Swing Low

Doris Lamb had telephoned the Rockhound four times before six o'clock, Arletta told me, and on the fourth call Birdie had taken the receiver off its hook and laid it in the drawer under the register with the pie server and the rubber bands. It was still in there when I came in under the cowbell at a quarter past six. From the door I could hear it, a thin voice in a drawer, asking after somebody.

The room went still. The haul crew had the two booths by the door, and Leon sat on the end stool with his phone held out at arm's length, and the retirees at the long table had their cups halfway between saucer and mouth, and every one of them looked at me and then down at his coffee. The radio on the pass-through went on with the cattle prices. I stood on the mat with Deacon against my knee while the door eased shut behind us on the cold.

I had walked home the night before with Deacon after Wade's truck turned toward Mount Ida, down Holly Ridge and along Main past the bank and the Baptist church, both dark by then. I had not slept. I had come to the Rockhound at a quarter past six because I did not know what else a person does on the morning after. Somebody had seen me sitting on Lorene Pace's carport step, and somebody had seen Lorene come down her drive in her good wool coat and get into the front seat of a county truck, and in Hollis Springs that is a whole story by itself. The rest gets filled in by noon.

Arletta came down the counter first. She had the coffeepot in one hand and a biscuit out of the warmer in the other, buttered cold, and she went past me without a word and out the door and set the biscuit on the step under the front window, where Deacon has taken it every morning since I brought him home. He went out after it. Arletta came back in and poured my coffee at the counter, slowly, as she pours everything.

"You'll eat something," she said. "You look like the tail end of a hard winter."

Leon turned his phone face down on the counter. One of the haul crew said something about a blown hydraulic line on the Number Two loader, and somebody at the next booth told him whose fault that was, and the retirees went back to the Mount Ida coach and his fourth downs, and by the time Birdie came through the kitchen door with a plate of eggs I had not ordered, the room sounded like any Thursday in October. Birdie set the plate in front of me. There were shadows under her eyes the color of the grease pencil she marks the pie case with. She laid her hand flat on my back between the shoulders, briefly, and went on down the counter with the pot.

"Hal's not been out," Arletta told Leon's cup, filling it. "Doris says the preacher's car never left that drive all night. And Cody's truck went up Holly Ridge at a quarter to six."

"Arletta," Birdie said from the register.

"Well, it did."

Cody came in at seven. The cowbell went, and the room went still a second time, harder than it had for me. He stood on the mat in his work jacket with his cap in his hand and grease in the creases of his knuckles, and the half-smile he keeps for public rooms was nowhere on him. He looked down the length of the cafe toward the back, at the booths and the backs of men's heads and the distance to the kitchen door. Nobody said his name.

Lorene had told me where to sit, at my counter, with a tea towel folded small in her hands. You sit down at a table with him where they can see you. I had said I would, and she had ridden to Mount Ida in the front seat of a county truck without seeing me do it. I picked up my coffee and my plate and got down off the stool. Walking down the room with a plate in one hand and a cup in the other, past the haul crew and the long table, I could hear my own boots and nothing else. The back booth by the kitchen door had a long split in the red vinyl on one side, taped over with silver tape since Birdie's mother's time, and I set my plate down across from the taped side and sat.

Behind me came Cody's boots, the whole length of the linoleum, with the room listening to them. At the end of the booth he stopped and looked at the taped seat. Then he slid in on Verlie's side and put his cap on the table, and his elbows beside it.

The table in that booth had rocked on one short leg for as long as I could remember. Birdie's mother had kept a sugar packet folded in quarters under the foot, and every few weeks it worked loose and the whole booth heard about it. Cody leaned his weight on his elbows, and the table stood under them as level as the counter. The folded packet lay on the linoleum a foot from the leg, flat and gray from being stepped on.

Birdie brought biscuits and gravy and a cup and set them in front of him, and filled the cup, and stood there holding the pot.

"On the house," she said. "Don't argue with me. I've had a morning."

"Yes ma'am."

"Don't you ma'am me, Cody Odom, I'm four years younger than you are." She put her free hand on his shoulder and left it there. Over the top of the booth she looked up the room, at the haul crew and the end stool and the long table, and held the look until it had traveled the length of the counter and come back to her. Then she took her hand away and went into the kitchen.

Cody ate. He ate as a man eats who has had nothing since the morning before, which I expect was so, and I ate my eggs across from him, and neither of us spoke until his plate was half clean. Then he took his paper napkin and folded it in half, and in half again, into the square he folds his red rag into at the garage.

"I went up to the house," he said.

"Arletta said."

"Course she did." He creased the square with his thumbnail. "Pastor Ammons let me in. He'd slept in the den, in the other chair. Uncle Hal was at the kitchen table in his robe, eating pie out of the dish with a fork. Buttermilk." He folded the napkin once more, and it would not go smaller, and he set it down. "Said she must have made it before she went. Said it was the best one she ever made."

I looked at my plate. Up the room the cowbell went for somebody else, and I kept my eyes where they were.

"He won't come to town," Cody said. "He asked me would I see to the leaves in the yard, and the gutters. He's going to sit there." He looked at the tape under his hand, and ran his thumb down the length of it. "I always sat over on your side. She'd put me on the inside so I couldn't get out till she was through talking."

His jokes come late. This one came after a whole swallow of coffee, and landed easy.

"Took a while, some nights."

Leon got up off the end stool then. He came down the length of the counter with his cup in his hand, a big slow man in a canvas coat with the Bluff's clay dried on both cuffs, and stopped at the end of our booth and looked at Cody.

"That Ford of mine's pulling left again," he said. "Front end. You got a bay open today?"

Cody looked up at him for a long moment. "After ten."

"After ten." Leon nodded and went back up the counter to his stool and turned his phone over again, and the long table went back to the coach.

The luck jar was full when I opened the shop at nine. I fill it most weeks on a Monday out of the tumbler in the stockroom, and that Monday I had been in my mother's kitchen drawer for a cookbook instead and had not. I had given chips out of it all week, one to every first-timer through the door and two to a boy from Shreveport who cried because his sister got one first, and on Wednesday morning I had seen the bottom of the jar through the quartz. The chips came up to the shoulder of the glass. I put the lid back on and gave it the quarter turn and turned the sign.

Wade came a little before noon. He wore the same uniform shirt he had worn at the curb, creased across the back now from the seat of the truck, and he had shaved somewhere since with a razor that had left a nick under his jaw. He set a manila folder on the counter and his hat crown down on top of it. Deacon got up from his place under the window and came and leaned on his knees, and Wade put a hand on the dog's head and kept it there.

"She's at the county," he said. "There's a lawyer coming from Hot Springs this afternoon, and Hal's brother is driving up from Tyler. She told it all again at the office at two this morning, near enough word for word what she told me at the table." He looked at the folder under his hat. "I've had a good many people tell me things at two in the morning. They don't generally match."

"Did she sleep?"

"I don't know. I didn't." He took his hand off Deacon's head. "I'll need the tin now, Zara. And the letter. I've let them ride in your coat a week longer than I should have."

I took the Sucrets tin out of the inside pocket of my coat on the hook behind the counter, and the letter out of my jeans, and laid them on the oak. The letter had gone soft at the folds from my pocket. Wade did not open either one. He took a pad from his shirt and wrote a receipt in square capitals, one Sucrets tin containing four typed pages and one half sheet, one letter, handwritten, one page, and signed it and tore it off and gave it to me, as he had given Arvel Bledsoe his. I folded it into my shirt pocket with June's Kroger list.

"You can keep the groceries," he said. "Peggy Arnold handed me that ledger at eight this morning across her counter, and made me sign for it in a book of her own first. A grocery list in June Ivey's hand isn't going to tell a judge anything Peggy's book doesn't, except that she was out of oleo."

Then he moved the hat and opened the folder. There was one sheet in it, typed, with a case number across the top that was nineteen years old.

"It's a supplemental," he said. "The sheriff signs it after me. I typed it at five this morning on the same machine, down in the basement. They never did get rid of it." He took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on, without looking at me, and read it out in the voice he uses for numbers. "Item. Kerosene lantern, red, wire bail, found standing upright at the center of the flat rock at the north lip. Unlit. Wick turned down, cap tight, reservoir full. Placed there by the decedent before dark. Recovered by the undersigned and carried down the Odom path full."

He laid the sheet flat on the counter and turned it to face him. I gave him the pen out of the cup by the register, and he signed it, W. Tolliver, Chief Deputy, and under that the date.

"Took me nineteen years to type five lines," he said.

He put the sheet back in the folder and the glasses back in his pocket. On the cup hook at the end of the register shelf the pendulum hung on its chain beside the singing point, straight and still, and his eyes went across it on their way to the window and did not stop.

"Miss Lorene's statement says who Verlie was waiting on that night," he said. "I wrote it down the way she said it. It doesn't need anything from you, and I won't be asking you for anything."

"I'm telling Birdie tonight."

"Then that's where it ought to go first." He picked up his hat and held it. "Merritt Haskew called the sheriff at seven this morning. He's never telephoned that office in his life. He wanted to know were you all right."

"I owe him a visit."

"He said you'd say that." Wade went to the door and stopped with his hand on it, and looked at the sill, at the geodes at either end and the stones between them. "I thought I might sit on the Methodist steps tomorrow night. Where Granny used to sit. If nobody minds it."

"Counting?"

"Just the one window," he said, and put his hat on, and went out.

Ione came at three. I had not seen her on Main Street once since I came home. She came along the sidewalk from the east end at her own pace, in the man's cardigan over her housedress and a black wool coat over both, with the cane going ahead of her more to tell the sidewalk where she meant to step than to lean on, and a tourist couple on the bench outside the bank watched her pass. Deacon was at the door before she reached it. She stood on the step and looked down at him, and he looked up at her, and after a moment she said, "Well," and came in, and he went back to the window.

She did not take off her coat. She went to the front window and stood over the practice sill with both hands on the crook of the cane, and looked at what was on it, the geodes and the three from Arizona and the singing point and my creek point, and then she looked along the register shelf to the cup hook, where the pendulum hung.

"You took one off," she said.

"Last Thursday night."

"Is it settled?"

"I don't know yet."

She considered that. Then she said, without turning around, "Doris Lamb telephoned me at a quarter to six. I don't know who gave her my number. I've had it fifty-one years." The cane tip moved an inch on the planks. "The Calloway girl's dumplings were passable. You may tell her so."

"I'll tell her."

"That June," Ione said. "Before Verlie and I fell out over the mines. She sat on my porch one evening with her feet up on the rail, which I never let anybody do, and she was talking about you. She'd had you near a year. She said you asked a question wrong about every other time and knew it before the chain did." Ione's big hands shifted on the cane. "And she said you'd be better than both of us, if you'd stay."

The creek was loud under the back door. I stood behind the counter with my hand on the oak, and I could not have said a word if the building had been on fire.

"I meant to tell you the day you brought that pendulum up my steps," Ione said. "I've got out of the habit of saying things." She turned around then and looked at me through her thick glasses. "You never did answer me, child. Why you stopped."

"I'll answer you," I said. "Somebody else has to hear it first."

"Then you'd best go on and let them hear it." She went to the door, and Deacon got up from the window to see her out, and she looked down at him again on the step. "That's a good dog," she said, as if it had been in doubt, and went back up Main toward Spring Street at her own pace with the cane going ahead.

The Rockhound closes at eight on weeknights. I came back at half past and found the lot down to Birdie's truck and the cafe dark but for the kitchen and the fixture over the back booth. The boys were at Danny's for the night. Birdie had every ketchup bottle in the place lined up along the counter in twos, and she was marrying them, one upended into the neck of the other, waiting for each to run down before she went on to the next pair.

On my way past the register I stopped at the pie sheet taped to its side. HUNTER'S MOON. FRIED PIES BY THE DOZEN. PICK UP BY 5. The names ran down it in Birdie's printing, and at the bottom the one with nothing after it. I took the pencil out of the cup and wrote, after Lindell, two, peach. Birdie watched me do it from the counter and said nothing, and went on to the next pair of bottles.

"Ione says your dumplings were passable," I said.

"Passable." She set a bottle upside down in the neck of another. "Then she ate every one of them."

She brought the last fried apple pie and a wedge of chocolate chess to the back booth on one plate, with two forks, and pulled her chair to the end of the table, as she always had, and left Verlie's side empty. She brought one ketchup pair with her and set it on the table, still running. Deacon went under the table and lay down across her feet. I took the cap off the empty bottle at my elbow and turned it in my fingers, and screwed it on, and took it off again.

"That Thursday," I said. "The ballgame. Your mama's station wagon."

"Mount Ida and Glenwood." She did not have to think. "We lost by a field goal."

"I was supposed to be on the Bluff at seven. Thursdays were my nights. She went up the path and sat on the flat rock and waited on me, and I was on the bleachers beside you watching the scoreboard." The cap went around in my fingers. "I never told Mama. I never told you. I never told a soul until Lorene told it to me, over a pie, my second week open, because she was there and saw her waiting. That's how I knew it was Lorene."

Birdie's hands had stopped on the ketchup bottles. The top one had run itself empty into the bottom one and she held them anyway.

"She was sitting on the rock when Lorene came up the path," I said. "Lorene told me what she said. She said, 'My girl never came.'"

Birdie set the bottles down. She looked at them, and then she looked at me, for a long time, with the fixture over the booth putting the shadow of her cap bill across her eyes so that I could see only her mouth, and it was pressed shut.

"I asked you to that game," she said. "I begged you. I told you Mama would stop at the Sonic on the way home."

"I know it."

"You kept looking up at the ridge. All through the third quarter. I thought you were watching for some boy." She took her cap off and set it on the table and pushed her hair back with both hands, and there was the girl I split pies with at fifteen, under the shadows. "You were sixteen years old, Z."

"She waited till the light went."

"And Lorene was going up that path whatever you did." Birdie pushed the plate an inch toward me. "If you'd been on that rock, she'd have turned around on the switchback and gone home, and found her mama the next day at the shop, or in the parking lot at Harlan Moss's, or anywhere at all. You don't know you'd have saved anybody. All you know is you went to a ballgame." She stopped. "And then you got on a bus."

The ice machine dropped a load into its bin on the other side of the kitchen door. Under the table Deacon sighed against her ankles and did not move.

"I've been mad about that bus for seventeen years," Birdie said. "Every Christmas. Every time somebody came in here and asked me did I ever hear from that Lindell girl. I had it all ready to say to you, the whole of it, and then you walked in my door in September looking like that, and I poured you coffee instead." She picked up a fork and put it down again. "It was never the ballgame I was mad about, Z. It was the bus. I've had this one thing put by for you since the day you left, and you hold still now and hear it.

"I forgive you for the bus."