Love and Sleep (16 page)
When I have the favor of the return of what's mine, Floyd said, stepping closer to the poke.
What's yours is mine, she said. She had come around to where a hickory chair stood on the floor. She grasped its pole, and quick as stirring a pot she began to whirl it around on one leg. The cat shrieked, the fire spat, Floyd leapt across the circle to grasp her.
But with the Devil's help (summoned with the hickory chair) she had changed her spirit to the likeness of a pale moth, and fluttered out of his grasp. Floyd then bent his own spirit to the spaces of his heart where Jesus held court, and with his help changed his own spirit to the likeness of a nightjar, to catch the moth.
But the witch changed her spirit into the likeness of a screech owl, and stooped at the nightjar.
But Floyd changed his spirit to the likeness of a grain of corn on the floor, and the owl could not find him. She resumed her own form, seized the poke of chestnuts, and climbed with horrid spider-like swiftness out the window with it.
But Floyd changed his spirit to the likeness of a lean timberwolf, and before she had disappeared down the moonlit track, he was after her.
She fled him down along the cove, booted feet taking unnatural great steps, hank of gray hair streaming out behind her: but he was fleet too, four-footed, great-chested. Around him as he sought for her down the track there came to be others, a crowd of others, jostling for room, standing in his way, oblivious. He knew them now: the early dead, the carried-off, the luckless; he had not known there were so many. The knife fighters and feudists and the come-by-chance children strangled at birth; the black steel-drivers and gandydancers killed by work or dope or shot by the track bosses, unable now to rest in the nigger graveyards that lay unmarked along the tracks they had laid. Hanged men and soldier boys and miners, miners crushed in slate-falls or blown up in tunnel fires or broken between coal-car and tunnel-rib or gone down with gas or chokedamp: unreconciled to death, hungry still for what the living had. The long procession of them wound through the night hollers, swept sometimes with waves of anxious longing, when they would race and stare like panicked sheep. He seemed to travel amid them for days, seeking for the face of the old woman who fled him, her eyes hungry like theirs, the poke over her shoulder.
But it wasn't days, only the space of that longest night. Toward dawn the throngs sped under the ridge to where they roosted, the rustling soft-moaning river of them, and the witch the last of them. They evaporated with the day, but she grew more distinct, and he almost had her as she turned down under the mountain. Too late: when he reached the door it was shut against him, she had gone down to hell with her spoil. He lay (his spirit lay) on the cold rock face, sobbing amid the fallen leaves with weariness and loss.
So there were those, like himself, called out by the Holy Spert; and there were others who were called out by the Devil's fiddle. The feud between them went far back, he would learn, deep and bitter as the feuds his grandpap told stories of, the feuds that arose in the Cumberlands after the War had passed through (only one war was the War in his grandpap's stories), dividing counties and clans, never entirely ended, smoldering like slate-dump fires to that day.
What's yours is mine, she had said: and in the worst year of Hoover's dearth the chestnuts died—not only on Hogback but all through the timberland, not a one left living, dead in a single season, dead as at a stroke. Floyd and his father felled the dead chestnut above their cornpatch and burned her huge corpse over the sterile clay, along with the witchbroom and the brush that alone flourished there. The ashes fed the earth, and they got a good crop of corn that year at least; after that Floyd's old man lost interest in farming, spent his time drinking whiskey and staring into the littered crick fouled with black sump from Number Two. When Assistance started, Floyd and his wife and child walked into Bondieu to get theirs.
Why they should want to harm the world he didn't know, any more than he knew why he and not another should have been chosen to give them battle; why they did harm that could bring no good to them, why they took the corn laid by in the earth to grow, took the starting farrow from the sow's belly, carried them off under the earth, though it meant no one could have them.
Like the great devil Hoover, who had brought ruin on the country, only to be turned out in disgrace himself: you wondered why.
He would come to think that their old enmity was likely just a part of nature, like the enmity fixed between owls and crows, or between the red squirrel and the gray; it might even be a part of what kept the world foursquare as it was, like the opposition of fire and water, or male and female: unless their two kinds did battle over what would grow and what would not, then nothing at all would grow.
So that would be all right, a thing in nature, and no fault of his or theirs.
But if it was not they who were sucking away the world's life, draining its goodness like a milk-snake sucking a goat's udder in the midnight, then who was it? Who? He stood with his wife and child in the giveaway lines to get the gray lard and meal, gray giveaway cotton sweaters, gray surplus of a failing world: and in the anxious faces of the folk on the lines, the hopeless hope with which they jostled each other toward the trucks, eyes fixed on the cans of meat and colorless syrup, was the same hunger he had seen in the night faces along the cove.
The world wasted, grew old; the pillars of it crumbled, like the pillars of coal left standing in the mines to hold up the hollowed hills. The money times came back to the Cumberlands with the war and after, and men fell on the ravished mountains again, and pulled out the coal—only not with pick and shovel any longer but with giant duck-bill loaders that chewed through the seam swallowing coal by the ton and spewing it straight into the gondolas to be carried into the sun. Nor was that enough to fill orders, and a thousand dog-hole mines were pushed into the mountains’ backsides, the coal heaved into trucks, the trucks dumped into tramcars at a thousand blackened ramps. Floyd worked the narrow gullet of a truck mine until his blacklung got so bad he couldn't do the job. He made his money, he bought his television and his refrigerator.
But they only hastened the coming-on of the world's end with their money-getting. Floyd was unsurprised when Good Luck closed Number Two for good, unable to savage it further. The same end would come to the others, even to Big Black Mountain in the end. They had ripped out the womb of the hills; they took away too much, took away the unripe with the ripe, leaving no mother in which more could grow; they would end by leaving the mountains barren.
Nor was it only beauty and worth that were lost from the world. Floyd's father had understood the body of the year, in what part of it to plant, in what part of it to cut brush: head, arms, legs. Time's body. He'd known in what age of the moon to rive the boards for a cabin roof so they wouldn't curl; he could make a dulcimore, and play on it music of the old country,
Scotland
and
Barbrie Allen.
He who killed himself drinking busthead whiskey knew the secret of making methiglum, the old honey wine. He had learned those things from his father and his father's father, and then forgotten them. Now no one knew anything useful, nothing but how to get on the Well Far, and cling there: like Floyd Shaftoe himself.
He wasn't ashamed to draw. A man can look well on the outside, and have no health in him. Floyd had no Union pension—he was an old yeller dog, having had no warrant from the Holy Spert to take the Union obligation. When he adopted his granddaughter (traveling to the county seat for the first time in his life to sign the papers) a little more in food and money came in: enough. After his corn patch had been hoed twice in spring and laid by, Floyd spent most days in his chair, Bible on his lap and the television on, the same antic gray miniature life issuing from it as came through the Oliphants’ television.
The world grew old, that's all; the engine of it worn out with time, like a refrigerator no longer able to keep things cold, running slower and slower, no good, throw it in the crick to rust. It had not ever been meant to last: like a snake's skin periodically shed, like a new car built to fall apart.
Floyd walked in a world that wanted to die: coruscating with dull fires, washed in filthy rain. And yet just as certainly there lay within this world a new world wanting to be born; he could feel it beneath his feet, see it before him as the new moon can be seen held within the old moon's arms. He had come to the end of his Bible, the last pages, and he knew.
How long till then? Floyd had worked out an arithmetic of his own for predicting the time, calculations using the minute red numbers that preceded the significant verses in his Bible. He put it at thirty years, more or less.
The world was slipping into its passage time, the time of signs and wonders. There was blood on the moon; monsters were bred out of the dying world as maggots are bred out of the guts of a dead dog, crawdads out of spring mud. Up on Hogback, down along the cove, Floyd had encountered beings of the promised fire, and had questioned them. Was he to live to see it? If they knew, they would not tell him; or when they spoke he could not understand them. It made no never mind. He had done all that was asked of him, and would do all that remained for him to do; and he was content to wait in silence.
May is Mary's month; in Kentucky the roses bloom then, which are hers (poured from her apron upon Indian saints in Mexico, upon kneeling children in the Pyrenees; odor of roses, come to the bedsides of dying nuns in China and in Spain; roses pink as bubble-gum bordering every gold-edged blue-and-white holy card with her picture on it, crowned in stars, standing on the moon). Pierce's father Axel claimed a Special Devotion to the Virgin, and though Pierce could not do that, neither could he extract her from the springing grasses and the heavy lilacs, nor from his own stifling feelings, the Seven Joyful Mysteries.
The massy tea-rose bushes (var.
floribunda
) that ranged down from the house were unkempt, more leaf and thorn than blossom, but still able to fill the air for weeks and draw ecstatic bumblebees from far away. They had reminded Opal of the gardens of home, real gardens with annual borders and tended beds, and she had worked hard over these rangy cascades to civilize them again; Winnie too, no gardener, was reminded of the life lived elsewhere, of English gardens and Westchester. And Father Midnight (who, however eternal a fixture of this place he seemed to the Oliphants to be, was himself from somewhere else) saw in the wide lawn and its roses the heartfilling ceremonies and outdoor pageantry he had participated in back in temperate Cincinnati where he had studied for the priesthood: the children in white and lace, the sodalities with their gonfalons. How wonderful it would be (he murmured to Winnie and Sam on a spring Sunday afternoon) if Mary's month could be celebrated here, with a procession, a benediction, a rosary.
(Once Pierce had had among his souvenirs another photograph that Bird made, of himself assisting at this ceremony: large-eyed, long-necked, his own hair now shorn into Joe Boyd's fashion, in his surplice and cassock, and burdened with an immense cross surmounted by its writhen corpus of brassy gold; the day empty of color but the grasses aflame, white with sun, sun that Pierce squints his eyes against. Sun-whitened almost into nonexistence in the background, the pretty altar and his cousins in their Communion dresses: their white rosaries are drops of unfocused fire. There are Father Midnight's elbow and heel too. They only did it the once.)
On a night of May, on that night maybe, Pierce had a dream: that he and all his cousins, his mother and Sam, had died, and been consigned to Purgatory. He dreamed no death and no judgment, only the lot of them together finding themselves there. Purgatory was a burnt-over hillside under a night sky, burnt blackness and shriven trees, the ash still warm under foot. They were alone there; this was their private place, or the other sinners were maybe there but hidden in other hollers. Pierce walked beside Bird; up ahead the others went, looking side to side, awaiting the onset of the promised punishments. Purgatory was filled with that dread, at once hopeless and apprehensive, that Pierce had known in schoolyards and Little League tryouts and day camps. But he held Bird's hand firmly, determined to be brave. They became aware then of a dull continuous noise, a firestorm roaring, that came from some unimaginable somewhere not far away: and though Pierce knew that this was it, the punishment on its way, he lied to Bird, telling her it was nothing, just probably the big exhaust fan of some nearby diner.
He awoke then.
They ought to get to Bobby, he thought; they ought to, they ought to soon, it might be too late already.
So on a summer morning not long thereafter, the Invisibles gathered early in the kitchen of the big house. With Winnie's help they made sandwiches, spreading slices of Winnie's bread with peanut butter and marshmallow paste; they put milk in empty soda bottles, and corked the bottles with twists of wax paper and rubber bands. They cut carrot sticks, and for these they carried salt in another twist of wax paper. They filled up their bags with Fig Newtons, waffled sugar wafers, Saltines, and raisins in miniature boxes (Joe Boyd knew how to blow on such a box when it was empty to make an impressive hoot, but Joe Boyd wasn't coming).
Then they all swore fidelity (once again) to one another, and after Pierce and Hildy had chosen walking sticks and Warren had been shamed into leaving his guns behind, they set out and down the drive toward the highway; and at the bridge they crossed the crick, and started upward on the crumbling asphalt road into the summer.
It was a lot longer walking than it had been driving in Sam's car. They stopped often to rest, to pick wild strawberries and to argue over whether it was time to eat the lunch they had brought; they picked alder branches to swipe the deerflies from their heads.