by William Gay
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.
5
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 t
he 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 shov
el 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.”
“How old was you?”
“Fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to know not to be here but not bright enough to come up and warn em. That’s always bothered me some.”
“Why didn’t anybody else let em know?”
“I guess everbody figured it was all blow. If Hodges’d killed all the folk he threatened this county’d be mighty thin settled. Anyway, folks thought they was just takin a hickory to em, that’s what the whitecaps was famous for. I doubt they knowed theirselves they was goin to be slaughterin people right and left. It just got out of hand.”
The boy did not reply, seemed lost in the subtle gradations of umber and burnt sienna, the dull green of rampant summer’s growth turning sullen and sulfurous with its coating of dust, the old house bleached field gray, somehow oblique and alien in the harsh light, the bracken darkening and becoming more luxuriant near the spring and the hidden dark orifice of the abyss.