Swing Low

I ate Lorene's pie for breakfast, standing at the stockroom sink with the back door open. A fog had come up off the creek in the night and lay along the bank as high as the step, and Deacon went down into it nose first and vanished to the shoulders. Verlie's buttermilk pie had always carried more nutmeg than anyone else's in the county, so much that the Methodist ladies used to talk about it behind their hands, and Lorene had kept the nutmeg. I ate the slice down to the crust and gave the crust to the dog when he came back up the step, dripping. Then I washed the saucer, set it on the shelf beside the canning jar, and took the pendulum out of my pocket for the first time in two days.

It came out of the red bandanna warm from my leg. I let the brass chain run through my fingers until the point hung free above the drainboard, and waited for it to swing toward the back shelf, as it had on Monday, or hang dead plumb, as it did whenever anyone came near. It did neither. It moved in short arcs, a few inches toward the alley and a few toward the creek and a few toward the front of the shop, never long in any one direction, like a compass needle carried too near a wire fence. I held it until my wrist ached. When I wrapped it back in the bandanna I could feel it through the cloth for a moment, still going.

It was Thursday. I had known it since I woke at four, and I had not said so to the dog.

I knew whose pendulum it was. I had known on Monday, from the iron line in the base and the brass cap and the way my hand closed on it before I had decided to pick it up. What I did not know was how her working tool had come to spend nineteen years loose in a box of seconds, or why it would not hold still, or what anybody did about a stone that would not hold still. Verlie would have known. Verlie was gone, and there was one stone-worker left in Hollis Springs who had known her longer than I had been alive.

At seven I locked the front door behind us and walked east up Main.

Main Street at seven belonged to the Rockhound. Behind us at the west end the gravel lot was already full of pickups, and the smell of the fryer followed us along the sidewalk for a block before the creek air took it. Everything else was shut. The rock shops had their signs turned and their crystals in the windows, waiting on the sun, and the flag at the post office hung straight down its pole. From the north ridge the backup alarm of a haul truck carried down over the roofs, thin and steady, beeping over the same few feet of ground for a long time. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk and let Deacon read it for both of us.

The Hollis Springs Hotel stood where Main bent at the east end, two stories of gray clapboard with plywood over the lower windows and a veranda nobody had sat on since 1987. Spring Street went up the hollow beside it. It climbed past the hotel's back lot and the stone walls of the old bathhouse, where the spring came out of the hill cold and smelling of iron, and then on up between frame houses set into the slope, each one with more steps in front of it than the last.

The last time I had walked up Spring Street I was sixteen and two steps behind Verlie, carrying a coffee can of tumbled red jasper that she owed Ione Pickens over a bet about a vein. That was April. The two of them stood on Ione's porch steps and argued about the terms of the bet for twenty minutes while I held the can, and both of them enjoyed it. By August they were not speaking. I had been on the post office steps with a sack of the shop's mail the afternoon it happened. Ione came down the steps on her cane as Verlie came up, and stopped her by laying the end of it across the rail. "You will have the whole state of Arkansas up on that hill with a shovel," she said, in a voice that carried to the Rockhound, "and every one of us along with it." Verlie moved the cane off the rail with two fingers. "Better the state than the Dunagans," she said, and went in for her mail. Whether they ever made it up, I never heard. I had been gone before I thought to ask.

Ione's house was the fourth on the left, white frame with a green tin roof and a screened porch the width of it, and every windowsill I could see had stones on it. They stood three deep along the porch sills behind the screen. They filled the two front windows of the house behind the porch, and the sill of a narrow window by the chimney that could only have lit a closet. I stopped at the foot of her walk to look, as I would have stopped at a road cut. Bluff points with the red line in their bases stood among creek quartz with no wrapping on any of them. There were sprays of green wavellite from up past Mount Ida, split open to show the needles fanned inside. There was a smoky point as long as my hand, and two gray novaculite whetstones worn hollow in the middle by somebody's knives, and in the corner of the nearest sill a lump of white bull quartz the size of a Sunday ham that no rock shop in the county could have sold for a dollar. All of it faced in, toward the rooms.

The screen door opened before we reached the steps. Ione Pickens stood in it with one hand on the frame and the other on her cane, and she had plainly been watching us come up the hill for some time. She was taller than I was, even stooped. She wore a man's brown cardigan buttoned over a flowered housedress, and her glasses were so thick that the eyes behind them looked as if they belonged to someone twice her size. Her knuckles stood up on the backs of her hands like knots in a rope.

"Darlene Lindell's girl," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked down at Deacon, who had stopped on the bottom step with his nose going at the porch. "And whose is that?"

"Mine. His name is Deacon."

"Does he come in houses?"

"He goes everywhere I go."

Ione considered him a while longer. "Then I reckon he had better come in," she said, and held the screen.

Two cane-bottomed rockers faced the street. Deacon walked the length of the porch with his nose along the base of the sills and came back to me, and we followed Ione into the house and down a short hall papered in faded roses, toward the smell of coffee. She walked ahead of us at her own pace, the cane going down on every other step, and I did not try to hurry her.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it was hot. A black woodstove stood in the corner on a square of old brick, cold, with kindling laid ready in the firebox and a split of oak across it, but the room smelled of woodsmoke anyway, years of it, gone into the beadboard. Over the smoke was the coffee, perking on an electric range older than I was, and over the coffee something sharp and medicinal that I placed after a moment as Vicks. In the middle of an oilcloth table printed with cherries sat a yellowware mixing bowl heaped with quartz points, clear and cloudy and a few smoky, every one of them lying with its tip toward the rim. It was a resting bowl. Verlie had kept one at the end of her counter, a wooden one, and nobody but Verlie was allowed to put a hand in it.

Ione pointed at a chair with her cane. I sat.

Deacon had come down the hall behind me. At the kitchen doorway he stopped. He stood with his front feet on the edge of the hall runner and his nose working at the room, at the stove and the table and the bowl, and then he lowered himself across the threshold, front end first and then the rest of him, and laid his chin on his paws.

"Deacon," I said. "Come here."

His tail moved once on the runner. He looked at me from under his brows and stayed where he was. I patted my leg, and he watched my hand do it. Since the day I brought him home he had walked into the feed store and the post office and my mother's kitchen on Pine Ridge Road and the cab of Cody's truck, and I had never seen him stop at a door. I got up and went over and took hold of his collar. He let me lift his head by it and nothing else. The rest of him lay on the boards like a sack of feed.

"Leave him be," Ione said.

She was looking at the dog. She looked at him for a long time through the thick glasses, leaning on her cane, and he looked back at her with his chin flat on his paws. Then she turned to the range and poured coffee into two cups with saucers, and set a can of evaporated milk with two holes punched in the lid on the table between us. On her way back she took a blue jar off the sill over the sink, from among the stones there, and unscrewed it and worked a fingertip of Vicks into each knuckle of her left hand, one at a time, before she put the lid back on. I let go of Deacon's collar and went back to my chair.

"Now," Ione said, lowering herself into the chair across from me. She hooked her cane over the edge of the table. "What have you brought me, child?"

I took the bandanna out of my pocket and laid it on the oilcloth between the milk can and the bowl, and opened it.

She did not touch it. She bent over it, close, until her glasses were a hand's width from the point, and stayed bent while the percolator on the range behind her slowed to a tick. Her right hand came up off the table and moved toward the chain and stopped in the air above it, the big knuckles shining with Vicks. Then it went back to the table.

"Where did you find this?"

"In her stockroom. In a box of seconds."

"Seconds." She sat back. "Lorene never could tell a working stone from a doorstop. It isn't her fault. It isn't in everybody." She looked at the pendulum again. "That is her working pendulum. She kept pretty ones on the counter for people who wanted pretty. This is the one she asked."

"I thought it was."

"Look at the cap." She aimed her chin at it. "Worn bright on two sides. That is her thumb and her first finger, near enough forty years. And the bead." The tiger's eye sat above the cap on the chain, brown and gold, banded like the side of a cut hill. "That came off her eyeglass chain. It broke on the Dowsing Walk one spring, down at the creek crossing, and she picked up one bead and left the rest in the water. Said a broken chain was a broken chain." Ione was quiet a moment. "She was contrary about chains."

I had seen that eyeglass chain at every lesson for a year, lying against her shirt pocket, the tumbled beads clicking together when she leaned over a stone. I had looked at the bead on the pendulum every day since Monday and not once seen it. I saw it now.

"And the point," Ione said. "Where is that from?"

It was a question she knew the answer to. I answered it anyway. "The Bluff. There's iron from the north wall in the base."

"The north wall." She nodded slowly. "She took it out of that wall with a rock hammer the summer she was fifteen and I was six, before there was any mine, when it was still Odom land and a footpath up through the woods. I held the bucket. It was lying in a pocket of red clay as long as your arm, and when she got it loose she sat down right there on the slope and turned it in the sun for an hour, and I stood there holding that bucket." She stopped. Her hands found each other on the oilcloth and held on. "Verlie," she said, after a moment, "never once hurried over a stone."

I had known since Monday that the point was Bluff quartz, out of the north wall, out of the same red clay that had been under her when the dig crew found her. I had known it and kept from looking at it. Across the table Ione drank her coffee and set the cup down in the exact ring it had left on the saucer, and gave me the time to look.

"Has it been swinging for you?" she said.

"Since Monday."

"Did you ask it to?"

"No, ma'am."

"No," she said. "You wouldn't have." She turned her cup a little on its saucer. "What does it do?"

"The first day it swung at the back shelf. Now it won't hang still at all. It goes a little way in one direction and then a little way in another." I did not tell her what had been behind the shelf. I had expected her to ask, and she did not; she only watched me, her eyes swimming large behind the glasses, until I had finished, and for a while after.

"Give it here," she said, and held out her hand.

I laid the chain across her palm. She lifted the pendulum by it, the point turning once in the air between us, and set it in the resting bowl among the quartz, point down in the heap. She coiled the chain on top in three loose rounds and took her hand away.

"That bowl has rested every stone I own," she said. "Drink your coffee."

I drank it. It was strong enough to stand a spoon in, and I put more of the canned milk in. The clock over the door ticked. In the doorway Deacon let out a long breath through his nose that stirred the dust on the hall runner, and kept his chin where it was.

The chain began to come out of the bowl.

It came a link at a time over the yellow rim, unhurried, until a hand's length of brass hung down the outside of the bowl and lay against the oilcloth. Then the point lifted out of the heap of quartz and tipped over the rim after it and came to rest on its side among the printed cherries, rocking a little on the short end of the chain, an inch each way, and then less. Nothing had touched the table. The coffee in my cup lay flat as a mirror.

Ione reached out and gathered it all up and put it back in the bowl, point down, chain coiled, exactly as before. We drank our coffee. In a minute and a half by the kitchen clock it was out again, over the same place on the rim.

"That one is not resting," Ione said.

She left it where it lay this time. "When is the Hunter's Moon, child?"

"End of October."

"Four weeks, near enough. And what do we do on the Hunter's Moon?"

She asked it like a schoolteacher asking the year of a war.

"Set the stones on the sill," I said. "Turn out the lights."

I had grown up with it without anyone telling me what I was seeing. Walking home along Main with my mother after a ballgame on a cold October night, and every few doors a dark shop window with the moon on the glass, and my mother walking faster past each one. The October I was sixteen I had been inside one. Verlie let me set a single creek-washed point of my own at the end of her sill, beside hers, and then she turned off the shop lights, and we sat on two stools in the dark and ate fried pies from the Rockhound out of the sack. The moon came in over the stones and down across the plank floor to our feet, and she told me the names of the stones on the sill one by one without looking at them.

"That's half of it," Ione said. "Did she teach you the other half?"

"I don't know what the other half is."

"Then she didn't." Ione turned her cup again. "A stone-worker does not rest her stones while one of them is unsettled. If one won't rest, none of them do, and she leaves her light burning, and everybody on Main Street sees it lit." She looked at the pendulum lying on its side beside the bowl. "They will be watching your window."

"Who will?"

"Tobias Vance. The Haskews, driving by slow on their way home from church. Every family on Main and on Spring Street that keeps a sill." Her eyes came back to me, enormous behind the lenses. "Me."

"I haven't said I'm working stone, Miss Ione."

"No," she said. "You haven't. Then why have you got her pendulum in your pocket?"

I had wound one corner of the bandanna around my first finger while she talked, tight enough that the tip had gone white. I unwound it and watched the color come back.

"Why did you buy her building, child?"

"It was for sale."

"So is the hotel," Ione said.

Behind me in the doorway Deacon moved his chin from one paw to the other and lay still again. Ione looked past me, at the window over the sink and the stones along its sill and the blue jar among them, and the light from the yard on all of it.

"We were not speaking, she and I, that September," she said. "Did you know that?"

"I was on the post office steps."

"So you were. So was half the county." Her hands lay on the oilcloth, one on either side of her saucer. "I said things on those steps I would say again tomorrow, about the mines and about how loud a body ought to be. I reckon she'd have said hers again too. She generally did." A drop of coffee had run down the outside of her cup to the saucer, and she wiped it away with her thumb. "We had fifty years of not agreeing. That was only the last of it."

She said nothing more about it, and I did not ask.

"What stones have you got of your own?" she said instead.

"A shop full of hers. A coffee can of mine from Arizona."

"Desert stone." She considered it. "It will have to learn to sleep in the damp."

"Yes, ma'am."

"If you mean to keep that pendulum," Ione said, "you will have to learn to ask it right. She didn't finish you."

"No, ma'am."

"Is that no, she didn't, or no, you don't mean to?"

The clock over the door said twenty past eight. I had a sign on my front door that said nine o'clock, and a box of tumbled stones to price, and a back door that shut now with a click, and I looked at the pendulum lying on its side on the cherries with its chain hung over the rim of Ione Pickens's bowl.

"I don't know yet," I said.

Ione nodded once, as if I had given her the right answer to some other question.

I wrapped the pendulum in the bandanna and put it in my right pocket, where I could feel it going on moving against my leg, and thanked her for the coffee. She got up with me, the cane and the table edge together, and followed me to the kitchen doorway, where Deacon lay with his chin on his paws.

I stepped over him into the hall. He was on his feet before my back foot came down. He shook himself from his ears to his tail, hard enough that his tags rang, and walked ahead of me under the faded roses with his nails clicking on the boards and his tail going, out onto the porch, and stood at the screen door waiting for someone to open it.

Ione opened it. Deacon went down the steps, and I went down after him, along the walk between the porch sills and the stones behind the screen. The door clapped shut behind us. We started down the hill.

At the bottom of Spring Street, by the bathhouse wall, I looked back. Ione stood behind her screen door with both hands on the head of her cane. She watched us all the way to Main.