Outer Dark

  When he came out on the creek a colony of small boys erupted from a limestone ledge like basking seals alarmed and pitched white and naked into the water. They watched him with wide eyes, heads bobbing. He crossed at the shallows above them with undiminished speed, enclosed in a huge fan of water, and plunged into a canebrake on the far side. Crakes, plovers, small birds clattered up out of the dusty bracken into the heat of the day and cane rats fled away before him with thin squeals. He crashed on blindly. When he emerged from the brake he was in a road, appearing suddenly in a final and violent collapse of stalks like someone fallen through a prop inadvertently onstage, looking about in terror of the open land that lay there and still batting at the empty caneless air before him for just a moment before turning and lurching back into the brake. He went on at a trot, one eye walled to the sun for a sextant and his heart pumping in his gorge. When he came out of the cane again he was in deep woods. He paused to get his breath and listen but he could hear nothing save his pounding blood. Then he was kneeling like something broken or penitent among the corrugate columns. A dove called softly and ceased. He was kneeling in wild iris and mayapple, his palms spread on his thighs. He raised his head and looked at the high sun and the light falling long and plumb through the forest. No sounds of chase or distant cries reached him in this green serenity. He rose to his feet and went on. Nightfall found him crouched in a thicket, waiting. With full dark he came forth, a solitary traveler going south. He walked all night. Not even a dog spoke him down that barren road.

  When he talked to the man with the barn roof he had eaten nothing but some early field turnips for two days. He had washed and shaved in a branch and tried to wash the shirt. The collar of it was frayed open and the white cheesecloth lining stood about his neck with a kind of genteel shabbiness like a dickie of ruined lace.

  You paint? the man said.

  Sure, he said. I paint all the time.

  The man looked him over. I got a barn roof needs paintin, he said. You do roofs?

  I done lots of roofs, he said.

  You contract or just do day wages?

  Holme wiped his lips with two fingers. Well, he said, if it ain't but just the one roof I'd as soon do wages.

  You pretty fast on roofs?

  I make right good time on a roof.

  The man regarded him a moment more. All right, he said. I pay a dollar a day. You want to start tomorrow I'll get the paint this evenin and have it ready for ye.

  That suits me, he said. What time you want me to start?

  We start here at six. Ceptin the nigger. He gets down early on account of the feedin.

  Holme nodded.

  All right, the man said.

  He started away.

  Where you stayin at? the man said.

  Holme stopped. Well, I've not found a place as yet. I just got here.

  You can stay in the barn if ye ain't proud, the man said. You goin to be on it all day you might as well get under it at night.

  All right, Holme said. I thank ye.

  I don't want no smokin in there.

  I ain't never took it up, Holme said.

  From the roof ridge he could see a good distance over the rolling country. He adjusted his ladders and sat for a moment, watching the sun bleed across the east, watching a small goat go along the road. The rusted weathercock cried soft above him in the morning wind. He kneaded the bristles of his brush and adjusted his bucket. His shadow moiled cant and baneful over the lot below him and over the waking land a chorale of screaming cocks waned and ceased and began again. When the sun struck the eastern bank of the roof the water drew steaming up the tin and vanished almost instantly. He stirred the thick green paste and began.

  By midmorning the roof had reached such a temperature that the wet paint flashed on the tin like lacquer. The paint in the bucket healed over when he rested, and the base of the brush had taken on a skirt of dull green scum. He continued along, marking his progress by the crimped panels. Through the haze of heat rising from the roof he watched a girl come and go from the house with washing, watched her move along the line in the yard, stooping at her basket and reaching up, and the shape of her breasts pulling against the cloth. Paint seeped from the uplifted handle down his poised wrist. He scraped it away with one finger and slapped the paint out of the butt of the brush. He watched her go in again.

  By afternoon of the third day he had done one half of the roof and had moved his ladder to the other side, the ladder hanging from the ridge by its cleats, the bucket balanced in the rungs and him painting his way down the first panel. If they had come the day before or even that morning he would not have seen them. They were four, already in the barnlot and coming down the fence high-footed in the green bog of manure and mud. One had a shotgun and the others carried slats, their faces upturned brightly, watching him. He set the brush down, wedging it under a rung, and started up the ladder toward the top, coming erect on the peak and walking it carefully, watching his boots, until he was above the ground ladder. He squatted on his heels and coasted to it, braking with his hands and the soles of his boots and then almost overriding it. He heard one of them yell. He looked down again to see them but they had come under the lee of the barn.

  Head him, one of them called.

  Other side, Will, other side.

  Run him around thisaway and I'll break him down like a shotgun.

  He came down the ladder frontways, half running, falling the last six feet and stumbling up again, running along the side of the barn. At the corner a man sprang up, a face pale and contorted in a whitelipped smile, and brought the slat flatwise across his back with a sound that exploded clear through him. He went headlong in the dried chaff, not even stopping, running again from the ground up and across the fence through the hoglot where a boar came up out of a wallow with a scream and charged him and across the far fence and into the upper pasture. He could hear the man behind him saying Goddamn, Goddamn, leaping and stepping as the boar came at him, trying to get back to the fence and saying You son of a bitch you, and the boar screaming and cutting at him and him sliding and dancing in the mud and above it all the whack of the slat on the boar's hide.

  He went on, through waisthigh grass, listening for the shot until his head hummed. It didn't come. When he topped out on the hill he turned to look back. They were deployed across the field a hundred yards below him. They stopped, one and the next and the third and the last as if wired together and the one with the shotgun raised it and a black flower bloomed about him. Holme wheeled. The pellets went up his back like wasps. He winced and put one hand to his neck and came away with a thin smear of blood and already he was running again. He came down out of the field running and into a pine wood at the bottom running hard on the open ground with the trees dodging past. When he fell he slid his length again headlong in the pineneedles, rising out of a dark trough with swatches of them stuck to the paint and blood on his palms. When he looked back he had seized his wild face in both hands as if main strength were needed to look there and when he went on he went at a crazed pace deeper into the woods.

  He came out upon a ravine and ran along it until it began to draw away to the right and then he plunged and slid down the embankment and leaped to clear the creek at the bottom. But the soft turf gave beneath his foot and he went face down in the water. When he tried to rise he could not. He got himself propped on his elbows, gasping, listening. The creek murmured away down the dark ravine. He leaned his face into the shallow water and drank, choking, and after a while he vomited. And after a while he drank again.

  HE WORE a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. He wore neither shirt nor collar and his bare feet were out at the toes of a pair of handmade brogans. He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It's old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murd
ered. He nodded. All right, he said. Let's be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.

  In the cool and smoking dawn there hung from a blackhaw tree in a field on the edge of the village the bodies of two itinerant millhands. They spun slowly in turn from left to right and back again. As if charged with some watch. That and the slight flutter of their hair in the morning wind was all the movement there was about them.

  ONCE IN THE NIGHT she heard a horse coming along over the country road, a burning horse beneath the dead moonlight that trailed a wake of pale and drifting dust. She could hear the labored breath and harness creak and the clink of its iron caparisons and then the hoofs exploded over the planking of the bridge. Dust and fine gravel sifted down upon her and hissed in the water. The pounding faded down the road to the faintest sound of heartbeat and the heartbeat was in her own thin chest. She pulled the stained bundle of clothing closer beneath her face and slept again.

  She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road again. Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child's song from an old dead time.

  In half a mile she began to come upon houses and barns, fields in which crude implements lay idled. She went more slowly. She could smell food cooking. The house she chose was a painted frame house that stood in a well-tended yard. She approached, wary of dogs, up a walkway past rank growths of beebalm and phlox terraced with fieldstone, past latticed morning glories strung against the blinding white clapboards. Bonneted and bent to the black earth a woman with a trowel, a small cairn of stones and a paper of plants beside her.

  Howdy, she said.

  The woman looked over her shoulder, sat back on her heels and tapped the clods from the trowel. Mornin, she said. Can I help you?

  Yes mam. I'm huntin the lady of the house.

  Well, you found her.

  Yes mam. What I was wonderin was if maybe you needed some house help or not.

  The woman rose, dusting her skirts with the backs of her hands. Her eyes were very blue even in the shade of her bonnet. Help, she said. Yes. I reckon it looks like I need a gardener, don't it?

  It's a right pretty garden. As pretty a one as I've seed.

  Well thank you.

  Yes mam.

  You married?

  No mam.

  In other words you could stay on.

  Yes mam.

  Regular?

  Well, I don't know right off for how long. You ain't said if you needed me.

  I don't need somebody for just a week. I had them kind. More trouble than they're worth. Who was it told you I needed a girl?

  Nobody.

  Nobody sent you?

  No mam. I just come by myself. To ast if maybe you did.

  You're not one of them Creech girls are you?

  No mam. I'm a Holme.

  The woman smiled and she smiled back. The woman said: That's my granddaughter now. Then she heard it, a child's wail from within the house.

  They're here the rest of this week. You come along while I see about her.

  She followed the woman along the stone path to the rear of the house where they entered through the kitchen, the woman taking down her bonnet and laying it across a chair, saying: Just sit down and rest a minute and I won't be long.

  She sat. Already she could feel it begin warm and damp, sitting there holding her swollen breasts, feeling it in runnels down her belly until she pressed the cloth of her dress against it, looking down at the dark stains.

  Mam.

  Yes? The woman turning at the door.

  About workin here ... I don't believe ...

  Yes, just a minute now, I won't be a minute.

  She heard the woman on the steps, treading upward into the sound of the child's crying until both ceased, and she rose and left for them the empty room with table and stove and cooking pots, holding her own things to her breast where thin blue milk welled from the rotting cloth, going down the path to the road again.

  She went on through the town past houses and yard gardens with tomatoes and beans yellowed with road dust and poles rising skewed into the hot air, past rows of new corn putting up handhigh through the gray loam, along old fences of wormy rail, the spurs of dust from her naked heels drifting arcwise in pale feathers to the road again. If crows had not risen from a field she might never have looked that way to see two hanged men in a tree like gross chimes.

  She stood for a moment watching them, clutching the bundle of clothes, wondering at such dark work in the noon of day while all about sang summer birds. She went on, walking softly. Once she looked back. Nothing moved in that bleak tree.

  Further along she spied a planting of turnips. She crossed a fence and made her way toward them over the turned black earth. They were already seeding and she could smell the musty hemlock odor of them sweet in the air. They were small, bitter, slightly soft. She pulled half a dozen and cleaned away the dirt with the gathered hem of her dress. While she was chewing the first of them a voice hallooed across the field. She could see a house and a barn beyond the curve in the road and now in the barn-lot she made out a man there watching her. His voice drifted over the hot spaces lost and thin: Get out of them turnips.

  She looked at the handful of turnips, at him, then broke off the tops of them and pushed the bulbs into her parcel and started back to the road. When she reached the house the man was standing there waiting for her. She swallowed and nodded to him. Mornin, she said.

  Mornin eh? You've had a long day of it. What are you doin roguin in my garden?

  I wouldn't of took nothin if I'd knowed anybody cared. It was just some little old thin turnips. I've not eat today.

  Ain't? How come you ain't? You ain't run off from somewheres are ye?

  No, she said. I ain't even got nowheres to run off from.

  He considered this for a moment, one eye almost shut. If you ain't got nowheres to run from you must not have no place to run to. Where is it you are goin if it's any of my business?

  I'm startin to wish it was somebody else's besides just mine.

  I believe you've run off from somewheres, the man said.

  I've been run off from.

  Ah, said the man. He looked her up and down.

  I'm a-huntin this here tinker, she said.

  Tinker?

  Yessir. He's got somethin belongs to me.

  I'll bet he does.

  I got to get it back.

  And what is it?

  I cain't tell ye. He knows he ain't supposed to have it. If I can just see him.

  That sounds more than just commonly curious to me, the man said. Where's your family at?

  I ain't got nary'n. Ceptin just a brother and he run off. So I got to find this here tinker.

  The man shook his head. You ain't goin to get no satisfaction out of no tinker. Specially if you ain't got no kin to back ye up. I'm surprised myself you ain't got no more shame than to tell that it was one.

  They Lord, she said, it ain't nothin like that. I ain't never even seen him.

  You ort to of knowed one'd do ye dirt ... You what?

  I ain't never seen him.

  You ain't.

  No sir.
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  The man stood watching her for a moment. Honey, he said, I think you better get in out of the sun.

  I wouldn't care to myself, she said.

  Go on to the house and tell my old woman I said you was to take dinner with us. Go on now. I'll be in directly I get unhitched and watered.

  Well, she said, you sure it's all right. I don't want to put nobody out.

  Go on, he said. I'll be in directly, tell her.

  He watched her go, shaking his head slowly. She crossed the scored and grassless yard warding away chickens with a little shooing gesture until she arrived at the door and tapped.

  The woman who appeared had a buttermold in one hand and in the other a gathering of apron with which she wiped her face. The sight of this frail creature upon her stoop seemed to weary her. What is it? she said.

  Your man said was it all right I was to come for ... He said to ast you if you'd not care to let me take dinner with ye'ns if ...

  She didn't appear to be listening. She was looking at this petitioner with a kind of aberrant austerity. I've churned till I'm plumb give out, she said.

  It is a chore, ain't it.

  Plumb give out. She held the buttermold before her now in her two hands, sacrificially.

  Yes mam. Your man yander sent me. He said to tell you he'd be along in just a minute.

  She looked the young woman up and down. It's half a hour till dinner, she said. You would expect somebody to know what time dinner was after nineteen year now wouldn't ye?

  Yes mam, she said, looking down.