Child of God (18 page)

He worked all day, scratching at the hole with a piece of stone or with his bare hand. He’d sleep and work and sleep again. Or sort among the dusty relics of a nest seeking a whole hickory nut among the bone-hard hulls with their volute channels cleanly unmeated by woodmice, teeth precise and curved as sail-makers needles. He could find none, nor was he hungry. He slept again.

In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they’d nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brains had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl. He’d cause to wish and he did wish for some brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep.

In the morning there was a spiderweb between himself and the sky. He seized a clawful of rubble and hurled it up the shaft. And again, until the web was gone every trace. He pulled himself up and began to dig.

He’d wake with his head against the wall and the stone tool still in his hand and dig again. Late that day
he loosed a thin slab of stone and let it clatter down into the hole. In wrenching it loose he’d laid his finger open and he sat with it in his mouth, the earth’s musty taste mingled with the ironrust tincture of blood. Dry dirt sifted down from the hole. He could see treelimbs against the sky.

Climbing up again he set to work, hammering now at actual stone, stratified layers of it that flaked off, Ballard using the larger chunks to pry and dig with. Before dark fell he raised his head up through the earth and looked out.

The first thing he saw was a cow. It was about a hundred feet away in a field beyond the wood in which he’d risen and beyond the cow was a barn and beyond that a house. He watched the house for signs of life but saw none. He lowered himself back into his hole and rested.

It was hours past dark and a black night when he finally emerged from the earth. Down at the house there were lights. He cast about among the stars for some kind of guidance but the heavens wore a different look that Ballard did not trust. He crossed through the woods and climbed a fence and crossed a field until he came to a road. It was no place he’d ever stood in before. Seeing that uphill it led toward the mountains he took the other way and soon was hobbling along weak but able, the night being as fine as you could wish and a faint bloom of honeysuckle already on the air. At this time he had not eaten for five days.

He’d not gone far before a churchbus hove into
sight behind him. Ballard scuttled into the roadside weeds and crouched there watching. The bus clattered past. It was all lit up and the faces within passed each in their pane of glass, each in profile. At the last seat in the rear a small boy was looking out the window, his nose puttied against the glass. There was nothing out there to see but he was looking anyway. As he went by he looked at Ballard and Ballard looked back. Then the bus rounded the curve and clattered from sight. Ballard climbed into the road and went on. He was trying to fix in his mind where he’d seen the boy when it came to him that the boy looked like himself. This gave him the fidgets and though he tried to shake the image of the face in the glass it would not go.

When he reached the highway he crossed over into the fields beyond. He stumbled his way over the clods in a new turned bottom and came at last to the river. The river woods were hung with trash and papers from the high water, the trees plastered up with silt and enormous nests of jetsam lodged high in the branches against the sky.

As he neared the town the roosters were calling. Perhaps they sensed a relief in the obscurity of night that the traveler could not read, though he kept watch eastward. Perhaps some freshness in the air. Everywhere across the sleeping land they called and answered each to each. As in olden times so now. As in other countries here.

It was dawn when he presented himself at the
county hospital desk. The nightduty nurse had just come down the hall with a cup of coffee and found Ballard leaning against the counter. A weedshaped onearmed human swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered all over with red mud. His eyes were caved and smoking. I’m supposed to be here, he said.

B
ALLARD ENTERED THE HOLLOW
rock that used to be his home attended by eight or ten men with lanterns and lights. The rest of them built a fire at the mouth of the cave and sat about to wait.

They gave him a flashlight and fell in behind him.
Down narrow dripping corridors, across stone rooms where fragile spires stood everywhere from the floor and a stream in its stone bed ran on in the sightless dark.

They went on hands and knees between shifted bedding planes and up a narrow gorge, Ballard pausing from time to time to adjust the cuffs of his overalls. His entourage somewhat in wonder.

You ever see anything to beat this?

We used to mess around in these old caves when I was a boy.

We did too but I never knowed about thisn here.

Abruptly Ballard stopped. Balancing with one arm, the flashlight in his teeth, he climbed a ledge and went along it with his face to the wall, went upward again, his bare toes gripping the rocks like an ape, and crawled through a narrow fissure in the stone.

They watched him go.

Goddamn if that there ain’t a awful small hole.

What I’m thinkin is how we goin to get them bodies out of here if we do find em.

Well somebody shinny up there and let’s go.

Here Ed. Hold the light.

The first man followed the ledge and climbed up to the hole. He turned sideways. He stooped.

Hand me that light up here.

What’s the trouble?

Shit.

What is it?

Ballard!

Ballard’s name faded in a diminishing series of shunted echoes down the hole where he had gone.

What is it, Tommy?

That little son of a bitch.

Where is he?

He’s by god gone.

Well let’s get after him.

I cain’t get through the hole.

Well kiss my ass.

Who’s the smallest?

Ed is, I reckon.

Come up here, Ed.

They boosted the next man up and he tried to wedge his way into the hole but he would not fit.

Can you see his light or anything?

Shit no, not a goddamn thing.

Somebody go get Jimmy. He can get through here.

They looked about at one another assembled there in the pale and sparring beams of their torches.

Well shit.

You thinkin what I am?

I sure as hell am. Does anybody remember how we came?

Oh fuck.

We better stick together.

You reckon there’s another entrance to this hole he’s in?

I don’t know. You reckon we ought to leave somebody to watch here?

We might never find em again.

There’s a lot of truth in that.

We could leave a light just around the corner here where it would look like somebody was a waitin.

Well.

Ballard!

Little son of a bitch.

Fuck that. Let’s go.

Who wants to lead the way?

I think I can find it.

Well go ahead.

Goddamn if that little bastard ain’t played us for a bunch of fools.

I guess he played em the way he seen em. I cain’t wait to tell these boys outside what’s happened.

Maybe we better odd man out to see who gets the fun of tellin em.

Watch your all’s head.

You know what we’ve done don’t ye?

Yeah. I know what we’ve done. We’ve rescued the little fucker from jail and turned him loose where he can murder folks again. That’s what we’ve done.

That’s exactly right.

We’ll get him.

He may of got us. You remember this here?

I don’t remember none of it. I’m just follerin the man in front of me.

H
E WAS NEVER INDICTED
for any crime. He was sent to the state hospital at Knoxville and there placed in a cage next door but one to a demented gentleman who used to open folks’ skulls and eat the brains inside with a spoon. Ballard saw him from time to time as they were taken out for airing but he had nothing to say to a crazy man and the crazy man had long since gone mute with the enormity of his crimes. The hasp of his metal door was secured with a bent spoon and Ballard once asked if it were the same spoon the crazy man had used to eat the brains with but he got no answer.

He contracted pneumonia in April of 1965 and was transferred to the University Hospital where he was
treated and apparently recovered. He was returned to the state hospital at Lyons View and two mornings later was found dead in the floor of his cage.

His body was shipped to the state medical school at Memphis. There in a basement room he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. At the end of three months when the class was closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interred. A minister from the school read a simple service.

I
N APRIL OF THAT SAME
year a man named Arthur Ogle was plowing an upland field one evening when the plow was snatched from his hands. He looked in time to see his span of mules disappear into the earth taking the plow with them. He crawled with caution to the place where the ground had swallowed them but all was darkness there. A cool wind was coming from inside the earth and far below he could hear water running.

The following day two neighbor boys descended into the sink on ropes. They never found the mules. What they did find was a chamber in which the bodies of a number of people were arranged on stone ledges in attitudes of repose.

Late that afternoon the high sheriff of Sevier County with two deputies and two other men crossed the field from Willy Gibson’s old rifle shop where they’d left the car and crossed the creek and went up the old log road. They carried lanterns and coils of rope and a number of muslin shrouds on which was stenciled Property of the State of Tennessee. The high sheriff of Sevier County himself descended into the sink and surveyed the mausoleum there. The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew along them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tight. They pulled her from the slab and dragged her across the stone floor of the vault and down a corridor to where daylight fell against the wall of the sink. In this leaning bole of light, standing there among the shifting motes, they called for a rope. When it descended they made it fast to the rope about the corpse and called aloft again. The rope drew taut and the first of the dead sat up on the cave floor, the hands that hauled the rope above sorting the shadows like puppeteers. Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.