A decision must be made. If the Grand Crown could not be dragged or hoisted, how to get it to the greenhouse? Piece by piece, and why not, since she had to dismantle it anyway to get it into the potting room? Then I will, disassemble it piece by piece, clean and oil each bolt, polish the nickel, black the iron, wipe porcelain with a clean cloth. Then rebuild it in the potting room against the partition of double-hung sashes, open one to admit the drawbridge and connect the urn of a tower in the greenhouse proper — enough to keep the frost off her greens?
Screwed to the front, extending the length of the reservoir, oven and firebox, was what she could only think to be a towel rack, a heavy nickeled bar begrimed by grease and ash. No, not a rack for towels but for a wet wash on a rainy day! Unscrewing a can of Brasso ($2.05), which had an efficacious stink of ammonia and sulfur cream, she dabbed a clean rag (from a 1910 shirtwaist?) and scrubbed a length of bar. Under her hand the nickel winked in the sunlight like the sterling Ludean polished in the pantry on Saturday mornings.
She wrote in her notebook. For tomorrow: find rest of flue pipe in cellar. End of week: fit plastic pipe with sleeves and two elbows (one elbow under waterfall, other elbow over reservoir), string through laurels from waterfall to potting room (figure how to get pipe in without breaking a window: use hole in peak?). Slope is enough to permit a gravity flow yet gentle enough to rig a wire lift to stop flow: up equals stop, down equals flow.
The sun sank behind the pines. It must be four o’clock. Her back was cold. The dog stuck his muzzle under her knee. Let’s start moving inside, she said to dog and stove. Working fast now with her wrenches, she unbolted the reservoir. The copper-and-iron box weighed as much as she but she didn’t need hoist or creeper. She walked it, handling it downhill from corner to corner like the porter moving a steamer trunk from this very house. At the greenhouse porch she got it up (a hoist was too much trouble) and onto the creeper and zip, along silky cement to potting room. She eyed the sashes of the partition. Would the stove fit? Assuredly. The sashes worked. Better move stove from bottom up. Start with great nickel claw-and-ball feet, clean, reassemble, bolt to base, and build castle thereon stone by stone.
But, first, lay the Grand Crown over on its back, gently, using the block and tackle to pull it over and braking its fall with the half-inch nylon rappeled around the lonesome pine.
She looked at the sky. She figured she had a week.
VII
THE NEXT TWO HOURS passed as swiftly as if his secretary, Miss Nabors, had walked into his Wall Street office and given him his appointment calendar.
After dressing in jeans, T-shirt, windbreaker, and tennis shoes, he went into the bathroom and emptied a bottle of Placidyl capsules into his hand, two handsful, one for each pants pocket — it was Vance Battle’s prescription for his insomnia but he discovered he preferred lying awake — wrapped the empty bottle in toilet paper, crushed it with the Greener stock, flushed shards and paper. The plastic top wouldn’t flush, so he opened a window and shied it into the gorge.
I could use about forty-eight hours’ sleep, he thought. Then I’ll be ready to wait and watch and listen. Then I’ll take another little nap. And so on, until—
Sticking the flashlight in his hip pocket under the wind-breaker, he scooped up envelopes, went out into the hall and down the back stairs to the garage, got into his Mercedes, and drove to town.
He bought four fresh alkaline batteries for his flashlight, a roll of aluminum foil, a manila envelope, visited the post office, where he bought stamps from Mrs. Guthrie and had a conversation about the fog. You look like you’re going fishing, said Mrs. Guthrie.
He was surprised. Fishing? Yes, something like that, he said. A fishing trip. She would report the conversation later, it and his cheerfulness.
Another thirty minutes and the envelope had been stamped and dropped in the slot, the Mercedes parked behind the bus station, and he was walking down the middle of number-fifteen fairway of the back eighteen.
The fog surrounded him. A hole in the cloud traveled with him. As he walked, the hole seemed to be still while the earth turned under him. Though he could not see the rough on either side, there was never a moment when he did not know exactly where he was. By dead reckoning he came onto number-seventeen tee, which loomed suddenly in the cloud like an Indian mound. The golf links was like his own soul’s terrain. Every inch of it was a place where he had been before. He knew it like a lover knows his beloved’s body. It was possible without looking to know that one particular spot on the tee, a patch of grass near the right blue marker, would be harder used than the rest, have more scuff marks, broken tees, tee holes, because the fairway doglegged to the left, so drivers teed up as far to the right as they could. He stopped and leaned over. It was even possible, he noted without surprise, to identify the exact spot, a tuft of grass with a bare spot behind it shaped like Arkansas, where he had teed up three days ago.
He walked straight to a pine tree near the edge of the rough. The trunk was bent into a flattened S. There had been a tournament over the weekend. Golf balls had bombarded the tree. Chips of bark littered the grass at the base.
The shell of a cicada hard as a gold bug had been clamped to the tree for three years. His fingers felt the slit in the shell where the creature had escaped.
It seemed to grow colder. Something else was different. Perhaps it was the silence that pressed into his ears. He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock.
It was only at this moment that he remembered his tryst in the summerhouse with Kitty. It was enough to bring him up short, but after shaking his head and smiling at it — perceiving, let us admit it, a mild pang of regret in the groin — he was on his way again. Who knows, he thought smiling, in one week, two weeks, I may be sitting with Kitty in the summerhouse enjoying the fall sunshine. Kitty’s ass will keep for two weeks or for eternity.
Without further ado he walked quickly to the out-of-bounds fence, straddled it (no more ducking through), men moving more slowly, sidling through briars and laurel, came straight to the sassafras no larger than a shrub growing at the base of the ridge. It had fewer leaves now and they were more speckled. He picked a small one shaped not like a three-fingered hand but like a mitt with a thumb. As he sucked the stem, air stirred against his cheek. It was not cooler or warmer than the cloud but different. The cloud smelled of complex leaf rots, bark tannin, and funky anise from the gorge. The cave air was simpler. It had a wet metal culvert smell. He opened his mouth. Clean ferrous ions blew onto his tongue.
Pushing aside a branch of sassafras, he stepped into an inconsequential niche of rock which would have appeared as no more than a lichened recess even without the sassafras, then squeezed sideways through a crack (the Confederates were thinner, even, than he), in the same movement turning past a lip of rock as easily as stepping into the jogged entrance of a fun house, and was in the cave. It pleased him that the great cave should have such a banal entrance. Far below in the valley at the proper entrance to Lost Cove cave an underground river flowed into the sunlight through a cathedral arch of stone.
You disappeared, one second standing in a lichened niche, then a little jog and into the cave. Lewis Peckham said the entrance was too neat and therefore probably man-made or at least man-shaped, by the Confederates as an escape hole in case they got hemmed up below.