Swing Low

Some time before dawn my hands came back. I woke at five with both of them under the pillow, warm to the fingertips, and lay flexing them against the sheet for a while before I believed it. Then I went down the stairs to let Deacon out and stopped at the bottom with one hand on the newel post.

The pendulum hung on its hook a finger's width above the counter, where I had left it. On the oak beneath its point lay a pinch of pale gray dust, no bigger than my thumbnail, heaped up at the center like the sand in the bottom of an hourglass. I touched it. It was finer than flour and gritty when I rubbed it between finger and thumb, and I knew it at once, because it had lived in the creases of Verlie's hands every day I had known her: rock flour, the dust quartz gives up under a saw or a grinding wheel. Nobody had cut a stone in this building in nineteen years. I wiped the counter with the heel of my hand and wiped my hand on my jeans, and took Deacon out the back door to the creek.

The air had gone thick overnight. A south wind was pushing up the valley, warm and damp as breath, and the sky over the Bluff was the white of a sheet on a line. Deacon came back from the gravel bar with his ears full of beggar's lice, and I picked them out on the back step while the cicadas started up in the sycamores, loud for that hour.

On Saturday mornings the Rockhound smelled the same as every other morning and sounded like a ball field. By half past six half the booths were taken up by boys in gold jerseys two sizes too big for them and the parents who had driven them there. The radio on the pass-through had the Saturday swap show on, a man in Glenwood trying to trade a bush hog for a deer stand and having no luck. Tucker and Beau sat at the counter in jerseys numbered 12 and 21, putting away pancakes as fast as Arletta could stack them, and when Tucker saw me come in he pointed his fork at the door.

"Is Deacon out there?"

"On the step."

"Can he come to the game?"

"He's got a shop to keep," I said.

Every stool was taken. Birdie, going by with a tray of plates up her arm, tipped her head at the two-seat booth by the front window, and I slid into it and looked out at Deacon on the step and the flat white sky over Main. Arletta set my plate in front of me and went out with the biscuit. I was halfway through my eggs when a white county truck pulled in at the far end of the lot, and a big man got out of it with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck and a clipboard under his arm.

He stopped at the step. He crouched in front of Deacon with his elbows on his knees and let Deacon go over his boots and his hands and the cuffs of his jeans for a long time, with great attention, and when Deacon had finished, the man scratched him once behind each ear and stood up and came in. Beagles, I thought, a houseful of them.

I knew him before he had got the door shut. When I was in high school my ride had once left a Mount Ida game without me, and a young deputy had driven me the twelve miles home without either of us saying a word. He was heavier now, and his sandy hair had gone gray at the sides, and the back of his neck was burned red above the collar of a faded T-shirt that said MONTGOMERY COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE SOFTBALL. The boys at the counter turned around on their stools and said "Coach" in a ragged chorus, and he said, "Finish your pancakes," and every one of them went back to his plate.

"Coffee, Wade?" Arletta said.

"Yes, ma'am. Please."

She brought it in a cup and saucer, which she did not do for everyone. He looked down the room for a place to drink it, and there was no place, and then he looked at the empty seat across from me.

"Ma'am," he said. "Would you mind?"

"Zara," I said. "Go ahead."

"Zara." He sat down carefully, one knee and then the other under the table, and set the clipboard face down on the table and the cup on top of it. "Wade Tolliver. I expect you don't remember."

"You drove me home from a ballgame once."

"Your ride left without you." He turned his cup a quarter turn in its saucer. "You didn't say a word the whole way."

"Neither did you."

"No, ma'am." He heard himself and let it go. "I'm hauling those two to Mount Ida at a quarter to eight. Birdie's got the noon rush and Danny's got a fryer to fix, so I'm what they've got."

"Are you any good?"

"We haven't scored this season." He drank some coffee. "Tucker can catch. Beau can catch. I can't find a single boy on the roster who can throw the ball to either one of them." He looked out the window at the white sky over the ridges. "Front's coming through tonight. Hard rain, the radio says, and cooler behind it."

"Your grandmother would have told you Thursday."

He looked at me then. "Granny Nell would have told me Thursday, and been put out that I had to ask," he said. "It skipped me. I've got the radio, like everybody else." He said it without any weight in it at all, and went back to his coffee.

Out on the step Deacon had finished his biscuit and laid his head on his paws. Wade watched the boys at the counter for a while. Then he took a pair of reading glasses out of the neck of his T-shirt and turned them over in his fingers without putting them on.

"Doc Whitfield says you asked him about Verlie Odom," he said. "Tuesday, at checkers."

"I bought her building."

"I know you did." He turned the glasses over again. "Doc says you asked him how she fell."

"People tell me about her," I said. "Everybody who comes in. They tell me she went up there of a night with her lantern, and the edge gave out."

"That's what they tell."

"Doc said there was a young deputy up there that morning who had never seen anybody dead."

"That'd be me." He put the glasses down on the table between us and squared them against the edge of the clipboard. "Second car up. My sergeant went down into the pit with the dig crew, and he sent me up the old path from Sawmill Road to see where she went over, because I was twenty-five and could still climb." He was quiet a moment. Behind me the swap show had moved on to a woman selling puppies, half Catahoula, free to a good home. "I've thought about that morning more than I'd like. I try to remember it as it was and not as I've told it since. They're not always the same."

I waited. He did not look at me. He looked at the glasses on the table.

"There's a flat rock right at the top," he said. "Right at the lip. You'd know it."

"I know it."

"Her lantern was sitting on it. One of those old red barn lanterns with the wire bail. Sitting up straight in the middle of that rock, like you'd set a lamp on a table." He moved one hand an inch, setting it down. "It wasn't lit. Wick turned down, cap screwed on tight. I had to carry it down the path, and I remember I kept waiting for it to slosh on me, and it didn't, because it was full. That's all. It's in the file as one line. Lantern recovered at scene. I typed that line myself."

He picked up his coffee. I sat with my fork in my hand and looked at the lot through the window, the pickups and the flat white light on their hoods, and saw none of it.

A woman going along a pit edge after dark carries her light lit and in her hand. If her footing goes, the light goes over with her, or it lies where she dropped it with the globe broken and the oil soaked into the red clay. This lantern had been set down whole in the middle of the stone, with its cap on and its wick turned down.

For three days I had seen the flat rock with the lantern on the stone beside her. I had never once asked myself whether it was burning. I saw it now unlit, sitting full in the last of the daylight while the red went out of the north wall, and Verlie on the rock beside it with her hands in her lap, still waiting for the girl who was supposed to come up the path at seven. In my left pocket the bank envelope lay flat against my hip.

"She set it down before dark," I said.

Wade put his cup in its saucer. "Report says she went up after dark."

"Does it say the lantern was out?"

"It says lantern recovered at scene." He picked up the reading glasses again. "My sergeant wrote the report, and I signed it under him. Doc had his ruling in two days, and the file went in a box, and the box is in the basement of the courthouse in Mount Ida, on a shelf with every other box from that year." He looked at me for the first time since he had started. "And it'll stay there unless somebody brings me something a judge would look at twice. I want you to know that before you go any further than breakfast."

"I haven't gone anywhere."

"You've been up Spring Street, and out to Cody Odom's garage, and down in the spring run with Rosalind Fry." He said it mildly, reading it off. "Doris Lamb has called my office twice. She doesn't want anything done. She wants me to know she knew it first." He set the glasses down again. "Why'd you ask Doc?"

"She was my teacher," I said.

He did not ask what she had taught me. He looked at me a little longer, and then he nodded once and finished his coffee.

At the counter Tucker had his helmet on already, backward. Wade put two dollars under his saucer, stood up out of the booth in stages, and picked up his clipboard. "Boys," he said, not loudly, and the gold jerseys came off the stools and went out the door past Deacon in a pack, and Deacon lifted his head and watched them go by. Wade stopped at the door with his hand on it.

"Ma'am," he said, and heard it again, and this time shook his head at himself. "Zara."

The bell clanked behind him. I sat and looked at my cold eggs. His reading glasses were still on the table beside the saucer, squared against nothing now that the clipboard was gone, and I picked them up and went out the door with them. He was standing at the open door of the truck, counting heads in the back seat.

"You left these," I said.

He looked at the glasses in my hand. "I hate those things," he said, and took them, and put them in his shirt pocket, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something else. Then Beau leaned over the seat and told him they were going to be late, and he got in and backed the truck around and pulled out onto Main, and I stood on the step beside my dog and watched it go west.

When I went back in, Birdie was at my booth with a coffeepot, looking out the same window.

"Wade Tolliver doesn't sit with anybody," she said.

"There wasn't any place else."

"There's never any place else on Saturday. He drinks it standing at the register." She filled my cup, though I had not asked for it, and looked at my face. "What'd he say to you?"

"I'll tell you tonight."

"Tonight I've got the boys and a hundred and twenty pounds of potatoes." She looked at me a moment longer. "Tomorrow, then."

"I'm taking Lorene her pie dish back tonight anyway."

"Washed and empty, I expect."

"Washed."

"Lord help." She went to the pie case and came back with a dozen peach fried pies still warm from the kettle and packed them in a box between sheets of wax paper, as neatly as a mason laying brick. "Put those in it. You won't shame your mother."

I paid her for the pies. She let me, which she would not have done a week before.

The heat built all day. By noon the white sky had gone yellow at the edges, and the last of the dig-season weekend came into the shop with red clay to the knees. A man from Shreveport looked so let down at what his cantaloupe-sized cluster was worth that I showed him the one good termination at the back of it, and he went away happier with the same rock. The cicadas sawed in the pines on the ridge behind Spring Street all afternoon, rising and falling with the heat. Twice I looked at the counter under the pendulum. It was bare oak both times, polished where I had wiped it.

At six I laid the fried pies in Lorene's dish, locked up, and walked east with it in both hands and Deacon at my knee. Holly Ridge Road turned off the highway past the Baptist church and climbed a slope of oaks and brick houses. The wind had come around while I was inside. It blew in hard gusts out of the northwest now, cooler at every gust, turning the oak leaves silver side up, and over the ridges to the west the sky had gone the color of a bruise with a yellow line under it. Lorene's house was the fourth on the right, low red brick with a carport on the near end, the white Oldsmobile in it beside a tan pickup with a tomato cage in the bed.

I went to the carport door, because nobody in Hollis Springs uses a front door except the preacher. Lorene opened it before I knocked.

"Look who," she said. "Look who, Hal. Mama's little apprentice, and her dog." Then she saw what was in the dish, and put her hand to her chest. "Birdie Calloway's fried pies in my good dish. Oh, honey. Mama would have laughed till she cried. Come in, come in out of that wind."

The kitchen was yellow, curtains and teapot clock and all, with a Formica table scrubbed so long the pattern had worn off in the two places where two people had sat for forty years. It smelled of Pine-Sol and pot roast. Through the far doorway the den was blue with the television, where the Razorbacks were warming up in Fayetteville, and a man was lowering the footrest of a recliner to get up.

"Don't you get up," Lorene told him.

"I'm up." Hal Pace came to the doorway in his sock feet, a tall, soft, slow man in a cardigan with a newspaper still folded in one hand. He shook my hand as if it were a thing he did not often get to do. "Darlene's girl. You've come home."

"Yes, sir."

"Good," he said. "That's good." He looked out the window at the sky. "That front's going to finish my tomatoes tonight. Lorene, give her some tomatoes."

Lorene was already moving. She laid the fried pies on a platter, wiped the dish though it was clean, put it away, and wiped the counter where it had stood. She poured me iced tea without asking and told me to sit. I sat at the place where the pattern was worn.

Deacon had come in behind me. He went around the kitchen once with his nose down, and then he went to the doorway into the den, where Hal was standing. Hal stepped back to give him room. Deacon turned once in the doorway, slowly, and let his hindquarters down onto the linoleum, and then the rest of him, until he lay on his side across the whole width of the opening with his legs out straight into the den and his head on the kitchen side. His ears spread out flat on the floor. He kept his head flat on the linoleum and his eyes open, and he watched the kitchen.

"Well, look at that," Hal said.

"Deacon," I said. He did not lift his head. I said it again, and patted my leg, and his eyes moved to me and back to the room, and that was all.

"Leave him, honey." Lorene had stopped with the dishrag in her hand. She was looking down at him, and her eyes had filled. "Mama had a dog would do that. A big old yellow thing. He'd lie down in the door when somebody in the house was sad and he wouldn't get up for meat." She laughed and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. "This kitchen's had a hard week. I've been talking about Mama to anybody who'd hold still for it."

"She has," Hal said. He looked down at the dog across his doorway, and then he stepped over him, carefully, one long leg and then the other, and came into the kitchen and got himself a glass of tea and stepped back over to the den. Deacon did not move for any of it. "He's welcome," Hal said from his chair. "You tell him he's welcome."

Lorene came and sat across from me with the rag folded in her lap. Her hands went on folding it.

"I saw Cody yesterday," I said. "I asked him to eat at the Rockhound with me next week. At noon."

Her hands stopped. "What did he say?"

"He said maybe."

"Maybe," she said. "Oh, honey. Maybe is the most that boy has said yes to in nineteen years." She reached across the table and squeezed my wrist and let go. "Bless you for that. I mean it."

Above the telephone on the wall hung a calendar from the Farmers Bank, the September squares half written in, in a neat round hand: church supper, Hal's eye doctor, Cody's birthday with a cake drawn in ink. In the bottom corner, beside next month's little grid of numbers, the bank had printed the phases of the moon. The full moon was an open circle near the bottom of October, and I sat with my tea and counted the squares between, and made it a day or two short of four weeks.

"Are you finding anything in those old boxes?" Lorene said. "Worth anything, I mean. I'd hate to think I let you buy a building full of junk."

"Mostly it's what nobody wanted."

"That's about what I thought." She smoothed the rag flat on her knee. "I sold what was worth selling. Mama would have wanted it to go to somebody who'd use it." She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. "Doris Lamb says Wade Tolliver sat with you at breakfast."

"He was waiting on the Calloway twins."

"That poor boy." She looked at the window, where the oak in the yard was bending in the wind. "He's the one came and told us, you know. That morning. Him and his sergeant. He stood out there in the carport in his hat and couldn't get a word out of his mouth, and Hal had to say it for him. Hal said, 'It's Mama, isn't it,' and that boy just nodded." She got up and went to the oven and opened it and looked at the roast and shut it again. "Will you stay and eat? There's plenty."

"I'd better get home ahead of that rain."

"Then you take some of this with you." She was already moving again. She took a peach cobbler from the back of the stove, still warm in its pan, and cut it in half with a spatula, and lifted half of it into a glass pie dish from the cabinet, an older one with a chip in the rim. She wrote PACE on a strip of masking tape and pressed it to the side and covered the whole thing in foil. "That's my second-best. Don't you let the Baptists get it." Hal called from the den, and she put a paper sack of tomatoes on top of the foil, green-shouldered ones he had picked that afternoon ahead of the weather.

I stood up with the dish and the sack. Deacon lay across the doorway with his eyes on the kitchen and did not stir.

"Deacon," I said. "Come on."

Nothing. I said goodnight to Hal through the doorway, over the dog, and Hal raised his tea glass to me from the recliner, and Lorene walked me to the carport door with her hand on my back. It was not until I had gone out the door and down the step into the carport, with the wind banging the screen behind me, that I heard his nails on the linoleum. He came out through the screen when Lorene held it for him, and went past me at his slow walk without looking up, and went down the drive to the end of it and stood at the road facing home.

"He's a good dog," Lorene said from the step, with her arms crossed against the wind. "He knows."

The first drops caught us at the Baptist church, fat and far apart, cold as creek water on the back of my neck. By the bank they were coming hard. I put the tomatoes inside my shirt and the cobbler under my arm and we ran the last two blocks, Deacon ahead of me with his ears streaming, and got in the back door wet to the skin. I stood in the stockroom dripping onto the floor and laughing, and could not have said why.

It rained all night. It ran off the eaves in ropes, and the creek came up loud behind the building, and somewhere after midnight the thunder walked off east toward Hot Springs and left only the rain. I pulled the quilt up for the first time since I had come home and lay listening, and thought of a red barn lantern sitting full and dark in the middle of a stone, and of the light going off the north wall while she sat beside it and watched the path for me. Toward three I went down to the shop in my socks. The pendulum hung still over clean oak. I went back up and slept.

The telephone woke me. Gray light at the window, cool air coming in at the sash, Deacon on the rug with his nose under his tail. It was ten past six.

"Z," Birdie said. "Open your window."

I got up and pushed the sash all the way up. The rain had stopped. The street below was black and shining, the creek was running loud and brown behind the building, and the air that came in smelled of wet pine and was cold on my bare arms. I stood there in the window with the telephone against my ear.

"You hear that?" Birdie said.

"I don't hear anything."

"That's what I mean," she said.