Crude oblong holes dug deeply into the earth. Rectangles of dark leaking upward from some ultimate dark. Bits of wormscored wood, shards of bones, nameless dross. The stones still stood amidst the savaged sassafras trunks, leaning weather-thinned tablets and carved marble angels with folded wings and graven names and dates. Some of the names said Bender.
He sat there for a time smoking while the dusk deepened and nightbirds began to call to him out of the purple dusk. When he rose he looked instinctively to where the church had stood as if to see if it had been miraculously restored but of course there was no church nor anything at all that he recognized anymore.
I EXPECT WE NEED TO TALK, Lynn told him.
I expect we do, Bender said. He’d been watching her and he always knew when she thought they needed to talk.
Did you know old man Liverett took their offer?
No.
I guess you’re the last one left now.
I’ve always been the last one left, Bender said.
They ate supper in silence and Bender gathered up the dishes and washed them while Lynn played with Jesse. He washed the dishes as if this simple act might placate her, might be so far-reaching as to placate the very government that was stirring itself to move against him.
They sat on the porch in the swing awhile. The weathered wood seemed somehow to draw out what coolness the dusk held. Everything about the house was wood from the sills to the shingles, cypress and chestnut Bender’s grandfather had cut and hauled to the sawmill in a mule-drawn wagon. He had built the house himself and time had settled it and silvered the wood until the house seemed something organic that had just grown out of the earth, something that had always been there and that man had had nothing to do with. Honeysuckle grew all around the house and its vines climbed nigh to the roof itself. Full dark was falling and was intensifying the scent of the blossoms until the air felt drugged, some sweet narcotic that had sung in Bender’s blood all his days.
His three-year-old son Jesse was dozing on his lap with his blond curls against Bender’s chest and Bender’s arms loosely clasped about his waist. The boy was a wonder to Bender. Even the small things about him, the way his face looked subtly different when the light falling on it altered, as if here was an entirely different Jesse. Bender loved him so it scared him sometimes, and not because Jesse was some scaled-down and newly minted edition of Bender but a new and separate individual, innocent and unmarked as yet by the world.
He must have tightened his grip more than he thought for the child awoke and slid down Bender’s legs to the porch floor. Go shoot some wolves, he said sleepily.
Well all right, Bender said. Let’s waste some of them suckers. He figured the game would last awhile, perhaps even until Lynn was asleep, postponing the need to talk.
He did not even suspect where Jesse had come up with the game but it might have been from something he had seen on television or something he had heard someone say. They had been playing it two or three months and lately it had become every night’s ritual.
All the game required was two black plastic popguns and Bender and his son crouched peering through the sliding glass door into the backyard. Past the flagstone patio and where the porch light tended away into darkness the woods began and this was where the wolves came from. Jesse would point one out and Bender would pretend to see it and shoot it and then Jesse would kill one. There, he’d say, raising the rifle and sighting down its barreclass="underline" bang. Sometimes they would kill wolves for upwards of half an hour before Jesse wearied of the game, sometimes only one or two each would suffice. One of the rules seemed to be that they both had to kill the same number of wolves.
Tonight he was sleepy and grew bored with the game early. When he was asleep in his room and Lynn was undressing for bed she said:
What are we going to do?
Wait it out a few more days.
We can’t wait it out. We’ve gone as far as we can go. Something has got to be done.
Bender was standing by the window with an outspread palm on the frame and he was just looking out into the darkness. The EPA is going to shut the goddamned thing down and you know it.
I don’t know any such thing. Nothing is going to shut it down. Nothing. All this is going to be underwater and I don’t know why you can’t see that.
Bender watched the dark and thought about that awhile. He thought about the slow seep of water rising, first his shoe soles dampening and the summer dust going to mud and the water cascading over the lips of the barren graves and rising more until the mimosa fronds trailed in the deep like seaweed. The dam looked to be at least eighty feet in the air and Bender guessed the water would rise for days, for weeks, who knew.
That goddamned fish, Bender said.
What?
I was thinking about that goddamned fish.
Just come on to bed, David.
Bender got into bed with all his clothes on and then noticed his shoes and got back up and pulled off his shoes and socks and lay back down with his hands clasped behind his head. She touched his face, let her arm rest across his chest. David, she said, baby, I know what all this means to you, but—
Bender lay there not listening. Nobody knew what all this meant. He felt an enormous sorrow for the inadequacy of everything. For everything that was said, for everything that was done. There in the dark Lynn kissed his throat and tried to draw him to her. She was trying to comfort him in the only way she knew but dread lay in him heavy as a stone and Bender would not be comforted.
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT Bender awoke and lay staring at the ceiling above him and thought about the fish. There for a while he had had high hopes for the fish.
He had first heard of it months ago. He had been keeping his eyes open and he had known something was up when he had seen a news crew from a Nashville television station interviewing folks wearing hardhats over by the main gate. Then a night or two later he had seen the fish itself on the evening news being discussed by an earnest-looking young man in a pith helmet. The fish was about as ugly a thing as Bender had ever seen, angular and goggle-eyed and atavistic as something which had simply decided not to evolve. It was called a snail darter and the interesting thing about it was that it seemed to thrive nowhere in the known universe save in the riverbed not three miles from Bender’s farm.
Bender was exultant. Salvation was at hand. It did not even strike him as ironic that all his efforts had been impotent but that a fish as ugly and apparently useless as the snail darter had a branch of the federal government working night and day to save its home. He was more than willing to just go along for the ride. The man in the pith helmet said that the snail darter was an endangered species. Endangered himself Bender felt more than a passing empathy with it.
AT MIDMORNING a sheriff’s department car from the town of Ackerman’s Field pulled up Bender’s driveway towing a wake of dust fine as talcum. Bender went out to see. He’d come to dread cop cars, mailmen, ringing telephones.
It was the sheriff himself. Bellwether stood smoothing the wrinkles out of his khaki trousers and adjusting the pistol on his hip.
We’re all peaceable here, Bender said. You won’t need that.
I was just driving out to see what was going on out here, Bellwether said. I ain’t been out in this neighborhood in no telling when.
You can hear what’s going on, Bender said. He realized that he’d lived with noise so long he’d become accustomed to it. It was like the low hum of a swarm of distant bees.
Bellwether stood in an attitude of listening. The dull drone of who knew how many kinds of heavy machinery; to the south they could see the dust they stirred hanging in a shifting cloud.
They do make a hell of a racket, don’t they? Busy as little beavers.