THE DOZER TOOK the first cut out of the clay bank below Hixson’s old place promptly at seven o’clock and by nine the sun was well up in an absolutely cloudless sky and it hung over the ravaged earth like a malediction.

The superintendent walked over to a white flatbed truck and leaned his numbered gradepole against it. He filled a Pepsi-Cola bottle with ice water from a cooler on the truckbed and drank. He took out a red bandanna and mopped his face and throat. Behind him the scraped bottomland stretched as far as the eye could see like a dead wasteland, a land no one would have. A blue pall of smoke shifted over it and no tree grew, no flower. A bird would not even fly over it.

A swamper named Risner came up carrying a widemouth Mason jar. Its surface was impacted with earth and Risner was mopping at it with the tail of his shirt.

What’d you find, Risner?

Dozer cut it out on that slope yonder, Risner said. Likely it’s money. These old folks always used to bury their money in fruit jars.

These old people never had any excess money to put up in fruit jars, the superintendent said. Likely you’ve found you a antique jar of green beans.

Risner was holding the jar beneath the cooler’s spout and running water over it.

You’ll want that water long about three o’clock, the superintendent said.

Risner was mopping the jar with his shirt again. The shirt came away muddy. He was squinting into the jar then the wet jar seemed to slip in his hands and shattered between his workboots.

What the hell is that, the superintendent said.

In the splintered glass of this transparent crypt lay diminutive human bones of a marvelous delicacy. Bones fragile and fluted as a bird’s, tiny skull with eyeholes black and blind, thin as paper, brittle as parchment. Scattered as if cast in a necromancer’s divination, as if there might be pattern to them, order.

It looks like there was somebody in there, Risner said lamely.

JUST AT TWILIGHT Boyd came up the graveled walk, the chain with its plowpoint weight drawing the gate closed behind him, before him the shanty black and depthless as a stageprop against the failing light. On the porch the old man in the rocking chair sat staring burnt-eyed at him like some revenant out of his past.

Which he was, but Boyd went on anyway. Behind the shack the horizon went left and right as straight as a chalked line and as far as the eye could see, the furrowed earth tending away toward a hammered sky that looked like turbulent waters at land’s end. The old man just watched him come, sepia felthatted old man like a curling Walker Evans photograph, brittle and fragile as memory.

Come up, Boyd, the old man said.

Boyd strode up to the edge of the porch. He stood for a moment as if awaiting invitation to sit and when none came sitting anyway, taking a bag of Country Gentleman smoking tobacco from his shirt pocket and uncreasing papers and beginning to construct a cigarette.

Looks like they about plowed you under, he said. He’d not had occasion to speak aloud for two days and the sound of his own voice seemed almost to startle him. He struck a match and lit the cigarette. He could not see the river but he could sense it, dank and yellow-smelling, rolling somewhere out of sight in the gathering dark.

They claim they need all the land for cotton, the old man said. His voice was thin and whispery, like cornhusks rustling together. I reckon when I’m gone they’ll doze this mess down and plant it all.

Boyd smoked in silence. The momentum that had carried him for days, for miles, settled upon him like an enormous weight, and he was seized with weariness. Now that he was here he saw that he had reached not some final destination but simply a waystation that had drawn him miles in the wrong direction. If she was here he would have read it in the old man’s face, but nothing at all was written there, not even what Boyd had expected; bitter recriminations, who knew what. All there was was a stoic calm he didn’t know what to make of. As if the old man had come to some kind of terms. Then he studied the face closer. The yellowed skin was drawn tight across the cheekbones, the face sunken and caved, the blade of nose like something an undertaker had sculpted of wax then studied with a critical eye. All in all the old man looked like something recovered from the earth in gross resurrection and set arock on this porch in the middle of a cottonfield.

Boyd drew on the cigarette. You been sick, Ira? His voice was blued and furred by the smoke.

I’m fixin to die. I got a cancer.

Well I reckon you finally got something everybody else didn’t get one of first, Boyd thought. I hope you’re satisfied.

What’s it of?

I got it in my lungs. I wish you’d put out that cigarette. I ain’t let to smoke, and it makes me want one.

Boyd toed the cigarette out in the packed earth yard, a small vicious black smear. A lamp was lit inside, he could smell the smoky burning kerosene. He had forgotten about the old woman, but now he could sense her presence, see her bulk vaguely outlined against the screen of the door.

You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. You always walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain’t though, have you? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans.

Times is hard, Boyd said.

Times is always hard for some, the old man observed.

They sat in silence. Boyd was watching a blur of cypress past the cottonfield and beyond the cypress soundless lightning flickered the sky to a pale metallic rose. After a while a whippoorwill called out of the trees like something Boyd had been listening for without knowing it, or even some sound he’d summoned by sheer will, and he felt he’d crossed the entire state just to hear this lone whippoorwill mocking him out of the falling dark, and now he must turn around and go back the way he’d come.

How’s that chap? the old woman said through the screen door. He must be about grown by now.

He’s right at seventeen.

Who’s he favor? We never had no picture nor nothin.

He looks a right smart like his mama.

She ain’t here, the old man said suddenly. I reckon you’ve made a long trip for nothin.

If she ain’t here I have. And you ain’t seen her?

The last time I seen her her belly was swole up with that boy you spoke of and you was helpin her into that fine car. Looks like several things has changed since then.

Boyd stood up. He brushed dry flakes of tobacco off the front of his dungarees. He looked back the way he’d come. A dim wagon road fading out in the cottonfield. I got to get on, he said. We’ll see you.

You take care of that chap, the old woman said. You need to be worrying about him stead of traipsin around the country.

Boyd raised a hand in farewell, dismissal, and took the first step away from the porch. No one bade him stay.

You do find her tell her I got a cancer, the old man said.

Boyd didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t. He trudged on woodenly He looked back once and no one had moved, the whole scene fading into a mauve dusk that seemed to be rising out of the earth itself like vapors, bluely transparent, slipping into invisibility now that it could no longer serve him any purpose.

DAPPLED BY the first warm light of the season Fleming Bloodworth lay on his stomach on a shelf of limestone that formed the summit of a bluff overlooking Grinders Creek. He was propped on his elbows watching the road through his father Boyd’s binoculars. This road was red chert and it snaked in and out of sight through the cedars shrouding the bluff. A wooden bridge on concrete pylons crossed the creek downstream from where he was lying and through the powerful binoculars he could discern the heads of the forty-penny spikes the timbers were secured with, trace the grain that ran through the weathered wood.

He was waiting for the mailman. In actuality he was waiting for a lot of things: he was waiting for his father to return from wherever he had gone and for his mother to turn up from wherever she had gone and for himself to decide whether or not he was going back to school. His immediate concern, though, was for the mailman, for the U.S. Mail adhered to a schedule the rest of his life did not. The rest of his life seemed to be in limbo, waiting for one event to take place so that other events would sequence themselves behind it, a recognizable pattern coalesce from swirling chaos.

He had been up and about this day before good light. The day gave promise of being warm, and the remnants of a dream still swirling in his head touched it with portent.

He had dreamed that the mailman brought a check with his name on it, a check from a magazine called Country Gentleman, and he had little doubt that somewhere in the mailman’s sorted box of fertilizer ads and burial plan duns such a check existed, needed only the delivering to bring into his possession a typewriter he had seen in the window of a five-and-dime store in the town of Ackerman’s Field.

Some months back he had come into ownership of a stack of back numbers of this magazine Country Gentleman. He had read them cover to cover and written a story so cynically devised that he did not see how it could fail. This story had everything. It had a love story involving a boy and girl from two feuding families, a collie dog falsely accused of killing sheep, a sentimental resolution wherein the accused dog saves a child from drowning. It was Romeo and Juliet moved to the backwoods with a sheepkilling dog and a flood thrown in for good measure, and it would not have surprised him to learn that his name was being bandied about editorial offices in Atlanta, Georgia, where the magazine was published.

The mailman’s car hove into view in a stretch of road between the cedars and almost immediately it began to honk its horn. The boy scrambled up. He was an habitual joiner of book clubs and requester of catalogs and sample copies of magazines but he couldn’t think of anything he’d sent for that would not fit in a mailbox. Perhaps a check from a magazine required a signature.

He was scrambling down the shale bluffs going tree to tree. All right, all right, he yelled. The mailbox was set up by an enormous poplar tree at the foot of the hill and the mailman’s car had parked before it and continued to honk dementedly until Fleming arrived out of breath at the driver’s side window.

Young Bloodworth, the mailman said. Got a package here for you. He was holding a flat manila envelope and now he scanned the return address. The boy was regarding it with a dull loathing. Country Gentleman, the mailman said. Didn’t know they took to boxin em up like this.

Fleming received the package with some reluctance, stood regarding it balefully as if he did not quite know what to do with it.

That all you got?

That’s it, the mailman said. Your mama ever come back, Fleming?

Thanks for the package, Bloodworth said, turning away toward the hill. The car remained still for a few seconds then the mailman raised a hand and drove away.

Crossing the ditch before the hill began its steep ascent he opened the flap of the envelope. The first thing he saw was his own handwriting, the second a note that had been paperclipped to his manuscript. We regret that we are unable to read handwritten manuscripts, someone in Atlanta had written. All submissions must be typewritten. He threw the manuscript into the ditch and went on up the hill but after a few steps returned and recovered the manila envelope and went on.

To reach this house you came from either of two ways. If you came by the cherted road you left it at the foot of the hill and climbed up through patches of limestone and a grove of cedars where the footpath led. It was an almost vertical ascent and the house came into view by increments, first a green tarpaper roof, hipped from the four corners of the house to a peak in the center, then weathered board walls, a house cobbled up from odds and ends, homemade, as happenstantial as something left by the recession of floodwaters. I reckon it’ll do till we find some-thin better, Boyd had said, but the boy had been six years old then.

If you approached from the rear, came down from the heavily timbered woods, you followed a footpath that in turn followed the spectral shadings of an old wagon road, a ghost of a road, a rumor of a road. This house had been constructed by and for folk for whom a footpath would serve as well, folk who did not acknowledge the invention of the internal combustion engine, to whom the value of the wheel itself was still in question.

The day that had begun with such promise now yawned like an enormous vacuum that he was called upon somehow to fill. He took down a slingblade from the porch and began to cut weeds, clearing the yard then progressing on toward the garden spot, the air full of bits of weeds like anomolaec snow. The day warmed as it progressed and he took off his shirt and resumed work as if he’d rid the world of weeds once and for all.

In the late afternoon he finally put up the slingblade and went into the house. The house was dark and cool, cave like, scarcely lit by the windows. He took up a book and with it a cold cup of the morning’s coffee and went to a chair where light fell through a windowglass and began to read.

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk, in silence. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it.

NIGHT. Boyd hunkered in a viaduct watching beaded rain swing slant off the concrete lip above him. Through the silver curtain this made he watched the lights of a town wax and wane like something dimly perceived through deep waters. Thunder rolled hollowly across the flat countryside. An inch of dirty water coursed beneath him and his feet were wet. He tried to roll a cigarette but his fingers were wet as well and the paper shredded in his hands. I wouldn’t have this Goddamn country if they boxed it up and sent it somewhere I could use it, he said. If they shoved a deed to it in my shirt pocket. Cars went by with tires sluicing the water, gleaming and newlooking in the rain, stark in the surreal clarity of the lightning, like images that were imprinting themselves behind his eyelids.

The concrete was too low to stand erect in and when his legs grew cramped he stood stooped with his hands clasped on his knees, staring into the black water that coursed between his feet. Lightning showed him cigarette butts, scraps of paper, an unrolled condom trailing like some weird sealife.

I reckon by God it’s set in for the night, he told himself.

It hadn’t though. The intervals between the blind white stabs stretched farther and farther, he thought the low rumbling was growing more distant, rolling on eastward the way he planned to go himself. When the rain tempered itself to a slow drizzle he came out of the viaduct and rubbed the stiffness out of his legs and clambered up the sloping shoulder of riprap onto the blacktop and walked off toward the lights of town.

Such town as there was and what there was of it asleep. He trudged through a high-class section of town, into a neighborhood where watchdogs from the dark porches they watched refused even to acknowledge his passage, as if he’d achieved some measure of invisibility. Or was utterly alien to their frame of reference, emissary from some race set apart. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders in the wet coat and coming into what appeared to be the business section of town looked for something that might be open. A cab stand, a bus station, an allnight diner. The wet black sidewalks gleamed where the streetlamps pooled and particolored neon pulsed in the streets like a gaudy heartbeat.

Tires sloughed softly on wet macadam. An engine slowed, almost pacing him, the engine idled down so that he could hear the lick the full-race cam was hitting, and he thought cop without even turning to look. A soft breeze had risen in these western flatlands and in the street-lamp’s globe of yellow, rain swung slantwise in a silver spray.

Hey.

Boyd turned. A blue and white cruiser was creeping along, driver’s side window down, slab of beefy red face peering out. Jowly as a bulldog. Hard cop’s eyes, like shards of agate splintered off by the blow of a hammer.

Can I help you?

Not in any way I can think of, Boyd said.

Where are you going? Boyd had increased his pace but the cruiser compensated to match him, the cop’s face intent as if he’d commit him to memory should he be called upon to identify this visage from a witness stand or as if he’d compare it to some handbill seen long ago on a post office wall.

Somewheres it’s dry, Boyd said. Am I breaking one of your laws or something?

None that I know of. It’s just that it’s three o’clock in the morning and most folks is in bed asleep. I seen you walking and thought you might have troubles of some kind. Be looking for a doctor or something.

I don’t reckon I need one, Boyd said. He took a deep breath, held it, forced himself to contain his anger. I was visitin some folks out by the levee, he said. Got caught out in the storm and sheltered under a bridge back yonder. I live east of here, in Lewis County, and I figured there might be a Greyhound station here.

There ain’t no bus station as such. They sell tickets out of the Bob-White Cafe and the bus stops there for pickups. But not till seven thirty in the morning.

And there ain’t nothing else open?

There may be somebody hangin around the cab stand. Get in, I’ll drop you off.

Boyd knew the difference between an order and an invitation. He got in. He sat clasping the door handle. Thinks I’ll steal his fuckin town, Boyd thought with sour amusement. As if they had anything he wanted. The cruiser eased through the sleeping streets, Boyd’s eyes cataloging a five-and-dime, a jewelry store, the aforementioned Bob-White Cafe. Closed, closed, closed, please call again. The entire town of Tiptonville, Tennessee, posted off-limits this April morning in 1952. If he pulls up in front of city hall he’s goin to be one surprised son of a bitch, Boyd thought. He won’t know what hit him.

The cop didn’t speak again. He stopped in front of a small rundown storefront where a sign said TAXI and Boyd knew he was meant to get out. He did. He closed the door and the cruiser eased away. The plate-glass front of the cab stand was cracked in myriad fissures mended with duct tape and the entire window bulged slightly outward as if barely containing some internal force. There was a padlock through the hasp on the peeling green door but a cab parked at the curb before it and Boyd could see a pair of shoe soles propped against the driver’s side window.

When Boyd rapped with a knuckle on the glass the shoes moved and a man raised up in the front seat and rolled a bleary eye up at him. The man wiped a hand across his face as if he’d erase sleep and cranked down the glass.

You needin a ride?

You know where a man might buy a drink of whiskey this time of night?

I might. Get on in here, no, get up here in the front with me. It’s fell a flood ain’t it? Looks like it fell a good bit of it on you.

I got caught out in it, Boyd said, getting in and pulling the door closed. How far is it to this bootlegger’s?

It ain’t never far to a bootlegger, the driver said, cranking the engine and pulling out into the street. Won’t be no more than a fifty-cent run.

They drove out past the railroad tracks. A string of boxcars and flat-cars stacked with crossties was pulled onto a siding and Boyd turned and watched them out of sight. They rode on past poultry houses with rows of lighted windows that looked long as freight trains and past cotton-fields wet and blacklooking in the headlights and across a rickety bridge that popped and snapped ominously under the cab’s passage and to a bricksiding house in a treeless earth yard.

He don’t sell nothin but halfpint bottles, the cabby said. I think it’s a dollar and a half for a halfpint.

Boyd walked toward the porch beneath a bare lightbulb suspended from a wire that seemed to descend out of the dark heavens themselves. When he knocked a tiny door within the door opened immediately as if they’d had word here of his coming and a moleshaped man stood regarding him benignly from among his stacked cases of bottles.

Let me have two halfpints of whiskey.

I ain’t got nothing but peach brandy left, the man said. I sold a sight in the world of whiskey tonight. Everybody in this part of the country must of decided to get drunk.

Just let me have whatever you got then.

When he’d paid for the brandy and paid the cabdriver Boyd had one lone dollar left and this he folded and slid carefully into the watch pocket of his jeans. In the cab he cracked one of the bottles and drank and offered it to the cabdriver but the cabby waved it away.

Lord no. I ever started drinking when I was behind the wheel I’d likely drive clean off to Asia or somewhere. I can’t be trusted drinkin and drivin an automobile.

Shit ain’t worth drinkin anyhow. Kind of sickly sweet. I bet enough of this stuff’d give a man a hell of a hangover.

I’ll tell you what it’ll give you in Lake County, the cabdriver said. A few days in the crossbar hotel. Where do you want to go? They’ll vag you in this town, you ain’t got a pocketful of money.

About two hundred and fifty miles from here, Boyd said. I guess that’s more than a fifty-cent run, ain’t it. How often they run that train out?

Ever day. Them flatcars of ties leaves some time in the mornin headed towards Jackson. You goin to have to get somewheres until then.

Let me out at the railroad tracks then.

HIS MOTHER had gone in the night with no word of her intent though the signs were there if you cared to read them. In his mind Fleming could see her covert departure. Perhaps carrying her shoes, tiptoeing toward the door past the moonlit windows, light to dark, light to dark until she vanished. Until the night negated her, made her transparent as the shade in some old grandmother’s ghost story, sucked her down where the light goes when you lean and blow out a candle.

She had long been a silent woman, in her early thirties but old before her time, life passing her by, the world going its way without her. She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one.

He had watched the sallow mask she wore for a face and wondered what went on behind it. A year ago he came upon her burning a box of his books, feeding them one by one to the wood heater. They struggled for a moment over the book she was proffering to the fire. He wrested the box away from her and she threw the book she was holding and slammed him hard in the side of the head. You dreamyeyed little fool, she spat at him, expressing once and for all her contempt for the written word, those who would read it and those who would attempt to transcribe it in spiralbound notebooks.

The night she vanished Boyd had shaken him awake, holding aloft the kerosene lamp, something strange in his face that was echoed in his voice when he spoke.

Where’s your mama?

Fleming didn’t know anything to say to this. He got up and followed Boyd into the front room. Boyd was searching all about the room though there was no place for her to be. He seemed in the throes of a grief so grotesque it was almost comic, and Fleming watched him with a dispassionate emotion approaching contempt.

If this don’t beat any damn thing I ever seen, Boyd said.

The boy went back to bed. After a while he heard the door close when Boyd went out and then close again when he came back in. He waited for the sound of the bedsprings creaking when Boyd went back to bed but he never heard it. At length he turned his face to the wall and went to sleep.

BOYD WAS half asleep when the cars were coupled to the engine, a loud metallic shunting and a series of jolts he could feel in his teeth. He raised up from the straw he’d been lying in when the cars began to move, the dark landscape of light and shadow sliding past the open door. He drank from the opened bottle and put it back inside his shirt with its brother where he could feel it cold and smooth against his belly. He took out his tobacco and began to build a cigarette, watching past the flare of the match sleeping houses streaking past like islands afloat in the moving sea of night, the train’s speed increasing, so that he was caught in a rising tide of exhilaration at its sheer movement.

I wouldn’t mind one of them smokes, a voice said.

Boyd leapt involuntarily at the sound; he hadn’t known there was anybody else in the world. At length he could make out a shape, a darker shadow among other shadows.

I ain’t goin to bring it to you.

The shadow stirred, and Boyd could smell the man, a rank sour compound of perspiration, whiskey. He reached the tobacco across when the man hunkered before him, the man separating out a paper and sifting tobacco into it, light slant across his bearded jaw, long lank strawcolored hair that fell like a shadow across his eyes.

I had some money I’d buy a sack of my own. You ain’t got a quarter you’d let a man have have you?

All I got is a dollar bill and there ain’t no way of breakin it. If I had some change I’d give it to you.

That dollar’d work, the man said. His face was wolfish in the orange flare of the match, somehow unreal through the exhaled smoke, not like a man but the malevolent embodiment of one, just another obstacle the angry fates had stood in Boyd’s path.

Boyd was gauging the man’s size and he didn’t reply. He was confident of his own size and strength, once when he’d worked at the tie yards he’d on a bet shouldered and walked off with a seven-by-nine crosstie on each shoulder. He could feel the tensing muscles of his thighs, the rockhard biceps, and he drew comfort from them. Boyd was as fastidious in his personal habits as circumstances permitted and he thought, if I can get past the smell of him I’ll be all right.

How about a little drink of that whiskey?

I ain’t got no whiskey.

The hell you don’t. If there’s one thing I ain’t never mistook about it’s the sound of a whiskey bottle lid bein screwed off. There ain’t nothin else in the world sounds like it.

Why don’t you just get away and leave me the hell alone? I ain’t botherin you.

Let’s have that dollar you been braggin about.

Boyd shoved him hard backward but the man seemed to have been expecting it and when he came up he was opening a hawkbill knife that just appeared from nowhere. Boyd crouched and waited for the thrust of the knife and when it came he grasped the arm as hard as he could and broke it across his knee. The knife spun away. As he stooped to pick it up the man gave a cry of animal rage and butted him so hard he went backpedaling away until his feet ran out of surface and he was falling, a nightmarish vision of the door receding not only upward but jerked hard to the right, the wheels clocking and gears gnashing like hell’s jaws and abruptly he was rolling knees over head down a stony slope, pain that was liquid fire flaring in his sides and strange lights flickering behind his eyelids. He fetched up at the bottom of the slope sitting on his haunches and watching the vanishing train with a stunned disbelief.

At length he rose and pulled his shirt off and shook the glass out of it. Blood black as tar in the starlight was tracking down his ribcage from myriad cuts. He studied his wounds as best he could to gauge the seriousness of them and when he was satisfied stood picking the shards of glass out of his skin. The shirt was soaked with blood and peach brandy but there was nothing for it. He pulled the shirt on and buttoned it.

He turned left, right, trying to pinpoint the four points of the compass in all this dark. This world was flat as a pool table and as featureless. He wasted a few minutes searching for the tobacco and on the faint hope that only one of the bottles had shattered but gave it up when he found both bottlecaps.

It seemed a long time before the faintest wash of light appeared in the eastern sky and when it did he rose and walked off toward it.

WHEN E. F. BLOODWORTH came up the concrete stairway from the basement carrying the cased banjo she was sitting in the swing on the end of the porch waiting for him the way he had known she would be. He could hear the peas she was shelling begin striking the tin bucket set beside the swing but she had commenced only upon hearing him close the door to his rented room. The thought of her sitting there with unshelled peas held at the ready and waiting for the sound of his footfalls was a little disquieting, and he began to feel boxed in, a way he did not like to feel. And never had for long.

The day he had carried the guitar to the freight office to be shipped to Ackerman’s Field she had been at work but she had missed the old Martin double-F immediately and inquired about it. He had shipped the guitar first because he could not carry both instruments at once, and he hated worse being separated from the banjo.

You’ll fall out in that sun, she said. You know what the doctor told you.

Bloodworth was coming around the end of the porch, fending his way through the box elders with a walking stick. He only told me that because I was about broke, he said. If I had had twenty more dollars I could of got a more favorable report.

He crossed between the box elders and the porch. You planted all this mess so I couldn’t fight my way through it and escape, he told her. He set the banjo case down on a cracked and wonky sidewalk and seated himself with some difficulty on the edge of the porch.

She went on shelling peas. It don’t seem to be working too well, does it? she asked.

He took off his hat, a pearlgray Stetson fedora, and ran a hand across the long black strands of his hair. The sun was in his face and he shaded it with a hand. He had a craggy, hawklike face. His black eyes were heavylidded and sleepylooking, but watchful as a predator’s. He sat for a long moment watching her out of these hooded eyes.

She was as square and solid and unlovely as a wooden packing crate. Her high-complexioned moonshaped face bloomed with the high blood pressure she suffered from and her hair was dyed a hard bright orange that nature would have been hard put to replicate. But she sat in the shade of a rose trellis and the shadows of roses and the shadows of their leaves climbed her clean white nurse’s uniform onto her face and her eyes were a clear bright blue that reminded the old man of Indian summer skies he had seen long ago as a boy. On top of that she was as kind a human being as he had ever encountered and he had thought long and hard before deciding to make this move.

You are a fool, she told him. But then you don’t need me to tell you that.

Where were you fifty years ago? he asked. If you’d told me that then it might have done some good. I might have straightened right out.

You couldn’t be straightened out with a block and tackle hooked on each end of you. The only way you’ll ever be straightened out is when they arrange you in the box and clasp your hands together.

Damned if you wouldn’t cheer a feller up, he said. I bet in your spare time you set around making up sayings that would look good carved on tombstones.

I spend too much of my time taking care of people who die in spite of all they can do, she said. It aggravates me to see a man with a choice just set out to kill himself. You’ll die on that bus. They’ll take you off on a stretcher in some place where nobody gives a damn about you. It looks to me like if a man’s set on dying he’d want to do it where there’s somebody cares something about him.

I don’t want to do it nowhere, Bloodworth said. And ain’t about to.

You know I care something about you. I’d take care of you. And I can do it right, that’s what I do for a living.

The amount of care I need has been way overstated, the old man said. I believe I’m capable of taking care of myself.

He fell silent, watching her. He didn’t want to tell her that what she did for a living was part of the problem. Cora worked in a hospital in Little Rock, in the wing where patients were sent to die. It was Cora’s job to help them, and he guessed she was good at it, they all died, but he didn’t want any help from a professional. An aura of death hung about her like a plague. The smell of dying folks had soaked into her clothes, her lungs were saturated from breathing the last breaths of too many men, when she got up to cross the floor the unquiet dead she’d helped ferry across the Styx struggled up and followed obediently after her. She moved always encumbered by a legion of the invisible dead.

The tunes and words to songs ran perpetually through the old man’s head and he thought of one he used to sing: who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? and he wondered when the time came who would bind Cora’s slack jaws, who would lean to close her eyelids forever.

It’s just somethin I’ve got to do, he said. I want to see the country where I was a boy. And I guess maybe I want to see how long hard feel-ins can last.

They last a long time, she told him. I’ve no doubt that you’ll learn that, at least.

He stood up, took up the banjo. I’ve got to get this thing shipped, I can’t set around here jawing with you all day. I’m not even leaving till I get a little more of my strength back. Likely the way it’ll go is I’ll stay a month or two and come back before winter. Or maybe send for you, Cora, how about that? Would you come if I sent for you?

I’d go to wherever you sent for me from, Cora said, half amused and half angry. But God, what kind of fool do you think I am? You never needed anybody bad enough in your life to send for them.

I’m goin to town before this heat gets worse, he said, taking up the stick from where he’d leaned it against a porch stanchion.

You wait up, she said. If you’re so set on going I’ll call you a cab.

He went on. He did not want to die here in this boarding house. Cora was a good woman but he did not want his last vision of the world to be her moonshaped face floated down to his, leaning to whisper the password that would permit him access to a world that was in all probability even stranger and darker than this one.

TWO DAYS LATER just as he was falling asleep Fleming heard Boyd whistling his way down the footpath from the barn. The whistling was fiercely evocative, an artifact out of his childhood, and he thought at first he had dreamed it. He was out of bed and lighting the lamp when he heard Boyd’s heavy step on the porch. The room leapt into yellow relief as the door opened and Boyd came in. The room was suddenly smaller, the house less empty and dead. Boyd filled it with raw and jagged-edged life.

Who cut all them weeds? Looks like the place was attacked by a bunch of mowin machines.

I did. I ran out of anything to do.

You’d do better to be in school unless your plan is to set your ass in the same seat next year. It does look some better, though. You’ve probably run up property values all up and down Grinders Creek.

Fleming didn’t reply. Boyd had a bundle wrapped in white butcher’s paper and a loaf of bread. He set all this on the cooktable. Build up a fire and let’s cook some of this beefsteak, he said. I’m about starved away to nothing.

He removed a paperback book from the back pocket of his dungarees. I brought you this. I don’t know whether it’s any good or not.

Thanks, the boy said. He turned away from the cookstove where he was lighting kindling and took the book and tilted its cover toward the light. Yellowhair by Clay Fisher. The cover showed a yellowhaired man the boy judged to be George Armstrong Custer beset by a horde of marauding savages. It looks pretty good, he said. I may start on it tonight.

Let’s get this steak floured up and fried. I’ve toted it halfway across the country and we might as well get some good out of it.

While the stove heated up Boyd sliced the steak and tenderized it with the edge of a saucer and breaded it with flour and pepper and salt. He sliced potatoes into a skillet of melting grease. The boy watched him. He was waiting for Boyd to ask the question he knew he was going to ask and finally Boyd asked it.

You not seen nothin of your mama?

No.

I ever catch the son of a bitch she run off with I’ll cut his throat. I aim to catch him, too.

Fleming didn’t say anything but he heard this with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Another man might say these words and have them mean any number of things but if Boyd said it it just meant he was going to cut somebody’s throat.

Where were you at?

I been through hell and just barely got scorched. I learned that hell is real flat and somebody has planted cotton all over it. How come you ain’t over at Ma’s like I told you to be?

I don’t know. Brady’s a little hard to take at times.

He is that. At most times. Any clean shirts around here?

In that box by your bed. Old man Overbey was by here looking for you. He wants us to set out some pines.

Pines, Boyd said. He was turning the sizzling steak, stirring the potatoes. It’ll be hard times indeed when I work for that stingy son of a bitch. Is there any coffee left?

We’re about out of everything.

Something’ll turn up.

They ate the steak and potatoes by lamplight, fending away one-handed moths and candleflies the light drew through the window. Boyd wiped his plate with a slice of lightbread and rose still chewing and filled the wash basin from the water bucket. He pulled off his shirt and balled it up and raised the stovelid and dropped the shirt onto the coals.

Great God, the boy said.

I fell off a train, Boyd told him.

Fleming judged there was a story here could he but hear it but Boyd was a man whose fences you broached at your peril and he guessed if Boyd wanted him to know he’d tell him.

NOTHING TURNED UP and Monday morning they came out of Hubert Overbey’s barnlot and climbed a hillside to the edge of the woods where night still hovered, their shoulders laden with great burlap bags of pine seedlings, mattocks swinging along loosely in their hands. They fell to work on a slope of ravaged red clay, a blasted heath where nothing seemed to thrive save sawbriars and ditches.

An ascending sun burned off the early chill and as he warmed Fleming fell into an easy rhythm of working, a blow with the mattock, a dropped seedling, earth raked and tamped with a booted foot. Boyd worked savagely as if he bore each separate seedling some bitter grudge, as if he’d inflict pain to the earth each time he sank the mattock to the eye in the hard red clay.

At noon they ate a silent lunch of leftover breakfast bacon and biscuits and watched clouds form in the west, a thunderhead that rose and lay above the lowering hills like a tumor. Boyd threw away the rest of his lunch and poured out his coffee and got up. We’d better get it before that rain blows in here, he said.

By midafternoon they had covered scarcely a quarter of the slope and Overbey’s supply of seedlings seemed to have diminished not at all. They laid aside their tools when all the sun there was was a fierce chromatic rose flaring behind the thunderhead and by the time they reached the roadbed night was seeping down out of the trees and nighthawks came slant out of the mauve dusk like flung stones. When they reached the house full dark had fallen and the house was cold and dark and enigmatic, like some house abandoned, like some house where no one lived at all.

The boy was cooking when they heard a car door slam at the foot of the hill. Boyd started at the sound and Fleming said, it’s not her. Likely it’s Dee Hixson.

I don’ believe I feel like fightin them pines all day and contendin with that nosy old loafer all night. I believe I’ll just run him off.

Fleming was standing in the doorway peering into the darkness where a figure was climbing the hill, shoeleather clicking on stones, a shape gaining corporeality as if it were forming itself out of shadows.

It’s Brady, Fleming said.

On the other hand Dee might not have been so bad, Boyd said.

Brady Bloodworth was Boyd’s younger brother though you would not have known it to look at him. He was small and freckled and intense. Slightly hunched as if something inside him was winding itself up and as it tightened drawing him toward his own center. His curly red hair sprang out wildly from beneath the felt hat he wore and his eyes burned incandescent as a cat’s eyes in the lamplight. Childhood polio had marked him with a warped leg that limped still when he walked and left him perhaps as well with other warpings not as visible to the naked eye.

He sat on an old replevied car seat that served as a sofa and took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He ran a hand through his tangled hair. Still bachin, I see, he said.

Still bachin, Boyd told him.

What’s that boy cookin up?

I don’t know. We won’t know till it’s done. We’d ask you to supper but our grub’s probably a little rough for you. You used to Ma’s cookin and all.

It’s just as well. I believe he’s fryin up candleflies and everthing else. I seen a big one fly into that pan and I ain’t seen it fly out yet.

We’re a little loose in our ways around here. We wasn’t expectin company.

What I come about was Pa. He’s finally comin back.

That’s a little hard for me to believe.

Believe it. He’s had a stroke of paralysis and he ain’t got nowhere else to go.

Well, hell, Boyd said, with a curious note in his voice that made Fleming turn and look at him. It must have been a bad stroke to make him do that. Pa always had more pride than was good for him and he never was one for backtrackin. How bad is he?

He ain’t goin to die, if that’s what you mean. I talked to him on a telephone, long-distance from Little Rock, Arkansas. He just called right up on the telephone. Lucky I was in the house and answered it. It could just as easy have been Ma.

That wouldn’t have been the end of the world, Boyd said dryly. I expect she’s noticed by now he’s gone. It has been twenty years.

He’s stove up but he’s got all his senses and everything. His faculties. Got a limp on one side and goes with a stick but he says he’s gettin better. He thinks he’s goin to die, but he’s not.

He’s not? It must be nice to know stuff like that that other people wonders about. To have God lean down and whisper secrets in your ear.

Well. I run it out in the cards and he ain’t fixin to die.

Jesus Christ. You run it out in the cards. Everbody dies sooner or later.

Brady had taken the packet of cards from his shirt pocket without noticing, slid them from their satin slipcase, rippled them smoothly from one hand to the other. He seemed to draw strength and confidence from them.

The cards don’t lie, he said, apologetic but at the same time a little condescending. He may die later but he won’t from this stroke.

I believe you’re glad he’s had a stroke. You seem to relish the idea of him bein a cripple, a broken old man.

The Bible says as ye sow so shall ye reap. He sowed it, not me.

It also says fortune tellers and soothsayers are an abomination before God.

Then it turns right around and says don’t hide your light under a bushel. He gave me this secondsight, which is light in a way, and I ain’t about to hide it.

I give up. How come him to call you, knowin the way you’ve felt about him for twenty years?

You ain’t got a telephone. I guess he didn’t know Warren’s runnin that show in Alabama. He must have made a little money all them years he was pickin the banjo and singin all that crazy stuff nobody wanted to hear. He’s wirin me the money to buy him a little housetrailer and set it up somewhere on the place.

Oh Lord. He’s sendin you money and trustin you to do that?

Well, Pa always favored me over the rest of you. Always petted me, right up to the day he walked off and not a word out of him for twenty years. He done me and Ma sorry and you know it. Walkin off like that without a word. Not goodbye, not kiss my ass. Nothin.

Nothin to us, you mean.

Nothin to anybody. I can’t believe he’s got the nerve to come back. The gall. He probably expected to move right into the house with me and Ma.

Well. It’s a pretty big place, two hundred and seventy acres. And I believe he bought and paid for it.

He’d have lost it over that penitentiary business if it hadn’t been for Warren. I paid the last of it off myself.

He stood to go. I just thought you’d want to know he’s comin back, he said. That boy there ain’t never even seen his grandpa.

Don’t rush off, Boyd said. I was just teasin you about the food, it’s fit to eat. Just stay and eat with us.

I eat hours ago. I have to see about Ma. I have leavin her by herself at night. She’s gettin old and childish. Absent-minded.

She’s got more sense than me or you either one.

She’s also over seventy years old and ain’t realized it yet. I’m always afraid she’ll fall or somethin. I’ll let you know when I hear from Pa again.

Well. Come back, Brady.

When Brady was down the hill and they heard the car start Boyd said, That stroke must have kicked the hell right out of Pa. For him to swallow his pride and call Brady on the telephone.

He took a pan of water off the stove and set it on the table and positioned a mirror by the lamp. He lathered his face and began to shave. Fleming could hear the faint scrape of the straightrazor against Boyd’s beard.

Poor old Brady, Boyd said. One minute you’re feeling sorry for him and then he’ll start that crazy mess about cards and hexes he’s put on folks and about how the Jews are takin over the world and the Pope’s takin over the world and you just want to wring his neck.

After supper the house was hot from the cookstove and to cool Fleming went outside and sat on the doorstep. The wind was at the trees like something alive and faint light quaked and died, flared and diminished far to the west and he held his breath waiting for the thunder. It finally came, so faint it was like a dream of thunder, a hoarse incoherent whisper, just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world.

BOYD LIVED in a rooming house with other men whose lives he understood better perhaps than he understood his own. He did not know their names or their faces except to nod to when they met on the worn carpet of the hallway yet he had known them all his days, had known them as thoroughly as if he’d been an invisible listener to their every conversation, read their mail, hitchhiked through the burnt landscape of their troubled dreams. They were all men like him, gone north for something better, and finding there the trouble they’d fled was somehow augmented, their lives multiplied by themselves.

Nights he’d come out of the house to the electric neon streets and walk down to a strip of gaudy bars and find hundreds of others wearying themselves toward dreamless sleep. He watched drunken men pound themselves senseless in alleys, in bars, he kept to himself and he kept his mouth shut and he skirted barroom brawls that were just masses of men and whores and flailing cuesticks with a sort of amused contempt.

And so into the night. The rainy streets echoed the flickering neon as if the ghosts of revelry continued silently on at some subterranean level. The air was electric with sound: jukeboxes and the click of pool balls and the sluice of tires through the rain and police sirens, the wail of fire engines. Folks were always wounded, dying, burning alive. They died on roadhouse floors of gunshot wounds, of being flung through the windshields of automobiles that had been suddenly halted by utility poles, trees, concrete underpass abutments, they died of knife cuts you could just not get to stop bleeding.

He wondered at the jobs folks had, these curious restorers of order. There were people who moved in as if they homed on violence, they towed away the crumpled wrecks, others swept up the glass, others mopped up the blood. Together they knitted whole the fabric of night where violence had rent it. Everything was always changing and everything was always the same.

On the way back to his room there was a dog that would bark at him every night. Run down the length of a concrete sidewalk between box elders that were glossy black in the streetlights. There was a gate of wrought iron hung between two concrete posts. The posts were surmounted by gargoyle’s heads. The German shepherd would come padding down the concrete barking furiously, halt at the closed gate and watch him, his eyes fierce and alert, the skin of his nose and upper lip wrinkling with its short, angry barks.

One night the gate was standing open and the dog paused as if undecided whether to come into the street. Boyd watched it. He’d halted when he saw the unexpectedly open gate. He fumbled out the hawkbill knife, knowing if he ran the dog would be upon him. The dog seemed uncertain, watching Boyd, watching the gate.

Boyd showed it the knife. Get away from me, you son of a bitch, he told it.

Something stirred on the porch. Here, Jack, a man’s voice called. You there, what are you doing to that dog?

I’m just before cuttin the son of a bitch’s head off, Boyd said.

He could see the man standing on the top step, just a dark shape against the paler shape of the house.

You do and I’ll pound your hillbilly ass right into that sidewalk, the man said.

Why don’t you do it first and brag about it later, Boyd said.

Something had been growing for weeks inside him and he felt it burst, the tissues rupture and a richly corrupt and violent liquid spread warmly through him. Are you the one? he thought. I could practice on you. Get my moves down. I could start on you and work up to that drummer.

I see that knife but it doesn’t bother me, the shape said. I have a gun in the house.

In the house? Go get it. I don’t know why you people think Winchester made one Goddamned gun and then went out of business.

A silence fell. It elongated, spun out, frayed.

After a while the shape turned and went into the house. The door closed. Boyd waited but the door stayed closed. Finally he looked once at the dog then backed down the street. Not even the dog would follow him.

FOR DAYS Fleming had been seeing smoke that lay perpetually on the southern horizon, and when the wind was right he could smell it, faintly acrid, sometimes with the scent of burning cedar and pine. A haze hung over the treeline, somewhere back toward the river.

Late in the day he went with a blanket and a coffeepot and ground coffee folded in a paper bag and climbed a tall bluff that ascended from the creek. At its summit the cliff formed a rough dome that seemed to overlook the world itself and all that grew there was one enormous cedar leaning and windformed, its roots finding only precarious purchase in the fissured stone.

When dusk fell he built a fire and set the coffee in the coals to make. He sat against the trunk of the cedar and watched bats come veering up out of the twilight on isobars sheer and plumb as if they’d had courses plotted for them. In deeper darkness an owl crossed above him, its wings beating heavily and almost invisible, just a pale shape shifting against the dark heavens.

It had grown cooler with the fall of night and when the coffee was made he sat with the blanket drawn about his shoulders and drank a cup watching a glowing line of fire that was the southern horizon, a faint line that ebbed and throbbed like a length of redhot wire. In the unstable dark it seemed to advance and retreat, tremble and flare brighter under the fanning of winds he did not feel. As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.

IN DETROIT Boyd had worked for a time in a steel mill, stoking furnaces in an atmosphere so charged with fire and noise and molten metal he seemed constantly to toil in the eye of an electrical storm, a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it, a foundry that he felt might be more aptly occupied by scaleyskinned demons or other of the devil’s toadies. Then he got a job in a factory loading huge rolls of corrugated cardboard onto a machine that sucked the cardboard off the roll into itself and spat it out in cardboard boxes.

He was a man much to himself. He asked no questions, and in turn was asked few himself. He seemed to be descending into a well of silence so deep the hammering of machinery was as impotent to defray it as the discordant jangling jukeboxes that furnished the hillbilly bars he haunted at night. He’d eat his meager supper and bathe and put on clean clothes that were just like the clothes he’d taken off except laundered and go into the nighttime bars where other hillbillies crossed and re-crossed in tangents of random violence as if they were all looking for something they’d lost.

These folk from Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri did not seem to melt into the common culture of the city. They seemed to have changed only in the matter of geography. They were who they were. Drop them into a beaker of acid and they would list down and rest unchanged on the bottom, unassimilated, unrepentant, unreconstructed. All these folk seemed to have more past than future and it was a common past of failure and loss and they seemed to recognize each other on sight as Masons were told to do.

So he never doubted that he would find them. The peddler was much given to drink and Boyd had only to haunt the bars in the hillbilly section of Detroit. Trash always settles to the bottom, he had told himself, drifting downward himself. The wonder was not that he found them, but that it took so long. They must have been moving through the gaudy neon half a beat out of sync, coming when he was going, arriving when he’d just left.

He saw them once crossing the street where Delancey intersected 114th. He saw them first from the back, but he knew them instantly, as if something had been encoded into him so that he would have known them from the ghost of a reflected gesture, from a scuffmark on the sidewalk. Boyd’s wife had said something and the man had turned to hear. Something grinning and obsequious in his manner gave Boyd a moment of unease, perhaps he was killing the wrong half of this couple. The peddler seemed deferential and indecisive. Yet something ran through Boyd tangible as a seismic tremor, he felt an actual altering of his heartbeat, a change in the speed of the blood coursing through his body.

He was stopped from killing the peddler not by any compunction at violence or even by the fear of getting caught in so public a place under the eyes of scores of witnesses but by the sheer and abrupt realization that it would be the end of something. It was less a jumping off place than a denouement. He had not thought beyond it. He did not know what came next. He was at the point on an ancient map beyond which the old cartographers had drawn dragons.

He went back to his room at the boarding house and lay on his bed atop the covers with all his clothes on. He lay on the sweaty sheets with arms outflung in an attitude of crucifixion. He looked like a man who had fallen from an enormous height. There was a ceiling fan turning above him and he lay watching light play on the revolving blade. His life had honed itself down to a finite number of revolutions of a metal blade through dead air.

They came into a bar on Twenty-sixth Street. He watched them cross the room to a table near the back. The man came to the bar to order drinks. He stood at Boyd’s elbow unbeknownst as he did it. Like a man asking the Reaper if the seat next to him was taken. He ordered Boyd’s wife a whiskey sour. She used to be down on drinking but he guessed not so much anymore. He pondered how all good resolve is sanded away by the attrition of time and circumstance. The man paid for the drinks and left the bar. Boyd finished his bourbon and water and set the glass back. He ordered another. He drank it slowly, tasting the smooth whiskey on the back of his tongue. When he set the glass back empty he raked his change off the bar and pocketed it.

He was halfway across the room when the woman saw him. She sprang up, her chair fell behind her unnoticed. She had the peddler by the arm saying something harsh and peremptory to him. Instead of running the peddler jerked up the woman’s purse, and for a surreal instant Boyd thought that was funny; grabbing up a purse ought to be the last thing you’d do when someone was bearing down upon you with a hawkbill knife. But the man had opened the purse and was dumping its contents on the table. Coins went cartwheeling, lipsticks and bottles rolled off the table. A small chromeplated automatic pistol tilted onto the black Formica.

When the woman slapped the pistol away there was a moment when things could have gone either way. But Boyd was upon him now, there had been too many nights of absolute solitude, things had just gone too far, too far. The knife sank itself so deeply into the peddler’s viscera he thought his fist would go too, he jerked the knife upward with such force it wedged itself in the breastbone.

He rocked the knife free and turned and fled in what appeared one smooth motion, a movement so graceful it might have been rehearsed, choreographed. He came out on the street and then into it a dead run, horns blowing and tires squalling and then he was crossing on the hoods and trunks of automobiles, leaping from one to the other, the outraged faces behind the windshields like the appalled faces beyond footlights of a stage where a play has gone horribly wrong.

He leapt onto the sidewalk still holding the knife and without slackening his speed. He went down a narrow alley between buildings that rose on either side like the limestone bluffs rising from the banks of Grinders Creek where he’d been raised, and the concrete he ran full tilt on, arms pumping, seemed to be a creekbed. He dreamed a fan of water that rose before him, that diminished behind his churning feet. He could see light at the canyon’s mouth, pale green diffused light like a May sun in willows, and he ran on toward it.

ON AN EARLY Sunday morning Fleming left the street and went up a driveway toward a white stucco house set back in a grove of pecan trees. The house was flatroofed and low and the windows had ornate shutters of wrought iron painted black that made the windows look barred when they were closed. He went up wide concrete steps to a patio where from a chaise lounge a great marmalade cat lying in an oblique square of yellow sunlight watched him with disinterested and insolent eyes.

He opened a storm door constructed of the same iron as the shutters and knocked on a dark wooden door. After a while it opened and an old man stood regarding him with a friendly quizzical expression. He came onto the patio and closed the door behind him.

Could I help you this morning, young man?

I’m Fleming Bloodworth, Mr. Marbet.

Ah. Boyd’s son.

Yes sir. We live down on the creek on that place you own.

Marbet took off his glasses and began wiping the lenses on a handkerchief he took from his jacket pocket. He seemed dressed for church. His cheeks were ruddy and shiny from being freshly shaven and he was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The tie was maroon silk figured with tiny regal lions rampant across it.

How is Boyd getting along these days?

I don’t really know. He’s up north, working up there making cars or something.

Well. It’s a shame when a man has to leave his home to find a way of making a living. Is there something I could do for you? Would you come in and have a cup of coffee with us?

No, thank you. I just wanted to ask you something. I was back toward the river the other day talking to a man cutting timber and he was telling me something about the TVA planning to build a lake back in there.

Oh yes. They plan to build a dam on the river, they tell me for flood control. It’s going to be a huge lake, enormous. Most everything not underwater they’ll use for a recreation area. Camping, and so forth.

Will it affect your property down there?

It’s not going to be my property much longer, Marbet said wryly. As soon as we come to terms it’ll all belong to the TVA. No papers have been signed, but it’s just a matter of time. The way it was put to me, it’s not something I have a choice in. Not my decision at all. If I don’t sell they’ll just pay me what they consider a fair market price and take it.

Can they do that?

Oh yes. Certainly. They’ve done it a lot in the past, and I expect they’ll do it a lot more in the future.

Where does it come to?

Where does what come to?

The land they’re taking, or buying up. My grandmother lives back across the ridge there and I was wondering if she would be affected.

Oh, I know that place well. No. It’s a long way back through those woods. As I understand it, the TVA line will be on my property somewhere about that old crossroads. Do you know that place?

Yes.

I should have driven down there and had a talk with you, but to tell the truth I had forgotten about that house even being there. I never charged Boyd any rent, in all honesty I never considered that house worth renting. I have so much to look after, and that place just slipped my mind.

Well. I guess I’ll get on, then.

You’ve probably got a few months, but I’d certainly be making other arrangements. That’s all going to be underwater. If you need a place to live come see me. I’ve got a farm down there on Cane Creek I could use another cropper on. There’s an empty tenant house on it, and we’ll find something for you to do.

Well, I’ll think about it.

You’re well spoken and you look as if you’d make me a good man. Don’t think too long, I’ve got people asking about houses all the time.

All right, Fleming said. He turned to go.

We’d be glad to have you out at the church this morning, Marbet called.

Fleming raised a hand and went on.

THE DOG DAY HEAT held into the tag end of August, and there were days when they’d just head out in the communal taxicab with no destination in mind save sufficient speed to engender a breeze through the rolled-down windows. Albright and Fleming would pick up the old man at the trailer, Bloodworth coming out wildeyed with the heat and fanning himself with the Stetson, reeling on his stiff leg like some casualty of the malevolent heat itself, a celluloid man left in the heat too long.

They might sit in the shade of itchy Mama’s front porch with others like them but not quite, old men who treated Bloodworth with the sort of deference they might accord exiled royalty or a man living under the edict of death. The old man holding one warming beer for hours and listening to the tales the old men told, telling some himself. Fleming and Albright sitting among these garrulous old sots like acolytes or apprentices, as if they were picking up the fine points of being old.

You need to let your chauffeur there take you deer huntin, E.E, Cater Hensley said.

Who’s that, young Albright here?

When they first started bringin deer into this part of the country Junior took it into his head he had to kill him one.

Hellfire, Albright said. I’ve heard this till I’m sick of it.

He just lived in the woods there for a while, Hensley went on. But he never did come up on one. Then he was drivin up Riverside one day and there was a eight-point buck standin right in a fencerow Junior got his rifle out and took a rest on the trunk and cut down on it. It never so much as blinked. He shot again. It didn’t even look around. Junior couldn’t figure how in the world he’d missed it. Clyde Tennison was with him and Clyde said it looked for all the world like that deer had heard how bad Junior wanted to kill one and was offerin itself up for a sacrifice. Clyde had done seen what it was but he said Junior shot up a whole box of 30–30 cartridges and that deer just wouldn’t fall. Junior kept sayin his sights was off. Shot off one of its horns and it never moved a muscle. Finally they walked out there to the fencerow and somebody had skinned one out for the meat and hung the head and hide over that fence. Clyde said that hide looked like it had been stood up before a firin squad.

Clyde Tennison is as black a liar as ever drawed a breath, Albright said. I never shot up nowhere near a whole box of shells. It could of happened to anybody.

It could happen to anybody one or two times, Hensley said. How many shells is in a box, twenty? It could only happen twenty times to you.

He killed two concrete deer off old Judge Humphreys’s front yard, old man Breece said. Humphreys shoveled them deer up and rolled em off in a wheelbarrow.

Or they’d late in the day head out in the cooling air for a breath of the river, sit hours on the high gallery of Goblin’s Knob where you could look out across the river and mingle with the revenants of men who’d been knifed there or shot or simply clubbed to death with the hickory truncheons the men of Beech Creek were told to carry. A place of almost mythic violence, the haunt of men so confident in their ability to push things past their limits they could empty a lesser bar by coming through the door and sizing up the clientele. Men who killed each other over being called a son of a bitch with the inflection of the voice a shade wrong or over looking at the wrong woman the wrong way. Men who would for a kind of twisted honor kill each other over a woman who did not care which lived and which died and would before the matter was settled have taken up with another man altogether.

To Fleming’s bemusement Bloodworth and Sharp and the other old men remembered all this with something like nostalgia, as if this violent history was something you’d save bloody mementos from and place between the pages of a Bible like faded flowers. The old man himself, Sharp said, able and better to hold his own. When he was in his prime, Sharp said, the old man used to sweep the place out on Saturday nights like a longhandled broom.

You ever tell your runnin mates there about that shootout you had with the deputies?

The old man gave Sharp an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Sharp hushed. Bloodworth sat watching bubbles rise in the glass of beer on the table before him. Some things is better in the ground with the dirt throwed over them, he said.

Like deputies that use your wife for a shield and cut down on you with a.44 Special, Sharp grinned.

The old Dodge had idiosyncrasies peculiar to it and was subject to innumerable malfunctions and you might see it halted on the shoulder of the road with the hood raised, Albright blowing trash out of a fuel line or cleaning the points with a piece of sandpaper, Fleming looking on and the old man ensconced in the back seat, fanning himself and waiting with the ingrained patience of the old.

They might have been on their way back to Itchy Mama’s, and they might make it yet, where some nights they had vicious cutthroat games of Rook where millions of conjectural dollars rode on the fall of a single card, Itchy Mama and the old man teamed against Fleming and Albright, Itchy Mama watching Albright’s dealing with a hawklike intensity and describing the serious bodily damage that would ensure if she caught him palming the Rook or red one.

In these early days with the old man it seemed to Fleming that he was already changing, though he had never known his grandfather before and could not have said what he was changing from: from the protagonist of other men’s stories, perhaps, for he no longer looked like a man given to gunfights with deputies, this benign old man watching whatever moved with his wry ironic eyes did not seem the type to clean out Saturday night honkytonks, to be waylaid on Indian Creek by men who rose out of the sage like sepia men of another century who sighted down the barrels of their rifles and blew him off the wagonseat into the bloody weeds.

Even when he’d arrived he’d had restless eyes, eyes that were always looking about as if he might notice some place he’d rather be and head out for it immediately. Fleming had heard him tell Albright once that he had come back to make peace with his family. But as far as Fleming knew he had made peace with nobody. After a while it occurred to him that without even knowing it the old man was making peace with himself, and that that had probably been a good part of the trouble all along.

THE OLD MAN rolled six lemons on the countertop until they were soft and full of juice. The hot air in the tiny trailer took on their astringent, citrusy smell. He cut the ends off them one by one and one by one squeezed them into a widemouth glass jug and sliced them into chunks with his pocketknife and dropped them in as well. He poured in sugar gauging the amount with an eye instead of a measuring cup and added water from the tap.

Chunk us off some of that ice, he said.

The refrigerator had refused to freeze more ice and Albright had brought out a fifty-pound block the day before from the ice plant. What remained the old man had wrapped in a quilt and stored beneath the sink. Fleming unwrapped it and with a clawhammer knocked off several fistsize chunks. He handed them to the old man. Bloodworth folded one of them into a clean towel and pounded it with the clawhammer and dumped the shaved ice into a snuffglass. He took down from a doorless cabinet a bottle of Early Times and poured an inch or two over the ice.

He held the tumbler to the sunwashed window and then held it to his face and breathed in deeply. Early Times, he said. I always liked the name better than the whiskey. Early Times are the best times there is.

I believe we’ll drink these in the sitting room, he said, filling a glass with lemonade and reaching it to the boy. I believe I can smell my hair starting to singe.

He had supervised construction of this sitting room himself. What it consisted of was a clearing perhaps twenty feet by twenty feet hacked out of the undergrowth behind the trailer. Junior Albright and Fleming with briarblades and brushhooks and axes had cleared the smaller saplings and honeysuckle vines and brush then raked the earth clean as if swept with a broom. Above them a tangle of summer leaves and grape and muscadine vines interlaced so tightly they formed a virtual ceiling, so that the sitting room was always in shade save the early morning hours and just before dusk. The old man had bought three lawn chairs and he and Fleming and Albright would sit about the glade at their leisure as if they were quality folk taking the air from the balcony of a columned mansion.

This place is all right with me, Bloodworth said. I could live in a brush arbor. I could live in a groundhog den.

The old man did not actually drink the whiskey anymore. He had a bad stomach and a bad liver even aside from the stroke and he’d sit hour-long with a glass of bourbon in his hand as if he were absorbing it into his blood by osmosis. He’d occasionally take a birdlike sip or wet his lips with it, sometimes he’d raise the glass and just smell, taking in the odor of icy whiskey and mint like a connoisseur of fine wine inhaling the bouquet from a crystal goblet.

I’ve drunk good whiskey and I’ve drunk bad, the old man told Fleming. I’ve drunk whiskey so good you could smell the leaves in the woods where it was made and I’ve drunk it so bad you could strip the paint off a barn door with it. I’m inclined to believe it was the paintstrippin kind that left my stomach in the shape it’s in.

The boy tilted back in the lawnchair and drank down half the glass of lemonade. It was so cold it made his throat ache, strong with the sour taste of lemons, sweet with the sugar the old man had dumped in. The old man always used too much of everything, too many lemons, too much sugar, as if halfmeasures at anything were beneath him. He tipped too high in restaurants, exhorted Albright to drive faster, was wide awake and ready to roll in the small hours of the morning when Fleming and Albright folded on him.

Fleming was finding E. F. Bloodworth strange past any expectation of him. Much accustomed to only the company of himself the old man might complacently sit half a day without saying a word. Or he might, under the boy’s gentle prodding, begin to talk, telling little by little sections of his life. At some point it began to seem like a story telling itself, and finally a narrative the old man was telling for his own benefit. As if he’d make some order out of these chunks of personal history, some sense. Like shifting about the pieces of a puzzle on a table until the edges dovetail.

Studying him where he sat Fleming tried to match the old man to the photograph he’d found in his grandmother’s picture box. No pictures of him hung on the walls of the house. Fleming had seen family portraits with the old man neatly scissored out and only the blank man-shaped space he’d occupied remaining, as if the old man had been there a moment ago and you’d looked away then back and he’d vanished. Vanished so thoroughly all you could see of him was the newsprint or fabric you were holding the picture against. The air itself. Now you see me, now you don’t, the old man seemed to say. Wink and I’m gone, cross me or badger me and I’m down the line.

This photograph had somehow escaped, and Fleming suspected the old woman had hidden it away. It was perhaps four inches by six, darkened to varying stages of sepia, from the palest beige to a brown almost darkened to umber. It had a thick crumbly texture as if it had been fired in a kiln. A man stood before a board wall. Rough sawmill planks, you could see the circular marks where the saw had gone, the nailheads where they’d been hammered together. The man wore what looked like part of a dark serge suit, pants that looked oversized suspendered over a collarless white shirt. The man wore a dark fedora and beneath its brim the fierce empty eyes looked out as if they were coming from a thousand miles away, and were off immediately another thousand in some other direction. The eyes were just dark holes, he’d thought as a child if you canted the photograph to the light he could have seen through them like pinpricks charred through the cardboard.

He held a banjo that was slung by a strap across his shoulders, and the banjo was what the photograph was about. I’m not so much, the reserved young man in the photograph seemed to be saying. But look what I’ve got here. The left hand formed a chord on the neck, the right loosely clasped the head of the banjo, as if he were proffering it slightly for the camera’s inspection. The face was intense and slightly ill at ease, as if the young man was on his way elsewhere and only had a moment to pose for this picture.

Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in an ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

A cold glass of lemonade in his hand, the air full of the winey ferment from the curing vegetation they had cut, Fleming began to learn something of the old man’s life.

When he had gone courting Julia Bradshaw he had managed to have six hundred dollars that he carried folded in the pocket of his pants. Six hundred dollars at that time and place was an enormous amount of money. It had taken a long time and a lot of work and stinting to save it. He had a place lined up to crop. He had a wagon and a team of horses. He had a house spoken for should the need arise. Julia’s father did not care for him and he knew better than to go courting a girl as pretty as Julia with no prospects.

Saul Bradshaw liked him no better with six hundred dollars in his pocket than he had liked him when Bloodworth was a penniless banjo picker uncasing his instrument at any gathering he heard rumored.

E. F. Bloodworth was a layabout, a drunkard, a seducer of innocent young women and a patron of whores. When Bradshaw looked into his eyes all he saw was horizons receding fold on fold until the last one faded into a transparency of the palest blue. He will not stay put, he told Julia.

Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel would he take the time to try. Bloodworth was to learn that it is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved, and that inscrutability means just what it says.

It had come down finally to a choice between Bloodworth and her father and she hesitated only a moment before she climbed onto the wagonseat with Bloodworth. Another man might have noted only that she chose the wagon, which was already turned in the yard and pointed outward bound but Bloodworth saw the hesitation. He saw it as a lack of commitment, and while realizing how absurd this was, nevertheless wore it the rest of his life like a scar.

What he told Fleming was a shorthand version and there were things he kept to himself not because they painted a picture or told a story he did not want told but because they were things he could not articulate.

He could tell Fleming he was a musician but he could not communicate what the music said to him or said to the people he played it for. The music told itself, it made some obscure connection for which there were no words. The music was its own story, but a man could dip into the vast reservoir of folk and blues lines and phrases and images and construct his own story: though upon performing it and without it losing any relevance to his own life it now belonged to the audience as well. It was something he could not fathom. The old songs with juryrigged verses like bodies cobbled up out of bones from a thousand skeletons. Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left. Songs that treated the most desperate of loss with a dark sardonic humor. I’m goin where the climate suits my clothes, the song said, not saying the frustration and despair that created it, saying that in the sheer lonesomeness of the sound, in the old man’s driving banjo. There was an eerie timelessness about it that said it could have been written a thousand years ago, or it could have been an unfinished song about events that had not yet played themselves out.

So quick it would jerk your breath away I went from bein a man with six hundred dollars in his pocket to a man twelve hundred dollars in debt, the old man said. You couldn’t see over the top of twelve hundred dollars, it was just too big. Julia had a bad sickness and before I knowed it I owed what was then a small fortune to doctors and hospitals. A man might make two or three hundred dollars cash money a year sharecroppin. I said hundred, and I said year.

Then I had a fallin out with the landlord and he took the crop. Lookin back on it I can see it was as much my fault as it was his. I was always quick to get mad and slow to get over it. The way I saw it he cheated me, not just me but everybody that scooted a chair up to my table. I beat hell out of him, and there we went with all our plunder roped to the wagon. Winter not too far off. Not just one winter to get through, I could see that, but a long line of winters. One winter after another. I went to makin whiskey. Julia thought banjo playin was the road to hell but with whiskey makin she figured I was off the back roads and on the blacktop highway.

OUT OF ALL the infinite destinations the night held Boyd had just the sound of music he was moving toward and he had been following it for some time. It waxed and waned and at times ceased entirely and he’d thought at first it was just folks playing music, maybe grouped on a porch somewhere, but as he drew nearer he could sometimes hear brass instruments and a female chorus singing harmony and once even an entire orchestra playing big band swing, In the Mood, and the idea of all these phantasmagoric folk crowded onto someone’s porch and jostling for room made him grin wryly and he judged it a roadhouse jukebox.

He was following a road that wound through heavy timber, dark trunks like inkstains seeping down a page, velvet pine foliage against the sky. After a while a three-quarter moon eased up over the treeline and the dusty road went white as milk, Rorshach patches of grass bleeding through the white dust that rose and subsided with Boyd’s footfalls.

When the honkytonk came first into view he could see it through the trees, or the light from it, a bright outside light mounted on a utility pole. He climbed an embankment and cut through thinning scrub pine and came out in a graveled parking lot.

The building was set back from the road on earth so bare it looked bulldozed. It was a white stucco building in a mock Spanish style and blue neon script read WRIGHT’S PLACE. Everything looked stark and bare in the light from the highwattage bulb and even the air was bluelooking and cold. The door to the honkytonk was closed but yellow light spilled out the windows and the chimney smoked and music drifted out like something dangerous seeping from an imperfect container.

Boyd squatted on his heels and studied the dozen or so cars on the parking lot. He fished a cigarette pack from a shirt pocket and felt it between thumb and forefinger to ascertain the number of smokes left: two. He tilted one out and lit it and just squatted, halfhidden by the pines, studying the cars. After a few minutes he rose and walked among them, still dragging deeply on the cigarette, studying the license plates.

A green Hudson Hornet bore a Tennessee license plate. The doors were locked and the windows frosted over and even leaning and peering in he could make out nothing inside. He turned and glanced at the warm yellow light from the honkytonk and fingered the change in his pocket but after a moment he climbed onto the turtledeck of the Hudson and lay back against the windshield and closed his eyes. He could hear the wind worrying the tree branches, a paper cup scuttling across the parking lot. When the cigarette burned his fingers he tossed it away.

The sound of a door closing opened his eyes but it was only a man and woman coming out of the roadhouse door. He could hear the man’s voice, but not what he said, he could hear the woman’s soft laughter. They moved hand in hand around the darker side of the building and embraced and parted and eased along the building until shadows took them save the flash of the woman’s thighs when she raised her dress then the man’s leaning torso blotted even that. In the world but not of it, Boyd watched them couple with a bemused disinterest.

He was weary and he dozed offa time or two but it was so cold he’d shake himself awake and the icy metal was freezing him through his thin clothes and finally he rose and slid off the car and stamped about just to get his blood circulating. Goddamn a bunch of Missouri winter, he said aloud. When the hell’s closin time around here? He noticed the man and woman had gone back inside and he guessed it was too cold even for that.

He was on the trunklid again when the doors of the honkytonk opened and folks strung out toward the cars. A fat man in a gray gabardine suit came weaving his way toward the Hudson. When he saw Boyd he stopped and gaped at him.

That’s my automobile you’re sitting on, he said.

I was sort of hoping it was, Boyd said.

How about sliding your ass off it, the man said. That’s a new car and I paid two hundred dollars extra for that paint job.

Boyd slid off it. I need a ride to Tennessee, he said. I got sick folks there.

I’m not going to Tennessee, the man said.

You’re wearin Tennessee plates.

They let me run them in other states, the man said dryly. They work coming or going. I’m out of Nashville on my way to Indiana. I’m a traveling salesman.

What do you sell?

The man studied Boyd with sour amusement. Was you fixing to buy some of it? he asked.

I might.

I’m in women’s undergarments.

Boyd allowed himself a slight smile. I don’t know if I’d be advertisin that around, he said.

The drunk man had a thick head of wavy black hair brushed up in a pompadour and he kept smoothing a hand across it as if he’d feel was it combed right.

You hear the one about the dumb country boy ordered him a girl out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog?

No, Boyd said.

When it come all it was was this brassiere and a pair of stepins. The old boy just raised holy hell. Wrote them a letter threatening to sue. All I got was the harness, he said. Where’s the rest of her at?

Boyd grinned a tight mirthless grin and looked away across the trees. They were just a jagged ironlooking blur rising from the pale gravel. The cars were gone now save one other. The moon was well up now and the parking lot looked purposeless and desolate.

The fat man had his car keys out. He came around to the driver’s side of the Hudson. I’m sorry you got sick folks but I’m not going to Tennessee, he said. I wouldn’t go to Tennessee on a bet. I wouldn’t go to Tennessee if you deeded the son of a bitch to me.

All at once he got a peculiar look on his face. His eyes suddenly focused as if he was trying to see something very far away. Then he leaned toward the car and rested his forehead on the cold fender. Sick, he said. The car keys dangled from his right hand. He was wearing shiny wingtip shoes with little ventilating holes in them and abruptly he jerked convulsively and vomited on them. Arghh, he said. Oh, Jesus, I’m sick. He retched. A shudder ran across the tight gabardine fabric of the jacket.

Boyd hit him as hard as he could behind the left ear and the man’s head rebounded and bonged the fender and he slid silent and slack onto the ground and halfturned then lay with his head in the gravel. Blood black as ink crept out of the fat man’s nose and down his cheek.

Boyd kicked the car keys out of the puke and picked them up gingerly. Then he leaned and wiped them on the salesman’s suit. As he was doing this he heard a door close and looked around to see and there was a man coming out of the darkened roadhouse. The man turned and locked the door. He’d started toward the remaining car when he glanced toward the Hudson then he paused and came on toward Boyd.

Come on, Boyd thought to himself. Nose in, why don’t you? But he knew the man would have either a gun or a slapstick and he was wondering which and what pocket it would be in. What’s the trouble here, he thought.

What’s the trouble here? the man asked.

I believe you’ve overloaded him a little, Boyd said easily. He was all right then it looked like it hit him all at once. He took drunk and puked a while and then I reckon he just laid down to think things over.

It looks like his nose is bleedin, the man said.

He fell against the car, Boyd said. He’s all right.

Where do you figure in this? I don’t remember seein you inside.

I’m his cousin, Boyd said. His wife sent me to see about him.

Looks like she sent you a little late, the man said. Can you get cousin home?

Yeah. He done give me his car keys. Reckon you could help me get him laid out in the back there?

When that was done the man turned and went to his own car. He cranked it then Boyd started the Hudson. The cold motor turned over a few times and caught, set idling smoothly. Boyd backed around and followed the car out of the parking lot, red taillights winking through the exhaust. He drove onto the road, easing off the accelerator and letting the taillights pull farther ahead. When they vanished around a curve he slowed the car to a crawl, widening the distance, and when he judged it safe he pulled the Hudson onto the shoulder of the road, stopped and got out. He opened the back door. Last stop, he said. Everybody out, end of the line, everybody off the bus.

He grasped the fat man’s feet and heaved. A shoe came off and Boyd slung it away. Goddamn you’re heavy, he said. The man came sliding feetfirst across the seat and tilted and rolled slackly onto the road. Boyd took a leg beneath each arm and dragged him off the road into a thin stand of sassafras and stopped and stood breathing hard. Then he went through the salesman’s pockets. He took his cigarettes and a Zippo lighter with the likeness of a naked woman on it and a wallet and a thin sheaf of bills from his right front pocket. He went through the wallet and removed the money without counting it and dropped the wallet onto the fat man’s chest.

He stood looking down at the sleeping man. He lit one of the cigarettes with the Zippo lighter. The fat man was lying with his head in a bed of fistsize rocks and after a time Boyd leaned and worked the coat off the man, struggling to pull the tight sleeves off his arms. He rolled the coat into a pillow and grasped the fat man by the pompadour to raise his head. When he did the hair came away in his hands and Boyd stood staring for a moment at the crazylooking thing. It looked like a great hairy spider his hand was disappearing into. He shook the thing off his hand then wiped the hand on his jeans. Goddamn, he said. Then he raised the man’s head and worked the coat under it. Looks like women’s undergarments ain’t the only thing you’re in, he told the fat man.

HER HAIR WAS drawn thinly back on either side of her face, the line of scalp that showed where it was parted like old parchment. The face itself dark and corrugated as an old walnut kicked out of the leaves in the woods. Her eyes were near lashless and murky, like water that had once been clear and clean clotting up with seaweed and slime. Already the cataracts that would blind her created shifting islands of darkness, areas of whatever she was looking at that had simply been negated, did not exist anymore.

Have you not got anything to do that’s better than settin and talkin to a old woman?

I guess not, Fleming said. Here I am doing it.

Well. You’re in a sorry shape then. Leastways as long as you’re here maybe you’ll tell me the truth about somethin. You’re not much of a liar are you?

I never was much good at it.

Sometimes I believe E.F.’s come back here, she said. You don’t know anything about that, do you?

He’d been lying back with his eyes closed and his head against the metal of the lounge chair. Now he opened his eyes, saw to the composure of his face. What makes you say that?

I’ve been hearin banjo music sometimes in the evenins, she said. Long about dark. You ain’t took up banjo playin, have you?

No.

Brady can barely play a radio so I know it’s not him. Anyway he was settin right where you are one night when we heard it, so it couldn’t be Brady. You know he looked me right in the eye and swore up and down he never heard it? Said my mind’s gettin bad.

In fact Brady had told the boy the same thing, that the old woman was getting feebleminded, that time had shifted around her so that she didn’t know if something happened fifty years ago or yesterday. That she might arise in the middle of the night and cook breakfast, running now on some time inside her head that was utterly dismissive of clocks and calendars. That she might then turn around and cook the identical meal again.

He said he had arisen at one o’clock in the morning to go to the bathroom and discovered the old woman taking a pan of biscuits out of the oven, turning to break eggs into a bowl for scrambling.

Fleming had always found information related to him by Brady chancy at best, it required a certain amount of consideration. Everything had to be factored in, the look on his face as he told you, the intensity of his voice, what he had to gain or lose in the telling. After all this had been considered you could arrive at some approximation of the truth. But when he’d told this what had been on his face and in his voice was a kind of quiet horror, and Fleming expected all or most of it was the truth.

Now she turned and studied his face intently. What about you? Do you think I’m goin crazy, or do you think I heard a banjo?

He thought about it a time. I’d say if you thought you heard a banjo you probably did, he said.

Anyway I knowed that song, she said, and fell silent, remembering not just the tune but the pattern of the fingers on the strings, the words to it floating into her head though there had been no words with the melody that came drifting across the field, the words had just risen unbidden from memory: Got no use for a red rockin chair, I got no sugar baby now …

It was one of E.F.’s songs and I’ve heard it a thousand times, she said. Do you know anything about this?

He sat for a time thinking about conflicting loyalties. You keep your mouth shut about this, Brady had told him. What’s done is done, and there ain’t no changin it. She’s better off thinkin he’s dead, or whatever it is she does think. She’s hardly ever out of the house and there’s no need for her to know he’s even in this part of the country.

I guess that’s why you set the trailer in the back corner of the place, he had said, but this was so self-evident it did not even require an answer. It seemed to Fleming that it was the old woman’s business, hers and E.F.’s. It was not his, and if you came right down to it it wasn’t Brady’s, either. It went back further than either of them. He also didn’t like being told to keep his mouth shut, and he liked even less being painted into a corner and having to tell the old woman a direct lie.

Grandpa bought a trailer, he finally said. Or sent the money and had Brady locate one and buy it. He had a stroke back in Little Rock, a mild one I reckon, it don’t seem to have impaired him much.

Where’s it at, this trailer? Back across that field somewheres? That’s where the music was comin from.

Back up past it towards the blacktop. Me and Brady set it up for him.

That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life, his grandmother said. If he had to live in a trailer why wasn’t it set up over here where the power and water is? That’s just about as crazy as you livin like a gypsy and sleepin wherever night catches up with you when you could have a warm bed ever night and a full plate three times a day. If sense was gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn’t have enough to load a round of birdshot. And folks goin around sayin I’m losin my mind.

Look, he said, this was not my deal, I was just helping Brady set it up, and I was ordered to keep my mouth shut. If you say anything to Brady he’ll wind up putting some kind of curse on me.

I’ll keep you out of it. I aim to have the straight of it, though, I may put a few curses of my own, I ain’t above it.

Well. I reckon I better get on. I guess I’ve done about all the damage I can do here for one day.

She looked at him fondly. You won’t never make much of a liar, she said. I can see right through you like lookin down into still water. I expect law and politics is goin to be out of your reach.

She was silent a time, and he had already turned to go when she said, What’s E.F. like these days?

I don’t know what he was like any other days. I don’t know what to tell you. He’s just an old man, has to go with a stick. Kind of easygoing, talks about music all the time.

He must’ve calmed down with age some. Easygoin is not a word anybody would put to E.F. back when I knowed him. You tell him I said come by here some day. I done some talkin once a long time ago when I should’ve been keepin my mouth shut.

He turned to go. She would have told him more but he didn’t want to hear it. All these old troubles were burdensome and hard to carry, folks would load you down if you’d let them. He had plenty of troubles of his own, old and new, and he did not want to be further encumbered.

FLEMING WITH a sharp putty knife was scraping calcified bits of gasket off the heads while Albright cleaned the block. Albright had been drunk the night before and had given himself a tan with a bottle of suntan lotion called Mantan that was supposed to darken the skin chemically but had succeeded only in giving him a curiously piebald appearance. He’d tanned the palms of his hands, between his fingers, most of his face save round areas about the eyes which remained albino white and gave him the startled look of a raccoon.

You put me in mind of a spotted horse I had one time, the old man said. Come out of north Mississippi, I named him Cisco. His pattern of spots was laid out a whole lot similar to yours. Course I doubt he could have rebuilt a automobile engine.

I doubt if he could drive one just into the ground, either, Albright said. Just down to the ground and then into it. You’d think a man would know when to pull a car over to the side of the road and just cut the switch off.

Well, Fleming said, you said it needed overhauling anyway, and I’m helping you do it. Plus I bought that rebuild kit with the last of my typewriter money.

You couldn’t drive a typewriter to Clifton anyhow. Haul Miss Halfacre around on it.

That was my thinking exactly, Fleming said.

What I don’t understand is how you broke the inside light out of it. Plastic cover and bulb and everything. What happened to it?

It was the beat of anything I ever saw, Fleming said. We were going up that long hill before you get to Clifton. The motor was knocking louder and louder. When it knocked that last time, the loudest lick of all, that light blew up and scattered little pieces of white plastic all over the car. I didn’t understand it, not being a mechanic. I expect a mechanic could figure it right out. Probably something to do with the wiring.

Albright stopped scraping for a long moment and looked at him. I guess that explains why it don’t say Taxi on the sides no more, he said.

SHE SET the tone arm carefully onto the spinning record, waited. It was as the old man had told, the record was unused, there was scarcely a hiss as the needle tracked the grooves. The banjo commenced so abruptly it must have been going full tilt when the recorder was switched on thirtyodd years before. The old man’s voice, smoky and sardonic, almost mocking, but you couldn’t tell if he was mocking you or mocking the song or perhaps mocking himself.

She glanced at Fleming sharply, as if the voice had startled her. She opened her mouth to speak, then remained silent. The voice cast out words and drew them back misshapen, twisted to the nihilistic thrust of the song; phrases foreshortened then elongated, drawn out in entreaty. The last time I saw my woman, good people, she had a wineglass in her hand. She was drinking down her troubles with a nogood sorry man. The banjo seemed at an odd counterpoint to the voice, the blues rushed and almost discordant, playing out of the melody and then back into it. The banjo at times sounded as if it were playing a different song entirely, a song you could barely hear seeping through the walls of time itself, the banjo and the voice each telling a separate story, the music an almost satiric comment on the words and on the singer who was singing them, reducing the disembodied singer to a specter you could see through, and all you saw when you looked was a swirling empty darkness.

God, she said. He sounds a hundred years old and terribly pissed off. What’s he mad about? I don’t get this at all.

But when the voice and the banjo ceased, halted abruptly as if the old man’s pain or rage had spent itself, she set the needle back at the beginning and let it play through again. When it had played through a second time she turned the record over and played that, a driving raucous banjo, the voice so disaffected and distanced from everyday life it wanted completely gone, wished itself a mole in the ground. Well, the railroad man, he’ll kill you if he can, and drink up your blood like wine …

Well, she said when the song ended, that’s about as far from Bing Crosby as you can get. He’s strange. Strange but good. It leaves you feeling like you heard something important but you can’t quite figure out what it was. What’s your grandfather like?

I don’t know. What anybody’s like. I think he’s just an old man who’s about decided he misspent a good part of his life.

When was this made? Do you have others?

Back sometime in the twenties. I’ve got three more of them.

She closed the lid of the phonograph so that it looked like a small suitcase. It was checked in a red and white plaid, with white musical notes emblazoned on it, and its appearance formed an odd juxtaposition to the songs that it had just played.

He sounds black.

So what? You look like Pocahontas.

I’ve seen photographs of Pocahontas, and I’m much prettier. Seriously, when can I meet this old man?

Never, the boy said. He’d just take you away from me without even trying and head out to Arkansas or somewhere. Not, he added hurriedly, that you’re mine to take.

I’m yours if I’m anybody’s, nobody else wants me. Do you think he’d marry me? I always wanted to marry a real blues man. You’re not one, are you?

I could learn.

She shook her head. You don’t learn that, she said. It’s just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

I don’t see how you get all that just from listening to two songs.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I think too much. I sit in this room, I listen to dead people singing and I read books dead people wrote. I read strange things into it. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

He had crossed to the window and held aside the curtain to peer into the back yard. A bleak day which held winter like an implicit threat. A wind scuttled leaves along; even as he watched leaves fell and drifted away. On a strung length of clothesline perched a temporary bird. A lean black cat paced beneath it, as if charged with guarding it from other less civilized cats. Its hypnotic eyes never left the bird. The bird flew and the cat sprang impotently, its paws batting empty air. Down a concrete driveway a little girl was learning to ride a bicycle, her mother following, the mother’s mouth calling anxious warnings Fleming couldn’t hear.

He dropped the curtain and turned. I think I’m getting a little too fond of you, he said carefully.

She looked up at him from the iron cot she slept on. I don’t think you can do that, she said. I think people need to be as fond of each other as they can.

Be serious for once.

Why? You’re always serious enough for both of us. Besides, maybe I am serious.

I’m getting too dependent on you. Using you to get through the day. You need to tell me to just get away and leave you the hell alone.

Just get away and leave me the hell alone, she said.

He turned back to the window. The cat was playing with a leaf, rolling it over, slapping it intently. Fleming thought it might be practicing for the next bird.

She rose from the cot and came to stand beside him. She laced an arm about his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. They stood staring at nothing. A cloud passed the sun and the light grew dense and somber.

This is no way to bring me to my senses, he said.

I don’t want you at your senses, she said. You’d be even duller at your senses. Will you take me to meet that old man?

Sure. If you’ll stand by me like this a day or two.

Make up your mind. I thought you wanted let alone.

He turned her to him and raised her face and leaned and kissed the hollow of her throat. She seemed all there was to life. He hoped obscurely that she could save him, but he did not even know from what.

LET ME TELL you this story, Neal said. Do you know Jimmy de Nicholais, that works in the post office?

I’ve seen him around the poolhall, Fleming said. I don’t really know him.

He was staring through the car glass across a flat sweep of field, a bleak and wintry landscape. Trees were baring and already the sky had a look of immeasurable distances, the winds that morning had borne a trace of ice; cold was coming, cold hard on man and child, cold hard on old men in unheated rattletrap trailers.

Hey, he said. You want to come out tomorrow and help me rig up the old man some kind of heater? He bought one of these little sheet-iron jobs and I figured we might take that window out of the back and put in a piece of tin. We could elbow the pipe right through there.

I guess, Neal said. All right. Listen to this story though. Me and Albright was in the poolhall about halfdrunk thinkin about finding another drink of whiskey somewhere and we didn’t have any money. Right off we thought of de Nicholais. He’s always got a little drink hid away. We went over there, Jimmy was off that day, it was some kind of government holiday, Veterans Day or something, some such day. He wasn’t home, though, but the door was standing about half open and we decided to just go in and wait. Jimmy lives by himself and he wouldn’t mind, we’d done it before, or anyway I had. Anyway he didn’t come and he didn’t come and we got to looking for his bottle. We turned up the mattress, that’s where he usually keeps it, but there wasn’t no bottle there. Well, we turned that place upside down looking for whiskey and do you know what we found on the top shelf of his bedroom closet? Just guess.

What?

Well, are you going to guess or not?

Fleming was grinning. Just tell me, he said. Although I’m not sure I even want to know.

A sex doll, Neal said.

A what? A what doll?

One of them blowup sex dolls. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw. I’d always heard about them, but I sort of figured it was something folks made up, but there she was, and nothing would do Albright but he had to blow her up. We couldn’t find no pump and Albright he huffed and puffed around on her. I wasn’t about to blow that bitch up, no telling what you’d catch. Plastic clap or something. Pretty soon there she was. Big round titties, had these pink nipples on them. Had all these orfices, orifices, little round holes everywhere. Little round mouth. Had this like mop of steelwool-lookin hair. Albright like to fell in love.

Anyway at first we couldn’t decide what to do with her. Finally we carried her out by the mailbox in front of the house and stood her up. I found some bricks and piled them on her little feet so she wouldn’t blow away. Taped her hand to the door of the mailbox and she looked for all the world like she’d just run out to see what the mailman had left her.

Probably something in a plain brown wrapper, Fleming grinned.

Probably. Anyway we parked down the street to wait on Jimmy. It was a while before he come. This woman come by walkin a little dog and neither one of them knew what to make of her. Finally Jimmy come and it looked like he seen her from a long way off cause he started loping. He was looking all around, like he was trying to see was anybody looking out the windows of the other houses. Then he just run by her and grabbed her under his arm like a football and run right up the steps and through the door without ever slowing down. You ought to have seen it. Hey, hand me that pack of Luckies out of the glove compartment.

Fleming popped open the glovebox and tossed the unopened package of cigarettes to Neal. Then he withdrew a pair of women’s underwear and held them upraised by their elastic waistband. Pale blue watered silk, Tuesday embroidered in black thread. He regarded them with amusement.

I guess we’ve all got our secret side, he said.

That damned Raven Lee Halfacre, Neal said. For somebody that fought so hard to keep them she don’t seem to put much value on them. They say Tuesday, but I believe it was along about Friday before I got her out of them.

The road was running parallel with a wire fence, beyond it dying grass, weeds the wind had tilted. When he looked up nameless birds were moving patternlessly against a gunmetal sky, like random markings on a slate. He studied them intently, as if they were leaving some message there for him to decipher. Suddenly he wanted to be anywhere else but here, desperately wanted to be somewhere Neal was not.

I believe I’ll just walk, he said.

What?

Let me out.

Neal slammed the brakes and simultaneously slid the car toward the shoulder of the road. What the fuck’s the matter with you?

There’s nothing the matter with me, Fleming said.

He opened the door and climbed out. He stood for a moment leaning his left arm on the car and holding the door with his right.

Well there’s sure as hell something the matter with you. It’s three miles to the old man’s place and coldern a bitch out there.

I’ll see you, Neal.

You’re about as crazy a person as I ever saw in my whole Goddamned life.

I may be. You’re not very subtle, are you?

What? Neal took a last drag off the cigarette and spun it past Fleming onto the roadbed. Fleming turned and toed it out in the dry weeds. I guess not, Neal said. I guess subtlety is not my strong suit, as they say. Or it could be I just wanted to tell you something.

Could be I didn’t want to know it, Fleming said.

You need to know it.

I’d just as soon be the judge of what I need to know.

He was still holding the car door. It seemed to him for an absurd moment that closing the door would in some manner alter the rest of his life. Mark forever a line between what had been and what was yet to be. He slammed the door and started through the brittle weeds up the roadside.

Hey.

He turned and gave Neal the finger. He heard the door open. You crazy son of a bitch, Neal said. He heard Neal’s feet in the gravel. Then the footsteps stopped and a car door slammed and the engine cranked. He could hear Neal laboriously turning the car in the roadbed. Pulling up, backing, pulling up again.

He looked down and saw that he was carrying the panties balled up in his fist. His expression was caught somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He tossed them away and the wind pressed them furtively into the clashing weeds like a dirty scrap of paper, old newsprint. He hunched his shoulders into the wind and went on up the roadbed.

THERE WERE three carloads of them, two county cars and a state car full of Tennessee Highway Patrolmen. They had search warrants and official looking papers but as they had been expected most of the day they hardly disrupted the old man taking the pale sun on Itchy Mama’s front porch. Itchy Mama’s sources were wellnigh infallible and the whiskey had been removed hours before to a safer and more distant location and the old men watched all the legal proceedings with a bemused interest.

Deputies fanned out into the woods with sharp metal rods to prod the ground for jugs of contraband. Others searched the house with thoroughness and a mounting frustration but the place might have been a Pentecostal church so free of alcohol it was.

Bellwether seemed bored and he did not even participate in the search. He leaned against a porch support and smoked a cigarette, glancing occasionally at an old man in a gray fedora who sat beside a boy with dark hair and sleepylooking eyes like the old man’s. Bellwether knew the deputies wouldn’t find anything. He knew that Itchy Mama had a connection in the judge’s office, though he did not know who it was. Perhaps the judge himself, who knew. The moment a warrant was sworn out Itchy Mama would get a telephone call and everyone went into action. When the law had left and had time to get its collective mind on matters more pressing everyone would go into action again and move the whiskey back.

Finally the deputies strung emptyhanded out of the woods and made ready to go. Be a temperance meetin here at eight o’clock tonight, Garrison, one of the old men called to a deputy. Be testifyin and hymn singin. Everybody’s invited.

Bellwether rose to go as well. Crossing the porch he laid a hand in passing on Bloodworth’s shoulder.

Mr. Rutgers, I believe it is, he said.

THE DRIVEWAY was exposed aggregate concrete, long and winding, snaking sinuously up through enormous evergreens Albright had no name for but which he admired nonetheless. Finally the house came into view. Woodall had apparently done well for himself, for the house was huge, a long low ranchstyle dwelling shaped like the letter L. Before the house was parked a gray Lincoln Towncar and a white pickup truck; the truck immediately gave Albright a strong and unpleasant sense of déjá vu, and wrenched his insides with guilt. He remembered the truck idling in front of his house, he remembered Woodall taking off his cowboy hat and laying it carefully on the truck seat.

At closer range the house did not seem so opulent. There was an air of benign neglect about it. The paint was faded and peeling, the trim in places showed areas of bare wood. He was out of the Dodge and inspecting the cornice when the door opened and a middle-age woman came onto the porch. Albright couldn’t help noticing the front door itself was in bad shape, weathered and dull, the dark stain leached off the wood and everything in general just needed a good scraping and sanding.

Albright was wearing a paintspotted painter’s cap over his pale curls and he was studying the pocked and scaling fascia board with a professional eye.

What do you want here? the woman asked him.

Albright took off his cap and turned to inspect her. She was a squat ungainly woman with a hairdo that came down past her ears then curled abruptly outward. Her hair looked all of a piece, something sculpted from wood, a wig chopped carelessly out of dark mahogany and clapped onto her head. Albright judged her perhaps the ugliest woman he had ever seen.

Mr. Woodall told me to come out and look at the paint on this house, he said.

Mr. Woodall is dead.

I know he is. This was sometime back. This house needs paintin. It needs it about as bad as any I ever seen.

She didn’t argue. Gene was so busy he let things go quite a bit around the house. You appear to be a painter. Do you want the job of painting all this woodwork?

I owe Mr. Woodall somethin, Albright said. I figure to work it out. Paintin this house might not square it, but it’d go a long way.

I know nothing about that, the woman said. That would have been between you and Gene and Gene’s dead. I’ll pay you for your work.

I’d rather just do it to settle up.

What do you owe him?

Albright thought about it. To begin with I guess I owe him a house paintin, he said.

He began the next day. There was an enormous amount of scraping and caulking to do before he could begin the actual painting. As the paint flakes flew his heart grew lighter. He felt his debt being whittled down to a manageable size. The second day she came out and watched him at work. He thought at first she was keeping an eye on him to see that he did the job right but this seemed not to be the case. Perhaps she just liked to watch folks work. These were warm golden days of Indian summer and sometimes she would bring a book out to the lounge chair she favored. She would read a while then watch him work for a time. She wore hornrimmed glasses when she read but when she watched him she would lay them aside on the arm of the chaise and study him with no look at all on her face.

Toward the end of his first week she asked him if he’d like to use Woodall’s pickup truck to haul his ladders. It’s just sitting there going to waste, she said. I’ve been thinking about selling it. Gene was very fond of that truck. I may give it away, or let some junkyard scrap it out for parts.

This made no sense to him but he had about quit looking for sense in things folks said to him and he drove the truck anyway. It was easier than using the Dodge with ladders jutting ten feet out behind the trunk. He couldn’t help noticing that it handled a lot better than the Dodge, too. Sitting behind the wheel gave him an eerie sense of power, as if he were absorbing something of Woodall’s essence from the cab of the truck. He caught himself wondering what had happened to Woodall’s white superintendent’s hat, and he decided that if an opportune moment ever presented itself he would inquire about it.

JUST AFTER dark the red cattletruck parked where the chainlink fence stopped it and Coble got out. He stood squaring the straw hat on his head, looking at the house, listening to the raucous barking of dogs. Brady rose from the lounge chair beneath the pine tree. Hush, he said. The dogs fell silent. Coble came through the gate and Brady crossed to meet him. Pools of shadow lay like dark water beneath the pine and Brady limped nimbly around them. Without an inkling of who Coble was or what he wanted Brady knew intuitively that this was someone he needed to know who possessed knowledge he needed to acquire.

THAT NIGHT E. F. Bloodworth had difficulty in falling asleep and he lay in bed for a time thinking about the horse named Cisco that he had once owned. A small spotted stallion gaudy as a circus poster that he had traded for in Mississippi. The night of Cisco’s demise Bloodworth had been trying to keep a mare and the stallion apart. He had penned them in separate pens. Between the pens and joined to them on either end was a barn with a sloping tin roof.

Sometime in the night he woke to bedlam. He could hear a horse screaming, dogs barking madly. He jumped out of bed and ran into the moonlit yard. The stallion was screaming and thrashing about inside the barn. Bloodworth saw with a stunned disbelief that the stallion had climbed a stack of haybales at the end of the barn and somehow managed to clamber onto the roof; the tin and two-by-four lathing had not held, and the spotted horse had fallen in a jumble of tin and broken lumber. The horse looked like a unicorn struggling wildly to free itself from a snare and he saw with horror that a sharp section of rotten lumber had imbedded itself in one of the horse’s eyes like a horn. He’d struggled in the darkness dementedly with Cisco trying to remove the splintered board until he finally noticed that one of the stallion’s front legs was broken and he gave up and went to the house for his gun.

What the spotted horse had done awed him a little. He thought then and he thought now the cry of flesh calling to flesh must be the strongest thing in the world.

Finally he slept but woke to a din of barking dogs and for a moment he was caught in a deadfall he’d laid in time long ago himself and he knew he was going to have to struggle with the stricken horse again, sick at heart he was going to have to go on shooting it until it stayed dead. Then he remembered where he was and picked up the gold pocket watch from the table. It was just past two o’clock in the morning. He laid the watch back and closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. It was useless. Hellfire, the old man said. He lay listening to the dogs and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. One dog after another or the same dog repeating itself was running up the steps, barking furiously all the while, slamming against the door, running back down into the yard.

He got up and poured himself a shot of Early Times and stood looking at it for a while and then he drank it. He took the pistol out of the Martin’s case and checked the loads and stood beside the door. He turned the doorknob but when he did the door was jerked roughly from his hand and he had a German shepherd in the trailer with him. He wasn’t using his stick and when the door leapt backward he fell. He didn’t even think. He fired three times as fast as he could squeeze the trigger and the dog was jerked backward and tumbled howling down the steps. He sat on his haunches holding the pistol bothhanded before him as if expecting the onslaught of other dogs.

He struggled up cautiously and peered into the yard. The dog lay by the doorstep, its legs working slowly as if it were swimming. He fired the gun at random into the yard until both gun and yard were empty. The dogs had fallen silent. They seemed to have vanished into the woods, slunk back up the road to the field. He reloaded the pistol and sat for a time on the doorstep. For no reason he could name he felt as if someone was watching him from the edge of the woods.

AFTER HE LOADED the dead German shepherd Brady sat hunkered by the side of his juryrigged pickup truck. His hand held a length of stick he’d sharpened with his pocket knife like a stylus and he was scrawling the earth with meaningless hieroglyphics, random scratchings. You ought never to have shot my dog, Brady had said by way of preamble. Bloodworth didn’t ask him how he knew the dog was dead. He didn’t want to know. He sat on the doorstep staring at the pickup truck, on whose side long ago he had painted JOLIE BLON in some other lifetime.

I don’t want to even be around you, Brady said. All I want to know is why you told all those lies on me.

The old man was dumbfounded. Hellfire, boy, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Lies to who? I can’t remember saying anything about you, truth or lies either one.

That’s funny. That cattle buyer, Coble, he remembers it word for word. How crazy I am. Babtizin cows and chickens. Preachin to stumps. Where’d you come up with all that mess? I knew you were evil and worthless but I never knew you were totally insane.

The old man was silent a long time, hands on knees, stick propped against his leg. How to begin. Finally he said, Boy, that wasn’t about you. That didn’t have anything to do with you. I don’t really know why I made that stuff up, but it wasn’t even about me. It was about a man named Rutgers who wanted a ride to Tennessee.

All that crazy stuff about me marryin bulls and cows. Readin at them out of a Bible. Did that man really sit there and believe all that nonsense?

Bloodworth permitted himself a small smile. He eat ever bit of it and set there holdin his bowl and spoon wantin more, he said.

Well. I believe he’s about had a bait of it now. He’s makin trouble.

I figured after a while he’d just laugh it off.

No. For some strange reason he don’t see the humor in it. You took him hundreds of miles out of his way and worse than that you made a fool out of him.

Hell, I didn’t make him, Bloodworth said. He was a fool when I got there.

He thinks you’re crazy and he’s goin to do all he can to get you into trouble. He thinks you ought to be put away somewhere, and I agree with him. All the lies you told about me, then that remark the other day about company. I knew what kind of company you meant, you never needed but one kind. Women. Shooting off a pistol like you was doing last night. You are crazy.

I’ll just pay him his ride bill and be done with him, the old man said.

That’s not what he wants.

Then to hell with him. The only reason he done it to begin with was because he thought my back was against the wall so hard I was goin to practically give him a herd of Black Angus cows. Damn them cows anyway. I wish I’d never even thought of them.

In truth the old man felt a certain amount of guilt about the story he’d concocted. Long after telling it he’d remembered that Brady as a youngster used to preach funerals for runover dogs, writing sermons in tablets to read at them, said prayers over roadkill animals. He wondered if all this hadn’t in some manner seeped up out of his memory and colored what he was saying to Coble. The hell with it anyway, he thought. If it did it did. It was just one more misstep in a long line of missteps and there was nothing he could do about it now.

His idea was for us to get a lawyer and have you declared incompetent. Have the court appoint somebody to see after your business.

I guess you’d be a fine candidate for that, the old man said. You couldn’t see after the business a settin hen could accumulate.

None of it matters anyway, Brady said. You’re fixin to die. You’d be dead before the ink could dry on the paperwork. I run it out in the cards. Worse yet, you’re goin straight to hell. When I look at you settin there now it’s like you’re already on your way. Comin into the city limits of hell. Your hair’s startin to singe and little blue flames are flickerin all over you. Smoke boilin out of your ears. Your blood’ll boil and your brain snap and pop like grease in a hot pan. Your bones’ll burn white-hot and just burn through your flesh.

The old man struggled up. Get away from me, he said, and although he tried to keep the contempt out of his voice he could not.

WITH THE SHIFT in the seasons Fleming brought saw and axe and began to cut the old man’s winter wood. He felled blackjack and red oak and cut them to length with the bucksaw and split the cuts and ricked the wood behind the trailer. Working in the woods seemed to bring purpose to the days, a sense of order. He cut dead pine for kindling and a red cedar whose closegrained oily wood gave off a rich exotic odor that evoked some vague memory he could not get a fix on.

Finally the old man stopped him saying he’d never live long enough to burn such a pile of wood as the boy was accumulating. It was just as well for the rains of November began and the world turned bleak and somber, the woodsmoke from Bloodworth’s heater clinging to the ground in the damp heavy air. It seemed to rain every day and the days shortened and seemed to be perpetually dimming so that it was impossible to tell the exact moment that night fell. There were days he sat in the house watching rain string off the eaves and he was touched with a desperate and growing unease. The rain fell with an unvarying intensity until it seemed that the weathers of his world had coalesced in this mode and it had become a rain without a proper beginning or end and crossing through it to check on Bloodworth he moved always with the rushing of rain in the unwinded trees like a dark unmetered poetry of the woods.

WHEN FLEMING got out of the cab in Itchy Mama’s yard he closed the car door and stood for a moment staring past the hills toward the southwest. It was no more than midafternoon but the world had darkened save for a band of light that lay above the horizon. A bitter wind had swept the drunks from Itchy Mama’s porch and it rattled beercans hollowly against the stone steps and blew scraps of paper like dirty snow. Birds alighting about the trees were soon off again restlessly as if they’d had word of ill weathers that had not reached the world at large.

He went up the steps and crossed the porch and rapped at the loose screen door. Come in here, Itchy Mama yelled. Everybody else has. When he went in he saw that the cold wind had blown the sots and derelicts not to homes if they had them but to Itchy Mama’s front room, where they were ill-contained on ragged couches and easy chairs and even hunkered against the walls. He went past them acknowledging their greetings and comments about the falling temperature with an upraised hand and to the kitchen where Itchy Mama was slicing ham into an enormous iron skillet.

What are you doin out?

I’m just out, he said. Why wouldn’t I be? I didn’t know the world was coming to an end till I saw all those refugees camped out in there. Have they not ever been cold before?

Don’t you listen to the radio? They got warnins out about a ice storm. Done hit Alabama.

It looks like it’s hit your front room. That bunch looks ready to start breaking up chairs for firewood.

You better be checkin on your grandpa.

I just came from there. He said he’s denned up like a badger and dragging the dirt in after him. And he didn’t even need a radio.

You might ought to be huntin a hole yourself.

He smiled slightly at this and gestured toward the coffee pot. I thought I’d stop by a minute and see if you’d sell me a cup of coffee.

No, I’ll give you one. Give you a cup of coffee or a drink of whiskey either one. Which do you want?

I guess I’ll take the coffee, he said.

But she had produced from between her huge breasts a flat halfpint of clear whiskey. She tilted it to study the bead.

You don’t have a cup of coffee down there, do you?

Here. Take a little dram of this. It’s heated to body temperature already and it’ll go down like sweet milk. I’d even put a nipple on it if you wanted.

He took the bottle she was proffering. It did indeed feel warm to his touch. He unscrewed the cap and drank and stood by the window looking out to where the wind blew the cold trees. All the monochromatic world seemed in motion.

What’s the matter with you? You look like you’ve got the whole world’s troubles to sort out and you’re runnin behind already. Did somebody die?

No. I don’t know. I guess they did somewhere, nobody I knew died. I guess I better be going. I thought I might drive off down to Clifton.

You took Albright’s car away from him?

He’s been driving that pickup truck Gene Woodall used to drive.

She grinned, turned to cap a lid over the popping grease. Ain’t a fool a wonderful thing? she asked.

He wasn’t sure who she meant by that, but he didn’t ask. I’ll see you, he said. I’m going before this ice storm or whatever spreads from your front room.

Pile up in there with that bunch of drunkards, she said. About midnight I’ll come drag you off to my bed and show you how to stay warm. Goodlookin thing like you. I’d keep you for a goodluck charm.

You’d give that up soon enough, he said, reaching her the bottle.

She waved it away. Take it with you. You never know when a snake’s goin to bite you.

When he went out the day was more chill yet but he drove off into it anyway. A bleak feeling lay in the pit of his stomach heavy as a stone. He knew this was purposeless and could come to no good end but any sort of end at all was better than his life. Time had been grinding to a halt and he no longer possessed the tools to set it to motion again. He kept thinking he ought to turn back but he drove on into the leaden day. The wind spun a few snowflakes against the windshield.

The closer he got to Clifton the stranger the weather grew and by the time he cut off the switch before the pink house it was snowing hard and the wind was blowing it in shifting windrows ephemeral as smoke. When he got out of the car bits of ice scoured his face like sand.

He knocked and waited a while. He kept glancing back at the car and at the street. So far the wind was whipping the blacktop clean but the Dodge’s tires were slick and it was a long way back to Ackerman’s Field.

The door opened, the screen was unlatched. He was expecting Raven Lee but it was the mother herself who stood aside and bade him enter. He went in and stood awkwardly in the small parlor, not quite knowing what to make of the civility he was being shown.

I was just looking for Raven Lee, he said.

Well, she ain’t here. She’s uptown somewheres. Maybe the drugstore, she sets in there and reads them old magazines.

I guess I’ll go look.

You see her tell her to get herself home. They’re callin for ice and freezin rain on the radio and from the looks of things it’s already here.

I’ll tell her. He turned to go. He already had the door in his hand when she spoke again and he paused.

You talk right up to her. I can tell you think a lot of her but she’s a little pushy. A little overbearin. You speak up or she’ll run right over you.

He didn’t know what to make of this or even how to reply to it so he just nodded and pulled the door closed behind him.

She was not in the drugstore or in the Eat and Run Cafe. Nor about the snowy streets, which were as bare and bleak as if the town lay under an edict that shuttered its citizens inside. He sat with the Dodge parked at the curb and sipped at the whiskey and kept one eye out for the law but the law itself seemed denned up somewhere with the dirt pulled after. He drank and searched the streets as if he could conjure her appearance by sheer will. It was his intention to marry her on the spot or as close to it as possible. Or to launch himself into insane recriminations about Neal. He had no idea what his intentions were beyond the next sip of Itchy Mama’s whiskey, which had now cooled far below 98.6, and watching the snow list and slide on the glass. The day was failing and down the street where the poolroom was the nightlight came on, the harsh blue neon bleeding into the frozen air like ink in water.

He cranked the car and drove around the city square, down side-streets blown free of snow. Snow was sticking now on the uneven surfaces of folk’s lawns and in the glow of the streetlights it had a bluish cast.

He was about to cut his losses and leave when he noticed a brick building with a brass plaque that said LIBRARY. He parked the car and went in. She was sitting at a table reading a book, her back to the door, and she did not turn toward the noise the door made opening or closing. She was alone at her table and he crossed and seated himself opposite her.

What are you reading?

She looked up from her book, her eyes lost for a moment in transit from the place the book had taken her to this room with its oaken tables and the intense young man sitting across from her. She looked for a moment as if she couldn’t fathom who he was or why he might care what she was reading.

Then she said, What are you doing here?

It’s snowing, he said, meaning to say anything but that.

You drove forty miles to give me a weather report? I could have got that from the radio. Or looked out the window.

You didn’t tell me what you’re reading.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It’s about my favorite book, and I’ve probably read it a dozen times already. Is the snow really starting to stick?

Your mother said tell you to get home. What’s the matter with her? She treated me very nearly as if I was human.

She’s desperately searching for a bridegroom, Raven Lee said. She’s measured you for a suit and tie and decided you’re better than nothing.

I’m not sure I know what you mean.

She gave him a small cryptic smile. You will here in a minute, she said. Let me get this book checked out and if you’re so set on driving me home I guess I’ll let you.

When she rose with the book and her purse and crossed to a desk where a bluehaired woman sat he saw that what he had judged a blouse was in fact a maternity smock and that beneath it her waistline had thickened considerably since they had sat in her room listening to the old man’s records. While he waited for the library card to be processed he crossed to the glass double doors and stood looking out. The night had darkened and all he could see was his reflection and snow drifting against it. Then Raven Lee’s reflection turned with the book and approached him. Her reflection slid an arm through his. They went out.

Did you see that woman watching you? She was wondering if you’re the proud father.

He opened the passenger door and she got in. He closed the door and came around and climbed in. It was very cold and he cranked the engine and sat for a time with a hand cupped over the heater vent and watching windshield wipers clear the snow.

It’s starting to stick now, he said.

I’m showing pretty good, don’t you think? she asked, laying a hand on her swollen abdomen. This is what they call showing, you’ve heard people say that, she’s starting to show. I may be better at showing than I expected to.

To have something to do with his hands and to avoid answering her he eased the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. There seemed no other cars anywhere and he backed around and turned in the street and drove to the square where the traffic light went from red to green shuttling phantom cars through the windy snow. He did not speak until he had laboriously maneuvered off the twisting sidestreets and down the hill to Raven Lee’s house.

What are you going to do?

Have you read Rebecca?

Yeah, I read it a long time ago. It’s pretty good.

It’s just about my favorite book.

He had left the engine running for such poor heat as the heater was pumping out but it was still cold in the car. You said that, he said. What are you going to do?

I’m going to read it again.

Beyond her clean profile the porchlight flared like a cheerless beacon. The door opened and he could dimly see the mother come onto the porch and stare at the car before the cold drove her back inside.

I guess it’s Neal’s baby?

You guess correctly. Neal’s the only guy I ever got serious enough with for things to get to this point. And they sort of reached this point without me knowing what was going on. I guess you could say it’s sort of out of my hands.

You never told me what you planned to do.

She turned to look at him. He thought she might have smiled but in the poor light he couldn’t tell. I don’t know how much you know about biology but this is something that’s pretty much happening on its own. I’m not doing anything. Or planning on doing anything, except having a baby.

I meant like an operation. There are doctors who will perform abortions, for enough money.

Not in Clifton. Besides, I’m way too far along. It wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to kill this baby.

I reckon Neal knows.

Oh yes. He knows in no uncertain terms. Mama seen to that. She was trying to make him marry me, even with him denying right down to the ground that it was his baby. I said to hell with that. I’m sixteen years old, I’m not signing the rest of my life away to some jerk who’d lie about a thing like that and can’t even keep his pants zipped. Anyway, he’d already quit coming around. I think he must have some sort of sixth sense that warns him when this happens.

That sorry son of a bitch. I’ll kill him.

This time she did smile, and leaning toward him in the darkness, laid a hand on his arm.

If you’re going to start in killing folks right and left you may as well start with me. He didn’t waylay me in some dark alley and rape me. Club me over the head and drag me back to his cave. We did it, the both of us, I’d be lying if I blamed it all on him. He can just walk, and if I walk, it sort of goes with me.

God, he said.

I guess this is just my way of telling you to get the hell away from me and leave me alone, the way you asked me to do that time.

I must be the dumbest person in the world.

You’re pretty dumb, all right.

Brady can see the future like a man reading a newspaper and Neal’s got this fabulous sixth sense. All this shit just blindsides me out of a clear blue sky.

Oh stop feeling sorry for yourself. At least you don’t get morning sickness. You’ll get over it. You might even learn something from it. If it ever happens to you you’ll know not to walk out from under it.

I’d know that without having to learn it, he said.

Little by little the windowglass had gone opaque. Rain had begun to mix with the snow and instead of tracking down the glass it was freezing in a thin translucent skim that made the streetlamps blurred and otherworldly. The interior of the car seemed the world’s last outpost, these two the last two survivors.

I’ve got to go, he said. Likely I’ll slide off the road and be walking in this mess and it won’t be nearly as much fun as it was with you.

That was sort of fun, looking back on it. Probably because I’m comfortable with you. I was never comfortable with Neal, though I guess a look at me would make you doubt that.

Were you pregnant by then? That night by the river?

Of course I was. I was even a tiny bit pregnant that night you got the crap kicked out of you. I’ve never known you when I wasn’t pregnant. I haven’t seen Neal since before that night Junior brought you over and we met. He doesn’t even seem real to me anymore. Like I dreamed him or something. He just came to me in a dream and knocked me up and then I woke up.

You don’t have to be so crude about it.

That was the least immaculate conception you could possibly imagine.

I’ve got to go.

Then go. No, wait, not yet. Anyway you don’t have to go. Sleep on the couch, I doubt if Mama would say a word. By now she’s probably thinking any Bloodworth is better than no Bloodworth.

Don’t think I wouldn’t like to. But it’s getting slicker all the time and I’ve got to get back. Somebody has to make sure the old man has wood brought in and a fire kept up. He’s sort of got to depending on me.

She had opened her purse and taken out a small wirebound notebook and a pen. She opened the notebook and wrote a number on a page and tore the page out. Here. Do something for me. When you get back to Ackerman’s Field, I don’t care what time it is, call this number. That’s a girlfriend of mine and she’ll tell me tomorrow.

Why on earth would you want me to do that?

I’m hooked on you. No, I don’t guess I’ll ever see you again but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking you’re iced over in a ditch somewhere. Will you do it?

I guess I’d do about anything you asked me to.

Except leave me the hell alone.

Except that.

She couldn’t get the door open and he had to reach across her and shove the door hard with the heel of his hand. It opened with a soft shriek of splintering ice and he slid across the seat after her and helped her to the door. The sidewalk was iced over and they walked in the grass beside it. At the door she squeezed his hand hard for a moment but there seemed nothing at all to be said and when he turned back toward the street the world glittered like an ornate world fashioned from ice.

THE DAM WAS finished in the fall and the creek rechanneled into the basin the concrete guarded, and the waters swirled and eddied against its huge footing. The creek flowed in but the water rose so slowly the eye would not remark it. Only when the lower end of the creek slowly began to vanish, to drown itself, could you see the water begin to deepen.

The last of the dead were being moved. The area was chainlinked and secured by the government so that these grave robbers worked sanctioned by law and unremarked by prying eyes. The newer graves were dug up by backhoes; Bloodworth’s casket seemed scarcely touched by the abrasions the earth inflicted. It was loaded onto a flatbed truck and covered with a tarpaulin and the securing straps winched down and just at twilight the truck moved out through the shifting dust, nighthawks rising redeyed in the headlights, and it was down the line and gone, as if E.F.’s affinity for roads was impervious to death itself.

The older caskets must be handled with care, the earth carved away by men with shovels, and the cheap fiberboard caskets were not there at all, and the bones lay formal and serene and expectant as if they’d been waiting all along for just such a resurrection. Finally the graves were emptied of all save a fine dust you could not hold in your hand, and the earth on the hillside was pocked and ravaged as if the dead themselves had risen in desperate haste and clawed away the earth and fled. The stones still stood and when the moon, breathlessly perfect and unchanged, swung over the rim of the lifeless landscape, they gleamed dully as if they emitted some internal light of themselves.

The church stood. Its pews had been pried up and moved and the altar carefully born away by the deacons and perhaps they would serve some other church in some other place and time.

Then the waterway was cut from the river and the water poured down the slope toward the creek, churning and moiling and talking to itself, and the basin began to fill in earnest. There was no life here. It was a world creating itself, caught in the caesura between the scraping away of the old order and the gestation of whatever altered form might follow.

The trees had been cut and burned but the contour of the hill Fleming had lived on held itself stubbornly and the water climbed the rocky ledges toward the summit, everything drowning, the footpath and the footprints layered atop each other invisibly in unreckonable number, the ashes that darkened the water momentarily then vanished. Old voices echoed stubbornly until they drowned, re-monstrations and petulant complaints and old worn and useless endearments the rising waters silenced forever.

The water rose on implacably until it reached the crossroads, and late in the afternoon, when the light fell a certain way, you could see the beginnings of the wagon road leading down from the crossroads, see it lost from sight in the deepening water. The underwater road looked inexplicable, freighted with lost meaning, like some old imponderable road an ancient race had built to a place that no longer existed.