Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  When he got back to the window of his own cabin, the sun was on the tops of the mountains. He put his foot on the sill to step in, and saw his own body asleep on the bed amid his brothers, just as it had been when he was called.

  Had she beckoned him to come along with her? What would have become of him if he had? Or was she only surprised to see him there, among the dead, not knowing if he was one of them, or still quick?

  He had been told that at death the person goes on away from earth to heaven, or down beneath the earth to hell. That was what his ma had said was explained in the big Bible on the dresser: but he knew she had never read it, and neither had his old man. They couldn’t read at all.

  Why should the dead be walking the cove, and not in their places in the earth, or above it or below? He put his hand on the brown book, shaggy and heavy as a log, thinking the answer ought to be somewhere within it.

  That was the year Good Luck opened Number Two, and brought in trainloads of bricks to build the commissary and the school and the hospital, and lines of new yellow cabins cropped over the hills, smelling of creosote and tarpaper. Floyd’s older brothers came down off the mountain to get theirs, and Floyd went along with them, and lived with one or another in their identical cabins. He went to school there, was taught by the company teacher to read, to sing songs about America, to write with a steel-nibbed pen. He worked hard, listening to the teacher’s birdlike foreign twittering (she would catch him staring at her with unnerving intensity, his big ears seeming almost pricked up, like a fox’s), and so he got his letters: and he began on the Bible, to see what he could learn. He would open it to any page and run his eyes over the congested lines of tiny print until a word leapt out at him; there he would begin to read, coming sometimes to see through the words into a truth beyond or within them, a truth he couldn’t then speak, the same truth he had seen and not grasped in his mother’s face and the faces of the others who walked the cove.

  Good Luck Coal and Coke had bought Hogback Mountain twenty years before they opened Number Two: had bought, not the face of it that men saw, but only the rights to the minerals within it. Floyd Shaftoe’s grandpap had sold the rights beneath his own fifty acres of hardscrabble hillside, fifty cents an acre, and thought he’d done well out of it; he couldn’t read (signing the long form deed with a crow’s-foot mark, witnessed and notarized) and so he couldn’t know that he had given Good Luck not only the coal beneath the soil but the right to get it out as well, in whatever way they thought convenient. It seemed to make no difference then, for there was no way to get the coal out of the Cumberlands anyway: until the trains came.

  The black seams lay beneath a mere hundred feet of over-burden, sometimes not so much, sometimes so close that the dynamite of the track-layers brought it to light, tons of shattered midnight, the treasure-house ruptured. Even before the tracks reached Bondieu the agents of Good Luck were setting up tipples and opening driftmouths and building camps. By the time Floyd’s brothers came down, a mountain of slate had already arisen beside the tipple, and the hundred-car trains wound daylong through the yard, filling with coal: nut coal, egg coal, lump coal, every fifty-cent acre of Hogback’s surface yielding its thousands of tons.

  The Shaftoes made more money digging it than they had ever thought possible, and they spent it as fast as they made it on things they had not known they wanted, printed curtains and linoleum, Stetson hats, store teeth, gold-filled watches, sweet-smelling flannel shirts and silk stockings. The company paid the miners for the hours they had worked whenever they asked, in shiny tin flickers marked like real money, a dime, a quarter, a dollar, five dollars, spendable at the commissary and pretty soon at the store in Bondieu as well, for white bread, boxes of made biscuits, pale corn syrup, aspirin, Coca-Cola; and out of the fat catalogues kept at the commissary they could order sets of matching dishes, electric irons, washing machines, carbines with blued barrels, huge radios with little celluloid faces. From the radio preachers on Sunday Floyd learned the name of the one who had called him out in the summer night: the Holy Spert.

  He went to work first as a picker, working from before dawn in the tipple with crowds of other black-faced boys picking bone out of the endless shaking river of coal that rode the conveyors up to the loading booms. The boys weren’t allowed to wear gloves, even in the coldest weather, for it made their fingers less agile; their nails were rapidly worn away to the bloody quick, and Floyd learned from the others to slip metal guards, cut from a coffee can and secured with strips of inner tube, over his forefingers when the boss looked elsewhere.

  Bone: did they call the slate and stone that because they were the mountain’s broken bones which the boys culled from the coal, its flesh? The bone, mingled with pulverized coal, went to the slate dump hundreds of feet long that lay along the creek bed; when the boys, let out from the tipple, walked along it toward school in the afternoons, they could smell the fumes of its burning deep below. In winter it steamed softly, like fresh dung.

  His aunts hung out their shifts and sheets in the bitter air to dry, and after a time, long before they were old, they turned a hopeless gray and began to shred: you could put your finger right through them. They were almost not worth having, not worth washing in the acid-smelling washtubs. Greasy dust arose daylong from the tipple and the load-boom, mixing with the smoke of the slate-dump and the thousand stoves of the camp; when cloud-cover turned it back from heaven, the mixture settled again on Hogback, blistering the hopeful paint from the Good Luck cabins, peppering the snow far up the mountain. Floyd Shaftoe’s father on his farm rubbed it from the handle of his ax, tasted it in his greens.

  When he was eighteen, Floyd went under the hill, a miner’s helper, with his tin dinner pail and his canvas hat with its carbide lamp. He rode the man-cars down the narrow throat of the mountain into the unchanging clammy coolness of its innards, and all day holp the miner drill and shoot the coal. Down here too the dust filled the air, slicking the cars, the tracks, the tools, as though they had been polished.

  In the morning the miner undercut the satiny seam of coal with a pick, and Floyd pulled away the slate. The miner drilled holes along the face of the coal with a breast auger, and Floyd filled the holes with dead men—spills of paper filled with dirt—to keep the holes open. Then the company man came and set the charges, and they all went back along the corridor trailing a fuse behind them (just a line of black powder over the stone floor not long ago, said the company man, electric wire now) and he shot the coal, the whole twenty tons of it falling from the slate roof above like crockery from a shelf, lying hugely smashed and glittering in the room while black motes sparkled in the lamplight.

  Then load it all into the cars all afternoon, sucking in the coal-tasty air, and send it out, a little less left in the mountain than there was at dawn; and out at last into the air and the weather, sun going down, you had almost forgotten the season.

  And in all that time Floyd was not called out in the night.

  With two of his aunts, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior at the brand-new Full Gospel Church of God in Christ: forty-gallon Baptists who insisted on full immersion, which Floyd underwent almost prophylactically, dunked backward by the grunting preacher who clipped his nose with thumb and finger as he put him under.

  Take Jesus into your heart, the preacher told them, and Floyd did so: feeling him there ever after within the spaces of his heart, smaller than a sparrow, warming him like a tiny furnace. He never went back to the pine-slab church in Bondieu.

  The good times, the rich times, ended soon enough, Hoover conspiring with the millionaires and the bosses to send the country to hell. Wages fell to nothing, the company ceased to care for its dependents; Floyd’s brothers could only make enough to feed their families by working the turn-around: under the hill before dawn, not out again till long past nightfall, never see the sun. Floyd, as the youngest, was sent home to the farm, where at least there would be corn and turnips to eat, and no company store to owe.

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nbsp; Floyd’s father had worked his land hard, planting season after season of corn, making the earth bear without pause or refreshment (as he had done his wife, Floyd thought once, once only); it was far from wore out yet, though. Then in the spring of ’27 he had plowed and planted as he always did, after searching his almanac for the times and the moon’s age; he’d hoed it twice, and laid it by to grow. And the great flood had fallen just then on those acres of loosened weeded earth; all in a night, all through the mountains, scouring off the topsoil and vomiting it down the swollen cricks, leaving the naked yellow clay beneath that would grow nothing but broom. Even two seasons after, though Floyd’s father had dunged the land and harrowed it, it wouldn’t grow corn higher than a man’s shoulder.

  To this place, its grassless yard and its mule and its razorback hogs, its four-room cabin and its black dog beneath the porch, Floyd brought his wife, new-wed, and his wife’s daughter: a woods-colt and no child of Floyd’s. Which mattered nothing to Floyd: his gifts, he believed, forbade his having a woman as other men did, and his wife’s daughter was the only child he would ever have.

  Up Hogback on the sloping Shaftoe acres was a stand of chestnuts, a tall old tree and her striplings, whose sweet nuts fed the Shaftoe pigs in fall and winter, and which Floyd and his brothers had used to roast and eat too; in spring her white candles were filled with bees. On a November day, Floyd came at evening to call home the pigs, and he saw a woman among the yellow leaves grubbing for the nuts too, and filling a poke.

  She looked up, startled, mouth ajar and eyes guilty, when she felt Floyd regarding her. A rail of an old woman, articulated like a doll, in a brown soldier’s coat and tongueless boots. He knew her, somehow, or thought he remembered her: she was kin to him, probably, as were all the folk along this ridge. He could see with his mind’s eye the track up to her cabin.

  When she saw he wouldn’t upbraid her, she flung the poke over her shoulder and without a word began to hurry off. Plenty for you, Floyd called after her, but she didn’t answer, only glanced back once at him over her shoulder as she skittered out of sight. And then he knew her pale eyes: he had been looked on by eyes like those, but not here, not in the day world.

  That night, while his long body lay sleeping beside his wife, Floyd climbed from his bed without causing the straw to rustle and set out on the track up Hogback. So many years had passed, the flood had washed away so many landmarks, so many folks had left their worn-out farms or gone down the mountain to the camps, that he might not have known the way: but it shone a little beneath his naked feet, like a snail’s silver slime, and he could follow it well enough.

  The door to her cabin stood open, or anyway was no barrier to him; a yellow cat shrieked at his approach and climbed the porch post to the roof. As soon as he put his bare feet on the puncheon floor, he knew the place, remembered how once he had been taken here as a child, in the grip of a fierce ague: how the woman (old then too) had taken out her madstone—ugly lump of matter, found she said in the belly of a deer—and rubbed him with it to cool the blood; how a silver coin had changed hands.

  Yes I know you, Floyd Shaftoe, she said to him (keeping far from him on the other side of the cabin room). I knew then what kind you were.

  You tooken somethn today belongs to me, Floyd said. I come for the return of it.

  The poke full of chestnuts lay in the center of the cabin floor. They began circling it, keeping a fixed distance from each other, as though for a knife fight.

  I seen you down along the cove, she said. I was among them too.

  I never saw you, said Floyd.

  She told him—still circling widdershins around the cabin, holding his eyes with a skinny hand raised—she told him who they were who walked the cove at night, among whom Floyd had seen his mother. They were the dead, she said, who had died before their appointed time, the murdered and the suicides and those carried off in childbirth or by mischance. Not until each one’s span was up could he, could she, go lie in peace in the grave where the flesh lay, to sleep till the Judgment.

  Floyd knew then what it was he had seen in the faces of those who walked that track, in the face of his mother too, for it was in the witch’s eyes as well that held him like a hand at his throat, filling him with fear and pity: it was hunger.

  I will tell you a trick, she said, to save your life: Iffen the flesh that now lies sleepn in your bed be turned face down, then you will not be able to get back into it when you return; and iffen you don’t return in the turn of a day, you never will be able to. Then your spirit too will run with them along the cove, until your own death day.

  Thankee for that, Floyd said.

  You’re welcome, she said: and now be on your way.

  When I have the favor of the return of what’s mine, Floyd said, stepping closer to the poke.

  What’s yours is mine, she said. She had come around to where a hickory chair stood on the floor. She grasped its pole, and quick as stirring a pot she began to whirl it around on one leg. The cat shrieked, the fire spat, Floyd leapt across the circle to grasp her.

  But with the Devil’s help (summoned with the hickory chair) she had changed her spirit to the likeness of a pale moth, and fluttered out of his grasp. Floyd then bent his own spirit to the spaces of his heart where Jesus held court, and with his help changed his own spirit to the likeness of a nightjar, to catch the moth.

  But the witch changed her spirit into the likeness of a screech owl, and stooped at the nightjar.

  But Floyd changed his spirit to the likeness of a grain of corn on the floor, and the owl could not find him. She resumed her own form, seized the poke of chestnuts, and climbed with horrid spider-like swiftness out the window with it.

  But Floyd changed his spirit to the likeness of a lean timberwolf, and before she had disappeared down the moonlit track, he was after her.

  She fled him down along the cove, booted feet taking unnatural great steps, hank of gray hair streaming out behind her: but he was fleet too, four-footed, great-chested. Around him as he sought for her down the track there came to be others, a crowd of others, jostling for room, standing in his way, oblivious. He knew them now: the early dead, the carried-off, the luckless; he had not known there were so many. The knife fighters and feudists and the come-by-chance children strangled at birth; the black steel-drivers and gandydancers killed by work or dope or shot by the track bosses, unable now to rest in the nigger graveyards that lay unmarked along the tracks they had laid. Hanged men and soldier boys and miners, miners crushed in slate-falls or blown up in tunnel fires or broken between coal-car and tunnel-rib or gone down with gas or chokedamp: unreconciled to death, hungry still for what the living had. The long procession of them wound through the night hollers, swept sometimes with waves of anxious longing, when they would race and stare like panicked sheep. He seemed to travel amid them for days, seeking for the face of the old woman who fled him, her eyes hungry like theirs, the poke over her shoulder.

  But it wasn’t days, only the space of that longest night. Toward dawn the throngs sped under the ridge to where they roosted, the rustling soft-moaning river of them, and the witch the last of them. They evaporated with the day, but she grew more distinct, and he almost had her as she turned down under the mountain. Too late: when he reached the door it was shut against him, she had gone down to hell with her spoil. He lay (his spirit lay) on the cold rock face, sobbing amid the fallen leaves with weariness and loss.

  So there were those, like himself, called out by the Holy Spirit; and there were others who were called out by the Devil’s fiddle. The feud between them went far back, he would learn, deep and bitter as the feuds his grandpap told stories of, the feuds that arose in the Cumberlands after the War had passed through (only one war was the War in his grandpap’s stories), dividing counties and clans, never entirely ended, smoldering like slate-dump fires to that day.

  What’s yours is mine, she had said: and in the worst year of Hoover’s dearth the chestnuts died—not only on Hogback but
all through the timberland, not a one left living, dead in a single season, dead as at a stroke. Floyd and his father felled the dead chestnut above their cornpatch and burned her huge corpse over the sterile clay, along with the witchbroom and the brush that alone flourished there. The ashes fed the earth, and they got a good crop of corn that year at least; after that Floyd’s old man lost interest in farming, spent his time drinking whiskey and staring into the littered crick fouled with black sump from Number Two. When Assistance started, Floyd and his wife and child walked into Bondieu to get theirs.

  Why they should want to harm the world he didn’t know, any more than he knew why he and not another should have been chosen to give them battle; why they did harm that could bring no good to them, why they took the corn laid by in the earth to grow, took the starting farrow from the sow’s belly, carried them off under the earth, though it meant no one could have them.

  Like the great devil Hoover, who had brought ruin on the country, only to be turned out in disgrace himself: you wondered why.

  He would come to think that their old enmity was likely just a part of nature, like the enmity fixed between owls and crows, or between the red squirrel and the gray; it might even be a part of what kept the world foursquare as it was, like the opposition of fire and water, or male and female: unless their two kinds did battle over what would grow and what would not, then nothing at all would grow.