Authors: William Gay
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.
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.”