Swing Low

Monday came up clear. I woke at half past five to a sky over the ridge behind Spring Street the color of a gas flame turned low, and the stairs were cold enough under my bare feet that I went back up for a flannel shirt, the first one I had worn since Arizona. Down in the shop the front windows had fogged in their bottom corners. Deacon stood at the back door with his nose to the crack, and when I let him out he went off across the wet gravel toward the creek at a trot I had not seen from him since I brought him home.

I lifted the pendulum off the cup hook to carry it in my pocket. Everything else in the building had the night in it: the brass of the register, the oak under my hand, the glass of the case going gray with my breath when I leaned over it. The quartz point was warm. It lay in my palm warm as an egg brought in from under a hen, and the brass cap was warm, and the chain was warm all the way to the last link, the one that had hung on a cold hook since Friday night. I closed my hand on it and stood by the register while the coffee maker ticked and spat behind me. Then I folded the point into the bandanna and put it in my right pocket and went to let the dog back in.

Sunday had stayed gray. The creek ran high and brown all day and carried down half a sycamore from somewhere above town, and a little after one Birdie came through the back door in her church slacks with the score already out of her mouth. Mount Ida had beaten them thirty-four to six. The six was Tucker's, a pass thrown by a fifth-grader who told everybody afterward that he had shut his eyes. Wade had stood on the sideline the whole game with his whistle in his teeth and never blown it once, and afterward he had bought all eleven of them a Dr Pepper at the Sonic.

We ate Lorene's cobbler cold out of the PACE dish with two forks, sitting on the back step above the high water, and I told her about the lantern. She listened with her fork stopped halfway to the dish.

"Full," she said.

"He said he kept waiting for it to slosh on him."

She looked at the creek going by. Half the sycamore turned over in the current and went on. "So she set it down while it was still light out."

"And then it got dark."

"And she never lit it." Birdie put her fork in the dish and left it there. "Did you tell him about the letter?"

"No."

"Are you going to?"

"He said bring him something a judge would look at twice."

"And a sheet off an order pad in pencil isn't that." She picked the fork up again. "It is to me." Then, with her mouth full, looking at the water and not at me: "Wade Tolliver sat down in a booth."

"He was out of stools."

"Z, there has never been a stool in that cafe that Wade Tolliver couldn't stand beside."

By nine on Monday the sun had cleared the ridge and the whole street was steaming. I had two plastic tubs of Bluff clusters in the alley behind the shop, soaking in oxalic since the day I opened. Verlie's way: water no hotter than a bath, two weeks or as long as it took, and a rinse after in baking soda to stop it. The mine washes its crystal hot and fast and turns it the brown of weak tea, and Verlie used to say you could tell a Bluff Mine point across a room by its tan. I lifted the clusters out one at a time in rubber gloves and ran the hose over them, and the iron came off them in rust-colored threads and ran away down the alley toward the creek. Under it they were clear. I laid them on newspaper along the top of the alley wall to dry in the sun, twelve of them, and stood back with my gloves dripping.

Twice before ten, people came in from the mine with red to their knees and buckets of what the rain had opened up overnight. A couple from Paris, Texas, had a double-terminated point the length of a pencil and did not know what they had until I turned it over for them and showed them the second end. They bought a pendulum each off the rack by the window, plain ones, and a box of luck-jar chips for a grandson, and went out talking over each other.

At half past ten a long cream-colored Lincoln with Garland County plates pulled up across from the shop, in front of the feed store, and a man got out and stood on the sidewalk buttoning his sport coat and looking at my window for a while before he crossed. He was tanned to a shine, in his late fifties, his silver hair combed straight back and still wet from the comb, with a camel jacket over a golf shirt, a jeweler's loupe on a braided cord around his neck, and soft brown loafers that the rain had not been kind to. When the cowbell went he came through the door smiling at it.

"Garrett Lyle," he said. "Hot Springs. I buy rocks from people who know more about them than I do, and I sell them to people who know less. You must be Miss Lindell."

"Zara."

"Zara." He took my hand in both of his, dry and smooth as a church pew, and let it go. He smelled of limes. "Shelby Marsh up at the mine says there's a woman in the old Odom building who's figured out how to clean a cluster. She says it like it's a rumor. I said I'd drive over and look at the evidence."

"It's drying in the alley."

"Then that's where I'll look."

I took him back through the stockroom and out the back door. He went down the row of clusters along the wall with his loupe in his eye, bending over each one with his hands behind him, and at the sixth he stopped and picked it up and turned it in the sun for a long time without saying anything. I could hear the creek, and the hose dripping, and Deacon's tags somewhere under the step.

"No brown," he said finally.

"No."

"How warm do you run it?"

"No warmer than you'd bathe a baby in."

"How long?"

"Two weeks. Soda rinse after."

He took the loupe out of his eye and let it fall on its cord. "That's Verlie's recipe."

"Yes."

"I asked her for it once," Garrett said. "In nineteen hundred and eighty-something. She told me she'd give it to me the day the Dunagans gave her back that north wall." He laughed and set the cluster back on its square of newspaper, exactly where it had been, and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief. "I'll take these. All twelve. Write me a price for the lot and don't make it so low I feel bad."

I wrote it on the back of an order-pad sheet at the counter, and he looked at it and nodded and did not argue. Then he went along the shelves while I wrapped them, picking things up and putting them down. He argued about the wavellite, cheerfully, for ten minutes, and got the shoebox for less than I had meant to take, and told me while he did it about a woman in Hot Springs who kept a wavellite spray on her nightstand to stop her husband snoring, and that it had worked, because the husband had left.

"She ran me out of here three times," he said, by the back shelves. He was looking up at the top bays, where the oak went up into the shadow under the ceiling. "Verlie. Twice to my face and once by telephone before I could get here. She said I had a Hot Springs mouth on me and she didn't want it in her store." He smiled at the shelves. "Only time I ever got past that counter was the August the daughter called me down to appraise the stock. For the family. Mrs. Pace, at the bank. Lovely woman. She met me at the back door with a buttermilk pie and a legal pad, and I went through every shelf in this room top to bottom, and she wrote down every number I said. Took us most of a Sunday."

I had a cluster in one hand and a sheet of newspaper in the other. Verlie had been alive that August. I had stood behind that counter four afternoons a week all that summer, sorting chips and sweeping and listening to her talk, and I had never heard of a man from Hot Springs going through her shelves with Lorene and a legal pad. I folded the newspaper around the cluster and taped it and set it in the flat with the others.

"I don't suppose," Garrett said, still at the shelves, in the same easy voice, "you've turned up anything back there that rings?"

I looked up. He was turning a little amethyst point between his finger and thumb and holding it to his ear, the way a child holds a shell, and grinning at me over it.

"I don't sell that," I said.

"No." He put the amethyst back where he had found it. "She didn't either." He came back to the counter and counted out the money for the clusters in fifties and the wavellite in twenties, and laid a business card on top of the pile, cream-colored, with a raised gold G. "I come through every few weeks. If you clean anything else that looks like that, you call me before you put a price on it."

I carried the flat out to the Lincoln for him. He set it in the trunk beside two others, on a folded moving blanket, and shut the lid on it with both hands, gently, and drove off east toward the highway with one arm out the window. When I went back in the bills were still on the counter where he had left them, his card on top. I put the money in the register and the card in the drawer under the spinner rack, on top of Verlie's road maps, and wiped the counter where his elbows had been.

At noon I walked a box of wavellite to the post office for a collector in Tulsa who had telephoned on Saturday. Deacon came along at my knee. All down Main people were out in the sun after two days of keeping in. The man at the feed store was pushing a puddle off his loading dock with a push broom, and the two women who ran the antique mall had their front door propped open with a churn and were carrying a wet rug out to hang over the rail. Tobias Vance stood on the bank steps with his hands in the pockets of his overalls, and when I went by on the other side he turned his head and looked back down the street at my window, and then at me, and then at the dog, and went on in to the bank. The sidewalk had dried in white patches, and the air smelled of wet pine and of the diesel from a long white Ford with dual back wheels, idling at the curb in front of the post office steps, in the yellow paint where nobody was meant to park. BLUFF MINE was lettered on the door in red. The engine ticked and shook. A heavy arm in a pressed sleeve lay along the open window, and on the hand at the end of it was a gold nugget ring as big as the end of my thumb.

Deacon stopped at the front tire. He put his nose to the tread and went over it slowly, all the way around the curve of it to the mud flap, and the hair along his spine came up in a stripe from his neck to his tail. He did not growl. He breathed in at the tire for a long time.

"That dog smells my dog," said the man in the truck.

He was seventy or near it, heavy through the chest and neck, with thick white hair combed straight back off a red face. His shirt was a western shirt with pearl snaps, pale blue, and somebody had ironed a crease down each sleeve sharp enough to cut bread. He looked down at me out of the window with his elbow on the door, pleasant and in no hurry at all.

"You're the Lindell girl," he said. "Darlene's."

"Zara."

"Royce Dunagan." He did not put out his hand. He lifted it off the door, ring and all, and pointed past the post office roof at the north ridge, where the cut face of the Bluff stood out of the pines. "That's my hill you've got in your window."

"Some of it."

"Some of it." He laughed, a big easy laugh that shook the truck. "I had a man from Little Rock in my office Saturday morning with one of your tags on a cluster. Sixty dollars." He said the number as if it were a joke he wanted me to hear twice. "I'll sell that man a day on my hill for twenty-five, and he can dig all of that he can carry down to his car."

"He can," I said. "Then he can take it home and clean it."

Royce Dunagan stopped laughing. His hand came down on the door again, and the ring knocked once against the metal. For a moment his face was all the way still, the pleasantness gone out of it, and I could see the jaw set under the loose skin. Then it came back as if he had found it again in a pocket.

"That's what Verlie used to say," he said. "Word for word. She sold off my hill out of that building for forty years and told anybody in three counties who'd stand still that I was a thief." He looked at me. "I expect she told you."

"She told me."

"I expect she did." He looked down at Deacon, who had come away from the tire at last and stood at my knee with his hackles still up. "I hear you've been all over town about her. Up Spring Street. Out to Cody Odom's garage. Sitting at breakfast with Tolliver."

"People talk to me."

"People talk." He turned his head and looked at the ridge himself, a long look, and when he spoke again it was quieter and not at all friendly. "She was a hard old woman, and she went up my hill in the dark when she had no business on it, and I have had nineteen years of this town looking at me sideways at the Rockhound because of it. I'd take it kindly if you didn't start all that up again."

The post office door opened behind me. A woman in a gray fleece with BLUFF MINE stitched on the chest came down the steps with an armful of mail and catalogs, and I knew her after a second for Shelby Dunagan, who had been a senior with a Firebird when I was in the second grade. She smiled at me as if she meant it and said, "Hey, Zara, welcome home," and went around the front of the truck and got in on the other side.

"Daddy," she said. "They're waiting on us."

He put the truck in gear. Before he pulled out he leaned across the window one more time, and the pleasant face was back on.

"You price my rocks at sixty dollars, honey," he said, "you'll go broke a whole lot nicer than she did."

The truck went off up Main toward the highway with the diesel smoke hanging behind it. Deacon watched it go. When it had turned the corner at the bank he sneezed twice, hard, and shook himself as he does coming out of the creek, and then he sat down on the sidewalk and looked up at me, and I bent and put my hand on his back and felt the hair lie down under it.

Inside, the postmistress weighed my box and sold me the postage without looking up. Through the window behind her I could see the street, and the yellow paint at the curb, and a dark patch on the concrete where the truck had dripped.

Birdie came down from the cafe at half past two, between the lunch rush and the supper prep, with two coffees in paper cups and an apron still tied on under her jacket. She set one cup on the counter in front of me and sat on the stool by the register.

"Doris Lamb called the cafe," she said. "Royce Dunagan stopped you at the post office."

"He was parked in the yellow."

"He's parked in that yellow since before they painted it." She took the lid off her coffee and blew on it. "What did he say?"

I told her. The sixty dollars, and his hill, and the nineteen years, and the honey at the end. Birdie listened with both hands around her cup. When I got to the part about going up his hill in the dark she put the cup down.

"Did he tell you accidents happen?" she said.

"No."

"He told Verlie." She looked out the window at the post office across the street. "That August. Same steps, same truck, and I'd bet you the same shirt. Mama was in line behind her with the cafe's mail. Verlie came out with a big envelope she'd just mailed to somebody at the state in Little Rock, and Royce leaned out that window and said, 'Verlie, accidents happen up on that rim.' Mama said he said it pleasant, like he was telling her it might rain."

"What did Verlie say?"

"She said she'd see him in hell or in Little Rock, whichever one he got to first." Birdie almost smiled. "Mama came home and told it at supper. Half the town had it by Sunday. Everybody told it again after, at the funeral, in the parking lot."

The same steps. I had stood on them myself that August with a sack of the shop's mail while Ione Pickens laid her cane across the rail, and I had not heard about Royce. I had been sixteen, and that summer there had been a fight in Hollis Springs every time somebody went for stamps.

"If anything happens to me at the Bluff," I said.

"I know what it says, Z."

I put my hand in my pocket. The bandanna was there, and the point inside it was still warm through the cloth, warmer than my own hand. I took my hand out again.

"He said I'd go broke nicer than she did," I said.

"He says that to everybody that sells a rock." Birdie put the lid back on her coffee. "Wade's got that accidents business in his file too, I'd put money on it. Everybody told it."

"Wade said a judge."

"A judge has heard Royce Dunagan say worse than that at a ballgame." She slid off the stool and pulled her jacket shut over the apron. "Supper's chicken-fried steak. Bring the dog."

She went out, and the cowbell clanked behind her, and I watched her go back up the sidewalk toward the cafe with her head down and her coffee held out in front of her. The afternoon went on. A family from Hot Springs Village came in and spent forty minutes deciding between two amethyst clusters, and a boy of six cried until I let him pick his own chip out of the luck jar, and a dig customer with a sunburned bald head stood at the counter and told me about every stone he had ever found, beginning with an arrowhead in a plowed field outside Conway when he was nine. He had the arrowhead with him in a film canister. I held it to the window, and it was a good one, novaculite, the white gone gray-blue at the edges where somebody had worked it a thousand years ago, and I told him so, and he put it back in the canister and went away up the street with the canister shut tight in his fist. At four Deacon gave up the front step, where the sun had left him, and came in and lay down by the register. I swept the floor. I wiped down the cases. I took Garrett Lyle's card out of the drawer once, and looked at the gold G, and put it back on top of the maps.

At six I turned the sign. I opened the front door for the air and stood in it with the cold coming in around my ankles. Main Street was empty, and the shadow of the west ridge had taken the whole of the town, the post office and the feed store and the bank and the roof of the Rockhound, and was climbing the slope behind them through the pines. For three weeks I had kept my back to the north ridge when I stood in this door. I looked at it now. Above the dark of the trees the sun still had the top of the ridge, and the Bluff stood up out of it with the whole cut face laid open, the clay of it red from the lip to the pines, the white veins running down through the red, and over all of it the first clear sky since the rain, going pale green toward the west and empty to the edges.