Swing Low

At a quarter to six on Tuesday I gave up on sleep and took Deacon out the back door to the creek. The water was low and clear over the gravel bars, carrying the first yellow sycamore leaves of the season, and the air that came off it was the only cool air in Hollis Springs. Deacon read the bank with his nose, one stone at a time, while I stood on the path with my hands in my jeans pockets. The right pocket held the red bandanna with the pendulum folded inside it. The left held a bank envelope from the box under the register, and in the envelope was Verlie's letter. I had moved them out of my apron at some hour of the night when it had seemed important to have them on my body, and by morning I could not think of a reason to move them back.

My hands had warmed by midnight. The ache behind my eyes stayed until after two, and then I lay on top of the sheet listening to the window unit start and stop, and at some point after three I went down the stairs in the dark and put my palm flat on the kick panel in the middle bay to feel the four brads standing proud of the wood. They were there. I went back up and did not sleep any better for knowing it.

The Rockhound opens at six, and Birdie's biscuits are gone by seven, so we came back through the shop and out the front. Main Street was gray and empty, the ridges standing black against a sky that was going pale behind the Bluff. I locked the door and looked up at the transom, as I had every morning for two weeks. The gilt of the old name showed in the glass, every letter of ODOM ROCKS AND MINERALS bright and clear, lit from the street. The streetlight at the corner had gone off at five-thirty. Nothing in the street was lit. I put the key in my pocket beside the envelope and walked west with Deacon at my knee.

At that hour the cicadas had not started. The crickets still had the hollows, a thin steady sawing from every ditch, and a mockingbird on the bank's sign was running through the songs of birds he had heard yesterday. The cafe's lot was half full of pickups already: two with the Bluff Mine's logo on the doors, a feed truck, a county truck, a Buick that belonged to some retiree who had been eating breakfast at that table since before I was born. The smell reached me at the post office. Frying dough and bacon and coffee, and under it the cinnamon of the fried apples that Birdie's mother had cooked in the same black kettle every morning of my childhood.

Deacon knew the smell. He sat down on the concrete step under the front window without being asked and looked at the door.

The cowbell over it clanked when I went in. The Rockhound is one long cinder-block room painted the green of a hospital hallway, with red vinyl booths down the window side, a counter with ten stools down the other, and the pie case at the end by the register, lit from inside so the meringues glow. The ice machine groaned behind the kitchen door. Every booth but one was full. The last booth, at the back by the kitchen, had a clean table and a sugar jar and nobody in it, and nobody would sit there until the rush was over, because that was Verlie's booth, and the morning crowd in Hollis Springs had kept it for her for nineteen years without anyone deciding to.

Birdie was behind the counter with a coffeepot in each hand. She looked up when the bell went and her face did the thing it had done every time she had seen me in two weeks: brightened, and then remembered.

"Morning, Z. Sit anywhere you can find."

I found the stool at the end of the counter, next to the pie case. She set a cup in front of me and filled it without asking how I took it, because she knew, and then she stood there a moment with the pot.

"Thank you for sending that pie back for Beau," she said. "You didn't have to do that."

"He'd have fought Tucker for it."

"They'd fight over the air in the truck." She almost smiled. "Holler if you need anything."

Then she was gone down the counter with both pots, pouring and talking, and I watched her as I had been watching her for two weeks, from the far end of things, like weather on a ridge I had not walked in a long time. She was the same height she had been at twelve. She had flour on her left forearm and her ponytail through the back of a feed-store cap, and she knew the name of every person in the room and the names of their dogs. When we were fourteen and fifteen we had split a fried pie in the booth by the jukebox every afternoon after school, Birdie eating the crust first and me eating the filling, and she had talked for an hour without stopping while I listened. I had known then that I would never have a better friend. I had left anyway, in the summer I turned eighteen, on a bus to Tucson without telling her I was going, and in seventeen years I had written to her twice.

Arletta Sims set a plate in front of me that I had not ordered. Two eggs over medium, a biscuit split under sausage gravy, a side of fried apples in a saucer. She had been bringing me that plate since I was fourteen. She was seventy-one now, narrow as a fence rail, with her hair set every Saturday in the same silver waves and her order pad in her apron pocket, where it had been for thirty years, mostly unused.

"Where's that dog?" she said.

"On the step."

She took a biscuit from the warmer, cold-buttered it from the dish because Deacon would not take it hot, and went out the door with the bell clanking behind her. Through the window I watched her bend over the step and Deacon rise to meet her, taking the biscuit from her fingers as delicately as a bishop. He had been in Hollis Springs ten days. Arletta had known him for nine of them.

At the second booth, a couple in matching Hot Springs T-shirts had a map spread between their plates and a brochure for the dig mines open on top of the map. When Arletta came back in, the woman caught her sleeve.

"Is there a crystal shop in town?" she said. "Somebody said there's one that does, you know. Pendulums."

"Right there," Arletta said, and pointed her coffeepot down the counter at me. "That's her. She's got Verlie Odom's old place."

The woman looked at me, and then back at Arletta, and asked who Verlie Odom was, and the counter went on eating. A man from the haul crew put his fork down and then picked it up again.

Arletta filled the woman's cup. She filled it slowly. She had told this story to more tourists than I could count, and she did not hurry for any of them.

"Verlie Odom ran that rock shop for thirty-four years," she said. "Gave every child in this county a piece of quartz for luck, and I mean every child. I've got grandbabies with Verlie's rocks in their pockets. She could tell you where a rock come from by licking it. And the year Verlie Odom fell, she went up on the Bluff Mine of a night with her lantern, like she did, to look at her rocks, and the edge gave out under her, and she went over. Sixty feet." She set the pot down on the table. "And every crow in Montgomery County come and sat on the rim of that pit, all night long and all the next morning, not making a sound, till the dig crew found her."

The woman put a hand to her collar. Her husband looked at the ceiling.

Birdie was passing behind Arletta with a stack of plates on her arm. "Last time it was owls," she said.

"It was crows. Owls was the Haskew funeral." Arletta did not turn around. "She was fixing to shut that mine down, too. Sat right back there in that booth and told everybody that would listen she was putting it all in writing. Every rock those people ever sold that had no business going out of this county. She was going to send it to the paper in Little Rock and the state and I don't know who all."

"Royce slept better that winter," said the man from the haul crew, to his eggs. The man beside him said, "Leon," in a low voice, and he said nothing else.

"And nobody ever found one page of it," Arletta said. "Not one page. The family went through that whole shop. Went up there all by herself in the dark, and nobody even knew she was up there."

The envelope was in my left pocket, flat against my hip. I put my fork down beside my plate and moved it a quarter inch so it was square to the edge of the counter.

The family had gone through the whole shop and found no writing, and last night, on my knees on the planks, I had found two sentences. The rest is written. Arletta had just said aloud what I had sat on the floor and thought: that Verlie had been writing something against the Dunagans, and that whatever she wrote had been lost, or hidden, or taken. It was what everyone in the room believed. They had believed it so long that they did not hear themselves saying it.

But I knew that somebody had known she was up there. I had. On Thursday evenings that year Verlie went up the old Odom path to the north lip and waited for me on the flat rock above the vein she called the Thursday vein, because Thursdays were mine, and at seven o'clock we worked until the light was gone. That Thursday I had gone to a ballgame in Mount Ida instead, in the back of Birdie's mother's station wagon, with Birdie beside me spitting sunflower seed shells out the window. I have never told anyone that I was supposed to be on the Bluff at seven that night: my mother, or Birdie, who was sitting next to me on the bleachers when it got dark, or anyone else. Nineteen years. I had carried it to Arizona and back, and it weighed what it had always weighed.

Birdie came by with the pot and topped up a cup that did not need it. She looked at my plate and then at my face.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine."

"Okay," she said, the same voice she used for the temperature, and went on.

I ate the eggs because Arletta would ask if I didn't. When Birdie came back to ring up the haul crew, I said her name, and she stopped with her hand on the register drawer.

"Could I come by after you close tonight? There's something I need to show you."

She looked at me for a moment without any expression I could read. Behind her the ice machine groaned and dropped its load. "I close at eight," she said. "Dishes take me till nine."

"I'll dry."

"You always did dry like you were mad at the plate." The drawer rang shut. "Eight."

By a quarter past eight the rush had thinned to the retirees at the long table and the couple with the map, who had decided on a mine and were arguing about the road. At the table by the front window, two men had set up a checkerboard on a dish towel and were sitting across it with their coffee: Pastor Dale Ammons of the Methodist church, in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, and Doc Earl Whitfield, who had been the county coroner when I was a child and had come to the Rockhound every Tuesday morning since he retired to beat whoever would sit down across from him.

I had twenty minutes before I needed to open. I took my coffee over and stood at the end of their table, and Doc looked up at me over his glasses and said, "Darlene's girl," and moved a black checker one square.

"Yes, sir."

"You were a tall child. I see you kept it up."

He was seventy-six, bald and spotted, with big careful hands, and he played checkers without hurry and without any visible doubt. The board was missing one of its red pieces. In its place, on the pastor's side, sat a pebble of white quartz the size of a quarter, rounded smooth on every face.

"That's creek quartz," I said. "From the Caddo, below the low-water crossing, or somewhere close. You can tell by how round it is. Bluff quartz doesn't travel far enough to get round. It breaks before it wears."

"Verlie Odom gave me that," Doc said. "Nineteen years ago this spring, when I lost the last king out of this box. She said I'd lose every checker I owned before I lost a rock, and she was right." He looked at the pebble. "Arletta's crows."

The pastor moved, and Doc jumped him, and took the piece off the board and set it on the towel.

"I was up there that morning," Doc said. "After the deputies. There were no crows on the rim. There were six men from the dig crew and Royce Dunagan's dog and a young deputy who had never seen anybody dead." He made his next move before the pastor had finished his. "It was a fall, Zara. An old woman on bad ground at night. I've seen a lot of falls. I signed it inside of two days, and I'd sign it again."

The envelope was in my pocket. I could feel the fold of it against my leg when I shifted my weight, the stiff corner where the paper doubled.

"She'd have liked that you opened the shop back up," Pastor Ammons said. He said it to the board, gently, and slid a red checker forward into a place where Doc would take it, and Doc took it.

Prism and Pendulum opened at nine, and the day went like the others. A family from Shreveport bought four amethyst points and a polished stone egg for a grandmother. A man in a fishing hat asked me whether quartz could cure his knee, and I sold him a tumbled agate for a dollar and told him to see a doctor. Twice, when the shop was empty, I took the bandanna out of my pocket at the register and let the pendulum hang from my finger, and both times it hung straight and turned a little on its chain and did nothing else. The thermometer by the stockroom door read eighty-six at three o'clock. Deacon lay in his window patch with his legs straight out behind him and did not wake when the bread truck went by.

In the afternoon I brought down the seventh box. Fluorite cubes, green and purple, packed in egg cartons. A coffee can of iron pyrite. Two dozen geology hammers with their handles taped. Every piece was wrapped in a square of the Mount Ida paper, and this time I unfolded every square and read both sides of it, the obituaries and the feed prices and the school lunch menus for that September, and turned each one over looking for pencil in the margins. There was no pencil. There were seventy-one newspaper squares, and none of them had a word on them that Verlie had written.

The Rockhound's lot was empty at eight except for Birdie's truck and the dumpster. The sign in the door said CLOSED. When I knocked she came and turned the lock and let me in, and Deacon came in behind me as if he had been invited, and she looked at him and said, "Well, he can't eat the pie," and locked the door behind us.

The cowbell had stopped swinging by the time she reached the counter. It clanked once more, short and flat, a little after that, and the door was shut and locked and nobody was near it. Birdie looked up at it, and then went on untying her apron.

There were dishes. There were always dishes. She washed and I dried at the steel sink in the kitchen while the radio on the shelf played a gospel quartet out of Texarkana, low, and the fryer ticked as it cooled. The boys were at Danny's on Tuesday nights, she said. Danny had fixed the fryer again and it was fine and she was not going to say anything else about Danny. I dried the plates the way she said I did, and stacked them, and she did not tell me I was doing it wrong. We did not talk about anything for twenty minutes, and it was the easiest twenty minutes I had spent in Hollis Springs since I came home.

When the dishes were done she took the last pies out of the case on a plate, two apple and a chocolate, and two forks, and carried them to the back booth. I slid in on the side facing the kitchen door.

"That's her side," Birdie said.

I got up and went around to the other side. She set the plate down, pulled a chair from the nearest table to the end of the booth, and sat there instead, leaving Verlie's side empty, and Deacon lowered himself under the table and put his head on her feet. Birdie looked down at him and moved her feet so they were under his chin, and left them there.

"All right," she said. "Show me."

I took out the envelope and laid it on the table and slid it to her. She opened it and unfolded the yellow sheet, and I watched her face change when she saw the paper before she had read a word.

"That's off her pad," she said. "Off that pad by the register. She wrote Mama's pie orders on these. Six apple and six peach for the Methodists, and she always underlined the peach." She read it. She read it again, with her finger under the lines, as she used to check the answers in the back of the algebra book to make sure the book was right. "Where was this?"

"Behind the kick panel at the bottom of the back shelves. The middle bay. In a canning jar."

"How'd you know to look there?"

I took the bandanna out of my pocket and unfolded it on the table between the pies, and the pendulum lay on the red cloth with its brass chain coiled beside it. Birdie had seen Verlie's pendulums all her life. She had seen me learn on a fishing weight. She did not touch it.

"It was in a tobacco tin full of her chains," I said. "I had it hooked on my finger to keep it out of my hands, and it started swinging. Toward the back wall. I took it from three places in the shop and the lines crossed at that panel. When I got close it quit swinging and just hung there over the spot."

"On its own."

"I didn't ask it anything."

"Show me," she said again.

I hooked the chain over my finger, braced my elbow on the table, and let the point hang over the middle of the booth. We both looked at it. It hung straight down, the tiger's eye bead catching the light from the fixture over the booth, the tip of the crystal a finger's width above the Formica. It hung without turning, plumb as a surveyor's bob.

Birdie waited. She waited longer than I would have. "Well?"

"It does that around people," I said. "It went dead still when the UPS man came in, too, and then started again when he left."

"Around people."

"Yes."

"So it works great as long as nobody's watching it."

I put it down on the bandanna. She laughed, a short laugh she had not meant to let out, and pressed her lips together after it. For a second she was fifteen and I could have told her anything.

She looked down at the letter again. "This is the Dunagan thing," she said. "The writing. She told this whole cafe about it, Z. She sat right there and said it." She tipped her head at the empty seat. "Royce Dunagan was going to read about himself in the Gazette. Everybody heard her." She tapped the second line with one fingernail. "So she wrote it, and she hid it, and she was scared of him. That's what this says."

"The stones are keeping it," I said.

"You've got a whole shop full of stones."

"I know."

"And twelve boxes."

"Five left."

She sat back in her chair and looked at me across the pies. The light over the booth put a shadow under the bill of her cap, and I could not see her eyes well. Deacon sighed against her ankles.

"You know what I thought when you walked in this morning and said you needed to show me something?" she said. "I thought, she's going to sit down and tell me. Finally. Why she got on a bus and didn't say goodbye to anybody. Two letters in seventeen years, Z. One of them was a Christmas card." She did not raise her voice. Birdie has never needed to raise it. "And it's this."

I had my hands flat on the table. On the other side of the kitchen door the ice machine dropped another load into its bin, and the radio was playing a song I had last heard in the back seat of her mother's station wagon, on a night when the sky over the Mount Ida ballfield had gone from orange to black while I watched the scoreboard and thought about nothing. The words were there in my mouth. I could have said them. A ballgame, Bird. A Thursday. Seven o'clock.

"Bird," I said, and that was all I said.

She heard it. I watched her hear it: her name, the short one, the one nobody else in town used. Her mouth moved and then held still. She looked at the pendulum on its bandanna, and at the yellow sheet, and back at me.

"A rock on a string is not evidence, Z," she said.

Then she folded Verlie's letter along its old creases, put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope in the front pocket of her shirt, under the flour.

"I'm taking this home," she said. "I want to read it again where it's quiet."