Authors: William Gay
William Tell Oliver came out of the woods into a field the Mormons used to tend but which was now grown over in sassafras and cedar, the slim saplings of sassafras thick as his arm, but not as thick as his arms had once been, he reminded himself, he was old and his flesh had fallen away some. He didn’t dwell on that though, reckoned himself lucky to still be around.
Oliver was carrying a flour sack weighted with ginseng across his shoulder. His blue shirt was darkened in the back and plastered to his shoulders with sweat. It had been still in the thick summer woods and no breeze stirred there, but here where the field ran downhill in a stumbling landscape of brush and stone a wind blew out of the west and tilted the saplings and ran through the leaves bright as quicksilver.
He halted in the shade of a cottonwood and unslung the bag and dropped it and looked up, shading his eyes. The sky was a hot cobalt blue but westward darkened in indelible increments to a lusterless metallic sky, the color he imagined the seas might turn before a storm. A few birds passed beneath him with shrill, broken cries as if they divined some threat implicit in the weather and he thought it might blow up a rain.
Standing so with his upper face in the shadow, the full weight of the sun fell on his chin and throat, skin so weathered and browned by the sun and aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years that it had taken on the texture of some material finally immutable to the changes of the weather, as if it had been evolving all his life and ultimately became a kind of whang leather impervious to time or elements, corded, seamed, and scarred, pulled tight over the cheekbones and blade of nose that gave his face an Indian cast.
He hunkered in a shady spot to rest. He had been smoking his pipe in the woods to keep the gnats away from his eyes and now he took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the fire from it against a stone, taking care that each spark was extinguished, for the woods and fields had been dry since spring and he was a man of a thousand small cautions.
Below him Hovington’s tin roof baking in the sun, the bright stream passing beneath the road, the road itself a meandering red slash bleeding through a world of green. He sat quietly, getting his breath back, an old man watching with infinite patience, no more of hurry about him than you would find in a tree or a stone. The place was changing. A new structure had been built of concrete blocks and its whitewash gleamed harshly. New-looking light poles followed the road now, electrical, wires strung to the end of the house.
Yet some of strain of second sight from Celtic forebears saw in the lineaments of house and barn the graduations of hill and slope and road, something more profound, some subtle aberration of each line, some infinitesimal deviation from the norm that separated this place from any other, made it sacred, or cursed: the Mormons had proclaimed it sacred, built their church there. The whitecaps had cursed it with the annihilation, with the rows of graves their descendants would just as soon the roads grew over.
All his life he’d heard folks say he saw lights here at night, they called them mineral lights, corpse candles. Eerie balls of phosphorescence rising over the money the Mormons had buried. Oliver doubted there was any money buried or ever had been, but he smiled when he remembered Lyle Hodges. Hodges had owned the place before Hovington bought it for the back taxes and Oliver guessed that Hodges had dug up every square foot of the place malleable with pick and shovel. It had been his vocation, his trade, he went out with his tools every morning the weather permitted, working at it the way a man might work a farm or a job in a factory, studying by night his queer homemade maps and obscure markings, digging like a demented archaeologist searching for the regimen and order of elder times while his wife and son tried to coax crops from the soil that would ultimately produce only untaxed whiskey. Even now Oliver could have found the old man’s brush-covered mounds of earth, pockmarked craters like half-finished graves abandoned in hasty flight. Hodges worked on until his death, his dreams sustaining him. Oliver reckoned there was nothing wrong with that though his own dreams had not weathered as well.
In the upper left quadrant of his vision a car appeared towing a rising wake of white dust along the drybaked road. As it drew nearer he recognized it as a police car and some intimation of drama touched him, the prelude to some story, and he seated himself to watch.
It was a silent tableau that unfolded below him: the car stopped in Hovington’s (Hardin’s, he thought) frontyard and a deputy named Cooper got out, stood for a moment in the timeless way cops stand, sauntered to the porch with a halfarrogant and halfdeferential. Hardin came out. They stood talking for a minute while the deputy gestured excitedly with his hands, apparently conveying some information of importance though no word of it reached the old man’s ears.
He didn’t need it anyway. Hardin took out his wallet and counted money into Cooper’s waiting hands. Well, well, Oliver thought, he just might see a show here. Oliver was never surprised anymore and sometimes thought he’d seen all there was to see, but nonetheless he remained beneath the cottonwood watching. He took a flat pint bottle out of his pocket and rinsed his mouth with the tepid water, spat, drank. He thought vaguely of the cold spring behind his house but he was loath to leave.
The police car left. Almost immediately the hollow was vibratory with activity, a hornet’s nest slammed with a stone: Hardin loped across the yard to the sleek black Packard and cranked it and backed it to the porch’s edge, got out with the motor running, all four doors standing open, and unlocked the turtledeck and raised it. Pearl came through the door of the house with a case of half-pints, stowed it in the car. Hovington’s daughter, her long dark hair swinging with her motion, hurried out with a cardboard carton. Above the throaty idling of the Packard he could hear the almost constant slap of the screendoor and occasional voices, Hardin giving orders.
The back door sprang open and two uniformed soldiers and a woman staggered into the yard across it towards the thickening greenery around the abyss. One of the soldiers stumbled and fell into the branch and arose swearing and bright shards of the woman’s laughter fell on Oliver’s ears like a gift from a dubious source.
When the car was loaded Hardin and the girl got in and the car pulled away, going east, away from town.
After a while the breeze tilted the sedge toward him and dried the sweat on his face to a salty glaze he could feel drawing and tightening on his skin. Swift clouds chased shadows across the field. Here a bottleneck of sky showed between the hills, dark and light clouds lay in alternating layers like varicolored liquid that would not mix. The air chilled and he got up stiffly and took up his homecarved walking stick. As he arose he saw like some byproduct of imminent storm three cards pacing themselves along the roadbed, the sheriff and two cars of the Tennessee state troopers. As they wheeled into the yard there was a brief squall from the siren and they out and started walking rapidly towards the house. Thunder rumbled, faint and far off. Pearl came out and stood leaning against the porch support with her arms crossed, just waiting with an air of stoic forbearance. The old man shook his head and grinned to himself before he turned back toward the woods.
The trees were in motion, and the wind murmuring baleful in the clashing branches. Past their waving green tops what he could see of the sky was lowering, the air taking on a quality of depth, of weight, a world under roiled water. He moved through a heightened reality now, imbued with the urgency the air conveyed. Lightning flared silent and sourceless, eerily phosphorescent in the unreal green of the woods, and he quickened his steps, his movement stiff and jerky, a comic figure resurrected from an oldtime film.
He turned down a footpath, slowing his descent tree to tree, and warily crossed a barbed-wire fence into a flat bottom tangled with weeds and went up a path past his corncrib. As he came out into the barnlot he could see beyond the worn gray of his house the rain begin, past the pale dust of the road where a pastel field stretched to a darker border of woods he saw the horizon dissolve in a slanting wash of rain and the jerk of weeds advancing toward him portentous with motion.
He went hastily in the back door just as the first drops were singing on the tin. The room was dark and cluttered, shapes softly emergent like benign familiars from the cool ectoplasm of shadow. He emptied the flour sack of ginseng into an enamel washpan and turned to the stove, took from the warming closet a pan of beans. He dipped some onto a plate and too bread left from breakfast and set the plate atop the stove reservoir and filed an earthenware mug with cold coffee. He took up the plate again and with it and the coffee crossed from the long kitchen to the living room, stepping down where the level changed, through a room almost as dark as the kitchen, mismatched oddments of furniture, random debris beached by time.
He kicked open the latchless screen door and crossed onto the porch. The noise intensified, the porch was unceiled and the drumming on the tin precluded any other sound, even the wind whipping the trees seemed to do so in silence.
He ate in a swing hung by lengths of chain from the porch rafters and set the plate by his foot on the board floor when he had finished and slowly drank the coffee, staring past the earth yard where the road had gone to mud. The rain fell in sheets, sluicing off the unguttered tin, dissipated to spray the wind took. Thunder boomed almost directly above him, a few scattered pellets of rain fell and lay gleaming white as pearls in the mud. The trees were in constant motion, all the world he could see was animate. The chaff-filled air seemed electrical, unreal.
For a time he sat and listened to the soporific rain and when he had drunk the coffee he set the cup down atop the plate. The end of the swing nearest the yard darkened with moisture and drops of spray dampened the old man’s clothes but he did not move. The frenzy of the storm subsided and the intensity of the rain leveled off, the woods across the fields gained clarity like a scene viewed through clearing glass or turmoil constrained to stillness. They grew drowsy. Finally he slept, scarred big-knuckled hands resting on his knees, head leaning against a length of taut chain. From time to time his eyelids quivered with the progression of bits of dreams, dreams of when he was young, fiery dreams of iron furnaces and trains, dreams of walls and bars and time built as carefully as a mason might erect a structure in stone.
He awoke late in the afternoon, a dull drizzle leaden on the roof and the air smelling fresher and cooler. He took out a pouch of roughcut tobacco and began to pack his pipe. He lit it with a kitchen match and sat bemusedly smoking and letting the balance of the afternoon wear itself away. He had the air of someone used to waiting.
All there was to show he had ever farmed was a motley collection of old equipment about the yard, castoff discs and haymowers and archaic-looking scratchers like something abandoned by early man, all slowly dissolving into rust. It had been years but still he felt some affinity for the earth and the clocking of its seasons. There was something reassuring about the rain, what grass there was in his yard had been dying in circular patches and even the trees had begun to look stunned and wilted. He’d secretly suspected some turning away of the gods, unconcern or incompetence in high places.
Between four and five o’clock the Winer by came by and Oliver was still out to watch him pass. In actual fact he had been awaiting him. Time sometimes weighed heavily on his hands and there were weeks that passed when the only words he spoke were to young Nathan Winer. He watched the boy approach with obvious affection. He had had a son once himself and though the boy, had he lived, would be in middle age, he always thought of him as being Winer’s age.
When Winer was parallel with the house Oliver hailed him: “Boy, you better get in out of this mess.”
Winer was sodden, his outsize shirt and pants flopping and his hair plastered thinly to his skull. He obediently turned from the road and crossed the yard to the porch’s edge. In places the mud was shoemouth deep and sucked at his feet.
“Get in here out of that.”
“It’s too late now,” Winer said. “I don’t see how I can get any wetter.” But he stepped onto the porch and leaned against a support. He pushed his hair back out of his face and wiped his eyes on a dripping sleeve. There was a curiously temporary look about him as if he must soon be off. “It’s fell a flood, ain’t it?”
“Like a cow on a flat rock,” Oliver agreed. “You been workin out in this today?”
“No, we’ve been inside cleaning out the poultry house. Just shoveling it up and loading trailers.”
“Looks like old man Weiss could’ve run you home.”
“I guess he just didn’t think about it.”
“He’d’ve thought of it if he had to walk two miles through it,” the old man said. “You want somethin dry to put on?”
“It’d just get wet again. Anyway, it don’t bother me. I don’t reckon I’ll melt, I never have.”
“Still, it wouldn’t’ve hurt him. I had a car I’d take ye myself but I never owned one.”
“I don’t mind walking.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it hurts a man, I’ve done it all my life. Or so far anyway. You want me to heat up the coffee?”
“I got to get on. It’s getting dark early tonight. Cooled off some too.”
“Maybe a man can sleep then,” Oliver said. “Here lately, it’s been so hot I ain’t been able to get to sleep till two or three o’clock in the mornin.”
The boy rose. “Go with me.”
“I guess I better set around here.” Oliver seemed to be scrutinizing the boy’s feet. He got up stiffly from the swing. “I got somethin I been aimin to give you if it wouldn’t make you mad. You reckon it would?”
“I doubt it.” Winer grinned.
The old man went back into the house, Winer following. “I bought me a pair of shoes through the mail a year or two ago and then couldn’t wear em. I expect my feet’s about through growin too. I been kindly keepin a eye on them feet of yourn and I believe they’ve growed a size or two since spring.”