Swing Low

It rained on Sunday, as the needle on Wade's porch post had said it would, a slow gray rain from first light until dark that brought the last leaves off the sycamores along the creek and left the Bluff the color of wet brick for two days after. By Wednesday the sky had cleared and gone hard and blue. The cold came down off the ridges at night and stayed in the shop until noon. I sold a pair of amethyst clusters that morning to a man in a hunting coat who wanted them for his wife's birthday and paid in five-dollar bills, and that was the whole of the trade.

The recipe was on page forty of my mother's church cookbook, the kind with a plastic comb for a spine, which I had taken out of her kitchen drawer on Monday without telling her what for. Buttermilk Pie, it said, and under that, in the same typewriter print, Mrs. Hal Pace. Three eggs, a cup and a half of sugar, a stick of butter melted and let cool, three tablespoons of flour, a cup of buttermilk, vanilla, nutmeg grated over the top. I lit the oven in the apartment at three o'clock for the first time since I moved in. The crust came from the facing page, contributed by somebody's aunt in Oden, and it fought me from the first pass of the rolling pin. It tore twice going into the dish. I pressed it back together with my thumbs and crimped the edge with a fork and did not look at it closely after that.

The dish was Lorene's second-best, the old glass one with PACE printed on masking tape along its side. It had stood on the stockroom shelf beside the canning jar for three weeks with its chip turned to the wall. When I washed it at the sink that afternoon I ran my thumb around the rim to find the chip and keep clear of it, and my thumb went all the way around without catching. I held the dish up to the window and found the place, a shallow scallop out of the glass no bigger than my fingernail. Its edge had gone round and dull, like the lip of a bottle that has lain for years in moving water. I dried the dish and buttered it and laid the crust in.

Tobias Vance came in at four, while the pie was in the oven, so that I had to keep climbing the stairs to look at it. He stood just inside the door in his good corduroy coat and boomed at me about the weather in the voice he keeps for tourists, and then, when he had looked around the shop and found nobody in it but Deacon, let the voice down.

"I've come to beg," he said. "That point I've had on my sill since nineteen and seventy-one went and cracked clean through Monday night in the cold. My granddaddy's. It wants a Bluff point Friday, and I haven't got one from the north wall left that I'd set out." He looked past me at the front window, at the practice sill and the geodes standing at either end of it. "I'd have it back to you Saturday morning. Washed."

I brought Verlie's cigar box out of the stockroom and unwrapped the long points from their newspaper one at a time on the counter until he put his finger on one. He held it up to the window, found the rust-red line in its base, and nodded, and wrapped it back up himself, twice, in the same paper. He did not ask what it cost. At the door he turned with his hand on the glass.

"Friday," he said, and went out beaming at a couple from Texas on the sidewalk.

The pie came out of the oven with its top split across the middle and one side browned darker than the other. I set it on a rack on the counter downstairs to cool, and Deacon lay on the floorboards beneath it with his nose pointed at the edge of the oak and kept it there for two hours. At half past six I took the pendulum out of my right pocket and unwrapped it and hung it on Verlie's cup hook by the register. It hung straight. I folded the bandanna and laid it beside the singing point, and put on my coat, with the Sucrets tin buttoned into the inside pocket where it had ridden all week.

Wade came at a quarter to seven in the county truck, in uniform. He got out and opened the back door for Deacon, and stood on the sidewalk while I locked up, and looked at the pie under its foil in my hands without saying anything about it. We drove east along Main past the bank with its lights off and the Baptist church with its lights on, and turned up Holly Ridge Road, where the oaks had dropped most of their leaves into the ditches and the porch lights were coming on house by house. He pulled to the curb across from the fourth house on the right and turned off the engine. Then he rolled his window down, and the cold came in.

"I'll be right here," he said.

The kitchen window glowed yellow through its curtains. The white Oldsmobile sat in the carport, and the place beside it where the tan pickup belonged was empty, with a patch of old oil on the concrete the shape of Florida. I carried the dish up the drive in both hands, with Deacon at my knee and the acorns cracking under my boots, and knocked at the carport door.

Lorene opened it with a dish towel over her shoulder. She wore a pink cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and her reading glasses were on top of her head, and for a moment she only looked at me in the light from the kitchen. Then she looked at the dish.

"Well, look what's come up my drive in the dark," she said. "And that dog." She lifted a corner of the foil and laughed outright. "That's not Birdie Calloway's crust."

"No ma'am. I made it."

"You fought with it, honey." She looked closer. "That's my buttermilk."

"It's in the church cookbook. Page forty."

"They spelled nutmeg with two g's in the first printing." Her eyes went past my shoulder then, down the drive to the curb, where the county truck sat dark under the streetlight with its window down. "Is that Wade Tolliver out there?"

"He drove me. I don't have a car."

"Well, tell him to come in out of the cold."

"He said he'd wait."

She looked at the truck a moment longer. Then she took the pie out of my hands and turned and went in, and I followed her.

The kitchen was as I remembered it, yellow curtains and teapot clock, the Formica table with its pattern worn through in two places. It smelled of Pine-Sol and coffee. The supper dishes were done and standing in the rack. Through the far doorway the den was dark, and Hal's recliner sat empty in it facing a television that was off, with an afghan folded over one arm. On the wall above the telephone the Farmers Bank calendar had been turned to October, the squares filled in with the same round hand, and I kept my eyes off the bottom corner of it.

Lorene set the pie on the counter by the stove and wiped the counter where it had stood on the way in, and told me to sit, and I sat in the place where the pattern was worn. She poured me coffee I had not asked for. Deacon went around the kitchen once with his nose to the linoleum, past the stove and the icebox and the legs of my chair, and went to the doorway into the den and stood in it. He stood a long time. Then he went down all at once, the way he goes down on the rug at the foot of my bed on cold nights, curled tight with his nose against his tail, his back against one side of the doorframe and his feet against the other, filling the opening. He watched the kitchen over the curve of his tail.

Lorene looked at him. She said nothing about him this time. She took the towel off her shoulder and wiped the counter by the sink.

"Hal's at prayer meeting," she said. "They have coffee after. He won't be home till a quarter to nine."

"I know it."

I unbuttoned my coat and took out the tin and opened it, and laid the half sheet on the Formica, and the four pages of the will beside it. Lorene came and stood at the end of the table, drying her hands on the towel. She brought her glasses down off her head and read the cover note standing. Then she picked up the will and read it a page at a time, holding each sheet out at the length of her arm, and when she came to the fourth page she read it twice.

"Where on earth," she said.

"Inside one of Verlie's geodes. June Ivey had it in her garage."

"June." She laid the pages back on the table, squared, and picked up her towel. "Well. She never signed it, honey. Mama would get herself worked up and draw something up and then think better of it. She did it with the mines a dozen times." She went back to the counter. "She must have thought better of it."

"She was going to sign it Friday morning at ten," I said. "On Thursday at a quarter past four somebody called Harlan Moss's office and asked to have it moved. Peggy Arnold wrote it in the book. They wouldn't leave a name, so she told them no."

"Peggy Arnold." The towel went in a slow circle around the base of the canister set. "Could have been anybody. Half this county knew Mama's business before she did."

I lined the edges of the will up with the worn place in the Formica, and kept my fingers there.

"You brought me a pie my second week open," I said. "You stood across the counter from me and you put your hand on my wrist, and you said, 'Mama waited on you that night, you know. Sat up there with her lantern till the light went. She wasn't mad.'"

The towel went on around the canisters. "Well, she wasn't. Mama told me you were coming. She told me that afternoon at the shop, she had her girl coming up to the rock at seven for a lesson."

"She could have told you that," I said. "She couldn't have told you she waited till the light went."

The towel lay on the counter under Lorene's hand, at the corner of the canister set, half folded over her fingers. Her hand stayed on it. Out on Holly Ridge Road a car went by slowly, and its lights came through the yellow curtains and crossed the ceiling and slid down the far wall and were gone, and her hand stayed where it was. She was looking at the window over the sink. The dark glass gave her back the kitchen, the canisters and the teapot clock and her own face, and behind her face, at the table, mine.

After a while she took her hand off the towel and left the towel where it lay. She came to the table and drew out the other chair, the one across from me, and sat down in the other worn place, and put both hands flat on the Formica in front of her. They lay there. In all the times I had been near her, at my counter and in this kitchen and under her oak, I had never once seen them lie still.

"Does Wade know?" she said.

"He's seen the will. He knows about the call, and what you said to me over the pie. He's at the curb because I don't have a car, and he told me if you said to go, I was to go."

"I'm not telling you to go." She looked at the will. "It was the horses."

I waited.

"Hal never could pass by a racing form. Oaklawn, every season, all those years, and Hal at the rail with his program rolled up in his fist." She said it to her hands. "He owed men in Hot Springs you don't owe money to. He'd have lost this house. He'd have lost more than the house, from the things they said to him on the telephone."

"So you went to the bank."

"I'd been at that window eleven years by then. You get to know which accounts nobody looks at. Old people's, that only come in at Christmas. Dead people's, some of them, with nobody left to ask after them." Her thumbs pressed the Formica. "Two years. Thirty-eight thousand dollars. I wrote every cent of it down in a stenographer's book so I could put it back. It's still in my underwear drawer."

"And the examiners came in October."

"Every October. From Little Rock, the middle of the month." She looked up at me then. "Mama's ringing stones were going to pay it. Garrett Lyle said there was forty thousand dollars on those shelves if you knew who to call, and he knew who to call. They'd have come to me anyhow, someday. I only needed someday to be that fall."

"Garrett told her."

"Of course he told her. He was scared to death of her." Something crossed her mouth that was not a smile. "She had me come by the shop at three that Thursday. She stood behind that counter, your counter, and told me she was going to Harlan Moss's on Friday at ten, and every stone in the place was going to her girl. The building sold and split. Not one stone to me." Her hands lay where they were. "I said, Mama, I'm your daughter. And she said, 'The girl has the gift and you don't, Lorene.'"

The coffee had gone cold in front of me. In the doorway Deacon lay as he had lain, curled, his eyes open over his tail.

"I have heard that every day since," Lorene said. "I hear it at the drive-up window, counting out twenties. I heard it in church Sunday. I called Harlan Moss from the break room at a quarter past four and didn't give my name, and that Peggy Arnold said no like she had it printed on a card."

"And then you went up the path."

"I grew up on that path. I could walk it asleep." She said it plainly, as she might have told me how long to leave the pie in. "She was sitting on her rock with the lantern by her, and she hadn't lit it. The light was going off the north wall. I came up over the top and she didn't even turn her head. She said, 'My girl never came.'" Lorene's eyes came to me and stayed. "That's what she said to me. Not hello. Not what are you doing up here, Lorene. My girl never came."

My fingers were on the edges of the will, and I kept them there, and I kept my eyes on her.

"I asked her to come down off that rock and come home and sign nothing. I asked her nice, and then I didn't. She got up. She told me to go home to my husband and his horses." Lorene's voice did not rise. "And I put my hands on her. Once. Like you'd push a door that sticks." She looked at her hands on the table. "And she wasn't there."

The icebox came on behind me and ran and went off again.

"I stood at the edge till I couldn't see the rock under my feet," she said. "I never heard a thing. Then I came down in the dark and drove home, and Hal was asleep in that chair with the television going, and he woke up when I came in and asked me was there any pie." She turned her head and looked through the doorway, over the dog, at the empty recliner. "He has sworn I was home all evening to everybody who ever asked him, and he believes it. You don't put any of this on Hal."

"I can't promise you anything about Hal," I said. "I can't promise you anything at all."

She nodded slowly.

"That boy came to the carport the next morning with his sergeant," she said. "Wade Tolliver, with his hat in his hands, and he couldn't get a word out. And Hal said, 'It's Mama, isn't it.' And I stood behind Hal in my housecoat and let him say it." Her thumbs moved on the Formica, an inch, and stopped. "And by Sunday the whole town had started in on Cody."

"And you let them."

"I took that boy a plate every Sunday for nineteen years. I stood up for him at every church supper in this county. I thought if I was good to him long enough, it would come out even." She shook her head once. "It never once did. Not one Sunday. And I never asked him where he went that night. I was afraid he'd tell me nowhere."

"He was at the Caddo low-water crossing from a quarter past seven till half past nine," I said, "in the river to his belt with a Louisiana car sitting on its frame. Arvel Bledsoe wrote it down. Wade has the book."

Lorene shut her eyes. She kept them shut while the icebox came on again, and when she opened them they were wet, and she let them be.

"Then why did you tell me?" I said. "About the lantern."

She looked at me a long time across the worn table.

"Because you stood there in Mama's shop with the face you've had since you were seventeen," she said. "Like you'd been carrying something up a hill ever since. And it was so, honey. She wasn't mad at you. She was sitting up there worried sick about you, and I knew it, and nobody else on God's earth did." Her hands stayed flat. "It was the one true thing I had to give anybody. So I gave it to you."

I sat across from her with my fingers on the will and let that stand between us, because there was nothing I could set beside it.

After a while Lorene got up. She went to the counter and picked up the towel and folded it once and hung it over the handle of the oven door, straight, and stood with her hand on it.

"Go get Wade, honey," she said. "I'd rather tell it one time, to somebody who has to write it down." She did not turn around. "And I'd as soon you didn't sit here for that part."

I put the will and the cover note back in the tin and the tin back in my coat. Deacon stayed where he was when I passed him, and his eyes followed me to the door and went back to the kitchen. I went out through the carport and down the drive. Wade was out of the truck before I reached the curb, settling his hat, and he looked at my face in the streetlight and asked me nothing.

"She's asked for you," I said. "She wants to tell it once."

He took his hat back off. He reached into the cab and brought out a clipboard with a pad of lined forms on it, and took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and, standing there in the street, put them on. Then he went up the drive.

I sat down on the carport step with my coat pulled around me. Through the screen I heard Lorene say his name, and Wade say Miss Lorene, and a chair scrape on the linoleum, and after that their voices went low and steady, hers and then his and then hers for a long time, and I let them be only a sound. The oak dropped an acorn on the carport roof, and then another, and they rolled down the tin and fell off the edge into the dark beside me. Over the ridge to the east the moon had come up, round but for a shaving off its left side, and its light lay down the drive and along the white roof of the Oldsmobile and on the toes of my boots.

At a quarter past eight Wade's voice changed, and I heard him dial the telephone on the kitchen wall. "Dale," he said. "It's Wade Tolliver. I need you to bring Hal Pace home tonight yourself, and go in with him, and stay a while. No sir. I'll tell you tomorrow. Yes sir. Thank you." The receiver went back on its hook.

Lorene came out at half past eight in her good wool coat, with her pocketbook over her arm. She had written something on a sheet from the pad by the telephone and propped it against the sugar bowl on the table, and she had put the pie in the icebox. "Hal will eat that," she said to me. "He'll eat anything with nutmeg on it." Then she reached back in through the door and turned off the kitchen light herself, and the yellow went out of the curtains, and Deacon came out of the dark behind her, past her legs, and stood on the step.

Wade went down the drive ahead of us and opened the passenger door of the truck, the front one, and stood beside it with his hat in his hand. Lorene came down off the step. Where the carport ended and the drive began, among the acorns, she put her hand out without looking and found my arm, and held it at the wrist, lightly, her fingers dry and cool, and I let her. We went down the drive that way, slowly, the two of us and the dog, under a moon two nights short of full, toward the truck at the curb.