Authors: John Yount
“I’m headed up Virginia way,” Music said. “Bound home, if I can get there.” He heard in his voice the queer, slightly formal manner that spoke to him of home.
Again the man nodded almost imperceptibly, his jaws flexed thoughtfully. “You’ll want to take care hereabouts, for Switch County tain’t so comfortable for passing through as it might be.”
“I’m obliged,” Music said. He wanted some of the man’s whiskey but didn’t quite know how to deal with him. There was no one like mountain people, he thought, for making a simple business awkward. It was embarrassing for them to buy and sell, and so they approached the matter too bluntly or else circled it endlessly, either way stymied and shamed by their own awkwardness. Give the city man his due, Music thought; he can trade with you in the blink of an eye. He could feel that he and the one-armed man were going to stand where they were for a long, long time unless he could somehow clear the air. He shifted his package from one arm to the other and stroked his chin. “I don’t guess,” he said, “you’d care to do eleven cents’ worth of business?”
The one-armed man remained impassive. He looked off at the horizon, he chewed, spat. He looked at the ground before his shoes and the ragged and begrimed cuffs of his trousers. His hat brim waggled slightly. He turned his head and spat again. “Dwight,” he said, without turning toward the two figures lounging on the gallery, “see can ye find airey sort of bottle thereabouts.”
Music saw the boy rise and step through what had once been a window into the bowels of the building. Presently he emerged, dropped down from the porch, and came up carrying a pop bottle caked with dust. The boy’s hands and bare feet were black as a raccoon’s, and at the crown of his head, his hair rose in an unruly swirl, like the topknot of some strange bird; yet there was dignity in him somehow, in his eyes, the set of his chin. “Will this’un do?” he asked. “Hit’s all I could find.”
“Hit’ll serve,” the one-armed man said. He took it, turned it upside down, and gave it a shake. Nothing fell out. He rubbed it against his thigh as though shining an apple until it was possible to see through it. He blew into the neck of it and handed it back to the boy. “Hold hit still,” he said and drew a pint mason jar out of one of the baggy pockets of his jumper. He clamped the lid of the mason jar under the stump of his arm and with no trouble opened it without spilling a drop. But skillful and steady as he was, he could not pour a stream as small as the neck of the pop bottle, and Music could hardly stand to watch.
When the pop bottle was three-quarters full, and the mason jar two-thirds empty, the man ceased pouring. He managed to set the lid back on the mason jar as much with his armpit as with the stump of his arm. He spun the lid down with one flick of his thumb. He dropped the mason jar in his pocket, took the bottle from the boy, and, without a word, extended it to Music.
“I thank you,” Music said and took the bottle and paid him. “I surely do.” He swallowed in anticipation, whisked his palm over the mouth of the bottle, leaned back his head, and drank. Before he swallowed twice, the moonshine peeled his gullet all the way to his stomach and filled him with fire. A mist of tears washed his eyes and dampened his eyelashes.
“Hit’s stout fer hit’s doubled and twisted,” the one-armed man said, “but tain’t any cheap busthead.”
Music had no voice, could not speak. His eyes swam in tears. He offered the blur of the one-armed man the pop bottle. “No manners,” he managed to say, his voice no more than breath and whispers despite the volume of air which left his throat.
The one-armed man shook his head. “Stomach ain’t stout no more. Little buttermilk and biscuit, and maybe a dab of navy beans, is all I can handle without aggravation.”
Music bobbed his head again and again, since it didn’t yet seem quite possible to speak above a whisper. He raised the pop bottle in a gesture of salute and parting, and swung his head toward the north up the road. He cleared his throat, although it seemed already as clear as a whistle, and in a voice that was stronger, if not his own, said, “This’ll ease my travels.” He nodded almost formally to the man and the boy standing before him and even to the man sitting on the gallery of the building. “I’m obliged,” he said and turned to go.
“Ye’ll come to Elkin a little ways up the creek,” the one-armed man said behind him, “but I wouldn’t fetch up. There’s them in Elkin that’s mean-spirited. I’d keep on to Valle Crucis, son. Tain’t but seven mile.”
Music raised the pop bottle in acknowledgement and went on, surprised to feel a certain warmth in his joints already, a looseness, as though they had been lightly oiled. His ribs didn’t hurt so much either. Nor did he walk far until all the spots where he was stiff sore seemed to attract warmth and easement from the corn liquor. Even his hunger dulled and warmed and grew almost sweet, as though it weren’t, after all, serious or important. About a mile up the road he stopped and took another drink. It didn’t seem so wickedly strong as the first. His eyes scarcely teared. Still, he could feel the machinery of his body change gears again and settle into a slower rhythm, even as he breathed out the warm, sweet fumes of it, even as he watched the fog of his breath hover before his face until it disappeared.
How cool and serene the evening was, how still. As though cotton plugs had been drawn from his ears, sounds he hadn’t noticed before seemed to reach him from great distances up and down the valley. Someone’s dog was barking back toward the Bear Paw, his voice as short and precise as hammer blows; somewhere away, a cow was bawling, long and soft and consonant at first but raucous as the bleating of a sheep before it was done; and north toward Elkin, in perfect miniature, he could hear the slamming of doors and the voices of children. It is fall, he thought with wonder, as though he had known the month of the year but not the season. There was a field yet green on his right with long beige grasses at its edge, swirled and cow-licked by the wind. Some of the trees still held color, some were bare; already the unrelinquished leaves of the oaks were brown. Up the mountains toward the tops of hogbacks and ridges, there were laurel thickets and pines, the green of them deep and lusterless against the pale blue sky. He stood still for a long moment as though pondering what he saw: the mountains, the valley, and across it, the long, smooth arc of the railroad girdling the abrupt slope down to the river. The rails shone like quicksilver in the remaining light, and here and there snatches of the river he could see shone too, but softer, duller, like melted lead or pewter. And as if some strange wisdom lay in noticing such small things, he realized that he was indeed almost home, that after covering an unthinkable distance, he was nearly there. All the valley had to do was broaden out a little, the mountains rise a little higher with slopes a little less abrupt, and he would be there. It wasn’t more than two hundred miles or so farther. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, refusing to think into words or acknowledge the feeling that the distance didn’t matter, that he could come no closer—the sharp, sudden certainty that home existed in time and not at all in space. He wondered what the proof of “doubled and twisted” corn liquor might be. There was a warm spot the size of a silver dollar in the center of his head, and his balance was no longer quite sure. He climbed down into the right-hand ditch, cut a limb from some scrub maple, whittled out a stopper, and plugged his whiskey. Back up on the road, he dropped the bottle in his sack and went on.
The chicken he wished to find was nowhere to be seen. In a mile and a half he hadn’t passed a single homestead until he rounded a curve and saw a dirt road leading up into a narrow hollow on his left, but as he drew abreast of it, he saw no house and barn, but instead, another row of shacks, their front door stoops clinging to the bottom edge of the road and stilts holding their backsides above the steep bank behind them. Still, there were people there, for smoke rose almost straight up from every chimney, and here and there the mellow, rosy bloom of a kerosene lamp lit a window. And there were children playing in the road before the shacks, Negro children, girls with heads full of pigtails, boys of all sizes, most of them in motion and almost all indistinguishable from the color of the earth but for the rags and tatters of the clothing they wore; and there were men lounging on the high side of the road, one or two standing, one or two sitting against the bank, all of them black, head to foot, clothing and all—dull, lusterless, coal-dust black, save for the metal shine of a dinner bucket or a carbide lamp. The high, musical litany of the children playing and the occasional bass or baritone remarks of the men pleased him and stopped him on the road. He saw himself mounting the wide path into the hollow, sharing his whiskey with the men, talking trivially, laughing; they might just tell him where he could find that hen he was looking for. “Evenin,” he called out to them and raised his hand. The voices of the men ceased at once, and all eyes turned toward him. The shouts and laughter of the children, the running to and fro, subsided more slowly; and their eyes turned toward him as well, with only a little cautious movement among them to get a better view. “Evenin,” one of the men said at last.
But for the just audible goings-on inside the shacks, no one spoke or moved, except one figure who crept among the children and past an isolated woman or two toward the washed-out wagon road. It was an old man, or a broken one. He stopped at the edge of the road and leaned on a walking stick. “You a Hardcastle man, white folks?” he asked.
“Don’t know what a Hardcastle man might be,” Music said and laughed. “What does one look like?”
The old man leaning on his stick was not amused. He appeared to think the matter over and turned his head toward the men lounging across the rutted-out road as though to see what their opinion might be. They were quiet, looked uneasy, offered nothing. The man with the walking stick swung his head toward Music again. “You be some kinda law?” he asked.
“No, uncle,” Music said, “I’m just passing by.”
The man labored slowly across the road to the others, and they spoke together in indistinguishable voices for a moment.
The children began to stir, as though a spell cast over them were beginning to fail. The few women gathered together to whisper.
At last a large man with a dented carbide lamp clipped to his cap took a step in Music’s direction. “We ain lookin fo trouble, white man,” he said in a deep, strong bass. “You got no truck in Mink Slide.”
Music did not know what to say. Suddenly he couldn’t even remember what had already been said. He suspected he had made some blunder; was somehow drunker than he knew. A moment before it had seemed an easy thing to mount the rutted byway up into the hollow, to pass his whiskey among them, to warm himself before their conviviality as before a fire. “We ain lookin fo trouble,” the man said again, and Music nodded and raised his hand that he understood, although he did not.
A quarter of a mile further down the road he was still puzzling over it when, around a curve, the narrow valley opened out for another coal camp. Elkin, he thought.
It was bigger than the Bear Paw and lay under a blue haze of smoke. North and on his left there were two rows of company houses perched along the foot of a mountain and three or four buildings across the road from them. At the base of the mountain to the northeast, across the river and the railroad tracks, there were electric lights burning at the power plant and tipple, and along the conveyor to the mouth of a coal mine which was a third of the way up the mountain. Although it was not yet dark, many electric lights were burning in the houses and in one or two of the buildings across the road from them; and shabby as the community was, because of the lights it looked somehow festive as well. Just to his right was a schoolhouse, and upon a field of hard-packed mud and scrappy grass, white children were playing ball, the failing light notwithstanding. The team at bat slouched against a backstop of sagging supports and broken chicken wire, talking among themselves and haranguing the pitcher. But the pitcher, twelve or so, wearing a man’s old suit coat for a jacket, the sleeves rolled back, the hem striking him at midthigh, paid them no mind. He took his windup and fired the ball down the center of the strike zone, the suit coat he wore seeming to start its delivery a full second behind the boy inside it, and to stop its follow-through a full second after the boy had ceased to move. The batter ignored the pitch, took one and then a second practice swing.
“Ezel, you out!” the pitcher said.
“At ain’t nuthin but a lie,” the batter said; “that ball were a real groundhog.”
“Outta there,” the catcher said.
The batter hunched his shoulders, turned. “Nobody ast you nuthin,” he said. “I’ll stomp a mudhole in yore ass.”
The infielders came in to argue. The ragged group leaning against the backstop snapped upright and advanced toward home plate. A base runner on first broke for second, hesitated, and then beat it for third. In grave and noncommittal silence a group of smaller children and girls looked on beside the road. All, anyway, but one small, blond girl who stood, birdlike, on one bare foot; the other, toes curled, propped against her shin. She watched Music instead.
“What do you think, missy?” Music asked her as he passed them by. “I think he was out.”
The girl sucked her thumb, rubbed the sole of her foot slowly up and down against her shin, and made no answer. Despite the fact that her joints seemed swollen and nearly purple with the cold and she was none too clean, there was about her a kind of fair-skinned, fine-boned beauty that made him shiver, since he knew all at once, without knowing quite how, that she was feebleminded. He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably and picked up his pace. On the ball field, argument gave way to shoving.
At the north end of the playground, as he passed the small, one-story schoolhouse, the sound of scuffling and the hubbub of grunts and cries followed him. Except that the windows were so dirty they resembled the scales of a snake and the building was altogether scummed over with coal dust, the schoolhouse might have been in Shulls Mills, what with its single wooden step up to the worn doorsill and each of its four corners supported by stones.