Swing Low

Verlie had sold county maps. A drawer of them was still under the spinner rack by the front door, road maps of Montgomery County printed for the Chamber of Commerce in some year when the Chamber had money to spend, with the dig mines marked in red diamonds and a cartoon prospector in one corner holding up a crystal the size of his head. At six on Friday morning I took one out and unfolded it on the counter under the good lamp, and weighted the corners with four pieces of tumbled rose quartz from the bin. The creases had gone soft and brown. Lake Ouachita sprawled across the top of the sheet like a spill of blue ink, and the Bluff Mine sat on its ridge north of town in a red diamond no bigger than a lentil.

In Tucson nobody trusted an instrument until it had told us something we already knew. Every morning before we ran a single sample we ran the standard, a pressed disk of powdered rock whose numbers the whole lab could recite, and if the machine missed the standard by a hair we spent the morning fixing the machine. I knew where Verlie had fallen. Everybody in the county knew it: the base of the north wall, sixty feet under the flat rock on the lip. If the pendulum could find anything for me on purpose, it could find that.

Deacon lay on the planks in front of the counter, in the dip Verlie's feet had worn, with his legs out straight and his eyes shut. He had not opened them when I turned on the lamp.

I unwrapped the pendulum and hooked the chain over the first finger of my right hand, as Verlie had taught me, elbow braced and wrist loose. She had started me on a lead fishing sinker tied to a length of monofilament, because she said there was no sense letting a beginner put her nerves into a good stone. Yes was a swing toward my chest and away. No was side to side. You asked it to show you yes, and then you asked it to show you no, and you asked it nothing else until it had done both. By the end of my first month the sinker could do both with my eyes shut.

"Show me yes," I said.

The point began to turn. It went around in a slow, even circle about the width of a saucer, clockwise, the tiger's eye bead catching the lamp each time it came through the light. I let it go around a dozen times, and then I said, "Show me no," and it went on around in the same circle at the same speed, as if I had not spoken.

I steadied my elbow and tried again and got the circle again, and then I quit asking for yes and no and held it over the map.

"Where did she fall?"

I started at the bottom edge, at the Pike County line, and moved my hand north across the paper an inch at a time, as slowly as I could stand. The circle came with me. It went around over the Caddo and over Mount Ida and over the blue of the lake, the same width and the same speed, and when I brought my hand over the red diamond on the ridge it went around the Bluff Mine exactly as it had gone around the lake. I moved my hand east of the mine, and west, and back. Wherever my knuckles were, the circle was centered under them. It was not looking for anything. It was following me.

I asked it where Verlie Odom was found. I asked it to show me the north wall. At the words north wall it slowed and stopped and started around the other way, and went on counterclockwise no matter what I asked it after, which was the most it had told me all morning and meant exactly as much as the rest. By half past six the cold had come into the tips of my fingers. By a quarter to seven it had come up into the palm of the hand that held the chain and across into the other hand, though that one had only been resting on the counter, and an ache had set in behind my left eye, steady, like a thumb pressed there by someone in no hurry to stop.

The point went down onto the map, and when I unhooked the chain there was a red groove across the pad of my finger as deep as the mark a bucket handle leaves, and the skin was white on either side of it. For the last quarter hour the pendulum had pulled down on that finger harder than any sinker I ever learned on.

Verlie's gem scale sat at the end of the counter under its plastic cover, the brass-trimmed one she had weighed specimens on for thirty years. I took the cover off and zeroed it and laid the pendulum on the pan with the chain coiled beside the point. Thirty point two grams. I took it off, zeroed the scale again, and put it back. Thirty point two. Then I lifted it by the chain, and it hung from my finger and pulled down into the groove it had already made, and I put it in the bandanna and the bandanna in my pocket and folded the map along its old creases with hands I could barely feel.

Deacon opened one eye and shut it again.

I opened at nine. A retired couple from Texarkana bought a sack of tumbled stones for their grandchildren and asked whether the crystals in the window came from around here, and I told them which ones did and which had come from Brazil, and gave them each a quartz chip out of the luck jar, because it was their first time in Hollis Springs and that was how it had always been done in this building. I could not feel the chips when I picked them out. I dropped one, and Deacon got up and came over and considered it on the floor. When the couple had gone I held both hands over the gooseneck lamp until the backs of them stung and the palms stayed cold. At noon I turned the sign to BACK AT 2, and Deacon and I went out the front door and east along the highway.

Cody's garage sat half a mile past the end of Main, where the highway left the hotel behind and began its long climb toward Hot Springs. It was two bays of painted cinder block on a gravel apron, with a drink machine by the office door and a sign across the top of the building, white letters on blue: ODOM AUTO REPAIR. The letters had been painted by hand, carefully, and not long ago. Both bay doors were up. A Silverado stood on the lift in the near bay with its front wheels off, and the radio on the workbench was playing the Texarkana station, which had not changed its format in twenty years and saw no reason to start.

Cody was under the truck on a creeper. I could see his boots and his knees. Deacon went straight in across the oil-stained concrete and put his nose against the nearest boot, and the boots stopped moving.

"That's a dog," Cody said from under the truck.

"That's my dog."

The creeper rolled out. He lay on it a moment looking up at me, a trouble light in one hand and a smear of grease across his forehead where he had pushed his hair back, and then he sat up and set the light on the floor. "Rock," he said. "Door quit on you?"

"It clicks."

"Then leave it alone." He got to his feet, pulled a red shop rag out of his back pocket, and began to wipe his hands. "You walk out here?"

"It's half a mile."

"It's half a mile of highway with log trucks on it." He looked at me with the rag going over his knuckles. "You look like you got hit with something."

"Headache." I took the envelope out of my back pocket. I had put two twenties and a ten in it at the register that morning and written DOOR on the front. "This is for the door."

He looked at the envelope and did not take it. "We did this already."

"I know we did."

"Buy that dog a biscuit." He tipped his head at Deacon, who had found a patch of sun at the edge of the apron and was lowering himself into it by stages. "Buy him a bunch of biscuits. Arletta'll run a tab." I put the envelope back in my pocket. He nodded once and went to the drink machine and fed it quarters and brought me a Coke, cold enough that I felt it even through my fingers. I held it against my wrist.

"Who boxed up her stock?" I said. "After."

He had started back toward the lift. He stopped with one hand on the fender.

"Aunt Lorene and June Ivey. The week after the funeral." He looked at the bare wheel hub for a while. "They packed it, and I carried it down to the stockroom and stacked it, and I didn't look in any of it. I couldn't stand to be in there." He turned the rag over. "Aunt Lorene sold what was worth selling. What's left is what nobody wanted."

"Some of it ended up in the wrong box," I said.

"That'd be about right. June cried the whole three days, and Aunt Lorene was going so fast you couldn't keep up with her." He wiped his hands again, though they were as clean as they were going to get. Then he said, to the truck, "She told me she talked to you. Aunt Lorene. Wednesday. About the cafe."

"She said you and Verlie had words."

"Words." He laughed once through his nose. "Everybody's got the words. Arletta's got her throwing a fork." He folded the rag in half, and in half again. "You want to know what she said."

"I didn't ask, Cody."

"No. You don't, do you." He turned and looked at me straight on, for the first time since I had walked in. "You never have. Not on the phone. Not Wednesday." On the workbench the radio went to an advertisement for a feed store in Mount Ida. "So I'll tell you, and then you'll have it right, and you can tell it to whoever you want. I sat down in her booth and she was already mad. Before I'd opened my mouth. She said, 'Your aunt's been at me about money all week.' Then she said she wasn't going to sit there and hear it from me too."

"Hear what?"

"Whatever I'd come to say." He unfolded the rag and shook it out. "She paid for her pie and went. That's the last thing she ever said to me, and the whole cafe heard it." He put the rag in his back pocket. "I said a thing or two back. Nothing I'd be ashamed for you to hear."

I stood on the edge of the apron with the Coke against my wrist and Deacon asleep in the sun beside my boots. When I was sixteen and Cody was twenty, he used to come into the shop on Saturday afternoons with grease to the elbows and stand in the stockroom doorway, and Verlie would go back to him with her hands in her apron pockets, and I would sort chips at the counter and listen to them not quite whisper. Twenty dollars for a fuel pump. Forty for a set of tires. She gave it to him every time, with a speech about it that I could hear from the counter, and every time he took the speech along with the money and thanked her for both. I did not know what he had gone to say to her at the Rockhound that night, and he did not tell me, and I did not ask that either.

"Come eat at the Rockhound with me," I said. "Next week. At noon, when it's full."

He looked at me a while. "Aunt Lorene put you up to that."

"She did."

"She means well by it."

"So do I."

He looked at the Silverado on its lift, and at the dog, and at the highway. "Maybe," he said, and lay back down on the creeper and rolled himself under the truck.

Deacon got up out of the sun. We were at the edge of the gravel when Cody's voice came out from under the Silverado. "Rock."

I turned around.

"Drink that Coke," he said. "You're the color of door primer."

I did not want the highway shoulder again. Below the hotel the spring run came down out of the bathhouse walls and went the length of the hotel's back lot to the creek, and a path ran along it through the jewelweed to the alley behind the Main Street buildings. Verlie used to put her hands in running water after a hard working, to the wrists, and swear at the cold the whole time, and say it was the only thing she knew of that helped. I went down the bank by the bathhouse with Deacon ahead of me, and he was in the run to his elbows before I reached the bottom.

"Keep that dog out of my cress."

She was standing in the water downstream in a pair of black rubber boots, with a basket on the bank beside her and a pair of kitchen shears in one hand. Linen shirt, sleeves rolled. Her hair hung down her back in one long rope, red going gray, and the smell of yarrow and woodsmoke came up the run from her ahead of anything else. I called Deacon. He came up out of the water and shook himself on the path and lay down there, and she watched him do it.

I knew her. When I was fourteen she had stood behind Verlie's counter on Saturdays weighing amethyst on that same brass scale, and she had never once spoken to me, or to any child, that I could remember. Then one autumn she was gone, and when I asked, Verlie said only that Rosalind had gone to plants.

"Zara Lindell," Rosalind Fry said.

"Miss Rosalind."

"God. Don't." She bent and cut a stem of jewelweed close to the water and laid it in the basket, orange flowers hanging off it like little fish. Then she straightened and looked at my hands on the Coke can. "Your nails are blue."

I looked. They were, faintly, at the beds.

"That isn't the spring," she said. "You haven't put them in it yet. So you've been doing something you oughtn't, before breakfast, on an empty stomach, and now you've come down here to soak because she told you it helps." She snapped a seed pod off the jewelweed between two fingers, and it burst and curled in on itself and threw its seeds onto the water. "It helps about as much as the swearing did. She did both."

I set the Coke on the bank and crouched and put my hands in the run. The cold went to the wrist bones and stayed there, and an ache came in behind it that was almost a relief. Rosalind went back to cutting.

"Impatiens capensis," she said, without looking around. "Touch-me-not. Good for poison ivy and nothing else, which I like in a plant." She cut another stem. "Do you know how long I was at that counter?"

"No."

"Twelve years. From twenty-two. I learned her clays and her veins and her wrapping system, every Bluff point wrapped twice and never once told why. And one Tuesday she said I had learned what I was going to learn and I would do better with plants." She laid the stem in the basket with the others. "Two years later she had a sophomore at the counter who couldn't sit through a lesson."

"I could sit through a lesson."

"You could sit," Rosalind said. "You couldn't stay."

The water ran over my wrists. Downstream a pod went off on its own in the jewelweed and pattered on the water. Deacon put his chin on his paws on the path and watched her basket.

"Everybody in this county cried at her funeral," she said. "I went to see who would cry the hardest."

"Who did?"

"Ione Pickens." She snipped. "And the two of them not speaking."

I took my hands out of the run. They were red to the wrists and the fingers were still white, and I dried them on my jeans and picked up the Coke. "What's good for cold hands?"

Rosalind looked at me over her shoulder for the first time since she had told me my nails were blue.

"I could tell you," she said. "You would have to pay me, and I would have to like you." She bent to the cress. "I don't see either one happening this week."

At half past eight that night the Rockhound's lot was down to Birdie's truck and the cafe was dark except for the kitchen and the fixture over the back booth. Tucker and Beau were in Mount Ida at the football game with their father. The radio on the pass-through shelf had the game on, and Birdie turned it down until the crowd was a sound like surf and the announcer a man talking in another room, and brought two peach fried pies and a slice of chess on one plate, with two forks. She pulled a chair to the end of the booth, as she had on Tuesday, and left Verlie's side empty. Deacon went under the table and lay down on her feet.

I picked up a fork. She looked at my hand holding it and put her own fork down.

"Z," she said. "Give me that." She took my hand, and then the other one, and held them between both of hers on the Formica and rubbed them hard, the backs and then the palms. "Lord. Where have you had these, in my ice machine?"

The winter we were eight we had gone through the ice at the edge of the creek behind her mother's house, both of us, to the knees, and she had done exactly this on her mother's back step before either of us would go in and confess. Her hands were warm from the dish water. Mine stayed cold in them.

"Tell me," she said.

I told her about the map and the circles. She listened with her thumbs going over my knuckles.

"So you asked it something you already knew," she said.

"That's how you check an instrument."

"And it drew circles."

"Around my hand. Wherever I put my hand."

Birdie let go of me and picked up her fork and cut the point off one of the fried pies. "So the one thing it found all morning was you."

I ate a bite of chess pie. It was sweet enough to hurt my teeth, and I had another.

"Ione says I'll have to learn to ask it right," I said.

"Doris Lamb called the register at nine yesterday morning to tell me you'd been up Spring Street." Birdie chewed. "What else?"

I told her about Cody, all of it, the rag and the envelope and what he had said in the booth that night, in his words. When I came to the line I said it exactly as he had said it, and Birdie nodded before I finished.

"That's about what Mama always said she said. Mama was at the register." She turned her fork over. "Everybody took it the one way, Z. He comes in wanting money, and she's already sick of being asked."

"He didn't say he asked her for money."

"He didn't say he didn't."

I thought of him folding the red rag in half and in half again, and I did not say anything.

"And then," I said, "Rosalind Fry."

"Rosalind Fry sells soap at the Mount Ida market for nine dollars a bar and won't eat in here because we fry in lard." Birdie looked at me. "What'd she want?"

"Nothing. She was cutting jewelweed in the spring run." I turned my cup on the Formica. "She said I could sit through a lesson but I couldn't stay."

Birdie did not say anything for a while. On the radio somebody scored and the surf came up and went back down. She looked at the empty side of the booth, and then at the plate, and pushed the chess pie across the table to me.

"Well," she said. "She's not wrong about everything." Then, before I could answer, "Eat that. And go home and hang that thing up somewhere it can't get in your pocket."

Verlie had kept a brass cup hook screwed into the end of the register shelf, where she hung the key to the cash box. The key was long gone. At nine o'clock I unwrapped the pendulum and hung it there by its chain, with the point a finger's width above the counter, and turned off the lamp, and Deacon and I went up. I lay in the dark with my hands between my knees and listened to the creek. Around eleven a truck came home from the game with its windows down and its radio going and passed along Main and was gone. I did not sleep. Toward midnight I gave up and came down the stairs in my socks, and Deacon came down after me, one step at a time, complaining.

The pendulum hung perfectly still on its hook. The streetlight came in through the front window across the counter, and the point stood in it a finger's width above the oak, exactly where I had left it, and the chain did not turn when Deacon went past underneath it or when I leaned close enough to breathe on the brass. By the clock over the stockroom door it was midnight, eighteen hours since I had first hooked that chain over my finger, and my hands were still cold.