Twilight (23 page)

Late in the day he was going through a country showing signs of old commerce. Steep bluffs tended away to treegrown hollows, and the bluffs were riddled with horizontal shafts. Old rusted purposeless machinery like the flung playthings of petulant giants with a bent for the peculiar and the machinery itself in places Tyler couldn’t fathom how it got to and the ferriclooking bluffs hung still with rotted scaffolding dangling into space and everywhere the bright orangebrown rocks and split boulders with their layered centers in subtle gradations of earthtones and old rotting conveyors where the ore had gone and on a flattening of one of the ridges a perfectly round building forty or fifty feet tall built of contoured blocks with the roof caved and serving now as floor and the last few feet at the top gaptoothed and asymmetrical, and it was as inexplicable to him as some druidic configuration of stones ten thousand years old.

He skirted a deep quarry, its sides cannelured by marks where the featherdrill had gone. Far below, blacklooking water pooled in the quarry bottom and as he watched a bobcat drank then highfooted back up the sloping side, boulder to boulder with an almost surreal grace and vanished like some creature wholly of the imagination.

He began to come upon the ruins of shanties and silvergray tinroofed shacks fallen and vinecrept and solitary chimneys like sentries left charged with some watch then
forgotten and after a while in a frail stand of sassafras he came upon a desecrated graveyard. He’d heard of a black cemetery in the heart of the Harrikin pillaged by vandals. It was part of local folklore that blacks were buried with whatever of value they possessed and the thought of such chattels as jewelryand gold pocketwatches had drawn those who’d already gone beyond the pale here to initiate their own tawdry resurrections, and Tyler’s own nights with a pick and shovel were not lost upon him. He passed an open grave with sloping rainwashed sides at whose bottom lay a splintered coffin and reflexively he looked away, but there was a glimpse of a yellowed skull and a funeral suit bleached absolutely colorless by the weathers. This world should know better than to leave an old grandfather staring sightless into the sun with nothing of shelter left to keep him from the rain and predators.

He hurried on through thin tilting tablets of stone with their weary redundancy of script, and all there was to sum up these lives was the two dates so told. He stopped at the edge and stared back at this desolatelooking city of the dead. All these hardscrabble honor graduates from the school of hard knocks. Their lives had been drawn so thin it was one continual struggle just to exist and when death came like the one kept promise they’d ever encountered, their graves were pillaged for watches they’d never owned, jewelry they’d never even aspired to owning. The very air was telluric with all these untold stories but there was no tongue left to tell them, no ear to hear them save his own.

He went on. The land was ascending through thinning timber and he had come upon a town. A town whose thoroughfare was grown with brush and saplings and whose
wooden sidewalks were rotting. Old buildings tilted and robbed of windows, with doors standing open as if awaiting commerce. Stores with faded signs for Dr. Pepper, Groves Chill Tonic, 666. He went up a high set of steps to a porch that ran the breadth of the building. When he entered the store he flushed a family of pigeons who fled startled through glassless windows. He’d been hungry all day but whatever tinned foodstuffs had been left here had been looted long ago, and all that remained was a cavernous room with broken shelving and a long counter down one side. An ancient cash register had been broken open and cast aside. A few flyspecked bottles of some darkly coagulant cureall patent medicine still remained, and a hardened and moldy set of horseharness hung from a nail driven into the wall. A cool, dank smell of old rains and drifted leaves and animal dens and the subtle composite smell of time itself, the cancerous work of the shifting seasons.

He prowled about looking for some sort of tool to attempt repair on the rifle, but anything at all that would have served a useful purpose seemed to have been removed. Even boards had been ripped from the walls to repair other dwellings, great poplar and chestnut boards of improbable width.

He went out. Shadows lay long and distorted in the waning day. The sun was fleeing west. Such sparse windowglass as remained burned briefly with orange fire. He went past a log building mouldering into the earth; this building’s windows were barred with crisscrossed slabs of hammered iron, and he guessed this must have served as the jail. He thought of Bookbinder. Do you remember old Hollis Bookbinder? he asked the silence. A row of smashed whiskey bottles on a window ledge bore witness to some past hunter’s target practice. He went on past the jail down
sloping earth, and in a clearing stood a great whiteoak that drew his eye, for this must be where the black had died for impugning the white whore’s honor. He didn’t see a church or a school or if he did he didn’t recognize them. He kept thinking he’d happen uponthe railroad tracks but he did not.

A rising wind ruffled the carpet of leaves and with the wind at his back he hurried on. He wanted shut of this place with its air of dissolute ruin and its desecrated dead. A host of voices rode the wind, garbled and indistinguishable, all talking at once and all telling him stories he didn’t want to know. Old grievances he couldn’t bear. He came upon a stone building open to the sky built across a stream and within a spring. He raked leaves away and waited for the water to clear and drank and when he raised his face the world had darkened.

The sun had not set but clouds blown in from the west had obscured it and a few drops of rain sang in the leaves. He turned and the rain was swinging across the clearing toward him and what lay beyond it went shimmering and translucent as if it were all being erased from existence.

Just at dusk he came upon an old truck, rusted and motorless, down a hillside cocked against a tree. By some miracle all its glasses remained unstoned and its seats intact and he got in and closed the door against the rain and sat wearily staring out the blurred windshield. After a time his eyes closed and he slept with his head laid back against the back of the seat.

It was full dark when he awoke and he was sore and stiff and moonlight was falling through the windshield. He got out. It was clearing and high above him clouds sped eastward in the keep of some enormous wind. They trailed inkblack medusalike tendrils and the moon shuttled in and out of them and appeared
to hurtle eastward but never neared the horizon. He walked with his shadow fading in and out with the passage of clouds until at length the clouds were gone andthe woods began to burn with eerie silver fire.

He went on and he came to feel that he carried the seed of some dread plague that would lay waste to all before him and behind him and that word of his coming had preceded him so that folks dropped whatever tools they were holding and grasped up their children and fled into the woods with doors left ajar and meals left halfeaten on dining tables.

Then he thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.

He went on eastward looking for some high point he might climb and search for a light. When he found one he climbed it and turned, unwilling to believe all this blackness to the four points of the compass, but all lay sleeplocked and dark as if in all this desolate world he moved through he was the first man awaiting others or the last man left mourning those who had gone before.

For what seemed to him hours he had been following the sound of human voices raised in song and faroff imprecations of fervent faith or rage. He kept angling toward it and ultimately came out on a road. Beyond in a muddy clearing a tent and worshipers thronging out into the chill night. Voicescalled each to each. Goodnight, brother. God bless you. See you at the meetin tomorrow night.

He stood uncertainly by the wayside with the rifle which was by now an extension of himself dangling at his side searching countenances in the vague dusk and trying to decide who to ask.

A family passed. A short, slouching man and a bonneted woman, then, in descending order, a darkhaired girl and a teenage boy a year or two younger, then another boy younger still.

The man abruptly stopped, and when he did the woman and children as well as if they had walked into an invisible wall or were in some manner all geared together. The man was studying Tyler’s face intently and leaning forward in the failing light. Boy, he asked, are you washed in the blood?

Tyler shifted his weight on the balls of his feet. Not him, he was thinking. Man follow his directions, no telling where he might wind up.

I don’t reckon, he said.

Say you don’t reckon. That means you ain’t. If you don’t know for sure, then there ain’t no use hemmin and hawin about it.

No, then.

Then what are you even doin here then? This ridge is a place for worshipers tonight. No place here for sinners. No stormcellar here for sinners and backsliders to crawl into.

I just heard the singing and followed it. I’ve been turned around in the woods. I’m lost.

Lost? The face had leant closer yet and wore such a look of beaming benevolence that Tyler had begun to look skittishly about for someone else to ask. Madfolk he had fallenamong here and no safety in numbers such as these. The man had proffered his hand and Tyler shifted the rifle right hand to left and warily shook it. The hand was hot and dry and frantic.

I know all about lost, the benevolent madman was saying. I wrote the book on lost. I was lost myself till Jesus reached down tonight and plucked me out of the slop I was crawlin in and stood me on my own two feet. You can ask Pearl if you doubt what I say.

The bonneted woman was nodding indiscriminate agreement all the while, but the children’s faces watching were just the carefully closed and slightly skeptical faces of children and they told him nothing at all. The darkhaired girl was very pretty, and she was staring at him with a nightransfixed intensity.

Claude was saved tonight, Pearl said. He was a drunkard for twentyodd year, but tonight he give it all up.

I’m just trying to get to Ackerman’s Field, Tyler said. I come from Centre and I’ve been turned around in the woods.

Lord, you’re a long way from home, the man said. But you’re closer to Ackerman’s Field than you are Centre. You must be plumb wore out and about starved to death.

I just need to get to town. I have to see somebody bad. You don’t have a telephone, do you?

Lord, no. They work on wires, don’t they, and they ain’t never run no wires in here.

I can maybe catch a ride into town from here then.

But the man would not have it so. His hand had clamped Tyler’s biceps. His eyes sought Tyler’s eyes with a divine fixity as if righting this lost and doubtful sheep would consolidate his pact with whatever had struck him here this night. You goin with us. You goin to get somethin to eat and a bed to sleep in and you goin into town with us in the mornin. We go of a Saturday. Can’t let you wander around here all night, and it wouldn’t be Christian to leave you to the varmints.

Tyler made to pull away, but this seemed much the lesser of several evils, and at the mention of food his stomach had twisted with an almost painful writhing. He allowed himself to be tugged along toward whatever they were moving to. All the other revelers had gone as finally as if the night had taken them. The trees were steeped in a murky blue negation of light, and above them and the dark blue suggestion of horizon a moon had risen halfobscured by lavender clouds like a pale cataracted eye watching them.

The man talked as they progressed, he had not ceased. This here is Pearl, he said, gesturing toward the woman. These is Drew and Aaron and this here grown girl or thinks she is is Claudelle.

There was an old pickup truck turned into a sideroad. The truck had a flat bed with sideboards cobbled up out of slabs. It had been black but was a black now that remembered nothing of paint and seemed to draw light and suck it out of sight somewhere beneath its surface.

Nobody said anything, but Tyler guessed he was to ride in the back and climbed onto the tailgate. The two boys followed, and the girl would have as well, but the woman grasped her arm and pulled her toward the cab.

The road they followed was bowered so low with branches that they were forever ducking and ended sitting against the cab. As they progressed light to dark, the moonlight made lace filigrees of moving shadow in the truckbed. He rested his head against the cold metal of the cab.

The road spooled palely out behind them and shadow took it and it seemed never to have existed, a road formed by the headlights and diminishing in the red glow of the taillights, beyond that just windy space and nothingness save Sutter trying to devise a way to cross it.