They had all stood and watched as the grave was filled, but halfway through Ada had to turn her head and look away toward the bend of the river to be able to stand the moment. When the grave was tamped and mounded up, they all turned and walked away. Sally Swanger had taken Ada by the elbow and steered her down the hill.
—You stay with us until you can fix up things for going back to Charleston, she said.
Ada stopped and looked at her. I will not be returning to Charleston immediately, she said.
—They Lord, Mrs. Swanger said. Where are you going?
—Black Cove, Ada said. I will be staying here, at least for a time.
Mrs. Swanger stared, then caught herself. How will you make it? she said.
—I am not entirely sure, Ada said.
—You’re not going up to that big dark house by yourself today. Take dinner with us and stay until you’re ready to leave.
—I would be obliged, Ada said. She had stayed on with the Swangers three days and then returned to the empty house, frightened and alone. After three months, the fright had somewhat faded, but Ada reckoned that to be little comfort since her new life seemed only a foreview of herself as an old woman, awash in solitude and the feeling of diminishing capabilities.
Ada turned from the grave plot and walked down the hill to the road and decided as she reached it to keep on walking upriver and over the shortcut back into Black Cove. Aside from being quicker, that route had the advantage of taking her by the post office. And, too, she would pass the Swanger place, where they might offer some dinner.
She walked along and met an old woman driving a red hog and a pair of turkeys before her, cutting at them with a willow switch when they strayed. Then a man caught up with her from behind and passed. He was stooped, walking fast, carrying a shovel out before him. A mound of hot coals smoked in the blade of it. The man grinned and without pausing said over his shoulder that he’d let his fire go out and had gone to borrow some. Then Ada came upon a man with a heavy croker sack hanging pendant from a chestnut limb. Three crows sat high in the tree and watched down and said not a word in judgment. The man was bigly made and he beat at the sack with a broken-off hoe handle, laying into it so that the dust flew. He talked at the sack, cursing it, as if it were the chief impediment to his living a life of ease and content. There was the sound of dull blows, his breathing and his muttering, the gritting of his feet finding hold in the dirt from which to strike another lick at the sack. Ada studied him as she passed, and then she stopped and went back and asked him what he was doing. Beating the shells off beans, he said. And he made it clear that he was of the mind that every little bean in there was a thing to hate. He’d plowed and planted in hate. Trained the vines up poles and weeded the rows in hate and watched the blossoms set and the pods form and fill in hate. He had picked beans cursing every one his fingers touched, flinging them off into a withy basket as if filth clung to his hands. Beating was the only part of the process, even down to the eating of them, that he cared for.
By the time Ada reached the mill, the day’s haze had not yet burned away, but she had become too warm for her shawl. She removed it and rolled it to carry under her arm. The mill wheel was turning, spilling its load of water into the tailrace, spraying and splattering. When Ada set her hand to the doorframe, the whole building vibrated with the turning of mill wheel and gears and drive shaft and grindstones. She stuck her head in the door and raised her voice loud enough to be heard over the creak and groan of the machinery. Mr. Peek? she said.
The room smelled of dried corn, old wood, the mossy millrace, falling water. The inside was dim, and what light did come in the two little windows and the door fell in beams through an atmosphere thick with the dust of ground corn. The miller stepped from behind the grindstones. He brushed his hands together and more dust flew. When he came into the light of the door, Ada could see that his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes and the hair of his arms were frosted pale grey with corn dust.
—Come for mail? he said.
—If there is any.
The miller went into the post office, a tiny shed-roofed extension cobbled onto the gristmill. He came out with a letter and looked at it, turning it front and back. Ada stuck it into the book in her pocket, the Simms, and walked on up the road to the Swanger place.
She found Esco by the barn. He was bent over trying to cotter a cartwheel with a peg he had whittled from a locust branch, driving it in with a hand sledge. As Ada walked to him from the road, he stood and set down the sledge and leaned forward against the cart, gripping the topboard two-fisted. There appeared to be no great odds between the color and hardness of his hands and the boards. He had sweated through his shirt, and as Ada came near, she drew in his smell, which was that of wet pottery. Esco was tall and thin with a tiny head and a great shock of dry grey hair which roached up to a point like the crest on a titmouse.
He welcomed the excuse to quit working and walked Ada to the house, passing through the fence gate into the yard. Esco had used the fence for hitching rack, and the pointed tops of the palings had been cribbed away to splintered nubs by bored horses. The yard was bare, swept clean, with not a bush or flower bed as ornament, only a half-dozen big oak trees and a covered well, a novelty in that country of moving water, for the place they had chosen to live in was called No Creek Cove. The house was large and had once been painted white, but the paint was flaking off in patches as big as a hand so that currently it could fairly be said to resemble a dapple mare, though one day soon it would just be grey.
Sally sat on the porch threading beans on strings to make leatherbritches, and five long strings of pods already hung above her from the porch rafters to dry. She was shaped round in every feature and her skin was as lucent and shiny as a tallow candle and her greying hair was hennaed to the color of the stripe down a mule’s back. Esco pushed an empty straight chair to Ada and then he went inside and brought out another for himself. He started snapping beans. Nothing was said of dinner, and Ada looked to the pale sky. With some disappointment she saw that the bright spot where the sun stood indicated midafternoon. The Swangers would have long since eaten.
They sat together quietly for a minute, the only sounds the snap of beans and the hiss of Sally pulling thread through them with a needle and, from inside the house, the mantel clock ticking with the sound of a knuckle knocking on a box. Esco and Sally worked together comfortably, hands sometimes touching as they simultaneously reached into the bean basket. They were both quiet and slow in their movements, gentle toward each other, and they touched each pod as if it were a thing requiring great tenderness. Though not a childless couple, they had retained an air of romance to their marriage as the barren often do. They seemed never to have quite brought their courting to a proper close. Ada thought them sweet partners, but she saw nothing remarkable about their ease together. Having lived all her life with a widower, she had no true model in her mind of what marriage might be like, what toll the daily round might exact.
Their first talk was of the war, of how the prospects seemed grim, the Federals just over the mountains to the north, and things growing desperate in Virginia if the newspaper accounts of trench warfare in Petersburg were to be believed. Neither Esco nor Sally understood the war in any but the vaguest way, knowing for certain only two things: that they generally disapproved of it, and that Esco had reached an age when he required some help about the farm. For those and many other reasons, they would be glad to see the war done and their boys come walking up the road. Ada asked if there was any news from either of the boys, the two Swanger sons being off to the fighting. But they’d heard not a word in many months and knew not even what state they were in.
The Swangers had opposed the war from the start and had until recently remained generally sympathetic with the Federals, as had many in the mountains. But Esco had grown bitter with both sides, fearing them about equally now that the Federals were ranked up just over the big mountains to the north. He worried that they would soon c
ome looking for food, take what they want, and leave a man with nothing. He’d been in to the county seat recently, and it was all over town that Kirk and his bluecoats had already started raiding up near the state line. Came down on a family and looted their farm at grey dawn, stole every animal they could find and every bit of portable food they could carry, and set fire to the corncrib in parting.
—Them’s the liberators, Esco said. And our own bunch is as bad or worse. Teague and his Home Guard roaring around like a band of marauders. Setting their own laws as suits them, and them nothing but trash looking for a way to stay out of the army.
He’d heard the Guard had rousted a family out into their yard at dinnertime. Owenses from down about Iron Duff. Teague claimed they were known to be lovers of the Federals and suspected members of the Red String Band and that whatever hoard of treasure they had must fall forfeit. First they took the house apart and then they prodded around in the yard with their sabers to see if they could find soft dirt from fresh digging. They slapped the man some, and later his wife. Then they hanged a pair of bird dogs each by each, and when that failed to get the man’s attention, they tied the woman’s thumbs together behind her back and hoisted her up by them with a cord thrown over a tree limb. Hauled on it till her toes just touched the ground. But the man still wouldn’t say word one, so they took her down and set the corner of a rail fence on her thumbs, but that didn’t faze the man either.
The children were wailing and the woman was down on the ground with her thumbs still under the fence corner screaming how she knew her man had hid the silver service and the hoard of gold pieces they had remaining after the hard times of the war. She didn’t know where he’d buried it, she just knew he had. She first begged him to tell, then she begged the Guard to have mercy. Then, when Owens still refused to talk, she begged them to kill him first so she could at least have the satisfaction of watching.
About that time one of the Guard, a white-headed boy called Birch, said he believed they maybe should stop and leave, but Teague leveled a pistol at him and said, I’ll not be told how to treat the likes of Bill Owens and his wife and the young’uns. I’ll go to the Federals before I’ll live in a country where I can’t deal out to such people what they deserve.
—In the end, Esco concluded, they didn’t kill nobody and they didn’t find the silver. Just lost interest and headed off down the road. The wife left Owens on the spot. Came to town with the children and is living with her brother and telling the tale to whoever’ll listen.
Esco sat for a time leaned forward in the chair with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging loose from their wrists. He seemed to be studying the porch boards or gauging the wear of his boot leather. Ada knew from experience that, were he outside, he would spit between his feet and then stare at the spot in evident fascination.
—This war’s something else, he said in a minute. Every man’s sweat has a price for it. Big flatland cotton men steal it every day, but I think sometime maybe they’ll wish they’d chopped their own damn cotton. I just want my boys home and out hoeing the bottomland while I sit on the porch and holler Good job every time that clock strikes the half hour.
Sally nodded and said, Uh-huh, and that seemed to close the topic.
They moved on to other matters, Ada listening with interest as Esco and Sally listed the old signs they had noted of a hard winter coming. Grey squirrels rattling in hickory trees, frantic to hoard more and more nuts. Wax thick on the wild crabapples. Wide bands of black on caterpillars. Yarrow crushed between the hands smelling sharp as falling snow. Hawthorns loaded with red haws burning bright as blood.
—Other signs too, Esco said. Bad ones.
He had been keeping a tally of omens and portents from around the county. A mule was said to have given birth near Catalooch, a pig to have been born with human hands at Balsam. A man at Cove Creek claimed to have slaughtered a sheep, and among its internals no heart was found. Hunters on Big Laurel swore that an owl made utterments like those of a human, and though they found no agreement on its message, all confirmed that as the owl spoke, there appeared to be two moons in the sky. For three years running there had been uncommon raving of wolves in the winter, weak harvest of grain in summer. They all pointed to evil times. Esco’s thinking was that though they had so far been isolated from the general meanness of the war, its cess might soon spill through the low gaps and pour in to foul them all.
There was a pause, and then Sally said, Have you set on a course yet?
—No, Ada said.
—You’re not yet ready to return home? Sally asked.
—Home? Ada said, momentarily confused, for she had felt all summer that she had none.
—Charleston, Sally said.
—No. I’m not yet ready, Ada said.
—Have you heard from Charleston?
—Not yet, Ada said. But I suspect that the letter I just picked up from Mr. Peek may clarify the matter of funds. It appears to be from my father’s solicitor.
—Pull it out and see what it says, Esco said.
—I cannot bring myself to look. And, in truth, all it will tell me is whether I have money to live. It will not tell me where I might find myself a year farther on or what I might be doing with myself. Those are the questions that worry me most.
Esco rubbed his hands together and grinned. I might be the only man in the county that can help you there, he said. It’s claimed that if you take a mirror and look backwards into a well, you’ll see your future down in the water.
So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance. She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below.
Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well.
She shifted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror. The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself. The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror. It cast back the shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.
Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away. She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon.
Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well. And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror. It was like a poorly executed calotype. Vague in its details, low in contrast, grainy. What she saw was a wheel of bright light, a fringe of foliage all around. Perhaps a suggestion of a road through a corridor of trees, an incline. At the center of the light, a black silhouette of a figure moved as if walking, but the image was too vague to tell if it approached or walked away. But wherever it was bound, something in its posture suggested firm resolution. Am I meant to follow, or should I wait its coming? Ada wondered.
Then dizziness swept over her again. Her knees gave way and she slumped to the ground. Everything whirled abo
ut her for a second. Her ears rang and her whole mind was filled with lines from the hymn Wayfaring Stranger. She thought she might faint, but suddenly the spinning world caught and held still. She looked to see if anyone had noticed her fall, but Sally and Esco were engaged in their work to the exclusion of all else. Ada picked herself up and walked to the porch.
—See anything? Esco said.
—Not exactly, Ada said.
Sally gave her a sharp look, started to go back to stringing beans, then changed her mind and said, You look white-eyed. Are you not well?
Ada tried to listen but could not focus her thoughts on Sally’s voice. In her mind she still saw the dark figure, and the brave phrases of the hymn sang on in her ears: “Traveling through this world below. No toil, no sick nor danger, in that fair land to which I go.” She was sure the figure was important, though she could put no face to it.
—Did you see something down in that well or not? Sally said.
—I’m not sure, Ada said.
—She looks white-eyed, Sally said to Esco.
—It’s just a story people tell, Esco said. I’ve looked in there time and again and never seen a thing myself.
—Yes, said Ada. There was nothing.
But she could not shake the picture from her mind. A wood. A road through it. A clearing. A man, walking. The feeling that she was meant to follow. Or else to wait.
The clock rang out four chimes as flat and wanting in music as striking a pike blade with a hammer.
Ada rose to go, but Sally made her sit. She reached and put the heel of her hand to Ada’s cheek.