Swing Low

I asked Wade Tolliver on Saturday morning, at the Rockhound, standing up. The peewee boys had eaten their pancakes and gone out to the trucks in their gold jerseys, and Wade stood at the end of the counter with his clipboard under his arm, drinking his coffee at the register, as Birdie said he always did. When I went to pay I stood beside him and waited for Arletta to make my change, and then I asked him whether he would show me where he had found the lantern.

He took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, looked at them, and put them back.

"Not in this shirt," he said. It was the softball shirt again, washed to the color of dishwater. "And not in the county's truck."

"All right."

"I'm off tomorrow after church." He finished the coffee and set the cup down in its saucer. "I'll come by at one. Wear boots. It's steep at the top."

When his truck had pulled out onto Main with the boys stacked in the back seat, Birdie came down the counter from the pie case. "Wear boots," she said, low and slow, as near his voice as she could get it, and Arletta laughed until she had to set the coffeepot down. Then Birdie leaned on the counter across from me and asked, in her own voice, where he was taking me.

"Up the Odom path," I said. "To the north lip."

She looked at me for as long as it took Arletta to carry the pot to the back booth and come back. "Then you wear boots, Z," she said. After that she asked what I meant to send back in Lorene's dish, and when I said I hadn't thought about it, she went to the case and brought out a chess pie and set it in front of me. "Don't you tell her you made it," she said. "She'll know by the crust anyhow."

On Sunday at a quarter to one I sat on the front step of the shop in my Arizona boots with the chess pie in Lorene's dish on my knees and Deacon stretched along the warm brick beside me. While I waited I unwrapped the pendulum and held it up against the sky with my hand lens to my eye. I had looked at the iron line in its base every day for nearly two weeks, a rust-red thread caught in the last growth of the crystal, no longer than a grain of rice. Now it ran a quarter inch farther up into the clear quartz than it had at breakfast. I turned the point and looked from the other side, and then I wrapped it again and put it and the lens in my pocket, because a green pickup was coming down Main.

It was Wade's own truck, an old Chevrolet with a crew cab and two beagles' worth of white hair on the back seat. Deacon went over every inch of that seat with his nose before he would lie down on it. Wade had been to church. His hair was still combed wet, and he had changed out of whatever he wore there into jeans and a brown canvas coat. He looked at the pie in its foil, and at the masking tape on the rim of the dish in my lap.

"Lorene's," I said. "I'd like to take it back on the way home, if you don't mind stopping."

"I don't mind."

A ball compass the size of a plum rode on his dashboard on a suction cup, the kind they sell beside the register at gas stations. We went east on the highway and turned north onto Sawmill Road, and the card inside the ball swung round past W and past S and stopped with its N aimed across the cab at my right hip. It stayed aimed there through every bend in the gravel, whichever way the road went. Wade drove with one wrist over the wheel and told me how the older of his beagles had got out under the fence on Friday and treed a cat in the Methodist parsonage yard, and how Pastor Ammons had telephoned the sheriff's office and been put through to the chief deputy and asked him whether that was a county matter.

"What did you tell him?"

"Told him it was." Wade slowed for a washout. "Went and got her on my lunch hour. He gave me a sack of pecans for my trouble and her a talking-to."

Sawmill Road climbed the back of the north ridge through second-growth pine. We passed the old mill site, where a sawdust pile from before I was born had grown over in sumac, and the sumac had turned. It was the first red I had seen on the ridges that fall, a long stripe of it along the ditch, and above it the blackgums were beginning to go, one leaf at a time. A mile on, Wade pulled off where a culvert ran under the road and shut the engine off.

"Her truck was here," he said.

I knew. In nineteen years I had not stood on Sawmill Road. Since I came home I had driven past the end of it on the highway twice and looked the other way both times, at the creek, at the feed store's billboard, at anything. Now I got out and stood in the gravel and smelled pine and the cold breathing out of the culvert, and Deacon got down beside me and shook himself until his ears slapped.

The Odom path went into the trees where it always had, a foot wide and worn a hand's depth below the ground on either side by a hundred years of Odoms. It climbed through pine and white oak with quartz cobbles in its tread and chips of novaculite that clinked under our boots like broken china. Deacon went first with his nose down. I went second and Wade came behind me, and on the steep pitches nobody said anything, because there was no breath to say it with. My feet found the root across the tread at the second bend before my eyes did, and the flat step of bedrock after it, and I had not thought of either one since I was sixteen. Two-thirds of the way up, the path came to a shortleaf pine that lightning had split down the middle years ago, both halves still living, and there it turned back on itself and went on up across the slope the other way, steeper than before. From the split pine you could see nothing above but the hillside and the trunks and the sky through them.

At the top a single strand of barbed wire ran between leaning T-posts, with a tin sign wired to one of them: BLUFF MINE, NO TRESPASSING, in red paint gone pink. Wade set his boot on the wire and pressed it to the ground and put his hand over the top of the post, and I stepped across. Then I held it down for him. He was a big man and his coat caught on a barb as he came over, and he stood there on one leg with the other boot in the air while I worked the canvas loose, and I laughed, and after a moment so did he.

"Royce knows I come up here," he said.

"How often?"

"Once a year or so." He looked at the torn place in his coat and rubbed it with his thumb. "I couldn't tell you what for."

Then the trees ended, and in front of us there was nothing but the pit.

The north wall fell away from the toes of my boots, sixty feet of red clay and broken rock striped with white quartz, down to the floor where rainwater stood green in the low places. Across the pit, small and far off on the south rim, a few Sunday dig customers leaned on the overlook rail with their buckets at their feet. The wind came along the rim as it always had, on still days and windy ones alike, and pushed at my collar. Ten feet below the lip a white vein the width of my arm ran slantwise through the clay.

The flat rock was where it had always been, a slab of gray sandstone the size of a kitchen table, three steps back from the edge and tipped toward the pit, with lichen grown gray-green around its rim. I had sat on it at sixteen with a lead sinker on a length of fishing line and Verlie beside me, telling me to hold the end and not the middle. One evening that first summer she had leaned out over the edge with a hand on my shoulder for ballast, picked a chip of white quartz off the top of the vein below us, and put it on her tongue. "That one's yours," she said, and spat the chip into her palm and gave it to me, wet. "It comes out on a slant, like you. We'll call it Thursday." The last time I sat on the rock was August of the next year, and the stone had been hot through my jeans.

Wade stood beside me with his hands in his coat pockets. "Lantern was about there," he said, and lifted his chin at the middle of the slab. Then he turned his head to the right, where the lip came round in a shallow bite above the white vein. "She went over yonder."

I looked at the bite for a long time. The clay under the lip was undercut, and a tongue of it had slumped and dried and slumped again, and young pines had rooted on the slump and leaned out over the drop. Whatever that edge had looked like on a Friday morning nineteen years ago, the rain had had nineteen autumns to change it, and it had. I could read everything the ground had done since. That night was gone out of it.

Below the ridge to the south, the whole of Hollis Springs lay in the valley in the afternoon light: the creek in its sycamores, the water tower, the flat roofs along Main. I found the bank, and the feed store, and two doors from the feed store the tall front window of Prism and Pendulum with the sun on its glass. In a little more than three weeks, on the night of the Hunter's Moon, every stone-worker in town would look along Main Street to see whether that window went dark.

"Give me a minute," I said.

Wade looked at me, and at my right hand, which had gone into my pocket. "Take what you need," he said. He walked away east along the rim, forty steps or so, and stopped with his back to me and his hands still in his pockets, looking out over the pit. Deacon looked at me, and then went after him and sat down against his leg, and Wade put a hand on the dog's head without looking down.

I knelt on the uphill side of the rock and set my elbow on the sandstone. It was cold through my sleeve. I unwrapped the pendulum and laid the bandanna on the lichen, hooked the last link of the chain over the end of my first finger, and let the point down until it hung an inch above the stone. Then I asked it the question Ione would have had me ask first.

"Is this rock sandstone?"

It took its time. Then the point went out toward the pit and came back toward my chest, a hand's length each way, over the same gray rosette of lichen every pass. I let it run until it slowed. Down in the pit somebody's dog barked twice, and Deacon, beside Wade, looked down toward the sound and decided against it.

"Was something set down here?" I said.

The line came back longer. It went out across the middle of the slab, past the lichen, past the place Wade had lifted his chin at, and swung back to my chest and out again, longer than any yes it had given me at Ione's table. It held that length pass after pass while the wind pulled at my collar and moved the pine tops behind me and let the chain alone. I kept my elbow where it was. Lantern recovered at scene. Wade had typed that line himself at twenty-five, with a red barn lantern sitting full of oil on the floor beside the typewriter.

There were other questions. I could feel every one of them in my throat, and I wanted the answers so much that I knew what the stone would do with the wanting. It's an obliging stone. I let the swing run down on its own until the point hung still over the middle of the rock, and folded it into the bandanna, and stayed on my knees a moment with the bundle in my fist.

When I stood up, Wade had turned around. He was looking at my hand, at the red paisley and the end of the brass chain hanging out of it, and then he looked at my face. Then he turned back to the pit.

I put the bundle in my pocket and went along the rim and stood beside him. Deacon moved over and leaned on me instead. Down on the floor of the pit a man in a red cap was hosing off a bucket, and the hiss of the water came up the wall to us as plain as if it were at our feet.

"Sound carries off that wall," Wade said. "That morning I could hear every word they said down there. My sergeant, and Doc when he came, and the foreman. I stood up here with that lantern and listened to them decide what happened." He took one hand out of his pocket and looked at it and put it back. "Sergeant's been dead six years. Doc plays checkers. I expect I'm the only one left who carried anything down off this rock."

I let that sit where he had put it. After a while he looked at the sun over the west ridge.

"You ready?" he said.

We went down slower than we had come up, because going down was where the pine needles meant it. At the split pine Wade stopped. He put his hand flat on one half of the trunk and looked back up the path to where it went out of sight around the slope.

"Dig crew foreman came up this path at first light," he said. "Before any of us got there. He wanted to see where she'd gone over, and I expect he wanted to see it before the law did. He wrote it down after, in his statement." He took his hand off the tree. "Second set of footprints, partway up path, stop at switchback. That's how he put it. I read it in the file that next week. I've read it since."

"Whose?"

"Nobody asked. My sergeant said one of the crew, or kids, or a hunter scouting deer. Ground was soft that week." He looked down at his boots in the needles. "I came up behind the foreman that morning, and I was looking at the top the whole way. I expect I walked right over half of whatever there was."

I stood where he stood and looked up. From the split pine there was the slope, and the trunks, and the path going away steep across the hill, and the sky. There was no rock from here, no lip, no lantern. Whoever had made those tracks had come this far, to the place where the path turned back on itself and the top went out of sight, and had stopped, and gone back down.

"It's one line too," Wade said.

In the truck I found I was hungry. It was the hollow, shaking hunger of my first summer on the survey crew, when we walked the washes from six in the morning until two and ate whatever was in the cooler sitting on the tailgate, and it came up on me all at once, with Lorene's dish in my lap. Wade looked at my hands on the foil. Then he leaned across me, opened the glove box, took out a sleeve of peanut butter crackers, and laid it on top of the pie. I ate every one of them before we reached the highway.

The oak in the Paces' front yard was dropping acorns on the carport roof like somebody throwing gravel, and Lorene was out under it in her church dress and a pale blue cardigan, sweeping them off the concrete with a push broom. She looked up at the sound of the truck and shaded her eyes, and when she saw who was driving, her mouth went round.

"Wade Tolliver," she said, when I had come up the drive with the dish. "On a Sunday afternoon."

"He gave me a ride."

"I can see what he gave you." She waved the broom handle at the truck, and Wade lifted two fingers off the wheel. Deacon had his front feet on the back door and his head out the window, watching the acorns come down.

Lorene lifted a corner of the foil. "That's Birdie Calloway's crust."

"I never said it wasn't."

She laughed and took the dish from me and held it against her cardigan with one arm, sweeping one-handed at the acorns by her shoes while she talked. "Doris Lamb says Garrett Lyle had that big Lincoln parked at the feed store Monday half the morning."

"He bought twelve clusters."

"Then I expect he told you he's been in that shop before." She knocked the broom head against the carport post to shake the leaves out of it. "Garrett tells everybody everything. Mama said he had a Hot Springs mouth."

"He said you had him come down one August and go through the stock."

"I did." She said it straight out. "That last August. Mama was sixty-eight years old, honey, and still climbing up on that ridge of an evening with her knees, and standing behind that counter six days a week, and she wouldn't hear a word about quitting from me or anybody. You couldn't argue with Mama. But I thought if I could put a number in front of her, a real one, on paper, from a man who buys rocks for a living, she'd see she could sell out and sit down." She crimped the foil tighter over the chipped place in the rim with her thumbnail. "Hal had the back bedroom cleared out for her. I'd bought a chenille spread for the bed. Yellow."

"I never knew he'd been."

"Nobody did. I had him come on a Sunday she'd driven over to the rock swap in Mena, and I wrote down every number he said on a legal pad, and I meant to have it typed up nice at the bank and give it to her at Thanksgiving." She looked out at the oak. "I didn't get to."

My knees still had the top of that path in them, the steep pitch above the split pine. I thought of Verlie going up it at sixty-eight with her lantern, evening after evening that whole summer, and of Lorene at her Formica table with a legal pad, adding up the shelves. I had stood behind Verlie's counter four afternoons a week that August, and never on a Sunday.

"That was a kind thing to want for her," I said.

"Mama wouldn't have called it kind." Lorene smiled. "She'd have said I meant to put her out to pasture."

Behind the kitchen screen Hal appeared in his sock feet and his cardigan, with the Sunday paper folded under one arm, and peered past us at the truck. "Is that the Tolliver boy?"

"It's Wade, Hal."

"Tell him the crappie are biting at Ouachita." He looked at me. "Darlene's girl. You'll want the last of my tomatoes before the frost gets them." He went back in, and Lorene went in after him with the pie, and I stood by myself in the carport with acorns knocking on the tin over my head. When she came back out she had the PACE dish washed and dried and heaped with green-shouldered tomatoes, with a pint jar of chow-chow wedged in among them.

"A dish goes home full in this family," she said, and put it in my arms. "You bring it back when you've got something to put in it. There's no hurry, honey. There's never any hurry."

She walked me to the end of the drive with the broom in her hand and bent and looked across me through the open window at Wade. "You come to supper some Sunday," she told him. "Bring her." Then she straightened and went back up the drive to her acorns.

On the way home Wade asked me whether Lorene was keeping well, and whether those were Hal's tomatoes, and whether I fried the green ones in cornmeal or in flour, and whether that dog always rode with his chin on the seat back between our heads like somebody's aunt, and whether I was warm enough with the window down. I answered every one. He stopped in front of the shop with the engine running and the afternoon light lying long down Main, and I sat with my hand on the door and Lorene's dish on my knees and went back over all of them. He had stood on the rim of the Bluff and seen the brass chain hanging out of my fist. He had brought me down off that ridge and fed me and waited at Lorene's curb, and in three hours every question he had asked me was one I could have answered with my mouth full.