Holme didn’t answer.
Might be somethin of a comfort to have a preacher there at your final hour, the preacher went on. If your heart ain’t just scabbed over with sin.
You don’t look like much of a preacher to me, Holme said.
I’ll bet I don’t, the preacher said. I’d just bet I don’t at that, to you.
Holme trudged along over the chopped ground. They were following the swath the hogs had made.
Where was it you was a-goin anyways? the preacher asked.
Just on to the next town.
Guess you never reckoned when ye set out this mornin that you was on your way to be hung. Did ye?
Holme ignored him.
A feller never knows what day’ll be his last in this vale of tears. You been baptized?
Why don’t you go on and walk somewheres else? Holme said.
I guess a feller mires up so deep in sin after a while he don’t want to hear nothin about grace and salvation. Not even a feller about to be hung dead.
It ain’t no use, Reverend. He’s too mean to be saved.
Most probably you right, the reverend said. But I sure would love to do it if I could. It’d make a jimdandy sermon. I saved a blind feller once wanted to curse God for his affliction. You all want to hear that’n? It’s a strong sermon. I like to save it for best.
Tell it, Reverend.
I won’t tell it all. This blind feller hollered out one time and said: Looky here at me, blind and all. I guess you reckon I ort to love Jesus.
Well neighbor, I says, I believe ye ort. He give ye eyes to see and then he tuck em away. And maybe you never was much of a christian to start with and he figgered this’d bring ye round. They’s been more than one feller brought to the love of Jesus over the paths of affliction. And what better way than blind? In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most. I believe it’s got a good deal to recommend it. The grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him easy as not. It can bend him and make him crooked. And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind, that’s who. Them is the ones scarred with God’s mercy. Stricken with his love. Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God. Amen. I told him that.
That’s a right pretty sermon, Reverend.
I wisht Vernon could of heard it.
He knelt right there and was saved on the spot, the reverend said.
The path had come down from the high bluffs and was going along the river and already it was late afternoon. Holme looked about, stepped past the preacher and the drover next him and jumped.
It was a long way down and when he hit he felt something tear in his leg. He came up with a mouthful of muddy water and spat and turned. They were aligned along the bluff watching him. The preacher had both hands aloft, gesturing. The drovers against the pale sky were small, erect, simian shapes. The seven of them watched him. He could hear the preacher’s voice. The current was carrying him on and his leg was hurting but he kept watching them and after a while they were very small and then they turned and went on along the bluff with no order rank or valence to anything in the shapen world.
WHAT DISCORDANT vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.
In the clearing he set down his cart and circled the remains of a fire out of which rose a slender stem of smoke like the pistil of a burnt flower, his thin nose constricted and eyes wary. Shapes of risen sleepers lay in the pressed and poisoned grass. He set out the child and gathered wood and built back the fire. Dark fell and bats came to hunt the glade, crossing above the figure sulking there on his gaunt shanks like little voiceless souls. Then they went away. A fox stopped barking. The tinker in his mothgnawn blanket nodded. The child slept.
The three men when they came might have risen from the ground. The tinker could not account for them. They gathered about the fire and looked down at him. One had a rifle and was smiling. Howdy, the tinker said.
HOLME CAME limping out of the woods and crossed a small field toward the light, insects rising out of the dark and breaking on his face like rain and his fingers trailing in the tops of the wet sedge. He could hear no sound save a faint moaning like the wind but there was no wind. When he entered the glade he could see men seated about the fire and he hobbled on, one hand raised, into the firelight. When he saw what figures warmed there he was already among them and it was too late. There were three of them and there was a child squatting in the dust and beyond them the tinker’s cart with the hung pans catching the light like the baleful eyes of some outsized and mute and mindless jury assembled there hurriedly against his coming.