Swing Low

The woman who answered the telephone at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office asked me whether it was an emergency, and I stood in the stockroom in my socks with the receiver against my ear and thought about it longer than she liked. It was ten minutes to seven on Friday morning. Through the stockroom door I could see the whole length of the shop to the front window, where the stones I had set out the night before stood along the sill against a sky going from gray to white over the Bluff. I told her no, it was not, and asked whether the chief deputy had come in yet.

"He's not on till eight, hon. You want his voicemail?"

"I'd like him to come by Prism and Pendulum in Hollis Springs before he goes anywhere else, if he can," I said. "Tell him it's Zara Lindell. Tell him it's about the lantern."

I had come down the stairs in the dark to make that call, counting them under my feet as I have counted them since I was sixteen and Verlie sent me up to the apartment for her reading glasses. There are thirteen. This morning there had been fourteen, the last one as solid under my sock as the rest, and when I went back up to dress, with Deacon climbing ahead of me one step at a time, there were thirteen again. I put on a clean shirt and moved June's Kroger list into its pocket, and came down, and made the coffee.

He came at twenty past seven in the white county truck, in his khaki uniform shirt, with his hat already in his hand before his boots reached the step. Deacon got up from the sill and went to the door to meet him, and instead of going over his boots and his cuffs as he had the first morning at the Rockhound, he leaned his whole side against Wade's knees and stood there. Wade put a hand on his head. Then he looked past me at the window.

"You've moved your rocks."

"I'm practicing."

He looked at the sill a moment longer, at the bookends and the desert stones and the two clear points between them. "Granny Nell used to count the dark windows on Main from the Methodist steps, the night of the Hunter's Moon," he said. "Came home and told my mother the number like it was the weather." He set his hat crown down on the end of the counter and waited to be told where to stand.

I had laid it all out on the oak before he came, in the order I had been given it. Verlie's letter, unfolded. The Sucrets tin, shut. June's list, Thursday side up. I poured him a cup of coffee in one of Verlie's old saucers and put it at his elbow, and he turned the cup a quarter turn in the saucer and did not drink from it.

The shelf came first: the bottom panel on the back wall, held on with four brads, and what had been behind it. He took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on to read the letter, and read it twice. I told him about June Ivey's garage, and the plaster poured twice in the base of a geode, and opened the tin and gave him the half sheet and then the will. He read the cover note. He read the will a page at a time with the glasses down his nose and his lips shut, and at the fourth page he looked up at me over them, and then down again, and finished it.

"Where's the other half of this?" he said. "The rock it was in."

I tipped my head at the end of the sill. He turned on his stool and looked at the heavier bookend standing open-faced to the room, and then at me.

"How did you know to look inside a rock?"

"She said the stones were keeping it." I put my finger on the last line of the letter.

He looked at the letter. Then his eyes went down, not far, to the right front pocket of my jeans, where the bandanna made its lump, and stayed there about as long as it takes to read a price card. He went back to the will and asked me nothing else about rocks.

So I gave him the rest. Peggy Arnold and the title office and the green book in the back room that does not leave the building, and June's pencil copying the two lines letter for letter onto her grocery list. He read the list, both sides. Bread, oleo, Bon Ami. "Peggy Arnold's been telling this county no since before I could drive," he said. I told him about the bound volume at the library and the paragraph under the turkey shoot, and Arletta at the coffeepot and the men in gray suits, and Birdie counting her drawer twice every night till Christmas. I told him about Garrett Lyle and the legal pad and the Sunday in August, and about Hal at the fair turning his tomatoes, and what Hal had said about the horses. He listened with his glasses on and his hands flat on either side of the will, and when Deacon lay down across his boots he moved his feet to make room.

Then I told him what Lorene had said to me across this counter on a hot afternoon in September, with a buttermilk pie between us, every word of it, and where her hand had been while she said it.

"She was waiting on somebody that night," I said. "Up on the rock. Somebody who was supposed to come up the path at seven for a lesson. Nobody knew that but her and the one she was waiting on." I looked at the will under his hands. "I never told it to anybody. I'm going to. There's somebody I owe it to first."

Wade looked at me for a long moment over the glasses. He did not ask who it was she waited on, or who I owed it to. He took the glasses off and folded them and held them closed in one hand.

"Full," he said. "I carried that thing down full."

The coffee had gone cold in its saucer. Outside a log truck went through town with its jake brake rattling the window glass, and he turned the cup again, another quarter, so its handle came all the way back around to where it had started.

"I'll tell you what a lawyer does with this," he said at last. "He holds up four sheets of paper nobody signed. He holds up a telephone call nobody put a name to. He reads the paper where the bank says no customer was out a dime, and he asks the jury whether they've ever known Arletta Sims to tell a story the same way twice. And then he asks you what a woman said to you three weeks ago over a pie, in a room with nobody else in it." He put the glasses back in his pocket. "That is not a thing a judge looks at twice, Zara."

"I know it."

"Bank examiners keep their work papers. A judge can get them. A deputy can't get them on a waitress's story." He sat with his hand on the will a while longer. "Lorene Pace had my Sunday school class the year I was seven. She gave every one of us a New Testament with our name stamped on the front in gold. I've still got mine."

I did not say anything. There was a burr in the feathering of Deacon's ear, and I bent and worked it out with my fingernails while Wade looked at the window.

"Before anybody says that name out loud in front of me again," he said, "I want Cody Odom out of it. The first thing anybody in this county is going to say is the grandson had words with her at supper, and I won't have it said one more time." He picked his hat up by the crown. "Did he ever tell you where he went after?"

"He said work."

"Then he went to Arvel Bledsoe's. Every boy in this county who could hold a wrench worked for Arvel one time or another. I pumped his gas the summer I was sixteen." He stood, by stages, and settled the hat on his head. "Arvel had the county's wrecker rotation that year. And Arvel never in his life threw away a ticket, because the county never in its life paid him on time." At the door he stopped with his hand on the glass. "I'm off at four. Put that tin back in your coat."

Bledsoe's Garage & Wrecker sat on the old highway at the south end of Mount Ida, a tin building painted green so long ago that only the shade under the eaves remembered it. An old Ford wrecker stood on the gravel with ARVEL BLEDSOE 24 HR on the door in gold letters gone brown, and its boom folded down along its back like a heron's neck. The office smelled of tire rubber and burnt coffee and the oil-soaked sawdust somebody had swept into a pile in the corner and left. Arvel Bledsoe was in a kitchen chair by the counter with a feed-store cushion under him and a hearing aid in each ear, a narrow old man in pressed overalls, and when Wade came in with his hat off, Arvel looked him up and down.

"Tolliver," he said. "You still owe me a fan belt."

"Yes sir. I expect I do."

"Summer you were sixteen." Arvel turned his head and found me, and Deacon behind me at the sawdust pile. "Who's this?"

"Darlene Lindell's girl," Wade said. "She bought the Odom building on Main."

Arvel looked at me a long time with his mouth working. "Verlie's," he said. "I hauled her truck down off Sawmill Road that Friday. Nobody else would go get it." He looked at Wade. "What do you want, son?"

Wade told him. Arvel listened with his head tipped to bring his better ear around, and when Wade said the week, and the year, Arvel lifted one hand off the arm of the chair and pointed at the ceiling.

"Pull-down in the back office. Mind the third rung."

Wade minded it. I stood at the foot of the ladder and took what he handed down: cardboard cases from a liquor store in Hot Springs, which Arvel said through the doorway were the only boxes made anymore that would hold a ticket book flat, each one marked on the end in grease pencil with a year. Wade came down with the right one under his arm and gray cobweb across one shoulder of his uniform, and set it on the counter in front of Arvel and lifted the flaps.

The ticket books were printed in triplicate with carbon between the sheets, the white for the customer and the pink for the county and the yellow left bound in the book, a rubber band around each. Wade went through them on the counter with his glasses on, reading the first date in each book and setting it aside, and at the fourth book he took off the rubber band and turned the yellows one at a time with the side of his thumb until he stopped.

"Ticket four-oh-one-seven," he read aloud, and then he read the date, and it was the date. "Call from county dispatch, seven-oh-five p.m. Out seven-fifteen. Caddo low-water crossing, river road. Oldsmobile Cutlass, Louisiana tag. Both rear wheels off the downstream edge of the slab, setting on the frame. Winched forward. Towed to yard. In, nine-thirty." His finger moved down the yellow sheet. "Driver, Cody. Eighty-five dollars. Paid cash, signed for by a man from Bossier City." He moved the glasses down his nose. "And somebody's wrote across the bottom of it in pencil, boy done good."

"I wrote that," Arvel said. "That boy was in that river to his belt for two hours in the pitch dark with a trouble light in his teeth, and he never put a scratch on that car. I raised him a quarter."

I knew that crossing. Every child in Hollis Springs had been dared to walk it at high water at least once. The Caddo comes across a low-water slab as flat and wide as a parking lot and pours off the downstream edge into a hole it has been digging under the concrete since the year the county poured it, and a car that slides back off that edge sits down on its frame with its rear wheels hanging in the current over four feet of nothing. You do not drag it off. You lift it and bring it forward an inch at a time, with a man in the water watching the oil pan and the tailpipe, and if he is good at it, in the dark, that is two hours.

"Seven-fifteen to nine-thirty," Wade said, "at the bottom of the river road. Nine miles from the end of Sawmill Road, on the other side of the county." He looked at the yellow sheet a while longer. Then he looked at Arvel. "Nobody ever came and asked you where he was that night."

"Nobody ever did," Arvel said. "Everybody knew where he was. He was at the cafe making his grandmother mad. That's all anybody wanted to know."

Wade asked whether he might take the book. Arvel said he had kept it nineteen years for somebody to want it, and Wade could take the whole liquor box if he liked, and Wade took the one book. He wrote Arvel a receipt for it on the back of one of Arvel's own blank tickets, with the date and his name and his badge number, and tore it out along the perforation and gave it to him. Arvel held it at arm's length and read every line of it, and folded it once, and put it in the bib of his overalls.

"Fan belt," he said, as we went out.

Wade drove home by the river road, and at the bottom of it he let the truck roll to a stop on the gravel above the crossing. The Caddo was low and green and going over the slab no deeper than a dinner plate, and below the downstream edge the water turned over on itself, dark, where the hole was. A heron stood in the shallows at the far end and did not trouble to fly. We listened a while to the water come off the edge. Then Wade put the truck in gear.

"I've got dogs to feed," he said, "if you don't mind the stop."

His house sat at the end of a gravel lane above the river three miles short of Hollis Springs, a white frame house with a tin roof and a porch across the whole front of it, and two cane-bottom chairs on the porch that had not been sat in since summer, by the leaves in them. Three beagles came off the porch at the sound of the truck in full voice, and came around to my side, and stopped all at once when Deacon got down out of the back seat and stood on the gravel among them like a church among sheds. He let them go over him. He went over each of them in return, slowly, with great courtesy, and then he walked through the middle of them and up the porch steps and lay down across the top one with his chin on his paws and his back to the yard, as if he had been paying the rent on it for years.

"That's Pearl," Wade said, of the oldest, who had sat down at the foot of the steps to look up at Deacon with her whole heart. "She's the one treed the parsonage cat."

"And those two?"

"Dot and Lou. Her daughters." He looked at Pearl. "They take after their daddy."

He brought a feed can out of the shed and three pans, and I sat down on the second step below Deacon. On the post at the top of the steps hung an old brass barometer the size of a saucer, the face gone yellow, the words printed around it in a curve, STORMY and RAIN and CHANGE and FAIR and VERY DRY. Wade tapped the glass with one knuckle on his way past, as people do with those, and the needle stood where it was, at RAIN. Over the ridge the sky was clear to the bottom, and the last sun lay along the river below us without a cloud anywhere to lie across it.

"Granny's," Wade said. "It reads Sunday."

He scooped the feed into the pans and set them down in a row on the porch boards, and the beagles went to them, and the sound of three dogs eating filled the porch. Deacon watched without lifting his chin. I sat in Wade's yard and listened to them and thought about Sunday, and about Wednesday.

"Hal goes to prayer meeting," I said. "Every Wednesday at seven."

Wade had sat down on the step beside me, one step down, with his forearms on his knees. "Rain or shine," he said. "Ever since I can remember."

"I still have her dish. The second-best one. She told me to bring it back when I had something to put in it."

He was quiet a long while. Down the slope, below the dog pans and the yard, the river went over its rocks, and somewhere on the far bank a man was splitting wood, every stroke arriving across the water a little after I saw the maul come down.

"I can't send you," he said finally. "You understand me. If I send you up that drive, you're working for me, and every word anybody says to you in that kitchen is a word I said. I'm not sending you anywhere." He looked at his hands. "You're taking a pie dish back to a woman who loaned it to you. And you don't own a car, so I'm driving you. I'll be at the curb with the engine off and the window down."

"All right."

"You don't go in to get anything out of her. You don't tell her anything you can't say again in a courtroom with your hand on a Bible."

"I don't intend to say anything that isn't so."

"If she tells you to go, you go. If she asks for me, you come and get me." He turned his head and looked at me, and his face in the last light was tired and plain and kind, and older than it had been that morning in my shop. "And you don't make that woman any promises, Zara. Not about Hal, not about Cody, not about anything. You can't keep them, and neither can I."

"Wednesday," I said.

"Wednesday." He looked down at the dogs. "What are you going to put in it?"

"I don't know yet."

He nodded, and got up and went into the house. When he came back he had two mugs of coffee and the brown canvas coat that had caught on the wire at the lip, the tear on its pocket mended in black thread by somebody who did not sew. He gave me a mug. He put the coat around my shoulders without asking whether I was cold, and sat back down on his step below me, and drank his coffee.

Nobody said anything. The beagles finished and licked the pans across the boards and came and lay down along the porch near Deacon, as near as he would allow, and Pearl laid her chin on the top step a hand's width from his. The man across the river quit splitting wood. Wade took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and looked at them, and put them back. I held the mug in both hands under the canvas, and the coat smelled of woodsmoke and dog and the cab of his truck, and we sat on his steps until the coffee was gone and the river was only a sound below us.

Cody's bay lights were on. From the highway ODOM AUTO REPAIR stood up white and blue against the dark hill behind it, and both bay doors were up, and the radio on the workbench was playing the Texarkana station into the night. Wade pulled onto the edge of the gravel apron and shut off the engine and rolled his window down, and stayed where he was. I gave him back his coat. Deacon and I got out and walked across the apron into the light.

Cody was at the bench with a carburetor in pieces on a sheet of newspaper, cleaning the jets one at a time with a length of wire. He looked up at me, and past me at the county truck sitting dark on his gravel with the chief deputy in it, and set the wire down.

"Rock," he said. "You bringing the law out to see me now?"

"He brought me." I stood at the end of the bench, among the screwdrivers and the coffee can of bolts. "We went to see Arvel Bledsoe this afternoon."

He went still. Then he pulled the red rag out of his back pocket and began to wipe his fingers, though there was nothing on them.

"Arvel kept his tickets," I said. "All of them. Wade found yours. The Cutlass in the low-water crossing, seven-fifteen to nine-thirty, and boy done good written across the bottom in Arvel's pencil. Wade read it out loud to him at the counter. He's got the book in his truck."

Cody folded the rag in half. He looked at it, and folded it again. "He raised me a quarter for that," he said. "I'd forgot the quarter."

"You're clear, Cody."

"Clear of what?" He said it to the carburetor, quietly. "Nobody ever said I did anything, Rock. They just quit sitting by me." The rag went into a square, and he held it. "It was an accident. She went up there in the dark and the edge give way. That's what it was." He looked up. "Wasn't it."

I did not answer him. Out on the apron Deacon had lain down in the light from the bay with his back to the highway, and past him the county truck sat with its window down and Wade's elbow on the sill of it, not moving.

"Who, then?" Cody said.

"Ask me some other day."

He looked at me for a long time across the bench. Then something came near to a smile on his face and went by, and he set the folded rag down on the newspaper beside the jets.

"That's mine," he said.

"I know it is."

"Can I tell Aunt Lorene?" He was already reaching for the telephone on the wall by the office door, out of nineteen years' habit, before he had finished asking. "She ought to hear it from me. She's the only one ever stood up for me."

"Not yet," I said. "Wade asked. Not anybody, Cody. Not till he says."

His hand stopped short of the receiver. He stood with it lifted a while, and then he let it down to his side, and nodded, slowly, and picked the wire back up off the newspaper and turned it over in his fingers.

"She's going to want to bake something," he said.