Swing Low

The back door of Prism and Pendulum had stuck since the day I moved in, and by Wednesday it took my shoulder. I hit it twice at a quarter to six with Deacon waiting behind me, and on the second try it gave all at once and swung out over the step, and he walked through onto the path to the creek with the air of a dog for whom doors had always opened that way. The top corner of the frame was scraped bare where the door had been dragging. Cody Odom had told me on the phone that he would come Wednesday before opening, and in Hollis Springs that meant anywhere from seven to noon.

While Deacon worked the bank I filled his water bowl at the stockroom sink. The canning jar I had washed on Monday night still stood upside down on the drainboard where I had left it to dry, and there was water in it. An inch of clear water sat in the top of the inverted jar with nothing under it but the drainboard, and when I lifted the jar and turned it over, the water ran out across my wrist, cold, smelling of the creek at the bend below the sycamore. I dried the jar with a dish towel and set it on the shelf above the sink, right side up, and went out to call the dog.

Cody came at half past seven. His truck idled down the alley behind the buildings and quit, and then his boots came along the gravel, and then he was standing at the foot of my back step with a toolbox in one hand and a block plane in the other, looking up at the door. He was thirty-nine. The last time I had seen him he was twenty-one, with a ponytail he was proud of and a Camaro that ran on prayer and baling wire, and he had driven me home from my lessons in it with the windows down and the radio on the Texarkana station. The ponytail was gone. His hair was cut short and going gray over his ears, and the grease in the creases of his knuckles had been there long enough to belong to him.

"Rock," he said.

"Cody."

He tipped his head at the door. "Heard you were fighting it."

"I called you."

"That's how I heard."

He set the toolbox down and opened the door and shut it, twice, watching the gap along the top. Deacon came up from the creek wet to the elbows and pressed his nose against Cody's knee, and Cody put a hand on his head without looking down. He had kept dogs all his life, and Deacon knew it inside of a sniff.

"Swelled," Cody said. "It's been a wet summer. I'll take an eighth off the top and she'll swing."

I came down the step beside him and looked at the wall. The bricks along the back of the building ran true for the first five courses. Above that a crack had opened in the mortar and stepped down toward the creek corner one joint at a time, a stair a mouse could have climbed, and the sill on the creek side of the door sat lower than the sill on the alley side by about the thickness of a pencil. Below the step the bank fell away to the water. The sycamore at the bend had its roots in open air. The door was the same size it had been in 1924; it was the building around it that had gone, a sixteenth at a time, toward a creek that had been cutting under that bank since before either of us was born.

"Plane it and it'll stick again by Christmas," I said. "The frame's racked. That whole corner's settling toward the water. You'd want to shim the top hinge out so the door hangs square to what's there now."

Cody looked at the crack, and at the two sills, and then at me.

"Granny used to say that about you," he said.

"Say what?"

"That you'd read a wall before you'd read a person." He took a screwdriver out of the toolbox and started on the top hinge. A minute went by, and the first screw came out, and he looked at its stripped threads in his palm. "Don't tell the building."

He took the door off its pins and laid it across the toolbox and the step. The hinge screws were too short and stripped besides, and he said he had three-inch ones at the garage and would bring them after lunch, and in the meantime he could at least take the paint off the latch edge, where forty years of it had built up thick as a fingernail. The plane went down the edge in long strokes. Pale curls of yellow pine came off it and dropped on the step, and Deacon put his nose into them and sneezed.

Cody picked one up and held it under his own nose. Then he held it out to me without a word.

The curl smelled of Lava soap. The gritty gray bar, the one Verlie had kept on the edge of the stockroom sink to scrub the stone dust out of her knuckles, the smell that had been in her shirts and in the cab of her truck and on the hand she put on top of mine to steady a pendulum. I held the shaving and breathed it in again, and it was still soap.

"Huh," Cody said. He took it back from me, put it in his shirt pocket, and went on planing.

At nine I turned the sign and propped the front door to let the street air through, which only meant letting the heat in from the other side. Cody worked at the back with the door off and the creek audible through the empty frame. Between customers I went and stood in the stockroom doorway and handed him things he had not asked for, as I had at sixteen, and he took them, as he had then, and set them down.

On the stockroom doorframe, at the height of my hip and then my ribs and then my shoulder, were pencil marks I had found my first week in the building. Each was a short level line with a name and a number beside it in square capitals: CODY 6, CODY 7, and on up the jamb to CODY 15. Cody reached past me for his tape measure and stopped with his hand on the frame and put his thumb on the top mark.

"Fifteen," he said. "Then I quit growing and she quit measuring."

"You slept back here."

"On the feed sacks. When Mama was working nights." He took his thumb off the frame. "Granny said I was the only thing she ever kept in this stockroom that didn't need dusting."

The capitals were in the same hand as the letter in Birdie's shirt pocket, every one of them pressed hard enough to shine. I looked at them and said nothing about that. Cody said nothing either, about anything, for the next half hour. He did not ask where I had been for seventeen years, or why I had gone, or why I had come back to buy his grandmother's building with her name still in the transom glass. He had not asked on the phone. He was the only person in Hollis Springs who had not, and I stood in the doorway holding a coffee can of screws he did not need and felt it as plainly as I felt the heat.

At a quarter to twelve he said he would run out to the garage for the long screws. I said I would get us plates from the Rockhound.

"Get mine to go, Rock," he said, and picked up his keys.

The noon crowd at the Rockhound was the morning crowd with its hats off. Wednesday was meatloaf. The haul crew had the two booths nearest the door, Leon among them with his elbows on the table, and the retirees at the long table were arguing about the Mount Ida football coach as if he could hear them. Deacon took his place on the step under the front window. Arletta saw him through the glass and was already reaching for the biscuit warmer when I came in under the cowbell.

Birdie was at the register making change. She looked up and finished counting a man's dollars into his palm, and when he had gone she reached under the counter and brought out the bank envelope and laid it beside my hand with a lunch ticket on top of it.

"Read it six times," she said. "Slept on it. Didn't help."

I put it in my left pocket where it had been yesterday. "Two meatloaf to go."

"One of those for Cody?"

"He's fixing my back door."

She wrote the ticket without comment and clipped it on the wheel, and I took the stool at the end of the counter by the pie case to wait.

Through the front window I watched Cody's truck come up the highway and turn into the gravel lot and stop at the far end of it, away from the door. He got out and walked across the lot. He did not come up the steps. He came as far as the step under the window where Deacon lay with Arletta's biscuit between his paws, and crouched down there beside the dog with his forearms on his knees, and scratched behind Deacon's ear, and looked at the gravel.

The room went quiet from the window side in. A woman in the first booth stopped with her tea glass halfway to her mouth and then set it down without drinking. Leon looked at his meatloaf. The table of retirees, which had the coach halfway to the unemployment office, stopped arguing in the middle of a word and found its coffee. Arletta stood at the second booth with the pot tipped over a cup and did not pour. Nobody stared. Each of them looked once, through the glass, at the man crouched on the step with my dog, and then looked at whatever was in front of them, and went on looking at it. The radio on the kitchen shelf played a Statler Brothers song through the open pass-through. The ice machine dropped a load into its bin, and it was the loudest thing in the building.

Outside, Cody kept his eyes on the gravel. The kitchen door swung. Birdie came out with two foam boxes in a paper sack, looked down the length of her cafe once, and walked it, past the register and the haul crew and the woman with the tea, and out the front door with the cowbell clanking behind her. Through the window I watched her hand Cody the sack. She said something to him I could not hear, and he looked up at her and almost smiled, and she put her hand on his shoulder for about as long as it takes to say a name, and took it away, and came back in.

"That's paid for, Z," she said, passing me, at the ordinary volume of a woman who runs a cafe.

Arletta poured. The retirees picked the coach back up. A fork scraped a plate somewhere near the door, and then several did, and in a minute the noise of the Rockhound was the noise of the Rockhound again, and nobody in it had said a word about anything.

Cody was waiting by his truck when I came out with Deacon. He had the sack on the seat beside him and the window down.

"Birdie always does that," he said.

"Brings it out?"

"Since she took over from her mama." He started the truck. "Her mama did it too."

He followed me back to the shop and ate his meatloaf sitting on my back step with the plate on his knees and the door still lying across the toolbox, and Deacon sat in front of him and watched every bite go by. Then Cody shimmed the top hinge out with two slips of cedar shingle and drove the long screws into the old frame, deep into wood that had not been touched since the building was new, and hung the door on its pins. It swung shut and the latch went over with a click like a ruler on a desk. He opened it and shut it again, and it clicked again, and he stood back and looked at it.

"Square to what's there," he said.

I asked what I owed him. He put the plane in the toolbox and closed the lid.

"It's Granny's door," he said. He picked the toolbox up. "Good to have you back, Rock."

He went down the alley and I heard the truck start and pull away toward the highway, and I stood in the stockroom and opened the back door and shut it, three times, for no reason except that it worked.

The afternoon was slow. Two women from Fort Smith bought a bag of tumbled stones for a grandchild and a rose quartz pendulum for themselves, and asked me whether it was true that the rocks here could hear you, and I said the rocks here were mostly silica. The cicadas were going in the pines on the ridge behind Spring Street, rising and falling in the heat. Deacon slept on his side in the window with all four legs pointed at the door, and dreamed, and ran somewhere in the dream without getting there.

At half past four a white Oldsmobile pulled to the curb in front of the shop, and Lorene Odom Pace got out of it with a pie.

I knew her before she reached the door. She had been a grown woman when I was a child, with a husband and a job at the bank in Mount Ida and a place in the third pew at the Methodist church, and she looked as I remembered her except that the years had come down on her evenly, all over, the way dust comes down on a closed room. Her hair was a neat gray bob. She wore a pale blue cardigan over a blouse of the same blue, in eighty-five degrees, because the bank kept its air conditioning set for meat, and her reading glasses were pushed up into her hair. The pie was in a glass dish under a tea towel.

"Mama's little apprentice," she said in the doorway. "Look at you. Honey, look at you. You were this high."

She held the pie in one hand and put the other flat in the air at about the height of the counter, which was off by a foot, and then she came in and set the dish down by the register and folded back the towel. It was a buttermilk pie, the top gone a deep even gold with a crackle of sugar across it.

"Mama's recipe," she said. "She tried to teach me rocks till I was nine years old and then she gave up on me and taught me pie. It's the only thing of hers I ever could do." She refolded the tea towel in thirds and laid it beside the dish and squared it to the edge of the counter. "Hal sends his best. He'd have come, but he's got prayer meeting at seven and he takes his time getting ready for God."

"Thank you," I said. "Mrs. Pace, you didn't have to."

"Lorene. You're grown." She reached out and straightened the brass pendulum rack by the register, which was already straight, and turned the rose quartz so its point hung over the middle of the stand. "Of course I had to. You're in Mama's shop."

Her hands did not stop. While she talked she ran a fingertip along the edge of the counter and looked at what came up on it, and found nothing, and wiped it on the tea towel anyway. She took the lid off the luck jar and looked in at the quartz chips and put the lid back on and gave it an extra quarter turn. She looked up at the pressed tin overhead and down at the plank floor where it dipped in front of the counter, the dip worn by thirty-four years of her mother standing in one place.

"You kept her shelves," she said.

"They're good oak."

"Those were here before Mama was." She looked at them a while, down the length of the back wall, and then turned back to the counter. "Cody was by."

"He fixed my back door."

"I know he did. Doris Lamb called me at the bank at twenty after twelve to tell me Birdie Calloway carried his dinner out to him in the parking lot." She picked the tea towel up and folded it again, smaller. "Bless Birdie. Bless her heart for that."

She said it as Birdie's mother used to, as a blessing and nothing else, and for a moment she was quiet, looking at the folded towel in her hands.

"He and Mama had words at the Rockhound that evening," she said. "Family words, honey. The kind every family has over a supper table. And he was the last one anybody saw her with. And for nineteen years this town has looked at that boy like something on the bottom of its shoe." Her voice did not rise. Birdie's never did either. "He was twenty years old. He loved her better than anybody alive."

"He was always good to me," I said.

"He's good to everybody. It doesn't get him a thing." She set the towel down. "You go to the Rockhound with him. You sit down at a table with him where they can see you. That's what I'd ask you to do, if I was asking."

"I will."

"I know you will. You were always a good girl." She smiled at me, and her hands found the pie server I had put beside the dish and wiped it on the towel, though it was clean. "Mama thought the world of you. You know that. She'd come to supper on a Sunday and it was Zara this and Zara that. That girl has it, she'd say. Said it at my own table." The server went down beside the dish, squared to it. "I used to tease her she'd found herself a better daughter."

I had my hands flat on the counter, on the lemon oil I had rubbed into it at eight that morning. I could feel the grain. I said, "I quit. After. I never went back up there."

"You were sixteen, honey."

"She'd have wanted me to finish."

Lorene looked at me then, over the pie, a long look, and her hand came across the counter and rested on my wrist, lightly, the fingers dry and cool from the bank.

"Mama waited on you that night, you know," she said. "Sat up there with her lantern till the light went. She wasn't mad."

The window unit came on behind me. Deacon lifted his head off the floor at the sound and put it back down.

I had never let myself see it. In nineteen years I had seen the scoreboard over the Mount Ida field and Birdie's sunflower shells and the dark coming down over the bleachers, and I had seen the bus to Tucson and every mile of Oklahoma from its window, and I had not once let myself see the north lip. I saw it now. The flat rock, warm still from the day. The lantern on the stone beside her. Verlie with her white braid down her back and her hands in her lap, gray to the wrist with stone dust, looking down the Odom path for a girl who was in the back of a station wagon on the way to a ballgame. The red going out of the north wall below her, and then the white of the quartz veins going, and then everything going, while she sat and waited for me.

She wasn't mad. Lorene had driven twelve miles from the bank with a pie to tell me so.

"Thank you," I said. It came out of me rough, and I did not try to fix it.

Lorene patted my wrist twice and took her hand back and picked up the tea towel. "Now you eat that," she said, brisk again. "You're all bones. And bring me my dish back when you're done with it, honey. It's my good one." She turned the pie dish a quarter turn so I could see the strip of masking tape on its side, with PACE printed on it in ballpoint. "I've lost three dishes to the Baptists."

She went out to the white Oldsmobile, and stopped at the curb with her keys in her hand and looked up at the transom over my door, at her mother's name in the old gilt, and then she got in and drove east up Main toward Holly Ridge Road. The street was empty after that. A pickup went by. The shadow of the building across the street crept up my front window until it reached the sill.

I closed at six. I counted the drawer and turned the sign and wiped down the counter with the lemon oil a second time, because the rag was in my hand, and when there was nothing else to wipe I cut the pie. The knife went through the sugar crust with a sound like stepping on ice at the edge of a puddle. I put one slice on a saucer and carried it to the stockroom and opened the back door, which swung out square and easy and stopped where I stopped it, and sat down on the step with the saucer on my knees.

Deacon came and sat against my shoulder. The creek ran low and clear over the gravel bar below the sycamore. Across the water, the tops of the trees on the far bank held the sun after the bank itself had gone to shadow, and then the sun went up the trunks and off the topmost leaves, and the leaves were gray. I had the fork in my hand. At some point Deacon put his chin on my knee beside the saucer and left it there, and I broke off the crust and gave it to him, and he took it as he took Arletta's biscuits, carefully, with his front teeth.

The slice sat on the saucer. The light went off the creek, and then off the gravel bar, and then I could not see the water at all, only hear it, and I sat on the step with the plate on my knees and the door open behind me onto the dark shop and did not get up to turn on a light.