by Unknown
Ballard tugged at the hem of his nightgown to hide himself. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there a minute. Then he stood up. He sat back down again and gripped the little table. Where we goin? he said. Somebody in the back of the crowd said something but Ballard didn't catch it. Is that all of a thing you got to wear? I don't know. They opened a closet and looked in but there were only some mops and a bucket. They stood there looking at Ballard. He didn't look like much. We better get out of here if we're goin. Earl's likely gone to fetch the sheriff. Let's go, Ballard. They raised him up and pushed him toward the door and closed ranks behind him. He looked back once at the bed. Then they were going down the wide hospital corridor. Past open doors where people in bed watched him leaving, the linoleum cold under his feet and his legs wobbling a bit as he went. It was a cool clear night. Ballard's eyes went upward to the cold wash of stars that lay beyond the pole lamps in the hospital parking lot. They crossed the black asphalt, damp from recent rain, and the men opened the door of a pickup truck and motioned Ballard in. He crawled up in the cab and sat with his bare legs together in front of him. Men got in on either side and the motor started and the lights came up and the lights from other cars and trucks down the parking lot. Ballard had to shift his knees like a child for the man to get 'to the gear lever. They pulled out of the parking lot and down the street. Where we goin? said Ballard. We'll all know when we get there, said the driver. They drove out the highway toward the mountains, a caravan of trucks and cars. They stopped at a house. A man left the car behind Ballard and went to the door. A woman let him in. Inside under the glare of a naked bulb he could see the woman and some children. After a while the man came out again and came down to the truck and handed in a bundle through the window . Tell him put these here on, he said. The driver handed the bundle to Ballard. Put them on, he said. It was a pair of overalls and an army shirt. He sat in the truck with the clothes in his lap and they started on up the road again. They turned off onto a dirt road and wound through low hills with black pines sprocketting across the headlights in the curves and then they took another road, grass growing in it, coming at last out onto a high meadow where the remains of a sawmill stood in the starlight. A shed with the windows stoned lightless. Stacks of gray lumber, a sawdust pile where foxes lived. The driver of the truck opened the door and stepped out. Other vehicles pulled alongside and men began to crowd about. A subdued sound of voices and car doors closing. Ballard alone bareshank in his nightshift on the seat of the truck. Let Otis watch him. Why don't we just take him up here. Let him set there. How come he ain't put them clothes on. The truck door opened. Ain't you cold, said a man. Ballard looked at him dumbly. His arm hurt. Tell him put them clothes on. He wants you to put them there clothes on, the man said. Ballard began to sort through the bundle for arm or leg holes. Otis you watch him now. Reckon we ort to tie his hands.
You could tie his hands to one of his legs like a mule. Jerry you can put that jar right back where you got it from. This here is serious business. Ballard had on the shirt and was trying to do the buttons. He'd never tried to button a shirt with one hand and he was not good at it. He got the overalls up and the straps fastened. They were soft and smelled of soap and there was room inside for a whole Ballard more. He tucked the loose sleeve of the shirt down inside the overalls and looked around. A man squatted in the bed of the truck with a shotgun watched him through the rear glass. Up on the hill by the sawmill a fire licked in the wind and the men were gathered around it. Ballard pushed the button on the glove box door in front of him and it fell open. He felt among papers, found nothing. He shut the door again. After a while he cranked down the window. You ain't got a cigarette back there have ye? he said. The man leaned forward and held a pack of cigarettes up to the open window. Ballard took one and put it in his mouth. You got a match? he said. The man handed him a match. How you fixed for spit? he said. I never ast to come out here, said Ballard. He popped the match on the dashboard and lit the cigarette and sat smoking in the dark, watching the fire on the hill. After a while a man came down and opened the door and told Ballard to get out. He climbed laboriously down and stood there in his overalls. Bring him on up, Otis. Ballard at gunpoint shuffling up the hill. He must pause to roll the cuffs of the overalls. At the fire he stood and looked down at his bare feet. Ballard. Ballard didn't answer. Ballard, we're goin to let you make it light on yourself. Ballard waited. You show us where you put them people so they can be give a decent burial and we'll put you back in that hospital and let you take your chances with the law. You got it all, said Ballard. Where's them bodies at, Ballard. I don't know nothin about no bodies. Is that your last say? Ballard said that it was. You got that cable, Fred? Sure do. A man stepped from the circle and came forward with a coiled and greasy braided steel cable. You goin to have to tie that one arm down. Anybody got a rope in their truck? I got one. Ask him about that, Ernest. Yeah Ernest. The man turned to Ballard. What did you want with them dead ladies? he said. Was you fuckin em? Ballard's face gave a funny little jerk in the firelight but he said nothing. He looked about at his tormentors. The man with the cable had uncoiled a part of it along the ground. There was a ring spliced into the end of it and the cable was pulled through in a loop like an enormous rabbit snare. You know he was, the man said. Just take him on. Someone was tying a rope about Ballard's arm. The steel cable slipped over his neck and rested on his shoulders. It was cold, smelled of oil. Then he was walking up the hill toward the sawmill. They helped him along, down the skids, stepping carefully, the flames from the bonfire stringing them in a ragged
shadow show across the upper hillside. Ballard slipped once and was caught up and helped on. They came to rest standing on an eight by eight above the sawdust pit. One of the men was boosted up to the overhead beams and handed up the slack end of the cable. They ain't got him doped up have they, Ernest? I'd hate for him not to know what was happenin to him. He looks alert enough to me. Ballard craned his head toward the man who'd spoke. I'll tell ye, he said. Tell us what? Where they're at. Them bodies. You said if I'd tell you'd turn me loose. Well you better get to telling. They're in caves. In caves. I put em in caves. Can you find em? Yeah. I know where they're at. BALLARD 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 H. I'm just follerin the man in front of me. FOR THREE DAYS BALLARD explored the cave he'd entered in an attempt to find another exit. He thought it was a week and was amazed at how the batteries in the flashlight kept. He fell into the custom of napping and waking and going on again. He could find nothing but stone to sleep upon and his naps were brief. Toward the end he would tap the flashlight against his leg to warm the dull orange glow of it. He took the batteries out and put them in again the hind one fore. Once he heard voices somewhere behind him and once he thought he saw a light. He made his way toward it in darkness lest it be the lights of his enemies but he found nothing. He knelt and drank from a dripping pool. He rested, drank again. He watched in he bore of his flash eam tiny translucent fish whose bones in shadow through their frail mica sheathing traversed the shallow stone floored pool. When he rose the water swung in his wasted paunch. He scrabbled like a rat up a long slick mudslide and entered a long room filled with bones. Ballard circled this ancient ossuary kicking at the ruins. The brown and pitted armatures of bison, elk. A jaguar's skull whose one remaining eye-tooth he pried out
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and secured in the bib pocket of his overalls. That same day he came to a sheer drop and when he tried his failing beam it fell down a damp wall to terminate in nothingness and night. He found a stone and dropped it over the edge. It fell silently. Fell. In silence. Ballard had already turned to reach for another to drop when he heard far below the tiny spungg of the stone in water like a pebble down a well. In the end he came to a small room with a thin shaft of actual daylight leaning in from the ceiling. It occurred to him only now that he might have passed other apertures to the upper world in the nighttime and not known it. He put his hand up into the crevice. He pried. He scratched at the dirt. When he woke it was dark. He felt around and came up with the flashlight and pushed the button. A pale red wire lit within the bulb and slowly died. Ballard lay listening in the dark but the only sound he heard was his heart. In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods. 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 ard hulls with their volute channels cleanly unmeated by wood ice, teeth precise and curved as sailmakers 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 county hospital desk. The night duty nurse had just come down the hall with a cup of coffee and found Ballard leaning against the counter. A weed shaped one armed 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. HE 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. IN 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. In the evening a jeep descended the log road towing a trailer in the bed of which lay seven bodies bound in muslin like enormous hams. As they went down the v
alley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.