by John Crowley
So that would be all right, a thing in nature, and no fault of his or theirs.
But if it was not they who were sucking away the world’s life, draining its goodness like a milk-snake sucking a goat’s udder in the midnight, then who was it? Who? He stood with his wife and child in the giveaway lines to get the gray lard and meal, gray giveaway cotton sweaters, gray surplus of a failing world: and in the anxious faces of the folk on the lines, the hopeless hope with which they jostled each other toward the trucks, eyes fixed on the cans of meat and colorless syrup, was the same hunger he had seen in the night faces along the cove.
The world wasted, grew old; the pillars of it crumbled, like the pillars of coal left standing in the mines to hold up the hollowed hills. The money times came back to the Cumberlands with the war and after, and men fell on the ravished mountains again, and pulled out the coal—only not with pick and shovel any longer but with giant duck-bill loaders that chewed through the seam swallowing coal by the ton and spewing it straight into the gondolas to be carried into the sun. Nor was that enough to fill orders, and a thousand dog-hole mines were pushed into the mountains’ backsides, the coal heaved into trucks, the trucks dumped into train cars at a thousand blackened ramps. Floyd worked the narrow gullet of a truck mine until his blacklung got so bad he couldn’t do the job. He made his money, he bought his television and his refrigerator.
But they only hastened the coming-on of the world’s end with their money-getting. Floyd was unsurprised when Good Luck closed Number Two for good, unable to savage it further. The same end would come to the others, even to Big Black Mountain in the end. They had ripped out the womb of the hills; they took away too much, took away the unripe with the ripe, leaving no mother by which more could grow; they would end by leaving the mountains barren.
Nor was it only beauty and worth that were lost from the world. Floyd’s father had understood the body of the year, in what part of it to plant, in what part of it to cut brush: head, arms, legs. Time’s body. He’d known in what age of the moon to rive the boards for a cabin roof so they wouldn’t curl; he could make a dulcimore, and play on it music of the old country, Scotland and Barbrie Allen. He who killed himself drinking busthead whiskey knew the secret of making methiglum, the old honey wine. He had learned those things from his father and his father’s father, and then forgotten them. Now no one knew anything useful, nothing but how to get on the Well Far, and cling there: like Floyd Shaftoe himself.
He wasn’t ashamed to draw. A man can look well on the outside, and have no health in him. Floyd had no Union pension—he was an old yeller dog, having had no warrant from the Holy Spirit to take the Union obligation. When he adopted his granddaughter (traveling to the county seat for the first time in his life to sign the papers) a little more in food and money came in: enough. After his corn patch had been hoed twice in spring and laid by, Floyd spent most days in his chair, Bible on his lap and the television on, the same antic gray miniature life issuing from it as came through the Oliphants’ television.
The world grew old, that’s all; the engine of it worn out with time, like a refrigerator no longer able to keep things cold, running slower and slower, no good, throw it in the crick to rust. It had not ever been meant to last: like a snake’s skin periodically shed, like a new car built to fall apart.
Floyd walked in a world that wanted to die: coruscating with dull fires, washed in filthy rain. And yet just as certainly there lay within this world a new world wanting to be born; he could feel it beneath his feet, see it before him as the new moon can be seen held within the old moon’s arms. He had come to the end of his Bible, the last pages, and he knew.
How long till then? Floyd had worked out an arithmetic of his own for predicting the time, calculations using the minute red numbers that preceded the significant verses in his Bible. He put it at thirty years, more or less.
The world was slipping into its passage time, the time of signs and wonders. There was blood on the moon; monsters were bred out of the dying world as maggots are bred out of the guts of a dead dog, crawdads out of spring mud. Up on Hogback, down along the cove, Floyd had encountered beings of the promised fire, and had questioned them. Was he to live to see it? If they knew, they would not tell him; or when they spoke he could not understand them. It mattered no whit. He had done all that was asked of him, and would do all that remained for him to do; and he was content to wait in silence.
ELEVEN
May is Mary’s month; in Kentucky the roses bloom then, which are hers (poured from her apron upon Indian saints in Mexico, upon kneeling children in the Pyrenees; odor of roses, come to the bedsides of dying nuns in China and in Spain; roses pink as bubble-gum bordering every gold-edged blue-and-white holy card with her picture on it, crowned in stars, standing on the moon). Pierce’s father Axel claimed a Special Devotion to the Virgin, and though Pierce could not do that, neither could he extract her from the springing grasses and the heavy lilacs, nor from his own stifling feelings, the Seven Joyful Mysteries.
The massy tea-rose bushes (var. floribunda) that ranged down from the house were unkempt, more leaf and thorn than blossom, but still able to fill the air for weeks and draw ecstatic bumblebees from far away. They had reminded Opal of the gardens of home, real gardens with annual borders and tended beds, and she had worked hard over these rangy cascades to civilize them again; Winnie too, no gardener, was reminded of the life lived elsewhere, of English gardens and Westchester. And Father Midnight (who, however eternal a fixture of this place he seemed to the Oliphants to be, was himself from somewhere else) saw in the wide lawn and its roses the heartfilling ceremonies and outdoor pageantry he had participated in back in temperate Cincinnati where he had studied for the priesthood: the children in white and lace, the sodalities with their gonfalons. How wonderful it would be (he murmured to Winnie and Sam on a spring Sunday afternoon) if Mary’s month could be celebrated here, with a procession, a benediction, a rosary.
(Long after, Pierce would have among his souvenirs another photograph that Bird made, of himself assisting at this ceremony: large-eyed, long-necked, his own hair now shorn in Joe Boyd’s fashion, in his surplice and cassock, and burdened with an immense cross surmounted by its writhen corpus of brassy gold; the day empty of color but the grasses aflame, white with sun, sun that Pierce squints his eyes against. Sun-whitened almost into nonexistence in the background, the pretty altar and his cousins in their Communion dresses: their white rosaries are drops of unfocused fire. There are Father Midnight’s elbow and heel too. They only did it the once.)
On a night of May, on that night maybe, Pierce had a dream: that he and all his cousins, his mother and Sam, had died, and been consigned to Purgatory. He dreamed no death and no judgment, only the lot of them together finding themselves there. Purgatory was a burnt-over hillside under a night sky, burnt blackness and shriven trees, the ash still warm under foot. They were alone there; this was their private place, or the other sinners were maybe there but hidden in other hollers. Pierce walked beside Bird; up ahead the others went, looking side to side, awaiting the onset of the promised punishments. Purgatory was filled with that dread, at once hopeless and apprehensive, that Pierce had known in schoolyards and Little League tryouts and day camps. But he held Bird’s hand firmly, determined to be brave. They became aware then of a dull continuous noise, a firestorm roaring, that came from some unimaginable somewhere not far away: and though Pierce knew that this was it, the punishment on its way, he lied to Bird, telling her it was nothing, just probably the big exhaust fan of some nearby diner.
He awoke then.
They ought to get to Bobby, he thought; they ought to, they ought to soon, it might be too late already.
So on a summer morning not long thereafter, the Invisibles gathered early in the kitchen of the big house. With Winnie’s help they made sandwiches, spreading slices of Winnie’s bread with peanut butter and marshmallow paste; they put milk in empty soda bottles, and corked the bottles with twists of
wax paper and rubber bands. They cut carrot sticks, and for these they carried salt in another twist of wax paper. They filled up their bags with Fig Newtons, waffled sugar wafers, Saltines, and raisins in miniature boxes (Joe Boyd knew how to blow on such a box when it was empty to make an impressive hoot, but Joe Boyd wasn’t coming).
Then they all swore fidelity (once again) to one another, and after Pierce and Hildy had chosen walking sticks and Warren had been shamed into leaving his guns behind, they set out and down the drive toward the highway; and at the bridge they crossed the crick, and started upward on the crumbling asphalt road into the summer.
It was a lot longer walking than it had been driving in Sam’s car. They stopped often to rest, to pick wild strawberries and to argue over whether it was time to eat the lunch they had brought; they picked alder branches to swipe the deerflies from their heads.
“Warren! Those berries aren’t ripe.”
“They’re red,” Warren said.
“They’re blackberries. When they’re red, they aren’t ripe.”
Warren looked down at his handful.
“When blackberries are red, they’re green,” said Pierce, and they laughed and pondered this and said it more times as they went up.
They had passed this crossroads before: they all remembered the little store that stood in the crotch of the road, but they couldn’t agree on which branch of the road they had taken from here up to Hogback. They were already much farther from home than they had ever gone before.
“Go in,” Pierce said to Hildy, “and ask inside.”
“You go in.”
“Warren!” Pierce said. “Go in and ask which way to Hogback.”
Warren, unafraid, went up to the porch, whose roof seemed to cringe under the sun’s beating. This must be a store: a Pepsi sign in the shape of a huge bottle cap was fixed to the wall, weeping rust at the nailholes, and the array of things on the porch and in the grassless yard could not have come to be there by chance, they must be for sale. But a yellow dog came out from under the porch to bare its teeth at Warren, growling protectively, and a store dog wouldn’t do that.
Warren ignored the dog, making an automatic circle around it and climbing the porch stairs. He looked in at the tattered screen door. For some time the others watched and waited as Warren talked to whoever was within, while the dog sniffed him and Warren sidled away. Then he came back.
“What’d they say?”
“I couldn’t understand their English,” Warren said. But it seemed they had pointed up the left-hand way, and that was the way they all agreed they sort of remembered, and so they went leftward and up.
“Come on, Warren.”
“Do dogs think they’re naked?” Warren asked thoughtfully from the rear. “Or do they think they’re dressed?”
They took sides on this question and argued it closely as they went up; for the time that it occupied them they didn’t need to think about what exactly they were doing, nor how far from home they were getting.
How anyway was Bobby supposed to be a Catholic up here alone? How was she supposed to receive the sacraments, the others that ought to follow on the purloined one they had talked her into accepting? Pierce imagined Father Midnight in his old black Studebaker climbing this road, the Host hidden under his coat, as in the stories Sister Mary Philomel loved to tell, about priests behind the Iron Curtain. The purple stole quickly slipped over his shoulders, Bobby kneeling secretly out behind the corn-crib to receive. A hot flush of shame ran up Pierce’s neck at the nunnish melodrama of it, at his own complicity in it, not now ever to be withdrawn either.
“Maybe she’ll run away again,” Bird said. “Maybe come live with us.”
That was a story from a different book. There was another too Pierce could think of, looking into the green darkness of the pines and the holler: he and Bobby escaped together, he following her, her woodcraft and daring supplying his lack, his smarts and reasonableness hers. He could almost see their fleeing forms, hand in hand down through the clearings of the woods where sunlight fell.
They had begun to hear a constant noise from no locatable source, lower-pitched and not so various as the noise of the noontide all around. Then where the road widened for a moment and ran flat through thin woods they stopped—Pierce first, who saw it first, then Hildy behind him, then Bird—to study something inexplicable.
“Look. What happened?”
A boulder taller than Pierce stood in the woods right by the road. It was caked in clay, like a stone troweled out of a garden plot, clay which the day had dried to pale buff on its top still damp beneath in shadow. Behind it, leading a long way up the mountain out of sight, ran the path it had followed as it came down: shattered aspens and firs, crushed stone and gouged earth, a big rip down through the woods, or a long rough zipper unzipped.
What on earth. The four of them stood puzzling, then each in turn drew the same conclusion, that if by earthquake or some other agency this kingsize rock had been rooted out and thrown down the mountain, just hours ago maybe probably, then any minute another just as big might follow, and might not stop before it reached the road they walked along. What anyway was that weird noise.
They went on warily. They seemed to have ascended into a space of strange earth, unpredictable; there was a smell of raw dirt in the air. The road turned sharply upward again, crossing a tumbling crick on a bridge of cracked concrete and then climbing up beside it. The crick was brown as milky coffee, and choked with foreign stone.
The little cluster of cabins and their outhouses under the mountain appeared; the road, clinging to the spur, had brought them around to it. Hogback. The noise they had been listening to was more distinct now, and was clearly engines, big ones, the backing and attacking of an earthmover, more than one probably; and it came from up above.
“Maybe somebody building something,” Warren said. “Like a school or something.”
They left the main road at the turn upward, they all remembered, the last moment Sam could have turned back toward Bondieu with Bobby and hadn’t, and after a sharp bend, and another bend, knowing now they were very close and drawing themselves together, they arrived, somehow suddenly.
“That’s her bridge.”
But across the bridge was not the same. The height of dark mountain that had stood over Shaftoe’s place had collapsed, or been shattered. Pieces of it lay scattered over the sloping clearing. The green corn had been mown by tumbling stones.
“Her house got wrecked!” Warren whispered in horror.
A jagged bone of earth as big as Sam’s Nash had come down the mountain on a tide of clay and stones, parting the half-grown trees of the slope and laying them down like hair; it sat now in the bathroom Floyd Shaftoe had added to his cabin, jammed deep in the cellar-hole. The tarpapered roof had been lifted half off like a tipped hat, the tub, the commode and the sink pushed out the split seam of the house into the littered yard. A roll of toilet paper had rolled away from the house toward the crick, leaving a zigzag white path behind—they all noticed that.
When they had stood staring a long minute, Bird called out: “Bobby!”
But just as she let out the name, unable to recall it (clapping her hand too late over her mouth), Floyd Shaftoe pushed open the slack screen door of the house and came out to stand on his canted porch. He wore no shirt, and the children could see running over the flinty muscle of his chest a map of white welts, scars of a long-ago rock-fall underground. He looked at the children for a while without expression, and then went back inside.
The Invisibles looked at each other sidelong, each waiting for another to say Oh let’s forget it and go quick: but no one did. And Bobby came banging out of the house flinging a quick stream of invective behind her the children couldn’t decipher.
She was dashing across the yard toward the bridge and the Oliphants when Floyd called to her from the house, and she stopped, outraged by whatever she heard, and shouted back; then she stood straight, and walked deliberately to the bridg
e.
“Y’all come over.”
By now the Invisible College was a tight knot on the roadside, Hildy holding Pierce’s and Bird’s hands, Warren behind Bird.
“You come over,” Hildy called. “We’ll stay here.”
Bobby looked toward them puzzled. She seemed to be a similar but different person from the one they had hidden in their house: taller and stringier and duller-eyed, but more than that: at home, usual, instead of extraordinary. “Well what’d y’all come for?”
They had no simple single answer to that, and said nothing.
“I don’t think your grandfather wanted us to come over,” Hildy called.
“He says he’s agoin for his gun,” Bobby said sarcastically. “I don’t pay him no mind.”
“Well,” Hildy said in a goodbye tone.
“No come on,” Pierce said. “We said we would.” He probably doesn’t even have a gun, he thought, and it was crazy to threaten kids with one, irrational, who would.
“We can only stay a little while,” Hildy called, not having actually got there yet. Her sneakers as she crossed seemed not to touch the boards of the bridge. A lot later on, Hildy would sometimes dream of crossing such a little bridge, under the impression that there was someone on the other side who needed her, but suspecting that once she was across, things would not be as she thought them—knowing absolutely with a sudden starting horror that things would be very very different on the other side—and would wake then, and for a moment know that all her life she had dreamed this dream again and again, only to forget it each time: and even then she would not know from where it had come.
“He done burned all them things you given me,” Bobby said to her when she was across. “All them pitchers.”
