Swing Low

Birdie had a white paper sack waiting by the register when I came in for coffee Wednesday morning, folded over twice at the top and gone clear in two places with grease. "Apple," she said, before I could ask. "Not the half dozen. Those are Hunter's Moon. These are so she'll open the door." She pushed it across the counter at me with one finger and went back to the grill, and Arletta came around the end of the counter with Deacon's biscuit and said June Ivey took her coffee black and her gossip with sugar, and I was not to stay past the second cup or June would start in on the Baptists.

I turned the sign at the shop to BACK AT ONE and walked. June lived on Locust Street, a short climb up the hollow behind the Baptist church, in a green-shingled house with a carport made over into a garage and a row of chrysanthemums along the front walk in coffee cans painted white. The morning had come in clear and cold behind the fog in the creek bottom, and the oaks on the ridge above her roof had gone the brown of a paper sack. Her driveway was covered in sycamore leaves, big and curled and pale on their undersides, drifted against the garage door and the mailbox post. I looked up and down Locust Street. There were oaks and two maples and a cedar somebody had let go to seed in the ditch. There was no sycamore on the street.

The door opened before I was all the way up the steps. June was smaller than I remembered, in a navy cardigan with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, her hair gone from gray to white and still set in the same short waves, and there was a yellow pencil stuck behind her right ear.

"Well, now," she said. "I wondered if it'd be this week or next."

"Birdie sent these."

"Birdie Calloway sends what she wants people to eat." June took the sack and looked into it, and folded it shut again exactly on its old creases. "Come in. Your dog can come in. I had a dog for fourteen years and I never once made him wait on a porch."

Her kitchen was yellow linoleum and a dinette table with a vinyl cloth printed in cherries, and a percolator going on the back eye of the stove. She poured my coffee into a cup with a saucer under it, and hers, and set the fried pies out on a plate with a paper napkin under each one, and only then sat down across from me. Deacon lay down under the table with his back against the wall and his chin on my boot.

"Twenty-two years I stood behind that counter," June said, "and she bought me a stool the first week I was there, a good one, with a back on it, and I never sat on it once. She'd come out of the stockroom and find me standing and say, June, I paid four dollars for that stool. I told her she could sit on it." June turned her cup in its saucer. "You used to sit on it. When you were waiting on her to finish with a customer."

"I'd forgotten that."

"I hadn't." She looked at me over her cup, plainly, without hurry. "You were a polite child. You said thank you every time I gave you a box to carry. And then you weren't there anymore, and nobody said where you'd gone, and I didn't ask your mother because it wasn't my business." She set the cup down. "I'm not saying that to be ugly. I'm saying I'm glad you came."

I ate half a fried pie, because she was watching me to see that I did, and got Birdie's crust all down my coat. I told June I had bought the building. She knew. I told her I had been going through what was left in the stockroom, and that most of what was left was what nobody would buy.

"That's so," June said. "That's what I left you." She brushed a crumb off the cherries with the side of her hand. "Lorene said what was left could go down in the stockroom till the building sold, and the building didn't sell. I asked her could I have a few boxes for myself, and she said take what you want, June, and I took what I wanted." She was quiet a moment. "I sat out in front of that shop in my car with them on the seat a good while before I could drive. I expect somebody saw me."

"Birdie's mother."

"Well. Then everybody saw me." June got up and took the percolator off the eye. "They're in the garage. I never unpacked but the one. Come on, and bring your coffee, it's cold out there."

The garage was through a door off the end of the kitchen, two steps down onto concrete. June pulled a string and a bulb came on over a workbench, and then she went to the big door and bent and hauled on the handle, and it went up rattling on its tracks and let the morning in. The sycamore leaves that had drifted against it tipped over the sill and slid in across the concrete. June looked at them and said nothing about them, and went to the shelves.

Somebody had built the shelves to last: two-by-twelves on heavy brackets down the whole back wall, and on them, between paint cans and a box fan and a dozen mason jars of nails sorted by size, sat nine cardboard boxes, every one labeled on the end in the same square print. RECEIPT BOOKS 1971-1980. LABELS & TAGS. HER MUGS. FROM THE BACK SHELF. WINDOW. The tenth box was open and empty, and its contents stood along the top shelf in a row: a set of mineral field guides with broken spines, a Mount Ida phone book from the year Verlie died, three spiral receipt books, and at either end, holding them up, a pair of geode bookends.

"That's the one I unpacked," June said. "I needed something to hold up Charles's manuals, and those were hers and they were heavy, and so I used them. Charles has been gone eleven years. I never took his manuals down either." She put her hand flat on the box marked WINDOW. "You'll want this one, I'd think. Before long."

I opened the flaps. Inside, folded in tissue paper gone tan at the edges, was a length of dark green wool, cut and hemmed by hand to the width of a windowsill, with a rust stain at one corner where something iron had stood on it once and a long while.

"She'd have had me iron it by now," June said. "Every year, the week before the moon. She'd bring it in a grocery sack and set it on my side of the counter and say it was about time, wasn't it, and I'd take it home and iron it on the wool setting with a wet dishtowel over it, so it wouldn't shine." She touched the tissue with the end of one finger. "I haven't ironed it in nineteen years. I expect it's about time."

I folded the tissue back over the wool. My hands wanted to lift it out, and I kept them where they were.

"Would you keep it a little while longer, June?"

She looked at me, and then at the pocket of my coat where the bandanna was, as if she could see through the canvas. She knew. Anybody who had stood behind Verlie Odom's counter for twenty-two years knew what was in that pocket, and what a stone-worker had to do before she rested anything.

"I'll iron it," she said, "and I'll keep it." She took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote something on the box flap, small, and put the pencil back. "Now. Birdie Calloway didn't send fried pies up the hollow so you could look at my husband's paint cans. What is it you came for?"

"Something Verlie wrote down that last week. She left a letter in the shop. It says the rest is written." I did not tell her the rest of the line. "I don't know where."

June was quiet. Out in the driveway Deacon had gone to lie in the sun on the concrete apron, with the sycamore leaves around him, and he lifted his nose at a sound down the street and put it down again.

"She always sent me in the house," June said. "When she was going to do that. Sent me to the post office, or to the bank, or in the back to count something. I counted the same box of Herkimers three times one afternoon in 1986." She went to the kitchen steps and stopped on the first one with her hand on the doorframe. "Anything in this garage that was hers, you do what you need to with it. It's been sitting here waiting on somebody to. I'll be at the table."

The door shut behind her. I stood a moment in the cold with the bulb burning over the bench and the light from the open door coming across the floor as far as my boots. Then I set my coffee on the shelf by the mason jars and took the bandanna out of my pocket.

Verlie's pendulum lay in the red paisley as it always did, the point turned toward the brass cap, the tiger's eye bead fallen against the chain. I unwrapped it on the workbench. The bench top was a slab of fir with a vise bolted at one end and the outline of every tool on the pegboard above it drawn in black marker, so a man named Charles could have told at a glance, eleven years ago, which screwdriver was out of the house. I set my elbow on the fir. I hooked the last link over the end of my finger and let the point down until it hung an inch above a burn mark on the wood.

Certain question first. I looked for something I knew the answer to that had nothing to do with anybody.

"Is this floor concrete?"

It went out from my chest and back, straight, a hand's length over the burn mark and back again, and kept on until I was sure of it. I waited for it to come still. That took longer than it ever had on Shelby's rail. I had come up the hollow wanting something, and I knew what I wanted, and I could feel the wanting in my arm the way you can feel a fishing line that has something on it.

Ask it like you don't care. I couldn't. So I thought instead of what Ione had told me in her kitchen with her cup in its ring: that a thing set down and left rests in one place, and will rest there until somebody comes back for it. Whatever Verlie had written was somewhere. It had been there all along, in one place, whether or not I ever came. I could want it as hard as I liked, and it would still be where it was.

"Where does the rest of what Verlie wrote rest?"

I said the whole of it aloud. Concrete gives a voice back, a garage more than anywhere, and I had heard my own voice come back off the walls of a dozen sample sheds in Arizona. June's garage took the words and gave nothing back at all. I heard the last one leave me and that was the end of it, and in the quiet after, the point went out.

The swing ran in a long line, longer than anything it had done for me since the shelf, out across the concrete toward the back wall and the boxes and back to my wrist, out and back, a yard of chain's worth of swing on a chain that was not a yard long. I took my elbow off the bench and followed it. I had carried it across Ione's kitchen the same way, low, with the question held in my head. I walked toward the shelves a step at a time with my arm bent at my side, and with each step the swing came shorter, out and back, out and back, aimed at the top shelf the whole time. At the shelf it was a hand's width. I lifted my arm and held the pendulum along the row: past the field guides, past the phone book and the receipt books, and over the bookend on the left the point went in small slow circles, the size of a coffee cup's rim. I moved it to the right.

Over the bookend at the right-hand end of the shelf, it swung so hard the chain jerked my finger, out and back across the face of the geode, out and back, as straight and as long as it could go with the shelf above it in the way.

I let it run. Then I closed my hand around the point and stood there holding it, and both my arms went heavy from the shoulder down, all at once, as if somebody had hung a wet coat on each of them. I put the pendulum on the shelf beside the mason jars and sat down on an upturned five-gallon bucket of June's and let my hands hang between my knees until I could lift them.

It was a few minutes. Deacon came in off the apron and looked at me and lay down by the bucket with his side against my shin, and I put one heavy hand on his ribs and felt them going up and down.

When I could, I took the geodes down off the shelf one at a time and set them on the bench under the bulb.

They were a matched pair, two halves of a single stone, and a good one. Somebody had sawed a big Keokuk geode down the middle, from Iowa by the look of it: a knobbed gray rind outside, then a band of blue-white chalcedony a quarter inch thick, then the hollow, lined wall to wall with clear quartz crystals and a few rhombs of honey-colored calcite down in the bottom. Each half had been set upright with its open face out, the crystals showing, in a shallow tray of plaster of Paris inside a walnut frame, so it would stand on a shelf and hold up books. Along the cut edge of each I could see the faint parallel scoring of a diamond blade. The cut had gone a little off the middle. That happens with geodes. The rind is never the same thickness all the way around, and the saw finds the thin side.

I lifted one, and then the other. The right-hand bookend was heavier by more than a pound.

The off-center cut accounted for a little of that. It did not account for a pound. I turned them both over and laid them face down on the fir, crystals to the wood, and looked at their bottoms under the bulb. Each walnut frame had a square of green felt glued over the plaster. The felt on the left one was the color of a pool table and worn through to the plaster at one corner. The felt on the right one was a darker green, darker by a shade or two, and the plaster in that frame stood a good quarter inch higher than in its mate. Somebody had poured more into it, later.

I took a flat screwdriver off June's pegboard, from inside its black marker outline, and worked the blade under one corner of the darker felt. The glue was old and let go in a long brittle strip. Under it the plaster was white, and in the middle of the white was a rectangle of a slightly different white, about three inches by two, with a seam around it no thicker than a hair. Plaster from two different mixings dries to two different whites. I learned that in a survey lab in Tucson setting core samples, and I had not thought of it in years. I tapped the plaster at the edge of the frame with the screwdriver handle, and then the rectangle. The edge gave back a hard click. The rectangle gave back something duller.

I set the blade in the hairline seam and leaned on it, gently, and then not gently, and the plug came up out of the plaster in one piece, a neat white brick with a layer of waxed paper stuck to its underside.

Under it, in a hollow cut to fit it, lay a flat tin that had once held Sucrets lozenges. The yellow lettering on the lid had worn down to the metal at the corners.

My hands were steady enough. I sat back on the bucket for a moment anyway, and took Verlie's letter out of my left jeans pocket, where it had been every day since the shelf, and unfolded it on the bench beside the tin. I knew what it said. I read it anyway, her blunt pencil capitals gone soft on the creases. If anything happens to me at the Bluff, it was not the dark. The rest is written, and the stones are keeping it.

Everyone I had shown it to, and I with them, had read stones as ground: the Bluff, the north wall, the hill Royce Dunagan called his. I looked at the geode lying face down on June's bench with its crystals against the wood. I thought of every quartz point in that cigar box at the shop, wrapped twice, and of what Verlie would have said if I had asked her at sixteen where she kept the things she did not want found. In a stone. Where else would a stone-worker keep a thing.

The lid of the tin came off stiffly. Inside was paper, folded and folded again, into a block about the size of a deck of cards. I lifted it out and opened it on the fir, one fold at a time.

There were two pieces. The smaller was a half sheet of good bond, typed, and folded only once. At the top was a name printed in gray: HARLAN MOSS, ATTORNEY AT LAW, and under that a street address in Mount Ida and a telephone number with no area code. Under that, typed, Mrs. Odom, and a line I had to read twice before it said anything to me.

For signing Friday, 10:00 a.m.

At the bottom, in the left corner, two sets of initials in the capitals typists use: HM:pa.

The other piece was four sheets of the same bond stapled together at the corner, and the staple had rusted and left an orange print on the top page. The same gray letterhead. Under it, typed in capitals and centered, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF VERLIE ODOM, and under that the paragraphs, numbered, in a lawyer's careful spacing.

Nineteen years. Every person I had talked to, Birdie and Arletta and Royce's file and my own memory, had been sure that what Verlie was putting in writing that September was one more letter to Little Rock about the north wall. What she had put in writing that week was a will.

The paper had been folded eight times and shut in a tin under a brick of plaster for nineteen years, and when I opened the last fold and took my hand away, it lay flat on the fir. It did not try to close. The creases were there when I looked for them, fine as thread, and the pages lay as flat as new bond rolled out of a typewriter that morning.

The date at the top of the first page was the Tuesday of that week. I have known that week by its days for nineteen years.

Paragraph one revoked all former wills. Paragraph two named her executor, a name I did not know. Paragraph three left the building on Main Street to be sold, and the money from it divided in equal shares between my daughter, Lorene Odom Pace, and my grandson, Cody Odom. The stock was not in paragraph three. I read it again to be sure, and it was not.

It was in paragraph four. Behind me the garage door stood all the way open, and the cold came in over the sill along the concrete and around my ankles, and the sycamore leaves stirred a little on the floor and lay still. Deacon breathed against my shin. Under the bulb, in a lawyer's typing, on a Tuesday I had spent in a high school chemistry class, it said: I give all of my stones, minerals, and tools, and all of the stock of Odom Rocks and Minerals, to Zara Lindell.