by William Gay
Tyler pillowed his face against the polished walnut and squeezed the trigger. A windowlight went and he heard glass fall somewhere inside. He waited. A rifle barrel might appear at a shotout window. A warping face appear like a face from a nightmare. He profoundly hoped it would. He just lay there with the sun warm on his back shooting out window glasses. Playing X and O with the six-pane windows. When at length he was bored with this he reloaded the rifle and with it yoked across his shoulders he went off down the slope toward the house.
No soul about. The room still held a vestigial heat thoughthe fire had burned down and the heater when he laid a palm to it was only warm. He looked about. The room was neat and austere. Yesterday’s dishes washed and put away on the drainboard. Cot carefully made.
He opened the door and looked into the stove. A bed of coals waxed and waned in their delicate cauls of ash. Suddenly he wrenched the heater over. It toppled on its side in a hail of falling stovepipes and drifting soot. He scattered the coals with a foot. The linoleum darkened, then bubbled beneath them. He piled on the neat chintz window curtains, torn pages from old farm magazines, whatever seemed combustible. He knelt and blew his fire. A flame flickered, caught, a thin cutting edge of fire.
He went out.
Most of the morning Sutter was hid out by the Tyler place waiting for something to happen. The law to return, the boy to turn up. He’d had time to alter the scene in the field to some degree by calling the law himself and he wasn’t overly worried about the local law but Tyler might have it in his head to make it to the state or to Bellwether and he had to have the pictures before that happened. But this morning nothing happened at all. The place seemed vacant, abandoned, a dreamlike place where no one lived anymore.
He went down and searched some more. He didn’t find anything. Memorabilia, relics, the castoff souvenirs of life. They seemed to have possessed precious little worth keeping. He went out and hunkered in the yard watching the road and thinking while he smoked a cigarette. If I was arabbit, he thought, and a fox jumped out of the bushes on me, which way would I run? Would I stick to the road where there was other rabbits, or would I head for the deep pineys? In his heart he knew. A rabbit would cut for the deep pineys every time. And if the rabbit had any idea of making it to Ackerman’s Field, the shortest way was across the Harrikin. If the rabbit was fool enough to chance it. He stood up. There seemed little point in rushing in blind. He’d ask around a bit.
By midday he was in Patton’s store. He was eating cheese and crackers and drinking a dope when a man said with a patently spurious air of concern, Shore sorry to hear about your house, Granville. Did you manage to save anything?
Do what? he asked in a spray of cheese and crackers.
Did you manage to get any of your stuff out of the fire?
I’m a son of a bitch, he said. He slammed the bottle down on the dopebox and went out.
It was true what the man had said. He crouched before the quaking ashes. The day had turned chill and he held his hands outstretched for the warmth. He just sat staring mutely at all that was left of his home as if his mind would not quite accept it.
Rabbit my ass, he said at length.
He thought of a rabbit he’d run down and caught as a boy, hemming it in the tall grass. Its soft fur shrouding the delicate bone, its eyes almost confused with fear, its fierce little heart hammering against his cupped hands.
The deputy carefully laid the warrant back on the highsheriff’s desk. He shifted his weight in the folding chair. He cleared his throat.
I’m supposed to serve that?
The sheriff finished paring his nails and put away the penknife. Well, it’s a state warrant. I figured you still planned on drawin your pay the fifteenth. Christmas comin on and all.
Hell, he’ll go right through the roof. You know he shot it out with Radio Atkinson that time. Run him plumb off.
Then he’ll just have to go, Odel said. If you hang up your badge and retire, then somebody else’ll just have to go. He’s goin through the roof all the same.
Yeah, but I won’t have to see it.
Suit yourself.
You want to ride out there with me?
About as much as I want acute appendicitis.
The deputy drove out the Riverside Road. He drove slowly, taking in all the scenery. The day was very bright and he felt it just might be the last of his life. All this he might never see again. Sweet scrub blackjack. Beer cans and Coke bottles and windblown candywrappers pressed like dubious gifts onto the honeysuckle. Shotgun shanties with folk sitting about their leaning porches taking their ease. They seemed in no immediate peril. No warrants for Granville Sutter riding like malignant melanoma in their breast pockets. Before he reached Sutter’s gingerbread house he braked the car and checked the load in his revolver and placed it on the seat between his legs.
Piss on it, he said aloud. Let’s go get the big mean son of a bitch.
But the gingerbread house was gone. In its place mounded gray ashes. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was oneof those miracles when the gods pity and spare you that only happens once in a life. He kept looking about the still empty woods and back at the ashes. He approached them. There was yet a faint and fugitive warmth.
He sat in silence. The day had perceptibly brightened. All the sound there was was the car idling and the faroff calling of a mourning dove.
Gone like a bigassed bird, he breathed. He looked across the folded dreamlike horizons to the far blue timber of the Harrikin.
If you drove out the Riverside Road through the flatlands and crossed the high trestle bridge over Little Buffalo, then went on past the alluvial riverbottoms to where the earth begins to rise in a series of folds that become hills and hollows and sheer limestone bluffs, and if you kept roughly parallel to the river at some indeterminate point, you would be in the Harrikin. The road would fade to a ghostroad, the timber would thicken, the earth begin to climb in ascending hills. You would begin to come upon abandoned farms whose acreage bore only the faint spectral traces of tillage. Fallen houses with their broken ridgepoles and blind windows and windscattered shakes that are home now only to the foxes and dirtdaubers and the weathers. Tiny gray crackerbox shacks with dark, doorless apertures and tin roofs skewered with rusted stovepipes. Landscaped by the winds with the fallen leaves of decades. A series of them like a housing development brought to fruition by the profoundly impoverished. The roads meander and cross each other. They deadend and vanish. There are occasionally the ruins of houses where no road ever existed, once occupied by folk who had no need for anything wider than a footpath.
Once this land was privately owned. Now it is owned by companies or conglomerates of companies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York. By people who have never seen it, are perhaps unaware even of its existence.
It was bought up in blocks by other companies in the first days of the previous century for next to nothing. It was rich in phosphate, in iron ore. There were boom times for a while. A town sprang up virtually overnight. Originally it was the county seat of Overton County, though the Harrikin itself extends over into two other adjoining counties. A railroad bisects it, but the track is unused, as are the roads, and honeysuckle and kudzu cover its rails with impunity. There was a company store, a jail, a post office. Graveyards, one black, one white. Flush times. The heads of these companies grew very rich. The miners subsisted. They made enough for their families to survive. Those with other inclinations made enough to support the whiskeymerchants and whores and cardsharks who had materialized the first payday by some intuition of money approaching magic and these selfsame cardsharks and whores when the mines were shut down vanished like rats scuttling down capsizing decks.
The earth was sunk with vertical shafts, with horizontal tunnels. Great pits were eaten to the surface with pick and shovel and machinery, and some of this machinery is there yet, rusting back into the earth.
When the mines closed and the railroad shut down the town died and the money quit the people left like
the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities and all thatremained were the few families who’d refused to sell their land and itinerant squatters staking dubious claim to what no one else wanted and misanthropic misfits who felt some perverse kinship with this deserted, tortured land. Some of these folk did not, in a sense, exist. They paid no taxes, were listed on no courthouse rolls. They owned no Social Security numbers, having neither applied for nor received anything from the federal government, in fact only vaguely aware of its existence, its distant machinations only rumored to them. Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead.
The Harrikin grew wild. Trees sprouted up through the works of man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed some curious hybrid of earth and steel. Roads faded and the woods took them until there was nothing to show that wheels or hooves or feet had ever passed here. Brush and honeysuckle obscured the sunken shafts, and horses or whatever trod here might abruptly have what they’d taken for solid earth suddenly vanish beneath their feet. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, folks who thought they knew the woods lose their sense of direction in these woods, even compasses go fey and unreliable.
It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. It ripped away the roof of the old Perrie mansion that had stood since the eighteen-forties, and lesser houses it reduced to kindling wood or just whisked off to somewhere else. It snapped off trees and hurled them into hollows like flung jackstraws, and when it was gone the Harrikin was more of a maze than ever. Roads and paths were blocked, streams dammed and rerouted. The woods were full of deadfalls. Most of the folk who’d been dispossessed, and some who hadn’t, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck.
A time would come within twenty-five years when all this would be changed. When timber began to thin the companies who owned these half-forgotten properties realized their potential, and paper companies bought the timber and ravaged the land again and planted pine seedlings, and the Harrikin did not exist anymore.
But all this was not yet. When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.
Don’t he never sleep?
Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter, 1953
The rest indeed is silence.
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, 1979
BOOK TWO
BEYOND THE PALE
A spring came out of a rocky hillside and rusted steel pipes virid with moss had been driven back into the rocks. There was a tin cup affixed to a cutoff sprout but Tyler drank from his cupped hands then washed his face in the cold water. All he could hear was the rushing water and the air was heady with the scent of peppermint.
He had come up a rainwashed gully through a clutter of floodleft debris, old bottomless buckets and washtubs and mudclogged cartires worn out so finally there were booted holes in them. The gully ascended in a tangle of blackberry briars and leveled out into a walnut grove, and he could see the back of a house. Whitewashed, respectable, middle-class. He moved to the cover of a shed and skirted a rotting grape arbor with gray deadlooking vines and past a curious machine from which wires appended to poles led to the house. He scaled a sedgecovered slope into the sun and went on to the summit and lay in the warm grass watching the house. Somewhere off in the distance a tardy cock crowed daybreak.
After a while a heavyset woman came out of the house carrying a dishpan. He judged her to be middleaged. She went purposefully up the roadway to a gardenspot andstooped and began to gather turnip greens.
He didn’t think there was anyone else about: there was no stock to see after, and the place seemed to be going to seed, as if there were no husband about to keep it in repair. He decided to chance it, he didn’t figure he really had a choice anyway. He went around the back side of the ridge and down to the shed again and up the back steps of the house. The door was ajar as if in standing invitation to whoever might chance by. There was only a screendoor, and that was unlatched.
A cool, serried gloom smelling of years, decay. The sun was faint and heatless through dirtspecked glass. He was in a storeroom stacked nigh to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of what looked like old farm magazines, seed catalogs, newspapers. Cases of empty fruitjars. He was looking for a larder or a kitchen, and this wasn’t it. He went cautiously out.
Into a hall smelling of lemon oil and floor wax. Doors stood open, and he peered in to see if there was anyone else about. A bedroom with a cherry fourposter bed. A picture in a heavy oval frame. From it a young couple stared at him across time with vaguely accusing eyes.
The kitchen had a window above the sink and it gave him a view of the yard but not the garden and he figured he better hurry. In a cupboard there was a stack of brown paper bags folded and laid up for reuse and he took one and began to search for food. Under a cloth on the table he found the remains of breakfast. Here was provender beyond his expectations: biscuits and leftover sausage patties and a pint jar of what appeared to be strawberry preserves. He dumped the sausages and bread into the bag and turned to look for more. In a piesafe he found a loaf of homebaked bread and twobeautifully browned pies. He slid one carefully into the bag, cradling it so as not to crush it, and turned about and stood a moment as if in indecision and then took the other one as well. He found a tin can half-full of ground coffee and took that and was already at the door and outward bound when the thought of the strawberry preserves struck him. He’d read once it was bad practice to shop on an empty stomach and so was forewarned. The strawberry preserves were his undoing. When he had them in the bag and had turned to leave there were heavy footsteps. A shadow darkened the room. There was only one door out of the kitchen and the heavyset woman was standing in it staring at him with eyes huge with surprise.
Well, if you ain’t the beat, she said. Sneakthievin in broad daylight.
Tyler was gripping the bag bothhanded and ready should she give him leeway through the door but she was standing in it with the dishpan of greens on her hip and there was not room to get past her.
What’ve you been up to, you thievin little scoundrel? What’ve you got in that sack?
Just food, Tyler said. What was left from breakfast mainly.
Well, if you don’t take the ribbon. I reckon you was just too proud to knock on the door and ask for somethin to eat. You don’t seem too qualmy about sneakin in the back door and helpin yourself, though.
I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been here, Tyler said. There’s a man lookin for me, and I’d just as soon he didn’t know which way I’m going.
I’ll just bet there’s a man lookin for you, the woman said. It’d be my guess he wears a badge and got a paper in hispocket with your name on it.
No, not the law. This man aims to kill me. I’m looking for the law, going to find Sheriff Bellwether.
Well, he ain’t in my kitchen, she said. Her eye had wandered to the piesafe. The telltale door ajar. Her eyes narrowed. And if you been in them apple pies I baked for the church social, I aim to kill you myself. Them was as fine a apple pies as I ever made, and they wadn’t made for the likes of you.
She made a tentative step or two toward the piesafe and when she did Tyler made a run for the outside world. He made the door but not through it for she had anticipated him and stepped back and slammed him with a heavy hip into the door frame then bonged his head hard with the dis
hpan.
Goddamn, he said.
Blaspheme in this kitchen again and I’ll lay this pan upside your head a little harder, she said. Now you set right there a minute.
She stepped across him through the door, and he heard another door abruptly open and as abruptly close and she was back with an enormous shotgun breeched down and she was fitting a shell in the chamber. The gun was nigh as long as Tyler was tall and its elongated barrel was lustreless and crept with brown lichens of rust.
Now let’s see what all you’ve helped yourself to, she said. Dump that poke out.
Tyler’s miserable chattel aligned on the kitchen floor. The pies had been illy used. He’d fallen on them and one was broken into two sections and the other was crushed flat on one side and dripping apple juice. She just looked at them in silence. After a time she slowly raised the barrel until it was pointing into Tyler’s face. Now mister, she said, you fix them pies.
Do what?
Man oughtn’t to break nothing he can’t fix. Fix em like they was.
Hellfire, he said. I can’t fix them. You can’t fix pies. They’re broken. Anyway, you did it. You pushed me down on them.
He’d fallen into the hands of a madwoman here. Someone too long alone who dwelt in a surreal realm where the punishment for piethievery was death by shotgunning and the alchemy by which crushed pies were made whole was commonplace.
He shrugged helplessly. I’ll pay you for them.
A wisp of irongray hair curled over one eye. She blew it away. She still held the gun trained on him, and she was watching him with fey cunning.
If you got money, then how come you sneakin in my back door sackin things up?