“If you try Haynie’s Fork on the Laurel River, there’s something due to happen there this evening,” I said.
“Haynie’s Fork,” he repeated me. “Laurel River. I’m aware of the place. I’ll try.”
He grabbed onto the charm thing that hung on his neck, and he said those same words I was a-getting to know better and better:
“Fetegan . . . Gaghagan . . . Beigan . . . Deigan . . . Usagan ...”
The dark window churned itself and then cleared out, and 1 saw a place I’d been so often before. There was a string of rental pole cabins with cement betwixt the poles for chinking, and the poles painted black. It was nighttime, of course, and lights showed there, and folks there too, dozens of them, scores of them, likely better than a hundred men, women, and children.
All of them chattered and laughed together, and they were a-having something to eat. Best I could figure, it was a fish fry. Fish likely new-caught that very day out of the Laurel River, and hct com bread with the fish, all that.
Up on one of the cabin porches stood the musicians. My old friend Obray Ramsey was there, with his high forehead and his long straight nose, and his banjo that he plays so well. The others with him I didn’t make out so plain at first.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Obray was a-saying, and his voice carried over the crowd under the trees, carried across the miles to where we sat, “we’ll try to play you a right good old one— ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat.’ ”
The crowd clapped loud for that, and those musicians slid into it, with Byard Ray and his fiddle a-moving to the front.
“What an interesting tune, and what timing,” said Alka. “Do you know it, John?”
“I’ve picked and sung it a many times,” I said.
“Then why not sing it now?” she asked.
“If you say so.” And I joined in with my voice, halfway through:
“Oh, the moon that night
Seemed to hold us in its light,
And I heard her say,
‘You must never go away . . .’
Then I took her in my arms
And told her of her million charms,
And listened to the fiddle playing ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ ”
Harpe and the women clapped me for that, even mean old Scylla put her skinny hands together. “You’re a naturally tuneful singer, John,” said Harpe. “I’m planning things for you in that area, too.”
The musicians started with an old reliable one, “Arkansas Traveler.” The listeners got right into fours and began to dance, and somebody was a-calling the figures.
Tarrah got up and began to buck dance, her sandals swift and slappy. “Dance with me, John.”
“Why sure.” I got up, too. I don’t do much dancing, usually I’m a-picking music, but I can dance along with most. I put my boots into a single clog, whack-whack, then into a double clog, a-facing up to Tarrah. She was a-clogging too, and a-smiling, her hair on the fly and whip all round her face. Her bosom bounced, her skirt rode up from her round, bare thighs. I made me a cut—you all know what that is, you jump high and swing one leg in front of the other, then the first leg in front, and come down. I heard hand-clapping. That would be Harpe and Alka, and maybe even Scylla, too.
“Again!” Tarrah panted out. “Again!”
High I went, one leg across, then the other, then the first leg again—three cuts—and came down without a-missing a beat of the music.
They stopped with “Arkansas Traveler” and Tarrah moved back to our chairs.
Right away Obray and the musicians slid into another number, slower and sweeter. “Oh,” said Tarrah, still a-breathing hard from the dance, “that’s another beautiful one. Can you sing it, John?”
“Yes I can,” I said, for the song was one I’d known from when I was just little. And I sang it:
“Must I go bound and you go free,
Must I love the girl who won’t love me?
Oh, must I act the foolish part
And love the girl that broke my heart?
Round is the ring that has no end,
And hard it is to lose a faithful friend;
If you should find a love that’s true,
Change not the old love for the new ...”
Yet again they clapped their hands for me, even scowly old Scylla. “Lovely,” said Tarrah. “Who were you singing that song for, John?”
“Why, nobody special,” I said back. “I just sang it.”
“And sung it notably well,” put in Harpe. “John, I should think you could be a successful professional entertainer. Why hasn’t someone ever suggested it?”
“Two-three have,” I told him. “Now and then I do pick and sing at a folk festival or just a play party, but I'd rather not take it up for a full-time job.”
“Now let's change music to what Alka likes,” said Harpe.
Right off, the picture in the window was different. A great big stage there, and a great big sight of folks a-sitting on it, all in black suits with white shirt fronts and ties, or, with the ladies, dresses a-showing off their pretty bare arms and shoulders. Fiddles of all sizes, horns, air kind of instrument you might could name and a few I couldn't name. Up on the leader's stand, a chunky fellow a-beating time for them. And their music was, well all I can say is, it was sort of like a dream. I sat quiet, like all the others, to hark at it to the last sweet note.
“What was that piece?” I inquired them.
“ ‘Afternoon of a Faun,' ” said Alka.
“A fawn?” I repeated after her. “A little baby fawn deer, maybe, out in the woods with its mammy?”
Harpe droned a laugh. “A different sort of faun, John. Spelled with a u. ”
“Oh, that kind,” I said. I'd been told what that kind of faun was. Sort of like a man shape, but with a goat's legs and hoofs, and little goat horns a-sprouting out through his hair. Mostly up to some sort of pranky doings. I could reckon that such things might could be right there, right up on Cry Mountain.
“Can't we hear some of the music I want?” snapped Scylla.
“But of course, my dear Scylla,” Harpe granted her. “We'll look in and listen in on that coven of yours.”
A change in the window, one more time. Trees all round in a dark night, and a fire blazing up red and smokey, and folks a-dancing round it. Men and women, and none of them with enough clothes on to wad a shotgun. Round and round they danced, on a swing with their backs to one another, then face to face, and all the time they sang:
“Cummer, go ye before, cummer, go ye,
Gif ye won’t go before, cummer, let me . . .”
And all of a sudden they stopped and quick ran together from the fire and fell down on their bare knees where somebody showed in the shadows. Hard to see rightly, but the somebody sat in a big chair, and seemed to be all wrapped in black, with big bull horns on the head. Ruel Harpe touched the thing he wore on his neck, said his words, and the window went all dark.
Scylla scowled at me. “John, do you know that song, perhaps?”
“I know it,” I replied her. “I’ve heard it sung in my time. But I don’t sing it myself, nor air other witch thing.”
“Oh, you who know so much,” she sniffed. “Well, if I may be excused, I’ll seek my room.”
She got up, and so did Alka and Tarrah. They said their good nights too and followed Scylla past their green curtain. Harpe sat where he was, his eyes on me.
“Your singing and dancing impressed me all the more,” he said, so friendly I could near about believe him, but not quite. “You’re the one who can teach the survivors of a new earth. Teach them to rejoice along with the work they’ll have to do.”
“You figure to do away with the world we have and a-setting up the new one,” I said.
“I’ve told you I did,” he said, and quoted something:
“. . . To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”
He grinned me over those lines. �
�Omar Khayyam,” he said, like as if I’d nair heard of the fellow. “What Omar would have done I don’t know, but I know what I’ll do, with you to help me. What do you say?” f
“I say I’m a-getting too tired to figure that out,” 1 answered. “I’ve had me a plumb hard time a-swarving up Cry Mountain, and for two-three days before that I spent most of my time on my feet. Right now, I’d admire to know where I'll lay my head down.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been remiss in my duties as a host,” said Harpe. “Come along and bring your gear with you.”
I picked up my things, guitar and all. Harpe led the way to the door with the red curtain, the one the women hadn’t used. I followed him into a long, lean hall, lighted from somewhere up above. The walls were cut out of rock, a sort of pale tan color. At the end of the hall we came to a door that looked to be made of dark iron. Harpe pushed a button on it, and it opened before us and we went in.
The room, too, had those walls of pale tan rock, cut right out of some place inside Cry Mountain. The ceiling showed glassy pale, but it was clouded, you couldn’t see through it. A light of some kind filtered through, a soft light, but you’d be able to read by it. That room might could have been fourteen feet square. There was an iron bed, single size, with pillows and a spread on it as fluffy white as a new fall of snow on a winter’s morning. There were a couple of chairs and a chest of drawers. On one wall a picture, an oil painting of two men a-leading horses amongst dark, watching trees. I looked at it and wondered myself if those two men were supposed to be the old Harpe brothers, Micajah and Wiley Harpe. On another wall another picture, this time of a town with a run of water instead of a street and men a-pushing boats along with poles. And at the far end, across from where we’d come in, a door of iron painted red, that stood half open. I dumped my stuff in a comer and went to that door and inside.
It was dark in there, but I groped my hand inside the jamb and found a soft place and pushed. Light came on overhead. It was a bathroom with the rock walls colored gray, and all modern fixings, the sort you’d find in a good hotel. I came out again. Harpe was a-sitting in one of the chairs, with his grin on. I yawned, and he grinned me wider.
“That’s a comforting sign, John,” he said. “You’re tired. You’re sleepy, ready to lie down and drift off. Which means you’re getting around to trusting me. You’re dismissing the idea that I might slip in here while you’re dead to the world and perhaps kill you.”
“If you did that,” I returned to him, “I’d just be dead, and that would be the end. I’ve said before, I’ve looked death betwixt the eyes too often to be bad scared of a-dying.” I looked him betwixt his own eyes. “As life is to the living, so death is to the dead,” I quoted to him.
“Mary Mapes Dodge wrote that,” Harpe said, “as well as Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, which I remember as a more or less silly novel. But all right for that. You’re the healthy sort that doesn’t expect to die right away. I judge that you’re a truly strong man.”
“Yes, sir, I’ve always been powerful for strength, all the way up from a boy. Most times, whatair bunch I’m with, I can reckon to be the strongest one.”
“Ah,” he said, “and you must have proved your strength.” “Why, as to that,” I said, “three-four years back, I was up at what they call the Highland Games in the mountains, a good way off from here. They bantered me, some of them, to get into what they called a-throwing the caber.”
“I know what the caber is,” nodded Harpe. “A big, heavy length of a tree trunk. Something an ordinary man couldn’t even lift. So you threw the caber. How well?”
“I won,” I said. “They were all of them right much sur-
prised. The other throwers were big beefy men, and you see what I am, rangy more than aught else. But I watched them hike it up and fling it, and figured I saw what knack it took, and when it was my turn, I won.”
He studied me up and down. "No doubt you think you could beat me in a fair fight.”
"Not for me to say air such thing, since I'm your guest here.”
"But could you? Could you even get hold of me? Try it, just in a friendly way.”
A-standing across the floor from me, he reached his right hand at me, like as if to shake. His other hand was on the amulet round his neck.
I put out my own hand to take his, and, gentlemen, I couldn't.
It was like as if there was a pane of glass betwixt us, such pure-made glass it couldn’t be seen. I slid my fingers here and there, and whatair was in the way stayed there. Kept me from him.
His grin stretched wide, to show his lean white teeth.
"No good to try, is it? You must trust me, and you can. But come, let’s relax. Let’s play a little game.”
He reached inside his fringed shirt and fetched out a pair of dice, white with green spots. "Do you know how to roll these?” he asked me.
"1 flung dice when I was a boy, and some in the army,” I said. "But I don’t have money enough with me for a game, and I won’t gamble for aught else.”
"No, no, I said we’ll relax. Just have fun. Here, this rug will be as good as a blanket to roll on. Kneel down, John.”
We both knelt. He handed me the dice. I shook them and sent them out on a roll. Two single-spot faces came up.
“Snake eyes/' said Harpe. “Craps. But I'll give you another chance. Go ahead/’
I rolled them again, and they came up a one and a two.
“Craps again,” he said, a-chuckling. “The saddest story ever told. Now let me try.” He took the dice into his hand. “How about a nice fresh seven?”
He sent them a-tumbling out. They came up a three and a four.
“See there?” he laughed. “I don’t even have to talk to them.” He had them in his hand again. “How about elevens this time?”
They rolled away and stopped, with a five and a six up. If we’d have been a-shooting for money, I’d have been broke by then.
“But let’s not be monotonous,” Harpe was a-saying. “Give me something to be a point, and see me make it.”
The dice came up a three and a one. Harpe winked down at them.
“Four,” he said. “Little Joe, so called. The hardest point of all to make, except for Big Dick, the ten.”
He rolled them, and they quit with both twos up.
“There you are,” he said, “and I made it the hard way.” He shoved the dice back inside his shirt and got up, and so did I.
“You see,” he said, “I can make money by gambling. No need to pull that rope out there and fetch it to me from a bank or a safe. Now and then I visit gambling centers of the world. Some of those, like Las Vegas, know me and discourage me from getting into a game, but I go to other towns—up and down the California coast, towns in Texas and Florida, up to Chicago and New York.” He smiled about that. “And overseas, sometimes I play at Monte Carlo or in London or Rome or Paris. I have plenty of money in a safe place here for when I might need it. And seldom do I need it very much.”
“You gamble for lots,” I guessed.
“Yes, the stakes are in the thousands, even in the millions, in those gambling centers. I gamble for lots, as you say, and I always win.”
“You can even control chance,” I said.
“You're right, I can even control chance. Have a good night's rest, John, and I'll see you in the morning.”
With that, he went to the door and through it and shut it behind him. The room seemed quieter, easier, with Ruel Harpe gone out of it. After a second, I went and tried the door. It wasn't locked, he hadn't shut me in. Likely he reckoned he didn't have to.
Because he was sure of me in his mind. He'd shown me that I couldn't touch him, then that business with the dice, because he wanted me to know that he had command over a whole hobby of circumstances. Up here, inside his fenced-in top of Cry Mountain, he figured he was winner over all things in reach, and that he could be winner over all the world besides. He was dead certain sure about that.
He was like those Tories on Ki
ngs Mountain I'd sung to him about, earlier on: because they rule the mountain, they think they rule the land. But how dead wrong those Tories had been, and might could Ruel Harpe be wrong, too?
He had command over things like those dice, but I swore to myself that he didn't have command over me. Not by a long shot with a bush in the way.
I yawned again. A-sitting on the bed, I shucked off my clothes. In the bathroom I turned me on a shower, got into it with a square chunk of blue soap and sudsed myself all over from my head to my heels, and built up a lather in my hair and rinsed it out. Afterward, I rubbed down with a shuck towel that had the name of a hotel on it, and I felt some better after the trying, busy day I'd had. I lay down on the bed, all stripped as I was, and pulled the sheet and blanket over me.
I thought and thought about all I'd been through lately. 1 wondered myself if Tombs McDonald had a worry about me. Likely he had, by now. And likewise I wondered myself what tomorrow's talk with Ruel Harpe would be like.
About then, I went off to sleep. Like always, I dreamed. It was a dream about some big city I'd never been in, on a street where folks walked in crowds, dressed up in strange clothes, and cars ran back and forth, strange cars of makes I'd nair seen in my wakeaday life. And the air of that city was so clear, so pure, that far off and off, miles away, I could see tall buildings as plain as you can see tall mountains far off away from the smoke and fog of towns.
It was a right good dream. Naught happened to me in it. It might could have been a sign of good things to come, if truly there is something to be told to you in your dreams.
10
I woke up easy, but I woke up quick. As likely I’ve said before this, I can do that. Nobody has to yell me or shake me or blow the bugle over me; I wake up right off and know who I am and where 1 am.
Who I was, was John. Where I was, was in this comfortable bedroom I’d been given by Ruel Harpe, betwixt the times when he’d showed me the other side of the world or fetched his wants by a-tugging a rope or just a-shooting dice, to prove to me how big he was, how all-powerful.
Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 Page 10