Swing Low

The bookends had spent the night inside the front door in June Ivey's dish towels, and on Thursday morning I unwrapped them before I put the coffee on. The towels were feed-sack cotton worn so thin you could read a newspaper through them, one bordered in blue checks and one with a rooster stitched in the corner in red thread. I shook the felt lint out of them on the back step while Deacon went down to the creek, and folded them on their old creases, and put them in a paper sack by the register to carry back to her. Then I took the geodes to the counter one at a time in both hands. My arms had come back to me in the night. They were stiff from the wrist to the shoulder and smelled of yarrow, and they did what I asked of them.

On the oak in their walnut frames the two stones sat side by side, each hollow lined with crystal that went gold where the window light reached into it and gray where it did not. The right one sat a hair lower on its felt. I could find the line of the plug with my thumbnail, if I went looking, and I did not go looking. I took the tin out of the inside pocket of my coat, where it had ridden all night on the chair by my bed, and opened it on the counter and looked at the four stapled sheets and the half sheet folded on top of them, and closed it again, and put it back, and buttoned the pocket. June's Kroger list was in my shirt pocket. Verlie's letter was in my jeans. I had everything I had been given, on my body, and I went and made the coffee.

I opened at nine. The middle of October belongs to the leaf drivers, people up from Louisiana and over from Texas on the scenic byway with a cooler on the back seat, who stop in Hollis Springs because the sign on the highway says CRYSTALS and stay twenty minutes. A couple from Shreveport bought a Bluff point apiece and stood at the counter holding them up to the window to decide whose was clearer, and ended it by trading. A woman in a quilted vest laid her hand flat on top of the right-hand bookend and asked what I wanted for the pair.

"They're not for sale."

"Everything in a store's for sale."

"Those came in with me," I said, and she laughed and bought a sack of tumbled rose quartz for a granddaughter instead, and went out with her keys already in her hand.

At noon I turned the sign to BACK AT ONE, which would be true today, and took Deacon out the back and down the bank to the gravel bar below the sycamore. The creek was low and clear and loud over the riffle. I wanted one stone of my own for the sill, and there had only ever been one place I found them. The October I was sixteen, Verlie had let me set a single creek-washed point at the end of her sill, and it had come out of this gravel bar, out of this water, and I had never known what became of it. Deacon went in to his elbows and stood there drinking. I walked the bar bent over with my hands on my knees, turning gravel with the toe of my boot. Every few minutes the sun found something white, and it was bull quartz, or a chip of novaculite, or once a piece of a Coca-Cola bottle worn as soft as sea glass. Near the tail of the bar, where the water had dropped its heaviest load against the roots, there was a point no longer than my thumb, milky at the base and clear at the tip, the tip rounded off by however many miles of creek it had come down out of the ridge. I rinsed it in the riffle and put it in my shirt pocket with June's list, and called the dog, and he came up out of the water and shook himself on my jeans.

The afternoon was slow. In the lull after two I took down the coffee can of desert stones from the shelf over the register and poured it out on the felt. I had carried that can from Tucson between my feet in the cab of a rental truck, eleven hundred miles, and since then it had been as far as the fair and back. Most of it was what anybody picks up in seventeen years of walking washes for a living: chalcedony roses, a chunk of malachite from a dump at Bisbee, a dozen pieces of jasper I had liked the colors of at the time. I chose three. An Apache tear from the perlite pits outside Superior, black until I held it to the window, and then smoke brown all the way through. A nugget of chrysocolla from Globe the blue of a swimming pool painted on a postcard. A pebble of red jasper from a wash on the Ajo road, with the desert varnish still dark on one side of it where it had lain face up to the sky for longer than there had been people to pick it up.

Verlie washed a stone that was going on the sill in plain water and let it dry in the air, never with a towel, and put nothing on it after. I took the three of them and the creek point to the stockroom sink and scrubbed the dust out of their pockets with an old toothbrush, and set them in a row on the drainboard by the canning jar to dry, and went back out front and swept the Arizona grit off the felt into my palm and put it back in the can.

At six I turned the sign. The sun was already off Main. It had gone behind the west ridge while I was counting the drawer, and the street lay in the blue shade with the post office and the feed store and the bank across from me holding the last of the day in their upper windows. Above their roofs, on the north ridge, the sun still had the Bluff. The whole cut face of the pit stood up red over the pines with the white of the veins running down through it, and the light on it came level from the west and made it the brightest thing in the valley.

I cleared the sill. It was the original oak, as deep as my forearm is long, and since the day I opened I had kept stock on it, a pair of amethyst clusters on price cards and a calcite rhomb that doubled anything you set it on, and the window rack of rose quartz hearts the tourists liked. I moved all of it to a flat box on the counter and wiped the sill down with a damp rag and stood back while it dried. Deacon had come out of the stockroom when I moved the rack. He watched the rag go back and forth, and when it was finished he put his nose to the wood and went the length of it, slowly, from one end to the other.

The bookends went first, one at each end of the sill, with the open geodes turned in to face the room. Ione's stones had all faced the room, every one of the forty-one on her porch sill, and Verlie's had too; you rest a stone looking at what it lives with, and not at the street. Between the bookends I set the three from Arizona, the jasper and the chrysocolla and the Apache tear, a hand's width apart. From the register shelf, from beside the brass cup hook, I brought the clear Bluff point the child at the fair had said was singing, and set it in the middle. The creek point went next to it. Then I took the red bandanna out of my right pocket and unfolded it and laid it on the oak beside the heavier bookend, and lifted Verlie's pendulum out of it, and set the quartz down on the cloth with the chain coiled beside it and the tiger's eye bead lying in the coil.

Deacon looked at the sill when it was done. He turned around twice beneath it, in his patch of floor, where there was no sun now to lie in, and lay down with his back against the wainscot and his chin on his paws.

Verlie and I had sat on two stools. I brought the one from behind the counter and set it in the middle of the floor, facing the window, and turned out the lamp by the register and the overhead lights and the little red numbers on the gem scale, and sat down.

From the stool the sill was a row of shapes against the glass, and through the glass, over the roofs across Main, was the Bluff. The sun was going up the face of it. The red went first, from the bottom, a foot at a time, as the shadow of the west ridge climbed the north wall, and above the shadow the clay burned the brighter for having less of itself left. Then the shadow had the veins, and the white went out of them. Then only the lip held the light, a thin bright line along the top of the pit, and then it did not, and the Bluff was a dark hill against a pale green sky with the first planet over it.

On the sill the colors went the same way. The chrysocolla was a blue stone and then a gray one. The jasper went to brown, and the Apache tear was black again. The bookends held a little gold back in their hollows for a while. The two quartz points in the middle and the pendulum at the end took the last of the sky into themselves and kept it longer than anything else in the room, as clear stones do, so that for a quarter of an hour after the street was dark there were three pale lights along the sill and nothing else.

I said the names, as Verlie used to, without looking at them. Jasper, from the Ajo road. Chrysocolla, Globe. The Apache tear. Geode, Keokuk. I got to the far end of the sill and the stone on the bandanna, and I knew it without looking, too: north wall of the Bluff, dug by a girl of fifteen who grew up to sit on that rock above it on Thursday evenings with her lantern and wait for her own girl.

For a day and a night I had carried the whole of that Thursday on my body, folded into pockets, and I took it out now and went through it, in the dark, from the beginning.

At suppertime that Thursday Verlie had been at the Rockhound, in her booth, telling her grandson she would not hear it from him too. Cody had told me that in his garage with the red rag in his hands. She left the cafe, and from that door to the dig crew in the morning nobody in Hollis Springs had seen her. The whole town agreed on that much, and had for nineteen years.

At a quarter past four somebody had telephoned Harlan Moss's office in Mount Ida and asked to move her off Friday morning and would not give a name, and Peggy Arnold had told them no. Friday at ten Verlie was going to sit down in the client's chair and sign four sheets of paper that sold the building and gave the money to her daughter and her grandson, and gave everything she had ever dug or bought or cut or polished to me. The stock went with it. Every shelf of it.

At seven she was waiting for me on the flat rock. I was the only one living who knew it. I had never told my mother, or Birdie, who sat beside me on the bleachers in Mount Ida that night while the sky went black over the scoreboard. I had not told Ione, or Wade, or June, or anyone in three weeks of telling people things.

At some hour before dark she had set her lantern down in the middle of that rock, upright, with the cap screwed on and the wick turned down, and Wade had carried it down the path the next morning full to the brim, waiting for it to slosh on him.

At nine Ione had climbed to the pine the lightning took and called her name once. There was no lantern at the top. Nothing came back down the hill but the wind.

And at half past four on a hot afternoon in September, in this room, at that counter, a woman with a pie had put her hand on my wrist.

"Mama waited on you that night, you know. Sat up there with her lantern till the light went. She wasn't mad."

My hand was around my own wrist. I had not felt it go there. Under my fingers was the place where hers had rested, lightly, dry and cool from the bank, and I sat on the stool in the dark with my hand closed over it and did not move.

I had told her I quit. I had stood behind that counter with my hands on the lemon oil and told her I never went back up there, and she had heard me say it, and she had said that Mama waited on me that night. I had never said that night. There was nobody in this world who could have told her Verlie was waiting for me but Verlie.

Verlie could have. If she had seen her daughter that afternoon, she could have said, the girl's coming up at seven, as she might have said it's going to rain. I gave her that. I sat and gave it to her and looked at what was left.

Sat up there with her lantern till the light went.

I had just watched the light go. On the last Thursday in September the sun is down a little after seven, and up on the lip, with the ridge open to the west, the red goes off the north wall from the bottom, and then the veins go, and by half past seven there is no seeing your own hands on that rock. A woman who sits up there until the light goes and means to get herself back down a mile of path lights her lantern. Verlie had climbed that path in the dark a thousand times, and she never in her life climbed it without a light going. Her lantern was full in the morning, with the wick down. She had never lit it. Whatever happened to her on that rock happened while there was still light enough to sit by, and when the light was gone she did not need a lantern anymore.

So somebody had seen her sitting there. Somebody had been close enough on that rim, before half past seven, to see the lantern standing unlit on the stone beside her, and Verlie with her hands in her lap, looking down the path for a girl who never came up it, and the light going. Close enough to know she wasn't mad.

For three weeks I had lived on that. She wasn't mad. It was the only kind thing anybody had ever said to me about that night, and I had taken it out and looked at it the way I would look at a good stone, and put it back, every night since the pie. It had been true. It had been brought to me by somebody who was there.

Lorene had driven twelve miles from the bank to tell me so.

I got up. I do not remember deciding to. I was standing at the sill with the stool behind me and my hip against the oak, and outside the streetlight at the corner had come on and laid its yellow across the glass, and the stones on the sill were stones again, with nothing in them.

The rest of it came as the colors had gone, one at a time, and I let it.

Cody with the red rag: Your aunt's been at me about money all week. Garrett Lyle by my back shelves, looking up into the top bays: the August the daughter called him down to appraise the stock, for the family, Mrs. Pace at the bank, a buttermilk pie and a legal pad, every shelf in the room top to bottom, and she wrote down every number he said. Lorene in her carport, crimping the foil with her thumbnail: she had meant to have it typed up nice at the bank and give it to Mama at Thanksgiving. I didn't get to.

The stock she had priced shelf by shelf on a Sunday in August was going to a sixteen-year-old at ten o'clock on Friday morning. At a quarter past four on Thursday somebody had called Mount Ida to stop it.

Over Lorene's telephone, the night the cicadas stopped, there had been a calendar from the Farmers Bank with the phases of the moon printed in the corner, and I had sat at her table with my tea and counted the weeks on it. She had been at that bank since I was a child. Arletta at the coffeepot, pouring for the Baptists: men down from Little Rock in gray suits going through every drawer in that building, and the girls crying in the ladies' room. A posting error discovered in October. Fully corrected by the week before Thanksgiving. Cody at his garage, the first time, not looking at me: Aunt Lorene sold what was worth selling. What's left is what nobody wanted.

Hal at the fair, turning his tomatoes so their best sides faced the aisle. Nineteen years I've brought tomatoes to this fair. Started the year Lorene made me quit the horses. And Birdie at the register, correcting Arletta: Nineteen. I was sixteen.

Cody behind the cattle barn, with his legs out from under a stock trailer: Aunt Lorene's the only one in this county ever stood up for me, and she never asked me what I'd gone to say, either. And Lorene herself, at my counter, with the tea towel folded small in her hands. You go to the Rockhound with him. You sit down at a table with him where they can see you. That's what I'd ask you to do, if I was asking. I had told her I would. I had not done it yet.

I stood at the sill a long time. Down the street a truck went by with its radio going, and the music came and went through the glass. Below me, Deacon lifted his head off his paws and looked up at me, and when I did not look back he got up and came and leaned the whole of his weight against my leg, as he leans on the back door when he wants it opened, and stayed there.

I thought about Wade in the booth by the Rockhound's window with his glasses squared against the clipboard, telling me what it would take. Somebody brings me something a judge would look at twice. I had four sheets of paper nobody had signed. I had a pencil line in a green book that could not leave the building it was in, and a copy of it on the back of a grocery list. I had a paragraph from the Mount Ida paper, and a waitress's story, and an old man's tomatoes. I had a lantern that had been full in the morning. And I had twenty-one words a woman had said to me over a pie, with her hand on my wrist.

In the stockroom, on the shelf over the sink beside the canning jar, Lorene's second-best pie dish stood where I had washed it and left it, with PACE on its strip of masking tape and the chip in its rim turned to the wall. I could see it from the sill, through the stockroom door, by the streetlight. You bring it back when you've got something to put in it. There's no hurry, honey. There's never any hurry.

The stones on the sill faced the room. The bookends, the three from Arizona, the singing point, the creek point I had picked out of the gravel at noon. Ione said a stone-worker does not rest her stones while one of them is unsettled, and the families along Main and up Spring Street would be looking at this window on the night of the Hunter's Moon to see whether I knew it.

I reached down to the end of the sill and lifted Verlie's pendulum off the bandanna by its chain. It hung from my fingers straight down and did not move. I wrapped it in the red cloth and put it in my right pocket, and left the rest of them where they stood in the dark.