by William Gay
She hid it in the picture box under the Bible, he said in answer to an unasked question. You boys ready to try it up the hill?
We about ready to warm, Drew said. We ain’t got no fruitjar. We have to warm from the outside in.
What about that coffee? Tyler said.
She never made none.
Then if we got to do it, let’s do it and get it over with.
Loath to lose the jar again, Claude slung it along in his hand and at the peak of the slope stopped and drank and stood studying the grade intently as if he were figuring angles and degrees of inclination and then went on down the hill.
Drew, you the least. Get you a stick of wood ready and me and Lost Sheep’ll push it as far we can up the grade, and you scotch it. Then we’ll get us another toehold and go again.
They tried, and the truck wouldn’t move. You goin to have to help us, he told Drew. Help us roll it and maybe we can hold it till you throw your block under it.
They locked their feet in the mud and leaned into it. The truck moved two or three feet and then no more. Drew threw awhiteoak cut under the wheel and they released the truck and stood hands on knees breathing hard.
Again. This time no more than a foot. With his breath exploding in his lungs Tyler stood staring up the muddy slope and it seemed to stretch to infinity. He turned toward the woods and the blue horizon lay beckoning like a promise.
One more time, Claude said, but the truck just rocked on its springs and the wheels would not move. No matter how hard they rocked it or lunged against it, it would not roll.
Claude went to his knees in the mud breathing hard. It’s went in gear somehow, he said.
Drew looked. No it ain’t.
It ain’t going anywhere else, either, Tyler said.
Claude began to curse the truck. There on his knees in the mud swearing he seemed like a penitent praying to a god of blasphemy. After a time he ceased but remained sitting in the mud with the rain channeling through his sparse hair and the eggsized bald spot he’d so carefully combed over bared to the elements.
I got to think, he said. I’m not whupped yet. Go in the house and warm. I’ll think of somethin here directly. He raised the bottle aloft to the winter light and drank and set it carefully in the mud, wallowing out a hole with the bottom of the jar to prevent its overturning.
The serried warm gloom of the house. This is the last goddamn time I’m changin clothes today, Drew said. I’ve got me a good mind to just go back to bed and start all over.
When they came back through the curtained doorway to the front room, Claudelle said, Let me try to find you somethin of Daddy’s to put on.
He stood steaming before the fire. There’s no need of it, he said. I’d just get them wet. I’m going back out and see if I can help him do whatever it is he thinks of doing to the truck. Did your mama ever make any coffee?
She just shook her head.
When he’d warmed awhile and judged he’d soaked up enough heat to hold him against the cold he went back out. He met Claude coming up the slope but Claude didn’t speak or otherwise acknowledge his presence. Tyler noticed that the level of liquid in the jar had fallen and Claude seemed to list slightly as he slogged through the mud. For lack of anything better to do Tyler followed him to the barn.
By the time he caught up in the hall of the barn Claude had a bridle slung over his arm and was opening the door to a stall off the strawstrewn hall of the barn. Tyler could hear a heavy stamping behind the door. Here, Stannybogus, Claude was calling into the haysmelling dark. A horse’s head appeared in the widening crack, and when it did Claude grasped its mane with a fist twisted in it, and the horse tossed its head and Tyler could see it was blind in one eye. He shook his head and went back out into the rain and down the hill to the truck. After some time Claude came stumbling down the grade leading the horse and carrying a board in his free hand. He laid aside the board and hitched the horse to the bumper of the truck and took up the slab and turned to wink at Tyler.
When the board slammed the horse’s rump its one good eye walled fearfully and it leapt against the traces with bunched muscles, simultaneously lashing out with its hind legs. Its right hoof caught Claude a glancing blow on the thigh and he collapsed into the mud, thrashing about and trying to rise. The horse had fallen to its knees leaving great raw slashes in the fresh mud and it was frantically trying to regainpurchase before the board could fall again. It veered right and left, rolling its good eye to see then lunged again and for an elongated moment the chains held and it stood straining and vibratory with nervous tremors rippling its hide and when the traces broke it lost its footing and fell again.
From the porch the woman was yelling something the wind stole and Claude was rolling around in the mud clutching his thigh, face contorted in histrionic anguish. Crazed so all over with mud and lightly furred with straw he looked like the luckless victim of some peculiar catastrophe whose survival lay in grave doubt. Graver still, for the woman had left the porch and was approaching with long purposeful strides.
The horse was running in great sliding lopes around the hillside with the singletree randomly banging the ground and each time it did the horse redoubled its speed toward the edge of the woods. They looked good to Tyler too.
I got to get on, Claude, he said. I’ll see you.
Claude just shook his head and wiped his cheek, leaving in the wake of his hand a slash of mud. Boy, I ever need anymore back luck, I aim to look you up and wear you like a charm on a watch fob. You draw misfortune like shit draws flies.
Tyler knelt in the mud before Claude. There’s a man looking for me named Granville Sutter, and he may come here. I just don’t know. If he does, don’t fool with him. Don’t even let him in. He’s crazy.
You bring the son of a bitch on. After the day I’ve had and it not over yet, nobody’s goin to come on my own land and jerk me around.
Tyler rose and went on up the hill. Meeting the woman he gave her a wide berth and she shot him a look of fearful godspeed and he went on to the porch. The girl met him there. She had a folded coat in her arms and a brown paper bag with the top rolled down.
It’s Daddy’s old army coat. Try not to let him see it.
I think he’s got other things on his mind. I guess I better get on.
I guess you had. Mama’s pretty mad. I fixed you a little lunch, some bread and jelly was all I could find. And some coffee. I don’t reckon you’ll have any trouble findin water to make it.
Thanks a lot.
Bring that coat back. It’s Daddy’s old World War coat, and he wouldn’t take nothin for it. You are comin back, ain’t you?
You know I am, he said. Even your mama couldn’t keep me run off.
I just hope you ain’t lyin about it. I wished Daddy hadn’t stayed up all night stumblin around. I wished we’d of done it knowin we’d get caught. I’ve just got a bad feelin I ain’t never goin to see you again.
I’ll turn up.
No, you won’t. Give me somethin of yours to keep.
Do what? He looked about. All there was was the gun.
Anything of yours to remember you by.
He laid the coat and bag down and untied the thong from the arrowhead amulet and handed it to her. She tied it about her throat and tucked the arrowhead into the top of her dress. Her face was touched with an inexplicable sorrow. I don’t even know your first name, she said.
It’s Kenneth.
Well. Bye, Kenneth. Be careful.
You be careful. If a man shows up around here and asksabout me, you head out. If you have to go out a window or whatever. Just stay out of his way.
What in the world are you talkin about?
He picked up the folded coat and the bag and the rifle from against the porch stanchion. It’s a long story and you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Just do what I asked you. He raised a hand in farewell and went back into the rain.
He angled toward the barn and figured to come out of the hollow back onto the roadbed. He had a thought
for the tarp, but he could hear angry voices from the vicinity of the truck. When he had the barn between himself and the house, he unfolded the coat. It was emblazoned with the insignia of old wars long won or lost, and when he wrapped it round him there was room enough for a companion had he had one, but it was thick wool and very warm.
He went through the dripping brush skirting a wetweather stream boiling up from a mossy shrine and up a rocky incline and through a curtain of blackjack onto the road. He trudged on. The rain did not abate. The day drew on gray and somber and when dusk fell you could not have told the exact moment it did so. The light just faded by immeasurable increments until ultimately he was walking in darkness.
Sometime in the night he met a horseman. He’d been walking on half asleep, stumbling with a wooden gait, and the horseman was almost upon him before he recognized the sound of steel shoes on the packed earth roadbed. There was a bend in the road ahead and the rider just beyond and without even thinking he veered off down an embankmentand crouched in a thicket of winter huckleberry bushes till the rider should pass. When he passed he passed above him with the sound of steel on stone and the creak of the saddle and Tyler could see the smoking breath of the black horse and the rider pale and indistinct like some underimagined protagonist in a fever dream. Horse and rider diminished into the foggy rain and the mist muffled the slow clop of hoofbeats. There was a sharp pain in his chest and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled in a pale plume of steam and hunkered there in the winter huckleberries. He was shivering from more than the cold. He fought an almost overpowering urge to flee crazed and directionless into the fog that drifted between the dark boles of the trees. He didn’t know if it was Sutter or not and he didn’t know if it was real or he had dreamed it but he knew that something dread had passed over him in the night and gone on.
He could hear a rush of water toward the hollow that kept increasing in intensity, and he went downhill tree to tree over the slick, soggy leaves. Runoff was massing where the hollow was deepest and he could hear more than see the churning below him, a vague, dark, turbulent motion and thick, creamlike gouts of foam clocking rapidly downstream.
Loath to return to the road just yet lest the horseman double back he clambered on around the hillside, going steadily downhill. The carpet of wet leaves thinned to ultimate stony shale and he could hear his boots on the rocks. His feet felt wooden and strange and he wondered idly if they were frozen. He didn’t know how cold it was but it didn’t seem to matter. It was just cold. The earth flattened and widened here and he was moving through halfgrown cedars that loomed suddenly out of the mist like shrouded ghosts, and the waterwas boiling into a larger body of water and he stopped to get his bearings. He looked up as if to chart from the stars, but the heavens were leaden yet and out of them the ceaseless rain still fell. Some nameless creek on his right but he didn’t know what creek or even which direction it should be flowing. He went on. On his right hand rose an embankment that came out of the fog and continued on too symmetrical to have just happened, and he clambered up its rickrack sides to the summit, where railroad tracks laid on crossties gleamed palely with a wet phosphorescence through the dead weeds grown through them. One way led to town but in the dark he wasn’t sure which. Down the bank on the other side another shadow loomed anomalous out of the more familiar shadows of trees and stone.
He approached cautiously. If it was a house it might be inhabited and folks hereabouts sometimes answered a nighttime summons with a shotgun in hand. It was a house, or at least a building of some kind. A wall with darker rectangles for stonedout windows and a doorless cavity behind a canted stoop. He went in slowly, feeling for missing floorboards with his feet and for the snuffbox of matches with stiff fingers, and whatever tenanted the house this night crossed the floor in nighsoundless scuttling and over the windowsill and into the night. Somewhere in all this dark a startled nightbird rose with a clamor of wings and subsided against a wall with a soft thud. Rose fluttering again.
He dried his hands as best he could on the lining of the coat and lit a match. A low ceiling over his head, loose paper hanging in shreds. On the wall across the ruin of a fireplace. A litter of old newspapers, broken boards. The match went out, and he could hear the rain drumming on the tin roof. Within a half hour he had a cheery fire going in the fireplace and he was crouched before it feeding it broken pieces of boxing he had ripped off a partition wall. The room was lit with a hellish orange light and he had the firebox fairly stuffed to the damper with splintered chestnut before he ceased and he just sat on the hearth for a time basking in the heat. He’d never felt anything better and he hadn’t known such cold as he’d been existed. He’d kept the bag sheltered from the rain as best he could, and now he ate the lunch she’d packed. Thick slabs of yeast bread smeared with butter and jelly. Loose ground coffee in a folded paper tied with floursack ravels. He could smell the coffee through the paper and he had a taste for a cup but he could find no sort of pan about.
When he had eaten he stripped off his clothes and put the steaming coat back on and buttoned it around him. He leant boards against the brick mantle and hung his trousers and shirt to dry. He went on gathering wood for a while until he had a great pile mounded before the hearth. The chestnut burned fiercely hot but it was dry as tinder and there wasn’t much last to it.
He gathered a stack of old newspapers to read and sat as close to the hearth as the heat would permit. An eye to the boards cocked against the mantle, he had to be forever turning his clothes lest they scorch. He chewed a handful of the coffee raw, swallowing the bitter essence, and tried to read, but he was utterly weary, and the stories the papers told were strange and surreal and whole sentences tilted and slid off the page into the fire.
When the clothes were dry he put them on and restoked the fire one last time, and with a stack of newspapers for a pillow and the coat for a blanket he went to sleep. His dream was strange and fevered.
He was on a blasted heath where the trees were sparse and dead. Birds he couldn’t put a name to clustered their bare branches and called mournfully ahead of him and fell silent at his approach, then resumed when he’d passed as if they’d announce his entry into this sepia world of shades. He moved on a thin skift of snow that a sourceless wind kept setting in motion and settling back and all there was was the white snow and the black skeletal trees.
The weary road he traveled wound gently downhill toward a vague depression in the earth and he kept trudging on and after a time he could see another traveler approaching, a black figure seeping across the snowy landscape like a line of ink dripping down the snowy page, and he came to think that across a vast distance he was approaching a mirror image of himself.
When they met they ceased walking without speaking for a time and hunkered in the frozen roadbed to rest. The man took out a sack of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette with deft economy of motion and offered the tobacco then when it was refused pocketed it.
Then Tyler knew him.
Why, you’re Clifford Suggs, he said. Wait till Claudelle and Drew hear about me running up on you. Drew thinks you were lost down a mineshaft, and they’ve been hunting you for years.
The man exhaled acrid blue smoke from his nostrils. Beneath the felt hatbrim his shadowed face studying Tyler with a kind of distant amusement.
I don’t know who you are or how the story come to you, but you got it turned around backwards. I’m the one been huntin them. They’re the ones that’s gone.
Tyler was studying his shoes where the snow was compressed into a thin sole of transparent ice and between his feet were little curling strands of grass all seized in tubes of ice and when he looked back up the man’s face with the curious illogic of dreams was gone. In its place was a yellowed skull with a few strands of lank dead hair. Within the skull there was furtive movement. He leant to see. A rat’s sharp gray face peered through an eyesocket and all about the eyeholes the bone was chamfered with teethmarks, but the rat would not fit
. It withdrew, turning, trying the other eyehole then growing claustrophobic and agitated and turning endless upon itself within the bony confines of the skull but there was no way out.
At some unclocked hour the rain ceased and Sutter was on the move almost immediately, wending his way through the brush which dripped continually in small echoes of rain. He was trying to remember where the house was, and he kept making false starts and recovering and going on, and after a while a wornlooking disc of moon eased out of the broken clouds and hung there like a flare to guide his path.
When he came upon the barn lot it was all shadow and white light and where water stood it gleamed in the moonlight like pooled quicksilver. He stopped here to study the house. It seemed cloaked in sleep. He leant against a stall door to rest and he could hear a horse snuffling in the stable and he could hear the quick disquieted movement of its hooves. It seemed to be turning restlessly about in the stable.
Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and allencompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto the earth and he could make out mountains and ranges of hills and hollows and dark shadowed areas of mystery he judged to be timber and he wondered what manner of beast thrived there and what their lives were like and the need to be there twisted in his heart like an old pain that will not dissipate. As he watched, enormous birds stark and dimensionless as the shadows of birds passed the remote face of the moon, wings beating slow and stately and silent and they were like birds that had once existed but did no more and he could not put a name to them. They were at once familiar and foreign, archetypes from some old childhood dream that was lost to him.
There in the shadows he seemed a darker shadow than those he moved among, some beast composed wholly of the ectoplasm of the night and with some arcane magnetism drawing to itself old angers and discontents and secret and forbidden yearnings freefloating in the humming and electric dark. The sleeping house seemed to be waiting for him, and he went on toward it.
