Swing Low

Merritt Haskew did not care to ask things on the telephone, so on Tuesday morning he sent a man. He came into the shop at five past ten in a brown canvas coat and a feed-store cap, thirty years older than I was, and stood on the mat with the door open behind him until I told him he could come in. Deacon lifted his head from the sunny boards under the window, looked the man over, and put it down again. The man crossed to the counter, laid a cream-colored envelope on the oak with the flap tucked and not sealed, and went back to the mat.

Inside was a correspondence card with a gray H engraved at the top. Under it, in black ink and a hand somebody had once taught with a ruler, it said: Miss Lindell. I would be obliged if you would call at the house this morning at eleven. M. Haskew.

"He'll want an answer," the man said.

"Tell him yes."

He nodded once and went out, and pulled the door to behind him until the latch caught. I stood with the card in my hand. The last thing Merritt Haskew had said to me, in Ione's kitchen with his hat against his coat, was that a great deal had been said in his house that September and he would as soon nothing more was. I read the card twice and put it in my shirt pocket, and at a quarter to eleven I turned the sign.

The Haskew house stands at the top of the hill behind the Methodist church, where the street gives up being paved and goes on as two strips of concrete with grass between them. It is the tallest house in Hollis Springs and the least visited: two stories of gray clapboard, a porch along the whole front on fluted posts, every window with its drapes drawn halfway, as if the house were reading with its glasses pushed up. Deacon took the hill slowly, and I let him. At the foot of the porch steps I stopped, and put my hand in my coat pocket, and found the chip of black chert I had picked up on the creek path Sunday, and turned it over in my fingers.

Say what you mean on the porch. Verlie had sent me up these steps at sixteen with a box of tumbled agates, and I had walked home fast enough to get a stitch. I was thirty-five now, and on the bottom step I found myself going through what I knew the way I would go through a box of stock, setting to one side everything I could not say in that house without saying all of it. The shelf. The letter in my left pocket. The pendulum in my right. What was left was not much, and all of it was so.

Merritt opened the door himself before I knocked. Gray suit, a tie the color of a dove, the rimless glasses. He looked past me at Deacon.

"The dog will be comfortable on the porch," he said.

Deacon seemed to agree. He walked to the far end of the porch, where the sun came in under the roof and lay across the gray-painted boards, and let himself down there with his back to the house and his legs out straight, and sighed at the street.

The front hall was dim and smelled of floor wax and cold ashes. A hall tree, a long mirror gone gray at the edges, a table under it with a ledger lying open and a fountain pen standing in a brass holder. I remembered none of it except the floor.

"Everyone who comes into this house signs the book," Merritt said. "My grandmother began it."

The page was half full, in a dozen hands: the county judge, a man from the electric co-op, Ione's long upright letters from the week before. I wrote my name and the date under hers. The ink was dry before I lifted the nib off the paper. I touched the last letter with the tip of my finger and it did not smear, and I put the pen back in its holder, and Merritt opened the door to the front room.

It was cold in there, a shut room's cold, with a coal grate swept clean and unlit. A horsehair settee faced the grate. An upright piano stood against the inside wall with a photograph on it of a woman in a straw garden hat, laughing at whoever held the camera. The drapes on the front window were open, and the sill under it was bare, dusted, with the paint worn pale in two long strips where things had stood for years. Along the piano bench, in a row, sat seven African violets in clay pots on a folded lace runner.

"We sit in here on the Hunter's Moon," Merritt said. He had seen me look. "Ellen liked to count the windows going dark down the hill. My man clears the sill the second Saturday in October. I have never told him to. He has done it thirty-one years."

From the window I could see the whole of Main Street below the church steeple, and the creek in its trees, and the Rockhound's gravel lot at the west end with three pickups in it. I could see my own front window. He did not sit, so I did not. He stood at the mantel with one hand resting on it.

"You know the custom of this house," he said.

"I know it."

"Then I'll ask you one thing before I tell you anything, and you may decline to answer. That's no offense here. It happens more than you'd think." He looked at me through the rimless glasses. "Why are you calling on people about Verlie Odom?"

In my coat pocket the chert had gone warm from my fingers. I went over the side of the box I could say, and took out the one piece that mattered.

"Because I don't think it was the dark," I said.

Merritt looked at me for a long moment. Then he took off his glasses, folded them, put them in his breast pocket, and sat down on the horsehair settee, and after a moment I sat at the other end of it.

"That is so," he said. "As far as you know it." He put both hands on his knees. "Ellen was in the downstairs bedroom that September, across the hall. She was past getting up the stairs. Rosalind Fry came every day at four with her jars and her basins and stayed until Ellen slept, and some nights that was very late. I paid her. She would not take what it was worth." He looked at the photograph on the piano. "On the Wednesday of that week, Ellen called Rosalind back from the front door. I was in this room. I heard her through the wall. Ellen said Verlie Odom was telling the whole Methodist women's circle that somebody in the families was hushing ringing stone so the mines could sell it, and she said, Rosalind, you'd tell me. And Rosalind stood in my hall and said, I've had nothing to do with any of it, Ellen."

He said the words as a man reads back a number.

"Ten words," he said. "One of them wasn't so. Perhaps all ten. I can't tell you how I know it any more than you could tell me how salt tastes. I knew it. And the next evening Verlie went up on the Bluff, and Friday morning Ellen's sister telephoned to say she'd been found, and I stood in my own front hall and thought about Wednesday."

"You thought Rosalind pushed her."

"No." He said it at once. "That Thursday was Ellen's worst night. Rosalind came at four and didn't leave until nearly three in the morning. I sat in the chair at the foot of the bed the whole of it. She went to the kitchen for hot water, and my kitchen is eleven steps from that bed, and I counted them most of that night. She never left my sight long enough to cross the yard." He turned his hat over on his knee. He had brought it in from the hall with him and I had not seen him do it. "I thought she knew something about Verlie she could not say in my house. I thought it for nineteen years. Ellen died in November with Rosalind's hands on her feet. I have never been able to thank that woman properly, Miss Lindell. Not once. Because of ten words in my hall."

The house made no sound. Down the hill, a long way off, somebody was running a chain saw and stopped.

"At Ione's," I said, "you told me you'd as soon nothing more was said."

"I did. It was so when I said it." He put his glasses back on, and looked at me through them, and for the first time since I had known him there was something in his face besides care. "It isn't so now. Ione stopped me on the church steps Sunday and told me the child was not going to stop. I am sixty-three years old. I would like to stop wondering, and I would like you to ask her, and I would like you not to ask her in this house."

He walked me to the door. On the porch Deacon got up, stretched both front legs out in front of him until his chest touched the boards, and came along the porch to me. Merritt stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame.

"You'll come and tell me," he said. He did not wait to hear whether I would, and the door closed on the hall and the book and the gray mirror.

The antique mall on Main used to be the Ben Franklin, and it still has the five-and-dime's pressed-tin ceiling and its long wooden floor that sounds every step you take. Rosalind Fry kept a booth at the back, past the Pyrex and the quilts and a whole wall of railroad lanterns, and I had walked by it twice since I came home and not gone in. Her shelves held bars of soap wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, amber tincture bottles with eyedropper caps, flat tins of salve, and from a pegboard overhead hung bundles of dried plants by their stems, gray-green and brown and one the dark red of old brick. A card on the end shelf said FRY. REMEDIES. SOAP $9.

She was at a card table behind the shelves with a pencil and a sheet of gummed labels, writing. Deacon lay down in the aisle between the quilts and the Pyrex and was asleep before his chin was all the way on the floor.

"If you've come about your hands," Rosalind said, without looking up, "the price hasn't changed."

"Merritt Haskew asked me up to his house this morning."

The pencil stopped. Then it went on and finished the word, and she peeled the label off the sheet and laid it on the lid of a tin. Symphytum officinale. She pressed it down with her thumb.

"Did he," she said. "Did he sign you into the book?"

"Yes."

"He signs everybody into the book. It's how he keeps count of who's lied to him." She set the tin on the shelf beside her with the others, label out. "What did he want with you?"

"The Wednesday before Verlie died," I said, "Ellen called you back from the front door and asked you something, and you answered her."

Rosalind put the pencil down on the card table and laid her hand flat beside it. For a while she looked at the bundles hanging over my head, and I looked at the long gray rope of her hair over her shoulder, and Deacon snored once in the aisle.

"I've had nothing to do with any of it, Ellen," she said. She said it flatly, with the name at the end. "I have heard myself say that every day for nineteen years. I didn't know he had."

"He's thought it had something to do with Verlie."

"It had everything to do with Verlie." She picked up the pencil again and turned it end over end on the table. "She was right, you know. She was telling the Methodist ladies and anybody at the Rockhound who'd hold still that somebody raised in the families was hushing ringing stone for the mines. Putting it to sleep so it'd go out the gate in the same flats as the gift-shop points, and a dealer could tap it and hear quartz." The pencil turned over. "It was me."

I did not say anything. In the front of the mall somebody laughed at the register, and the door opened and shut.

"A month in a crock of wood ash and mullein, in the dark, with the lid on," Rosalind said. "It's still what it is. It just stops answering. Forty dollars a flat. The Bluff, and two outfits over in Garland County." She looked straight at me then, for the first time. "I started the spring after she sent me to plants. She told me I'd learned what I was going to learn. Well. I'd learned enough to be worth forty dollars a flat to Royce Dunagan. Which was more than she ever paid me."

"That's against the Accord."

"Against the Accord," she agreed. "Which nobody in this county can tell you the year of." She tapped the pencil once on the table. "I still do it. Spring and fall. You can tell Ione Pickens. She'll be the gladdest woman in Montgomery County to have been right about me."

"I'm not going to tell Ione."

"Then you're a fool, and I'd stay out of the Haskew house." She held my eye a moment longer and then looked down at her labels. "You want to know where I was that Thursday."

"He told me."

"Then you know." She said it anyway, to the label sheet. "I got there at four. It was her bad night. I had her feet in a basin of warm water with lavender in it, and I changed the water every hour because she couldn't stand it cooling, and Merritt sat in the chair at the foot of the bed with his tie on the whole night through and never said a word. At half past seven I was at his kitchen sink. At nine I was at it again." She wrote a word on the next label, slowly. Achillea. "I heard about Verlie at the Mount Ida market on Saturday, from a woman selling eggs. I'd been up two nights. I thought I hadn't heard her right."

Deacon woke in the aisle and lifted his head, and looked at the two of us, and put it down again.

"He'd like to thank you," I said. "For Ellen. He told me he's never been able to, properly."

Rosalind sat with the pencil in her fingers and did not turn it.

"He'll want to hear it from me, then," she said at last. "In his own house. Where he can tell it's so." She tore the label off the sheet. "Go on. You're bad for business."

I woke Deacon and we went out past the lanterns and the quilts and the register into the afternoon. It was the clearest day of the fall, the sky over the north ridge the hard blue of a jay's wing, and in the gutter in front of the antique mall lay a piece of ground fog the size of a hall rug, white and low and holding together, with sun all around it. A pickup came down Main and drove through it, and it closed up behind the tailgate, and Deacon and I walked on past it to the shop.

At half past eight that night the Rockhound was dark except for the kitchen and the fixture over the back booth. Birdie had the radio off. She brought the last two slices of the day's sweet potato pie and a cereal bowl of banana pudding with the wafers gone soft, and two spoons, and pulled her chair to the end of the booth and left Verlie's side empty. Deacon went under the table and lay down across her feet, and she let him.

"Every bit," she said. "You promised."

So I gave her every bit, from the paper sack to the porch rail. The ballroom photograph with Royce's palm up, and the program in the frame, and Shelby in her hose at table six. The four posts the slump took in March, and the man from the state with his plate lunch, and the one wire strung after the funeral. Birdie listened with her spoon upside down in her mouth, and when I came to the envelope she took it out.

"Four hundred dollars," she said. "And a rock for his wife." She looked down the dark cafe toward the counter. "In here. Mama would've served him. She'd have given him extra gravy."

"Shelby said she's held her daddy's hat since she was nineteen."

"Bless her heart," Birdie said, and meant it, which is not how she usually means it. "And then you went and stood on her porch."

I told her about the rail, and what I had asked first, and what I had asked after, and how the point had gone out toward Chigger's yard and hung there off true and would not come down until I asked it about Deacon. I told her about my ears.

"So you asked it where it wasn't," she said.

"I asked it something I didn't know the answer to. That's the difference."

Birdie took a spoonful of the pudding and thought about that. "Shelby told you Wade Tolliver has eyes," she said.

"She meant at the Rockhound. Reading it on his face."

"I know what she meant. I'm asking what you mean." She watched me eat a bite of sweet potato pie. "That's all right, Z. You take your time. You've got till the Hunter's Moon on the rest of it, you might as well take till Christmas on that."

Then I told her about the man in the canvas coat, and the card with the gray H, and the book in the hall, and the seven violets on the piano bench. I told her what Merritt had heard through his wall, and every word of Rosalind's in the back of the Ben Franklin, the crock and the mullein and the forty dollars a flat. Birdie set her spoon down halfway through and did not pick it back up.

"Rosalind Fry," she said, when I had finished. "Putting rocks to sleep for Royce Dunagan. At forty dollars a flat."

"In wood ash."

"I don't care if it's in a feather bed." She shook her head slowly. "Nine dollars a bar, and won't eat in here on account of the lard." Then, after a moment, in a different voice, "Holding Ellen Haskew's feet in a dishpan all night. Every hour."

"Merritt counted the steps to the kitchen."

"I believe it." Birdie pulled the pie plate toward her and turned it a little on the Formica, and looked at it and not at me. "So that's Royce, and that's Rosalind. Two days, and all you've found out is who it wasn't."

"That's most of fieldwork, Bird. You find where the vein isn't, and then there's less hill to look at."

"There's still hill." She counted it off on the plate's rim with one finger, though she did not say the names out loud. Cody, who I had not asked again. Ione, who I had never asked at all. "And whatever it was Verlie wrote, that you can't find and your rock says isn't up on that mountain." She looked at me. "Have you asked June Ivey?"

"June?"

"June Ivey stood behind that counter twenty-two years, Z. When they cleared Verlie's shop out, June took boxes home. Mama said she sat in her car in front of the shop with them on the seat beside her and cried before she could drive." Birdie reached over and took my spoon out of my hand and put it in the empty bowl. "And she's down on my sheet for a half dozen."

I thought of June at sixteen, from my side of the counter: the cardigan and the pencil behind her ear and the stool by the register that she never sat on. I had not knocked on her door since I came home. I had not thought of it once.

"No," I said. "I haven't asked June."

"Well," Birdie said, and began stacking the plates. "Now you've got somewhere to go."

It was after ten when Deacon and I came along Main to the shop. The street was empty and the bank sign said forty-four degrees. On my front step, square in the middle of the top board where I could not miss it, sat a squat glass jar with a tin lid. I picked it up. The lid was cold, and the jar was full to the threads with something pale green and stiff, and when I turned the lid it came off easy and let out the smell of yarrow and woodsmoke. Deacon put his nose to it and drew back and sneezed.

A brown paper label was gummed to the side, and on it in pencil, in a narrow hand I had watched writing that afternoon: Achillea millefolium. Rub in at night. Under that was a price, nine dollars, and somebody had drawn one straight line through it.