Swing Low

At five on Tuesday morning I came down the stairs in my socks and switched on the lamp at the end of the counter, and the pendulum's shadow was moving on the wall. The stone itself hung from the cup hook as plumb as I had left it at midnight. The point did not stir, and the chain lay against the oak of the register shelf without a tremor. Behind it on the plaster, the shadow of the point went out a hand's width toward the stockroom door and came back, slow and short and even, and the shadow of the chain bent at the hook to follow it. I stood with my hand on the switch and counted eleven passes. Then I turned the lamp off and on again, and the shadow hung on the wall beside the stone, as still as the stone, and stayed that way while the coffee maker filled.

Supper at the Rockhound the night before had been chicken-fried steak with the gravy poured over everything on the plate, green beans included, and Birdie had not said Royce Dunagan's name once. The twins fed Deacon gristle under the table and believed I could not see them. Tucker wanted to know whether the Bluff Mine dog was bigger than Deacon, and Beau wanted to know whether Deacon would win, and Birdie told them both to eat their beans and looked at me over their heads across the booth. That was all of Royce I got from her. I walked home at eight with the dog and the cold sliding down off the north ridge, and kept my eyes on the sidewalk.

In bed I had gone back over Friday morning at the counter: the county map, the slow circle following my hand wherever I carried it, yes and no coming out the same. In her kitchen Ione had told me I would have to learn to ask it right, and I had told her I didn't know yet. Somewhere around two, with the creek loud under the window and the quilt up to my chin, I found out that I did know, and had for a week, and was only waiting for it to be light enough to walk.

At half past six I lifted the pendulum off the hook. The quartz was warm again in my palm, as it had been every morning since Monday, and I folded it into the bandanna and put it in my right pocket. Then I took my coffee can of desert stones down from the shelf at the foot of the stairs, wrote BACK AT NOON on an order-pad sheet, and taped it to the inside of the front glass.

Main Street was wet with dew and empty. Deacon took the middle of the sidewalk, and we went east past the post office and the bank and the feed store with its doors still rolled down, past the hotel's plywood windows, and turned up Spring Street at the bathhouse wall. Halfway up I stopped to let the dog read a mailbox post and looked back over the roofs. The moon was still in the sky above the west ridge, five days past full, white as a dinner plate against the blue and shaved a little along one edge. It had to go all the way down to nothing and fill again before the Stone Night. I watched it until Deacon leaned on the leash, and then we went on up the hill.

Ione's porch was empty this time. Both cane-bottomed rockers had been tipped forward against the rail to keep the dew off their seats, and the stones stood three deep on every sill with their faces to the house. I knocked on the frame of the screen door.

"It's open," Ione said from somewhere inside. "Leave that dog on the porch."

Deacon considered the screen, and the smell of the kitchen through it, and went to the far end of the porch where the sun was coming in under the eave. He lay down there with his back against the rockers and his nose on his paws. I went down the hall between the faded roses with the coffee can under my arm.

Ione stood at the black woodstove with the firebox door open, looking in at the kindling and the oak split she had laid in it. She had a man's brown cardigan buttoned to the neck over her housedress, and the cane hung by its crook from the edge of the warming shelf.

"I had meant to wait for October," she said, without turning around. "My knees didn't care to." She shut the firebox door on the cold wood and latched it. "I'll not light it while you're at this. You'd only blame my fire." Then she turned and looked at the can. "You've brought your desert stones."

"You said they'd have to learn to sleep in the damp."

"I said that." She took her cane down and came to the table, and lowered herself into her chair with one hand flat on the oilcloth. The yellowware bowl of quartz points sat in the middle of the cherries where it had been the week before. "Sit down, Darlene Lindell's girl. Have you come here to be taught, or have you come to give it back to me?"

"I asked it wrong," I said.

"What did you ask it?"

I told her. The road map out of Verlie's drawer, and the chain over my finger before the sun was up, and the question. Ione listened with her hands folded on the head of her cane and her eyes on the bowl.

"Where did she fall," she said. "Over one of her own maps."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And where did she fall, child?"

"At the foot of the north wall."

"So you knew." She tipped her head. "Everybody in three counties knows where she fell. You asked a stone to go hunting for a thing you already had in your hand. And it went, the poor obliging thing, and found the only one on that table that was looking." She let that sit. "What did you ask it after?"

"I asked it to show me yes. And then no."

"One right after the other."

"Near enough."

"And it showed you the same both times, and you decided it was broke." Ione unfolded her hands. "Lay your elbow on my table. There. Hold it by the end of the chain, not the middle. She was forever after you about the middle, I expect."

"She was."

I unwrapped the pendulum and laid the bandanna by the bowl, and hooked the last link of the chain over the end of my first finger with my elbow set on the oilcloth. The point hung an inch above the printed cherries. In the week since I found it, it had moved in my hand every way I could name, and now it hung still and plumb and waited, and so did I.

"You don't ask it anything worth knowing," Ione said, "until you've asked it something it can't argue with. And you don't tell it how to say yes. You let it show you how this one says it. Not how a fishing sinker says it." She pushed one of the points out of the yellowware bowl with a fingernail, a Bluff point the length of her little finger with the iron line in its base, and nudged it across the oilcloth until it lay under the pendulum. "Ask it what that is. Out loud, and the whole of it."

"Is this stone quartz?" I said.

Nothing moved. Through the window over the sink I could see the top of the oak in her side yard, and a crow walking along a limb of it, and I made myself watch the crow and not the stone. Then the point began to swing. It went out from me toward the window and came back toward my chest, in a straight line over the oilcloth, and out again, the length of my hand each way and no more. It passed over the same red cherry every time. I had learned yes on a lead sinker on a length of monofilament at Verlie's back counter when I was sixteen, toward the chest and away, and this was that, and cleaner than the sinker had ever been.

"That's her yes," Ione said. "Now ask it a lie."

"Is this point from Arizona?"

The line stopped. The point swung out to my right toward the stove, and at the top of the swing it stayed. The chain ran from my finger at a slant, straight and still, with the point hanging off plumb over the oilcloth, as if it were leaning its weight on something I could not see. I kept my elbow where it was. My arm did not move, and the point did not come down. I could feel it at the end of the chain, holding.

"Don't push on it," Ione said. "You'll be there all morning. Ask it something else."

"Is this table covered in oilcloth?"

The point came down through plumb as though somebody had let go of it, and went straight into the line again, toward the window and back over the same cherry. The clock over the kitchen door ticked. I had not heard it since I sat down.

Ione looked away from me, at the window, at the stones along its sill, for long enough that the pendulum had made four passes. "Verlie," she said, after that, "called it holding the gate. She said a no from a good stone was the gate held shut on you, and you could stand there and lean on it till dinner." She looked back at me. "I've never seen another one do it. Mine swing side to side, like everybody's."

I asked it four more things, because she told me to. Whether the bowl was yellowware, and it said yes. Whether the stove was lit, and it leaned out toward the stove and held the gate until I asked whether the stove was cold. Whether the crow in the oak was a crow, and it gave me the line, steady, and Ione made a sound in her throat that I took for a laugh.

"Don't ask it about me," she said. "Nor any living soul. It'll go dead on you, and you'll think you've ruined it."

"I know that much."

"Good. Then she taught you that." She pointed her cane at the bandanna. "Put it down a minute. Let your hand rest."

I laid the pendulum on the cloth. The tips of my fingers had gone cool, and an ache had settled behind my left eye, lighter than Friday's, and I sat with my hands in my lap until both had eased.

"Now go out on my porch and sit with that dog till I call you," Ione said. "Leave the can."

I sat in the sun at the end of the porch with my back against the wall of the house and Deacon's head on my shoe. From there I could see down Spring Street to the roofs of Main and the bank's flat top, and across the drive to the big white oak, where one long limb hung out over the gravel stripped of its bark and gone the color of bone. Inside, Ione moved through the house. A drawer opened and shut. A cupboard door squeaked on its hinge. The back screen slapped, and something tin was set down on something hard, and a little while later the back screen slapped again. Deacon lifted his head at each sound and laid it down again on my foot. When I counted the stones on the nearest windowsill I made it forty-one, and every one of them faced the room.

"Come in," Ione called.

She was at the table again with both hands on the head of her cane, where she had sat before. The coffee can stood where I had left it, with its plastic lid off. I tipped it toward the window and went through it with one finger: the Apache tears from the Superior dump, the desert rose from the dry lake, the banded agate off a wash near Ajo, the brown jasper that nobody but me had ever thought was pretty. A thumb-length scrap of chrysocolla was gone, the blue-green piece I had broken out of a road cut outside Globe my first summer on the survey crew. Without it there was a gap in the can I could see.

"I have put one of your stones somewhere in this house," Ione said. "Ask it where that stone is."

I set my elbow on the oilcloth and hooked the chain. "Where is my chrysocolla?"

The point went round. It was the same slow circle it had given me on Friday over Verlie's map, wide as a saucer, and I watched it with my stomach going tight. Then the circle stretched toward the coffee can, and swung back, and stretched toward the window over the sink and the stones along its sill, and came back to the can and went round it once and drifted off toward the door.

"Where is a big question," Ione said. "A thing that's lost is all over creation to whoever's lost it. That piece of yours is in that can with its own kind, because that's where it's missed. And it's in your head, because you're thinking on it. And it's out on that road it came from." She did not look at the circling point. "You ask a stone where a thing is, and it'll go looking everyplace the thing is thought of, and drag you behind it. Ask it where the thing rests."

"Where does my chrysocolla rest?" I said.

The circle closed. The point came out of it all at once into a line, a long straight swing from my hand toward the stove and back, longer than any yes it had given me, and it held the line while I stood up from the table and carried it. From the sink it swung toward the stove. From the hall door it swung toward the stove. I stood over the cold iron top with the chain on my finger, and the line shortened under me until it was hardly moving at all.

"Is my chrysocolla in the firebox?"

Yes, toward my chest and away, the width of two fingers. I unlatched the firebox door and looked in. On the laid kindling, on top of the oak split, sat the piece of blue-green stone, with a smudge of soot on one side where she had set it down.

I took it out and held it in my palm, soot and all.

"A thing that's set down and left rests in one place," Ione said behind me. "It'll rest there till somebody comes back for it. Ask for the resting. That's the whole of the lesson, and it took her forty years to say it as plain as that." She shifted in her chair. "And mind the other thing, while you're standing there pleased with yourself."

"What other thing?"

"If you want it in the bread box, it'll do its best to be in the bread box. It's an obliging stone. She found a cake plate three Sundays running in the Methodist kitchen because she'd made up her mind it was there, and it was in the Baptists' the whole time." Ione looked at me over her folded hands. "You ask it like you don't care what it says. Even when you care more than you can stand."

I wiped the soot off the chrysocolla with my thumb and put it back in the can. On the porch Deacon gave one short bay, deep in his chest, and then the sound of a car in the gravel came in through the screen.

"That'll be Merritt," Ione said. "He telephoned at six to ask could he come at nine. I told him I'm up, Merritt, I'm seventy-eight years old."

Feet on the porch steps, slow and even. A man wiped his shoes on the mat twice, the second time longer, and knocked on the frame of the screen door, though it stood open.

"Ione. It's Merritt Haskew."

"I know who it is. Come back here."

He came down the hall with his hat in his hand. He was a narrow man in his sixties, in a gray suit and a tie on a Tuesday morning, his white hair cut close to his head and rimless glasses on a thin nose. In the kitchen doorway he stopped. He looked at me, and at the pendulum on the bandanna beside the bowl, and at the coffee can, and back at me, and his face did nothing at all.

"I didn't know you had company," he said.

"You knew, Merritt. There's a hound on my porch."

"Miss Lindell," he said to me. "Darlene's daughter."

"Zara."

He inclined his head and did not use it. Ione pointed her cane at the chair across from her, and he thanked her and did not take it either. He stood by the sink with his heels together and his hat held against his coat, and spoke to the stones on the windowsill more than to either of us.

"The county will send a truck Friday to take that dead limb off your oak," he said. "It's over your drive, and the next wind will put it through your car. I'd like your permission before they come up on you."

"You might have asked me that at six o'clock on the telephone."

"I don't care to ask things on the telephone, Ione."

"No," she said. "You never did. Cut it, then, and tell them to stack it by the shed. I'll burn it."

"Thank you." He turned the hat a little in his fingers, and then he looked straight at me for the first time. "I'm told you've been calling on people about Verlie Odom."

"Some people," I said.

"I knew her forty years. I was sorry. I've been sorry since." He said it carefully, as if each word had been weighed before he let it go. "There was a great deal said in my house that September, Miss Lindell. I would as soon nothing more was."

Ione looked down into the bowl of points. Merritt Haskew buttoned his coat with one hand.

"Ione," he said.

"Merritt. Mind the top step. It's loose."

We listened to him go down the hall and out. Through the window I watched him stop on the bottom step and put his hat on, square, with both hands, and walk to a long gray Buick parked under the dead limb. Deacon walked beside him as far as the car and stood watching while it backed into the street. Then the dog came back up the steps and lay down again at the end of the porch in the sun.

"You'll want to know what that was," Ione said.

"I know what the Haskews hear."

Everybody raised in the families knew it. Verlie had told me at sixteen, the first time she sent me up the hill to the Haskew house with a parcel: say what you mean on that porch, and once you're through the door, say nothing that isn't so, because they will know it, every one of them, and they will never ask you to come back. I had stood in their front hall with a box of tumbled agates and said thank you and nothing else, and walked home fast.

"Then you know as much as I can tell you," Ione said. "Ellen Haskew was dying that fall. Rosalind Fry was up there most every day with her jars and her hands, doing what could be done, which wasn't much by October." She set the cane against the table. "Merritt has heard every word spoken under that roof for sixty years that wasn't so. That's a fact. What he heard that September is his to tell, and he has told nobody in nineteen years, and I'm nobody."

I thought of Rosalind in the spring run in her black rubber boots, cutting jewelweed. You could sit. You couldn't stay. I put the lid back on the coffee can and pressed it down all the way around with the heel of my hand.

Ione got up. She went to the stove and opened the firebox and took a kitchen match from the box on the warming shelf, and struck it on the iron lid, and put it to the kindling under the split. The kindling caught and went up yellow, and she watched it a moment and shut the door down to a crack. Woodsmoke came out around the lids and hung under the ceiling, and the iron began to tick.

She brought two cups of coffee, and the can of milk with its two punched holes, and a plate with a square of cold cornbread and a jar of sorghum, and set the plate in front of me.

"Eat that," she said. "It takes it out of you, and you'll walk down my hill faster than you ought."

I ate it. She sat across from me with her cup in both hands and did not drink from it, and watched me, and watched the pendulum on its bandanna, until I had finished.

"She taught you yes on a sinker," Ione said. "She taught you to hold it by the end of the chain. She would have had you asking for the resting by Christmas. You had all of it but the last of it." She put her cup down in its saucer. "Why did you stop, child?"

The fire settled in the stove behind her. I picked up the pendulum, and folded the bandanna over the point, and over again, and held it in my lap in both hands, and the clock over the door went on ticking, and I did not answer her.