Winer said something noncommittal and stared off across the river. The highway was running parallel with the water now and beyond the border of cypress and willow the water was cold and metalliclooking, choppy in the windy sun. Far and away to his right what looked like an island and rising from it some enormous circular structure of gray stone like a silo or lighthouse and past this farther till three great pillars brooding in the mist like pylons for a bridge no longer there. He did not inquire the purpose of any of this lest Motormouth be inspired toward further fabrication, for no one had ever heard Motormouth admit the existence of anything he did not know and he always had an answer for everything even if he had to make it up. Winer watched them vanish like something unknown on a foreign coast and they drove on past used-car lots with their sad pennants fluttering on guywires and past old tilting groceries and barns with their tin roofs advertising Bruton Snuff and Popcola and Groves’ Chill Tonic like fading hieroglyphs scribed by some prior race.
“Some of these old riverrats,” Motormouth mused. “These old boys work the barges and stay out a week or two at a time. You think they ain’t ready when they hit port? They’d as soon cut ye throat with a rusty pocketknife as look at ye. They make Hardin look like a home-ec teacher. You have to be careful you walk soft,” he cautioned Winer. “A boy like you ain’t never been out of the county could get in a lot of trouble around here.”
Coming into Clifton they stopped for breakfast and directions at a place called Mother Leona’s. Winer judged himself safe in any place named Mother Leona’s but he didn’t see her about, after all his eggs and homefries were dished up by a surlylooking man in dirty whites and a chef’s hat cocked on the back of his head.
“We down here lookin for work,” Motormouth volunteered.
“I ain’t hirin today,” the man said.
“No, we lookin for where they load the ties. We heard they was hirin.”
“That’d be down by the docks.”
“I guess so. We ain’t never done it but we’ll shore give her a whirl. We hard workers.”
“You don’t have to sell me,” the man said, lowering a basket of sliced potatoes into poppin grease. “I don’t do the hirin for that neither.”
Winer broke a biscuit open and paused suddenly with his butterladen knife. A perfectly intact candlefly, wings spread for flight, was seized in the snowy dough like an artifact from broken stone. He sat for a time studying it like an archaeologist pondering its significance or how it came to be there so halt in flight and at length he laid his bread and knife side.
Motormouth pushed his empty plate back, chewed, and swallowed. He drank coffee. “Where’s these here docks at?” he asked.
The counterman turned from the spitting grill as if he might inspect these outlanders more closely. “They generally always down by the river,” he said at length.
A mountain of crossties guided them to where the work progressed. Men were unjamming the ties with tiepicks and dragging them to where other workers loaded them onto a system of chutes that slid them to yet another crew in the hull of the barge. They stood for a time watching the men work, admiring the smooth efficiency with which the workers hefted the ties from the dock, the riverward giving his end of the two a small, neat spin just so onto the chute and the near one pushing with the same force each time and the tie gliding smoothly down the oiled chute to slam against the bulkhead of the barge. “Hell, they ain’t nothin to it,” Moormouth said. “Look at the way them fellers goes about it. Reckon who you ask?”
Winer didn’t reply. He was studying the ties. They were nine-by-twelve green oak he judged to be ten or twelve feet long and they had a distinctly heavy look about them despite the deceptive ease with which they were slung onto the chutes.
They approached the river. The barge rocked in the cold gray water, a wind out of the north behind them blew scraps of paper past them and aloft over the river like dirty stringless kites. Nameless birds foraged the choppy waters and beyond them the river’s farther shore looked blurred and unreal and no less bleak and drear than this one.
The barge was secured by hawsers tied to bits on the dock and it rocked against its cushion of old cartires strung together. Two men in the aft of the boat took the ties as they came off the chute and aligned them in stacks. The chutes seemed always to have a tie coming off, a tie sliding, another one being loaded on. An almost hypnotic ritual of economic motion. The workers were big men, heavily muscled even in this cold wind off the river they worked in their shirtsleeves.
“There’s a feller now we can ask,” Motormouth said.
A man wearing a yellow hardhat and carrying a clipboard was striding toward them across the pier. He had opened his mouth to speak when a cry from the barge gave him pause and he turned to see who had called out.
Winer had seen it. A tie cocked sideways and jammed the chute and a huge black man reached an expert hand to free it just as the next tie slammed into it with a loud thock. He stared for a moment in amazement at his hand from which the four fingers were severed at the second joint. Blood welled than ran down his arm into his sleeve and he sat down heavily in the water sloshing in the hull of the barge. “Goddman it,” the man in the yellow hard hat said. He laid the clipboard on the dock and his hardhat atop to hold the papers in the wind and swung down a rope ladder into the barge. The black man was leaning up against the bulkhead with his hand clutched between his knees. His eyes were closed and his face ashen and it wore an expression of stoic forbearance.
Winer and Motormouth stood uncertainly for a moment. The two men on the upper end of the chutes had ceased loading and now they hunkered and took out tobacco and began rolling cigarettes. “Course we don’t have to rush into nothin,” Motormouth said. He had taken a tentative step or two away from the river and toward the stores and cafes in town. “I guess we could study about it awhile.”
“Yeah, we could,” Winer said. “We could study about it a good long while.”
He’d sleep cold now and in the mornings find on the glass and metal of the Chrysler a rimpled rime of frost. Lying on his back Motormouth would stare upward a time into the ratty upholstery and then unfold himself, his distorted reflection in rustpocked chrome mocking him, a jerky caricature. The wind along the river these chill mornings would clash softly in the sere stalks of weeds, he’d hear it gently scuttling dislodged leaves against the car. Through the frosted glass there was little of the world he could see yet more of it than he wanted. He was peering into a world locked in the soft cold seize of ice.
Such mornings as these brought the bitter memories of winters past and he fell to thinking of walls and ceilings and flues. Of a porch ricked with seasoned wood and the smell of smoke sucked along the ridges. Of the soft length of her laid against him on December mornings. The way her hair looked in the morning, tousled as if she’d fallen asleep in a storm.
He drove past the house. It looked still and empty and he had no expectation of seeing her yet there she was, standing before the smokehouse door peering in, a sweater pulled about her shoulders. He slowed, looked all about. He could see no one else. No car or sign of one. He stopped. A core of something near fear lay in the pit of his stomach, anticipation and dread ran in his veins like oil and water.
It was cold in the front room as well, colder than in the spare light of the sun a musty chill of unused rooms and closed doors. A jumble of stovepipes littered the floor, a film of soot and ashes dusted the linoleum. He sighted up the flue, saw only the gunmetal sameness of the sky, half a bird’s nest perched precariously on a loosened brick. He was standing in the middle of the floor rubbing his hands together and looking about when she came through the kitchen door. She paused on the threshold and stood watching him.