Outer Dark

  They ain't nobody here, she said.

  No, he said. Come in.

  She followed him uncertainly into the gloom and stood looking about her. From the naked sash of a window on the far side a dead light fell through looped and dusty skeins of cobwebbing and laid upon the plumbless floor a pale and bent mandala.

  Ain't they nobody here? she said.

  No.

  What all did we come for?

  Come in, he said. Ain't no need to stand there like a orphan.

  She came slowly to the center of the room and stood in the fading patch of light like one seeking warmth of it or grace. A faint stale wind was coming through the window and she turned her face there and breathed deeply. The tinker traversed the room with gnomelike stealth, still bowed in his posture of drayage.

  Set down, he said.

  She could see no place to sit. She turned and spoke into the gloom after him: He ain't here.

  No, he said. A match flared rich sulphurous light in which the tinker's malformed shape turned quavering, faded and expired. Not here, he said.

  She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg.

  The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern and placed it upon the mantel and lit it. She watched him. He had a jar of whiskey beneath one arm and he knelt in the floor before the hearth like some sackclothen penitent. He was breaking small brush and sticks and soon there was a flame to which he bowed prone and blew gently upon. He sat back on his heels and coaxed the fire with his wafted cap. You ain't took root there have ye? he said.

  She moved across the empty cabin toward the door and stood there for a moment and then closed it. On the back of it hung a coat cocooned in spiderweb like some enormous prey and on the floor lay a dead bird. She toed it with her naked foot. Spooned to a shell, faintly soursmelling. A small white grub writhed in the damp spot it left. She took down the flower from her hair and held it at her breast and turned. The tinker had the jar of whiskey aloft before the lantern. He unscrewed the lid, paused a moment as if to take breath, and drank. She watched his slack throat pump and his eyes tighten. He lowered the jar again and said Whoof and clapped the lid back on as if something might escape. When he saw her watching he extended the jar in one hand. Drink? he said.

  I don't care for none, she said.

  No. He turned and set the jar beside the lantern. His sparse gray hair stood about his head electrically and in all these gestures before the fire he looked like an effigy in rags hung by strings from an indifferent hand. Come over by the fire till ye warm, he said.

  I ain't cold.

  The tinker was not looking at her. I expect you're hungry, he said.

  She didn't answer for a minute. Nor did he turn his head. Yes, she said.

  He left the fire and crossed the room and went out. When he came in again he had a small willow hamper over one arm and a load of wood. She had come to the fire and was standing with her back to it. He set the hamper on the floor and stacked the wood.

  They used to be a table but I burnt it for firewood oncet of a cool evenin, he said.

  She nodded.

  Set down, he said. I got some cold supper.

  He had squatted on the floor and opened the hamper. She sat carefully with her legs tucked.

  Here, he said. Get ye a piece of this cornbread.

  She took a chunk of the bread and bit into it. It was hard and sandy and tasteless.

  Get ye some of these here beans.

  She nodded, her mouth stuffed. He was dipping up beans out of a bowl with a piece of the cornbread. Get all ye want, he said.

  Is it far to where he's at? she said.

  Far and far, said the tinker.

  She scooped up some beans on her bread and crammed it into her mouth, flicking crumbs from her lap, her streaked and dusty feet tucked beneath her. When do we get there? she said.

  The tinker looked at her. We, is it? he said.

  I guess we fixin to get a early start of the mornin ain't we?

  It's a hard thing to know what daylight will bring any day, the tinker said. Get ye some more cornbread there.

  I've got all I need.

  Ain't much of a big eatin gal are ye?

  I'm some out of the habit.

  Ah, the tinker said.

  You reckon we'll get there tomorrow sometime?

  Tomorrow?

  Will we?

  The tinker chewed steadily. Over the floor their long flung shadows swayed like dancing cranes. Little sister, he said, you ain't the first slackbellied doe to go about in the woods with them big eyes.

  I just want my chap, she said.

  Do ye now?

  You said I could work it out.

  They's work and they's work, the tinker said. He rose to his knees and reached down the whiskey and set it before him.

  I'll do just whatever, she said. I ain't got nothin else to do.

  The tinker smiled and captured the beanbowl between his thin shanks and wiped up the remnants with the last of the bread. He chewed with eyes half closed and his face by the firelight hung in a mask of morbid tranquillity like the faces of the drowned.

  You don't need him, she said.

  He wiped his wattled chin with his cuff and took up the jar and drank. He was watching her very steadily above the rim. He set the jar down and recapped it. I've gone up and down in this world a right smart, he wheezed, and I've seed some curious ways. But I never to this day seen a stout manchild laid out in the woods save one.

  Woods? she said.

  They don't nourish out of the earth like corn.

  He was give to ye. Was he not give to ye?

  He was not give to nobody.

  What did ye have to give for him?

  Yes, the tinker said. What did I have to give for him.

  I'll make it up to ye, she said. Whatever it was.

  Will ye now, said the tinker.

  I'll work it out, she said. I can work if I ain't never had nothin.

  Nor never will.

  Times is hard.

  Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away.

  Whatever it was you give, she said softly. I'll give it and more.

  The tinker spat bitterly into the fire. They ain't more, he said.

  You promised.

  I promised, the tinker said. I promised nothin.

  He's mine, she whispered.

  The tinker looked at her. She had both thumbs in her mouth. Yourn, he said. You ain't fit to have him.

  That ain't for you to judge.

  I've done judged.

  She had leaned forward and her eyes were huge and hungered. She touched his ragged sleeve with two fingers. What did ye give? she said. I'll make it up to ye. Whatever ye give. And that nurse fee.

  The tinker jerked his arm away. He leaned his face toward her. Give, he said. I give a lifetime wanderin in a country where I was despised. Can you give that? I give forty years strapped in front of a cart like a mule till I couldn't stand straight to be hanged. I've not got soul one in this world save a old halfcrazy sister that nobody never would have like they never would me. I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other and you cain't pay that back. You ain't got nothin to pay it with. Them accounts is in blood and they ain't nothin in this world to pay em out with.

  Let me have him, she moaned. You could let me have him.

  Let you have him, the tinker sneered. I'd care for him, she said. They wouldn't nobody like me.

  Like you done?

  He done it. I never.

  Who? the tinker said.

  My brother. He's the one.

  Yes
, the tinker said. He's the one would of laid it to early rest save my bein there. Cause I knowed. Sickness. He's got a sickness. He ... the tinker stopped. It was very quiet in the cabin. They could hear the branch murmuring. Or perhaps it was the wind. The tinker stopped and stared at her with his viper's eyes gone wild in their black wells. It ain't hisn, he said.

  It ain't nothin to you.

  The tinker leaned and seized her wrist in his boney grip. It ain't, he said. Is it?

  Yes.

  Neither of them moved. The tinker did not turn loose of her arm. That's a lie, he said.

  What do you care?

  That's a lie, he said again. You say it's a lie.

  She didn't move.

  You say it's a lie now, the tinker said.

  You don't want him, she whispered. You wouldn't of took him if you'd of knowed ...

  The tinker pulled her close. You say that's a lie damn you.

  It's no right child, she said. You don't want him. Her body was contorted with pain and her eyes closed.

  Yes, said the tinker. You'd try it wouldn't ye? You lyin little bitch. He flung her arm back and she crumpled up and held it in her other hand. The tinker rose and stood gaunt and trembling above her. You'll see me dead fore ye see him again, he said.

  You won't never have no rest, she moaned. Not never.

  Nor any human soul, he said.

  The fire had died to coals. The tinker swung down the lamp and their shadows wheeled wildly from each other and froze on opposite walls. Don't foller me, the tinker said. You foller me and I'll kill ye.

  She didn't move.

  Bitch, he said. Goddamn lyin bitch.

  She had begun to keen softly into her hands. The tinker could hear it a long way down the road.

  He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep.

  HOLME WALKED across the stony earth with his eyes on his broken boots, crossing a black and fallow bottom newly turned, the wind coming very steady and cold and with it like pieces of scaled slate martins with shrill chittering cast up motionless to break and wheel low along the ground past him once again. When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

  He stood before the cabin uncertainly, his palms resting in the small of his back. He looked toward the road again. Then he mounted the steps to the porch and crossed and entered through the open door.

  It was a very old cabin and the ceiling of the room he stood in was little higher than his head, the unhewn beams smoked a foggy and depthless black and trellised with cobwebbing of the same color. The floor was buckled and the walls seemed tottering and he could see nothing plane or plumb anywhere. There was a small window mortised crookedly into the logs of one wall, the sash hung with leather hinges. That and the long clayless chinks among the logs let in the waning light of this day and wind crossed the room with the steady cool pull of running water. There was a claymortared fireplace of flatless and illfitted fieldstone which bulged outward in the room with incipient collapse, a wagon spring for lintel, the hearth of poured mud hard and polished as stone. A serpentine poker. Two wooden bedsteads with tickings of husks and a halfbed with a mattress on which lay curled a dead cat leering with eyeless grimace, a caved and maggoty shape that gave off a faint dry putrescence above the reek of aged smoke. He took hold of the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it to the door, fighting it through the narrow opening and outside and long bright red beetles coming constantly from beneath the cat to scatter in radial symmetry outward and drop audibly to the floor. He threw the mattress in the yard and went back in. In the kitchen a doorless woodstove propped in the front with two bricks against the floor's fierce incline. A partitioned mealbin with sifter and a hard dry crust of meal adhering to the wood, the meal impregnated with worms whose shed husks littered the floor of the bin among micedroppings and dead beetles. A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger, a tin percolator in which an inverted salmoncan sat for a lid. A nameless gray dust lay over everything. He returned to the front room and at the bed pressed one spread palm down in the center of the ticking and looked about him wearily.

  Later he went out and gathered wood. He found beanpoles in a log crib behind the house and brought them in and he found some roughsawn chestnut boards. When he had got the fire going he pulled one of the beds up toward the hearth and sat down and watched the flames. Smoke seeped from under the wagon spring and stood in blue tiers and he could hear swifts in the flue fluttering like wind in a bottle. He sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees. The window light had crept from the floor onto the far wall and the room lay traversed with a bar of bronze and hovering dust. After a while he rose again and went out for more wood.

  When he came back he built up the fire and pulled off the stinking boots and stretched out on the bed. There was a string of dried peppers hanging from a nail in the beam over the fireplace. They looked like leather. In the chimney's throat frail curds of old soot quivered with the heat. A deermouse came down from somewhere in the logs, soundless as a feather falling, paused with one foot tucked to his white bib and regarded him with huge black eyes. He watched it. He blinked and it was gone. He slept.

  He was cold all night and in the morning when he woke there was a frost. There was also a man watching him with one bright china eye from behind the paired bores of a shotgun.

  Get up, he said.

  Holme sat slowly.

  Now get your boots. He motioned sideways with his head to where they lay in the floor.

  He bent to reach for the boots and got one up, fumbling at it with his naked foot.

  Hold it, the man said, waving the barrels in an arc before his face.

  He stopped, holding the boot up, watching the man.

  Just tote em with ye.

  He got the other boot and sat there in the bed holding them in his lap.

  Now let's go, the man said, stepping back and motioning toward the door with the shotgun.

  He rose and crossed the floor and stepped out. The long flat grass about the house was blanched with frost, the barren landscape beyond sprayed with those small and anonymous birds of winter. He had not thought of such cold weather and was surprised to see it come.

  Let's go, the man said.

  He descended the rimed planks and stood barefooted in the yard. The man came down the steps waving the barrels at him. They crossed through the frozen grass to the fence and then across the iron clods and furrows of the plowed land and into the road.

  Gee, the man said.

  Holme looked at him.

  The man waved the barrels to the right and he tucked the boots up under his arm and turned down the road, advancing upon his lean and dancing shadow with feet that winced in the cold sand. He could hear behind him the measured tread of the armed man, and after a while his breathing, but the man spoke no word. The sun was gaining and he could feel it a little on his back and it felt good.

  When they had gone a mile or better along the road they came to a wagon road that went off to the right.

  Here ye go, the man said behind him.

  He turned up the road. It was washed out and weed-grown and with the mounting sun water had begun again over the bare stones in the gullies. They climbed on, past high oblique faults of red sandstone, coming at last into a field where the road leveled.

  Just hop on down, friend, the man said. Tain't far now.

  They came past a barn and beyond that a frame house mounted at the corners on high cairns of rock. A row of chickens regarded them from the porch.

  Ho Squire,
the man called out, hallooing along his raised palm. Hold up right here, he said to Holme. He advanced to the porch and rapped on the floor. Ho there, he called.

  Come up, said a woman's voice from the house.

  Go on, the man said.

  Holme shifted the boots to the other arm and mounted onto the porch past the chickens and went in. He could smell breakfast cooking.

  On back, the man said.

  He crossed the room and went through the door at the far side. The woman was coming in carrying an empty pail. She said Howdy without looking at them and went into the kitchen. They followed her. There was a man sitting at the table eating eggs and biscuits from a large platter before him and as they entered he looked up at them. He was dressed in his undershirt, a verminous-looking bag of ashgray flannel from which the sleeves were gone at the elbow as if chewed off. He turned back to his plate before speaking.

  Mornin John. Been huntin?

  Huntin housebreakers, the man said.

  Have eh?

  Yep. He poked Holme forward with the shotgun.

  This him? he said, not looking up, spooning eggs sideways onto his fork and into his mouth, his chin almost resting on the table.

  I caught him in daddy's old house a-layin in the bed.

  How'd he get in.

  How'd you get in, the man said.

  I come thew the door, Holme said.

  He come thew the door.

  Did eh?

  He was a-layin in the bed.

  The seated squire nodded, wiping up grease from the platter with a large biscuit. I don't drink coffee or I'd offer ye some, he said, leaning back and wiping his mouth with the palm of his hand. Now, what was your name young feller?

  Culla Holme.

  You a indian?

  No sir.

  What was your first name

  Just Holme is my last name. Culla. Holme.

  Well, the squire said, say you broke in John's daddy's old house?

  I never broke in, I just come in. It wasn't locked nor nothin. I didn't know nobody lived there. They wasn't nothin there to let on like it.

  They's furniture, the man with the shotgun said. You was a-layin up in the bed your own self.

  They was a dead cat in the othern, Holme said.

  I never seen it, he said. He turned to the squire. He thowed the beddin out in the yard for it to rain on. I wasn't goin to tell that.