Henry and George sat there by the island for another ten minutes, but neither of them said a word. After-chores customers began to arrive. In the gray of dusk the figures of Henry and George grew less substantial, it seemed to Callie, watching from the diner. At last Henry pushed up out of his chair slowly and came in.
5
They came to the diner night after night when the chores were done, and sometimes they talked about the drought and the heat, sometimes they merely sat, quiet, preoccupied-looking, like men listening for something in the back of their minds: some voice out of dried-up hills, a sound of water moving down under the ground. Sometimes they played cards; other times they did nothing at all. Ben Worthington, Jr., would stand by the counter drinking his beer and studying the punchboard for hours at a time, as if the whole secret of the universe lay under one of those dots. Once as Callie was passing him with a tray he caught her arm and said, as if continuing an old conversation, “There’s got to be a way to figure it.” He pointed at the punchboard with the top of his bottle. “There’s a way to figure everything.”
Callie pulled away. “You tell me when you figure it out,” she said.
Old Man Judkins said, “All the same, I can tell you where the clock is.”
“The hell,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said.
Old Man Judkins tipped his head back, so he could look through his glasses, and pointed at one of the dots without a moment’s hesitation. It was as if he could see through the paper.
“Here’s what,” Ben said. “I’ll give you five-to-one the clock ain’t there.”
Judkins shook his head. “No, sir. You pay for the punch and the clock’s half yours, half mine, because I showed you where it is.”
Ben looked at him, and slowly he reached in his pocket for change and paid for the punch. The clock wasn’t there. Old Man Judkins stood with his head back, holding his old straw hat in his hand, looking surprised, and when he was sure the clock was really not there he shrugged. “Hunch was wrong,” he said.
Days went by and it still didn’t rain, and all of them grew more edgy. Old Man Judkins said, as though Callie Soames had not lived in farm country all her life (and yet she listened, remembering hand-loaded wagons of hay, thrashing crews, wheat standing on the hillsides in shocks): “It never changes. They bring in all them new machines, put all them chemicals into the ground, get dairies with a hundred cows, but they still got to wait on the land. Progress, they say. But th’ earth don’t know about progress. No rain, that means no corn and no hay, no feed in the winter. The old days, they might have trucked it in, but not now. Fifty cows was a real big barn in the old days, and two men could clean the gutters in half an hour. Now they got gutter cleaners — seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don’t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can’t compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he’s in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can’t even sell it.”
She shook her head.
“No chance any more of winning,” he said. “They just try and survive.” Old Man Judkins looked at her with his head cocked; then down at his hands. They were gnarled and liver-spotted and scarred, and she remembered suddenly what Jim Millet had said, the day of George Loomis’s accident: “The goddamn cylinder was going around and around. You could see slivers of bone — I never see nothin’ like it — red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away.”
She said quickly, “I guess the oldtimers had their troubles too.”
Old Man Judkins looked at her, and after a minute he smiled again. “You talk about the old days and everybody gets impatient. Things are getting better and better, that’s what people have got to believe. Say it ain’t so and they know for sure you’re an old codger, not right in the head. Prophet of doom, they say.”
Callie said, “You have to have faith.”
The old man bent his head, drawing a square with one finger on the counter-top, moving the finger around and around the square. She said it again, as though it were important, louder this time, to penetrate what she knew was not mere deafness. “You have to have faith, Mr. Judkins.” She glanced at the sleeping dog, and her heart caught.
Fred Judkins’ finger stopped moving, and after a long time he looked up again, lips puckered. “No,” he said. “You have to have the nerve to ride it down.”
But at least about this much Old Man Judkins was right: If it didn’t rain soon every one of them would be finished. Henry said so, Doc Cathey said so, even Jim Millet said so. One night — Henry wasn’t there at the time — Jim Millet said, joking, the tobacco cud bulging in his whiskered cheek, “You want the truth, it’s all Nick Blue’s fault. He could’ve done a rain dance for us a month ago if he’d wanted to, but you think he’ll do it? Hell, no!”
They all laughed except Nick Blue, sitting straight-backed and solemn-faced, smoke going up from his nostrils past his small sharp eyes, and Ben Worthington, Jr., said, as if fiercely, “He’s trying to get his land back, that’s what it is.”
Jim Millet slapped the counter. “You hit it on the head! That goddam redskin’s got it in his mind he’ll break us all and get back his heritage.” He chewed fast, like a rabbit.
“Now, Jim,” Callie said.
But they liked the joke too well to leave it.
“Nick Blue’s a smart man,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said. “He don’t talk a whole lot, but he thinks.” He tapped his temple.
The two truckers at the counter grinned without turning.
Lou Millet said, “Ah, you’re too hard on him, Ben.” He smiled, though. Even Lou was capable, these days, of going further than he’d dream of going some other time.
Jim said, “I bet you couldn’t get him to dance. I bet he wouldn’t do it for nobody!”
The truckers glanced at Nick and smiled. Nick sat as still as ever, as if made out of wood, moving only his cheeks when he puffed at the cigarette.
Then all at once they were standing up, Jim Millet and Ben Worthington, Jr., and Emery Jones’ albino hired man, and the trucker by the cash register was watching them, smiling, as if half-thinking of getting up too.
Callie pursed her lips.
Nick sat quietly smoking as though he were deaf, and when they were standing behind him, leering like monkeys, he put the cigarette down and squared his shoulders more.
“Now, that’s enough,” Lou Millet said.
Old Man Judkins watched calmly, as if he’d seen it all many times.
“Come on now, Nick,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said, “have some mercy, eh?”
Nick turned his head like a man bothered by a fly on his shoulder, his yellow-brown forehead wide and smooth, slanted like an ape’s, and for a long moment everything was still, as if even the wind had suddenly stopped to listen. Then, for no reason, it was over. They laughed — even Nick Blue was smiling — and they slapped his shoulders and told him, by God, he could take a joke, and then they went back to their counter stools, still laughing. Callie leaned on the counter. She said suddenly, as if to all the room, “What ever became of the Goat Lady?”
They seemed to think about it. Nobody knew.
“Do you think she ever found him, heading off blind like that?”