Swing Low

The girl from Oklahoma wanted to know which of her rocks was a diamond. She had carried them down from the Bluff in both pockets of a pink nylon jacket, and when she turned the pockets out onto the shop towel on my counter the rocks came with a handful of pine straw and a stick of gum still in its paper. Her grandfather waited inside the door in a feed-store cap and told me she had been at the dig since the gate opened and had not let him carry one thing. Behind him, on the inside of my front door, the sign painter from Mount Ida stood on a step stool laying gold leaf on the glass backward, one letter at a time, so that it would read right from the street.

None of what she had was diamond. Arkansas diamonds come out of one field down by Murfreesboro, in gray dirt, and they look more like a drop of grease than a stone. What she had was Bluff quartz, a good deal of it, red clay still packed in the cracks. I put a drop of water on the best point and turned it under the lamp until she could see the rust-colored line in its base where the north wall had marked it.

"That's where it grew," I said. "Up on that ridge. You can see the wall from my window."

She went to look. Deacon was in his place under the sill, and she knelt down beside him without asking, and he let her, and she looked past the stones on the oak at the ridge standing up red and gold behind the roofs across Main. The morning sun was full on the north wall. Her grandfather had found the cup hook at the end of the register shelf in the meantime, and he put out one thick finger toward the pendulum hanging there, and stopped short of touching it.

"That one for sale?"

"No, sir," I said. "That one was left to me."

Before they went I unscrewed the lid of the jar by the register and let the girl choose a chip of quartz for luck. She took a long time over it, holding the candidates up to the window one after another, and her grandfather said the waitress at the cafe had told them about the jar, and about the dog, and that the crystal lady would tell them straight what they had. I said Arletta had been right on all three counts.

The sign painter came down off his stool when they had gone and stood back by the counter to look at his work. He was a narrow old man in white painter's pants with a mahl stick under his arm, and it had taken him until the Friday of the Hunter's Moon to get to me. I had not asked him to hurry. Across the door glass, reading backward to us from the inside, the gold said PRISM AND PENDULUM, and under it, smaller, HOLLIS SPRINGS. From the sidewalk it would read the right way round.

"My daddy did your transom," he said, and tipped his head at it. "The year she opened. I held the ladder." He looked up at the old gilt over the door, ODOM ROCKS AND MINERALS, worn soft at the edges after fifty years of afternoon sun. "I can take that off clean with a razor blade and do you new up there, if you want it."

"Leave it," I said.

"Most do." He began wiping his brushes on a rag. "I've left more dead people's names up on Main Street than I've taken down."

June Ivey brought the long white Mercury down Main just after twelve and set it against my curb with both front tires touching. She came in with her pocketbook over her arm and a flat parcel done up in a brown Kroger sack, and her pencil behind her right ear, and stopped inside the door to read the new gold backward.

"Well, now," she said. "He spaced that nicely."

I had her dish towels ready in the paper sack by the register, where they had been for eight days. She took them out one at a time and looked at each rooster in its red thread and folded each towel back on its own creases and put them in her pocketbook. Then she laid the brown parcel on the counter.

"I said I'd iron it and I'd keep it," she said. "I've ironed it. And I've thought about where a thing like that is kept." She folded back the paper. Inside was Verlie's green wool sill cloth, pressed flat and square, with the rust stain near one end where a Bluff point had sat for thirty-four years. "It's been kept in a box in my garage for nineteen years and done nobody any good there. I'd like to see it in this window tonight. You can see the end of Main from my back step, if you stand on the cinder block."

I put my hand on the wool and did not lift it. June watched me not lift it for a while, and then she turned in its saucer the cup of coffee I had poured her unasked, and drank it, and told me the Baptists were doing a chili supper the second Sunday in November and I was expected to bring cornbread.

She went out to the Mercury at one. I lifted the stones off the sill onto the counter and unfolded the cloth along the oak, and it fit the sill to the half inch, end to end and front to back, because it had been cut to fit this sill. This was the window it had come out of.

At two I turned the sign and walked out Pine Ridge Road with my mother's cookbook under my arm and Deacon at my knee. Her house sits where the pavement ends, yellow brick behind a chain-link fence, with a concrete goose on the front step that she dresses for the seasons. That week it had on a black witch's hat with an orange band, which on the day of the Hunter's Moon I decided to take as an accident. She was at the kitchen table doing the crossword in ink, and she looked at the cookbook when I laid it down, and then at me.

"I wondered where that got to," she said. "I had to call the church office for my own banana bread."

"Page forty."

"I know what page it was." She got up and put it back in the drawer by the stove, under the dish towels, where it has lived since I was in grade school. "Doris Lamb has telephoned this house three times since yesterday. I told her I was in the bathtub." She stood with her hand on the drawer pull and looked me over, brisk, from my boots up. "Are you eating?"

"Birdie's feeding me."

"Birdie Calloway feeds half the county. It isn't the same thing." She sat back down and capped her pen and laid it across the crossword. Deacon had gone under the table to lean on her shins, and she put a hand down to him without looking. "When you were little I used to walk you home past those windows as fast as your legs would go. Every October."

"I remember."

"I thought if you didn't look at them you wouldn't want one." She turned the pen on the paper. "I never asked you why you quit that woman. I was so glad when you did, I didn't want to know. I'm not asking you now, either. You'll tell me when you tell me."

"I will, Mama."

"Well." She looked out her kitchen window toward town, where you cannot see Main Street for the trees. "I'm driving down tonight after supper. I want to see it."

"You'll be the only car on the street with its lights on."

"Then I'll turn them off at the bank," my mother said, "and coast."

The Rockhound's lot was full of trucks at half past four, and so was the shoulder of the highway in front of it. Inside, Birdie had white paper sacks lined up along the counter from the register to the pie case, every one folded twice at the top and lettered in grease pencil, and people I had known all my life were coming in out of the cold and taking them and going out again without staying for coffee. Tobias Vance went out with two sacks under one arm, booming at Arletta about the weather. The Haskew sack was gone already. At the end of the counter Cody sat on the stool next to Leon with a slice of coconut pie, and the two of them were arguing about the front end of a Ford with their forks.

"Lindell," Birdie said, and put my sack in my arms, and on top of it a bigger one marked PICKENS. She squared the two of them against my chest with both hands, as she squares a stack of plates. "Take Ione hers. She'll not come down Main twice in one week, and I'm not sending Tucker up there to be looked at."

"She'll ask what I'm doing delivering pies."

"Tell her it's my cafe." Birdie went back down the counter with the coffeepot, and stopped, and turned around. "Go on, Z. You've got a window."

Cody got off his stool and caught the door for me with his shoulder, since my arms were full. "Got Uncle Hal's gutters cleaned out this morning," he said. "He come out on the step in his robe and watched me do the whole house. Never said a word." He held the door a moment longer against the cold. "Brought me out a glass of tea, though."

Spring Street climbs north out of Main past the hotel and the bathhouse wall and up into the hollow, steep enough that the sidewalk ends halfway and becomes a path along the ditch. The sills were set all the way up. I passed a window I had never been inside, with three tall points of smoky quartz and a jelly glass of tumbled jasper on a white doily, and a lamp still on behind them, and a woman at the kitchen sink beyond the lamp who looked up at me and the dog and lifted her hand out of the dishwater. On Ione's porch the forty-one stones stood on their long sill facing in, toward the porch swing and the screen door, as they always had.

Ione had the stove lit. She let us in and went ahead of us down the hall with the cane, and in the kitchen Deacon went past her chair to the brick in front of the stove and lay down on it with a groan and stretched out his legs toward the heat. I set the sack marked PICKENS on the oilcloth beside the resting bowl.

"So Birdie Calloway sends you up with my pies," Ione said, "so I'll have to let you in."

"I think that's about it."

She hooked the cane over the edge of the table and sat. Her stones were all out front by now; the kitchen sill was bare for the first time since I had known the house, and the glass over it had gone dark blue with the evening. She did not offer coffee. She looked at me through her thick glasses and waited, and the stove ticked.

"You asked me why I stopped," I said.

"I did. Twice."

"Thursday nights were mine. Seven o'clock, on the flat rock at the north lip, all that year. That Thursday I went to the ballgame in Mount Ida with Birdie instead, and I never told Verlie I wasn't coming." The pie sack sat between us and I kept my eyes on Birdie's grease pencil. "She went up the path and sat there and waited on me. After they found her, I couldn't pick up a stone without thinking she'd have had somebody beside her on that rock if I'd come. So I put them down. And then I got on a bus."

Ione said nothing for a long time. Out on the porch the swing chain creaked once in the wind and was still. When she spoke she spoke to the resting bowl, and her big hands lay flat on the oilcloth either side of it.

"At seven she was waiting on you," she said. "At nine I was standing on the switchback, too proud to call twice. Between the two of us, child, we have kept that woman waiting nineteen years." She lifted her eyes. "She'd not have stood for it from either one of us. She'd have told me I was a stubborn old fool, and she'd have told you to get up off the bleachers and come on."

"Birdie said about the same."

"Did she." Ione took the sack and opened it and looked in at the fried pies, a dozen apple in their wax paper, and closed it again. "That girl has more sense than she lets on in her cooking."

She saw me to the screen door. Deacon got up off the brick and came down the hall behind us, nails on the boards, and at the door Ione put one hand on the frame and looked down Spring Street toward Main, where the lights along the storefronts had begun to come on.

"Verlie kept the east end of her sill bare," she said. "Twenty years, nothing on it. Then she put a creek point of yours there." She looked at me sideways. "You leave the end of yours bare. Somebody will want it someday. Now go home and put your lights out. I'll be looking."

Verlie's crows were on my roof when I came back down Main at dusk. Five of them sat along the ridge of the parapet in a row with their feathers puffed against the cold, black against a sky gone the green of old bottle glass, and they did not stir when I unlocked the door under them. Every evening of my life the crows of Hollis Springs have gone down into the sycamores along the creek by sundown. When I looked up again from inside, with the light off the street and the door shut, they were still there.

The stones went back onto the green cloth in the order I had laid them on the bare oak a week before, but with the bookend at the east end set in a hand's width from the end of the sill, so that the wool showed bare there. Then the three from Arizona, and the Bluff point the child at the fair had said was singing, and my creek point beside it. The bandanna I folded and laid on the counter. The brass cup hook came out of the register shelf with eleven turns of my fingers, and I stood on the step stool the sign painter had left me and looked along the oak header over the window for a place to put it.

There was a screw hole already in the header, over the middle of the sill, with a ring of brass green worn into the grain around it. I had wiped lemon oil over that ring in September and painted the window trim around it and never asked myself what it had been for. The hook went into it as if it had been gone an afternoon. I hung Verlie's pendulum on it, and the clear point came to rest an inch above the green wool among the stones, and I got down off the stool and asked it nothing at all.

I put out the lights. The good lamp on the counter, and the overhead, and the bulb over the stockroom stairs, and the lamp upstairs by my bed, and I came back down in the dark with my hand on the rail. From the stockroom I brought the second stool, the one that had been under a box of agate since I moved in, and set it beside mine in front of the window, and sat on mine, and Deacon lay down under the sill against the wainscot with his chin on his feet.

Across Main the street lamp at the corner by the bank lit the front of the Methodist church, white board and three white steps, and a man was sitting on the top one with his elbows on his knees and his hat beside him on the step. He had been sitting there, I thought, since before my lights went. I did not wave, and he did not, and after a while I stopped looking at him and looked at the sill.

The moon came up over the east ridge a little before seven, whole, the color of a candle flame at first and then white. It came down the length of Main Street and in at my window, and over the stones, and across the planks to the toes of my boots, where it had come to Verlie's and mine on two stools the October I was sixteen. I said their names without looking at them. Keokuk geode, the light one. Keokuk geode, the heavy one. Apache tear from Superior, and chrysocolla from the dump at Globe, and red jasper from the Ajo road with the desert still on it. The Bluff point, the north wall. The creek point, under the sycamore. At the end of it I said, "North wall. She was fifteen," which was what Ione had told me about the one hanging over the middle of the sill, and then I did not say anything else.

Up Spring Street the windows went first. A lamp I could not put a house to, high in the hollow, and then the woman at the dishwater, and then Ione's front room, and after it, a long minute later, her porch light, as though she had stood a while in the door first to see whether mine was out. On the hill behind the bank the long windows of the Haskew house went dark together, and I thought of Merritt in the front room with his hat on his knee, counting down the hill as Ellen had, and that I would go up there in the morning and tell him what I had promised to. Across from the post office Tobias Vance's front window went, with the Bluff point he had borrowed from me in it. Somewhere on Main a shop I had never known to keep a sill put its lights out over a display of geodes. A car came down Main from the east with its headlights off, rolling slow in neutral past the bank and past my window at a walk, and at the far end of the street, by the Rockhound's dark sign, its headlights came on again. Up the hollow behind the Baptist church, toward Locust Street, a kitchen light went off, and I could not have sworn to whose it was.

There were others, and I let them go without knowing whose. Nell Tolliver would have had the number by morning.

I opened Birdie's sack in the moonlight. Two peach fried pies in their wax paper, and with them a slip torn off an order pad, and on it in her slanting hand, Z. Eat both. B.

I ate the first over the paper and the second slower, and when I had finished I sat with the wax paper folded in my lap and looked at the ridge for a long time, as I had in September over a plate of foil, with the moon on the north wall now where the sun had been. Across the street the man on the Methodist steps put his hat on and stood, and stood there a moment longer, and then went down the steps and along the sidewalk toward wherever he had left his truck. The church steps were white and empty under the corner lamp.

Deacon got up from under the sill some time after eight. He walked the length of the dark shop with his nails going on the boards, and stopped at the front door and turned around twice, and lay down across the threshold with his back against the door and the new gold over him. Then he rolled onto his side and put his legs straight out across the mat, and sighed from the bottom of his chest, and in a minute he was snoring, his front feet running after something in a dream.

I let him lie. The cold came in under the door around him and he did not care. A log truck came down Main from the west, late, loaded, gearing down for the light at the bank, and the whole front of the building took it: the door glass shook in its frame, and every stone on the back shelves ticked against its neighbor in the dark, and the empty stool walked a quarter inch on the planks. Deacon slept through it across the threshold with his feet going. Over the stones on Verlie's green cloth the pendulum hung at the end of its chain and did not move.