“I guess I’m fresh out of a job,” Winer told him without being asked.
“That’s about the way I figured it. He’s gone, is he?”
“Yeah.”
“You want some coffee?”
“I might drink a cup.”
Winer followed him into the kitchen. Oliver poured coffee from a blue enamel pot. The food on the table was covered with a clean white cloth to keep the flies off.
“Help yeself to anything ye see.”
“I don’t want anything,” Winer said. He raised a corner of the cloth, peered. “What kind of cake is that?”
“Storebought. Coconut. You can eat it, I didn’t cook it.”
Winer sliced a wedge of cake and stood eating it.
“Come on out to the edge of the porch where’s it’s cool.”
When they were on the porch and Oliver back in the porch swing he said, “Old man Weiss was a funny sort of feller.”
“He acted all torn up about her death.”
“Hell, I guess he is all torn up. Look at it this way. He’s been here twenty years and don’t have friend one. Which I guess was more than not his own fault. Nobody to talk to, drink with, nothin. Everybody has to have somebody like that and he had her. Now he ain’t.”
“I guess so. They thought the world of each other. They got along better than any folks I ever knew.”
“Hell, he may be in South America by now.”
“South America?”
The old man grinned. “Weiss said some funny things sometimes. Told me one time, said, ‘I got open channels to heads of state and access to banana boats to South America.’ Said it like he was braggin. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Course, I didn’t mind. I never envied anybody their access to banana boats.”
“He told me one time he invented Coca-Cola. But whether he did or not, I’ve still got to find a job.”
“Boy, why don’t you just ease up and be your age for a while? School’ll be startin pretty soon anyway, won’t it? Don’t you finish this year?”
“I may not go. I may take a year off and work then go back next fall. I don’t know what difference a year makes anyway.”
“I guess at your age you feel like you got more years than anything else.”
“I don’t guess it matters.”
“How much was you makin if you don’t mind me askin?”
“Two dollars a day.”
“Great God, boy. I wouldn’t grieve long over a job like that. You ort to be jumpin up and down turnin somersaults. You can make more money than that trompin the woods for ginseng and blackroot.
“I might could if I knew what it looked like.”
“I’ll show ye. It’s got me through some mighty tight places back when times was really hard. But we got to hurry. We need to get started right now. You can’t find if after frost.”
“Well. We’ll go then. I’ve got to do something while I’m waiting on a job to turn up.”
Oliver dreamed his wife was shaking him awake. “Tell, Tell,” she kept saying. He dreamed he was awake and she was leaning before him in her nightgown with her hair all undone and the room was lit with the cool, otherwordly glow of moonlight through the glass. The weight of her hand still lay on his shoulder. “Get up, Tell,” she said. “He ain’t come in. Willie ain’t, I heard him at the door a while ago but he ain’t come in.”
He got up and pulled on his overalls and shoes without putting on his socks. The dream was so vivid he didn’t know it was a dream. It was wintertime and he could feel the cold, stiff leather against his bare feet and the icy metal of his galluses against his naked shoulders. He did not know the hour but in a detached part of his mind he knew he was in a strange, clockless world set apart from time.
He went out the door and into the moonlit yard. The Mormon Springs road lay white and cold and dusted with moonlight. He went past the pear tree and onto the hardpan and stood for a moment undecided, he didn’t know which way to go. He turned back toward the house and she stood in the doorway watching him. The shadow of the porch fell across her, beheaded her with darkness, but he could see her eyes glowing out of the dark like cats’ eyes. He turned and went on toward the apple orchard.
Nothing looked right, by subtle increments everything was changing. He was venturing into a world going surreal before his eyes, reality was being stepped up, warped by heat. The bare branches of the apple trees writhed like trees from a province in dementia. A coarse whispering came from the orchard, furtive, conspiratorial, almost but not quite intelligible. Then he saw that the branches of the trees were alive with birds, curious dark birds he could not recognize, birds a fevered brain might hallucinate. Unfeathered salamandrine birds with strange lizardlike heads and skin textured like wet leather. He could see their yellow eyes about the trees like paired-off fireflies. The whispering increased in pitch, became intelligible. He stood transfixed by the hypnotic buzz of sound from the apple orchard. Willie, Willie, the birds were crying, over and over. Willie, Willie.
He was touched by a cold engendered by more than weather. He turned in the road, north, south, searching the silver fields for sight of the boy. Random stones gleamed like details in a mosaic. Weeds sheathed in ice were glass reeds in the moonlight. He began to walk aimlessly down the white road. He could hear a fluttering from the trees behind him as the birds took wing. Looking up, he could see dark shapes shifting patternlessly above him. A few alighted in the road and paced him with a ducklike gait he found repulsive and whirling he kicked viciously at one and it hissed like a snake and spread its unfeathered wings and stood its ground.
“Get,” he told it. “Get, Goddamn you.”
Willie, Willie, they were calling above him.
The bird had stopped at the edge of the road. Turning, he went on a few feet then looked back and the bird was following him, taking delicate, mincing steps as if it were tiptoeing. He went on through country he had known all his days that was slowly altering before his eyes and at length the road he had known faded out and the metamorphosis was complete: he was somewhere he had never been. A barren twilit world of winds and sounds.
The road began to descend toward some great declivity, an enormous pit like an amphitheater excavated out of the ground. When he reached the edge he paused and peered down. He stood in frozen awe. The bottom seemed hundreds of feet away. All he could see of the earth looked red and raw, freshly dug, as if all there was of the world anymore was this ravaged, bleeding ruin. He knew intuitively that he had been following this moonlit road all his life and that this was where it led. The pit was profound, imbued with meaning, and he felt he must absorb every detaiclass="underline" he was being shown something of the workings of life. He must remember this place and whatever tale it had to tell. The birds began to alight in the dead vestiges of trees on the precipice of the pit. The trees leaned as if they bore the weight of some perpetual wind. The chanting from the birds ceased and turning at the sudden silence he saw multitudes of them descending, their leathery wings beating the air.
He began to descend the sloping shoulder of the pit over icy whorls of frozen earth and bulldozer tracks seized in ice like something vague and prehistoric preserved for all time. In the bottom of the pit water had seeped and pooled and it had frozen white as milk. He went on. He could hear the thin crystalline breaking of ice beneath his feet and he was held by a sense of impending doom, an apprehension of things beyond his command, forced onward yet possessed of a foreknowledge of what was to be.
A rusting yellow bulldozer sat cocked long silent on a mound of earth. Veering toward it he thought he might ask the nature of all this destruction but beneath the dozer’s cowl the operator was an eyeless skeleton in leached khaki rags, a faded blue hardhat tilted rakishly on yellowed bone. A rusted black dinner bucket lashed to the cowl. Oliver turned without surprise and went toward the bottom.