by William Gay
Amber Rose did not believe in miracles. He is dying, she thought. She thought of a casket lid being closed. No one will open it, ever, she thought in wonder. The concept of forever struck her with the force of a blow. It yawned before her, all engrossing, awesome. She stopped in the curve of the road and looked back.
The house sat full in the sun, its roof growing dull green, its walls myriad shades of weathered gray. Brooding so in the morning light it seemed pulled magnetically by the anomalous shadows from the hollow. She whirled and hurried on.
Through the moving windshield of the Packard he watched with wry amusement their progress up the dusty roadbed, two figures imbued with haste, hurrying jerkily towards him like puppets dragged along by strings.
He slowed the Packard as he neared them, braked to a stop when they were almost parallel with the car. He cut the switch and sat watching them, an arm on the sill of the window.
“Looks like you had a long, hot trip for nothin, Miz Winer,” Hardin said. “Brother Hovington passed away a minute ago. I thought I’d save you the rest of the trip.”
“It wadn’t no trouble,” the woman said. Her voice sounded stilted and formal beneath the rim of her bonnet. “I have to hear about Mr Hovington.”
“Well, I guess he can rest easy now. Get in and I’ll run you back home.”
“I’ll just go on I reckon and see if I be of any help to Mrs. Hovington.”
“We can manage. I’m sorry we drug you into our troubles.”
“Folks got to help one another.”
“I reckon. We’ll manage though.”
The girl came around the side of the car, opened the door, and got in without speaking. The woman stood awkwardly in the roadbed as if awaiting enlightenment. “What was it he wanted me for anyway?”
“He never said,” Hardin told her.
The girl sat staring across the fence where Oliver’s goats grazed the bright tangle of bitterweed, though she did not see them. She thought, they will have to break his back to ever get him in a casket. A sense of horror suffused her, she fell to thinking on how this could come to be. Surely there were tools for this, no ordinary hammer would suffice. Beyond the grazing goats her mind dreamed implements of brass and gleaming bronze, folds of purple velvet to mute the blows.
Hardin had said something.
“No, I’ll just walk,” Mrs. Winer said.
“Suit yourself then,” Hardin said. He started the car and began to turn it in the road.
She sat watching her hands fold pleats in her blue skirt. She thought she ought to cry but she didn’t.
William Tell Oliver straightened from the milling goats amidst the halfmusic glangor of the bells to watch the stately passage of the hearse, the corn spilling forgotten from his hands, the polished black of the hearse winking back the midday sun, its sides already dulling with a film of dust.
Hovington, he thought, fascinated by the windows curtained by red velvet, the hearse’s low, sinister configuration somehow profound and appalling against the border of sumac and blackberry briars, diminishing then, content this time with another.
Winer went three times to the Red Diamond Poultry Farm. The first two times there was no one about at all and no sign of Weiss’s car. The chickens were halfstarved. He fed and watered them. The third time was on a Wednesday and Weiss’s car was parked in the drive and the front door was ajar though no one answered his call. He stood uncertainly in the clutter of the porch and after a while he sat in a lawn chair and waited. He felt restless, bemused, time was a commodity in short supply and he must ration his.
Everything seemed to be in disorder. The porch held stacked boxes of white cylinders that turned out to be photographs rolled tightly as window shades. A box was upended and the pictures scattered about the floor. He unrolled one. Another. They all seemed to be photographs of military units, hundreds of soldiers posed before barracks that looked makeshift and temporary, perhaps as temporary and fragile as the men they housed. Only the faces were different, a multitude of them, stern faces with overseas caps cocked jauntily, and then after a while even the faces seemed to merge and lose identity, become multiple exposures of some soldiers posed in limbo, awaiting a ship that would bear them to a war fought long ago.
A noise drew him up through the halfopen door. This room as well was in disorder, suitcases open, clothing strewn about the floor as if kicked there. Weiss lay on the couch. His mouth was open and the room was full of his noisy breathing. A stain fanned out from an overturned wine decanter, a red seeping as if the room had been the scene of gruesome carnage. Weiss slept in his clothes and his boots. The pith helmet lay tilted on the carpet.
When Winer shook him. Weiss’s eyes opened and he started, rose on his right elbow, peering wildly about the room.
“What? What is it? What’s the matter?”
Winer suddenly found himself bereft of anything to say. Weiss’s startled face struggled up from sleep wore an expression somehow akin to madness as if whatever had happened in the last week had marked him, left him deranged.
Weiss had always worn the helmet and looking down at him Winer saw that he was almost bald, the scalp pink and vulnerable through the kinked black hair.
“It’s morning,” Winer said. “The sun’s way up.”
“Fuck the sun,” Weiss said.
He struggled toward a semblance of erectness, abandoned the effort, settled back against the couch cushions. His eyes were open but unfocused, his fingers going awkwardly through all his pockets. At last he came up with the remnants of a pack of Camels, took one out and stuck it in his mouth, and sat without lighting it. His big head was propped on the heel of his hand, his elbow kept sliding off his knee.
“Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Winer stood in silence peering out the window. The sun fell through the window, a rectangle of merciless light. Where the yard fell away he could see the fence bordering it and through broken greenery the red road itself. He wished he were already on it. When he turned back toward the man on the couch Weiss’s eyes were closed to slits and were watching him speculatively as if surprised to find him still there.
“What do you want anyway?”
“Well, I came to work. To feed and all.”
“There’s not any work,” Weiss said. He had taken up a table lighter and was turning it in his hands this way and that, dropping his eyes to stare at it bemusedly as if uninitiated in its complexities.
“Not any work?”
“That’s what I said. I’m gathering up some stuff and getting out of here. I’m getting the fuck out and I don’t know if I’m ever coming back or not.”
“What about the chickens?”
“What about them? You can have them. Give them to those rednecks around here and let them have a barbecue to remember me by. Give them to our friend Hodges, he wanted them badly enough to try to steal them.”
Winer stood awkwardly without speaking, unable to articulate his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Then you don’t need me?”
“Hell, no. I don’t need you. What would I need you for? I told you, there’s nothing. I’m getting the fuck gone and you may as well do the same.”
“I guess that’s plain enough. I’ll see you.”
“I doubt it.” When Winer was halfway to the door Weiss said, “Look. Goddamn it. For what it’s worth I’m sorry, Winer.” He raised his hands, dropped them. “There’s just nothing. How much do I owe you?”
“Eight dollars.”
“All right.” He withdrew his wallet, sat for a time staring into it so that Winer thought he had forgotten is purpose in extracting it. Then he tossed it to the boy. “Here. You get it. My vision seems somewhat impaired this morning.”
Winer counted out a five and three ones and folded them down into his shirt pocket. He handed Weiss the wallet.
“No hard feelings, Winer. You did me a fine job.”
“No hard feelings. I was sorry to hear about your wife.” Winer turned to the door. When Weis
s didn’t reply he went into the hot sunshine.
Dreading what she might have to say he didn’t tell her until the next morning.
“Ain’t I told you?” she wanted to know. “That’s just like him, I always knowed he was no account. Come in here throwin his money around and buildin his big chickenhouses and now where is he? I reckon now you’ll take him up and argue your own mama down. Read a book one time and think you know it all.”
He let the screendoor fall behind him and sat for a time on the doorstep. This was a world of distances, of silence. This was the first day there’d been a hint of coolness in the air. He was surprised to see a few leaves already turning. There was a winey smell to the air, an immeasurable blueness to the sky. He was still sitting there when she came out. There did not seem much else to do.
“Well?” she asked him. “What do you aim to do now?”
He didn’t say anything.
William Tell Oliver had known Winer’s father a long time. He remembered seeing him going to work in the mornings, Oliver as well was an early riser and back before the boy was born and Winer had no horse much less an automobile to ride to work Oliver used to hear him pass about four o’clock in the morning. That was before Winer started carpentering and in those days he used to talk all the way to Big Sinking to offbear at Hickerson’s sawmill all day and even in the summer it would be dusk when he got home, in winter dark would have long fallen. Old even then, Oliver if he happened to be on the porch would hear out of the cold dark Winer’s measured footfalls, see him pass wraithlike, the stride determined, constant. He might raise an unseen hand in the spectral dark. Winer needed no light to find his way, needed only the constant repetitions of his journey to guide him.
He did not know the woman that well. She had been a Hines and like the particular branch of the family she sprang from Oliver thought her dour and overly practical. She had no interest in anything that happened in a book, on the radio, in France or Washington, D.C. Nothing that was not readily applicable to her life. If you can’t eat it, fuck it, or bust it up for stovewood, she’s got no use for it, Oliver thought one time with sour amusement. So when he saw the boy coming up the road in midday he thought, so Weiss has lit a shuck and he’s out of a job. And they have been into it about it.
“I guess I’m fresh out of a job,” Winer told him without being asked.
“That’s about the way I figured it. He’s gone, is he?”
“Yeah.”
“You want some coffee?”
“I might drink a cup.”
Winer followed him into the kitchen. Oliver poured coffee from a blue enamel pot. The food on the table was covered with a clean white cloth to keep the flies off.
“Help yeself to anything ye see.”
“I don’t want anything,” Winer said. He raised a corner of the cloth, peered. “What kind of cake is that?”
“Storebought. Coconut. You can eat it, I didn’t cook it.”
Winer sliced a wedge of cake and stood eating it.
“Come on out to the edge of the porch where’s it’s cool.”
When they were on the porch and Oliver back in the porch swing he said, “Old man Weiss was a funny sort of feller.”
“He acted all torn up about her death.”
“Hell, I guess he is all torn up. Look at it this way. He’s been here twenty years and don’t have friend one. Which I guess was more than not his own fault. Nobody to talk to, drink with, nothin. Everybody has to have somebody like that and he had her. Now he ain’t.”
“I guess so. They thought the world of each other. They got along better than any folks I ever knew.”
“Hell, he may be in South America by now.”
“South America?”
The old man grinned. “Weiss said some funny things sometimes. Told me one time, said, ‘I got open channels to heads of state and access to banana boats to South America.’ Said it like he was braggin. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Course, I didn’t mind. I never envied anybody their access to banana boats.”
“He told me one time he invented Coca-Cola. But whether he did or not, I’ve still got to find a job.”
“Boy, why don’t you just ease up and be your age for a while? School’ll be startin pretty soon anyway, won’t it? Don’t you finish this year?”
“I may not go. I may take a year off and work then go back next fall. I don’t know what difference a year makes anyway.”
“I guess at your age you feel like you got more years than anything else.”
“I don’t guess it matters.”
“How much was you makin if you don’t mind me askin?”
“Two dollars a day.”
“Great God, boy. I wouldn’t grieve long over a job like that. You ort to be jumpin up and down turnin somersaults. You can make more money than that trompin the woods for ginseng and blackroot.
“I might could if I knew what it looked like.”
“I’ll show ye. It’s got me through some mighty tight places back when times was really hard. But we got to hurry. We need to get started right now. You can’t find if after frost.”
“Well. We’ll go then. I’ve got to do something while I’m waiting on a job to turn up.”
Oliver dreamed his wife was shaking him awake. “Tell, Tell,” she kept saying. He dreamed he was awake and she was leaning before him in her nightgown with her hair all undone and the room was lit with the cool, otherwordly glow of moonlight through the glass. The weight of her hand still lay on his shoulder. “Get up, Tell,” she said. “He ain’t come in. Willie ain’t, I heard him at the door a while ago but he ain’t come in.”
He got up and pulled on his overalls and shoes without putting on his socks. The dream was so vivid he didn’t know it was a dream. It was wintertime and he could feel the cold, stiff leather against his bare feet and the icy metal of his galluses against his naked shoulders. He did not know the hour but in a detached part of his mind he knew he was in a strange, clockless world set apart from time.
He went out the door and into the moonlit yard. The Mormon Springs road lay white and cold and dusted with moonlight. He went past the pear tree and onto the hardpan and stood for a moment undecided, he didn’t know which way to go. He turned back toward the house and she stood in the doorway watching him. The shadow of the porch fell across her, beheaded her with darkness, but he could see her eyes glowing out of the dark like cats’ eyes. He turned and went on toward the apple orchard.
Nothing looked right, by subtle increments everything was changing. He was venturing into a world going surreal before his eyes, reality was being stepped up, warped by heat. The bare branches of the apple trees writhed like trees from a province in dementia. A coarse whispering came from the orchard, furtive, conspiratorial, almost but not quite intelligible. Then he saw that the branches of the trees were alive with birds, curious dark birds he could not recognize, birds a fevered brain might hallucinate. Unfeathered salamandrine birds with strange lizardlike heads and skin textured like wet leather. He could see their yellow eyes about the trees like paired-off fireflies. The whispering increased in pitch, became intelligible. He stood transfixed by the hypnotic buzz of sound from the apple orchard. Willie, Willie, the birds were crying, over and over. Willie, Willie.
He was touched by a cold engendered by more than weather. He turned in the road, north, south, searching the silver fields for sight of the boy. Random stones gleamed like details in a mosaic. Weeds sheathed in ice were glass reeds in the moonlight. He began to walk aimlessly down the white road. He could hear a fluttering from the trees behind him as the birds took wing. Looking up, he could see dark shapes shifting patternlessly above him. A few alighted in the road and paced him with a ducklike gait he found repulsive and whirling he kicked viciously at one and it hissed like a snake and spread its unfeathered wings and stood its ground.
“Get,” he told it. “Get, Goddamn you.”
Willie, Willie, they were calling above him.
The bird had
stopped at the edge of the road. Turning, he went on a few feet then looked back and the bird was following him, taking delicate, mincing steps as if it were tiptoeing. He went on through country he had known all his days that was slowly altering before his eyes and at length the road he had known faded out and the metamorphosis was complete: he was somewhere he had never been. A barren twilit world of winds and sounds.
The road began to descend toward some great declivity, an enormous pit like an amphitheater excavated out of the ground. When he reached the edge he paused and peered down. He stood in frozen awe. The bottom seemed hundreds of feet away. All he could see of the earth looked red and raw, freshly dug, as if all there was of the world anymore was this ravaged, bleeding ruin. He knew intuitively that he had been following this moonlit road all his life and that this was where it led. The pit was profound, imbued with meaning, and he felt he must absorb every detail: he was being shown something of the workings of life. He must remember this place and whatever tale it had to tell. The birds began to alight in the dead vestiges of trees on the precipice of the pit. The trees leaned as if they bore the weight of some perpetual wind. The chanting from the birds ceased and turning at the sudden silence he saw multitudes of them descending, their leathery wings beating the air.
He began to descend the sloping shoulder of the pit over icy whorls of frozen earth and bulldozer tracks seized in ice like something vague and prehistoric preserved for all time. In the bottom of the pit water had seeped and pooled and it had frozen white as milk. He went on. He could hear the thin crystalline breaking of ice beneath his feet and he was held by a sense of impending doom, an apprehension of things beyond his command, forced onward yet possessed of a foreknowledge of what was to be.
A rusting yellow bulldozer sat cocked long silent on a mound of earth. Veering toward it he thought he might ask the nature of all this destruction but beneath the dozer’s cowl the operator was an eyeless skeleton in leached khaki rags, a faded blue hardhat tilted rakishly on yellowed bone. A rusted black dinner bucket lashed to the cowl. Oliver turned without surprise and went toward the bottom.
