William Gay: Twilight

He extended a hand, and Tyler stood a moment in indecision. Sutter seemed to sense this lack of resolve and hunched himself along the length of pole.

Tyler suddenly swung the board. It struck Sutter’s outstretched hand so hard Sutter swung like a pendulum, the pole swaying. He shook his head and came on anyway, his eyes closed and face lowered onto his arms to evade the flailing plank. When Sutter finally looked up his eyes looked far away as if whatever lived behind them were shrinking, getting so tiny you could hardly see it, and blood was running into his eyes.

Tyler was halfcrying. He swung the board again and Sutter’s head jerked sidewise and he slipped and caught by his hands with the pole bouncing up and down and Tyler was sobbing raggedly then and beating at just the hands, the flesh peeling away whitely like the flesh of a corpse and the knuckles beaten to shreds of flesh and bone, and finally he threw away the board and kicked the end of the pole dementedly until the pole slipped past the stone edge and tilted and vanished from sight with Sutter’s hands still locked desperately about it.

Tyler stood leaning, peering into the chasm cautiously, halfthinking Sutter might be clinging to the stone walls like a spider, refusing to acknowledge even the laws of gravity and physics but he was not. There was only the mocking dark drawing off the light and snowflakes sifting down into silence.

He began to kick the rest of the lumber and poles into the hole and all the while the pastoral snow was sifting down and when he’d finished the lips of the crevice were alreadywhitening and the earth had resumed its eerie keening.

He sat dully before the fire. He seemed touched by a kind of numbness. He took out the tin of pictures and opened it and sat looking at them dispassionately. He began to feed the pictures to the fire. Halfcrazy he thought the fire might not even take them but it did. Their edges curled and darkened and the perverse images bubbled then burned with little blue flames. He burned them one by one, staring at them as emotionlessly as the camera’s eye had. One by one they went to a pale gray ash that rose on the updrafts, and they were as clean and pure now as the falling snow that obscured them.

A soulless and unpromising dawn had broken before the motley band of volunteers reached the whistling well. Their number was much diminished by laggards and dropouts and they were redeyed and weary and had been wandering hopelessly lost throughout the night and they were scratched from briars and branches and had fallen more times than they cared to think about. Their feet were wet and nighfrozen and their dungarees seized thighhigh with leggings of ice, and few among them were happy.

The fire had burned to a smouldering mound of ash. A driving snow still fell and these folk clambered calfdeep through it to hunker before the smoking ash. Son of a bitch, one of them said. That’s the story of this whole damn mess. You get there right after they left or just before they get there. Who do you reckon it was here?

Bellwether didn’t say anything. He was looking about, but everything save the mounded ash was pristine white withtrackless snow. Bellwether was nonetheless studying the glade as though there were a tale to be told here could he but decipher it. A few bedraggledlooking birds were looking about forlornly for food.

Old man Bookbinder’s place is right down the ridge, the man said. He might of seen somethin.

Maybe, Bellwether said.

Want to go down there and see? Bet it’s warm. And it’s just possible old man Bookbinder might own a coffee pot.

It sounds better than bein poked in the eye with a stick, Bellwether said.

The men rose. Their breath plumed palely. One of them stood looking warily down into the pit. He didn’t get too close. Hell of a thing to be just out here open in the woods, he said. Without a fence around it or nothin. A man could damn sure get his ticket punched he didn’t watch where he was goin.

Bellwether looked down. Yes he could, he said.

Tyler came out of the pines just after good day and went down the slope cautiously for the snow now wore a coat of clear ice and he’d lost count of the times he’d fallen. The woods behind him lay seized in a white surreal glaze, and he’d moved through a continuous gauntlet of tree branches breaking and tops splitting off with sounds like random and sporadic gunfire. Once in the night he’d been on a road and come upon a highvoltage wire trees had broken down. All alone there in the dark the wire was leaping and writhing serpentlike, spitting arcs of blue fire against the fluorescent snow like some forerunning tendril crept up from Hell. There was analien beauty to the dancing blue wire and he gave it a wide berth and went on.

He looked gaunted and thin, the flesh drawn tight over the sharp cheekbones, the eyes just smoky bores in his grim face. He came down the slope sliding cedar to cedar.

When he reached the point where he’d last left the Breece house there was no house there and he stood for a moment in stunned wonder. Secretly he’d have doubted the ability of fire to negate this symbol of copious wealth but the evidence lay all about him. Enormous piles of unidentifiable rubble all cloaked alike in ice. So much. Tens of thousands of fallen bricks and the charred remains of appliances and rising dizzyingly out of the ashes a brick chimney and high in the air the third-floor fireplace hearth suspended like a fireplace for a curious race of giant folk or aerie for the birds to quitclaim. Atop the chimney some dark bird already crouched uncertainly as if it had no other place to be, then lifted itself with slow strokes of the wings and was gone. Tyler looked about. Trees had shrouded the house and the near side of them was blackened and burned away. The shrouding trees looked like the container the fire had come in.

He sat down and laid a hand to the ashes but the ashes as well wore a film of ice. He stood up and made to go but like the bird he seemed to have no other place to be and he squatted in the epicenter of this holocaust like its sole grim survivor and when he’d rested for a time he rose and went on.

When he went out it was a Saturday and he didn’t know how many days had passed since Sutter had taken him for a walkdown by the tie yard nor did he want to sort through these past days to get a count on them. The weather moderated and what snow remained lay in dirty melting skifts. The road too was muddy and he kept skirting the deeper areas of mud with a thought for the new shoes he wore. He carried a tan suitcase and it as well was newlooking and cheap. A pickup went by once but didn’t stop, and Tyler took to the ditch to avoid the tireslung sluice of muddy water. Two large handpainted signs adorned the side of the truck proclaiming jesus jesus, but to Tyler it just looked like some old farmer making his Saturday pilgrimage to town.

Where the dirt road intersected the highway there was a tiny clapboard church bowered with rose briars set back in the corner the roads made and a graveyard with toilers at work, and he saw that the dead were still being replevied from the earth. He glanced once, then turned away, striding on toward the blacktop. Before he reached it a voice halted him.

One old man, two young. The old man watched, and the other two, sons perhaps, flailed at the earth with pick and shovel. It was the old man who’d hailed him and the old man himself coming gingerly through the nettles. One of the younger men stood shovel in hand watching him go and he called Pa once but the old man just went on.

Tyler stood awkwardly holding the suitcase and scanning down the wavering blacktop for traffic.

Ain’t this a hell of a mess? the old man asked. Old man with a caved and ravaged face, illfitting discolored teeth.