Swing Low

The boy from Texas wanted to know which of his rocks would make him rich. He had carried them in from the parking lot in a bread sack, hugging it against his chest with both arms, while his parents waited inside the door with the sunburned patience of people who had already paid to dig at two mines since breakfast. I spread a shop towel on the counter and poured the sack out onto it. The gravel came down with a sound I have known all my life, dry and rattling, and a little red dust lifted off it into the light from the front window.

"Let's see what you've got," I said.

Most of it was lot gravel. The dig mines spread it on their parking areas by the truckload, crushed limestone hauled up from a quarry downstate, and it rides home in every tourist's sneaker treads. I showed him how to tell: the pale gray color, the chalky feel when you rub it with your thumb, and in one piece a row of fossil discs no bigger than shirt buttons, stacked up like a roll of nickels.

"Crinoid," I said. "A sea animal. This whole county was ocean floor once."

He looked past me at the window, at the ridges standing green and hazy beyond the dust on Main Street, and decided he could believe it. I liked him for that. Under the limestone he had a slab of novaculite the size of a bar of soap, fine-grained enough to put an edge on a knife, and three quartz points. Two were chipped tourist points with the brown cast oxalic acid leaves when a mine washes its crystal too hard. The third was clean, two inches long, with a cloudy base and a clear tip, and when I turned it under the lamp I found a faint smaller point drawn inside the larger one, an outline where the crystal had stopped growing for a few thousand years and then started again.

"That's a phantom," I said, and tilted it so he could see. "It won't make you rich. It's the best thing in the sack."

He took it from me with both hands. His mother had drifted to the brass rack by the register where I kept the pendulums for sale: amethyst, rose quartz, a pressed-glass one from a catalog that I had bought to fill a hook. She lifted the rose quartz by its chain and let it turn in the light.

"Do you do readings?" she said. "The waitress at the cafe said maybe you did."

"I sell rocks," I said.

Before they left I unscrewed the lid on the jar beside the register and let the boy choose a chip of quartz for luck. Verlie Odom had kept a jar in that spot for thirty-four years, and every child who came through the door of Odom Rocks and Minerals went home with a chip of Arkansas quartz in a pocket. I had bought a new jar and filled it from a bucket of mine tailings the day I opened, because three different women had stopped me at the post office to ask whether I would. The boy's father said Arletta had told them about the jar too, and that if I didn't give the boy a chip she'd want to know why.

Deacon watched them go from his place under the front window. He had been mine for ten days, and in that time he had claimed the patch of floor where the sun came through the glass from about eleven until the ridge took it. He lifted his head when the door closed, let his ears fall back around his face, and went back to sleep with a groan that carried to the counter.

Second week open, and the shop still smelled more of me than of her. Cedar from the built-in shelves, damp stone, the lemon oil I rubbed into the counter every morning before I turned the sign. Underneath that, faintly, on hot afternoons when the window unit could not keep up, the old smell came back out of the boards: tobacco and Lava soap and the green of the creek that runs behind the building. Above the door, in the transom glass, the gilt letters of the old name still showed when the light hit them from the street. The sign painter from Mount Ida could not come until October. I had not asked him to come sooner.

Out on Main Street the cicadas were going in the sycamores along the creek, a sound like a sheet of tin shaken without end, and the heat stood on the pavement in a shimmer. The last hot week of September holds on in the Ouachitas until a front comes down out of Oklahoma, and until then the rock-hounds keep coming and everything in Hollis Springs wears a coat of red dust that comes off on your hands.

Twice that week Tobias Vance had walked past on the far side of the street and looked at my window without slowing down. He looked at the stones I had set on the sill, and at the pendulums on their rack, and at me behind the counter, and then he went on toward the post office. I had watched Verlie do the same to other people's windows when I was sixteen. The families were deciding what I was. They would take their time about it.

At three o'clock Tucker Calloway coasted up on his bicycle with a foil-covered plate balanced on the handlebars. He was twelve and all elbows, with his mother's freckles and his mother's way of coming through a door before the door had finished opening. Under the foil were two peach fried pies, still faintly warm, and a note in Birdie's slanting hand: Z, extras from lunch. Hope the shop's doing good. Birdie Calloway.

She had signed both names, so I would know which Birdie.

"Mama said to give you those and not stay and bother you," Tucker said, already on his knees beside Deacon. "Can I pet him? Beau says he's the best dog in the county. I said he's the best dog in the state."

"He'll let you know if you do it wrong."

Deacon let him know he was doing it right by rolling over and offering a speckled belly to the ceiling. Tucker scratched it with both hands and told him about the Mount Ida game Friday night, and the quarterback's broken thumb, and his brother's opinion of the cafe's new ice machine, which was that it sounded like a cow with a cold. I wrapped one of the pies in wax paper and sent it back with him for Beau. When he had gone I stood at the counter and ate the other one over the foil, and it was so good that I had to look at the ridge for a while afterward.

The stockroom was where the afternoons went.

Twelve boxes of Verlie's leftover stock had come with the building. The listing called them contents, as is, and the woman from the realty office had apologized for them. I had been through five. Tumbled agate in coffee cans. Flats of Brazilian amethyst Verlie had bought for the tourists and never bothered to price. A shoebox of wavellite from the hills west of here, green sprays of needles radiating out across the gray rock, each one wrapped in a square of the Mount Ida paper from the month before she died. I had stopped reading the newspaper squares by the second box. They were all from the same few weeks, and I knew how those weeks ended.

The sixth box was heavy for its size, and the third stair from the bottom gave its usual complaint when I carried it down. Inside were bolo ties and belt buckles set with turquoise, a dozen cardboard trays of earring findings, and a Prince Albert tobacco tin so stuffed with tangled chain that the lid had bowed. I set the tin on the counter and pried it open with a butter knife.

My first month with Verlie, she had put me on chains. Every afternoon after school I sat at the end of this counter with a tin like that one and two sewing needles, picking knots out of fine brass and silver while she worked stone at the other end and told me about the people walking past the window. You learn patience on chains, she said, or you don't learn it at all, and I could go home if I wanted. I did not go home. By October she had let me hold my first pendulum, a lead fishing weight on a length of kite string, and she had told me the only rule I could remember all these years later without trying: ask it right or don't ask it.

Her needles were in the drawer where I had put them, which was the drawer where she had kept them. My hands knew the work. Pick the loosest loop, open it, feed the free end back along its own path, and never pull, because pulling only tightens what you are trying to undo. Deacon snored. The window unit ran and stopped and ran. One by one the chains came out of the tangle and I laid them in a row along the lemon-oiled wood, a dozen of them, then fifteen, some with clasps and some without.

The last chain was brass, longer than the others, and worn so smooth that it slid through the needle's eye almost by itself. At its end, wrapped twice in a scrap of red bandanna, was a pendulum.

Clear quartz, a little longer than the top joint of my thumb, set in a brass cap with a single bead of tiger's eye above it. Somebody had held it often. The brass had gone bright and soft-edged on two sides where finger and thumb would rest, and the bandanna had been washed so many times that its paisley showed only at the folds. When I turned the point under the lamp, a rust-red line showed in the base of the crystal, fine as a hair, the iron stain that the north wall of the Bluff Mine leaves in its quartz and that no amount of washing will take out. I had not been up to the north ridge since I was sixteen. I knew the line anyway.

The tiger's eye bead was the same stone as the chain Verlie wore on her reading glasses. That proved nothing. She had loved tiger's eye, and she had kept pendulums the way other women keep reading glasses, one in every drawer and two on the windowsill, and I could not have told you which one she trusted. During my lessons she had never worked in front of me with anything but her hands and a fishing weight. Whatever she used alone she had used alone.

I hooked the chain over the first finger of my left hand to get it out of the way, picked up the pencil, and started writing tags for the brass chains.

Four dollars. Four dollars. Six for the long one with the lobster clasp. I was on the eighth tag before I noticed the pendulum moving, and by then it was moving in long, even arcs, out and back, out and back, the point swinging nearly level with my knuckle at each end of its travel. It swung along a single line. One end of the line was the front window and Deacon asleep in his patch of light. The other end was the back wall.

I put the pencil down and held still. The arcs did not shorten. A pendulum on a finger will pick up any motion in the hand that holds it, every pulse and twitch, and a tired arm will drive it in circles without the arm's owner feeling a thing. That much I had known at sixteen. I braced my left elbow on the counter and slowed my breathing. The window unit was off and the back door was shut. The floor dips by the counter, an inch at most, toward the front of the building, and the swing was running crosswise to the dip, not with it.

Out and back. Out and back. Toward the shelves along the back wall, and away.

So I did what I would have done with any reading I did not trust. I took it again from somewhere else. The lumber crayon I carry for marking specimen bags was in my apron pocket, and when I reached in for it my fingers found a chip of stone there too, the size of a fingernail. I turned it over in my palm. Bluff quartz, white, with a thread of the same red iron through it. I could not have said when I picked it up. I set it on the counter beside the chains and took the crayon to the end of the counter nearest the window.

While I walked, it swung only with my steps. When I stopped and held my elbow against my side, it hung for a breath and then began again: out and back, along a new line, angled toward the back wall from this new place. I crouched and drew the line of its swing on the floorboards in yellow wax, a long mark down the planks. Then I went to the stockroom door and did it a third time.

Three lines on a floor make a triangle if you have made a mistake. They make a point if you have not. I had run resections like that a thousand times on survey crews in Arizona, standing in a wash at noon with a compass, working out where on God's earth I was. These three lines ran across the old boards, through the dust Deacon's tail had swept, under the end of the counter, and met at the foot of the built-in oak shelving, in the middle bay, at the bottom panel.

I stood there looking at the place where they crossed.

Deacon woke before I heard the truck. He lifted his head, then his whole front end, and when the brown UPS van pulled up at the curb he was already at the window, nose on the glass, sounding the bay that bluetick hounds were bred to carry across three hollows at night. It filled the shop to the tin ceiling. The van was his enemy from before my time, and he told it so every time it came.

"Easy," I said. "Deacon. Easy, now."

The driver came in sideways with a box on his hip, and Deacon retreated to his window to watch him with enormous suspicion. The box was the display stands I had ordered in August. I signed for it on the driver's scanner with the pendulum still hooked over my finger, because I had forgotten it was there, and while he talked about the heat and about the woman out on the river road who left him a cold Coke every Friday, the pendulum hung under my hand plumb and dead still, as if the chain had been soldered at the bottom. I watched it while I wrote my name. It did not twitch. He tipped his cap to Deacon, who did not accept the apology, and went back out into the glare. Before the van had cleared the post office, the point had started swinging again toward the back wall, and I went and got the putty knife.

The shelving along the back wall is the oldest thing in the shop. A carpenter built it when the building was new, quarter-sawn oak in five bays, eight feet high. Each bay closes at the floor with a kick panel, a plain board set back a few inches under the lowest shelf. Four of those panels were nailed with the square-headed cut nails the carpenter had used everywhere else in the building. The fifth, in the middle bay, was held at its corners by four round wire brads, and the oak around them had been worried by a blade at some time and then oiled over until the scratches nearly disappeared.

I knelt on the planks. The closer I came to that bay, the shorter the arcs grew, until the point was swinging no wider than a pencil's width, then trembling, then still, hanging over the bottom panel with its tip a finger's length from the wood. I sat back on my heels and looked at it hanging there. Then I took the chain off my finger, coiled it into the bandanna, and laid it on the bottom shelf where I could see it.

The brads came out easier than they should have. The panel tipped toward me on its lower edge and I lifted it free, and the smell that came out of the dark behind it was dust, mouse, and old cedar. Deacon came over and pushed his nose into the gap beside my arm, inhaled for a long time, and sneezed. Behind the panel the space ran back under the shelf to the brick, maybe ten inches deep, floored with the same planks as the shop and furred with gray dust and the brown paper shells of a dirt dauber's nest. Against the bricks at the back stood a pint Mason jar with its ring and lid screwed on.

I reached in and brought it out into the light. The glass had clouded with dust and the ring had rusted to the lid, and I had to wrap the bandanna around it to get a grip before it gave. Inside, folded twice, was a single sheet of yellow paper torn from a pad. The edge at the top was ragged. I knew the pad. Verlie had kept them by the register, one after another for thirty-four years, and written orders and phone numbers and grocery lists on them, and once, my second month, a list of eleven stones I was to learn to name by touch with my eyes closed.

Her hand was the same. Square capitals, pressed so hard that the pencil had dented through to the back of the sheet, every line short. There was no date and no name at the top.

IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME AT THE BLUFF, IT WAS NOT THE DARK. THE REST IS WRITTEN, AND THE STONES ARE KEEPING IT.

Under that, smaller, two letters. V.O.

I read it on my knees with the panel leaning against my leg and Deacon breathing into my ear, then sat down properly, with my back against the end of the counter, and held the paper on my knee so my hands would stop moving it.

Nineteen years ago this month, on a Thursday night, Verlie Odom went up to the Bluff Mine after dark, as she sometimes did, and fell from the north lip of the pit. A dig crew found her at the bottom of the north wall the next morning. The county coroner ruled it an accident within two days: an old woman alone on the rim of a pit at night, the ground uneven, the light gone. A fall in the dark. That is all the town ever said about it, when it said anything. The year Verlie Odom fell. Then the subject changed to the weather.

I know how pit walls fail: how they slump and shear and give, how a lip of clay over a quartz vein will hold a man's weight in August and drop out from under a cat in January. People go over them looking at the view, or at their feet, or in the dark because they cannot see where the edge is. For nineteen years I had believed hers was one of those, because the alternative was something I did not let myself picture.

The Bluff was the Dunagans' hill. That September Verlie had been fighting the mine about the stone it sold, loudly, at church suppers and at the post office and in the back booth of the cafe, telling anyone who would listen that the Dunagans were selling stone out of that north wall that had no business leaving the county. The families had wished she would lower her voice. The mine had wished she would stop. I had been sixteen and thought she was magnificent. Now I sat on the floor of her shop with her handwriting on my knee and thought about that north wall, and the people who owned it, and what it would mean to them to have a loud old woman standing on their rim at night.

The rest is written. I looked up at the shelves above me, at my own stock in rows where hers had been, at the stockroom door and the six boxes I had not opened. I had been through five boxes of her things and found nothing written but price tags and newspaper. The stones are keeping it. In a shop full of stones, that narrowed nothing at all.

My hands had gone cold. I noticed it when I tried to refold the paper and my fingers would not do it neatly. Cold to the wrist, with the thermometer by the stockroom door reading eighty-four, and a dull ache starting behind my eyes. I had felt both before. Sixteen years old, at this counter, after an hour with a fishing weight on a kite string. I had forgotten them, or put them away with everything else.

The panel went back on its brads, left a quarter inch proud of the wood. I swept the dirt dauber shells out the back door into the weeds along the creek and rubbed the crayon lines off the floorboards with a rag and lemon oil, because a customer would ask about them. The bandanna I folded and put in my apron pocket with the pendulum inside it. The Mason jar I washed at the stockroom sink and set upside down on the drainboard to dry, out of a habit that was not mine.

By six the street had emptied. Main Street empties early in Hollis Springs, and the only cars left were outside the Rockhound at the west end, where the supper crowd was going in for chicken-fried steak and pie. I turned the sign. The ridge had taken the sun from the front window half an hour before, and the light that came in now was the long copper light of a late September evening, coming level down the street and laying the shadow of every stone on the sill across the floor toward the back wall.

Deacon was still asleep in his patch under the window. The patch was still there, a square of yellow sun on the planks the size of a bath mat, bright and sharp at its edges, with the rest of the shop gone to evening around it. I looked at the ridge. I looked back at the dog. He sighed in his sleep and stretched his legs out into the warm boards, and I let him be.

I took the yellow paper out of my apron and unfolded it on the counter, under the window, where the last of the street light fell across it. I read it again from the beginning, slowly, every short pressed line, the pencil gone shiny in the grooves where she had borne down. On the second reading I stopped at the end of the first sentence and stayed there, with my cold hand flat on the counter beside the paper and the crows on the roof walking back and forth above my head.

It was not the dark.