He sat there for a long time, watching the lights go out one by one over the valley. Sound of voices close and urgent on the acoustic night air, doors falling to, laughter … An encampment settling for rest, council fires put out … In caverns by torchlight a congress of fiends and warlocks rattling old dry bones in wistful hunger.
You goin to hunt him out. When you’re old enough. Goin to find the man that took away your daddy. (Remember: fierce and already aging face downthrust into his, sweetsour smell …)
How can I? He had begun to cry.
Your daddy’d of knowed how. He was a Godfearin man if he never took much to church meetin … The Lord’ll show you, boy. He will not forsake them what believe. Pray and the way will be made known to ye. He … You swear it, boy.
His arm was growing numb with pain … could feel her tremble through the clutched hand … I swear, he said.
You won’t never forgit.
No.
Never long as you live.
Long as I live.
Yes, she said.
Long as I …
I won’t forgit neither, she said, tightening once more on his arm for a moment, leaning her huge face at him. And, she hissed, he won’t forgit neither.
I live …
He never forgot. From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of a banjo, tentative chords … a message … what news? Old loves reconsummated, sickness, a child’s crying. Silence now in the houses. Repose. Even to those for whom no end of night could bring rest enough. And silence, the music fled in the seeping amber warmth of innumerable dreams laid to death upon the hearth, ghostly and still … The morning is yet to the nether end of the earth, and he is weary. Bowing the grass in like sadness the dew followed him home and sealed his door.
Still the weather held, and the rain. The days were gray and misty and in the night the trees dripped and spattered. The pond had been bottled and he watched them drifting about one morning while still-fishing from the limestone ledge at the upper end. Later a man came in a skiff poling through the fog and he saw him stop what bottles skittered and jerked and lift up the lines to take off the fish. The man saw him and nodded his head and he nodded back. The skiff circled at the upper end and returned down the pond, silent but for the thud of the pole on the stern-boards.
He was pushing hard now and the days were bending under and cold weather came. His cot was still on the porch and daily he checked the undoing of the yard trees, woke to a red world with the sun wedged huge and squat in the mountain gap and the maples incandesced. Couched in his musty blanket he sniffed to test the air. A limp breeze water-wrought and tempered with smoke came lisping through the screen with no news yet.
He waited. In the slow bleeding month of October he watched, looking torpid and heavylidded as a toad, his nerves coiled and tuned like a waiting cat’s.
One evening coming from the store he saw her on the road and she smiled at him and said Hidy. He nodded and went on, heard them giggle behind him. He hadn’t seen her since late in the summer.
He was crossing Saunders’ field and bound for the creek, the homemade crokersack seine riding his shoulder like a tramp’s dunnage. He never saw her until she spoke, leaning against a post with her hands capping the top of it and her chin resting on them. She looked as if she might have been standing there for days with an incalculable patience just waiting for him to come by.
Well, he thought, she ain’t old enough to own the land to want to run me off of it even if she is big enough. So he said Howdy back to her.
Your name’s John Wesley, ain’t it?
He started to say, Yesm, but he said, Yep, that’s my name.
She moved down from the post and came toward him, unhurried, sauntering. She wore a cotton print dress that buttoned up like a housecoat and where it stretched across her belly or strained to cover her rolling breasts white flesh and pink silk pursed out between the buttons. She pulled a weed and began chewing on it, eying him sidewise, standing in front of him now and favoring one leg so that her hip tilted out. What you doin? she asked.
Jest messin around, he said.
Messin around?
Yeah. That’s all.
She nudged a stone with the toe of her slipper. Who you messin around with?
Why, nobody. Jest me.
The tips of her breasts were printed in the cloth like coins. She was watching him watch. You ain’t supposed to mess around with yourself, she told him, part of a smile at her mouthcorners and eyes squinting in mischief.
Who says that? he asked.
Me. Preacher says that too.
I got to get on, he said.
You goin to mess with yourself some more?
He started on and she fell in alongside him. Where you goin? she asked.
Pond, he said.
What you goin there for?
Fish.