Once this land was privately owned. Now it is owned by companies or conglomerates of companies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York. By people who have never seen it, are perhaps unaware even of its existence.
It was bought up in blocks by other companies in the first days of the previous century for next to nothing. It was rich in phosphate, in iron ore. There were boom times for a while. A town sprang up virtually overnight. Originally it was the county seat of Overton County, though the Harrikin itself extends over into two other adjoining counties. A railroad bisects it, but the track is unused, as are the roads, and honeysuckle and kudzu cover its rails with impunity. There was a company store, a jail, a post office. Graveyards, one black, one white. Flush times. The heads of these companies grew very rich. The miners subsisted. They made enough for their families to survive. Those with other inclinations made enough to support the whiskeymerchants and whores and cardsharks who had materialized the first payday by some intuition of money approaching magic and these selfsame cardsharks and whores when the mines were shut down vanished like rats scuttling down capsizing decks.
The earth was sunk with vertical shafts, with horizontal tunnels. Great pits were eaten to the surface with pick and shovel and machinery, and some of this machinery is there yet, rusting back into the earth.
When the mines closed and the railroad shut down the town died and the money quit the people left like the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities and all thatremained were the few families who’d refused to sell their land and itinerant squatters staking dubious claim to what no one else wanted and misanthropic misfits who felt some perverse kinship with this deserted, tortured land. Some of these folk did not, in a sense, exist. They paid no taxes, were listed on no courthouse rolls. They owned no Social Security numbers, having neither applied for nor received anything from the federal government, in fact only vaguely aware of its existence, its distant machinations only rumored to them. Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead.
The Harrikin grew wild. Trees sprouted up through the works of man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed some curious hybrid of earth and steel. Roads faded and the woods took them until there was nothing to show that wheels or hooves or feet had ever passed here. Brush and honeysuckle obscured the sunken shafts, and horses or whatever trod here might abruptly have what they’d taken for solid earth suddenly vanish beneath their feet. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, folks who thought they knew the woods lose their sense of direction in these woods, even compasses go fey and unreliable.
It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. It ripped away the roof of the old Perrie mansion that had stood since the eighteen-forties, and lesser houses it reduced to kindling wood or just whisked off to somewhere else. It snapped off trees and hurled them into hollows like flung jackstraws, and when it was gone the Harrikin was more of a maze than ever. Roads and paths were blocked, streams dammed and rerouted. The woods were full of deadfalls. Most of the folk who’d been dispossessed, and some who hadn’t, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck.
A time would come within twenty-five years when all this would be changed. When timber began to thin the companies who owned these half-forgotten properties realized their potential, and paper companies bought the timber and ravaged the land again and planted pine seedlings, and the Harrikin did not exist anymore.
But all this was not yet. When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protege, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.
Don’t he never sleep?
The rest indeed is silence.
BOOK TWO
A spring came out of a rocky hillside and rusted steel pipes virid with moss had been driven back into the rocks. There was a tin cup affixed to a cutoff sprout but Tyler drank from his cupped hands then washed his face in the cold water. All he could hear was the rushing water and the air was heady with the scent of peppermint.
He had come up a rainwashed gully through a clutter of floodleft debris, old bottomless buckets and washtubs and mudclogged cartires worn out so finally there were booted holes in them. The gully ascended in a tangle of blackberry briars and leveled out into a walnut grove, and he could see the back of a house. Whitewashed, respectable, middle-class. He moved to the cover of a shed and skirted a rotting grape arbor with gray deadlooking vines and past a curious machine from which wires appended to poles led to the house. He scaled a sedgecovered slope into the sun and went on to the summit and lay in the warm grass watching the house. Somewhere off in the distance a tardy cock crowed daybreak.
After a while a heavyset woman came out of the house carrying a dishpan. He judged her to be middleaged. She went purposefully up the roadway to a gardenspot andstooped and began to gather turnip greens.
He didn’t think there was anyone else about: there was no stock to see after, and the place seemed to be going to seed, as if there were no husband about to keep it in repair. He decided to chance it, he didn’t figure he really had a choice anyway. He went around the back side of the ridge and down to the shed again and up the back steps of the house. The door was ajar as if in standing invitation to whoever might chance by. There was only a screendoor, and that was unlatched.
A cool, serried gloom smelling of years, decay. The sun was faint and heatless through dirtspecked glass. He was in a storeroom stacked nigh to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of what looked like old farm magazines, seed catalogs, newspapers. Cases of empty fruitjars. He was looking for a larder or a kitchen, and this wasn’t it. He went cautiously out.
Into a hall smelling of lemon oil and floor wax. Doors stood open, and he peered in to see if there was anyone else about. A bedroom with a cherry fourposter bed. A picture in a heavy oval frame. From it a young couple stared at him across time with vaguely accusing eyes.
The kitchen had a window above the sink and it gave him a view of the yard but not the garden and he figured he better hurry. In a cupboard there was a stack of brown paper bags folded and laid up for reuse and he took one and began to search for food. Under a cloth on the table he found the remains of breakfast. Here was provender beyond his expectations: biscuits and leftover sausage patties and a pint jar of what appeared to be strawberry preserves. He dumped the sausages and bread into the bag and turned to look for more. In a piesafe he found a loaf of homebaked bread and twobeautifully browned pies. He slid one carefully into the bag, cradling it so as not to crush it, and turned about and stood a moment as if in indecision and then took the other one as well. He found a tin can half-full of ground coffee and took that and was already at the door and outward bound when the thought of the strawberry preserves struck him. He’d read once it was bad practice to shop on an empty stomach and so was forewarned. The strawberry preserves were his undoing. When he had them in the bag and had turned to leave there were heavy footsteps. A shadow darkened the room. There was only one door out of the kitchen and the heavyset woman was standing in it staring at him with eyes huge with surprise.