William Gay - Twilight

Tyler stepped to the side of the door. Open up a minute.

There was silence within. A flare of dim light. Then a covert stirring.

The door sprang inward as if under the onslaught of enormous winds and an overalled figure stood above him clutching the door in one hand and a doublebarreled shotgun in theother. Tyler could smell kerosene, and behind the man a yellow light dished and wavered in its globe of glass. The man’s face was florid and unshaven and he looked halfdemented. How is it all you crazy son of a bitches always know how to find me? Out of all the people in this round world and half of it covered in trees, why is it you fools keep wanderin up out of the same goddamn woods into my front yard?

Put your gun up. I don’t aim to hurt anybody.

Put up yourn. And I shore can’t say the same about myself.

Tyler glanced down. He’d forgotten the useless rifle. It don’t shoot, he said. I jammed it somehow.

How many of you crazy sons of bitches is it out here?

Tyler considered. Just one, he said.

It’s folks has to work for a livin. Has to sleep. All of us can’t get by runnin crazy in the woods all night long.

Who else was here? Somebody’s killed your watchdog.

No shit.

Granville Sutter’s after me. I think he’s crazy.

You think he’s crazy? I know for a fact he is. I can guarangoddamntee he’s crazy as a shithouse mouse and getting farther into the territories all the time. And it’s a thousand wonders I ain’t layin here dead as my dog is yonder. If Sutter hadn’t of had the sense to stay away from the winders, Fenton Breece would be tyin a necktie around his neck.

He aims to kill me if he can.

You need to get the hell on away from here. As long as you’re somewhere else I’m thinking he’ll be too. I’ve just about had my bait of this crazy mess.

Who are you?

I’m Sandy Barnett. I know who you are. Sutter told me andthat’s all I need to know about you.

I’m trying to get to Sheriff Bellwether. Have you got a car?

I got one but it’s broke. All I got is a team and wagon.

Take me to Ackerman’s Field.

Not likely. I’m a Godfearin man. I ain’t messed up with you two and don’t plan to be. I know for a fact he shot my dog in cold blood, and no tellin what you done. Diggin up graves and everthing else from what he was ravin. And aside from all that I don’t believe this is the night I want blowed off a wagonseat with a 30-06.

Then let me in awhile. I’m about wore out. You want to talk about graverobbing, somebody needs to check out Fenton Breece. He’s crazy, sick somehow, the things he’s doing to dead folks. Open a few graves and you’ll see what I mean.

Tyler could hear him breathing. Wind caught in the glass globe of the lamb and behind Barnett the room seemed to be in motion.

The man did not speak, nor did he move to unblock the door.

All right then. At least show me the way the railroad tracks are.

The man just pointed mutely into the night and when Tyler looked the way he pointed there was only darkness.

That way? Hellfire. That’s the way I came.

I can’t help that. They’ve always been there, and unless they moved em they’re there still. Now head out. And the next man prowls into my yard tonight they goin to have to drag him out.

He stepped backward and the door slammed to in Tyler’s face. A wooden latch fell with a sound of finality. Through the cracks faint yellow light, remote, tantalizing, inaccessible. Tyler turned and trudged back down the stone steps into the yard. The light was blown out and the windows went secret and still and black and there was only the moonlight foreign and oblique. He went on toward the woods. Halfway across the yard he turned.

How far is it?

Nothing.

How far?

The house seemed vacant, some old place with newspapered walls and caving roof he’d stumbled across in the Harrikin long ago.

Tyler seemed suddenly taken by a fit of rage. He was fairly screaming. Goddamn you, he shouted. I never made these crazy sons of bitches. None of it’s my doing. They’re just put here for me to contend with. They’ve killed my sister and tried to kill me, and I don’t even know if she’s buried or not.

He could feel the wet earth of the yard through his jeans. He’d fallen to his knees. He was almost sobbing. As if in prayer or remonstration with whatever gods held dominion over these territories no one wanted. He kept thinking about Corrie but the face that kept coming to mind was her freckled child’s face as if her life had stopped at this innocent point and none of this had yet happened.

He stood for a time waiting for a reply but there was none. Had he been able he’d have brought a bolt of lightning out of the uncaring heavens and blown the house to splinters but as it was it occurred to him what a good target he made in the moonlit clearing and he faded into the woods and struck out for darker timber.

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.