellwether arrested him. Pearl followed the squad car back into Ackerman’s Field and he was on the street within the hour. In a week he appeared before Judge Humphries and the case was bound over to the grand jury. When the jurors met they threw it out. They decided there was insufficient evidence for prosecution and that they all owned barns.

Weiss’s wife was named Alma. She didn’t have much to say and when she did speak her voice was a wheeze like air leaking from a broken accordion in one endlessly sustained note. She had asthma attacks. Each breath she took was audible from several feet away. Winer caught himself waiting for her to breathe, holding his own breath. Then it would come, the tone of the wheeze breaking off in an agonizing pause when her lungs were filled, changing then, the pitch lowering as if some tension had been relieved, then the battle for oxygen would begin again.

She had a small dog she perpetually clutched in her arms and she swore it had saved her life during three separate asthma attacks. It was a breed Winer was unfamiliar with and it was the ugliest dog he had ever seen, possibly the ugliest anything he had ever seen. He judged it some model of lapdog. It had a mouthful of tiny needle-sharp teeth like some malign form of life dredged up by appalled fishermen from the keep of the sea. It did not like Winer any more than he liked it and it would bare its teeth and snap at him from the safety of the woman’s cradling arms in a gesture curiously catlike. It had black, shiny, bulbous eyes devoid of any emotion remotely doglike and with its bulging eyes and spiderlike limbs it looked like some grotesque insect the old women had taken to her bosom. Their fates were intertwined, for when she died in September that year the dog was put to sleep as well and placed in her coffin, a talisman whose own luck had run out.

“They say he went crazy and pulled a gun on Ratcliff,” Sam Long told Winer in town the Saturday after she died. Long was arranging the boy’s purchases in a cardboard box, totting them up in a ticketbook. “Ratcliff doin all he could to save her and Weiss throw down on him with a pistol thataway. Ratcliff said he was just a rippin and a rarin. Said he said, ‘You let her die and by God you die with her.’ Old Ratcliff told him, ‘Son, can’t nobody but God Almighty blow breath back into the dead woman and he ain’t no more impressed with pistols than I am.’”

“Are they burying her around here?”

“Lord, no, boy. You think the ground around here is sacred enough for old man Weiss? I reckon not. He hired a ambulance all the way to Nashville. Puttin her in one of these aboveground tombs, what I hear.”

Winer remembered the Sandburg book she had given him. In the dust, he thought. In the cool tombs.

He took up the cardboard carton and balanced it on his left shoulder, steadied it with a hand. He moved toward the door and opened it onto the hot sidewalk.

“I’ll see you.”

“You come back,” Long said automatically.

The door closed behind Winer with a soft ching from the bell and burdened with the box he went on down the street toward the cabstand.

Motormouth came out of the pasture past the looming bulk of the barn and halted where the moon threw cedared shadows, paused a moment to gain his bearings. A thin figure propelled by sheer anger dark to dark and shadow to shadow past the barn and on to the house. The world lay in a grail of silence, the only color a square of yellow light a window threw misshapen into the yard. One shadow among the others less mobile, he moved past the truck in a soundless lope through unprotected light, the gun clasped across his chest, gaining invisibility momentarily in the accumulation of shadows against the wall.

He lay in the grass. It had just been mown, he could smell it, could feel it, wet with dew, adhering to his bare arms. Slowly he began to rise, straightened to a crouch, scarcely daring to breathe. The screen was cool against his cheek.

The room was yellow. He could see three-quarters of the bed and a man’s freckled arm, a yellow wall bare save for a door and a calendar with a scene of a lovable waif wending his way down a country road, fishing pole on his shoulder. Unloved and perhaps unlovable, Motormouth straightened further when the door opened and a young woman came through it. She was young and pretty, Motormouth’s wife. She wore a peachcolored slip and now she drew it over her head in one smooth motion, tossed her hair, breasts bobbing, turning toward the lightswitch. He stared at the darker thatch of her pubic hair as the room went down to darkness. He fumbled open his clothing, spent himself in an act of bitter solitude, affected more by the sight of her naked now than in all the nights she’d willingly shared his bed. He moved limberkneed back to the truck, more confident now that the lights were out.

He brought out a packet from his hip pocket, unwrapped it. A soft avalanche of sugar down the throat of the gastank. “One lump or two?” he asked it. He moved on toward the barn, a figure curiously simian in the cold night. Somehow the sugar did not seem enough. He could smell the sour ammoniac odor of the horsestalls. He brought out his wirecutters and knelt in the grass. He could hear the soft shuffling of the horses. The woven wire clicked when he cut it, when he was through he went on to the barbed wire. The barbed wire was taut and it clanged when he cut it and sprang away into the darkness. The moon slipped behind a cloud and the horses were lost to his sight. He could hear them moving about the pen fretfully, almost furtively.

He pocketed the cutters and took up his rifle and turned hurriedly back toward the woods. The cloud passed the moon then and its huge shadow paced him, dreamlike, through the surreal field of silver weeds.

4

In Hovington’s last days they moved his bed out of the long front room and into a side room as if the sight of his dying might offend the sensibilities of such drunkards and whores as the nights seemed to draw ever more of. The long room held more cardtables now and the jukebox and sometimes late at night couples danced in the end where his bed had been. He’d lie in the darkness and listen to their laughter through the slatted walls, to the thump and slide of their feet on the rough floorboards. Perhaps in these last hours he was grateful for the jukebox. This world is not my home, the Crater family saying. Oh Lord, what will I do? Or perhaps he lay in the darkness and thought no thoughts at all, not even dwelling on the thousand deeds and nondeeds that had brought him to such a pass.

The room had one fourpaned window and he used to lie curled facing it and peer across the weeds to the branch and past that to where the hills gave way to autumn sky.

Visitors didn’t come much anymore and with the cessation of a need for appearances Pearl had stopped shaving him and his thin cheeks were covered with a soft black beard flecked with gray. He might have been a fanatic consumed from within by the fires of some fierce and obscure religion.

The girl used to come sit by his bed in the ladderback chair and watch him without speaking. In those days she could study his face at leisure. His eyes would be closed, the eyes unmoving beneath the yellow lids, and she guessed he didn’t dream much anymore.

She remembered his laughter from a childhood so long ago it might have been a tale she’d read in a dusty schoolbook. Then a little at a time silence had taken him over and there had been a time when she wanted to scream at him. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you let him run over us like you do?”

When his back began to bend like something folding what was left of his life inside it, and the perimeters of where he could go and not go were marked by the dimensions of the bed, he had grown more silent yet. Sometimes he’d come awake from dozing and she’d be a slim, dark presence by the window, watching him, her face as unreadable as his own. And he had no words to say, no deeds to do. Everything seemed said, nothing left but waiting.

He lay seeped in pain and oblivious of his surroundings like a dying rat preoccupied with the pellet of poison slowly dissolving in his belly. Death by misadventure, a garbage can explored better left alone.

“He’s coughing up blood again,” she told her mother. Pearl laid aside the dishtowel and went into the near-dark room.

Hardin shuffled a poker deck and dealt himself a full house, the cards rippling smooth as water. He reshuffled and dealt a jackhigh straight flush, conscious of the sounds from the sickroom, of the door opening. The shiftless shuffle of her houseshoes ceasing. He could feel her behind him, silent and somehow accusatory.

The she said, “He’s dyin.”

Bored with straight flushes, Hardin laid the cards aside. “Well,” he said, “there’s no news in that. He’s dyin ever since I knowed him.”

“He’s bad off.”

Hardin went to see. Hovington’s flesh was gray and clammy. Hardin’s hand came away moist with cold sweat when he touched the sick man. He wiped his hand on a trouser leg. It seemed to him he could already feel a rigidity seeping into Hovington’s flesh, stealthy, covert, he could already smell the sweet, carrion presence of death.

“You reckon he needs a doctor?”

“Undertaker is more like it.” Hardin passed through the door and paused and lit a cigarette. He went on through the house and onto the porch, then sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. Pearl followed him out, the door closing nigh soundless behind her. “Stay with him,” he said. “It’s him in there dyin, not me out here.”

Pearl was silent awhile. “He’s wantin somethin,” she finally said.

“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Hardin said. “In his place I might could think of a thing or two I’d want myself.”

“He wants that Winer woman brought up here. He wants to talk to her.”

“Say he does?”

“That’s what he asked for.”

“He’s out of his head.”

“Maybe, but he ain’t never asked for nothin else.”

“That’s crazy and a waste of time besides.”

“All these years and he’s never asked for nothin,” she persisted. “Nothin only what a preacher could give him and he never even got that. Just laid there all this time and took what come.”

“That’s all any of us can do, take what comes.”

She looked stricken, the flesh of her cheeks folded on itself, her lips trembling. A damp and fearful blue eye. He thought she might cry.

“Just shut up,” he told her. “Don’t think it’s a bit late in the day for this? He made his bed and by God you made yourn and all you can do now is lay there with the cover pulled up around your chin and rest as best you can.”

Yet there was a stolid immutability to her he hadn’t known was there, an immovable weight of stubbornness that held her rooted before him as if he were wedded to her, condemned alike to her tardy sense of guilt. He thought suddenly that to move her aside he’d have shove her, cut a path through her with a hawkbill knife. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

“Then by God get her. But get her on your own book. I’ve got more to do than run up and down the road.” He stepped off the porch and strode toward the barn. She went back in.

The girl came out and hurried across the yard, a momentary hand raised to shield the sun. It was early yet, the morning sun resting above the green treeline. A day brimming with incandescent light and filing up with birdsong and she thought she’d never seen a brighter day. So bright a day to lie dying on. She was touched with horror, with a desperate need to hurry.

Her shoes made flat little plops in the roadbed and little clouds of dust arose like phantoms pursuing her. She increased her pace and the hash green world became a world in motion, a bobbing wall of greenery like murky water, and even the cries of birds were muted and distorted like sound filtered through fire.

Amber Rose did not believe in miracles. He is dying, she thought. She thought of a casket lid being closed. No one will open it, ever, she thought in wonder. The concept of forever struck her with the force of a blow. It yawned before her, all engrossing, awesome. She stopped in the curve of the road and looked back.

The house sat full in the sun, its roof growing dull green, its walls myriad shades of weathered gray. Brooding so in the morning light it seemed pulled magnetically by the anomalous shadows from the hollow. She whirled and hurried on.

Through the moving windshield of the Packard he watched with wry amusement their progress up the dusty roadbed, two figures imbued with haste, hurrying jerkily towards him like puppets dragged along by strings.

He slowed the Packard as he neared them, braked to a stop when they were almost parallel with the car. He cut the switch and sat watching them, an arm on the sill of the window.

“Looks like you had a long, hot trip for nothin, Miz Winer,” Hardin said. “Brother Hovington passed away a minute ago. I thought I’d save you the rest of the trip.”

“It wadn’t no trouble,” the woman said. Her voice sounded stilted and formal beneath the rim of her bonnet. “I have to hear about Mr Hovington.”

“Well, I guess he can rest easy now. Get in and I’ll run you back home.”

“I’ll just go on I reckon and see if I be of any help to Mrs. Hovington.”

“We can manage. I’m sorry we drug you into our troubles.”

“Folks got to help one another.”

“I reckon. We’ll manage though.”

The girl came around the side of the car, opened the door, and got in without speaking. The woman stood awkwardly in the roadbed as if awaiting enlightenment. “What was it he wanted me for anyway?”

“He never said,” Hardin told her.

The girl sat staring across the fence where Oliver’s goats grazed the bright tangle of bitterweed, though she did not see them. She thought, they will have to break his back to ever get him in a casket. A sense of horror suffused her, she fell to thinking on how this could come to be. Surely there were tools for this, no ordinary hammer would suffice. Beyond the grazing goats her mind dreamed implements of brass and gleaming bronze, folds of purple velvet to mute the blows.

Hardin had said something.

“No, I’ll just walk,” Mrs. Winer said.

“Suit yourself then,” Hardin said. He started the car and began to turn it in the road.

She sat watching her hands fold pleats in her blue skirt. She thought she ought to cry but she didn’t.

William Tell Oliver straightened from the milling goats amidst the halfmusic glangor of the bells to watch the stately passage of the hearse, the corn spilling forgotten from his hands, the polished black of the hearse winking back the midday sun, its sides already dulling with a film of dust.

Hovington, he thought, fascinated by the windows curtained by red velvet, the hearse’s low, sinister configuration somehow profound and appalling against the border of sumac and blackberry briars, diminishing then, content this time with another.

Winer went three times to the Red Diamond Poultry Farm. The first two times there was no one about at all and no sign of Weiss’s car. The chickens were halfstarved. He fed and watered them. The third time was on a Wednesday and Weiss’s car was parked in the drive and the front door was ajar though no one answered his call. He stood uncertainly in the clutter of the porch and after a while he sat in a lawn chair and waited. He felt restless, bemused, time was a commodity in short supply and he must ration his.

Everything seemed to be in disorder. The porch held stacked boxes of white cylinders that turned out to be photographs rolled tightly as window shades. A box was upended and the pictures scattered about the floor. He unrolled one. Another. They all seemed to be photographs of military units, hundreds of soldiers posed before barracks that looked makeshift and temporary, perhaps as temporary and fragile as the men they housed. Only the faces were different, a multitude of them, stern faces with overseas caps cocked jauntily, and then after a while even the faces seemed to merge and lose identity, become multiple exposures of some soldiers posed in limbo, awaiting a ship that would bear them to a war fought long ago.

A noise drew him up through the halfopen door. This room as well was in disorder, suitcases open, clothing strewn about the floor as if kicked there. Weiss lay on the couch. His mouth was open and the room was full of his noisy breathing. A stain fanned out from an overturned wine decanter, a red seeping as if the room had been the scene of gruesome carnage. Weiss slept in his clothes and his boots. The pith helmet lay tilted on the carpet.

When Winer shook him. Weiss’s eyes opened and he started, rose on his right elbow, peering wildly about the room.

“What? What is it? What’s the matter?”

Winer suddenly found himself bereft of anything to say. Weiss’s startled face struggled up from sleep wore an expression somehow akin to madness as if whatever had happened in the last week had marked him, left him deranged.

Weiss had always worn the helmet and looking down at him Winer saw that he was almost bald, the scalp pink and vulnerable through the kinked black hair.

“It’s morning,” Winer said. “The sun’s way up.”

“Fuck the sun,” Weiss said.

He struggled toward a semblance of erectness, abandoned the effort, settled back against the couch cushions. His eyes were open but unfocused, his fingers going awkwardly through all his pockets. At last he came up with the remnants of a pack of Camels, took one out and stuck it in his mouth, and sat without lighting it. His big head was propped on the heel of his hand, his elbow kept sliding off his knee.

“Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Winer stood in silence peering out the window. The sun fell through the window, a rectangle of merciless light. Where the yard fell away he could see the fence bordering it and through broken greenery the red road itself. He wished he were already on it. When he turned back toward the man on the couch Weiss’s eyes were closed to slits and were watching him speculatively as if surprised to find him still there.

“What do you want anyway?”

“Well, I came to work. To feed and all.”

“There’s not any work,” Weiss said. He had taken up a table lighter and was turning it in his hands this way and that, dropping his eyes to stare at it bemusedly as if uninitiated in its complexities.

“Not any work?”

“That’s what I said. I’m gathering up some stuff and getting out of here. I’m getting the fuck out and I don’t know if I’m ever coming back or not.”

“What about the chickens?”

“What about them? You can have them. Give them to those rednecks around here and let them have a barbecue to remember me by. Give them to our friend Hodges, he wanted them badly enough to try to steal them.”

Winer stood awkwardly without speaking, unable to articulate his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Then you don’t need me?”

“Hell, no. I don’t need you. What would I need you for? I told you, there’s nothing. I’m getting the fuck gone and you may as well do the same.”

“I guess that’s plain enough. I’ll see you.”

“I doubt it.” When Winer was halfway to the door Weiss said, “Look. Goddamn it. For what it’s worth I’m sorry, Winer.” He raised his hands, dropped them. “There’s just nothing. How much do I owe you?”

“Eight dollars.”

“All right.” He withdrew his wallet, sat for a time staring into it so that Winer thought he had forgotten is purpose in extracting it. Then he tossed it to the boy. “Here. You get it. My vision seems somewhat impaired this morning.”

Winer counted out a five and three ones and folded them down into his shirt pocket. He handed Weiss the wallet.

“No hard feelings, Winer. You did me a fine job.”

“No hard feelings. I was sorry to hear about your wife.” Winer turned to the door. When Weiss didn’t reply he went into the hot sunshine.

Dreading what she might have to say he didn’t tell her until the next morning.

“Ain’t I told you?” she wanted to know. “That’s just like him, I always knowed he was no account. Come in here throwin his money around and buildin his big chickenhouses and now where is he? I reckon now you’ll take him up and argue your own mama down. Read a book one time and think you know it all.”

He let the screendoor fall behind him and sat for a time on the doorstep. This was a world of distances, of silence. This was the first day there’d been a hint of coolness in the air. He was surprised to see a few leaves already turning. There was a winey smell to the air, an immeasurable blueness to the sky. He was still sitting there when she came out. There did not seem much else to do.

“Well?” she asked him. “What do you aim to do now?”

He didn’t say anything.

William Tell Oliver had known Winer’s father a long time. He remembered seeing him going to work in the mornings, Oliver as well was an early riser and back before the boy was born and Winer had no horse much less an automobile to ride to work Oliver used to hear him pass about four o’clock in the morning. That was before Winer started carpentering and in those days he used to talk all the way to Big Sinking to offbear at Hickerson’s sawmill all day and even in the summer it would be dusk when he got home, in winter dark would have long fallen. Old even then, Oliver if he happened to be on the porch would hear out of the cold dark Winer’s measured footfalls, see him pass wraithlike, the stride determined, constant. He might raise an unseen hand in the spectral dark. Winer needed no light to find his way, needed only the constant repetitions of his journey to guide him.

He did not know the woman that well. She had been a Hines and like the particular branch of the family she sprang from Oliver thought her dour and overly practical. She had no interest in anything that happened in a book, on the radio, in France or Washington, D.C. Nothing that was not readily applicable to her life. If you can’t eat it, fuck it, or bust it up for stovewood, she’s got no use for it, Oliver thought one time with sour amusement. So when he saw the boy coming up the road in midday he thought, so Weiss has lit a shuck and he’s out of a job. And they have been into it about it.

“I guess I’m fresh out of a job,” Winer told him without being asked.

“That’s about the way I figured it. He’s gone, is he?”

“Yeah.”

“You want some coffee?”

“I might drink a cup.”

Winer followed him into the kitchen. Oliver poured coffee from a blue enamel pot. The food on the table was covered with a clean white cloth to keep the flies off.

“Help yeself to anything ye see.”

“I don’t want anything,” Winer said. He raised a corner of the cloth, peered. “What kind of cake is that?”

“Storebought. Coconut. You can eat it, I didn’t cook it.”

Winer sliced a wedge of cake and stood eating it.

“Come on out to the edge of the porch where’s it’s cool.”

When they were on the porch and Oliver back in the porch swing he said, “Old man Weiss was a funny sort of feller.”

“He acted all torn up about her death.”

“Hell, I guess he is all torn up. Look at it this way. He’s been here twenty years and don’t have friend one. Which I guess was more than not his own fault. Nobody to talk to, drink with, nothin. Everybody has to have somebody like that and he had her. Now he ain’t.”

“I guess so. They thought the world of each other. They got along better than any folks I ever knew.”

“Hell, he may be in South America by now.”

“South America?”

The old man grinned. “Weiss said some funny things sometimes. Told me one time, said, ‘I got open channels to heads of state and access to banana boats to South America.’ Said it like he was braggin. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Course, I didn’t mind. I never envied anybody their access to banana boats.”

“He told me one time he invented Coca-Cola. But whether he did or not, I’ve still got to find a job.”

“Boy, why don’t you just ease up and be your age for a while? School’ll be startin pretty soon anyway, won’t it? Don’t you finish this year?”

“I may not go. I may take a year off and work then go back next fall. I don’t know what difference a year makes anyway.”

“I guess at your age you feel like you got more years than anything else.”

“I don’t guess it matters.”

“How much was you makin if you don’t mind me askin?”

“Two dollars a day.”

“Great God, boy. I wouldn’t grieve long over a job like that. You ort to be jumpin up and down turnin somersaults. You can make more money than that trompin the woods for ginseng and blackroot.

“I might could if I knew what it looked like.”

“I’ll show ye. It’s got me through some mighty tight places back when times was really hard. But we got to hurry. We need to get started right now. You can’t find if after frost.”

“Well. We’ll go then. I’ve got to do something while I’m waiting on a job to turn up.”

Oliver dreamed his wife was shaking him awake. “Tell, Tell,” she kept saying. He dreamed he was awake and she was leaning before him in her nightgown with her hair all undone and the room was lit with the cool, otherwordly glow of moonlight through the glass. The weight of her hand still lay on his shoulder. “Get up, Tell,” she said. “He ain’t come in. Willie ain’t, I heard him at the door a while ago but he ain’t come in.”

He got up and pulled on his overalls and shoes without putting on his socks. The dream was so vivid he didn’t know it was a dream. It was wintertime and he could feel the cold, stiff leather against his bare feet and the icy metal of his galluses against his naked shoulders. He did not know the hour but in a detached part of his mind he knew he was in a strange, clockless world set apart from time.

He went out the door and into the moonlit yard. The Mormon Springs road lay white and cold and dusted with moonlight. He went past the pear tree and onto the hardpan and stood for a moment undecided, he didn’t know which way to go. He turned back toward the house and she stood in the doorway watching him. The shadow of the porch fell across her, beheaded her with darkness, but he could see her eyes glowing out of the dark like cats’ eyes. He turned and went on toward the apple orchard.

Nothing looked right, by subtle increments everything was changing. He was venturing into a world going surreal before his eyes, reality was being stepped up, warped by heat. The bare branches of the apple trees writhed like trees from a province in dementia. A coarse whispering came from the orchard, furtive, conspiratorial, almost but not quite intelligible. Then he saw that the branches of the trees were alive with birds, curious dark birds he could not recognize, birds a fevered brain might hallucinate. Unfeathered salamandrine birds with strange lizardlike heads and skin textured like wet leather. He could see their yellow eyes about the trees like paired-off fireflies. The whispering increased in pitch, became intelligible. He stood transfixed by the hypnotic buzz of sound from the apple orchard. Willie, Willie, the birds were crying, over and over. Willie, Willie.

He was touched by a cold engendered by more than weather. He turned in the road, north, south, searching the silver fields for sight of the boy. Random stones gleamed like details in a mosaic. Weeds sheathed in ice were glass reeds in the moonlight. He began to walk aimlessly down the white road. He could hear a fluttering from the trees behind him as the birds took wing. Looking up, he could see dark shapes shifting patternlessly above him. A few alighted in the road and paced him with a ducklike gait he found repulsive and whirling he kicked viciously at one and it hissed like a snake and spread its unfeathered wings and stood its ground.

“Get,” he told it. “Get, Goddamn you.”

Willie, Willie, they were calling above him.

The bird had stopped at the edge of the road. Turning, he went on a few feet then looked back and the bird was following him, taking delicate, mincing steps as if it were tiptoeing. He went on through country he had known all his days that was slowly altering before his eyes and at length the road he had known faded out and the metamorphosis was complete: he was somewhere he had never been. A barren twilit world of winds and sounds.

The road began to descend toward some great declivity, an enormous pit like an amphitheater excavated out of the ground. When he reached the edge he paused and peered down. He stood in frozen awe. The bottom seemed hundreds of feet away. All he could see of the earth looked red and raw, freshly dug, as if all there was of the world anymore was this ravaged, bleeding ruin. He knew intuitively that he had been following this moonlit road all his life and that this was where it led. The pit was profound, imbued with meaning, and he felt he must absorb every detail: he was being shown something of the workings of life. He must remember this place and whatever tale it had to tell. The birds began to alight in the dead vestiges of trees on the precipice of the pit. The trees leaned as if they bore the weight of some perpetual wind. The chanting from the birds ceased and turning at the sudden silence he saw multitudes of them descending, their leathery wings beating the air.

He began to descend the sloping shoulder of the pit over icy whorls of frozen earth and bulldozer tracks seized in ice like something vague and prehistoric preserved for all time. In the bottom of the pit water had seeped and pooled and it had frozen white as milk. He went on. He could hear the thin crystalline breaking of ice beneath his feet and he was held by a sense of impending doom, an apprehension of things beyond his command, forced onward yet possessed of a foreknowledge of what was to be.

A rusting yellow bulldozer sat cocked long silent on a mound of earth. Veering toward it he thought he might ask the nature of all this destruction but beneath the dozer’s cowl the operator was an eyeless skeleton in leached khaki rags, a faded blue hardhat tilted rakishly on yellowed bone. A rusted black dinner bucket lashed to the cowl. Oliver turned without surprise and went toward the bottom.

The floor leveled out and he seemed in some lifeless manmade valley that went on forever. He moved moonlit though shadowless to the edge of the ice then a foot onto it and stopped where the white face of his son lay pressed against the underside of the ice, eyes open, dark hair fanned and listless in the still water.

He cried out in a strangled voice and fell to his knees. He could feel hot tears flood his eyes and course down his cheeks unchecked and bitter grief lay in him like a stone. He clawed at the whorled ice until his fingers were torn and bleeding and he ceased and looking skyward exhorted the fates who’d glanced aside for a moment and let this thing happen. All he saw was the seamless heavens and the slow drift of a dead and foreign moon.

The birds began to call again and their voices had the mournful cadence of doves. Willie, Willie, they called. When he looked again through the ice the face was gone and all there was beneath the translucent ice was motionless water and black frozen leaves.

He awoke breathless in the hot dark and his chest constricted and an ache in his throat and it was a few seconds before he knew where he was or that he had been dreaming. He lay with his mind sorting through the fragmented images separating real from imagined and he thought of her saying, “Where’s Willie? What have you done with him?” and did not know whether it had ever happened or if it was some curious halfawake progression of his dream.

Willie will kill Dallas Hardin, he thought. Then, confusedly, no, no. Not Willie, Willie’s dead himself these fifty years. Young Winer will kill him.

He got up. He lit the lamp on the dresser and crossed the room to the chifforobe and opened it. He took down a shoebox and unwrapped the skull from its bed of tissue and looked at it. Course I got to do somethin, he thought. He had thought at first to bury it and be done with it but somehow that had not seemed fitting. It was unfinished, there were too many loose ends. Wrongs needed someone to right them and words ought to be said but he did not feel worthy of saying them.

In the yellow halflight from the coaloil lamp he and the skull formed a curious tableau. Kneeling so before the chifforobe he might have been an acolyte before an oracle, a disciple seeking wisdom from this hard traveler newly raised up from the bowels of the earth. Could it speak, what tales would it tell him? Had it seen its doom? Had its eyes unbelievingly traced the trajectory of the bullet that splintered it?

If he ever finds it out nothin won’t stop him from killin Hardin and he’ll live out his life in the pen, Oliver thought. If I wasn’t soft in the head I’d a killed him myself a long time ago.

5

There were three of them. They were there at first light, coming up the road or simply coalescing out of the mist, the sound that portended their coming clean and clear and halfmusical and lending an anticipatory air to their arrival, though there was only Amber Rose Hovington there to hear them or to see them, sleek and arrogant and graceful, quartering at the road and singlefile following the branch, halting to feed on the dewy clover that grew rankly on the stream’s bank and nuzzling the clear limestone water, raising their heads from their roiled reflections to stare contemptuously at the house, their eyes not yet admitting its existence.

Their steel shoes rang hollowly on the slate, moving on toward the abyss, which had already claimed two heifers that summer. Turning aside only when they came upon what Hardin liked to call his garden, four rows of defeated corn yellowed and bent askew by stormwinds, pale beans wrinkled and dried on their tripod arrangement of sticks. Nothing thriving here save ragweed and Spanish nettles.

“There’s horses in the garden,” she called into the house.

The dry snap of breaking beansticks drew Hardin onto the porch with his coffeecup still in hand. The horses had trampled most of the ruined corn as if scorning whatever poor nourishment it might contain and were at the pole beans, raising their heads and staring toward the sound of the girl’s voice, the stallion disregarding them and turning toward the rich green at the hollow’s mouth.

“Horses I reckon,” Hardin said. “Them’s Morgans. Look at that big beautiful son of a bitch. Ain’t he somethin?” He drained the cup and set it by a porch support and eased into the yard. “Be a shame to see horseflesh like that go end over end down a hole in the ground. Go in there and roust Wymer out. He’s on that old carseat.”

Hardin sat on the doorstep and watched the horses. “Easy now,” he said. He tipped a cigarette from a pack and lit it with a thin gold lighter, sat smoking and turning the lighter in his hands. The lighter was initialed, though the initials were not his own. He had on a pair of tailored slacks and he was barefoot.

The stallion stood facing him across the branch-run, peering up at him cautiously from its lowered head. Hardin watched the smooth, oiled play of its muscles beneath the roancolored hide. “Look at me then,” he told it soothingly. “Get your eyes full, you sweet bastard. Fore this is over you aim to see a lot of me.”

From past weatherboarded walls he could hear the voice of the girl and another voice raised in querulous anger. Sounds of protest, disbelief, anguish. The girl could go get fucked, Hardin learned. Hardin himself could go get fucked. A suggestion Wymer continued to issue indiscriminately and to the world at large. The door opened, the keeperspring creaked it to.

“He won’t come. He just cussed me.”

“The hell he won’t,” Hardin said. He tossed the cigarette into the yard and arose. “You go down there and get me a bucketful of that sweetfeed and bring it here. Go around the far side of the house so you don’t spook them horses.”

He went in. After few moments of silence sounds of commotion arose. The splash of water, cries, curses. The door burst open and a little man ran drunkenly out onto the porch and with Hardin’s now-shod foot to propel him continued down the steps and into the yard. His thin hair was plastered away from a pink baldspot and rheumy gray water dripped off his nose and chin. Half an eggshell was tangled in his hair like some fey adornment. The white shirt he wore was spotted with esoteric bits of food. His hands shaded his eyes as if to shield them from deadly rays. He stood swaying limply for a moment then dropped his hands and stared at the red orb of sun burning away at the mist, peering at it as if he had never seen it at just this angle before.

“Get on up there by that hole and stand,” Hardin told him. “When that girl brings that feed, if she ever does, me and her’ll try to toll em down to the lot. If we can’t we’ll have to drive em. And if you let that big red son of a bitch stumble off in that pit just make damn sure you beat him to the bottom.”

Wymer had his shirttail out wiping his eyes. He raked the dripping wing of hair back out of his face. “Why, shore,” he said. “All you had to do was ask.”

Hardin had the bucket of sweetfeed now and his fist knotted in the stallion’s long auburn mane and he was whispering into its ear. The horse tossed its head in tentative defiance but Hardin’s calm assurance aborted it, its eyes rolled heavenward and his fist knotted tighter, pulling the neck down. He went on whispering, a ripple of motion ran across the horse’s smooth hide. The girl stood by the doorstep watching. Pearl had come out and stood leaning in the doorway. Wymer was waistdeep in the bracken, bent hands to knees peering apprehensively into the weeds for snakes. The voice went on, conspiratorial, equal to equal, halfsoothing, halfobscene banter, dark secrets he shared with the stallion. He took a step, halfturned, his voice coaxing, slackening his grip in the mane, raising the feedbucket to the horse’s muzzle. He took another step toward the stream and this time the stallion’s feet echoed it. They came down the embankment with his arm still about the horse’s neck and into the stream where the horse paused for a moment, had bent to the cold water ripping across the slick black slate. He stroked its shoulder.

“Get that lot gate open,” he told the girl. “Now.” The two mares had ceased worrying the bean vines and stood watching the stallion. After a moment one of them lifted her head and took a tentative step follow him.

Such a fence as it was, they were in it. Hardin and the girl fed them cracked corn and more sweetfeed and then stood by the fence watching them eat. The fence seemed held together more by honeysuckle vines and cowitch than by wire and half the posts were rotting and canted and held up by the towering pyramids of poisonoak that clotted them.

Wymer hunkered in the shadow of the barn wiping his face with his handkerchief. Hardin reached him a cigarette and Wymer took it and stuck it in his mouth. When he made no move to light it Hardin proffered the gold lighter.

“Who do you reckon they belong to, Wymer?”

“Nobody around here got any Morgans but them Blalock boys over on Harrikan. They got to belong to them.”

“Man owns horseflesh like that ought to tend his fences.”

Wymer gestured with his cigarette. “You won’t keep em in there.”

“I will when you get through patchin it and proppin them posts and loopin me three strands of bobwire around it,” Hardin said.

“Lord God,” Wymer said. He peered toward the sky as if beseeching the intervention of some more authoritative word. The sun was in ascension now and the sky was a hot, quaking blue, it seemed to pulse like molten metal. Against the deep void a hawk wheeled arrogantly, jays came to tease it and it rose effortlessly on the updrafts from the hollow like an intricately crafted kite, climbed until it was only a speck moving against the infinite blue.

Hardin put an arm about Wymer’s shoulders. “Now, it won’t be so bad,” he told him consolingly. “It won’ take long and while you’re doin it you know what I’m goin to do? I’m goin to take a case of beer and put it in the freezer, and it’ll be there icin down just waitin on you.”

Wymer didn’t say anything. He just stood there staring at the leaning fenceposts.

“You tell Pearl I said to give you some money and take that truck and go get two rolls of bobwire.”

“Why, I ain’t even got no license,” Wymer protested.

“I never knowed one was required to buy bobwire,” Hardin said.

“It likes to grow on the north slope of a hill,” Oliver told him. “Shadier there I reckon. It’s funny stuff, some places it’ll grow and some places it won’t. And it don’t come up ever year. You won’t find it none in no pineywoods or in a honeysuckle thicket. Lots of times you’ll find sang up on a hillside from where a branch runs. But then lots of times you won’t.”

Winer followed the old man down a steep hillside, Oliver negotiating his way tree to tree, pausing to point with his stick toward an arrowheadedshaped fern.

“See that? Now, that’s a pointer. Where you find that you’ll generally find some sang though it ain’t no ironclad guarantee, it just grows in the same kind of ground sang does.”

They had been out since daylight and Winer’s legs ached from clambering up and down the hillsides and he did not how the old man held up. He was agile as one of his goats and he seemed possessed by a curious sense of excitement.

“It’s like gambin or drinkin or runnin women of whatever you get habited to,” he had told Winer. “You get started huntin sang and it just gets in your blood.”

Oliver paused, peering groundward. “Come here a minute, boy.”

Winer came up beside him. Oliver was pointing out with his snake stick a plant growing in the shade of a chestnut oak. He dropped the point of his stick back against the earth and rested his weight on it.

“What would you say that was there?”

Winer laid his sack aside and knelt to the earth, raking back the leaves and dark loan from around the delicate stem of the plant. He studied the wilted top he carried for reference.

“It’s ginseng,” he said.

“Are you right sure now?”

“Well, its looks like it.” He studied his top some more. “Sure I’m sure.”

Oliver grinned. “That’s just old jellico,” he said. “See how limbs grow out of the stems on it? One here and one there? Now look at ye ginseng. See how them limbs grows out right even with one another? That’s how ye tell it.”

“Well, it looks like it to me.”

“It ain’t though. Folks dig some peculiar things thinking it’s ginseng. Back in the Depression it couldn’t stalk peep out of the ground without there was somebody there waitin on it. I never like to dig it myself fore it sheds it berries. That way you always got young comin along.”

“It must have been hard to learn to recognize it.”

“No. And once you do learn nothin else looks exactly like it. You can spot it as far as you can see it. Though I do remember old man Hovington when he was a boy dug half a tow sack of poisonoak fore he learned the difference. He found out in two-three days. He might never’ve learnt sang but I bet he knowed poisonoak from then on.”

They went on under the lowering branches of a chestnut oak, gentle wind out of the south stirring the leaves. The woods smelled yellow and brittle. The hollow was deep and below them Winer could hear the rush of water over stone. Occasionally the old man would stop and punch a hole in the loam with his stick and drop in one the reddish-brown berries he carried.

“Nature’s a funny thing,” he said thoughtfully. “Now, you take that jellico. It’s like sang but it ain’t. It grows in the same kind of ground and it looks about like it. Everything in nature’s got a twin and jellico’s sang’s twin. I don’t know for what reason. Protection maybe. Whoever laid things out make it look that way so some folks’d go ahead and dig it up and let the sang be, where it wouldn’t die out. Sort of like iron pyrites, you know, fool’s gold. You could learn a lesson in all this was you lookin for one.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Now, I know you at a age where you don’t want folks teachin you lessons. But you’ll learn em sometime and this here’s the easy way. Sometime up ahead you’ll think you found what you been lookin for. Lord God, you’ll think. What a mess of ginseng. You’ll fly in and dig it up thinkin you really got somethin. But you won’t. All you’ll have it a sack of this old jellico.”

“The whitecaps came down this ridge right about here,” Oliver said, pointing toward the stony sedgefield. Below him Winer could see Hovington’s house and outbuildings, the corncrib almost swallowed in a riot of pokeroot. “Them Mormons had their church built down some from where the spring is and I reckon two or three brush arbors and lean-tos or some such. The old foundation pillars is I guess still there.”

“Why did they do it anyway?”

“Lord, boy, I don’t know. I long give up on wonderin why folks do all the things they do.” He hunkered in the windy sedge, began absentmindedly to massage his stiff knee. “Though guess like everthing else it was a number of things. I guess they was drinkin a little and just wanted to raise hell. The Mormons was a different breed of cat too and I reckon bein different’s always had its occupational hazards around here. And you got a bunch of the old hardankles like used to be around here together, specially with pillowcases to hide who they are and you need to make sure wherever you are’s got a back door to it.”

“I thought the story was they were worried about their womenfolks. That’s what I always heard.”

“Well, that was the tale but it was just so much horseshit. But then folks in these parts always had some curious idea about women. Had to be protected and all that. Sheltered. I never knowed one couldn’t take care of herself and I never knowed one to park her shoes under any bed she hadn’t crawled into by herself.”

“Did they have any women from around here at their camp?”

“They had two or three I think but they was here on their own hook. Nobody tolled em off or drug em screamin by the hair of the head.”

Below them came the faint slap of a screendoor and a man entered the back yard. He took up from against the weatherboarding a shovel and advanced onto a cleared area where a large rectangle was marked off by stakes and batterboards He pulled off his shirt and began to shovel earth from beneath the line. His back was very white. He worked fiercely for a few seconds then stopped and stood leaning with his foot cocked on the shovel studying the distance left to cover.

“Who all was it?”

“I doubt you’d remember any of em,” the old man said drily. “There was a good bunch of em. Tom Hovington’s pa, he was one. Not no ringleader or nothin, just one of the bunch. A follower, he was good at that sort of thing. Never had an idea of his own but was the first to jump when somebody else did. Kind of a suckass. They talked it up for a week or two before they done it. They come around the house and Pa, he run off. Pa never was much of a joiner. Old man Hodges was I guess the worst. He had a daughter down there. She would’ve been, let’s see, Motormouth Hodges’s aunt. She’d done run off with everbody else and maybe she figured she’d see if the Mormons had come up with some new way of doin it. That mob come up here long about daybreak and set in to whip em but them Mormon must’ve had mixed feelins about bein whipped. They started shootin back and forth and the whitecaps ended up killin ever one of em cept four or five women. They tied em up and whipped em, among other things.”

“How old was you?”

“Fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to know not to be here but not bright enough to come up and warn em. That’s always bothered me some.”

“Why didn’t anybody else let em know?”

“I guess everbody figured it was all blow. If Hodges’d killed all the folk he threatened this county’d be mighty thin settled. Anyway, folks thought they was just takin a hickory to em, that’s what the whitecaps was famous for. I doubt they knowed theirselves they was goin to be slaughterin people right and left. It just got out of hand.”

The boy did not reply, seemed lost in the subtle gradations of umber and burnt sienna, the dull green of rampant summer’s growth turning sullen and sulfurous with its coating of dust, the old house bleached field gray, somehow oblique and alien in the harsh light, the bracken darkening and becoming more luxuriant near the spring and the hidden dark orifice of the abyss.

He wondered what the truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth and folklore. Truth had changed the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation. And the old man’s truth might not be Winer’s. Hodges had said that the old man himself had killed two mean, but Oliver had never spoken of it. Now that too was layered with time, had held truth only in the bright millisecond of all time it occupied, now there was the old man’s truth, the dead men’s survivors’ truth, the court’s truth, all of them separate truths men had sworn to. Winer disregarded them all.

“One thing about gettin old,” Oliver was saying. “You can watch another feller work and not feel guilty about it. Though whether or not what that feller’s doin qualifies as work depends on whether you’re payin or gettin paid.”

The man had forsaken the shovel for a mattock and was flailing at the earth. A darkhaired girl came out and took up the shovel with what from a distance seemed reluctance. The pale man ceased and stood gazing thoughtfully off into space then recommenced with renewed enthusiasm when a tall man came into the yard and stood watching them.

“I guess they’ll get it now,” the old man said. “There’s Old Nick in the flesh.”

“Hardin?”

“Whatever he’s goin by now.”

Winer turned as if to share Oliver’s jest but the leathery face showed no sign that the old man had not been serious.

“What do you suppose he’s buildin down there?”

“More room for his meanness, I guess.” Oliver braced himself on the handcarved stick and arose, gaunt and ungainly against the blue void, a figure himself of myth perhaps, an Old Testament patriarch marvelously transported to 1943 and finding the world not entirely to his liking. “The harder times get for everbody else the better they get for folks like Hardin,” Oliver said.

Motormouth’s wife Ruby had left him for what she described as good and all in August. Ruby was a bitch but there was no news in that. She had always been a bitch. He had divined that even when she had been a little girl in white crinoline and white shoes holding her father’s hand on the way to church she was already a bitch, though a more diminutive and less strident one. She had been a bitch in her cradle, a tiny, toothless bitch at her mother’s breast. Motormouth had known all this and had married her anyway, planning to reform her.

The ink had barely dried on their marriage license when she had cuckolded him. He had caught them at a deserted racetrack, naked in the backseat of an old Ford. She had been with a high school junior who was not even seventeen years old. He had been scared so badly he could not even get his pants on, had both feet stuffed into the same trouserleg and was just madly jumping up and down as if he were trying to drive himself into them and escape from sight. Motormouth had been appalled. “Why, he’s not even on the Goddamned football team,” he told her.

He used to get up in the mornings after she had left him and make himself a pot of coffee and just head out. He didn’t have a job anymore and he subsisted on whatever he could eke out. As time drew on his wants became simpler. He used to work some for Abner Lyle at the service station. He would patrol the main highway west of town. He had the old rustcolored Chrysler tricked out with a removable redlight and a siren and he used to cruise the highways like a predator, a hawk on the wing, riding the updrafts and scanning the earth for a victim. Motormouth’s victims were little-old-lady schoolteachers on vacation, elderly couples who appeared prosperous and looked as if they did not know much about automobiles.

“Looks like you about to run a wheel off,” he would tell them once he got them stopped. They always looked apprehensive even before he told them, for there was nothing reassuring in his appearance, Motormouth with his old junker like something from a junkdealer’s dreams, encrusted with blinking lights and reflector mudflaps and various animal tails descending from high, looping police antennas. Him with his cap in hand, puckish-faced hangdog, the bearer of bad tidings, wheelbearings shot, rearends about to fall out. His fey leprechaun’s eyes were halfmad and the lies strung from his mouth like spittle, a demented spider who would draw them into his web. “Just drive right slow to Abner Lyle’s fillin station,” he would tell them. “I’ll foller ye case ye have trouble.”

“Thank you,” they would say uncertainly.

“Lots of folks would just drive on and go about their business,” he would tell them. “But I believe in helpin my feller man.”

As autumn dew on he lived an increasingly precarious existence, sleeping wherever dark or exhaustion overtook him, a curious nomad, homeless as a gypsy, the old Chrysler parked in brush by the river’s edge, out of sight at some roadside table. He took to carrying soap and a razor and a change of clothing and he would just stay out for days at a time.

Listening to the radio in the falling night by the river the disc jockey’s voice overlay an incessant crying of frogs and the voices became his consorts, all there was of friendship left in the world. Silences elongated, for there were fewer and fewer people who would listen to Motormouth’s troubles. His face in these solitary hours between waking and the drugged unconsciousness he accepted as sleep took on a peculiarly serious look, a kind of slackjawed thoughtfulness as if all his resources were locked in concentration, devising a way out of the quandary he found himself in. Sometimes while the voices and guitars underlined his plight he feared madness, thought, I've got to get a hold of myself, but he could not find the handle. By day he’d spend the kickbacks Lyle paid him at Hardin’s or wherever temptation and opportunity coincided, sure of an audience as long as he parceled out his worn greenbacks.

His theory was that all would have gone well had it not been for the Blalock brothers. “If I could just keep the sons of bitches away from her,” he told Hardin one day. “If me and her was off to ourselves and let alone I know she’d be all right. But they’re like a pack of Goddamn dogs around her. I had it all to do over I’d marry somebody so ugly nobody would even fuck her.”

“There is nobody that ugly,” Hardin told him from the height of his experience. Hardin was whittling with a big bonehandled Case pocketknife, carving something unrecognizable from soft red cedar. He favored Motormouth with a look of sour condescension. “People will fuck anything,” he said. “Chickens, cows, sheep, each other. They’ll fuck watermelons and cucumbers. Anything with a hole in it or that’s soft enough to cut one, somebody somewhere will fuck it.”

This romantic view of the world of Eros did not sit well with Motormouth. “Ruby ain’t like that,” he said sullenly.

Hardin would listen to Motormouth’s incessant monotone as long as there was money left to spend but when Motormouth began stretching out his last beer and letting it warm in his hands Hardin would know he was broke and he would grow restless, wanting him gone, his sad stories falling on other ears. “I’ll tell you how it is, Hodges,” he said. “It’s a fact of life and you might as well face it. When you lay down with the hogs you ain’t got but two choices. You can waller with em in the mud or you can get clean away from em. You can’t have it both ways.”

Motormouth lurched drunkenly to his feet, the Coke crate falling behind him against the house. “I didn’t come here to be made sport of,” he said, running a big freckled hand through his hair, his face seized with besotted dignity. “And furthermore Ruby ain’t no hog.”

He looked for a moment as if he might reseat himself, then thought better of it and shambled around the corner of the house. After a while they heard the Chrysler cough and start.

“Hodges had to draw light in ever pot he was ever in,” Wymer told Hardin. “But he really outdone hisself on that Blalock deal. Cecil Blalock took to wantin to screw that gal Motormouth was married to so he got his brother Clyde to go over and get Motormouth to go coonhuntin. They was coonhuntin heavy there for a while. Motormouth was always braggin about it, he thought they wasn’t nobody like Clyde Blalock. Me and Clyde this, me and Clyde that. What fine coondogs Clyde had. And all the time Cecil screwin her right in Motormouth’s bed an then him and Clyde sniggerin about it.”

“It does sound like he’s missin a face card or two,” Hardin said.

“Hell, he used to ride em around in that old car. Him and Clyde in the front and her and Cecil settin in the back.”

“He talks like he thinks a right smart of her.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But he done it to himself. He’s just too dumb to live.”

Hardin sat for a time in silence, just listening to Wymer talk. Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time, turning each section this way and that to see where it fit. He sat listening and whittling while Wymer talked on and the evening shadows lengthened.

She had been gone for over forty years and Oliver would have thought her forgotten long ago. Wherever she was she was old or maybe even dead but that was not the way he remembered her, for in some curious way she had transcended the ravages of the years. From where she waited in time she still looked the way she had that morning long ago when she had walked through the door with no backward look, not even pulling the door to, just across the porch with her shoulders stiffened and into the road.

He seldom thought of her except in fall, and he could not have said why that was. Something in the way the skies looked or the woods smelled sent him reeling down the years. The leafy hill he and Winer were climbing became transient in time, could have been the same hill forty years before.

Course, I wouldn’t change things now if I could, he thought hastily. Except about Willie and maybe if that changed the rest would too, for that was the root it growed from. But I wouldn’t beg her to stay even now. I never begged man or woman for any blessed thing. But if it would do any good I would about the boy—

“Let’s blow awhile,” he said aloud. “I can’t tramp these hills like I used to.”

Winer paused and seated himself on a stump on the hillside.

“We ain’t goin to find no sang in this holler anyway,” William Tell Oliver said. “Damn cordwood trucks and saws had ruint it. I reckon they’ll keep on cuttin till all timber biggern a broomhandle is hauled off to them chemical plants.”

“I guess the country around here’s a lot different that it was when you were a boy.”

“Oh Lord, yes. But you know, you always hearin about how things is growin but I don’t know. The way I see it it’s gone down. They was thirty-five hundred people livin at Riverside then and now they ain’t nothin but a grocery store. That and them old wrecked furnaces. The railroad tracks run all the way to Centerville then and the train run ever day haulin out pigiron. Boy, that was a rough place. Saturday nights Riverside was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“And Napier was boomin too, they was minin iron ore over there. Worked over there for a while. Me and this other feller swung fifty-pound sledgehammers. All this raw ore come down a big chute with water runnin through it to wash the dirt out. They had it rigged where it come out of the river, didn’t have no pump or nothin like that. These big chunks of ore comin tumblin off the chute and we had to bust em up. He’d swing and I’d swing. All day long. They Godamighty. Fifty-pound hammers. Now I doubt I could pick one up.”

“I bet it was rough around here back then.”

“Well. It was tolerable rough. That bunch around Riverside was more roughhouse than mean, though they was a few cuttins and the like when they got to drinkin. But I’ll tell you what, I’d take a week of it over thirty minutes down at Hardin’s on a Saturday night. We used to have a lot of dances down there back then. Wasn’t much else to do. Course, they wasn’t enough women to go around but everbody would get drunk and listen to the music.”

The night he met her the fiddle played: You ought to see my Cindy, she lives away down south…

They came out of the dance arm in arm to a balmy Saturday night and the local boys had run off his mule. She’d been tied to a tree in the schoolhouse yard but she was long gone now. He’d walked Cindy home and kissed her. As he’d been walking (twelve miles, to this day he could not remember passing through Rockhouse, or crossing the river, though that was the only way. As if he’d floated or been in a trance) home out of Riverside someone had thrown a railroad spike at him and it had sung past his head, turning end over end. He could still hear the vicious fluttering sound it made in the air. He’d whirled but there’d been no one there.

“They say folks was mean at Napier back then.”

“What? Oh well, I reckon they was. Riverside couldn’t hold Napier a light for rough. They had a bunch of them whitecaps over there tried to run everbody’s business. Take folks out and whup em, that sort of stuff. But the truth is people don’t change much. Individuals change, me and you change, but people in general just keep on bein people. All you can do is just try to pull yourself up as high as you can. Your own self, that’s all you can be helt accountable for. Sometimes you’ll think folks is gettin a higher foot on the ladder, and then here comes a son of a bitch like Hardin and it all goes out the winder with the dishwasher. But you can’t worry about that. Leave that to the preachers, they get paid for it.”

Winer was silent a time. Past the timbered horizon and west was awash with purple. Whippoorwills began to call one to the other tree to tree. With falling light the woods took on a quality of ambiguity, as if nothing were quite what it seemed.

“Don’t it bother you living by yourself all the time?” he finally asked the old man.

“Well, I don’t reckon. It did awhile, some time ago. Course, a man don’t always get his druthers, he has to make do sometimes. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Motormouth Hodges. Him and his wife split up and his wife took up with somebody else. He acts like he’s about halfcrazy. Tryin to get her back all the time.”

“He ort to let it lay, but it ain’t for me to advise nobody. And Lord knows a man can’t always do what he ort to. Me, I got used to livin by myself. When you come right down to it, a man’s always by hisself anyhow. When push to comes shove all you got’s yourself.”

“Leavin? Leavin where?” He’d come in off the third shift and she had her suitcase already packed. He’d come home an hour early, had the furnace not broken down she’d have been down the road and gone. “It come up might sudden,” he said. “And might hard too for you to set out walkin four miles to town.”

“It’s nothin to me. I’m going and you can’t stop me.”

“The hell I can’t.” She’d been standing by the bed and he’d pushed her back, gently laid his weight against her, his hands cupped her face. He’d kissed her, but the face was dead, she lay quite still without looking at him, staring at the ceiling, he did not exist anymore. He laid a wrist across her throat: he’d been feeding the boilers at Napier then, loading them three times an hour with iron ore, and his arms were thick and corded with muscle. He had never hit her but he was dizzy for a moment with an awareness of his own strength. He could have broken her neck, crushed her throat in his hands, but he could not get what he wanted or make her do anything but that she had already made up her mid to do.

“It’s that son of a bitch on Jack’s Branch, ain’t it.”

“Jack’s Branch or China, it’s all the same to you. I’m leavin.”

It was a week before Rayner came by.

“Rasbury talked to Clyde and knows you ain’t sick. He said to tell you he’d hold your job for twenty-fours hours and then that’s it. He’s hirin somebody else.”

“You tell Rasbury I said hold it or drop it, or just whatever suits him.”

“Oliver, what the fuck’s the matter with you? You look like death warmed over and this place is a Goddamned pigsty. What're you doin?”

“What does it look like I’m doin?”

“It looks like you're tryin to crawl down the neck of a whiskey bottle. And to my way of thinkin makin pretty fair progress.”

“I lived by myself a lot of years,” Oliver said. “Used to work twelve hours and walk home and feed the stock by lanternlight. Cook and eat and hit the bed and in the mornin tryin to farm. Back that night at the furnaces. A man that busy don’t have much time for feelin sorry for hisself.” He looked westward, arose stiffly. The last of the light had drained off, the might crept up like rising waters. “We stayed longern I meant to. We don’t get out of this mess of tops fore good dark we’ll be here in the mornin.”

Nights Motormouth spent time like linty change fished up from the pockets of his jeans. Drinking in the Snowwhite Cafe, Hardin’s. In the Snowwhite a slanteyed whore with a mop of curly black hair give him a halfsmile he carried with him into the cooling night, where his only other comfort was the slow drift of the Chrysler’s wheels in the gravel, his only absolute the moonlit road coming at him like gleaming cable unreeling dizzily from a spool.

Out of town then, where the last of the streetlights were sentries marking civilization’s end, all that dark beyond them a world in flux, unclaimed, provinces without dominion. A world up for grabs, where a man with an eye for the angles might make a stand. Here where the light pooled and gave the slick pavement the gleam of dark glass he went, reflected headlights tracking below like something sinister pacing him just beneath the surface of the earth, car and anticar snaking past the city limits and gone, looking perhaps for the deceptively simple curve where matter and antimatter collided in a brief and fatal explosion, the slow rain of falling glass, the tilting headlights limning panoramic birches white as bone, the grinding wrench of crumpling metal, sweet peace.

For there where nights when Hodges sought death like a brother, courted it like a longlost lover, a bitter and unnamed grief lodged in his breast like a stone. If I can make it at seventy-five, can I make it at eighty? he’d wonder, the mysteries of physics spread before him, a clinical coolness settling over him. Hands steady on the wheel, the fruitjar cocked between his thighs, the spiel of disc jockeys a dislocated and demented commentary on the onslaught of night coming at him faster and faster, a dark frieze of trees and mailboxes and nameless tenant houses. Then at the moment he was sure of his control a feeling of elation almost orgasmic would seize him, he’d slow and raise the fruitjar and drink to the fates pacing him who’d seen fit to spare him once again, some joy perverse and sweetly erotic.

And down the line. Past sleeping houses behind whose walls sleepers spun dreams he’d never know, let alone share. A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out sign, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.

Maybe down to Hardin’s, he might think, fingering the scant sheaf of bills, the ball of greasy change. Who knew who’d be there? A blond whore from Memphis watching him from beneath mascaraed lashes. “You wasted in this onehorse town, Daddy,” she’d tell him. “Let me take you away.”

Rounding a curve on the Mormon Springs road he came upon them framed in his headlights temporary as startled deer, the old man and Winer stepping from the hedgerow of sumac onto the roadbed and turning frozen in momentary hesitation as if undecided whether to flee or wait and take their chances, will he stop or not? A madman coming at them in a two-thousand-pound carton. Motormouth locked the wheels and slid sideways toward them.

“Lord God,” the old man said. He leapt backward as the car careered past, flailing at it with his stick as if he might head it off like an animal, the stick striking the front fender and rebounding into the night, Oliver scrambled up swearing from out of the sawbriars and gravel, fiercely red and diabolic in the brakelights. The backup lights of the Chrysler came on then and the car fishtailed drunkenly back toward them.

“He’s seen he missed us,” the old man said. “I reckon he means to try his luck again.”

“It’s just Motormouth Hodges.”

“I know who it is,” the old man said irritably. “Why do you think I was scoutin the bushes?”

Motormouth had rolled down a window and was peering myopically into the night. The Chrysler idled throatily. Past the dark horizon the first stars were out, a pale band of them strung eastward. “Yins want a ride?”

Oliver was silent a long minute. “Not hardly,” he finally said.

“What are yins doin out here anyway?”

“Hunting ginseng,” Winer said.

“You must have needed some real bad,” Motormouth sniggered. He lit a cigarette, the flaring match giving his face a yellow, wolfish cast. “I never knowed you had to slip up on it in the dark,” he said.

“We got turned around back on Buttermilk Ridge. Cordwood cutters got the woods so changed it’s easy to get on the wrong road.”

“I been on that wrong road myself,” Motormouth said. “Get in. I ain’t got all night.”

“Well, I have,” Oliver said. “And hopefully two or three more. I wouldn’t slide my bony ass across them seatcovers for a hundred dollars with the ink still wet on it.”

“Get your gimlet ass in here, Winer. I got a thing or three to show ye.”

“Not tonight, Motormouth. We’ve been out since good light hunting sang. We’re trying to get what we can before frost.”

“That’s what I’m doin myself. Tryin to get what I can fore frost. Get in and I’ll run ye home anyway. Don’t you think I’d let ye out, or what?”

Winer grinned. “I’m not even sure we’d get there.” His fingers traced the long scrapes on the Chrysler’s rocker panels, straight furrows like clawmarks as if the car had barely escaped some dread beast. Lines like hesitation marks on the wrists of an aspiring suicide. “Looks like you been cleanin out a ditch-run or two.”

Motormouth put the car in gear, the pitch of the engine rising. “Well, they never did build roads to suit where I wanted to drive,” he said. “If you old folks don’t want to ride, you can walk then. I got things to do. I’ll see you.” He released the brake, left in the small storm of dust and rocks the wheels flung.

The old man watched as the taillights winked from sight. “You take a little bitty crazyhouse and put a wheel on each corner and give it a kick down the road and you’d have somethin about like that,” he said.

Several years back William Tell Oliver had gone out to his hoglot one morning and found a curious phenomenon. He had kept a few sows and a boar then and what he saw so surprised him that he set the bucket of feed he was carrying aside and stood leaning against the fence, ignoring the riotous squealing of the pigs, just staring out at the lot.

There were two holes there, craters almost, ovals roughly five or six feet in diameter and almost two feet deep. After a time the old man climbed the fence and passed among the milling hogs and inspected the holes closely, expecting who knew what. They were a wonder to him. He squatted in the offal of the lot examining them. The manure and rich black earth mounded their rims and the bottoms were smooth. He peered closely at the bottoms, perhaps looking for the remnants of some motel star, thin, bright layers of celestial slag. Hurled here at random or by discernment.

There was nothing. Only the dark earth beneath the layered manure and what he took to be spade marks. “Be damned,” he said to himself. With his walking stick to part the thick weeds about the fence he searched for signs. He had no idea what he expected to find. Old bones replevied from the curious graves, new bodies so destined. All he found was the hot ferment of the weeds and a copperhead moving sleek and burnished in search of deeper shade. He let his mind wander. What would there to be steal? He counted the hogs three time and all three times there were all accounted for. “What else in a piglot,” he asked himself, “save pigs and pigshit? A manure thief?” He looked for tiretracks without expecting to find them, for there was no road through the weeds and his mind could conceive no one so desperate for pigshit they must steal it under cover of darkness and cart it away on their backs.

It was a mystery and he didn’t care for mysteries: an old man who suspected chaos and disorder beyond the curtain of swirling dark, he hungered for order and symmetry in what remained of his life, a balancing of the scales.

He fed and watered the hogs and returned to the house. When his chores were completed he sat for a time in the shade of a pear tree, his eyes closed, feet up on a Coke crate, listening to the drone of bees glutting themselves on the ripe and windfallen fruit. Before the day was over he had returned to the lot to puzzle anew over the holes. He learned no more than the nothing he already knew.

In the morning there were three more holes, somewhat shallower but spaced over a wider area, as if someone had been digging for something at random. “Be damned,” he said again. He stared at the harried earth, suspecting perhaps some magnetic anomaly that sucked meteors and asteroids from the dusty band of space he hurtled through. He stared upward, seeking some cosmic mirror whose reflections marvelously cast chaos into order, righted the perverse and disorder, but he peered only into the blue emptiness, past shapeless wisps of clouds that fled westward ahead of the sun. He stood listening to the morning sounds that mocked him with their familiarity. He could hear the crinkling of hot tin, the pop of barn rafters warping in the heat. The furtive scuttling of a lizard. A thin film of perspiration crept across his shoulders, dampening his chambray shirt.

He counted the pigs again without expecting to find one gone. They were all there and he was halfdisappointed, surprised to find himself willing to sacrifice a pig for an explanation. A pig thief he could have understood, there was reason in it, sense. There was no sense in these holes pitting his hoglot. After a while he got a manure fork and began halfheartedly to shovel the earth back into the holes.

He took a long nap that afternoon and about dark he made himself a quart jar of coffee and carried it with him down to the barn. He had an old Browning over-and-under and he carried that too. In the hayloft he arranged bales of hay into a comfortable chair and settled himself out of sight to see what transpired.

For a long time nothing did. Dark deepened and shadows took the world. He sat immersed in the cries of insects, in the timeless tolling of whippoorwills. There was something of eternity in these sounds, at once bitter and reassuring. He’d heard them as a boy, as a young man, they sounded the same then as now. In this curiously altered stillness he felt he might even hear his wife open the kitchen door and call his name, his son might be on the spring path following him, a small form forever stalemated by time. He drank from the jar of bitter coffee and wiped his mouth on a sleeve, forced his attention to the barnyard below him. It lay in darkness but after an hour or so the moon cradled up out of the eastern trees and the pale illumination crept across the face of the land, tree and fence and stone imbued with significance like images in a dream.

The moon was high over the treeline and he judged it ten o’clock or better before he saw anything stir. When the boy came he came up from the branch-run with silent stealth, easing through the border of gum and persimmon, peering all about, cautious as a grazing deer. Apparently satisfied, he came out of the brush and approached the fence, carrying a burlap bag and a shovel whose handle was longer than he was tall. It was the Hodges boy. Why, he ain’t no morn nine or ten year old, he thought. The boy threw the sack over and leaned the shovel against the fence and clambered over. He took up the shovel and immediately fell to work, selecting a fresh corner of the lot to dig in. Just clock in and go to work, the old man thought in puzzlement. The boy dug for some time and then unpocketed a flashlight, knelt on the scattered manure he’d dug from the hole, raking carefully through it with his hands. Kneeling so in the earth he raised his face to the moon clocking on westward and then arose and commenced shoveling again.

The old man was at a loss. For a moment he thought of Hodges’s grandfather digging for money on the Mormon place, perhaps some genetic quirk had encoded it in the third generation, a trait so degenerated by now that nothing remained save the compulsion to dig at random just on the offchance someone might have buried something worth replevying.

Oliver rose as stealthily as he could, even so his knees popped and he stood still and silent until he saw the boy hadn’t heard. Then he moved cautiously toward the ladder and climbed down it. When he eased into the moonlit piglot Hodges was still digging. Oliver approached within a foot or so of his back. “Hidy,” he said. The boy dropped the shovel as if electricity had coursed through it and leapt five or six inches into the air. When his feet touched earth they were already pedaling as if he rode an invisible bicycle and he was almost immediately at the fence. Oliver caught him as he was scrambling over the topmost slab and lifted him, kicking and squirming and cursing, and set him back to earth.

“Let me alone,” the boy was yelling.

“Whoa, young feller. Hold on a minute here. Noboby aims to hurt you. I just want to know what you’re up to.”

Hodges was trying to jerk his arm free. “None of your Goddamn business. Now let me alone.”

“You’re young Hodges, ain’t ye?”

“What’s it to ye?”

“Well, they don’t call ye Hodges, do they? What’s ye first name?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Me tell ye my name so’s you could run straight to the law with it.”

“Hell, son, I don’t need no name. I got you in the flesh, right by the seat of your britches. I’s just askin to be polite.”

“My name’s Clifford.”

“All right. That’s some better. And just so you’ll know, I ain’t never been one to run overquick to the law. Now, you reckon if I turn you aloose you can control the impulse to jump that fence?”

“I ain’t done nothin.”

“You move right pert for a feller just takin the night air. Ain’t none too qualmy about these copperheads neither.” Oliver released his grip on the boy. “Now, what’s my hoglot got you can’t dig up nowhere else?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Oliver had been wanting to smoke but had been afraid of setting the hay in the barnloft afire. Now he packed the bowl of his pipe and struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit the tobacco. When he spoke his voice was furred by the smoke. “What was you diggin for?”

“It ain’t none of your business.”

“Well. I reckon it’s your shovel. But it’s my lot and my hogs been standin around losin sleep and watchin you diggin like a fool. Now, what is it? Do you just like diggin or is there somethin particular about my hoglot that appeals to you?”

The boy seemed to be considering, there was a shrewdness to his features, a transparent cunning. Oliver watched the play of thought on the small freckled face. Half is better than nothing, the face was thinking. Oliver grinned. The face was already trying to devise a plan for cheating him out of half of whatever it was he didn’t even know about yet.

“Well. I guess we could split.”

“I don’t see why not.”

The boy squatted on the earth before him. In the moonlight they were dwarfed by the dark shape of trees above them. A warm wind smelling of summer going overripe came looping up the hollow across them. Faint surcease scented with rich opulence, the ripe pears and musk of honeysuckle. An owl called lonesome from a hollow negated by dark.

“Well. It’s pigs.”

“Pigs?” the old man asked in disbelief.

“Hell, yeah. I’d a thought a man as old as you are would have figured it out hisself by now.”

“Boy, you’ve lost me. Figured out what?”

“Diggin up them pigs.”

Oliver felt like a participant in some surreal conversation in which the answers bore no relation to the questions, lines had been fragmented and shuffled indiscriminately. “They Godamighty. Is that what you been doin out here of a night? And them sacks… ”

Hodges nodded. “To tote em home in,” he said.

“Lord God, boy. You don’t dig pigs up out of the ground like taters or somethin.”

“You want em all for yeself,” the boy said craftily.

“Whoever told you pigs were dug?”

“My mama did and I don’t know what cause she’d have to lie.”

“I see,” Oliver said.

“I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted em up in the hogpen.”

“And you not havin a hogpen…”

He sat in ruminative silence, just smoking his pipe and listening to the crying of the nightbirds, somewhere far and lost and streaking down the night the whistle of a train. “And what’d you figure, just kindly eliminate the sow? Bypass her sort of? Just dig the pigs up ahead of her and sell em?”

“Yeah. A person’s smartern a hog ain’t he?”

“We won’t argue about it,” Oliver said. “I suspect folks listening to us might work up evidence for either side.”

He sat watching the boy. This diminutive hog rustler, self-confessed and unrepentant thief of unborn swine. He with his fallow burlap bags and eye cocked to livestock futures. Oliver saw little that was lovable. He had a moment of clairvoyance, an insight of weary foreknowledge stabbed with regret. He knew that Clifford Hodges would always be slipping in at night and digging up somebody else’s pigs. He would always be playing the longshot or taking a shortcut, figuring the angles in somebody else’s game. And he would never have a game of his own. If he lived until he was grown he would be shot then or shoot someone else in a failed inept holdup. He and a cohort halfmad as they looked aghast at each other across the body of a fallen grocer or gaspump operator. If he won the game he’d be in Brushy Mountain penitentiary, if he lost the graveyard. Oliver felt pity for him, a commiseration for the things that had been and the things that were yet to be. He wished for words to encourage him, but none came. And his own life did not lend itself to examples.

“Well, what about it?”

“What about what?”

“About them pigs. Are we goin to split like we said or are you goin to dig em up after I leave and keep em for yeself?”

“Boy, they ain’t no pigs there to dig.”

“You done got em.”

“Goddamn it. Son, that ain’t where pigs comes from. I done told you that.”

“So you say.”

“Well, there’s a considerable body of evidence to back it up.”

“Then where does the old sow get em?”

Oliver took deep breath. “All right,” he said. “They grow here in the sow. Then when they’re big enough, when they’re made, they come out.”

“Come out,” the boy echoed. He was shaking his had, staring at Oliver in wonderment. “Everbody says you’re crazy and by God you are,” he said. “You’re crazy as hell. I never heard such a crock of bullshit in my life.”

“Well,” the old man said, “don’t blame me for it. It’s not like I laid it out or anything. It’s always been like that.”

“I’m goin to tell Mama,” Hodges said. He arose and took up the burlap bag and shovel and hurled them over the fence and clambered after them. “Keep ye damn pigs,” he said. “I don’t mind ye bein greedy but I hate to be took for a fool.”

Oliver grinned to himself. “You watch for snakes,” he called. After a while he could hear Hodges scurrying down the embankment, a small bright angry thread in the pastoral tapestry of night sounds. He hunkered still in the barnlot awhile listening and then he arose and went on back toward the house.

6

The horses had been gone for three weeks before Cecil Blalock even learned where they were. He had covered almost all the county asking and had come to think they must have started back toward west Tennessee, where he had bought them, for everyone in the county knew him and he could not imagine anyone just putting his up Morgans and not telling him. Blalock was the only man in the country who raised Morgans.

“You hear about them fine Morgans Hardin’s got?” a man in the poolroom asked him.

“No. What sort of Morgans are they?

“Big stallion and two mares. Finelookin horseflesh.”

“Where’d he get em?” Blalock asked, though by now he knew.

“He told me he found em.”

“The hell he did,” Blalock said.

This was late on a Saturday evening and by good light on Sunday morning he was up and breakfasted and had the sideboards on the truck. A redhaired woman clad in a slip stood in the door and watched him make ready to leave. “You be careful,” she called but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t.

He had turned in at the yard and was backing toward the outbuildings when Hardin stopped him.

“You tearin my yard all to hell Blalock. Ain’t you had no raisin? I never heard you say you could cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.”

Blalock looked down from the driver’s seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By all odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at six o’clock of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.

“I come for my horses.”

“Can you prove they’re yourn?”

“You know damn well I can.”

“I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we’ll talk about it.” He crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.

“There ain’t nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure up what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.”

“Whatever you say, you’re the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars.”

Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. “Eight hundred dollars? For what?”

Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.

“I had me a fine corncrop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.”

Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leapt out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettled and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hand pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers.

“And where is this fine corncrop?” Blalock asked.

Hardin had a sharpened kitchen match in his mouth for a toothpick. He withdrew it and threw it away. “I thought I said,” he told Blalock. “It’s gone. They eat it. They wiped me out.”

“Why, there ain’t a Goddamned thing out here but rocks and sawbriars. You couldn’t hire a fuckin stalk of corn to grow here.”

Hardin was deferential. “I admit it don’t look like much now,” he said. “But you ought to have seen it before your horses got in it.”

Blalock climbed back down the abutment and this time waded right through the branch. He was watching Hardin’s pocket trying to see did he have a gun there but he couldn’t tell. If he did it was a small one.

“If you think I’m givin you eight hundred dollars for a few bales of hay you’re crazy as hell. I’ll give you what I think’s fair and you can like it or not. Just whatever suits you. And I’ll tell you another thing. Anybody else would’ve let me know where them horses was. It takes a damn sorry feller to put up another man’s stock and not say a word about it. Especially a stallion worth as much as that one.”

“How’d I know whose they was? They ain’t got no license plates on em like say a automobile nor collars like a coonhound, and this old free-range shit has about played out. Most everybody keeps their stock up nowadays.”

“I do keep em up, Goddamn it. Somebody cut my fences.”

“Well.” Hardin shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” He walked back toward the truck and Blalock stood awkwardly for a moment and then followed.

“Why don’t you buy your own damn horses and leave mine alone?”

“Well, I’ll make you another deal. I’ll count you out five one hundred dollar bills for that horse right here and now. Then we’ll go have a little drink and forget we ever had words.”

“That horse ain’t for sale and you know it. And even if it was that wouldn’t make a down payment.”

“Whatever you think. Whether you go loaded or unloaded is all the same to me.”

“I’ll go loaded or by God, know the reason why?”

Hardin turned. “All right,” he said. “This is the reason. If you so much as trespass a foot farther onto my property, so much as open a gate or cut my fences, they will carry your dead ass out of here on a stretcher. They will load you up and haul you away. Do you understand me?”

“You’re crazy, you’re the one that’s goin to be hauled away.”

“Not so crazy I don’t know whose property we’re standing on.”

“Nor me either,” Blalock said. “Thomas Hovington’s.”

Watching the yellow eyes fade to slits Blalock thought for a second that he was a dead man. Had Hardin been carrying a pistol perhaps he would have been. There was a moment when things could have gone either way, and then his eyes widened a little and Hardin said, “Like I said it’s on you. You can bet or fold.”

“I’m suin you,” Blalock said. “I’m gettin a lawyer right now.”

“That’s fine. I’ll get me one too and while our lawyers is dickering back and forth and runnin up the tab, the price on the horse is goin down and the corn’s goin up.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Blalock said. He opened the door on the truck and climbed in. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll get them papers and I’ll be back.”

“That don’t surprise me,” Hardin said.

There was a faint wash of light on the window curtains, a cessation then of the sound of an engine somewhere down the road. Hardin rose on his elbows and peered at the phosphorescent hands of the clock. It was after one o’clock. He lay back stiff and silent, listening, thinking, Well, why not? If they’re goin to try it they’ll try it now. Hovington’s dead and buried. He had always known without articulating it that Hovington was a kind of insurance policy as long as he lay dying. He knew the curious decorum of county folks, their superstitious fear of death and dying, and he had slept a little better at night, had not been afraid of the windowlights being shot out, the house being torched. That policy had lapsed now, and he thought of another, the Winchester leaning in the corner, a 30–06 in a land of.22-caliber squirrel rifles.

There was a long elastic interval between the faint hushing of the motor and any other sound so that he lay completely wide awake now, straining for any aberration in the night, his ears amplifying the whir of dryflies, and he thought, Well, is there anything or not? A carload of drunks? He immediately discarded that, he had never known drunks to remain so quiet. A courting couple, someone getting them a little? He had halfrelaxed when the first sound came, though less a sound than some suggestion of difference, of disquiet, some delicate change in the balance of the night, so that he was off the bed and halfway to the gun when the first firm step came on the porch. By the time the shoulder or whatever heavy it was slammed against the front door he was on the floor with the rifle in his arms and scrambling toward the back door aware of Pearl awakening in the bed behind him, her saying, “Dallas?” Then, “What is it, Dallas?” And of the girl crying out in the front room, the noise the latch made flying off and skittering across the linoleum. He was swearing running into and around dark objects that seemed conspired to snare him, as if the house and ultimately the night itself were aligned against him.

There were already two of them at the back door, garbed in white, faces obscured by masks, featureless save dark eyeholes. He felt hands clutch at him, jerk him forward, he could hear their grunts of triumph and something, a club or cudgel, caught him alongside the shoulder so that for an instant his left arm went dead and he was conscious of a great rush of relief, thinking, Sticks. The son of a bitches have just got sticks.

The moon was shining and the dusty yard gleamed lime mica. He was down in it for an instant, twisting a cheek against the ground, the cold rifle still beneath him, his elbows holding it against his naked stomach. “Help me hold him, Ray. The son of a bitch is gettin up.” He staggered up with one of them astride his back, an arm about his throat, and struck blindly with the barrel of the rifle, felt metal strike bone again and again till one of them said, “Can you get aholt of his fuckin gun?” The other man kept swinging the stick. The voice behind him said, “Goddamn, Ray, you hittin me, not him. Try to hit him just ever now and then.” A glancing blow to Hardin’s head knocked him halfsenseless and he felt his legs buckle.

He whirled and the man on his back slipped free. Hardin’s momentum spun him halfway around and he fell, sitting with one leg twisted beneath him, the rifle in his lap momentarily disoriented, seeing rising above him the gray bulk of the house and the play of flashlights at the windows, above the inkblack pyramid of the roofline the luminous fabric of the sky, all of it swimming sideways in a sick illusion of motion as if he alone was stationary, all the universe spinning dizzily past him.

He could hear Pearl and the girl screaming, he was dimly aware that they had been herded into the yard. He heard blows without knowing where they were coming from, who they were directed against. One of the men dove behind the hood of the truck just as Hardin fired and simultaneously there was the whang of the bullet and then the more solid thunk against the engine block. He could hear running footsteps, they seemed to come from everywhere. A man was sprinting desperately for the road, bobbing in the moonlight. Hardin aimed, took a breath and held it, squeezed the trigger almost gently. The man did an eerily comic dance in the roadbed, his right leg flung out rubbery and unhinged, the knee shot away. Then he fell forward, balled up in the driveway. Hardin could hear him moaning. The man halfrose and began to vomit.

Hardin wiped the blood out of his eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with it. He could hear the brush popping in a diminishing flurry and in a multitude of directions. In a little while the car cranked somewhere down the road and he could hear the tires in the gravel. Hardin grinned. He thought, The first son of a bitch there took off with the car and left the rest of them to walk it. There’ll be some sore feet and mad whitecaps in Ackerman’s Field in the mornin.

“Shut it up,” he told the girl. She was sitting on the doorstep crying. She did not cease. Her face was hidden by her hands and twin wings of long black hair.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

“Then shut it up.”

Pearl leaned her head against a porch support. Her eyes were closed.

“Are you hurt?”

“They hit my legs with a big old stick or something. They never done me and Tom thisaway. This never happened before.”

“Nor is it likely to happen again. Can you walk?”

“I reckon. Let me see about your head.”

“Let it go. Just help me load him in the car. Get a bedspread or quilt or somethin out of the house and put it in the back. Bastard’s bleedin like a hog with its throat cut.”

She arose, stood massaging the flesh of her thigh. She seemed dazed or drunken. “You ain’t aimin to kill him, are you? I can’t stand no more trouble.”

“Just get it like I told you.”

Hardin backed the Packard up to where the man lay and opened the right rear door. He knelt beside the man. Apparently he had passed out. He lay unmoving but Hardin could hear the steady rasp of his breathing. He took out the bonehandled Case pocketknife and tested the blade with a thumb, slit the pillowcase and folded it aside like a caul.

Pearl stood looking down, a quilt draped across her arm.

“Who is he, Blackwell, Blackburn, Blacksomethin. I’ve seen him.”

“Why, that’s Mr Blackstock,” Pearl said. “He runs the drygoods store in town.”

“He’ll run the son of a bitch out of a wheelchair now if he runs it at all. No, I ain’t goin to kill him. If I killed him I’d have to hide him, and I don’t want him hid. I want him where folks can see him, ever day of his life, right there in that drygood store. Get that quilt laid out in there.”

The man was heavy and slack, a seemingly boneless weight they could hardly handle. When he was almost in Hardin fell to swearing at him and shoved him the rest of the way in with the door, leaning his weight against it until he heard the latch catch.

“Where do you live, Slick?” Hardin asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer, glancing upward at the rearview mirror and not seeing the man either, just the top of the upholstery and the back glass where fled a landscape in motion, a retreating moonlit world with a blacktop highway snaking down the middle of it. He looked forward again and the night was coming in wisps and tatters of fog like clouds blown past the speeding car. The countryside was remote, locked in sleep. Off the blacktop then and back to chert and past old man Oliver’s unlit house and the orchard of dead apple trees, tree on tree looming at him from the silver roadside, unpruned branches gnarled and twisted and dead, charred bone juxtaposed against the seamless heavens like some childhood witchwood of myth or nightmare. Taking the curve the headlights yawned across the unkept yard and touched the windowpanes with illusory life, leapt past the hedge of alders gleaming white as bone the road straightened here and he accelerated onto the long stretch to town.

The old man roused from whatever state of halfsleep he habited and watched the wash of light across the faded wallpaper, arose and rested on his elbows till the light faded, the wall momentarily disappearing and then regaining visibility in the moonlight. For a moment he had thought the car was coming here, for a moment past and present had merged and he was unable to tell one from the other, dream from reality. Old days of crisis in the night, the knock at the door, the light at the window. Then he recognized the deepthroated roar of the Packard’s muffler and lay back listening to it fade away.

The town was in restless slumber as well but there was an allnight cabstand out of which a man named Wolf de Vries ran a bootlegging establishment and an almost perpetual poker game. Hardin parked in front of the cabstand and cut the lights and switch. He went in the front and passed by a desk where a woman slept with her mouth open and her head pillowed against a telephone and down a narrow hall to a locked green door. He knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Dallas Hardin.”

After a moment the door opened a crack and a face studied him. The door opened wider. Stale blue smoke boiled out and Hardin coughed. He fanned the air wildly. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “They goin to find ever one of you sots in here smothered to death some mornin. Does this place not have a winder?”

“Deal Hardin in,” de Vries called. De Vries was a quick little man with a slick, evasive face like a failed politician’s. “His money’s as good as anybody else’s”

Hardin studied the men circling the green baize table. “Looks like you got a full set of fools without me.”

De Vries had noticed the blood drying at Hardin’s temple. “What the hell happened to you? You been sorting cats?”

“No.” Hardin didn’t smile. “You know where a feller name of Blackstock lives? Runs a drygood store.”

“Charles Blackstock? Sure. West Fourth Street, right behind the school. Why?”

“I got him out in the car. Him and some whitecaps or Kluxers or some damn thing come down to the house to teach me a lesson.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he may have wished he was a time or two.”

The men at the table arose and followed Hardin back through the cabstand. The woman had awakened and her face wore a stunned, vapid look as if she did not know where she was, or care.

Blackstock was conscious as well. He stirred on the back floorboard, said something unintelligible. His eyes stared at the faces ringing the windows of the Packard but did not remark them. He flung an arm across his face as if the light bothered him. His trouserleg from the knee down was saturated with coagulating blood.

“Shitfire,” de Vries said. “You better get him to a hospital fore you’re lookin a murder charge in the face.”

Hardin got behind the wheel, cranked the engine. “By the way,” he said, “you didn’t by any chance know anything about this, did you? Or know anybody else who might be in on it?”

“Hell no, Hardin. They may hit me next.”

“No. It was me they wanted.”

The man remained conscious all the way to his house, mumbling something incoherent, prayer, blasphemy, benediction. When Hardin opened the door and laid a hand on either side of his shirtfront the eyes opened and when Hardin jerked as hard as he could the face blanched lifeless and the eyes rolled back and he went to sleep again. Hardin laid him in the dewy grass and sat down breathing hard. As he arose a black dog loped around the corner of the house, paused, its hackles rising. It growled deep in its throat.

Hardin had the pocketknife out. “Try it if you feel lucky,” he told the dog. The dog hushed and then dropped to its belly and began to inch along the ground toward the wounded man.

Hardin got back in the car and blew the horn. The dog turned and lay watching him across the fallen man. Hardin lit a cigarette with the gold lighter, turned to study the house. It was silent and dark. He blew the horn again, longer, puffed the cigarette, his image reflected back by the windshield fiercely orange, a curious fiery face with black recesses for eyes.

The porchlight came on. The door opened and a woman stood under the lightbulb tying the belt of a yellow robe. She raised a hand to her face and stood staring at the crumpled man on the lawn. She opened her mouth to speak but the Packard abruptly cut off whatever she said. Hardin glanced back once and she was running down the walk.

Sometime after four o’clock in the morning William Tell Oliver was awakened again, this time by a heavy determined pounding at the door. He lay for a sleepy minute listening to it, perhaps thinking that if he ignored it it would go away. It did not. It intensified and after a time a voice began to call, “Hey, hey.”

What on earth, the old man wondered. He got up slowly, began to pull on his pants. The voice kept calling. “All right, all right,” Oliver said. “I’m comin.” He took down the Browning over-and-under from the rack above the bed. He lit a lamp and with it in one hand the gun in the other crossed to the door. He leaned the gun against the wall and opened the door slightly.

The moon had set by now and the porch was in darkness, fainter darkness framing the bulk of the man standing before the door. The door opened wider, allowing the seepage of yellow light to spread, illuminating a tiredlooking man leaning against the doorjamb. He swayed slightly as if drunk or exhausted.

“What is it?” Oliver asked.

“Well, I’m in kind of a bind and I need some help. I need to get you to run me into town.”

“Have you got a stick?”

The man looked startled. “A stick? What kind of a stick?”

“Well, you wanted run to town. I shore ain’t got no automobile.”

“Shitfire.” When Oliver didn’t comment the man said, “I’m Cecil Blalock.”

“I know who you are. But I still ain’t got no way to town. What’s the trouble, ye car play out?”

“Yeah, and it’s a hell of a piece to town. Seems like I been wanderin around in the woods half the night.”

“Where’d ye have trouble?”

“Down by Hardin’s.”

“Why, Lord, that ain’t over a mile. It ortnt took but a few minutes to walk that.”

“Yeah. Well I might’ve got turned around or somethin. How about lettin me use your phone to call a cab?”

Oliver was silent a time. “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I just ain’t bein no help at all. I ain’t got no telephone either.”

“Hellfire.” Blalock stood as if undecided what his next move should be. A cool wind blew across the porch, rustled through the leaves. The light wavered in the quaking globe, guttered, flared up. “Thanks anyway,” Blalock said. He descended the steps and crossed the yard toward the road. He was out of sight but Oliver could hear the walking. “Hey,” Oliver called. The steps ceased. “Ain’t no use wakin up them Winer folks. They ain’t got no car either.” There was no reply save the steps commencing again and after a moment he went back inside and closed the door.

Like aging birds aligned on a winter wire the row of old men sat before Sam Long’s cold stove and endlessly refought Hardin’s set-to with the whitecaps. On creaking Coke crates and upended cuts of wood they refurbished or delineated the story to its marrow according to their whims.

“I hear they takin his leg off,” Horace Hensley said. “What of it Hardin didn’t take off with that highpowered rifle.”

“Some say Hardin didn’t do it,” a man named Pulley said. “Blackstock hisself says he had a fight with a feller he caught ransacking his house.”

“A man tells a baldfaced lie like that I wouldn’t believe him if he was standin in Buffalo River and he told me his feet was wet.”

Sam Long dumped William Tell Oliver’s poke of ginseng onto the scale, watched intently the fluctuation of the needle. “I make it just under thirty-nine ounces, Mr. Oliver. You want it in cash or credit?”

“Well, I took me on a partner. You might ort to just let me have it in cash.”

“That must’ve been a purty good to-do, though,” Long said. He punched No Sale on the cash register and began to count bills onto Oliver’s palm. “Shoot Blackstock’s leg off and kill a Diamond-T truck. All in the same night. Well, I guess Blackstock was astin for it since he didn’t have no business down there. But that truck was just a innocent bystander.”

Horace Hensley had been listening in silence. “I’ll tell you what Hardin told me one time,” he finally said. “And it was the damnedest thing I ever heard tell of, I still don’t know if it was so or not. You never could tell when Hardin was tellin the truth and when he was talking just to hear hisself.

“It was right after he come to this part of the country. Back before Hovington died and right after Hardin moved in with Pearl. Times was tight then and by God I mean tight. They wadnt no soldiers blowin money nor judges birdhuntin with him nor none of these sharptittied Memphis whores down there. He wadnt drivin no Packard back then neither, all he had was an old Diamond-T truck and he won that off old man Pennington in a poker game.”

Pope raised the lid of the dead stove and spat into the ashes. “Which he probably rigged,” he said.

“Which he probably did,” Hensley agreed. “Anyway, somebody had busted his still up, just teetotally demolished it and busted all his whiskey, and he worked up some kind of deal with Homer McCandless over in Hickman County and bought a bunch of whiskey off of him. I don’t know how, he probably beat him, you know how slick he could talk. The hell of it was Hardin couldn’t drive a car. Here he was a grown man and he couldn’t even drive. Oh, he could I guess hold one in the road but nobody had never showed him the gears nor how to start and stop one. Course he can now he drives that Packard, but he couldn’t then. So he come to me.

“I didn’t want no part of him. He just didn’t look right to me. He looked like a feller who’d do anything and already had a start on all of it but drivin a car, but I had three kids contrary enough to want to eat ever day or two. And he laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table, I never will forget it. It looked as big as a bedsheet, and I believe I could have warmed my hands off of it. I got to thinkin about grocers.”

“Hovington had about five or six hundred pounds of cotton down there in a crib and we loaded it on that truck. He had some old sideboards he’d cobbled up. We headed out to Hickman County and got that whiskey, and I was on pins and needles all the way. I never fooled none with whiskey, didn’t even drink. I think that’s why he wanted me. He had the whiskey hid under that cotton and a tarpaulin stretched over it and lit out like we was headed to Lawrenceburg to the gin. Made it all the way back and turned down the Mormon Springs road and a rod in that old truck started knockin. I was wringin wet with sweat, and it October, I knowed we wadnt goin to make it. I knowed I’d be settin there in the middle of the road with fifty gallon of whiskey and a blowed-up truck and I’d done made up my mind to take to the bushes.

“Then to top it off the law stopped us. Amacher was hid out in a sideroad and he stopped us. I don’t know if he’d been watchin Hardin or not, I do know he didn’t have em bought off like he does now. Amacher come up and checked my license. Wanted to know where we was goin. ‘Just takin off cotton,’ I told him. ‘Takin it where?’ he ast. We was headed the wrong way and I hadn’t even thought of it. Then Hardin spoke up calm as you please. He told Amacher we was headed to Lawrenceburg and the truck started tearing up and we come back.

“Amacher made me crank it up. It sounded like a cement mixer with a armful of brick throwed in it. Amacher just nodded and waved us on.

“Anyway, we got there and got the whiskey unloaded. Hardin took him a little drink and got to braggin. Spread hisself a little bit. That’s when he said what I started out to tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. He said he was a walkin miracle, that nothin couldn’t ever happen to him cause the worst already had. He said he was a walkin dead man.

“He told me he was born in a casket. Said his mama was killed when a horse run off with a buggy and throwed her out and broke her neck. They had her laid out and everthing and was preachin her funeral, and in a way I guess his too, when they heard a baby squallin. Folk didn’t know what on earth to do. Some just jumped up and took off runnin out of the church. Some of the women finally got up and looked. Godamighty. He was down in her clothes. He’d crawled out or got jarred out by them handlin the casket or somethin. Anyway there he was.”

“Not that I believe any of this horseshit for a minute,” Sam Long said. “But that’s the strongest argument for embalmin I ever heard. She’d a been embalmed he never would’ve been.”

“It just sounds like a damn lie to me,” a man named Pope said.

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t know why a man would make up a tale like that to tell on hisself. But I don’t know why he’d tell it if it was the truth either.”

“Hardin never done nothin without a reason.”

“Yeah. It makes you think though. This ain’t nothin against religion but looky here. It looks like somebody slipped up and let him get started in the first place and then seen what they done. They tried to wipe out that mistake with anothern and let the cagey son of a bitch slip through anyway. I guess when they seen how set on gettin into this world he was they just throwed up their hands and said let him go.”

The car blew one peremptory blast of its horn but by the time it did Winer had already opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Dusk was deepening, the western sky beyond the darkling stubbed fields mottled with bloody red where the day’s light was draining off the rim of the world.

“What say, Winer?” The Packard sat gleaming dully in the yard.

“Hidy.”

“You got a minute? I got a little business I need to talk with you.”

“I reckon so.”

Winer approached the car. Hardin cut the switch and the lights and swung the door open a little way though he made no move to get out. He sat facing Winer with his arms on the door panel, chin resting on his forearm. “Come on up, boy. I reckon everbody’s peaceable.”

Winer thought the face curiously asymmetrical: the nose had been broken and healed crooked, tipped slightly toward the left side of his face. The right side of the face was lanternjawed, the cheek perpetually swollen. There was an imbalance to the jaws as if God Almighty had laid a hand on either side of the face, slipped one side a notch up and the other a notch down. The eyes were pale yellow, some peculiarity about the pupils. The eyes were goatlike. The left lid drooped sleepily as if his guard never dropped, as if one eye must watch while the other rested.

“I hear you run out of a job.”

“Yeah. I was working for Weiss.”

“Me and you might be able to help one another. You need work and I need it done.”

Winer hunkered in the yard, absentmindedly took up a stick, began to scratch meaningless hieroglyphics in the earth. A whippoorwill abruptly called from the woods, as if at some occult signal others took up the chorus. As dusk drew on the face phased out, there was only the voice and the pale gleam of the Packard, which seemed to emit some cool black light.

“What was it you wanted done?” Winer asked.

Something in his voice, caution perhaps, made Hardin grin. “I ain’t tryin to hire you to kill somebody,” he said. “I don’t sub that work out.” He took a cigarette from a pack, offered the pack to Winer, returned it to his pocket when it was refused. A match rasped on metal, flared. “You know that buildin I’m puttin up up there? I need some help on it. Reckon you can drive a nail? You ever done any carpenter work?”

“What I don’t know I can learn.”

“I hear your daddy was a carpenter.”

“That’s right.”

“I heard he was a damn good worker. I heard a lot of folks say you’re a pretty damn good worker yourself.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I want that place finished before cold weather. I want it dried in before the rain starts and I ain’t getting it. I got Gobel Lipscomb down there piddlinass around and he’s cryin he ain’t got no help. Hell, he ain’t no carpenter nohow. I can pick up plenty of these old boys but as soon as they get enough worked out to buy a halfpint of whiskey you don’t see em no more till next Thursday. That ain’t what I want. What I want is somebody’ll be there to work ever day the weather’s fit and give me a day’s work for a day’s pay. From what I hear that’s you, Winer.”

“What are you paying?”

“Well, I’m payin fair wages. What are you worth?”

“I don’t know.”

“I might tell you a dollar an hour and be underpayin you. I might say two dollars a day and be payin you too much. What say you come down Monday mornin and we’ll try each other out.”

“Well, that sounds fair enough to me.”

“I guarantee you a fair wage. I ain’t astin you to work for nothin, and man nor boy don’t enter into it. I pay what a man’s worth. Me and you just might hit it off. I been lookin for a likely feller I could trust. A young man want to make his mark.”

Winer arose. “I’ll see you Monday then.”

“You got any tools?”

“I got my pa’s. I reckon he had about everthing I’ll need.”

“You get in there and rest up then. Me and you’s got a honkeytonk to build, Winer. A hell of a honkytonk. I’m gonna have a nigger cook fryin hamburgers for them that’s hungry. I’m gonna run poker games for them with money burnin their pockets and whores for them inclined in that direction. I’m gonna feed em, bleed em, and breed em, all under one roof. And you’re gonna build me that roof.”

Winer dragged the box of tools from the back room out to where the light was. Hands gentle and respectful to the tools. He wiped the framing square with an oiled rag, tilted it toward the white globe of light to read the spill of numbers. Something awesome, almost occult, ageless, in this sheer condensation of knowledge.

“What are you doin?”

“Getting ready to go to work.”

“For him?”

“Yes.”

“Buildin that Godless mess down there at Hovington’s.”

He laid the square aside. “Well. I haven’t noticed any preachers coming around to hire me build a church.”

“You think God Almight’ll ever allow a roof over such a snake’s den as that? No, he won’t. He’ll burn it down with a bolt of lightin before the first bottle’s sold or the first blasphemy’s said. Then where will you be? If it was me I’d want to be as far away from a sight like that as I could.”

“Well. God Almighty let him sell it off Hovington’s front porch and I never even heard any thunder.”

“Yeah. Yeah. And him gettin bolder every minute and darin folks to stop him. Shootin em and goin scot-free, burnin houses over folks’ heads. And you defending him to your own mama and gettin a mouth on you needs a bar of soap took to it.”

Winer didn’t reply. He tried a tape measure, dripped oil into the case, and tried again.

“And you gettin more like him ever day. Usin his tools. It’s a wonder he didn’t take em with him when he went, I reckon he figured there wadnt a dollar on them.” Old bitter anger long unhealed imbued her with vehemence. “Storm in here mad at nothin and gone with never a word of why to anybody.”

He still didn’t reply. He seldom did anymore.

Oliver had always expected his fences to outlast him but in the last year or so it seemed to him that he spent most of his time repairing them where the goats had pushed through.

“I aim to kill em,” he said. “Ever last emptyheaded one of em. I’m goin back to the house soon as I fix this fence and get my gun and lay out ever last goat I own.”

“If I was going to kill them I’d just let the fences go,” Winer said. He was grinning, he’d heard death sentences passed on the goats before but the old man’s herd always seemed to increase rather than diminish. Even as Oliver spoke a baby goat was rubbing its head against the old man’s arm.

He was weaving a temporary deterrent of seagrass string among the rusted strands of wire. “I sort of like to hear the bells but by God I can string the bells on wire and let the wind ring em.” He knotted the string. Already the goats were pushing against the wire. “And say we’re out of the sang business?”

“I reckon. I told him I’d be there Monday.”

“Just as well, I reckon, I’ll be gone fore long. I look for a early frost and a long winter. Long and cold. Signs is there if you know where to look.”

“You reckon I ought to go work for him or not? I’m a little undecided.”

“Boy, you got to do what you want to do. You suit yourself. As long as you keep your head straight and stay out of his business you’ll be all right. Just drive nails and draw your pay on Friday and go on home. Besides, I know you. You’re goin to do what you want to anyway.”

Oliver straightened when he finished the fence, stood halfbent a moment then with hands on knees, his fingers kneading recalcitrant flesh and bone. “No,” he said. “But there ain’t no law says you got to like a man to do his work and draw his money. All you have to do is get along with him. I just worked for bosses I liked, I guess I’d a spent a good portion of my life settin on the front porch.”

“Would you work for Hardin?”

“Lord, no. I’d scratch shit with the chickens before I’d take a nickel that passed through his hands.”

“Why? Because he’s a bootlegger?”

“No. I got nothin against bootleggin. I lived around it all my life. Thomas Hovington was a bootlegger and I never had nothin against him cept he let folks run over him. Never would stand up for hisself. Let Hardin do him out of business, his place, even his woman. A man like Hardin now, he can spot that in a feller and use it, he knows who he can shove around and who he can’t. Just see he don’t get started off that way with you. The way I see it there’s a way of doin things, a way they ort to be done. Hardin strikes me as a feller that won’t cull much if it’ll get him what he wants.”

“Well. It’s your business anyhow,” Winer said. “I just wanted you to know why I won’t be over Monday.”

“You a good worker. Don’t sell yourself short and don’t let him run nothin over on you.”

Watching the boy go back up the roadbed Oliver knelt back in the sun and rested a moment. Well, go then, he thought. I can’t stop you. The sun was a warm weight on the paper lids of his eyes but it already had a quality of distance to it, a subtle eclipse of the seasons he had an affinity with, a clocking of the earth’s time he felt in sync with, he and the earth growing old together but never able to give up.

That spotted horse, he thought, remembering the hoofbeats and almost concurrent with them the horse and rider appearing apparitionlike and immediate out of the brush and morning fog, the bunched muscles of horse’s hindquarters when Hardin sawed the reins and the horse rearing its eyes wild and muddy but no more wild that Hardin’s own, the look of surprise lasting no more than a second then going blank and serene, all surface you could not penetrate. There was a Winchester cradled in the crook of Hardin’s arm and as the horse calmed he laid it across the pommel of the saddle. Just resting it there.

“What the fuck are you doin out here?”

It was fall of the year and the woods were the color of bright copper and the wind was blowing, shifting the depth of the driven leaves like water. The forest became surreal, a place he’d never seen or dreamed or heard rumored, a dark corner of childhood night and he thought. This son of a bitch is crazy. This madman is goin to shoot me where I stand and leave me where I fall. He would rot in these woods, black millipedes sleep in his chambered skull, the teeth of predators score his bones. “Just mindin my own business,” he said. “A pastime I ain’t noticed much around here.” There was a sharp, metallic taste to his saliva, like cankered brass.

“Your business, hell. I reckon you think anything moves in these woods is your business. Don’t think I ain’t seen you prowlin. Stickin your long nose in my business.”

There was a hot seeping anger in Oliver’s chest. “You don’t own this property,” he said. “You better check your lines.”

“My lines is where I make em,” Hardin said. “And I make a new set everday.” He spurred the horse and almost as an afterthought quartered the horse toward Oliver, the horse’s shoulder catching him in the chest and spilling him backward into the brush, the spotted horse passing almost over him, he could hear the creak of leather and smell the horse, then the hot, acrid leaves he lay in, breathless. His lungs were emptied as if he’d fallen from some great height. His mind was a torrent of rage and disbelief. He lay stunned for a moment. He heard the blood singing in his veins, the fallen cries from a blackbird winging above him. Falling his mind had seen what his eyes had not remarked, the shovel across the saddle, not a proper shovel but a military entrenching tool, the blade wet with fresh clay. The shapes in a gunnysack tied to the saddlehorn.

Them was fruitjars, he thought. I just like to caught him buryin his money.

He thought of the jars packed with greasy coins and wadded bills, overflow from the money machine Hardin was hooked to, tucked into graves like the hasty and unforeseen dead.

The sight of the rifle had raked his forehead and a fine, bright line of blood crept down his face unnoticed. I will lay for him and shoot him, he thought, but he knew already he wouldn’t. I am old, he admitted for the first time, old, tired of it all. All I want is to be let alone, all I want is for things to run along smoothly. All I want is peace, and an old man ought to have that, if nothin else.