Visitors didn’t come much anymore and with the cessation of a need for appearances Pearl had stopped shaving him and his thin cheeks were covered with a soft black beard flecked with gray. He might have been a fanatic consumed from within by the fires of some fierce and obscure religion.
The girl used to come sit by his bed in the ladderback chair and watch him without speaking. In those days she could study his face at leisure. His eyes would be closed, the eyes unmoving beneath the yellow lids, and she guessed he didn’t dream much anymore.
She remembered his laughter from a childhood so long ago it might have been a tale she’d read in a dusty schoolbook. Then a little at a time silence had taken him over and there had been a time when she wanted to scream at him. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you let him run over us like you do?”
When his back began to bend like something folding what was left of his life inside it, and the perimeters of where he could go and not go were marked by the dimensions of the bed, he had grown more silent yet. Sometimes he’d come awake from dozing and she’d be a slim, dark presence by the window, watching him, her face as unreadable as his own. And he had no words to say, no deeds to do. Everything seemed said, nothing left but waiting.
He lay seeped in pain and oblivious of his surroundings like a dying rat preoccupied with the pellet of poison slowly dissolving in his belly. Death by misadventure, a garbage can explored better left alone.
“He’s coughing up blood again,” she told her mother. Pearl laid aside the dishtowel and went into the near-dark room.
Hardin shuffled a poker deck and dealt himself a full house, the cards rippling smooth as water. He reshuffled and dealt a jackhigh straight flush, conscious of the sounds from the sickroom, of the door opening. The shiftless shuffle of her houseshoes ceasing. He could feel her behind him, silent and somehow accusatory.
The she said, “He’s dyin.”
Bored with straight flushes, Hardin laid the cards aside. “Well,” he said, “there’s no news in that. He’s dyin ever since I knowed him.”
“He’s bad off.”
Hardin went to see. Hovington’s flesh was gray and clammy. Hardin’s hand came away moist with cold sweat when he touched the sick man. He wiped his hand on a trouser leg. It seemed to him he could already feel a rigidity seeping into Hovington’s flesh, stealthy, covert, he could already smell the sweet, carrion presence of death.
“You reckon he needs a doctor?”
“Undertaker is more like it.” Hardin passed through the door and paused and lit a cigarette. He went on through the house and onto the porch, then sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. Pearl followed him out, the door closing nigh soundless behind her. “Stay with him,” he said. “It’s him in there dyin, not me out here.”
Pearl was silent awhile. “He’s wantin somethin,” she finally said.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Hardin said. “In his place I might could think of a thing or two I’d want myself.”
“He wants that Winer woman brought up here. He wants to talk to her.”
“Say he does?”
“That’s what he asked for.”
“He’s out of his head.”
“Maybe, but he ain’t never asked for nothin else.”
“That’s crazy and a waste of time besides.”
“All these years and he’s never asked for nothin,” she persisted. “Nothin only what a preacher could give him and he never even got that. Just laid there all this time and took what come.”
“That’s all any of us can do, take what comes.”
She looked stricken, the flesh of her cheeks folded on itself, her lips trembling. A damp and fearful blue eye. He thought she might cry.
“Just shut up,” he told her. “Don’t think it’s a bit late in the day for this? He made his bed and by God you made yourn and all you can do now is lay there with the cover pulled up around your chin and rest as best you can.”
Yet there was a stolid immutability to her he hadn’t known was there, an immovable weight of stubbornness that held her rooted before him as if he were wedded to her, condemned alike to her tardy sense of guilt. He thought suddenly that to move her aside he’d have shove her, cut a path through her with a hawkbill knife. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his boot.
“Then by God get her. But get her on your own book. I’ve got more to do than run up and down the road.” He stepped off the porch and strode toward the barn. She went back in.
The girl came out and hurried across the yard, a momentary hand raised to shield the sun. It was early yet, the morning sun resting above the green treeline. A day brimming with incandescent light and filing up with birdsong and she thought she’d never seen a brighter day. So bright a day to lie dying on. She was touched with horror, with a desperate need to hurry.
Her shoes made flat little plops in the roadbed and little clouds of dust arose like phantoms pursuing her. She increased her pace and the hash green world became a world in motion, a bobbing wall of greenery like murky water, and even the cries of birds were muted and distorted like sound filtered through fire.
Amber Rose did not believe in miracles. He is dying, she thought. She thought of a casket lid being closed. No one will open it, ever, she thought in wonder. The concept of forever struck her with the force of a blow. It yawned before her, all engrossing, awesome. She stopped in the curve of the road and looked back.
The house sat full in the sun, its roof growing dull green, its walls myriad shades of weathered gray. Brooding so in the morning light it seemed pulled magnetically by the anomalous shadows from the hollow. She whirled and hurried on.
Through the moving windshield of the Packard he watched with wry amusement their progress up the dusty roadbed, two figures imbued with haste, hurrying jerkily towards him like puppets dragged along by strings.
He slowed the Packard as he neared them, braked to a stop when they were almost parallel with the car. He cut the switch and sat watching them, an arm on the sill of the window.
“Looks like you had a long, hot trip for nothin, Miz Winer,” Hardin said. “Brother Hovington passed away a minute ago. I thought I’d save you the rest of the trip.”
“It wadn’t no trouble,” the woman said. Her voice sounded stilted and formal beneath the rim of her bonnet. “I have to hear about Mr Hovington.”
“Well, I guess he can rest easy now. Get in and I’ll run you back home.”
“I’ll just go on I reckon and see if I be of any help to Mrs. Hovington.”
“We can manage. I’m sorry we drug you into our troubles.”
“Folks got to help one another.”
“I reckon. We’ll manage though.”
The girl came around the side of the car, opened the door, and got in without speaking. The woman stood awkwardly in the roadbed as if awaiting enlightenment. “What was it he wanted me for anyway?”
“He never said,” Hardin told her.
The girl sat staring across the fence where Oliver’s goats grazed the bright tangle of bitterweed, though she did not see them. She thought, they will have to break his back to ever get him in a casket. A sense of horror suffused her, she fell to thinking on how this could come to be. Surely there were tools for this, no ordinary hammer would suffice. Beyond the grazing goats her mind dreamed implements of brass and gleaming bronze, folds of purple velvet to mute the blows.
Hardin had said something.
“No, I’ll just walk,” Mrs. Winer said.
“Suit yourself then,” Hardin said. He started the car and began to turn it in the road.