Outer Dark(2)

What about that? said the tinker.

The man pushed the book at him. Naw, he said. I don’t want nothin. You excuse me. I got to see to my sister.

Well, sure now, the tinker said. I just thought I’d let ye take a peek. Don’t hurt nothin do it?

Naw. I got to get on. Maybe next time you come thew I’ll need somethin … He was backing away, the tinker still standing with the little book in his hand and the cupidity in his face gone to a small anger.

All right. Didn’t mean nothin by it. I hope you’ns well. And your sister.

Thank ye, said the man. He turned and half lifted one arm in tentative farewell, then thrust both hands into his overalls and strode toward the cabin.

I’ll be clost by a few days yet, the tinker called out after him. The man went on. The tinker spat and stepped again between the prone tongues and hoisted the cart and turned it, creaking and jangling, and set off again into the woods the way he had come.

The man had stopped short of the door and stood with one foot propped on the sill watching him out of sight. For a while he could hear the rattle and clang of the cart as it labored over the pocked and rutted road, fading, then ceasing into the faint clash of the pines and the drone of insects, and then he went in.

Culla, she said.

Yes.

That pedlar have ary cocoa?

No.

I sure would admire to have me a cup of cocoa.

She sat huddled in a ragged quilt, her feet gripping the bottom rung of the chair, watching the barren fireplace in which the noon light lay among the ashes and in which her voice trembled and returned about her.

He’s done left, the man said. He ain’t got nothin.

She stirred slightly. You reckon we could have us a fire tonight?

It ain’t cold.

It turned cold last night. You said your own self it was cold. I sure do admire a good fire of the evenin. You reckon if it was to turn off kindly cool we could have us a fire?

He was leaning against the doorframe and slicing thin coils of wood away with his pocketknife. Maybe, he said, not listening, never listening.



Three days after the tinker’s visit she had a spasm in her belly. She said: I got a pain.

Is it it? he said, standing suddenly from the bed where he had sat staring out through the one small glass at the unbroken pine forest.

I don’t know, she said. I reckon.

He swore softly to himself.

You goin to fetch her?

He looked at her and looked away again. No, he said.

She sat forward in the chair, watching across the room with eyes immense in her thin face. You said you’d fetch her when it come time.

I never, he said. I said Maybe.

Fetch her, she said. Now you fetch her.

I cain’t. She’d tell.

Who is they to tell?

Anybody.

You could give her a dollar. Couldn’t you give her a dollar not to tell and she’d not tell?

No. Asides she ain’t nothin but a old geechee nigger witch noway.

She’s been a midnight woman caught them babies lots of times. You said your own self she was a midnight woman used to catch them babies.

She said it. I never.

He could hear her crying. A low bubbling sound, her rocking back and forth. After a while she said: I got anothern. Ain’t you goin to fetch her?

No.

It had begun to rain again. The sun went bleak and pallid toward the woods. He walked into the clearing and looked up at the colorless sky. He looked as if he might be going to say something. After a while he licked the beaded water from his lip and went in again.


Dark came and this time he did have a fire, going out from time to time with the worn axe and splitting kindling and later by lanternlight scouring the near woods for old stumps which he split out and dressed of their rotted hearts, bringing in the hard and weathered shells and stacking them on the floor beside the hearth.

She was propped in the bed now with the frayed and musty quilt still about her. Periodically she would seize the thin iron headrail behind her, coming tautly bowed and slowly up with her breath loud in the room and then subsiding back among the covers like a wounded bird.

He had stopped asking her about it. He just waited, sitting in the chair and nursing the fire.

I wisht they’d hush, she said.

What.

Them varmints.

He drew the poker from the fire where he had been absently stirring the coals. Somewhere between the wind’s cry and the long rip of rain on the tarpaper roof he heard a dog howl. They ain’t botherin you, he said.

He heard her fingers clatter at the iron and her body rattle the springs as it arched. In a few minutes she said: Well I wisht they’d hush.


She wouldn’t eat. He set a pan of cornbread on a brick before the fire and warmed it and ate with it the last of the cold meat he had brought from the store. He took the axe from under the bed and set forth one more time for wood. It was still raining but the wind had died and he could hear the dull lowing of an alligator somewhere on the river. When he came in again he stood the axe in the corner and stacked the wood and squatted once again before the fire. He was there for some time before she said his name.