The Long Home

by William Gay

  Jiminiz went around back to the long beerjoint and was there only a minute or two before he came back and mounted the porch. He knocked at the front door, waited. He leaned against the doorjamb smoking and when knocking harder brought no response he turned the knob and went in.

  Directly he came back out. He went across the yard again to the rear and paused by the litter of papers and cans on the earth studying the frozen ground. Something seemed to catch his eye, for he leaned forward hands on knees then straightened and went toward the pit and vanished into the bracken.

  He was running awkwardly when he came out of the brush. He ran on to the hardpan of the road and slowed to a fast walk. A hundred feet or so down the road he halted and stood still and seemed to be listening to some far-off sound. He looked down the red road. He looked back toward the bleak, still house and studied the slatecolored sky. Nameless winter birds foraged the ruined garden and watched him with hard agate eyes. They took wing and flew patternlessly above him. He went back to the house and went in leaving the door ajar. He came out carrying a nickleplated pistol in his right hand and a cigarbox in his left. He paused a moment on the stoop. He pocketed the pistol and opened the cigar box. It was full of money. He began to count it, leafing hurriedly through it, then he gave it up and went back onto the road. This time he didn’t look back.

  The day drew on. It had not warmed as the day progressed nor had the frost melted. The sun grew more remote and obscure. At its zenith it was no more than an orb of heatless light above the glade. A bank of pale clouds arose in the west and ascended the heavens and beyond them the sky looked dark and threatening. A wind arose. It teased such dead leaves as remained on the trees and sang eerily in the loose tin on the barn. The stallion whinnied from the barnlot and came pacing down the length of barbed-wire fence, its hooves ringing on mire frozen hard as stone. The day grew darker yet. The sun vanished. The wind carried chill on its knife edge and a few pellets of sleet rattled on the tin like birdshot. The sleet fell and lay unmelting in the stony whorls of ice, a wind from the pit blew scraps of paper like dirty snow.

  When Winer came he came walking. He came the shortcut across the field and down the branch to the house. He crossed the yard without caution as if he were impervious now to anything the world could do to him. He crossed the porch and pounded on the door and waited. Knocked again. He paused and stood uncertainly. Leaned to a curtained window and shading his eyes peered in, saw only his sepia reflection in opaque glass.

  He turned, a gangling figure graceless in the stiff wind. He went down the steps and echoing Jiminiz’s movements or moving in patterns preordained he went around the house and through the strewn garbage and pounded on the back door. No one came. He stood before the raw wood honkytonk with its red brick grouped in banded bundles awaiting a mason who’d never come and he tried the door but it was locked. He walked back to where the Packard was always parked and ran a hand through his wild hair like a cartoon figure miming perplexity and leaned to the frozen ground as if he might divine how long the car had been gone and its destination.

  He climbed back onto the porch and tried the door. It opened. He peered into the cloistered dark but some old restraint engendered by his upbringing stayed him from trespass and he pulled the door to with a curious air of finality.

  He sat on the stoop a time though he did not expect anyone to return. The sleet had not ceased and it had begun to spit snow. He sat wrapping his knees with his arms and it began to snow harder, the snow intensifying first the border of the far field and obscuring the treeline with a curtain of billowing white. He seemed ill at ease and uncertain as to where he should be and what he should be doing and at length the cold brought him off the steps and into the yard. He went off into the snow turning up his collar against the wind.

  At dusk the yellow cur came up from the branch-run and prowled through the garbage without finding anything and it sniffed the air with disquiet and lay down on the earth. The earth was powdered with a thin sheath of white but it was fine, dry snow and it lay in eternally drifting windrows. As dusk drew on the square of yellow light the bedroom window threw deepened and the dog approached and stood in it as if it fostered warmth. It seemed to snow harder when the light fell. At last the dog turned with its tail curled between its legs and followed the scent back to the pit.

  Winer had been gone with no luggage save the weight of his father’s knife against his leg and no destination save the memory of Amber Rose saying, “Natchez, Mississippi,” for six months when William Tell Oliver found the first jar of money.

  All that spring he had watched the scavengers arriving, a seemingly unending stream of them prowling Hovington’s place, tearing up the floorboards, ripping loose the weatherboarding in splintered shards, prying out the brick beneath the flue until at last it toppled in a rain of mud and broken bricks and soot, all these greedy folk doing more work than they’d ever done before, loath to leave even at night lest another find Hardin’s fortune so that at night he could see their lanterns flitting like fireflies about the glade, flashlights in random isobars of yellow light appearing and disappearing like spirit lights in old ghost tales of his youth or warnings prophesying direr events yet to be.

  Silhouetted black and motionless against the sun he watched from the ridge like some strange outrider of life, watcher rather than participant, some ungainly prophet from olden times, leaned on his stick watching with bemused arrogance the turmoil of lesser mortals and it came to him one day that old mad Lyle Hodges had been digging not in the wrong place but at the wrong time, through some peculiar quirk in time he had been digging feverishly and obsessively for fruitjars that would not even be buried for another fifty years.

  Checking on a patch of twoprong ginseng growing in the shade of an enormous beech he was struck by an aberration of the land here, some subtle difference in a country he had known all his life. Stooping to where the contour of the slope was altered, he dug with the point of his handcarved stick, knelt at last to withdraw with amused contempt a halfgallon jar of Hardin’s money, heavy with coin, the greasy, wadded bills, strange summer provender laid by for harder times than these.

  By the last of August he had found four others. He stored them at first in the pantry behind the old jars of canned goods, ancient cans of muscadine jelly long gone to burgundy sugar. He grew uneasy and pried up floorboards in different rooms, scooped out black loam, consigned the jars to the earth once more. He was a man of a thousand small cautions so he drove a steel stake beside each jar. “If the house burns and I don’t all I’ll have to do is kick through the ashes,” he told himself.

  For it’s young Winer’s money, he thought, it is money owed him for a wrong done long ago.

  He waited and the year drew on into a hot, dry summer and the empty road baked whitely in the sun. The scavengers didn’t come anymore and tales began to arise about Hovington’s place. It was told cursed, haunted, a barren patch of earth forever luckless. One night a group of boys torched the house and then the honkytonk and the old man watched the hot red glare, the parks cascading upward in the updraft from the pit. The next day he walked gingerly through the hot ashes and the scorched brush to the lip of the abyss. Felt its cool fetid breath. Now there was only the pit, timeless, enigmatic, profoundly alien.

  Time passed and he began to feel that Winer wasn’t coming back. At last he began to think him dead. He knew that the world was wide in its turning and it was fraught with dark alleyways and pastoral footpaths down which peril lurked with a patience rivaling that of the very old.

  I never needed nobody anyway, he told himself. Nary one of them, then or now, and at last he was touched with a cold and solitary peace.

  For he had the white road baking hot in the noonday sun, the wavering blue treeline, the fierce, sudden violence of summer storms. At night the moon tracked its accustomed course and the timeless whippoorwills tolled from the dark and they might have been the selfsame whippoorwills that called to him in his youth.

  Tha
t’s all that matters, he told himself with a spare and bitter comfort. Those were the things that time did not take away from you. They were the only things that lasted.

  Also by William Gay in e-book from M P Publishing

  Twilight