She sat in a contemplative silence. Summer nights you can still hear them parties. People talkin and laughin far off so faint you can’t make out what they’re sayin. Some warm nights I set out here and listen to their dance music. You believe that?
I didn’t come all this way to call you a liar.
She laid the tree aside and dusted honeysuckle leaves from her dress. Come on in the house, she said. It’s about time for a bite of supper.
They entered a dark and cloistral gloom. More wood here. A raw odor of its curing. All manner of handles stood about where she’d leant them. As if she were driven to make new all the world’s broken tools. A path wound through the wood like a maze and at its end a shadowed leanto kitchen.
He’d thought himself hungry but not so much as he thought. Supper was some type of cold greens boiled without grease or salt and the bread was unleavened as if she held to some vow of abstinence. She watched him while he chewed this tasteless mess in silence.
How come this feller wantin to kill you?
An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.
I’m a old woman but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for the business. Folks dyin all the time, it’s the way of the world. Help yourself to them greens there.
Tyler finished and swallowed with an effort and pushed his plate aside a fraction of an inch with a thumb. He hoped she didn’t try forcing the greens on him and she didn’t. She rose and covered the pan with a cloth and set it atop the cookstove, perhaps for another meal.
You want me to tell your fortune?
I reckon not. I’ll just play them like they fall.
Life ain’t no card game. Be forewarned. I’d not charge you. Usually I get a dollar, but yours I’d do for nothin.
I reckon not.
Let me give you the dollar then.
He laughed nervously. How come you want to tell my fortune?
There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.
Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know.
I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.
You can’t read people, skim through them like books and lay them aside. All the fortune I need to know is how to get to a road. Can you not tell me how to find the railroad tracks?
There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t ye?
No. This fella that you sell your vines to, does he pick them up? How do you get to the railroad tracks?
I don’t. There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.
I told you I was just lost.
You’re lost, all right. Now I wonder if I ain’t myself.
He had risen and made ready to go. You could tell me where the road goes.
You said you came in on it. If one way come here and it don’t go but two ways, then the other way must be the one you want. Ain’t that right? I never did anything to you that I know of.
There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.
There’s a man going to be looking for me, Tyler said. If he comes here don’t let him in.
My enemies gives me plenty of leeway to pass, she said. I don’t expect yourn to be any different.
He wound his way back through the dusty maze into the wan winter light. She had followed him to the door as if to ensure that he kept going. He took up the rifle. I’ll see you, he said.
She did not reply, and he wound through the nettles past the dark cathedral where the ghosts held sway and back down the slope into the bottomland.
A gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines and watched Sutter above jagged black carvings of scrimshaw trees. His shadow appeared palely beneath his feet like some faint image developing on a photographic plate. He came out of the hollow following his shadow through the slashes of dreaming trees past the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence until he came upon the toy house with its windows blind save the refracted moon and its weathered walls bleached with silver light. Its dark tin roof seemed the very negation of light.
On the porch with fist upraised to pound on the door he thought he heard the furtive pitterpatter of hasty retreatingfootsteps. Some creature of the night perhaps who’d sensed his presence and struck for deeper timber.
He lowered the poised hand and twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open onto a darkness so profound the house seemed to store nothing save the dark itself. He stepped into the room and vanished, the dark simply took him. He stood invisible beside the framed oblong of moonlight. He stood holding his breath, listening. When he breathed again he could smell the room, stale smoke and kerosene and years of old cookery. The odor of curing wood and tinned mackerel and the sour musty female smell of the old witchwoman herself. Nothing of humanity here, the smell was the smell of some old vixen fox’s lair.
Young Tyler, Sutter called. If you’re here come on out. I just need to talk to you.
Silence. He tilted out a kitchen match and struck it on a thumbnail. Orange light filled the room, objects leapt out at him, shadows reared and subsided about the walls as if Sutter had suddenly unleashed into the room dozens of his darker selves.
There was a kerosene lamp atop an old sewing machine cabinet and he unglobed and lit it. Warm yellow light banished the shadows and the first thing he saw was the ricked wood. Goddamned if you wasn’t expectin a cold spell, he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh and unreal in the silence and it seemed to startle him.
With the light held aloft like a smoking torch he searched the house without expecting to find anyone and his expectations were fulfilled. He peered into cabinets and under beds and he prowled through cardboard boxes. The old witchwoman seemed to possess even less of the world’s goodsthan Sutter did and he deemed himself much the better housekeeper. The back door stood ajar to the night and all there was beyond it were the stygian trees. Long gone ain’t she lucky, he sang softly to himself. She’s a long gone mama from Tennessee. He shook his head and grinned ruefully to himself and turned back to the kitchen.
He found two tins of sardines and half a box of soda crackers. He pocketed the flat tins and tucked the crackers under an arm. He found a pone of cornbread so hard it seemed some sort of weird fossil or a flat cylinder of petrified wood and when he hurled it against the wall it rang like stone and spun onto the floor unbroken. I bet a man could drive a nail with that son of a bitch, he said. He found a little coffee in a tin and he took that and then he went out.
He paused by the ruined mansion and sat on the stone doorstep and popped the key on a tin of the sardines and opened them. He laid sardines side by side on one cracker and topped them with another making dainty little sandwiches. He ate until he’d finished one tin and then he lit a cigarette and sat smoking. Grinning to himself he imagined the old woman fleeing soundless out the back door and running sylphlike and blind into the bowering trees. Up and gone at just the imminence of his footstep, gone before his upraised foot touched the plank floor.