Swing Low

I carried Royce Dunagan's file back up his hill on Monday morning in the same paper sack it had come down in, with the top folded over twice along Shelby's crease. On Sunday afternoon I had read the nine letters again at the counter with the CLOSED sign up, and put them back in their order, March to September, and squared them, and slid them into the accordion file past the broken elastic. Somewhere on the first switchback I found I had been running my thumbnail along that crease for a quarter of a mile. I made myself stop, and a hundred yards on I was doing it again.

Before I left the shop I had stood the Bluff point from the fair on the register shelf beside Verlie's cup hook, upright on its base with the iron line toward the window, where I could see it from the stairs. I had not put a price card back in front of it. Hal's green tomato I had fried on Sunday in cornmeal and bacon grease, as my mother does them, and eaten in four bites standing at the stove. And Birdie had heard about the Folgers can on Saturday night, all of it, on the twelve miles home from Mount Ida with the twins asleep against each other in the back seat and Deacon's breath on my neck. She drove with both hands on the wheel and said nothing until the Hollis Springs water tower came up white in the headlights. Then she said, "Fuel pump," to the windshield, and pressed the heel of her hand under each eye, and that was all.

A week ago I had climbed this road in the gray before sunup with a question in my mouth. This morning the sun was over the east ridge before Deacon and I reached the second switchback, and the slopes above the road had come into their color all at once: the oaks gone the red-brown of a saddle, the hickories yellow, a sassafras at the edge of the gravel orange to the tips of its mittens. At the cattle guard a redbud leaned out of the bank over the road, no taller than a man, its heart-shaped leaves gone the yellow of old butter and half of them already down on the rails. One low branch was in bloom. The flowers sat close along the bare gray wood in tight pink knots, as a redbud's do in March, and two bees were working them. I stepped across the rails behind Deacon and kept walking.

Shelby was on the dig office porch in rubber boots with a garden hose, rinsing the rental buckets and stacking them upside down along the rail to drain. Chigger came out of his barrel when my boots hit the gravel, saw who was behind me, and stopped at the gate with one front foot lifted. Deacon walked to the middle of the lot and lay down facing him with his chin on his paws, and the two of them settled in to look at each other through the chain-link like two old men over a checkerboard.

Shelby shut the hose off at the nozzle. "He didn't miss it," she said.

I held out the sack. She looked inside it without taking the file out, and then at me.

"You read them."

"Twice."

"Then you know more about that north wall than the state of Arkansas does." She tucked the sack under her arm and dried her hand on her fleece. "Come in out of the wind. I'll put it back where it lives."

The office smelled of burnt coffee and the wet rubber of her boots. She went on through to the back with the sack, and I heard the green cabinet's bottom drawer roll out on its track, and I stood at the counter with my hands in my coat pockets and looked, for the first time, at the wall behind the register. A week ago my mouth had been too dry to see it. There were twenty-odd frames, hung close and not quite level. Royce shaking hands with a congressman in front of a dump truck. Royce and a governor whose name I half remembered, holding a cluster up between them like a prize fish. Royce with a television weatherman from Little Rock, both of them squinting. A front page of the Mount Ida paper under glass, gone yellow, with an aerial photograph of the pit when it was half the size it is now.

Near the end of the second row hung a frame larger than the others, a black-and-white print of a hotel ballroom. Round tables in white cloths ran back into the dark of the room, and across the front stood a long head table under a banner, and in the middle of it Royce Dunagan stood at a lectern in a dinner jacket with one hand raised, palm out, caught in the middle of a sentence. On the head table in front of him somebody had set a Bluff cluster the size of a hatbox for a centerpiece. Even in black and white I could see the dark stain in its base where the north wall's clay had gone in and stayed. Across the bottom of the mat, in the gold script a studio stamps on its prints, it said OUACHITA MINE OPERATORS ASSOCIATION, FALL BANQUET, THE ARLINGTON HOTEL, HOT SPRINGS, and under that, a date. I did not have to count back to it. Tucked into the corner of the frame between the glass and the mat was a printed program folded in thirds, brown at the folds.

"That's the night," Shelby said behind me.

"I know."

"I was at table six. Mama made me wear hose." She came and stood at my shoulder with the empty sack folded flat in one hand. "We drove over at five o'clock, the three of us, in Mama's car, because Daddy's truck smelled like the mine. He was president that year. He talked from eight o'clock till about twenty after, and they had to flash the lights at him." She put one finger on the glass over the program, where the third line said 8:00 Remarks, Mr. Royce Dunagan, President. "We stayed the night upstairs. The sheriff's office called the room at half past seven Friday morning. Daddy drove home in his tuxedo pants."

"Wade's sergeant would have had that."

"Wade's sergeant had it. It's in a box in Mount Ida somewhere, I expect, with everything else." She lifted the frame off its nail with both hands and held it a moment, looking at her father with his palm up, and laid it face up on the counter between us. "Daddy could have told this town where he was any day of the last nineteen years. He'd rather they looked at him sideways at the Rockhound."

"Why?"

"Because if they're looking at him for pushing her," Shelby said, "they're not looking at his fence."

The window unit in the back office was off, and the room was so still I heard Chigger's tags jingle out in the yard.

"There was a fence on that north lip," she said. "Post and cable, eight feet back from the edge, on the permit drawing the same as the bench line. That wall was slumping just like she wrote it would, and in March of that year the toe went out under the Odom path and took four of the posts with it. Cable lay down in the clay. Daddy said he'd get to it. In August the man came over from the state to inspect, and Daddy walked him around the south rim and the haul road and bought him a plate lunch at the Rockhound, and gave him an envelope with four hundred dollars in it and a cluster for his wife. And the man wrote fence in good repair on his form and drove home to Little Rock." She turned the sack over in her hands. "Two weeks after that, Daddy leaned out of his truck at the post office and told Verlie Odom accidents happen up on that rim. He knew exactly what that rim looked like. He'd stood on it with the man from the state."

I thought of the April letter and the June one, in Verlie's square capitals: the north wall worked back past the bench line, steepening the face, undercutting the toe of the slope below the Odom path. Every word she had written about that wall was about the ground under her own feet, and the ground had done what she said. She had copied each one to him so he could not say he was not told.

"After," Shelby said, "the week of the funeral, he pulled the rest of the posts out of there and strung that one wire. And called it a fence."

"I stepped over it Sunday."

"I know you did. My loader man about fell off the loader." She looked down at the photograph. "I'm forty-five years old, Zara. I have held that man's hat since I was nineteen. You went up there with Wade Tolliver and stood on that rock, and Wade has eyes, and I'd as soon you heard it from me as read it on his face at the Rockhound." She set the sack on top of the frame. "The man from the state retired to Florida and died there. You tell Wade if you want to. There's not a thing he can do with it now but think less of Daddy, and he's had practice."

I stood at the counter on my side of the frame. Out the front window the lot was bright and empty, and Deacon and Chigger were still at their checkerboard.

"It was set back eight feet," I said. "She sat on that rock three steps from the edge. She'd have stepped over a fence to get to it. She'd have stepped over it and sat down."

Shelby was quiet for a while. "That's what I tell myself," she said. "Some days it takes."

She hung the photograph back on its nail and straightened it with one finger, and it was the only frame on the wall that hung level. Then she looked at the clock over the door. "He's not up till ten. Stand on my porch as long as you want."

The rail at the far end of the porch was a two-by-six of treated pine, gone silver, at the height of my ribs. From there I could see over the top of the dig office roof to the south rim of the pit and the overlook, and past it, down the whole face of the ridge, the town in its trees. I set my elbow on the rail. The wood was cold through my coat sleeve and gritty with red dust from the buckets.

A week ago I had stood out there in the middle of that gravel with nothing under my arm at all. From the rail I could see it as plainly as if somebody had taken my picture: my arm held out from my side, the chain hooked over my finger any which way, no question asked first to show me what its yes looked like, the whole thing said in one breath I'd been holding since four in the morning. The point had been swinging before I got the last word out. I had gone up onto my toes after it. Ione had told me about the cake plate a week before that, three Sundays running in the Methodist kitchen, and I had nodded at her across the oilcloth and gone home and walked up this hill at six in the morning with my mind made up. The stone had done its best to oblige me.

I unwrapped the pendulum and hung the bandanna over the rail beside me and hooked the last link of the chain over the end of my first finger. The point hung an inch above the gray wood.

"Is this rail pine?"

It went out from me toward the pit and back to my chest, a hand's length, out and back over the same knot in the board. I let it run until I was sure of it, and then I waited for it to settle, and stood there.

You ask it like you don't care what it says. I tried to find what I wanted and could not get hold of it. I wanted to know. Which way I wanted the knowing to come out I could not have told anybody, and that had not been true of me at any hour since the shelf.

"Does the rest of what Verlie wrote rest on this hill?"

The point went out to my right, toward Chigger's yard, and at the top of the swing it stayed. The chain ran from my finger at a slant, straight and still, the point hanging off plumb over the rail, holding the gate. The wind came up the face of the ridge and moved the bandanna's corner and did nothing to the chain. I kept my elbow where it was and let it hold. Ione had said you could lean on it till dinner. Down in the lot Deacon lifted his head off his paws and looked at me.

"Is that my dog?"

It came down off the gate and swung straight out over the gravel toward him and back, and Deacon put his head down again.

My ears had stopped up. Both of them, all at once, with the dull pressure of a car coming down the long grade off the mountain into Hot Springs, and Chigger's tags and the drip off the buckets and Shelby's radio inside came to me through cotton wool. I wrapped the point in the bandanna and put it in my pocket and swallowed, and swallowed again, and on the third try my ears gave with a pop and the morning came back in.

Birdie had asked me, in the back booth with the September letter under my hand, whether I was sure or only wanted to be. I stood at Shelby's rail and gave her the answer where she could not hear it. I had wanted to be. I had wanted it to be a loud man with a gold ring who lived on a hill I could see from my own front door, and I had wanted it badly enough to walk up here in the dark and ask a stone to agree with me. And it had obliged.

Deacon got up off the gravel when I came down the steps. Chigger put his foot down.

The Rockhound at a quarter past nine on a Monday belongs to the men with nowhere to be until ten. Leon from the haul crew had the end stool with his phone held out at arm's length, three retired men from the Baptist church had the round table by the window and a plate of biscuits between them, and the radio on the pass-through was playing an advertisement for a funeral home in Glenwood with an organ under it. Arletta had Deacon's biscuit out of the warmer before the cowbell finished. She buttered it cold and went out past me to the step without a word, and through the glass I heard her tell him he'd been up that mine road again, she had it on good authority.

Birdie poured my coffee before I sat down. She looked at my hands, and then at my face.

"Doris says you went up with a sack and came down with your hands in your pockets," she said.

"I took it back."

She looked at me a moment longer and did not ask the next thing, and went down the counter with the pot.

"Look at that." Leon turned his phone around and held it out to the counter at large. "Friday's check. Pending. Says pending since Friday at four o'clock."

"Farmers Bank," said one of the Baptist men, without turning around. "What'd you expect."

Arletta came back in with butter on her fingers and wiped them on her apron. "That bank," she said. "That bank lost forty thousand dollars in the computer one fall, Leon, and found it again by Thanksgiving. I expect they'll find your eleven hundred."

"Last time it was twenty," Birdie said, filling Leon's cup.

"It was a lot, is what it was." Arletta took the pot out of Birdie's hand, because it was hers to pour, and topped off the Baptists. She did not hurry. "They had men down from Little Rock in gray suits going through every drawer in that building, and the girls crying in the ladies' room, and then the president of the bank told the Mount Ida paper it was a posting error." She said posting error in the voice of a woman reading a word off the side of a pill bottle. "Like it was a letter went in the wrong box."

"When was this?" Leon said.

"Nineteen years back. Twenty."

"Nineteen," Birdie said. "I was sixteen. Mama made me count this drawer twice every night till Christmas, in case it was catching."

The Baptist men laughed. Leon's phone chimed in his hand, and he looked at it and held it up over his head for the room to see, and Arletta said, "See there. Thanksgiving come early," and went to the kitchen pass-through with her order pad that she never wrote on.

When I went to pay, Birdie was at the register making change for the Baptists, and taped to the side of it, where the lunch special usually went, was a sheet torn from a spiral notebook with the fringe still on its edge. Across the top in Birdie's printing it said HUNTER'S MOON. FRIED PIES BY THE DOZEN. PICK UP BY 5. Under that, in the same printing, ran the orders. Pickens, one dozen, apple. Vance, two dozen, half and half. Haskew, one dozen, peach, his man will come. June Ivey, a half dozen. A name from Garland County I did not know. Every October, on the night of the Hunter's Moon, the stone families of Hollis Springs sat in their dark front rooms and ate fried pies out of wax paper, because nobody can cook with the lights off and nobody wants to sit up hungry. Birdie's mother had fried them for thirty years. At the bottom of the sheet, in Birdie's printing, it said Lindell, and nothing after it.

"You put me down," I said.

"I put your name down." She counted change into a Baptist man's palm and thanked him and shut the drawer. "I didn't put down how many. That's your business."

"Bird. You asked me was I sure, or did I just want to be."

She stopped with her hand on the drawer.

"I wanted to be," I said.

Birdie looked at me across the register for a long moment, under the bill of her cap. Then she reached over and tucked the loose hair at my temple back up under its pin, as her mother used to do to both of us on the church steps, and left her hand there a second longer than it needed.

"Peach or apple?" she said.

"Apple."

She came back from the pie case with one folded in wax paper and set it in front of me, and went down to the round table with the pot. The first bite was peach, hot and sweet and sharp with the nutmeg her mother always put in. I looked at the filling. It was apple, pale slices in their brown syrup, and so was the second bite, and the third, and Birdie was pouring for the Baptists with her back to me.

"Tomorrow night," she said over her shoulder, to the coffeepot. "Back booth. I want every bit of it."

I opened the shop at ten. A couple from Tyler bought a geode cut in halves for their grandsons and argued pleasantly at the counter about which boy would get the bigger half. A woman from the Methodist church came in for a birthday present and went out with a tumbled carnelian and a luck chip she said was for herself. In the slow hour after lunch I opened one of the five boxes of Verlie's I had left and found it full of tiger's eye in newspaper from the year I turned fifteen, every piece wrapped twice, and I unwrapped them and laid them out on the felt and did not try to remember why. Twice in the afternoon I looked up and found Deacon in his spot under the front window with his eyes open, watching the street.

At six I turned the sign. The light went off Main, and the front window went from glass to a dark mirror with the shop in it, and the creek came up loud under the back door, as it does when the street goes quiet.

Verlie's letter was in my left pocket where it always was. If anything happens to me at the Bluff. For three weeks I had read that line with Royce Dunagan's face in it. Tonight it had nobody's face, and I did not put one there.

I took the pendulum out of my pocket and unwrapped it on the counter, beside the Bluff point from the fair, and set my elbow on the oak and hooked the last link of the chain over the end of my finger. The point turned a quarter of the way round on the chain, as any hung thing does, and turned back. Deacon got up from the window and came and leaned his weight against my leg. The creek went by under the floor, and the lamp ticked once as it warmed, and I kept my elbow on the counter and my mouth shut and let it hang there and be a stone.