Nobody knew.
Late that night, in the kitchen (Jimmy not asleep, as they thought, but standing on the stairs, in the dark), Callie said: “Henry, I saw Simon Bale.”
“What?” he said.
She frowned, realizing for an instant that perhaps it had not really happened.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said. “What if Jimmy was to hear you, talking like that.”
She felt sick, and the absurd conviction came over her that if she let herself turn to the window Simon would be there, his face yellowish-gray against the dark of the mountains. But she knew he wasn’t there, and to prove to herself that she knew, she kept from turning.
“He wants to tell us something,” she said. It came to her that that was not so. He had nothing to say to them.
Henry said, “He spoke to you?” His eyes were slits, and she knew what he was thinking. He said, “Callie, you dreamed it.”
She thought about it.
After a long time, as if by accident, as if not having meant to say it aloud, he said, “What does he want to tell us?”
“You’ve seen him, then?”
“No. Of course not.”
The round white pain came under her collarbone.
“What did you think he wanted to tell us?”
“I don’t know.”
After that they were silent again for a long time. When Callie finally spoke, her words came out in a rush. “It’s simple. He was an evil man and now he’s tormented. He lived with us all those weeks passing out his pamphlets to people in the diner and scaring Jimmy with his talk of the devil, and now he knows. He’s afraid he poisoned us. It wasn’t true.”
“You need to get more rest,” Henry said. “You’ve been worried lately. And this heat.” He looked at the table-top, biting his upper lip and squinting. He got one of the little white pills out of the bottle in his shirt pocket. He was remembering how he would sit in his car up on Nickel Mountain, in the old days, and the fog would be there all around him like a sea, and strange thoughts would come into his mind. He would think strange thoughts, knowing they were not true, strange, and knowing he could suspend the knowledge that what came into his mind was unreal, and he would savor that queer freedom the way he savored the smell of Catskill air at night or savored the obscure, continually shifting patterns in the fog around his headlights. When the night was clear he would push the old rattletrap Ford as hard as it knew how to go, and turning into a curve he would know exactly where the line lay between making it and not, and he would ride that line as he rode the line down the center of the highway, conscious every second of the choices on either side. He’d gone to stock car races once with George Loomis, and he’d been surprised: George Loomis wanted them to hit, wanted somebody killed, and he’d said, “Admit it, Henry, so do you.” “No,” he’d said. They’d looked at each other and they’d understood — as though everything had suddenly snapped into focus, past, present, future: They profoundly disagreed.
“He’ll destroy us,” Callie said, wildly now, no longer knowing what she was saying.
She thought of the Preacher, carefully avoiding the spatters of manure, her father carefully avoiding the Preacher, the milking machines chugging regularly, and she remembered: “You never think of anybody but yourself, that’s truly all you think about,” her mother struggling against him futilely, stupidly, as once, wrongly, he too had struggled, hitting her for it, forgetting the truth that you had to ride it down. She remembered the day No. 6 died. They had to saw the stanchion off to get out the corpse, and they dragged it out of the cowbarn with a log-chain that peeled the dead hide off the leg; they tipped it over the bluff with crowbars, and when it rolled down over the tin cans, boxes, buggy-wheels, bedsprings, rusted fencewire, kettles, crocks — the corrupting record of seven generations — her father and the two hired men had yelled like Indians, with glee. It was natural that cows die, and fitting. One had no need for faith in what was reasonable, because they would survive. Faith was for what made no sense. She said again, with conviction: “He’ll destroy us.”
But Henry shook his head, squinting at her, “No, he’ll save us.”
And instantly Callie knew, in the mind-fogging heat, that he was right.
He got up early, the following morning, and most of the day he helped her in the diner. But he went on eating, and nothing she did was any use.
6
All Old Man Judkins knew was this: that in George Loomis’s barn, among spinning wheels and casques and antique farm tools, half-hidden under an old tarpaulin, there stood a pink and purple goatcart, the rear end shaken or smashed to bits, the spokes of the left rear wheel broken. Maybe someone had run into it, maybe it had gone over a cliff; he couldn’t tell. And he knew, too, that whenever anyone asked him about her, George Loomis said he’d never seen the Goat Lady — which sounded reasonable enough, except for that goatcart he had in the barn. For what would even the Goat Lady want on Crow Mountain? She’d have had to pull off the main highway and travel two miles up steep, winding gravel road, beechwoods on either side of her, an occasional sharply sloping haylot, ahead of her nothing but more steep road, beechwoods, haylots, one or two abandoned-looking houses and, off in the woods, out of sight from the road but marked by a blue and white state historical marker, a crumbling pre-Revolutionary lookout tower.
He’d stumbled on the cart by accident. The odds against anybody else’s stumbling onto it, or knowing what it was in that barnful of junk — especially since nobody ever came here — were a thousand-to-one. He’d been out walking one morning, as usual, because of a theory he had about arthritis — a theory he’d picked up from Albertus Magnus’s Egyptian Secrets years ago — and, as he did sometimes, he’d decided to turn up Old Joseph Napoleon Road, for the red raspberries and the view of the valley and to see how the tower was holding up. He was thirsty when he got to George Loomis’s place, partly thirsty for ginger water, partly for talk, so he went up to George’s door. There was nobody home. He went out to the cowbarn but that was empty too, the stables swept clean and powdered with lime, the rear doors wide open to let in the sun and air, and so he went on through the cowbarn and over to the old horsebarn, now storage-shed, and there he saw the goatcart. He was tired from walking, every blamed bone in his body aching, and he sat down on the flat rock by the door and pulled a timothy shoot and chewed the end. When the timothy shoot got stringy he took out his pipe, stoked it, and lit it. On principle, he did not speculate, merely looked around him at the farm.
It looked like a nigger’s place. The fences were bad, the barbwire strung loosely, toggled to the fenceposts with baling wire — because, no doubt, you couldn’t both nail and stretch with just one arm — and the weeds along the fencelines hadn’t been cut in at least three years. The hayfield dropping away from where he sat was eroded and pitted, too rough to get over with a tractor by now, and the hay in it was brown, with bright patches of mustard weed, and long past prime, no good even for pasture, even if he somehow got a fence around it. The beehives at the foot of the hill looked abandoned. And the place was dry, of course. To the right of where Old Man Judkins sat, up the slope to the cowbarn from the tractor-shed, the barnyard was so dry it was powdery, like a hogpen that hasn’t been used in years, or like ashes. Birds had overrun the place, both good and bad, pigeons, sparrows, woodpeckers, starlings, chippies, swallows, finches, robins. The beanloft would be caked with their droppings, the granary thick with nests, even down in the oats. There was no water at all in the big iron tub, and no gutting of the ground below from spillover, which meant George Loomis was taking it easy on the watering these days, maybe because his well was low, maybe because it was dry already and he was hauling his water in in milkcans, paying money for it, or promising to pay with labor — if he had that much nerve.