Swing Low

By four on Monday morning I had given up on sleep and was sitting on the stockroom stairs in my socks, putting it together in the dark. Verlie had written that if anything happened to her at the Bluff, it was not the dark. That same August she had mailed a big envelope to somebody at the state in Little Rock, and Royce Dunagan had leaned out of his truck at the post office steps and told her accidents happen up on that rim. The Bluff was his hill. Whatever she had been putting in writing that September, the whole cafe had heard her say it was about him, and every piece I had picked up since the shelf pointed back up that ridge. I was tired of carrying them around one at a time.

Deacon came down at five and lay on the step below me with his chin on my foot. At six I put on my flannel shirt and my Arizona boots, left the CLOSED sign where it was, and went out the front door with the pendulum in my right pocket and the dog at my knee.

The mine road leaves the highway at the west end of town, past the Rockhound's lot, and climbs the face of the north ridge in long switchbacks for a mile and a half. The cafe windows were lit and steamed at the corners. Birdie was at the register with a coffeepot in her hand, and she saw me go by and lifted the pot an inch, and I lifted my hand and kept walking. Arletta was at the window too. By the time I reached the first switchback, I expect, Doris Lamb knew which way I had turned.

The crows came off the shop roof somewhere behind me. I did not see them leave. On the first long straight of the mine road there were five of them on the power line ahead, black against a sky going from gray to the white of skim milk, and when Deacon and I came under them they dropped off the wire one after another and flapped heavily up the hill and sat down on the next span. They did it at every pole. At the cattle guard where the mine's property began they settled on the last pole by the road and did not come any farther, and I stepped across the rails with Deacon picking his way behind me, setting each foot down on steel as carefully as a man crossing a creek on stones.

The Bluff Mine's public side sits on the south rim of the pit, looking down at the town: a gravel lot big enough for forty cars, a long metal building painted barn red with BLUFF MINE DIG OFFICE across its front in white letters, a porch of treated lumber with a rack of plastic buckets for rent, and beyond the building the railed overlook where dig customers stand to look down at what they are paying for. At ten minutes to seven the lot was empty. A chain-link yard ran off the east end of the building with a front loader parked inside it and a doghouse made from half a plastic barrel, and before I had taken three steps on the gravel a dog came out of the barrel at a dead run and hit the fence.

Ever since Deacon went round Royce Dunagan's front tire at the post office, I had wondered what kind of dog Chigger was. He was a feist, black and tan with a white blaze, not much bigger than a loaf of bread, and he went up and down the inside of that chain-link from the doghouse to the gate and back with his whole body barking. Deacon stopped and looked at him. Then he walked over to the fence, slowly, nose down, and went along the outside of it the full length of the yard with Chigger flinging himself at the wire a foot from his ear. At the gatepost he stopped, considered it, lifted his leg on it at length, and came back across the gravel to me and sat down with his back to the yard. Chigger stopped barking. He stood at the gate with one front foot held up off the ground and looked at the back of Deacon's head for a long time, and then he sat down too.

There was no table in the lot. I stood in the middle of the gravel with the red building in front of me and unwrapped the pendulum and laid the bandanna over my shoulder. I hooked the end of the chain over my first finger and held my arm out from my side. My hand was steady. I had been saying the question to myself since four o'clock, on the stairs and on the road, and it came out of me all in one breath.

"Where does what Verlie wrote rest?"

The point was moving before I had the last word out. It swung out toward the dig office and back to my chest and out again, longer, a straight line from me to the red siding, and I felt my weight go forward onto the toes of my boots with it. I took a step and the line held. I took four more across the gravel to the foot of the porch, and it held there too, pointing past the steps and along the front of the building toward the far corner, where an air-conditioner unit hung out of the wall above a stack of pallets. I followed it. Under that window the swing shortened to a hand's width, and then to two fingers, and went back and forth in front of the red metal, out and back, out and back, and did not stop until I closed my hand around it.

"There," I said to Deacon, out loud. He had come along the building behind me, and he looked at the pallets and then up at me, and sat down again.

My mouth had gone dry. It was the thick, sticky dryness of a day in the desert with the canteen left in the truck, and it had come all at once. I wrapped the pendulum and put it in my pocket and swallowed and could not do much about it.

At half past seven a white pickup with BLUFF MINE on the door came up the road and over the cattle guard and stopped beside the porch, and Shelby Dunagan Marsh got out of it in her gray fleece with a ring of keys in one hand and a sausage biscuit in the other. Chigger came out of his barrel again for her, but in a different voice. She looked at me standing at the corner of her building, and at Deacon, and at the gatepost, and back at me.

"Zara Lindell," she said. "You're early for a bucket."

"I walked up."

"I can see that." She took a bite of the biscuit and chewed and looked at me some more. Up close she had her father's pale blue eyes in a narrower face, and lines at the corners of them that had not been there when she drove the Firebird. "That's the hound that lived under my loader in August."

I looked down at Deacon. "Is it?"

"Two weeks, about. I'd come up of a morning and there he'd be with his head out between the wheels, and Chigger in there losing his mind. He about tore my fence down." She went up the steps and unlocked the door. "County came and got him the week before Labor Day. I figured somebody'd take him. Nobody takes the old ones." At the door she stopped and looked back at Deacon, who had turned his head away from her toward the town as though he did not care to discuss it. "Well. Somebody did."

I followed her up onto the porch. "I wanted to ask you something."

"Daddy says you've been asking everybody something." She pushed the door open with her hip and turned on the lights. "Spring Street. Wade Tolliver at the Rockhound. Up on the north lip yesterday with Wade, which my loader man saw from the pit floor and told me about before I'd got my coat off at church." She went behind the counter and set the keys and the biscuit down by the register. "Go on."

"Did your father keep anything Verlie Odom sent him?"

Shelby looked at me across the counter. Then she laughed, short and tired, through her nose.

"Kept it," she said. "Honey, he used to read them out loud at supper. Every one she ever mailed him. He'd stand up at the table and do her voice, and Mama would pick up her plate and go eat in the kitchen." She came back around the counter and stood with her hands in the pockets of the fleece. "I've been cleaning up after Daddy since I was nineteen years old. I'd as soon you read whatever's in there in here as hear it told wrong at the Rockhound. Come on."

The dig office was one long room with the counter across it, a cash register and a coffee maker and a rack of rental screens, a water cooler with a sleeve of paper cones, and a wall of framed photographs behind the register, most of them of her father shaking hands with men in hats. A door at the end opened on a back office with a metal desk, two green steel filing cabinets, a calendar from a tire company, and the window unit I had stood under outside, ticking as Shelby turned it off. She crouched at the second cabinet and pulled open the bottom drawer and walked her fingers back through the folders without looking at them, as though she had done it before.

"There," she said, and lifted out a brown accordion file with a broken elastic, and set it on the desk. On its tab in black marker, in square printing that leaned hard to the right, somebody had written VERLIE. Under that, smaller, in the same hand: LITTLE ROCK.

"I've got customers at eight." Shelby stood up and dusted her knees. "Take your time. If you want to carry it down the hill, carry it, and bring it back before he misses it. He won't miss it."

When she had gone back out front I sat down in Royce Dunagan's chair and opened the file.

There were nine letters. They were on ruled tablet paper, written in ink in Verlie's square capitals, and at the top of each one she had printed COPY, and under her signature on each one, in pencil, she had added the same line: COPY TO R. DUNAGAN SO HE CANNOT SAY HE WAS NOT TOLD. The first was dated March of that last year, and the last was dated the second week of September. Four were addressed to the Arkansas Geological Commission in Little Rock, three to a man at the state's mining permit office, and two to the editor of the Little Rock paper. In the margins somebody had written ha in ballpoint, more than once, and on one of them, beside a sentence about the Dunagans' character, a single exclamation point pressed so hard it had torn the paper.

I read them all the way through, in order. She never once wrote the word ring. You don't, to Little Rock. She wrote about trucks. She wrote that the Bluff was shipping crystal out of Montgomery County by the flat to dealers in Hot Springs who sold it as Arkansas museum grade, much of it still stained with clay and burnt brown from a hot wash, and that the county was being stripped of the best of what it had for the price of a tank of diesel. She wrote, in April and again in June, that the mine had worked the north wall back past the bench line shown on its own permit drawing, steepening the face and undercutting the toe of the slope below the Odom path, and that a wall cut so would slump in the first wet autumn and keep on slumping. Yesterday I had seen that clay tongue under the lip, slumped and dried and slumped again. She had been right about the wall nineteen years before it did what she said it would.

The September letter was the shortest. It went to the Geological Commission, and it repeated the trucks and the north wall in a few lines each, and then it said: I have told Mr. Dunagan to his face what he is doing on that north wall. There is more than this, and I will put the rest in writing.

I sat with that sheet in both hands under Royce Dunagan's tire calendar. Out front car doors shut, Chigger started up, and Shelby's voice said that would be twenty-five apiece. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I laid the September letter on top of the others and closed the file and sat with my hand flat on its cover, and then I got up and went out front, because I could not swallow, and drank five of Shelby's paper cones of water from the cooler one after another while a family from Texarkana chose buckets.

Shelby watched me crumple the fifth cone. "You look like you walked here," she said.

"I did."

She was making change. When the family had gone out with their buckets she reached under the counter and came up with a paper sack with BLUFF MINE printed on it, and held it open, and I put the accordion file in it. She folded the top over twice and creased it with her thumbnail and handed it to me.

"You'll find a lot in there that makes Daddy look bad," she said. She did not lower her voice, and she did not look at the Texarkana family. "Most of it he earned."

On the porch Deacon got up from the boards. Chigger was at the gate again, silent, with his nose through the chain-link, and Deacon walked past him without turning his head, down the steps and across the gravel and onto the road. When we came over the cattle guard the pole by the road was empty.

I opened the shop at ten. A couple from Bentonville bought a tray of tumbled carnelian for their granddaughter's birthday party favors. The paper sack sat on the shelf under the register all day. Twice between customers I took the September letter out and read the last two lines again, and put it back, and wiped the counter with lemon oil where my hands had been.

At half past eight that night the Rockhound's lot was down to Birdie's truck and Arletta's Buick. Tucker and Beau were at the counter with their spelling books open beside the remains of two hamburger plates, and Arletta was putting on her coat to drive them home, and when the cowbell clanked behind me both boys turned on their stools at once.

"Did Deacon fight Chigger?" Tucker said.

"Arletta saw you go up the mine road," Beau said, in case I wondered how they knew.

I looked at Deacon, who had gone straight under the counter to Arletta's feet in the hope of a last biscuit. "Chigger," I said, "is about the size of a loaf of bread."

Beau put both hands over his face. Tucker looked at me with deep betrayal, and Arletta took them both by the backs of their jackets and steered them out the door, saying over her shoulder that Chigger had bit a lawyer from Little Rock once, she had it on good authority, and they could put that in their pipe.

Birdie had the dish tub of clean forks and knives at the back booth and a stack of paper napkins, and she was rolling silverware for the morning when I sat down. She had pulled her chair to the end of the booth, and Verlie's side was empty, and on a plate between us was the last of a sweet potato pie and two apple fried pies going soft in their paper. Deacon came out from under the counter and arranged himself under the table with his head on her feet and his back end on mine.

"Arletta," Birdie said, rolling a fork and a knife into a napkin, "saw you go up that mine road at half past six with a look on your face like you were going to pay a light bill." She set the roll in the tub. "Then Doris Lamb called the register at eleven to say you came down it at nine with a sack."

I took the accordion file out of the sack and laid it on the table and opened it. Birdie wiped her hands on her apron before she touched anything. Then she read. She read the first one with her lips pressed together, and the second one faster, and she turned the pages over to see Royce's ha in the margins, and when she came to the torn exclamation point she held it up to the light over the booth and looked at it and set it down.

"Royce Dunagan," she said, "bless his heart, never could keep a thing to himself at a supper table."

"Read the last one."

She read it. She read the last two lines twice, with her finger under them, and then she put the sheet down on top of the others.

"Tell me how you got to that drawer," she said. "Not Shelby. Before Shelby."

I took the bandanna bundle out of my pocket and set it on the Formica between the pie plate and the file. Behind the kitchen door the ice machine was in the middle of one of its long groans, the one that sounded like a truck downshifting on a grade, and it stopped. It did not finish. It stopped in the middle, and the kitchen beyond the door was so quiet I could hear the fryer ticking as it cooled. Birdie turned her head and looked at the kitchen door, and then at the red paisley on the table.

"Don't you put that back in your pocket," she said. "I'll pay you rent on it."

I told her. The lot at seven with nobody in it, the question, the line out to the red building and along the front of it to the corner, and the swing coming down to two fingers under the back office window, and Shelby crouching at the bottom drawer without having to look. I told her the mouth like a sock afterward and the five paper cones. While I talked she went back to rolling silverware, fork and knife and napkin and into the tub, and she did not stop until I had finished.

"So it went where you asked it," she said.

"It went straight there. It didn't wander. Ione showed me how to ask it so it wouldn't wander, and it didn't. And there they were."

"There they were." She picked up the September letter again and looked at it without reading it. "In a drawer with her name on it. That she mailed him."

"Copies."

"Copies she mailed him, Z. Nine times. With a note on every one so he'd be sure and know." She laid it down. "You don't hide a thing by sending it to the man you're scared of. She wanted him to have these. She'd have read them to him herself if he'd stood still for it." She rolled a knife and a fork and did not put the roll in the tub. "And her letter. The one off the pad. What did that say?"

I did not need it out of my pocket. "The rest is written, and the stones are keeping it."

"Is a filing cabinet a stone?"

"Bird."

"I'm asking." She set the roll down. "This says there's more. Fine. There's more. She told the whole cafe there was more, I heard her, I was standing right there with the pot. But this isn't the more. This is the part she wanted everybody to have." She tapped the stack. "Where's the rest?"

"In the stones."

"Whose stones?"

I did not answer that. I had no answer that I liked, and she knew it, and she let it sit. The ice machine stayed quiet. Deacon shifted his weight more onto my feet and sighed, and Birdie reached down without looking and put her hand on his back.

"Doris says Tobias Vance has been out on the sidewalk every morning this week with a bucket of vinegar and a sheet of newspaper, washing his front window," she said after a while, in a different voice. "Three weeks early. Doris thinks he's lost his mind." She picked up a fork. "And she says every morning, going to the bank, he slows down in front of yours."

"I know he does."

"I know you know." She rolled the fork and knife together slowly, and tucked the end of the napkin under, and held the roll in both hands. "Z. I stood at that register Saturday and watched you ask Wade Tolliver to take you up that hill. I've known you since we were six. I know what you look like when you want a thing." She looked at the bandanna, and the file, and the window, where the lot was dark and the Bluff was somewhere above it in the dark too. "You went up that road this morning knowing what you wanted it to say. You asked it about the mine. You asked it standing at the mine. And it said the mine."

"The letters were there."

"The letters were there," she agreed. "They've been there nineteen years. Shelby knew right where they were without looking. Royce read them out loud at supper. Anybody in this town could have told you that drawer was full of Verlie Odom, honey, if you'd asked a person instead of a rock."

I put my hand on the file. The September letter was on top, and Verlie's last line on it was under my palm, the ink gone brown at the edges where the pen had sat. I had stood under the back office window at seven o'clock in the morning and watched that point come down to two fingers over the gravel, and I could still see it.

"I'm sure, Bird," I said.

Birdie put the roll of silverware in the tub at last. She folded her arms on the table and leaned on them and looked at me across the pie, under the bill of her cap, the way she used to look at me across a desk when I swore I had done the homework.

"Are you sure, Z?" she said. "Or do you just want to be?"