by James Dickey
There had never been a freedom like it. The pain itself was freedom, and the blood. I picked up the knife and cut one of the nylon sleeves off, the whole thing at the shoulder, and stuffed it in the wound, and then cut a long strip out of my right pants’ leg and tied it around my waist. I was thinking like a driven creature, but also like a singing one. Could I walk? What else could I do?
Walking was odd and one-sided but not impossible. I went to the edge of the gorge, which was almost straight up and down. There was no sign of the canoe, and I reckoned it had already gone by. Well, too bad. I’d wait for a while, try to find the man I had shot and bury him or get rid of him in whatever way I could, and then try to walk out.
I went back over to the rock where I had bled and threw a lot of sand and dirt on the blood, so that at least it didn’t shine. That was all the blood I planned to leave in the woods; the rest would have to be somebody else’s.
I went over to where the man had been. There was blood on a good many pebbles, and a concentration of it where he had been vomiting. I looked into the forest, and recalled what little I knew about the procedures of deer hunting: after hitting the deer with the arrow, you are supposed to wait half an hour and then follow it by its blood trail. I had no idea of how long ago it had been since I had shot, but from what I had seen I believed he could not be far away; maybe just a few yards. I got down on my hands and knees to try to find a direction for the blood.
Wherever it had been dropped on loose sand it had sunk, and so immediately I knew that the story, if I could figure it out, would be told by rocks. He had moved toward the woods, as he would have to have done. But when I saw his blood confirming this, my confidence rose; I followed where it went, stone by stone.
At the edge of the woods I found the rifle, flat and long and out of place on the pine needles. I left it there, and drew the knife. I was on my knees, bleeding wherever I looked for his blood. Once I had to go back and try to pick up the trail again, for I could not tell which was my blood and which was his. My side had pretty much soaked the middle part of my outfit, and there was some oozing through the cloth. But I did not feel weak at all. I wondered how the blood would clot, with so much of the wound open, but a kind of numbness had set in on that side, and in the time since I’d cut the arrow out I had developed a hugging-with-my-elbow way of standing and walking that already seemed second nature; I felt I could hold myself together for a while, and didn’t think any further forward than the next pebble I didn’t think I had bled on yet.
There was no path into the woods where I was going. It was dark there, but I could see blood, and when I couldn’t see it I could feel it, and, in some cases, smell it. I tried one last time to think like the man I had shot. He was center-shot; it had looked like he was hit just under the throat, though it might have been right through the lower part of the neck. He was dying, he had no weapon, his jugular was probably cut in half. The only thing about him that concerned me was that he was trying to get somewhere he knew about: to some place, or even more pertinent, to someone. I didn’t believe this was true, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t.
And I had to find him. If I didn’t, somebody else might, and that would be the end of us, in one way or another, or at least it would be the beginning of explanations, trials, lawyers and all the other things we had tried to prevent when Lewis persuaded us to bury the first man under the ferns.
It was too dark to see from a standing position; I had to get closer to the blood. I went to all fours with my head down like a dog and the knife between my teeth, going through bush limbs one by one until I came out into an empty clearing about fifty yards wide. I could hardly hear the river now; it was only a distant, down-and-far murmur; every leaf I put between it and me diminished it.
But I had lost all contact with the blood. My head would not come up, and I felt faint without feeling particularly weak. The main trouble was that I could not think clearly. But I knew I had to do something about finding his blood again, or everything was gone.
I got up and walked out into the middle of the clearing. A badly hurt man is not going to want to fight through bushes. If he was trying to reach a definite objective, he would have used the open space. He would probably have used it even if he wasn’t. He was not in the clearing, so he had gone through it. Straight across? How straight could he have gone? I went across to the other edge, ready to look at every leaf on every bush, and began to work slowly around the border. Shafts of early sunlight were everywhere, sensitive and needled, directed at certain places for no reason, moving slightly on the ground with the wind stirring in the tops of the trees. When I was about halfway around the perimeter one of the rays moved and gave back something. It was a reddish-brown rock about the size of a tennis ball that looked exactly as though it had been hastily painted, and I had to wait a minute, my head heavying even more, before I knew what it meant. This time I knew it was not my blood. You haven’t been here yet, I kept saying to myself through the knife; you haven’t been here. I went to the rock.
It was the place where he must have given up the last of the blood that had enabled him to move. A few steps farther on into the woods I found blood on a low leaf; crawling, maybe. I thought of getting down on my hands and knees and smelling for blood like an animal again, but the possibility that he was crawling made me want to stand, and I did, though crouching and leaning over the arm that held my own blood in.
I raised my eyes along the ground over the rocks and leaves and pine needles, and twenty yards away it bunched at the foot of a dead tree. It could have been a bush or a stone, but I knew when I first saw it that it was neither. It was not moving, but the light was playing over it and it seemed not entirely inert, but alive in the same way that most of the things in the woods were alive. I walked over to it, and it was a man lying facedown, holding on to one of the roots of the dead tree. He had long thin dirty fingers, and his back was soaking with blood.
Before there was everything to do there was nothing to do. His brain and mine unlocked and fell apart, and in a way I was sorry to see it go. I never had thought with another man’s mind on matters of life and death, and would never think that way again. I just stood there looking down, breathing with the knife. Then I took it out of my face.
There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.
I turned him over with a foot, and his hand moved around palm-up, still with the shape of the root. His face came clear.
I fell down; the knife fell away. My heart moved into my bad side and beat there, trying to throw my blood away any way it could. I put my hands over my face and went wild with terror; I could not look again. His mouth was open, and full of yellow teeth.
But was it? I crawled over to him and picked up the knife. I put it in his mouth and pried at the gums, and a partial upper plate began to come out. Did that make the difference? Did that make enough difference? I shoved the teeth back in with the handle of the knife, and took a good look. He was dressed like the toothless man in the clearing; whether exactly like him I truthfully couldn’t say, but very much like. He was about the same size, and he was thin and repulsive-looking. And, though my time close to him in the clearing was burned in my mind, I had still seen him under those circumstances, which were a lot different from these; I believe that if I could have seen him move I would have known, one way or the other. But I didn’t, and I don’t.
I took the knife in my fist. What? Anything. This, also, is not going to be seen. It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him. I can do anything I have a wish to do, and I waited carefully for some wish to come; I would do what it said.
It did not come, but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife. I began to sing. It was a current popular favorite, a folk-rock tune. I finished, and I was withdrawn from. I straightened as well as I could. There he is, I said to him.
The problems came back, one by one, in sequence. I would rather drag him than carry him, but I knew I could make better time if I carried him, so I put the knife back in the case, dropped down on one knee and wrestled him across my shoulders in the fireman’s carry from boy scout days. I got up with nearly double my weight and started back toward the clearing. I went around the rock of blood that had led me there, stumbled through the bushes I had crawled in, and tried for the river with my side oozing me wet and the top of my left leg wet and drying and moistening again. The man’s body held me to the ground, and I had the feeling that when I got him off my shoulders, I would fly. Blundering through the bushes, I had no idea whether I would make it back to the river. The woods burst slowly open in front of me, across my eyes, and twenty yards ahead dropped off into still, sun-filled space from which the old noise of eternity came back.
I put him down in almost the exact place where I had shot him, and stepped to the edge of the bluff. I looked downriver first, for I was afraid to look upriver and see that unchanging emptiness, but even looking downriver I could tell that the emptiness upstream was not complete, that there was something there like a mote, and I turned to it to be able to face it and make sure. Lewis’ canoe shone there, flashing frankly in the sun, riding grayly like a trout, coming out of the rapids. I looked at the dead man. You’re dead, Lewis, I said to him. You and Bobby are dead. You didn’t start on time; you did everything wrong. I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man. You’d have been dead, you should’ve been dead, right about exactly now. You’re right in line, you’re going slow, you’re going slow, you’re just sitting there. If I hadn’t come up here and did what I did, you’d’ve been floating along now with no brains and no blood, and so would Lewis.
I walked back and picked up the gun, and my craziness increased when I touched it. I sighted down the barrel and put the bead right in the middle of Bobby’s chest. Do it, the dead man said. Do it; he’s right there. But I got around the feeling just by opening my fingers, and letting the gun fall to the ground. I did think momentarily of firing straight up to attract Bobby’s attention, but turned loose of the notion because the sound of a shot might have frightened him into ditching the canoe. Besides, I didn’t want to put the thing to my shoulder again; it had been close; very close.
I took the gun by the barrel, wheeled it once around my head and slung it as far out over the river as I could, where it went from a heavy spinning sail into outright falling, turning slower and slower sideways until it hit the water about fifty yards in front of the canoe. I hoped that Bobby had seen it long enough to know what it was, and that it meant we were safe; a gun falling out of the sky.
After it hit, Bobby pulled his paddle out of the river, but did not look up. I put my thumb and forefinger in my mouth and whistled as loud as I could, a high cutting whistle that nearly deafened me, but I had an idea it failed somewhere in the sound of the banks. I climbed the biggest rock at the edge and stood there. Then I figured I ought to put some motion into myself, and I went into the sidestraddle hop from my old PT class in high school; it had more arm and leg movement in it than anything else I could think of. It almost tore me apart, but I danced away while I could. Bobby looked up, finally, and the blank of his tiny face stayed uptilted, looking more. I did a bloody clog step, my tennis shoes silent on the rock and my side tearing but in joy, then pointed down under me. He pulled up his paddle and dug slowly in on his right to turn the canoe in to the cliff.
I went back to the man on the ground, flopped on his side with one leg drawn up, and rolled him onto his back. He looked lazily straight up into the sky. One open eye had been poked into by a branch or a twig, and was cloudy, but the other was clear blue, delicately veined in a curious, un-eyelike pattern; I saw myself there, a tiny figure bent over him, growing.
After carrying him I had no trouble touching him, or going through his pockets. Though I had no real interest in who he was anymore, I thought I had better make some effort to find out, for I might need the information in some way later on. I reached into one pocket and turned it inside out. There was nothing in it; one of his inside buttons made a quick cold place in my hand. In the other pocket were five rifle shells — big ones, and I thought of Drew’s head — and there was also a card of some sort that I had to straighten up and hold to the light in order to read. His name was Stovall, and he was an honorary deputy sheriff of Helms County, which was, I suppose, where we now were. This worried me some, but not too much, for Lewis had once told me that everybody in the hills, or just about everybody, was an honorary deputy sheriff. The main worry in connection with this was that if someone thought enough of him to give him the card, he might conceivably be a person well known, as they say, in the community — whatever that was in Helms County — and consequently might be searched for. I looked at him, though, and it seemed obvious that he was so nondescript, even for Helms County, that he would probably not be missed by more than a few people, and probably not much by them, either. I balled the card up and unballed it again, tore it up, then packed the pieces into another ball and threw it out over the river, where it came apart in a current of air, suspending its pieces incredibly before it moved wanderingly in many directions, all down. I went and got the death-arrow and threw it like a spear into the river, then picked up the arrow covered with my own blood and threw it over too. Then I pitched out my old broken catapult of a bow. I hated to turn it loose. I thought maybe the handle section might be salvaged, and I wanted very much to have it with me for the rest of my life, but in the end I threw it, and threw it hard.
I uncoiled the rope from my belt. I had a lot of it. I didn’t believe I had enough to let the body all the way down to the river, but I could let it down some of the way and after that I was sure I could think of something. I dragged the body to the edge of the cliff and put the rope around it and made it as fast as I could, tying square knot after square knot — the only kind I knew, as it is the only kind that most people know — under the armpits. The head lolled and jerked as I tied, and this irritated me more than anything had in a long time; irritated me more than the set of Thad’s secretary’s — Wilma’s— mouth and her tiresome, hectoring personality posing as duty. The wound in the man’s throat was not painful-looking, particularly — it was nothing like as gruesome as the hacked-at hole in my side — for it had closed over and clotted, and now looked like nothing more than a deep scratch, almost like a bad shaving cut; it was hard to believe that it went all the way through him and out the back, and that it had killed him; that it was his death itself.
I tied the other end of the rope to the tree closest to the edge, and went over and tried to call down to Bobby, but the sound of my voice falling into the abyss frightened me; I knew it would never reach bottom; I could feel the strength and meaning fade from it in the sun that filled the emptiness. There was a kind of crack or fault in the rock, turning green with bushes near the water, and Bobby’s face came up through it. There may also have been a little voice with it, something added to the sound of the river and coming up, but if it was there I couldn’t make out what it said.
I might as well; it was a thing I had prepared. I shoved the body over the edge with my feet, kicking it and rolling it and holding the rope in both hands. Just after it went over it seemed to hitch in the air to get its feet down, and then settled into a long, hard, unsure pull against me. I worked along the line back to the tree and braced against it, paying the invisible weight out hand over hand down the wall. It was hard going; I kept having to take turns of the thin nylon around one wrist and then the other, and then both, oftener and oftener. The coil at my feet wore away as I sweated, and the red rings around my w
rists cut deeper, nearing the blood. I began to wish I had taken a turn of rope around the tree before I started, but I had to hold: there was something about just turning loose of the rope and letting the man fall free and then bring up and dangle, that was shocking to me; I would not do that, no matter what. I sweated and braced, and tried to imagine what Bobby was now thinking, seeing a man come down like this, inch by inch; a man who had held a gun on him while another one cornholed him, and would have killed him in an instant. I tried also to imagine, from the different tensions on the rope, what the body was doing and how it was doing it, all under a kind of control, undignified and protected by the red rings on my wrists and my pain and work, kneeling on and then falling away from outcroppings, rocks and projections, dangling, sliding, rolling, but even so not falling and bursting apart on the river-rocks like a sack of jellied sticks.
I gave up the last yard of rope I had and stepped back, letting the tree hold the body effortlessly. I had trouble undoing my hands; I tried to undo them as I went back to the edge of the cliff; they still wanted to be holding a rope desperately. As it was, I looked down the green strand going over the sandy edge and over a projecting, dangerously sharp rock on down out of sight, then reappearing, straining in space, catching on something, swaying again, where an invisible body was hanging. Once more I wondered what Bobby could be thinking. I walked back to the tree and checked the knots, then came back to where the rope bent to go down and tried to put my bloody handkerchief under the rope at the edge to keep it from chafing on the stone, but I didn’t have the strength to lift it.
Well, all right, I said. The name of the game is trust; you’ve got to trust things. I looked inland and got down on my knees, took hold of the rope with one hand above and one below the cliff edge, slid my feet over and started down.