He stood leaning into the rain, hands on knees, his sides heaving. The door opened a crack and yellow light spilled into the yard and in this light rain fell plumb and silver.
“Dallas?” Pearl said
He could hear the rain beating on the tin. The knife lay gleaming in the mud beneath his feet, half open. “Shut the fuckin door,” he said. The light disappeared. He picked up the knife and wiped it on his trousers. He closed and pocketed it, stood trying to think what to do.
Pale light from the weeping heaves. By this light Winer’s face upturned, right eye staring up unblinking, left a black hole, long hair fanned out sliding through the mud, head leaving a weallike track in the slick yard. Mouth open a little, a glint of spare light off the gold teeth.
Hardin had him by the feet, a leg under each arm, walking backward through the yard toward the spring. Winer was a big man and every few minutes Hardin had to stop and rest and catch his breath. He rested hunkered over the dead man’s feet and scanning the road for car lights. Then rising and taking up the legs again and hurrying until they were out of sight in the brush and he could breathe a little easier. The going was rough until they reached the limestone lip of the pit and he moved faster here, Winer’s head bouncing a little across the uneven stone floor. He dragged him through the honeysuckle to the lip of the pit and paused to go through his pockets, storing in his own such miserable chattel as he found. A handful of linty change, a cheap pocketwatch from which his ear could detect no ticking. Little it seemed to him to show for a life as long as Winer’s.
“Get your last look at this world,” he told Winer. “It sure looks dark in the next one.”
The depth of the abyss looked beyond blackness. Like a pit cleft to a stygian world leaking off blackness to fill this world as well. He rolled the body with a booted foot, the legs swinging over the precipice, the body overbalancing on the edge in illusory erectness and the startled face fixing Hardin with a fierce and impotent eye then vanishing.
Book One. 1943
1
William Tell Oliver came out of the woods into a field the Mormons used to tend but which was now grown over in sassafras and cedar, the slim saplings of sassafras thick as his arm, but not as thick as his arms had once been, he reminded himself, he was old and his flesh had fallen away some. He didn’t dwell on that though, reckoned himself lucky to still be around.
Oliver was carrying a flour sack weighted with ginseng across his shoulder. His blue shirt was darkened in the back and plastered to his shoulders with sweat. It had been still in the thick summer woods and no breeze stirred there, but here where the field ran downhill in a stumbling landscape of brush and stone a wind blew out of the west and tilted the saplings and ran through the leaves bright as quicksilver.
He halted in the shade of a cottonwood and unslung the bag and dropped it and looked up, shading his eyes. The sky was a hot cobalt blue but westward darkened in indelible increments to a lusterless metallic sky, the color he imagined the seas might turn before a storm. A few birds passed beneath him with shrill, broken cries as if they divined some threat implicit in the weather and he thought it might blow up a rain.
Standing so with his upper face in the shadow, the full weight of the sun fell on his chin and throat, skin so weathered and browned by the sun and aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years that it had taken on the texture of some material finally immutable to the changes of the weather, as if it had been evolving all his life and ultimately became a kind of whang leather impervious to time or elements, corded, seamed, and scarred, pulled tight over the cheekbones and blade of nose that gave his face an Indian cast.
He hunkered in a shady spot to rest. He had been smoking his pipe in the woods to keep the gnats away from his eyes and now he took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the fire from it against a stone, taking care that each spark was extinguished, for the woods and fields had been dry since spring and he was a man of a thousand small cautions.
Below him Hovington’s tin roof baking in the sun, the bright stream passing beneath the road, the road itself a meandering red slash bleeding through a world of green. He sat quietly, getting his breath back, an old man watching with infinite patience, no more of hurry about him than you would find in a tree or a stone. The place was changing. A new structure had been built of concrete blocks and its whitewash gleamed harshly. New-looking light poles followed the road now, electrical, wires strung to the end of the house.
Yet some of strain of second sight from Celtic forebears saw in the lineaments of house and barn the graduations of hill and slope and road, something more profound, some subtle aberration of each line, some infinitesimal deviation from the norm that separated this place from any other, made it sacred, or cursed: the Mormons had proclaimed it sacred, built their church there. The whitecaps had cursed it with the annihilation, with the rows of graves their descendants would just as soon the roads grew over.
All his life he’d heard folks say he saw lights here at night, they called them mineral lights, corpse candles. Eerie balls of phosphorescence rising over the money the Mormons had buried. Oliver doubted there was any money buried or ever had been, but he smiled when he remembered Lyle Hodges. Hodges had owned the place before Hovington bought it for the back taxes and Oliver guessed that Hodges had dug up every square foot of the place malleable with pick and shovel. It had been his vocation, his trade, he went out with his tools every morning the weather permitted, working at it the way a man might work a farm or a job in a factory, studying by night his queer homemade maps and obscure markings, digging like a demented archaeologist searching for the regimen and order of elder times while his wife and son tried to coax crops from the soil that would ultimately produce only untaxed whiskey. Even now Oliver could have found the old man’s brush-covered mounds of earth, pockmarked craters like half-finished graves abandoned in hasty flight. Hodges worked on until his death, his dreams sustaining him. Oliver reckoned there was nothing wrong with that though his own dreams had not weathered as well.
In the upper left quadrant of his vision a car appeared towing a rising wake of white dust along the drybaked road. As it drew nearer he recognized it as a police car and some intimation of drama touched him, the prelude to some story, and he seated himself to watch.
It was a silent tableau that unfolded below him: the car stopped in Hovington’s (Hardin’s, he thought) frontyard and a deputy named Cooper got out, stood for a moment in the timeless way cops stand, sauntered to the porch with a halfarrogant and halfdeferential. Hardin came out. They stood talking for a minute while the deputy gestured excitedly with his hands, apparently conveying some information of importance though no word of it reached the old man’s ears.
He didn’t need it anyway. Hardin took out his wallet and counted money into Cooper’s waiting hands. Well, well, Oliver thought, he just might see a show here. Oliver was never surprised anymore and sometimes thought he’d seen all there was to see, but nonetheless he remained beneath the cottonwood watching. He took a flat pint bottle out of his pocket and rinsed his mouth with the tepid water, spat, drank. He thought vaguely of the cold spring behind his house but he was loath to leave.