Child of God (13 page)

What do you get for yourn? he asked.

Eight dollars.

Ballard eyed the merchant’s watches doubtfully. Well, he said. He finished the cake and took up his own watches by their straps and took his drink and crossed the floor to the stove again. He held the watches out, tendering them uncertainly at the man nearest him. You all don’t need a wristwatch do ye? he said.

The man glanced at the watches and glanced away.

Let’s see em over here, old buddy, said a fat boy by the stove.

Ballard handed the watches across.

What do ye want for em?

I thought I’d get five dollars.

What, for all three of em?

Why hell no. Five dollars each.

Shit.

Let’s see thatn, Orvis.

Wait a minute, I’m lookin at it.

Let’s see it.

That there’s a good watch.

Let me have it. What will ye take for thisn?

Five dollar.

I’ll give two and won’t ast ye where ye got it.

I cain’t do it.

Let me see that othern, Fred. What’s wrong with em?

Ain’t a damn thing wrong with em. You hear em runnin don’t ye?

I’ll give you three for that there gold lookin one.

Ballard looked from one to the other of them. I’ll take four, he said, and pick your choice.

What’ll ye take for all of em?

Ballard totted figures in the air for a moment. Twelve dollars, he said.

Why hell, that ain’t no deal. Don’t ye get a discount on job lots?

Is them all the watches you got?

Just them three is all.

Here. Hand him thesens back.

Ain’t you goin to get in the watch business today, Orvis?

I cain’t get my jobber to come down.

What’ll you give for em? said Ballard.

I’ll give eight dollars for the three of em.

Ballard looked about at the men. They were watching him to see what price used watches would bring this Sunday morning. He weighed the watches in his hand a moment and handed them across. You bought em, he said.

The watchbuyer rose and handed across the money
and took the watches. You want thisn for three? he said to the man next to him.

Yeah, let me have it.

Anybody else want one for three? He held up the spare watch.

The other man who had been looking at the watches straightened out his leg across the floor and reached into his pocket. I’ll take if off of ye, he said.

What’ll ye take for thatn you got, Orvis?

Might take five.

Shit. You ain’t got but two in it.

This here’s a good watch.

I
T WAS DARK WHEN HE
reached the cave. He crawled through and lit a match and got the lamp and lit it and set it by the ring of stones that marked the firepit. The nearer walls of the cavern composed themselves out of the constant night with their pale stone drapery folds and a faultline in the vault’s ceiling appeared with a row of dripping limestone teeth. In the black smokehole overhead the remote and lidless stars of the Pleiades burned cold and absolute. Ballard kicked at the fire and turned a few dull cherry coals up out of the ash and bones. He fetched dry grass and twigs and lit the fire and went back out with his pan and brought it in filled with snow and set it by the fire. His mattress lay in a pile
of brush with the stuffed animals upon it and his other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.

When he had the fire going he took his flashlight and went across the room and disappeared down a narrow passageway.

Ballard made his way by damp stone corridors down inside the mountain to another room. Here his light scudded across a growth of limestone columns and what looked like huge stone urns moist and illshapen. From the floor of the room an underground stream rose. It welled up blackly in a calcite basin and flowed down a narrow aqueduct where the room tailed off through a black hole. Ballard’s light glanced from the surface of the pool unaltered, as if bent back by some strange underground force. Everywhere water dripped and spattered and the wet cave walls looked waxed or lacquered in the beam of light.

He crossed the room and followed the stream out and down the narrow gorge through which it flowed, the water rushing off into the darkness before him, descending from pool to pool in stone cups of its own devising and Ballard nimble over the rocks and along a ledge, keeping his feet dry, straddling the watercourse at points, his light picking out on the pale stone floor of the stream white crawfish that backed and turned blindly.

He followed this course for perhaps a mile down all its turnings and through narrows that fetched him sideways advancing like a fencer and through a tunnel
that brought him to his belly, the smell of the water beside him in the trough rich with minerals and past the chalken dung of he knew not what animals until he climbed up a chimney to a corridor above the stream and entered into a tall and bellshaped cavern. Here the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.

W
HEN BALLARD REACHED
the river he looked about the empty white countryside and then dropped down off the road and under the bridge. Coming up the river were tracks not his own. Ballard scrambled up under the stanchions and reached up to the beam atop which he’d left the rifle. There for a moment he flailed wildly, his hand scrabbling along the concrete, his eye to the river and the tracks there which already he was trailing to the end of his life. Then his hand closed upon the stock of the rifle. He fetched it down, cursing, his heart hammering. You’d try it, wouldn’t ye? he wailed at the tracks in the snow. His voice beneath the arches of the bridge came back hollow and alien and Ballard listened to the echo of it with his head tilted like a dog and then he climbed the bank and started back up the road.

A
WINTER DREADFUL COLD
it was. He thought before it was over that he would look like one of the bitter spruces that grew slant downwind out of the shale and lichens on the hogback. Coming up the mountain through the blue winter twilight among great boulders and the ruins of giant trees prone in the forest he wondered at such upheaval. Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed. Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.

It snowed again. It snowed for four days and when Ballard went down the mountain again it took him the best part of the morning to cross to the ridge above Greer’s place. There he could hear the chuck of an axe muted with distance and snowfall. He could see nothing.
The snow was gray against the sky, soft on his lashes. It fell without a sound. Ballard cradled the rifle in his arm and made his way down the slope toward the house.

He crouched behind the barn listening for sound of Greer. There in the frozen mire of mud and dung deeply plugged with hoofprints. When he came through the barn it was empty. The loft was filled with hay. Ballard stood in the forebay door looking down through the falling snow at the gray shape of the house. He crossed to the chicken house and undid the wire that held the hasp and entered. A few white hens eyed him nervously from their cubbynests on the far wall. Ballard passed along a row of roosting rails and went through a chickenwire door to the feedroom. There he loaded his pockets with shelled corn and came back. He surveyed the hens, clucked his tongue at them and reached for one. It erupted from the box with a long squawk and flapped past and lit in the floor and trotted off. Ballard cursed. In the uproar the other hens were following by ones and pairs. He lunged and grabbed one by the tail as it came soaring out. It set up an outraged shrieking until Ballard could get it by the neck. Holding the struggling bird in both hands and with his rifle between his knees he crowhopped to the small dustwebbed window and peered out. Nothing stirred. You son of a bitch, said Ballard, to the chicken or Greer or both. He wrung the hen’s neck and went quickly through the nesting boxes gathering up the few eggs and putting them in his pockets and then he went out again.

I
N THE SPRING OR WARMER
weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. Ballard went through the woods kicking down his old trails where they veered over the hill toward his onetime homeplace. Old comings and goings. The tracks of a fox raised out of the snow intaglio like little mushrooms and berrystains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood.

When he reached the overlook he stood his rifle against the stones and watched the house below him.
There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Ballard watched with his arms folded. He asked Greer where he was today. A gray and colder day with all the melting snow ceased from its dripping and runneling. Ballard watched the first flakes fall like ash into the valley.

Where are you, you bastard? he called.

Two minute doilies of snow settled and perished on the crossed arms of his coat. He watched until the silent house grew dim below him in the gray snowfall. After a while he took up the rifle once again and crossed the ridge to where he could see the road. There was nobody going up or down. Already the snow was falling so that you could not see up the valley at all. A spray of small birds came out of the snowfall and passed like windblown leaves into the silence again. Ballard crouched on his heels with the rifle between his knees. He told the snow to fall faster and it did.