“Get that lot gate open,” he told the girl. “Now.” The two mares had ceased worrying the bean vines and stood watching the stallion. After a moment one of them lifted her head and took a tentative step follow him.
Such a fence as it was, they were in it. Hardin and the girl fed them cracked corn and more sweetfeed and then stood by the fence watching them eat. The fence seemed held together more by honeysuckle vines and cowitch than by wire and half the posts were rotting and canted and held up by the towering pyramids of poisonoak that clotted them.
Wymer hunkered in the shadow of the barn wiping his face with his handkerchief. Hardin reached him a cigarette and Wymer took it and stuck it in his mouth. When he made no move to light it Hardin proffered the gold lighter.
“Who do you reckon they belong to, Wymer?”
“Nobody around here got any Morgans but them Blalock boys over on Harrikan. They got to belong to them.”
“Man owns horseflesh like that ought to tend his fences.”
Wymer gestured with his cigarette. “You won’t keep em in there.”
“I will when you get through patchin it and proppin them posts and loopin me three strands of bobwire around it,” Hardin said.
“Lord God,” Wymer said. He peered toward the sky as if beseeching the intervention of some more authoritative word. The sun was in ascension now and the sky was a hot, quaking blue, it seemed to pulse like molten metal. Against the deep void a hawk wheeled arrogantly, jays came to tease it and it rose effortlessly on the updrafts from the hollow like an intricately crafted kite, climbed until it was only a speck moving against the infinite blue.
Hardin put an arm about Wymer’s shoulders. “Now, it won’t be so bad,” he told him consolingly. “It won’ take long and while you’re doin it you know what I’m goin to do? I’m goin to take a case of beer and put it in the freezer, and it’ll be there icin down just waitin on you.”
Wymer didn’t say anything. He just stood there staring at the leaning fenceposts.
“You tell Pearl I said to give you some money and take that truck and go get two rolls of bobwire.”
“Why, I ain’t even got no license,” Wymer protested.
“I never knowed one was required to buy bobwire,” Hardin said.
“It likes to grow on the north slope of a hill,” Oliver told him. “Shadier there I reckon. It’s funny stuff, some places it’ll grow and some places it won’t. And it don’t come up ever year. You won’t find it none in no pineywoods or in a honeysuckle thicket. Lots of times you’ll find sang up on a hillside from where a branch runs. But then lots of times you won’t.”
Winer followed the old man down a steep hillside, Oliver negotiating his way tree to tree, pausing to point with his stick toward an arrowheadedshaped fern.
“See that? Now, that’s a pointer. Where you find that you’ll generally find some sang though it ain’t no ironclad guarantee, it just grows in the same kind of ground sang does.”
They had been out since daylight and Winer’s legs ached from clambering up and down the hillsides and he did not how the old man held up. He was agile as one of his goats and he seemed possessed by a curious sense of excitement.
“It’s like gambin or drinkin or runnin women of whatever you get habited to,” he had told Winer. “You get started huntin sang and it just gets in your blood.”
Oliver paused, peering groundward. “Come here a minute, boy.”
Winer came up beside him. Oliver was pointing out with his snake stick a plant growing in the shade of a chestnut oak. He dropped the point of his stick back against the earth and rested his weight on it.
“What would you say that was there?”
Winer laid his sack aside and knelt to the earth, raking back the leaves and dark loan from around the delicate stem of the plant. He studied the wilted top he carried for reference.
“It’s ginseng,” he said.
“Are you right sure now?”
“Well, its looks like it.” He studied his top some more. “Sure I’m sure.”
Oliver grinned. “That’s just old jellico,” he said. “See how limbs grow out of the stems on it? One here and one there? Now look at ye ginseng. See how them limbs grows out right even with one another? That’s how ye tell it.”
“Well, it looks like it to me.”
“It ain’t though. Folks dig some peculiar things thinking it’s ginseng. Back in the Depression it couldn’t stalk peep out of the ground without there was somebody there waitin on it. I never like to dig it myself fore it sheds it berries. That way you always got young comin along.”
“It must have been hard to learn to recognize it.”
“No. And once you do learn nothin else looks exactly like it. You can spot it as far as you can see it. Though I do remember old man Hovington when he was a boy dug half a tow sack of poisonoak fore he learned the difference. He found out in two-three days. He might never’ve learnt sang but I bet he knowed poisonoak from then on.”
They went on under the lowering branches of a chestnut oak, gentle wind out of the south stirring the leaves. The woods smelled yellow and brittle. The hollow was deep and below them Winer could hear the rush of water over stone. Occasionally the old man would stop and punch a hole in the loam with his stick and drop in one the reddish-brown berries he carried.
“Nature’s a funny thing,” he said thoughtfully. “Now, you take that jellico. It’s like sang but it ain’t. It grows in the same kind of ground and it looks about like it. Everything in nature’s got a twin and jellico’s sang’s twin. I don’t know for what reason. Protection maybe. Whoever laid things out make it look that way so some folks’d go ahead and dig it up and let the sang be, where it wouldn’t die out. Sort of like iron pyrites, you know, fool’s gold. You could learn a lesson in all this was you lookin for one.”
Winer didn’t say anything.
“Now, I know you at a age where you don’t want folks teachin you lessons. But you’ll learn em sometime and this here’s the easy way. Sometime up ahead you’ll think you found what you been lookin for. Lord God, you’ll think. What a mess of ginseng. You’ll fly in and dig it up thinkin you really got somethin. But you won’t. All you’ll have it a sack of this old jellico.”
“The whitecaps came down this ridge right about here,” Oliver said, pointing toward the stony sedgefield. Below him Winer could see Hovington’s house and outbuildings, the corncrib almost swallowed in a riot of pokeroot. “Them Mormons had their church built down some from where the spring is and I reckon two or three brush arbors and lean-tos or some such. The old foundation pillars is I guess still there.”
“Why did they do it anyway?”
“Lord, boy, I don’t know. I long give up on wonderin why folks do all the things they do.” He hunkered in the windy sedge, began absentmindedly to massage his stiff knee. “Though guess like everthing else it was a number of things. I guess they was drinkin a little and just wanted to raise hell. The Mormons was a different breed of cat too and I reckon bein different’s always had its occupational hazards around here. And you got a bunch of the old hardankles like used to be around here together, specially with pillowcases to hide who they are and you need to make sure wherever you are’s got a back door to it.”