That night Weiss took him home. “There’s nothing else do to inside,” he said. “If this mess is still going on in the morning don’t even bother to come out. I can feed myself. There’s no point in soaking yourself getting here just to wait until feeding time.”
The creek was already yellow and ominiouslooking and had picked up speed and small sticks and debris that spun in gouts of foam. The branch behind Oliver’s house came out of its banks and fanned into his piglot, festooning fenceposts and saplings with drifts of dead brush and cartires that looked like buoys left to navigate a world going to water, and from where he stood in the hall of the barn he could see it lapping upward out of the hollow.
A disgusted Dallas Hardin counted two days’ receipts and grew tired of the company of Pearl and the girl Amber Rose and went out into the rain and stood on the lip of the pit and it seemed to him that he could hear turbulent waters deep in the earth. A change in the earth’s pulse, a quickening, a curious occult change. He looked up at the leaden sky. He looked west and there was just more of the same as if the earth’s weather had coalesced in this mode. “Then rain some more, by God,” he told it.
It did. The third day the bridge between Mormon Springs and town wrenched free of its concrete pylons with shrieking of timbers and lurched into the canefield at the creek’s edge spinning lazily in the calm eddies, drifting into the swift mainstream of the creek, where it picked up speed and went spinning crazily downstream like a calliope snapped free of its moorings. Half the road was underwater now and Oliver could sit on his front porch and look off into a vast wet world, a stretch of muddy water reaching all the way across the field to the creek unbroken save by the treetrunks and the tips of the brush. He’d had to move the goats to higher ground and set pans and tincans under leaks he hadn’t even known his house had. He sat on his porch like some grim and hopedrained survivor awaiting rescue or the ultimate cessation of the waters.
Winer had followed the ridge down through the woods. “Did you ever see it rain like this?” he asked the old man.
“I expect I have,” Oliver said. “I don’t know as I’ve ever seen it keep it up this long though.”
Hardin watched the water in the branch rise. A thin line of foamy spray strung over the rim of the pit and increased even as he watched. When he came back out an hour later the hollow was filled with a rushing perpetual thunder and he could not even approach the abyss. A stream of muddy yellow water six or eight feet wide cascaded out of the hollow and he could hear it boiling and churning far down in the pit.
Later on the fourth day Hardin looked up toward the hillside where a quartet of dark and sodden figures hailed him. Four foolhardy souls driven by challenge or thirst to walk the six miles made twelve or more by twisting and turning required to keep to the ridges and out of the waterglutted roads and hollows.
These travelers were the three De Preist brothers and a young whore named Bledsoe they had picked up somewhere. They wanted something to drink.
“Wolf ain’t got a drop,” they told him. “Sold out to the last dram and can’t get no more.”
They drank up what money they had and then a halfpint. Hardin set the De Preists to gather firewood for when the day grew chill. While they cut lengths of rotten planking and last year’s beanstalks and old sodden rails deposited by floodwaters the whore sat steaming by the fire and plaited her hair with a kind of demure and drunken dignity.
The kept saying they guessed they’d better get on but they never left. Like cats they slept on the floor before the fire and like cats fell to fighting over the whore sometime deep in the night. Great thumpings arose, overturnings of furniture, chairs thrown against the wall. Outraged and squalling and swearing to Hardin leapt naked from the bed and drove them to the last brother into the rain at gunpoint, not even letting them shelter on the porch but backing them down the steps into the gray drizzle and going back inside thumbbolted the door.
They made peace among themselves and conspired to burn Hardin out but possessed not a dry match amongst them. The youngest spent a drunken hour trying to strike sparks with a pocketknife and piece of flint. At last they gave up and retreated to the barn and left at first light, sullen and hungover, the whore abandoned.
The old man was asleep worrying some old dream when the rain ceased and when it did he awoke immediately. Water was dripping sporadically into a coffee can he’d set under a leak, then that ceased too he could hear the creek. He arose from the swing he’d been catnapping in. In the west a band of clear sky lay above the treeline, a thin crescent of sun gleaming on the clouds above it. The clouds were the color of gold and they gleamed like something hammered from burnished metal.
Wearing an old black coat and a straw hat he’d resurrected from somewhere Oliver looked like a scarecrow made clumsily animate. Carrying an enamel waterbucket he crossed his juryrigged system of planks spanning the stream’s meanderings, at last just giving up and wading in, the water swirling cold as ice about his thighs. “Waistdeep in water and havin to tote a bucket for more,” he complained to himself. “If that ain’t the beat.”
Chestnut boards nailed in a V and shoved into an orifice in the limestone bluff fed the water into the springbox. The water was cold and virid. Mossgreen, it swirled against the lichened cedar planking of the springbox. Oliver stood immersed in the roar of water, the thousand seepings and drippings of a veritable mountain of water loosely contained by the fissured limestone, the continuous roar of the falls above him. It was deep shade here, cool, and dark. The perpetually wet earth was a ferment of watercress and the air drugged with peppermint. He set the bucket down by his feet and leaned forward, his hands cupping his knees. He peered into the springbox.
He’d caught a flash of white, not gleaming but dull like the old discolored ivory. It was like peering into deep seas. From the shadows of the springbox slow strands of moss and fern waved like seaweed, echoed the slow circular movement of water. In these dark depths the object turned, winked a bright and momentary gleam of gold from beneath the near-opaque surface. He reached into the water.
He held in his hands a human skull. It was impacted with moss and mud, a salamander curled in an eyesocket, periwinkles clinging like leeches to the worn bone. Bright shards of moss clung to the cranium like perverse green hair. He turned it in his hands. A chunk of the occipital bone had been blown away seemingly by some internal force, the brain itself exploding and breaking the confines of the skull. He turned it again so that it seemed to mock him, its jaw locked in a mirthless grin, the two gold teeth fey and winsome among the slime and lichens.
It was concrete, irrevocable. Tangible vestige of old violence from chasms and channels so far beneath his feet light was not even rumored. To his hands. Mute sacrifice from the well of the world. He felt besieged by knowledge he had not sought and did not want. The past eddied and swirled about him as the waters had beleaguered the skull. For a bright moment he felt omnipotent, the years rolled by had opened a door and permitted him momentary passage through it, he knew he possessed knowledge denied all the world, save one other, but he had no idea what to do with it.
The wagon had stopped in the yard. Pearl turned, the gauzy window curtain strung from her hand. She was heavier these years and her placid face bore few traces of her former bovine prettiness.
“They comin in,” she whispered.