Outer Dark(54)

You ain’t even civil, he said. It ain’t civil to come and go thataway and not say nothin never.

I ain’t got nothin to say.

Well damn it you could say somethin. Hello or goodbye or kiss my ass. Somethin. Couldn’t ye?

I’ve not took up cussin yet, she said.

Just hello or goodbye then. Couldn’t ye?

I reckon.

Well?

Goodnight, she said.

He watched her go, his jaw let down to speak again but not speaking, watched her fade from the reach of the powdery lamplight and heard her steps soft on the moaning stairboards and the wooden clap of the door closing. Goodnight, he said. He drank the last of the milk from the glass and wiped his mouth on his shoulder in a curious birdlike gesture. He’d see all night again tonight the mule’s hasped hoofs wristing up before him and the cool earth passing and passing, canting dark and moldy with humus across the coulter with that dull and watery sound interspersed with the click of bedded creekstones.

A moth had got in and floundered at the lamp chimney with great eyed wings, lay prostrate and quivering on the greasy oilcloth tablecover. He crushed it with his fist and flicked it from sight and sat before the empty plate drumming his fingers in the mothshaped swatch of glinting dust it left.


She did not know that she was leaving. She woke in the night and rose half tranced from the bed and began to dress, all in darkness and with gravity. Perhaps some dream had moved her so. She took her few things from the chifforobe and bundled them and went to the landing beyond her door. She listened for his breathing in the room opposite but she could hear nothing. She crouched in the dark long and long for fear he was awake and when she did descend the stairs in her bare feet she paused again at the bottom in the dead black foyer and listened up the stairwell. And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. It was damp and cool and she could hear roosters beginning. She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent.

She went west on the road while the sky grew pale and the waking world of shapes accrued about her. Hurrying along with the sunrise at her back she had the look of some deranged refugee from its occurrence. Before she had gone far she heard a horse on the road behind her and she fled into the wood with her heart at her throat. It came out of the sun at a slow canter, in a silhouette agonized to shapelessness. She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.





ON A GOOD spring day he paused to rest at the side of the road. He had been walking for a long time and he had been hearing them for a long time before he knew what the sound was, a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies. He rose and went on until he reached the gap in the ridge and before long he could see the first of them coming along the road below him and then suddenly the entire valley was filled with hogs, a weltering sea of them that came smoking over the dusty plain and flowed undiminished into the narrows of the cut, fanning on the slopes in ragged shoals like the harried outer guard of schooled fish and here and there upright and cursing among them and laboring with poles the drovers, gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair.

Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.

Howdy neighbor, called out the drover. Sweet day, ain’t she?

It is, he said. Whereabouts are ye headed with them hogs if you don’t care for me astin?

Crost the mountain to Charlestown.

Holme shook his head reverently. That there is the damndest sight of hogs ever I seen, he said. How many ye got?

The drover had come about the base of the rock and was now standing looking down with Holme at the passing hogs. God hisself don’t know, he said solemnly.

Well it’s a bunch.

They Lord, said the drover, they just now commencin to come in sight. He passed his stave from the crook of one arm to the other and cocked one foot on the ledge of rock, his sparse whiskers fluttering in the mountain wind, leaning forward and watching the howling polychrome tide of hogs that glutted the valley from wall to wall as might any chance traveler a thing of interest.