The boys thought on it for a minute. “That is something,” the nine-fingered boy said. “I never thought of it. Wouldn’t call it a puzzle, but it’s something to note.”
A grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, the ten-fingered boy said, “You was a farmer.”
“Oh yeah,” Cartwright said, smiling. “Them was good times.”
“Huh. We’ll have to talk some more about that plow.”
Before they left, they slipped him a twist of tobacco, as they would to a neighbor. Cartwright snapped his fingers, twice. He was in with them now.
Cartwright climbed the rungs of the ladder to his nest. The drummer was careful with his cigarette, cleaning the boards with his shoe and killing the cinder on the wood. Then he heard a woman screaming on the mountain, but remembered it was merely the cry of a gray fox, a dog that walks trees like a cat. He leaned back, breathing the ancient smell of cured apples and tobacco hanging from the rafters. Also, a whiff of swallow droppings.
The smell brought to mind his father, mother, brothers, sisters. Cartwright’s family took up pine-stobs, brooms, and pokers, beating pigeons to death by the dozens. His father lined them up on the ground, and his sister Audrey broke kindling to fire the kettle and scald the feathers from the bodies. They gorged themselves, like every other hard-up family from Canada to Texas. The birds were nothing less than manna, and their soil fell like flakes of lime, his mother and sisters holding umbrellas straining over their heads to keep it off their dresses. What they couldn’t eat, they ground into fertilizer. Back and forth, his sisters carried the pailfuls of feathers and pulp. The flocks blotted the sun and spooked the horses, which tried to crop grass to the verge of foundering because they weren’t ready, at midday, to return slack-bellied to the barn and stand hungry in the darkness. The screaming clouds peeled back the green table of grass, and the horses chewed faster, faster.
Cartwright’s brother Nige handed him a dead passenger pigeon to play with. He turned it over in his hands: the red eye set there like a hardened drop of blood, the slaty guard feathers the color of water churning over the bottoms of rivers that hold trout. The body was limp in his hand, neck lolling about as he stroked the saffron underbelly. In his trunk in Anthem, he now kept that mummified pair of wings, feathers still crisp as fletching against his thumb. Wrapped in black gauze and smelling sweetly of dry mold, they could have been torn from its back just yesterday. He would wrap them back up and put them away under his winter clothes. There were damn few pigeons left now and someday the sky would be evacuated of everything but rain, airships, and stars.
Cartwright turned and felt a sharp corner dig into his kidney. He plunged his arm into the straw and came up with a jar of corn. “Hallelujah,” he said, grinning. He held the clear liquor up to a moon as hollow and weird as Thomas Jefferson’s death mask. He turned the jar, and the moon’s geography warped and spilled to the corners. With luck like this, he’d be back in Anthem in no time. He unscrewed the two-piece lid with a grainy, skirling sound.
After taking a third of the jar, Cartwright made a nest in the straw and settled into a dream-sleep rife with women. He was a man of low station, a virgin at twenty-five. He wouldn’t be Threadgill, though. Cartwright wanted a steady woman. Regional Manager pay would get him one. Maybe she’d have earth to till, a few acres. Yes, she would. He cocked his ear. The gray fox screamed.
The nine-fingered boy said, “Here it comes, dollar bills on the foot,” and his brother laughed a laugh as dry as cornhusks. The boys waited for the fox under a wash of stars. There were hunts, too, writ in the sky above: the hare, the dogs greater and lesser, and the Great Hunter whipping them on.
A square of sun teased Cartwright’s face and chest in the morning. Blinking, he glanced about the loft, trying to remember where he was. Swallows peeked out of their mudnests and streaked blue and gold out the window. He woke to their piping, and McBride called him out of the barn. In the kitchen, a tray of sloppy eggs was laid out and a kettle whistled. The tea had the musty tang of roots, or the kettle had been used to make chicory coffee, one. Cartwright asked if the boys had shot themselves a fox. McBride said he supposed they had not.
“That’s a shame,” Cartwright said. “Bounty’s a good way to turn a few dollars.”
McBride flinched. Cartwright meant to spur a conversation of whether McBride wanted to buy or not — his back ached from sleeping strangely and a bouncing wagon might cure it — but like these mountain people do, McBride shunned talk of money and led the drummer in an elliptical conversation that touched upon foxes, what foxes eat, foxes and chickens, bounties, plows, planting by the signs, the Stations of the Cross, the months of the moon, the death of his wife in the winter, TB, washing handkerchiefs of red roses, foxes again, plows again, and, finally, the matter of money. McBride counted out pennies, paper bills, and a lone Quarter Eagle, building them into a small pile.
Cartwright frowned, plucking off the Confederate note the man placed on top — a two-dollar Judah Benjamin — and setting it aside. He said, “This is only half, I’m afraid. Barely half.” It was time to go. Experience told him that McBride was about to offer him goats and old boots to make up the difference.
“I know this,” McBride said. “But you said it yourself, this is a tool a man can’t do without. I got something to cover the rest. It’s out where the flints are, just sitting in the ground. It can be sold back where you come from for great profit.”
“If you’re talking about ginseng or hides, I don’t truck in that,” Cartwright said, the tooth flickering as he spoke.
“The agent buys hides all the time.”
“Look, you don’t understand. I don’t buy them. Too much bother. Town-people don’t barter no more. The Company says I got to take federal money. Legal tender. I had a fellow wanted to give me a rarefied sidelock shotgun all the way from Italy and I couldn’t take it.”
“This goes beyond your typical deal. This is five shotguns. Cover the plow and more and you can have the rest for your troubles.”
Cartwright looked about the room. No. If McBride had some silver buried about the place, it wouldn’t be such a wreck. “Well,” Cartwright said, standing up, not even bothering to hide his disgust, “I’ll be taking my leave of you, Mr. McBride. Good luck with your yield. Got to find somebody who can actually buy this thing.”
When Cartwright went out the door, it was the serene way that McBride said, “You’ll regret it,” that called him back. The Irishman took a folded piece of newspaper from his wallet and smoothed it out on the knife-scored table. “I had to go to Jephthah for court day. I was on the jury that hung that Brad fellow for jiggering his little niece and I got this off the corner-man.”
Cartwright read it once, and read it again. McBride said, “I know where you can get one of them, a great big one.”
“Why ain’t you got it out already?”
“Thought you said you was a farmer,” McBride said, bristling. “Anthem’s more than sixty mile. You can’t go leaving.”
“Hey now, settle down,” said Cartwright. “I ain’t casting aspersions.” He read the notice a third time, a grin swelling on his face. “We’ll split it sixty-forty,” he said. “But that’s a solid forty.”
No one had been to the cave much since the War, when a few dozen men harvested saltpeter for the Confederacy, and then for the Union when the militia told them they lived no longer in Old Virginia. They’d shrugged, saying, Makes no difference to us, we just want to eat. And avoid conscription, they might have added. When the War ended, their profits vanished and the cave was plunged back to obscurity. A scattering of people knew the place, but none knew it like McBride’s boys: they crawled into the Sinks of Gandy to harvest flint and hide from downpours when they hunted spring turkeys.