Swing Low

June read it standing up, at the end of her dinette table, with the four stapled sheets held out at arm's length and the pencil still behind her ear. I had gathered everything off the fir bench before I came in from the garage: the letter folded back along its soft creases, the cover note, the will, the empty Sucrets tin. The plaster plug was back in its hollow, and the dark felt pressed down over it as well as old glue would let it. I told her where I had found them. She heard me out, and when I came to the plaster poured twice she nodded once and went on reading.

She read the first page and turned it back over the staple, and read the second and the third. At the fourth she stopped turning. Under the table Deacon moved his chin off my boot and laid it on the linoleum.

"Well," June said. She set the will down on the cherries. "She never told me."

"She sent you in the house."

"She sent me to the post office twice that week. I thought she was put out about the mail." June sat down across from me and folded her hands on the vinyl, and looked at the will and not at me for a long while. "When she drove up to Mount Ida that week I thought it was the courthouse. Fussing at the county about the mine road again." She touched the bottom corner of the cover note, the two sets of capitals. "HM is Harlan Moss. He's been gone twelve years. Thirteen. That little pa is Peggy Arnold. She typed for him from the June she finished high school till they closed his office, and now she's at the title office on the square." June took the pencil from behind her ear, looked at it, and put it back. "Peggy keeps things. She was that way at eighteen."

I looked at the clock on her stove. My sign on Main Street said BACK AT ONE, and it was going to be wrong.

"I don't have a car, June."

"I know you don't. Arletta says you walk everywhere like a Methodist." She got up and took her coat off the hook by the door. "I go to Mount Ida Wednesdays anyhow, for the Kroger. Put that back in its tin before you lose a page, and bring those bookends. Charles's manuals can lie down flat for once."

The will and the note folded back on their own creases and went into the tin as easily as they had come out. The tin went into the inside pocket of my coat, and I buttoned the pocket over it. Verlie's letter went where it had lived since the shelf, in the left pocket of my jeans. June wrapped the geodes in two dish towels, one apiece, and when I reached for the heavier one she took it out of my hands.

"You're carrying your arms like a pair of buckets," she said. "Get the door."

Her car was a long white Mercury, as clean inside as her garage, with a plaid lap robe folded on the back seat. Deacon climbed up onto the robe between the two wrapped geodes and lay down with a groan and his nose against the glass. June drove the twelve miles with both hands on the wheel and the needle on fifty, and passed nothing, and nothing passed us without her having a word to say about it. At the county line the ridges opened out to the east. The color had gone over the tops of them since Monday, and the hickories stood bare along the crests with the oaks still holding below. I rode with the tin pressed against my ribs under the coat, and every few miles I pressed it again to be sure.

The title office was a brick storefront across the square from the courthouse, with MONTGOMERY COUNTY ABSTRACT & TITLE lettered on the glass in gold leaf. Deacon stayed in the Mercury with the windows down an inch. Inside, plat books as tall as a child leaned on slanted shelves along one wall, and a long counter cut the room in two. Behind it, at a desk under the window, a woman in a pressed white blouse sat going through a stack of deeds with half-glasses low on her nose and a rubber fingertip on her right thumb. She looked up at June, and then at me, and set the stack square before she spoke.

"June Ivey," she said. "It isn't the first of the month."

"Peggy, this is Darlene Lindell's girl. Zara. She was Verlie's girl, that last year." June set her pocketbook on the counter. "She's found something of Harlan's."

Peggy Arnold looked at me over the half-glasses. "You bought the building on Main," she said. "I filed that."

I unbuttoned my coat and took out the tin, and from the tin the half sheet, and laid it on the counter facing her. She read it without picking it up. She read the bottom line twice. Then she put one finger on the two sets of initials, with the rubber tip held just off the paper.

"That's me," she said. "Mr. Moss wanted the pa in small letters. He said a secretary had no business shouting." She looked up. "There'd have been a will with this."

"I have it."

"Then you've read your name in it." Peggy took off the rubber fingertip and set it on the deeds. "I asked Mr. Moss how to spell it. I had it with a y. Mrs. Odom was in the client's chair at his elbow that Monday, and she spelled it for me herself, Z, A, R, A, and she said, that girl spells it without any help, Peggy, and she's sixteen."

The tin was in my hand, empty, with its lid open. I shut the lid and held it against my coat.

"She didn't come Friday," Peggy said. "Mr. Moss came out of his office at ten past ten and again at twenty past and looked at the door. At eleven he had me telephone the shop, and it rang till I hung it up. A little before noon a man came across from the clerk's office and told us." She folded her hands on the deeds. "Mr. Moss kept his door shut the rest of the day. An unsigned will is a piece of paper, Miss Lindell. He told me that the next week, when I asked him what to do with ours. He said there's nothing in this world a lawyer can do with one but put it in a drawer."

"Do you still have his appointment books?"

"Every one, from 1961 to the spring he died." She stood up and lifted a flap in the counter. "Nobody else wanted them."

The room behind the office had no window and steel shelving to the ceiling, banker's boxes on every shelf, each labeled on the end with a year in a round, upright hand. Peggy would not let me lift. She put the rubber fingertip back on, found the year without counting along, and pulled the box down herself and set it on a stepladder, and June held the lid. Inside, among folders and a pair of desk blotters, lay a tall clothbound book with its green gone gray at the corners, a week to every opening and each day ruled off in half hours down the page. Peggy turned it with her thumb to the last week of September, and turned it around on the box lid so it faced me.

Friday's column was in fountain pen, in a man's hand that ran uphill. At ten o'clock it said: Fri 10:00, V. Odom, will. Beside that, written sideways up the margin in pencil gone silver, in the same round hand as the labels on the boxes, was a second line.

Thurs 4:15, call re Odom appt, asked to move, told no. Did not leave name.

"That's my pencil," Peggy said.

"Do you remember the call?"

"I remember writing it." She looked down at the margin. "I answered that telephone forty times a day for thirty-nine years. If they'd told me who they were, I'd have written down who they were. That's what the line's for." She set the rubber tip beside the last four words. "Somebody wanted Mrs. Odom moved off Friday morning and wouldn't give me a name to move her for. So I told them no. I'd tell them no today."

I read the pencil line again, and the ink beside it. Somebody had known about Friday. On the Thursday afternoon, with Verlie still alive, somebody had known she meant to sit down in Harlan Moss's office at ten the next morning and put her name to this, and had picked up a telephone at a quarter past four to stop it, and Peggy Arnold had said no.

"Can it leave here?" I said.

"It does not leave this building." Peggy did not move her hand from the page. "You can sit with it as long as you like. If the law wants it, the law knows where I sit."

June took the pencil from behind her ear and a Kroger list out of her pocketbook. She turned the list over on the box lid and copied both lines onto the back of it, letter for letter, commas and all, and then read them back against the book with the pencil point under each word. When she was satisfied she handed it to me. Bread, oleo, Bon Ami, on one side. Thursday, on the other.

The library was a block off the square, a low brick building with a book drop out front shaped like a mailbox. June knew where they kept the bound volumes of the Mount Ida paper: on the bottom shelf at the back, past the large print, a year to a book in black cloth with the year stamped in gold. I bent to pull out the one I wanted, and my arms would not do it. June pulled it out instead and carried it to a table against her chest.

The paper came out on Thursdays. The issue a week after she died had her on the front page below the fold, under HOLLIS SPRINGS WOMAN DIES IN FALL AT MINE, in a photograph I had never seen: Verlie at her own counter, holding a quartz cluster up to the front window with the light coming through it, her reading glasses down on their chain. Four short paragraphs said she had apparently gone up to the north rim after dark, as she was known to do, and that services would be at the Methodist church. June turned to the obituary inside and read it with her finger under each line.

"They put she was a member of the gem and mineral society," June said, when she had finished. "She quit them in 1979."

I had been sixteen that fall, and I had not read one word of it. I read all of it now, week after week, while June sat beside me with her hands in her lap: the football scores, the fair results, the coroner's ruling in two paragraphs, the price of feeder calves at the Glenwood sale barn, the Methodist bazaar. The week before Thanksgiving, at the foot of page three under a notice for a turkey shoot at the VFW, a single paragraph sat under a headline in capitals.

FARMERS BANK COMPLETES AUDIT; POSTING ERROR CORRECTED. Officers of the Farmers Bank of Mount Ida reported this week that the bank's annual examination is complete and that a posting error discovered in October has been fully corrected. No customer accounts were affected, according to the bank's president.

Arletta had told it better. I turned the page, and the next, and came to the Christmas parade, and closed the book.

June let us out on Main at a quarter to three and handed the geodes up to me one at a time through the car window, and would not hear about my arms. "You take those in and set them down," she said, "and you go eat something." The Mercury went off down Main at its own speed. I stood the bookends inside the shop door in their dish towels. On the step, knocking my boots against the sill, I looked down at them. The creases across both toes were packed with red clay, soft and dark, fresh enough to take the print of my thumbnail, the red of the north wall in the morning before the sun is on it. I had walked that day on June's linoleum and June's concrete, the title office's tile and the library's carpet, and nowhere else. I scraped it off on the edge of the step and went to eat something.

At half past three the Rockhound was between its dinners. Arletta had gone home, the grill had been scraped, the chairs were up on two of the tables, and the radio on the pass-through was playing low to nobody. Birdie sat in the back booth with a bus tub of clean silverware and a stack of paper napkins, rolling, and when I slid in across from her she pushed a saucer at me with the last slice of chocolate chess pie on it and did not look up from her hands. Deacon went under the table and put his head on her shoe. I left Verlie's side empty and set the tin on the Formica between the bus tub and the pie.

"What's that?"

"The rest of what she wrote."

Birdie wiped her hands down the front of her apron, twice, and opened the lid. She read the cover note and laid it to one side. She read the will a page at a time with her lips pressed together, and I ate the pie, which was cold from the case and good. At the fourth page she stopped and read the same lines again. Then she turned the page face down on the Formica and looked out the window at the gravel lot and the pickups in it, long enough for me to finish the slice.

"She left you her rocks," Birdie said.

"All of them."

"Seventeen years you were gone," she said, to the window, "and two letters, and the whole time she'd left you every rock she had." When she turned back her eyes were wet and she was furious about it. She wiped them with the back of her wrist and left a stripe of flour across one cheekbone. "Well. She knew what she was doing, Z. She generally did."

"It isn't signed."

"I saw." Birdie picked up a fork and a knife and laid them on a napkin and rolled them, tight, and tucked the corner. "So it's paper."

"It's paper she meant to sign at ten o'clock on Friday morning."

I gave her June's Kroger list, Thursday side up, and told her about Peggy Arnold and the back room and the green book, and Mr. Moss looking at the door at ten past ten. Birdie read the two lines and then held the list a while longer and looked at the pencil, as if June's hand might tell her more than June's words had.

"Who all knew she was doing it?" she said.

"June didn't. Peggy typed it. Harlan Moss drew it up."

"And whoever this is." She laid one finger on the list.

"And whoever that is."

Birdie gave the list back. She rolled another set of silverware, and another, and laid them in the bus tub in a row, and did not say anything for three of them. "You taking all this to Wade?"

"Not yet."

"Then who?"

"Ione."

Her hands stopped. "You're finally going up there to ask Ione Pickens something."

"I'm going to tell her something. She knew Verlie fifty years. She ought to hear it from somebody before she hears it at the post office."

"She'll hear it at the post office anyway. Doris Lamb has already told somebody you rode to Mount Ida in June Ivey's Mercury." Birdie slid out of the booth and went back into the kitchen, and came out with a quart carton of chicken and dumplings with the lid taped down. "Take her that. Ione won't eat my pie, she says I put too much in it. She'll eat my dumplings and lie about it."

The light was going when I came back down Main. In the shop I sat on the stairs and worked Rosalind's salve into both arms from the wrist to the shoulder, and the yarrow came up off my skin and went with me out the door and all the way up Spring Street, with the carton of dumplings warm against my stomach and Deacon walking close on my left.

Ione's porch light was on. The stones on her sills stood dark against the lamplight from inside, three deep, and the smell of her woodstove was out on the walk to meet us. She opened the screen before I knocked.

"Bring the dog," she said, and went back down the hall ahead of us with her cane.

The stove was lit, and the iron ticked, and the kitchen was close and hot and smelled of woodsmoke and coffee and Vicks. Ione had me set the carton on the warming shelf and said nothing about who had sent it. Deacon came down the hall behind me under the faded roses, and at the kitchen doorway he sat. He sat a good while on the runner, looking in at the stove and the table and the yellowware bowl and Ione. Then he turned himself around and lay down across the threshold with his back to the kitchen, facing up the dark hall toward the screen door, his head up off his paws and his ears let down.

Ione watched him settle. "He did that the first time," she said.

"He was facing in, the first time."

"So he was." She looked at his back a moment longer, and lowered herself into her chair with a hand on the oilcloth. "Sit down, child. You've come up my hill with something."

I took out the tin and opened it and gave her the will. She held it close to her thick glasses and read the first page with her mouth moving, and the second and the third, and at the fourth she read aloud, slowly, the way she might have read a verse she meant to know by heart. "All of my stones, minerals, and tools." She stopped there. She laid the sheets on the oilcloth beside the bowl and set her big hands down on either side of them.

"She'd have told me," Ione said. "If we had been speaking."

The stove ticked. Down the hall Deacon breathed out through his nose and kept his head up.

"We were not speaking that Thursday," Ione said. "You know that. Half the county stood on the post office steps and heard why. By the Tuesday I had made up my mind to go to her and say I'd been wrong. I hadn't been wrong. She'd have said she was wrong, and she wasn't either, and then we'd have gone on another fifty years. That's how it was done with us."

She did not look at me. She looked at the window over the sink, where her sill stones stood against the black glass with the kitchen lamp in every one of them.

"She went up the hill Thursday evenings. Everybody that keeps a sill knew she did. I sat at this table till it was dark, getting my nerve, and then past dark, and at nine o'clock I put on my coat and drove out Sawmill Road. Her truck was pulled off under the pines where it always was. I took the flashlight out of my glove box and went up that path." Her hands stayed where they were on the oilcloth. "I hadn't walked it since we were girls. I was fifty-nine, and so were my knees."

"It was black up there, child. Black as the inside of a boot. No lantern at the top. I thought she was sitting on her rock in the dark to spite me, because she'd have heard my car on the gravel and known whose it was." Ione's mouth worked. "I got as far as the pine the lightning took. Where the path turns back on itself and you can't see the top."

I had stood at that pine with Wade Tolliver's hand flat on the trunk beside me. Second set of footprints, partway up path, stop at switchback. The foreman had come up at first light and found where somebody had stood and turned around and gone back down, and Wade had read it in the file that next week and every so often since. Nineteen years they had been a stranger's boots. They had been hers. At nine o'clock that Thursday the top of the Odom path had been dark, and nobody up there had made a sound.

"I called her name," Ione said. "Once. I can hear yet how I said it. Like I was calling her in to supper." She was quiet. "Nothing came back down that hill. The wind on the rim, and nothing else. And I thought, she's heard me, and she'll not answer, and I'll not stand on a hillside in the dark and beg Verlie Odom for anything. So I came down. I drove home, and I went to bed."

The fire settled in the stove. She moved one hand on the oilcloth, an inch, and stopped it.

"Tobias Vance came to that door at eight o'clock in the morning with his hat in his hand. I never told the sheriff. Nobody asked me, and what was I to tell them? That I went partway." She turned her face from the window at last and looked down the hall, at the dog's back in the doorway. "I have thought every night for nineteen years that she was lying at the foot of that wall while I stood there, and heard me call her, and couldn't answer. And I went home to my bed."

I knew what sixty feet of the north wall does to a body that comes off the top of it, and what is waiting at the bottom. I kept it. It would have lifted nothing off her that night.

Deacon got up. He stood in the doorway and shook himself from his ears back, and turned around, and came into the kitchen on his slow nails past my chair and lay down on the brick in front of the stove with the heat on his ribs and his eyes half shut. Ione watched him the whole way across the floor, and for a while after he had stopped.

"You asked me why I stopped," I said. "That morning with the chrysocolla."

"I did." She looked past me, down the hall, at the empty doorway and the screen door at the end of it gone black with the night. "I stopped at the switchback," Ione said. "I have been stopped there ever since."