Part I

LAVADA ROSE TO THE IRON DARK and stepped barefoot across the cabin floor, paused and placed her hand to the door to test the wind’s new ache, to know it as her own. Touch told her she would need Mason’s coat. It hung on a nail next to the mantel. She took it in her hands and slipped her thin arms through the sleeves, wore the weight of her man for a moment before she drew on his blistered boots and stepped into another day that lacked him.

A rill of daylight cracked the ridge. She came around the side of the cabin to check the car for frost. Drew back her fist and smacked the door seam. Overnight rime freed. She climbed in and cranked the engine, revved it to open the thermostat. Went back to the cabin to get the old man up and ready for being left alone.

She tapped at his bedroom door and spoke his name. She could hear him stir, but he said nothing. She knocked again, harder, and heard the underlying hiss of his slippers. He would be out.

She snapped three eggs into a china bowl and whisked them together, dicing in onions and thawed peppers. Anything else would have been too hard on the old man’s teeth. The range ticked three times before the pilot light caught and the ring spat crenellated flame. The skillet talked as the eggs hit the surface. By the time she scraped them onto two small plates, Sam entered, dressed and cleanly shaven.

“Good morning, Daughter,” he took his place at the kitchen table.

She set his plate before him and sat. How long had it been now since the convention of calling her as his kin had been confused with his actual belief in their blood relation?

“Good morning, Sam. Sleep well?”

“Ah,” he nodded.

His words failed him more these days. What was said and what he intended seemed to live in two different corners of the same room, never completely at odds and yet mislaid somewhere between the thought and the saying.

“Do we have time to garden today, Daughter?”

She crossed the fork and knife on her plate.

“It’s winter, Sam. There’s nothing we can plant this time of year. Everything’s frozen. I’ve told you that.”

He released a sigh, shook his head, blue eyes seeking.

After scraping off the remains of windshield ice with a kitchen blade, Lavada climbed into the Honda and gunned it for the ridge line road. She liked the feeling of the hollow sinking behind her, the road opening up to the overlooks. Slip all tethers and give herself to momentum. The morning drive was a pleasure, a tight controlled movement along the shoulders of the mountains, the right-of-way ceding to her memory of so many drives in and out like this one. She did not consciously anticipate dips and curves, as much as feel herself forward, lean intelligently into the next bend and brake.

At Stubbs’s roadside stop above the county line, she pulled into the empty parking lot for her cigarettes. When she swung the door open, the cowbell banged against the glass and Mrs. Stubbs glared at her over the top of a Better Homes and Gardens.

“Help you?” she said in a tone bereft of sincerity. Her magazine a solid screen of overbold font, porticoes, English topiary.

“Yessum,” Lavada answered, awkward. “Can I get a pack of Kools?”

“What’s a Kools?”

“They’re cigarettes. Menthol cigarettes.”

“Never heard of them.” She sighted her down one ill eye.

“They’re in a green box. With stripes.”

The old woman found them, shoved the pack across, rang her up.

“How’s your husband? I’m used to seeing him in here.”

“Coughing up a lung,” the old woman said. “Come down with something, I guess. He’ll recover.”

“That’s good.”

Lavada turned to leave.

“Your man still up at the pen?” Mrs. Stubbs asked.

The familiar disfavor, the judgment of a life reduced to what they wanted to see of her, what they wanted to make of her. She knew she would always remember the simple gift of their hate.

“Thanks for the cigarettes.” She clinked open the door.

“You’re still a young thing,” the old woman called. “There’s better out there than holing up with a father-in-law fit for the old folks’ home, you know.”

She had lit the first cigarette before the engine turned and finished it by the time she crossed the South Carolina state line. With the window cracked, the winter air danced in, making confusion of the hair loose at her temples. It stung.

Once she was coming down through the foothills, the road widened as it plunged through red banks and thickening pines. Roadhouses stood empty this time of morning. Fireworks stands were bright and antic with signs. Broad ply board proclaimed: BLACK CAT. NO DUDS GUARANTEED.

On to the town limits of Pennington, a long stretch of green flats with a few small farms on either side, tractors asleep under tin roofs. Farther on, the town proper began to assemble itself, newish brick ranches with big yards and cyclone fences surrendered to hundred-year-old stately colonials with scrolled balconies. Finally, the old downtown, a true main street, divided by occasional islands of rotary club flower beds, stubbled for the winter. Small poplar trees braced with metal poles to ensure perfect vertical growth. On each side broad sidewalks gave way to independent store fronts: a pair of barber shops, Lonney’s Hardware, a Purina feed store, Army/Navy surplus. Going out of business.

Lavada parked at the end of the sidewalk and stepped into Gillenwater’s. Inside, the grill sizzled with sausage patties and hash browns. She stepped behind the counter and poured a white mug full of coffee for herself. Gillenwater flipped the sausage and potatoes onto a plate and leaned back over the counter with a mostly clean fork. She poured him out a cup and set it down at his right hand. He fell to his breakfast.

“You’re in early.” He shaped out his words between bites.

She scanned the few tables and booths to make sure the morning prep work was done.

“Afraid of the weather. Thought it would be worse than it is.”

“You know I can always come out to get you in case it gets rough.”

“That’s too far, Dennis.”

“It’s just a drive, is all.”

He looked down at her boots, laced tight to her calves, the ends tucked in.

“Don’t those get tough on your feet? You look more sawmill pulper than waitress.”

Through the glass facade, she watched the empty street come into its regular midweek stride. As soon as the door swung open, she greeted her first customers, order pad tucked under her arm, pen notched above her ear.

“Now, Dennis,” she cocked her head and answered in her best Nancy Sinatra. “You know as well as I do these boots were made for working, And that’s just what I’ll do…”

She whistled off, left him grinning.

MASON LIFTED HIS ARM, THUMB RIGID in the air, hearing big tires and a quick engine coming on. He had not bothered with the thin sounds of passenger cars, knowing they were a waste of effort, but the big trucks were driven by men long on the road, empty of good caution. They would welcome him, a curiosity to entertain the lonesome hours ahead. When he heard the grinding downshift and the engine catching high, he dropped his hand, eased one shoulder strap of the ruck from his shoulder and turned toward the asphalt, waiting to be let on and taken the rest of the way home.

He climbed up into the cab and stowed the back pack on the floor in front of him, all his ready possessions riding against his shins, bouncing softly as the truck gathered speed.

The driver grunted his name and Mason gave his as well and then they were on to the ritual exchange, the swapping of stories that ate up so much of the common life of the highway. As the hours drew on, his own voice became an easy song in the throat, a steadiness that passed between both men while his mind could slip away to watch the long green of the free world roll out on either side of the road, the borderless ground like some kind of materially realized echo, a cracking sound wave of all that limitless choice.

As they came into the foothills and later the mountains, the trees nudged in closer, attending him, constricting the passage into some form he could reasonably suffer. So different than the unfamiliar world of the piedmont, a place that was crushed, dimensionless. Here there was grip and hold, a country with legacies not easily slipped. This place held no guesses, no deceptions of promise, only the fate of knowing what others who had ridden these same roads and byways knew, that the world of bluff, creek and gorge was without parallel, that the grim and the beautiful were locked together and that the men and women were owned by it in equal measure, released by nothing so simple as God given will.

He got out at the head of the Narrow Spoke crossroads, footing it back toward the glum windings of the gravel road leading in to the family property, singlewides up on naked blocks with clapboard additions tipping against the prefab, rude ideas of improvement realized by increments. Shepherds and terriers barked. Security lights popped on in the twilight.

Ray Ray met him on the deck of his trailer, automatic pistol palmed but loose, a simple piece of iron, no threat between peaceable kin.

“You look like shit, Cousin.” Ray Ray smiled.

“The way of the world.”

Ray Ray laughed his easy laugh.

“Bring your sorry ass up here.”

Mason slipped the ruck and met an embrace. Ray Ray shoved him back a second later and stared into his face.

“Same old Buddy,” Ray Ray said finally, falling to Mason’s childhood nickname. “Sit down. I’ll get us a little cold beer.”

Mason pulled up one of the metal folding chairs and trained it around so he could see the length of the valley he’d trudged up. On the other side of the far ridgeline the tourists had moved in and bought up all the scenic views, sticking pasteboard mansions to it so they could feel good about themselves for looking across at all the stubborn trailer trash who refused their bribes. The homes’ huge glass fronts were ablaze with electric light. Big yellow light pouring out so they could be seen watching those who watched them back, maybe wondering if it was enough to stir envy and hate in those poor misbegottens. Hoping it did. The sight of it all made Mason itch for a few satchels of dynamite.

Ray Ray came back with two popped tall boys, tears of condensation running. Mason laid one to his temple for a moment, then drank deep.

“I guess you figured out Lavada didn’t come and see me,” he said. “Two years, and not once.”

An old diesel train engine hauled a short freight out towards the river bed. The sound of its progress clacked on, a spike of useless noise in the useless distance.

“Buddy, she’s been looking after your Daddy real good. That has to count for something.”

They emptied their cans.

“She’s my woman, and she abandoned me. That sure as hell counts for something too.”

There was little easy room to be had when it was time to settle in for the night. The couch and an old boy scout sleeping bag were all Ray Ray could apportion. The beer had taken its toll on Mason, and he suffered a tiredness that threatened to carry him into a scaling and dreamless oblivion. But before he would let himself be broken and dragged down, he ground his fists into his eyes and turned his head toward the long window and the valley beyond. Darkness and mountains reared in an enormous force over everything his eye could take in. A frozen breakwater, a great avalanche of stone poised to descend.

He swung his feet to the floor and steadied himself, listening to Ray Ray snoring in the back bedroom. The night made things somehow strange, derelict. The shape of old lamps, chairs and end tables released their accustomed lines, and objects inert managed to live, to feel. The sadness of this place suddenly broke over him, tumbled in a mute chaos of things remembered and imagined. Confused grief beaded in his eye. He did not know what sorrow he was weeping for. He feared, above all, that it was not his own.

One more beer. A rickety shuffle to the humming fridge and an Ice House torn from the plastic ring. Drinking like there was an undiscovered world in the next swallow. Knowing it all was about her, always had been. Even his hatred was a kind of love. He knew she made him suffer a brand of madness, an epilepsy of need, and regret too. One element seemed to sharpen the others, grinding down whatever remained of him in the process.

He eased out to the porch where his ruck was leaned against the far railing and carefully drew the weight of it onto his back. Staggering, he braced his free hand to the corner post and stepped out into the starlit yard, moving under the constellations, feeling as ancient and marooned as those splinters of galactic time. Overhead sketchings of cardinal direction and decision. He sucked back the rest of the beer, pitched the aluminum husk beside the road and walked straight out of the old family place, pursuing the stranger course of what lay before him.

LAVADA PANICKED WHEN SHE FOUND THE cabin empty. She looked in his bedroom, called Sam’s name, turning dumbly in the center room, brought hard up against the scant furnishings and silent walls. Dread emptied itself into her.

The drive back had been quick, tires crying in the sharp road curves. The day nurse had never answered her calls. Not once. And she knew Sam had been by himself for the entire day, subject to his own hand when it was time to take his pills. Without them, he was a man outside of himself, a confusion to his own skin and sense. Violent tempers could squall through and be trailed by sudden calm, an ease that spoke of some knowledge just the other side of suffering. All the seasons of his mind revolved in relentless opposition to the world outside him, setting him always apart, tending him consistently toward a kind of chemical wildness.

She stepped out into the cold of the front porch and called for him again, the sound of her voice threading the distance of the hollow. The sky was low and heavy and the air had thickened with impending storm. Crows complained somewhere down by the creek bed, their cawing discordant. She hurried toward them.

Wind worked at the limbs overhead, and as she moved through the woods, the trees cried like children playing. She shivered in the big coat and kept on. Something in her triggered, and she felt her legs carrying her forward, impelling her beyond what she understood. Worry had given way to act. She was sure some profound wrong had discovered life. The certainty of it wrung itself inside her.

The old man reeled into her view, his pale chest scorched with chill as he hove up from the freezing creek water, shocked silent with pain, his mouth a silent, perfect O. His hands spread to either side, palms raised with fingers crooked as the blue lightning strike of veins. And then life tumbled in through a cough. Sam’s body arched and collapsed and arched again, an unsprung chaos of movement as he struggled to break the grip of hypothermic waters.

She ran to him, gathered his weight against her. They slid in the bank muck and staggered over rounded stones, his frame heavy against her slightness. She looked for signs of his clothing, but saw nothing and quickly drew him back the way she had come. His long arms overreached her shoulders as they stumbled for the shelter of the cabin.

Once inside, she lowered Sam to the couch, falling in beside him. Entwined herself as she rubbed her palms across his chest and stomach. He still had not made a sound. The muscles in his face were as fixed as cord wood.

His eyes sought something over her shoulder, slipping their immediate focus. Finally, sound escaped him in a low moan, and he began to shudder. Lavada piled him with as many blankets as she could find before swinging open the wood burning stove and lighting the kindling already laid there.

Go to the waters to make all things new into nothing, to make found things lost again. The location of time is to be found within this slivering, this conversation of ice and current. The recognition of memory will be dug up from river bottoms, clawed free of the old burials, and you and I will coil like serpents in the tall grass, tongues seeking the truth of what we were and what we will become.

I knew the woods as a boy. They were my prophets. The language of elms and thickets filled my ears with their botany, and it was a song unmatched. I sketched these things and what they spoke, recorded the living shape of trunks, tangles and boughs. Met their divinity with my notion of them, poorly translated by the arts of charcoal illustration and sentimental verse. A poor artist, perhaps, but a sincere one. A simple but good instrument in God’s willing hand.

My father loved me. He showed me the cemeteries where his people rested. He took me there and held the butcher paper against the face of their tombstones while I drew the charcoal pencil gently across, resurrecting lost names beneath my hand. The soft texture of what I was bound to inherit from them blackened my skin and would not wash easily away. I would carry the smudge for the rest of the day, laying the edge of my hand against any newly cleaned or polished thing, imprinting my surroundings with what I’d stolen from the dead.

Before our life in the wilderness, he worked as a machinist. His job was in Knoxville, and we moved there when I was a child still short of schooling age. Despite my youth, I do remember some things—the silver purling of the Tennessee River in winter, the reek of the wharf, an old man with gold teeth and an impossibly tiny monkey who would take a nickel from any passers-by to strike the poor squalling creature with a ballpeen hammer. My father would never give me a nickel, though I begged him, wanting to see the razored mouth swing open in a moment of dumb pain.

My mother and I lived in a boarding house during the week while my father worked twelve-hour shifts and slept in a workers’ dormitory he would never let me see. The single room where we lived was small and overheated by a radiator that ticked as regular as rain against the roof. My mother was a quiet woman with a young face despite bearing me when she was middle-aged. Her hair was the color of sunlit ice, but she was all the more lovely for her matured prettiness. I remember walking with her and clutching her hand when we would pass strange men in the streets who would let their gazes linger. My fingers would become demanding of her palms if I did not feel her reciprocal squeeze, until finally she would laugh and pull me against her, calling me her “prize boy,” and promising the world held no eyes of favor for her but mine and my father’s. Even then, the sound of her voice was a balm. It stayed me. I would weep to hear it now.

When my father spent his weekends with us, the air was that of a holiday. Even if it was just a walk along the riverfront, every second was devoted to my mother and me. We were each rewarded by the easy pleasure that appeared in his eyes, eclipsed suns of dark but burning brown. We would walk through the purple evenings of the city and I felt myself bound between them, bobbing along in a perfect equilibrium of contentment. My curse, I realize now as an old man, has been that I should have known such happiness so early in this wrecking life.

AFTER LETTING GO THE NURSE FOR never showing, Lavada was up on her feet for much of the evening, watching the sleet and snow from the front room and listening for Sam’s troubled breaths. She depended on a strength that didn’t belong, lifting some spirit of will out of the hot tea she drank, blending a measure of calm into her. Whatever repair was done, she lost as soon as Sam rose from the couch and staggered into the bathroom where he clattered and banged away at the faucet to fill the tub.

“Sam, do you need help?”

The door swat shut and she could hear him climbing in and mumbling, apparently speaking to the walls and water itself. She stood close by and listened to make sure he wasn’t doing any harm to himself before pulling on her heavy coat and stepping out to the porch for some air.

Ice ticked against the branches, weighed them. The possibility of power loss. She turned up her collar and stepped out into the slanting weather, walking toward the outbuilding. Already there was enough snow on the ground that it would be hard going out of the hollow. The falling ice would glaze everything overnight, making it into brittle waste. The land would be still but not easy, never easy, simply locked away, wearing this pristine mask.

She wedged the door open and tugged the hanging switch on the overhead light. Within, she saw mostly gardening supplies stacked high, shovel handles and bags of mulch, a Craftsman push mower that hadn’t run in two summers. The generator was in the far corner, turned up on its side. The cap was missing. It had to be dry.

She wrestled the generator around the collected glut, through the door and finally outside. Catching her breath, she turned her face to the breaking sky, the pellets stinging down into her. Broken pieces of the night finding their correct way back to other broken things on the earth.

Once she had the machine up under the porch roof, she went back for the gas can, but found it empty. She rooted around for a hose to siphon something out of the Honda, but there was nothing she could use. She would have to drive out now if she was going to make it to the closest gas station, a good three miles down toward the old Lincoln Township. But she couldn’t leave Sam. Not tonight.

“Sam,” she said, knocking on the bathroom door. “Get dressed, honey. We need to make a run to the store. Before the weather gets too bad. Let’s hurry up.”

She prayed for his compliance in the few seconds that passed before she could hear the water dripping from his body as he stood up and stepped across the tile floor. When the door opened, he was wrapped in a towel, but still as wet as if he’d just thawed.

“May I drive, Daughter?” he asked as he stood there, letting her dry him like he was her own child.

“No, honey. You can’t drive anymore. Not for a while you haven’t been. Besides, it’s snowy. Dangerous. Let me do it, okay?”

By his distracted silence, she took him as having conceded.

He went into his room and dressed himself, putting on tweed slacks and a wool sweater that bunched at the top of his throat. Lavada helped him into his duck boots and sheepskin jacket she’d bought him the winter before from Goodwill.

“You look handsome, Sam.”

He said nothing, leading the way out.

The tires slipped and whirled before they found purchase and kicked the Honda up the steep drive and out to the hardtop road. A plow had run through within the hour, leaving a thin flat of macadam visible. At the road edge, the fallen snow had already begun to stack. Lavada felt her stomach drop and swing out when she coasted onto an ice patch and glided toward the half-thrown guardrail. Her headlights cut wildly, slashing the tree line. She lost breath.

The car nudged the railing in a high grind and scratch, halted. Lavada closed her eyes and rested her head on the wheel. Sam simply looked on, his tongue working inside his mouth but no words following. When she opened her eyes and looked down into the hollow, Lavada could see the symmetrical glinting of the Plum River where it forked and played out into the broader wilderness of the Smokevine National Forest. No light pollution capped the powdered trees, the frosted ridges. Development had been forfeit in this stretch of country for a century, and the woods she gazed on were as true and wild as they had been three generations gone.

“Lovely,” Sam said just above a whisper, spoken so quietly that Lavada did not know if his words were meant for her. “I have always enjoyed the difference, what the snow makes of this. The winter.”

She eased the shift into reverse and put them back on the road, headed towards the gas station. She drove slowly on, hugging the high side of the road. They witnessed no other traffic the way there.

The clerk was locking up when Lavada rolled to the gas pump. When the engine cut, she could hear the ice cracking down harder now against the emptiness of the crossroads.

“Please, just a minute,” Lavada called, waving.

The clerk, a teenage boy in a dark hoodie and stuffed vest, flipped the lock back open and stood inside by the register, leaning up against the counter. His eyes bit into Lavada like a blade.

“I can’t afford to get stuck,” he said as soon as she stepped inside. She glared at him but said nothing, spreading a ten dollar bill in front of him and going back out to fill the plastic can. When she was done, she threw the nozzle on the ground and drove away to the sound of the boy cursing.

MASON MADE HIS WAY INTO THE cut well past midday, the sky over him heavy with the weather to come. He stopped alongside the old logging road and capsized his pack to get to the grey sweatshirt that tumbled out in a wad from the bottom. It smelled of mildew as he pulled it over his head, still damp from poor drying. Even so, he counted on his body heat to make the material serve its purpose, to keep him feeling fluid, ready and human.

His calves ached from the hike across the valley. He had stayed clear of the roadways that would have given him easy transit, preferring instead the barren ridgelines and the untrafficked railbeds, not wishing to see anything or anyone that would remind him of what he’d lost. Not wanting to see or be seen. Remain the intruder he knew he was.

He ascended the final draw, sweating. The weight on his back had become too much, and when finally he came into the derelict timber camp and released the straps, the rucksack dropped from him like an old pain giving way only after some deeper hurt had been done. He turned over an old paint bucket caged among weeds and sat on it, gazing at the longhouse. Despite the southeast corner being stove in, most of the old tin roof appeared to be intact. When the sky began to toss the first shreds of snow, he set about what improvements could be directly met.

Wedging open the front door for light, he still had to blink away the dimness before he could advance on the shelter’s interior. As his pupils brimmed, he began to make out the cobwebbed intricacy of upended bedframes, splintered furnishings and corroded tools enmeshed in one another’s crooks and planes. He inspected one of the open boxes where a hammer claw hooked itself to the rim. Among the crate itself maybe half a dozen boxes of ten penny nails, an empty bottle of 3-in-1 engine oil and a Ducks Unlimited calendar from 1974. He took the hammer and swung it to feel its heft. It answered solidly, so he tossed it toward the front door where he could find it later.

He discovered little else of interest. Much of what was there was utter garbage or so long exposed to the elements as to take on a useless frailty. However, toward the back he found what the timber men had used as an improvised heating source, an upright steel drum with a hand cut opening large enough to feed split logs and deadfall. It was attached to aluminum flashing piped through the north facing wall. Other than the obstruction of a deserted bird’s nest, the homemade furnace appeared to be in working condition. He jerked out the straw from the piping by handfuls, scattering it across the bottom of the barrel for kindling, went outside to see what could be gathered before dark.

When the snow began to stick he brought what he had scavenged from the hill and dumped it beside the furnace. Within five minutes the fire barrel began to tick with the heat, flames spiraling amid smoke that rose and snaked up the pipe.

Though the longhouse began to warm, the furnace cast only feeble light, and Mason lost himself to the contemplation as the dark shapes around him eventually found their own eventide shapelessness. Origin and oblivion were matched doors. Gates in and out of a life that held no ceremony, no special dignity for those that passed through them. As a boy he’d often heard old men talk about the life after this one, the hereafter coming, but such pronouncements seemed impossibly remote, absurd. A man breathed and then he rasped once before breathing no more.

His thoughts touched Lavada. How she’d drawn him back here, despite everything, despite the hurt. Swung it down on him like an ax blade, opening the tenderest parts of who he was to sun and air. She was utter confusion, an ambush of feelings he could not ever defeat. He wanted to hate himself for the stupidity of his own actions, the years of running pills back and forth across the county, roxies dropped off in the trailers of kin that were supposed to know well enough to keep their mouths shut whenever the law came poking into what wasn’t anyone’s concern outside the hollow. But she had known there was something in him, some element of risk that always seemed to get drawn out if he sat idle for too long. Nothing like his father, the old fool with his swerving state of mind, the inevitable collapse of all those years spent hooked over his desk, eyes growing weak from books, dim light and superiority. No, Mason was a wreck of intent and pure will. A sudden danger that couldn’t be controlled or assigned ready value. And she had wanted it, craved the unpredictabilities that were as much a part of him as the pitch of his voice. So he could not fault himself for what had made her desire him. He had simply happened to her. It was as useless to blame himself as it was to blame a lightning strike.

When he woke at first light, Mason rose from a dreamless sleep and went to the cracks of the door sill, the world outside given over to a piercing white. Ice had maimed the landscape, making dangerous beauty where the slash of the old timber cut was ugly enough beneath. He could smell wood smoke on the morning air, acrid and thin. How far away the fire burned he could not tell. Big hurt worked itself up in his chest like something trying to punch its way through his skin. He went to stoke the furnace.

It calmed him to know he could lose himself in the simple mechanics of surviving, the tending of the fire, the heating of pork and beans still in the can, the deliberate bites he took until the contents disappeared into his body. Not unlike prison. There the schedule had been artificial, enforced by men. Both cons and guards strove to keep a kind of order on the yard, even if the mechanics of the system might appear obscure to an outsider. Nevertheless, it was there, a forecast of how you were to behave if you expected to hold on to some fiber of dignity. When to obey and when not to. When to talk and when to bow your head and say nothing. The truth of the place made its truth in you, testified itself so that the daily repetition developed into a kind of faith. That world baptized you, making you fit for it. The trick was to not lose yourself in what it would make of you, give away too much of what got you there in the first place. If that happened, everything was lost.

But here too there was a regimen, only more archaic and vague. Ceremonies had to be reinvented each day. Repetition was not nearly as simple as it was behind the penitentiary fence. Act surrendered to analysis too soon, too many doubts invited themselves in. Madness was written in all this open sky, and the only defense a man could mount against it was in discovering something new each day that confirmed who he was and what he could do to keep himself free.

Midmorning, he set out to walk the perimeter of the timber cut. Much scrub had grown up since the last big cultivation more than a decade ago, and the woods were a maze of runty pine and copse, made uncanny by the pall of snow and ice. At times, after walking for a good distance unhindered, he would meet a low convergence of limbs so thick that he couldn’t go on, and he would have to read the signature of his own footprints to find his way back. But these errors did not dissuade him. Each misdirection enlarged his knowledge of the woods, and he began to plan what he would make of them given enough time.

As the snow began to melt away from the weak sun, he discovered a clearing. A shell of sandy ground over a granite outcropping that permitted only a few spiny weeds. A wall of low pine encircled. The only view was at the extreme of the stone ledge pitching off into a bluff above a creek that moved through a stand of mixed hardwoods. He stood looking over the edge and dropped a few loose rocks to watch them clatter wildly down the stone face before they leapt toward the white treetops and disappeared.

He stood, working dimensions in his head, the force of concentration turning back thoughts of the cold. A small cabin, overlooking the gorge. He could devise the shape of it in his mind’s eye, a primitive enclosure better suited to his needs than the longhouse could offer through the cold months. Giddiness surged through him at the prospect. The materials could be salvaged from the longhouse, the tools as well. The accomplishment of it by degrees seemed almost physically palpable, and he began to mark the outlines of what could be wrought by tearing straight limbs from the snowy trunks and laying them flat to the ground, tip to break, the simple skeleton of what he meant to build.

He faced back down toward the longhouse and set about wrecking the materials that could be useful to him, carrying up the bits of what he would use to assemble into his own scattered home.

LAVADA HEARD THE RUMBLE OF A downshift before the bright grill of Dennis’s Blazer thrust into the head of the hollow. The grind of the engine rocketed down, glancing off the smooth cape of snow and blisters of naked outcroppings. Before she could decry his general foolishness, he had barreled down the narrow trail, nosed in next to the Honda and cut the engine, sticking out his chapped face, bareheaded and grinning.

“You’re alive!” he shouted.

“And you’re plumb loony,” she answered. “What you doing out here?”

He stepped down, smacking his loose leather gloves together as he stamped the snow from his Timberlands across the broad boards of the porch. Welts of his breath opened in the air.

“I was worried you’d tried to drive over the mountain and you’d gotten yourself stuck. I called, but your phone wasn’t ringing.”

“Wal-Mart phone. Can’t get reception down around here even half the time. I don’t know why I pay for the damn thing.”

He stood there, still smiling and looking on her in a way that made her suddenly shy.

“Well, come in. I guess I can allow you a cup of coffee for your driving out here, as long as you shuck them boots before dragging all that slush in with you.”

He complied, bracing his shoulder up against the cabin while he pried one crusted boot free, then the other. Followed her in.

She poured them both coffees. This stolen day did not offer a respite from her waiting on him. What was it in her that succumbed to this easy tending of men? Why did it rise up in her unbidden? She placed the mug to her lips too quickly and burned herself.

“I was worried about you all,” Dennis said, his voice lowered, perhaps fearing he might wake Sam.

“We’re pretty good about seeing to ourselves out here, Dennis. You might be surprised.”

“No,” he smiled. “I don’t guess I really would be all that much.”

Dennis had always puzzled her. She knew little of him, other than he’d been good enough to her when she’d turned up in his diner a few weeks after Mason had been sent upstate. He had given her a chance to clear tables when there wasn’t much else to be had, other than clerking at the Wal-Mart or running the redeye at Citgo. He was always quiet and she thought lonely, staying open on nights when there wasn’t much better than the slimmest chance that some wayfarer might straggle in from the interstate on the tail end of a freight run between Florida and Knoxville. She had never minded the time spent alone with him, even if they didn’t trade more than a few dozen words over the course of an evening. She half expected some form of harassment on those solitary nights. While she did not think herself a beauty, she was aware of how men could act when they gave themselves license to behave as they wished. But he had never offered anything other than his reticent kindness. And now to have him turn up here on the other side of the storm, standing in her cabin in his sock feet grinning at her, she was aware of something new between them, something she would prefer to hold as her own guarded pleasure.

“Looks like you could stand to have a little wood hauled in,” Dennis said, setting his emptied coffee on the kitchen counter. “Let me earn this cup of joe off you.”

She watched through the window as he thudded around to the far end of the outside overhang and overloaded his arms with split oak. She watched as his long fingers plucked at the splintered ends of the cord wood and brought it evenly against his chest, arranging a simple but comely gathering in the hollow of his arms.

A chill passed over her and she realized she’d let the fire get too low. She squatted down and swung the iron door open, the gloomed coals breathing out a swirling of ash. With the few sticks at hand, she fueled what stilled burned, brought the flame up by tender degrees. She was careful not to reach too far and graze the inner iron latch of the stove handle. It would rob her of skin in an instant, just as it had Mason the first winter they’d lived here, nearly ten years before. That season had been harder than most, not only because of the weather, but the student poverty they’d endured as well. Utility bills overlapped prompt remittances. Sometimes a weekend lacked water or lights. Money was borrowed from cousins or the church and never repaid. Shame simply accrued.

She remembered the scar along his arm, a lean silvering where the flesh had parted from him and updrafted in the fire. He had not cried out or cursed when he was burned, but drew back reflexively and stared at part of his body detached, wilting. His fascination numbed him to the pain. He still had not broken his gaze in the time it took Lavada to run cold water over a washcloth and apply it to him as a compress. Even then, he remained transfixed, drawn in by the spectacle of what no longer belonged to him.

Dennis came back in and settled a rick of wood next to the stove, truing up the ends with a few gentle nudges until the facing fit his idea of symmetry. She saw that he’d grown brick red in the face. Once he’d settled into a front room wing chair they talked for a while, discussing every manner of small consequence they could conjure. But with the day getting on, Lavada decided finally she could hazard a few minutes away from the old man, and she suggested they take a walk through the hollow to see what could they could see of the storm’s effect. Dennis was on his feet and to the door, folding her coat around her like a dark wing, his heavy steps sagging the tongue-in-groove floor but his hands light upon her shoulders.

Thaw had come in to the hollow. Huddles of snow had begun to thump down from the tree branches, laying prints in the accumulation below. Squirrels dangled from overhead but did not fuss at the incursion. Dennis paused to study their frozen postures, kissing his teeth to try to lure them to some action, but the animals would not be baited and they walked on, their steps like grindstones where they went. What had been made of this world appeared somehow diminished but not damaged, a rounding of underlying edges as only slow time might enact. Lavada marveled that this place had not always belonged to her. How had she come to find it so native, so integral to every concern and consideration when she was not born to it? And yet it was as true to her now as if it were a due and necessary inheritance. Something definitive impressed on her heart, a blemish worn to familiar knowledge.

At the creek she shied away, not wishing to explain what had happened with Sam the night before. It remained a bad dream even to her. Or perhaps she preferred to assign it as that, an encroachment of the unbelievable into her everyday, rather than to confront the reality of the old man slipping further from reason. Her grief proved what she’d thought for so long—she loved him in a way his own natural born son never had. Sam had said to her once that sadness was the price men and women paid for being good. She saw the pain that set itself in Sam, made itself adjunctive to his good heart. She wondered if the curse strong people faced was in their ability to endure too much. Or perhaps it was not even that so much as the fact that eventually others must witness what the suffering makes of what they once were. Regardless, the trials they had passed through had made her and Sam closer, joined them like night and day welded fast at the horizon.

Without thinking and almost without registering the change, her arm looped itself around Dennis’s sleeve, and they fell in step together as they mounted a trail above the water. He did not brace or show surprise, but took her hand naturally, as if he had expected her to take hold of him from the moment he’d arrived. Was she so transparent, so typical? Lavada realized she was often blind to those things that had been most obvious to others. So much of her time was spent in the basic struggle to survive, to make new what sustained her through the long days of self-debate and plain, fumbling hurt that she often failed her own tending, spited what had kept her safe, kept her able. Her grip tightened, bringing her nearer Dennis’s arm, her weight an ease against this man who seemed to welcome every ounce of her.

They walked together through midday, making a wide sweep of the hollow and the ridges girding it until the day was bright and the snow melting loose. When they stepped onto the porch and stamped the snow from their boots, she came to her toes and kissed him briefly on the chin before burrowing her head into his chest, her breath coming sharp and definite.

“I’m glad you came,” she said quietly, almost so that she wondered whether he could hear her. Whether he did or not, she shuddered when she felt his hand first on the back of her head and then again as it slid to her nape, drawing her to him, bringing her within the peace the two of them were beginning to make of each other.

Lavada tends to me, oversees what she believes is my madness. I hear her in the next room, moving about, talking to herself perhaps, writing off her own quiet insanity to particular circumstance, as if all madness is not a branch from the same searching root. But she is good to me. She is heir to my hurt and I wake each morning with her name on my lips, speaking who she is as a means of cure. I will not let her know I am wakened. I do not want to know what shape the world deigns to make of my lost mind just now.

So broken. Her heart is a despised country, borderless and overrun with the worst parts of some bygone revolution, some defeat without name. It is a place where old men sit and murmur, dispassion pressing flat their faces. There is a counting house there as well, a chancery of lost and given souls, but she knows none of them, forgoes any idea of tally. She is innocent to the regrets that commit themselves to her care. So much the better.

She is a hurt child. A strong woman. One does not preclude the other, and so often is the necessary receipt of the same. I have made her mine. It doesn’t matter whether she is. Not that I can tell. So much is resistant to me. So many obvious assignments of names and places, people, the history of them and me. So much fracturing that I can claim little more than the persistent sense that I know the deepest note that plays over and over, a resonance that binds the many elements of every particle of the earth correctly together. It is cosmic. But it is also a little nothing as thin and as lost breath and perforated memory.

She does not know the wisdom of having lost all. She is part of that cursed race, those who believe themselves immune to the worst of tortures, but who are only a new generation of sentimentalists. She is tender in hope, in charity, in the many Christian lies. That she would take my son back into her arms, make a trial of his need for her. That should earn her some grace, shouldn’t it? Some pardon. But thinking like that is willful and perverse. We are told so since we are children. And all of us are children still now. Even me. Even me, lost in the gaze of this.

And now that my son has come home. Is this the best hope of fathers? I cannot remember how he has become this man. Strangeness and familiarity are parts of a spinning coin, animating themselves into oblivion.

LATE MARCH WINDS CHEWED THROUGH ICE in the cracks of granite, brought quick melt. Water actually spoke. It awakened a part of Mason he’d thought long discarded, a lightness in the limbs and skin that needed to shake off the heavy blankets of winter. It made him hungry. It made him want to eat away at the world.

His small cabin had kept him well through the coldest months. A few trips to Ray Ray’s hollow had supplied his primitive larder with canned goods and cheap beer. In exchange, he’d helped his cousin string barbwire and shore up the trailer’s rotting porch. Throwaway jobs. Gestures at barter meant to spare his feelings. But with the warming weather his desire increased. He needed some greater possession than mere subsistence. Some piece of what other people called real living.

He hitched his way into town in the back of a county works truck hauling tools and tar back from a half day of patching road. The stink got down into the fibers of his clothes. When after only a few miles he jumped from the deep bed, thumped the side of the truck in thanks and turned down the main street of Canon City, he smelled bad enough that anyone passing close involuntarily winced. He went into the first service station that offered restrooms along the back exterior wall and locked himself in while he stripped and doused his clothes in a sink full of sudsy water before airing everything beneath an automatic hand dryer. He stepped out into the sun, blinking, waiting for some sound idea to yield itself to him.

He walked the entire street looking for Help Wanted signs, but saw none. He went on toward the edge of town, the railroad tracks curving beyond the paper mill, and squatted in an empty lot behind a flap of torn cyclone fencing where an aluminum screening business had once stood. He smoked a cigarette, watching the afternoon sun work its foul glimmerings across the puzzlework of busted glass spread across the concrete. Vandals had scribed black spray paint across boarded up windows, but the characters belonged to no alphabet Mason could decipher. Some failure of symbol perhaps, some shared mistake of heart and eye.

As the afternoon wore on and drew clouds and finally sunset, cold came back by degrees. Little traffic passed by the edge of town. He realized nothing could be done with what remained of the lapsed day, so he broke through one of the window boardings and stepped straight through into the vacuum of dark. Loneliness swung up from beneath his gut as he walked across the bare concrete floor. Awareness of empty space opened inside him like something decayed giving way to deeper waste. Just one depth breaking into another, a headlong descent that was endless and paralytic.

He had become homesick for his small selfmade cabin, slight and crude as it might be. Just a day off the mountain reminded him of how much a good place could mean. In every true effort, there was some measure of approximation, a strain toward what felt right.

A single sodium light buzzed on at dusk, relieving the overall dark. He looked for something to burn, considered the boarding, but was afraid a fire might draw the police. He hunkered against the back cinder block wall and listened to the occasional scurry and sidling of invisible rodents. Eventually, he nodded off, sleeping deeper and better than he thought he might deserve.

The sound of a truck door clapping shut woke him in the soft blue of dawn. He went to the jagged break in the window and saw an old man across the road working beside a rust dappled pickup. He was hauling big crates out of the back and swinging them around toward an abandoned concrete platform, stacking them with an eye to keeping plumb. Mason watched him for a few minutes before he crawled through and walked across the street to speak with him.

“I can’t tell whether I should pop you with my crowbar or not,” the old man said, leaning toward the truck cab.

Mason showed him his hands. “No sir, I’m an honest feller.”

“Boy, I doubt that. Those that need saying it usually ain’t the best qualified. What you doing stepping out of that old place?”

“Just caught a long way from home when there wasn’t an easy ride back.”

“You laid up there drunk, were you?”

Mason nodded over toward the platform.

“Want a hand with that what you’ve got?”

The old man looked over at his heaped crates for a minute, considering. Finally, he leaned back into the truck and brought out a hammer and pinch bar, pitching them both underhand to Mason.

“Pop those tops off and spread everything out by kind.”

Mason did as he was asked, revealing rows of greens—mustards, turnips and collards—as well as red potatoes and deep bundlings of yellow squash. Once all the produce was presentable, the old man reached out a tight sheaf of plastic and paint roller extension poles so they could pitch an awning over everything once the sun was up.

By the time they’d finished, a short line had formed, older women mostly who probed their fingers into the vegetable flesh, testing, sensing, judging. The old man smiled and ducked his head when they said something that was supposed to amuse him, though Mason could tell it was all theater. There was a hardness behind the old man’s expression that spoke some immeasurable distance. Once the customers moved on, the old man drew a pint bottle of Old Crow from his denim jacket pocket and bubbled a snort.

“Here,” he said, handing the bottle across. “I know what it’s like to suffer the wrath the next morning.”

Mason took the bottle and did it justice. They looked on the whole vivid green field of unmown grass, slow wind moving.

“Name’s Virgil. Virgil Hammond,” the old man said, sticking out his hand.

Mason shook it and gave his own name. The talk that passed between them eventually eased. When their silences came, they did not look too deeply into the moment. Instead, they merely swapped language, letting it settle over them like good weather.

“You know,” Hammond began. “I can’t offer much more than what veggies you can carry with you and a few dollars at the end of the week, but I could use some help if you’re of a mind. My back can’t handle this hauling like it used to. Plus all the cheap whisky you can hold, as long as you can hold it. I need somebody to sit and watch the store too, from time to time.”

“Store?”

“If you’re of a mind.”

“I might be.”

“Alright then. Let’s load up and I’ll run you over there to have a look.”

What remained of the vegetable stand could be gathered and boxed in a pair of the bigger crates. The remaining empties the old man crushed flat for kindling and tossed in with the tarpaulin and poles. Mason got in and rode, letting his arm drape from the open window, sunshine beating down on his skin. The slipstream gushed up to his armpit. He felt like some invisible hand was trying to lift him up.

When they pulled into the gravel lot it was near suppertime and Hammond’s old collie barked its welcome. The dog was mangy and tied to an iron pipe. Its eyes were fogged with cataracts that Mason could make out from a dozen feet away. He leaned over and scratched it behind the ears. He could feel burrs that had been picked and scabbed. The dog quit barking and licked his hand. He saw the water bowl was empty and filled it from the house spigot, watching it drink while the old man unlocked the door and turned on the lights.

He followed Hammond inside the general store, looking up and down the length of the shotgun aisles of canned meats, vegetables and hardware. A box fan rattled from somewhere far in the back. Dust motes danced.

“Crack something open if you’re hungry,” Hammond called.

Mason walked in among the Vienna sausages, Spaghetti-os, and other dry goods. He turned the key open on some Spam and dipped his fingers, chewed and sucked on the juice while his gaze took in this place from half a century gone. A tin sign tacked over the transom featured a pickaninny rolling ecstatic eyes over bloodred watermelon.

“Only true general store left in the county,” Hammond said, tumping out some more of the Old Crow into a pair of red Solo cups, followed by a splash of lukewarm Coca-Cola. “My Daddy willed it to me back in the eighties.”

Mason briefly wondered if any customers had ventured the threshold since that lost decade. He took the red cup and turned it up, his head light from so much already on an empty stomach.

“We used to get more foot traffic from the college before they went and got that big bond so they could build everything up. Put in campus stores. Fucking Starbucks. Now it’s not too many. But I guess I keep the doors open out of nostalgia as much as anything else. You ever been up to the college?”

“Father used to work there. Years ago.”

“That right? Well, it’s good money I guess.”

Mason didn’t allow whether it was. He followed Hammond around to the few shelves, learning where everything was kept: the ledger, the cash register, the ancient scattergun loaded with single aught buck.

“Can’t be too careful with goddamn methmonkeys running around.”

“Methmonkeys?”

Hammond fell to a story of a meth lab run by a strawberry headed boy known by the name of Strom who had cooked crank by the deep crook of the Plum River, remembered up unto that point in time for hollering drunk at the full moon, claiming hereditary werewolfdom. When he met the blunt edge of sobriety these claims evaporated as surely as the river fog did, but that did little to allay the sufferings of any souls within earshot whenever the animal spirit moved on him. At some obscure point he had inherited a chimpanzee rejected by a traveling circus, rejected supposedly because of the ape’s proclivity for detaching his trainer’s digits with his teeth. Two such poorly prepared individuals had no correct business being placed in one another’s company, of course, but the universe conspired and this ill-favored boy and this ill-starred primate found themselves domestically bound. There were some who believed, despite all common expectations, the pairing drew a previously obscured sense of responsibility out of Strom, as a magnet might draw out solid mineral deposits from a pile of dry scat. He was seen tending to the hirsute dependent, running a comb over its wiry coat, mimicking the grooming behaviors of true children of the wild.

The problem, however, came when the county deputies caught Strom out on the back end of Buchanan Holler, delivering three baggies of crank to a bachelor party for Roddy Buchanan, a boy less than six weeks back from Iraq. When he was popped for possession (as a result of being shaken down in a routine brace since there was no mystery to the illicit nature of the boy’s income), Strom mouthed off to one of the arresting deputies, which resulted in a quick jab to the mouth with the tough end of the lawman’s PR-24 police baton. The blow did more damage than intended, dislocating Strom’s front teeth and swelling his mouth so that his words came out in an ugly and largely ignored stream of profanity. Lost in this muffled diatribe were his entreaties about his pet chimp, locked without direct access to food or water in his small trailer.

Three days passed before the boy recovered his ability to speak clearly enough to be understood. Animal control was dispatched to the trailer immediately but could not have been prepared for the evil greeting them, the starved and outraged beast delirious from its meth binge. Before the officer could wrangle the steel loop around the chimp’s neck, it burst through the front door, hissing and foaming at the mouth. The animal control man dove back into the protection of his truck cab. Since that day, the furry addict had been running the hills, howling for its accustomed fix. Many mistook the sound for Strom’s own wailing, but some knew the boy was still in county lock up and that the cry belonged to a soul even more hopeless than he.

Mason did not betray a smile through the course of Hammond’s cautionary tale. He knew it foolish to discount a man’s wildest fear when the man himself believed in the telling well enough to treat it as wisdom. And despite his incredulity, once Hammond left for the evening, Mason picked up the shotgun and ran a dust rag over its oiled surface before returning the weapon to its customary concealment, comforted by having the piece close at hand. He sat alone in the dark as moonlight slowed across the puncheon floor in those long hours, the fan softly rattling behind him. He was listening for any night cries. Though there were none, he occasionally leaned from his chair and touched the breech of the shotgun, gradually learning its total shape, discovering his affinity for what such a piece of metal might issue.

DENNIS CAST INTO THE WATER, THE dry-drop rig gentling the surface. A pair of big brook trout frisked among carved sunlight. The fishing line bowed as it drew past and tailed out in a long bright score down the middle of the river. When the hooks began to drag, he hauled down sharply on his spare line to break tension, and with one long backcast, laid the flies out in the same upstream braid of current. He waited again. Watched the fish. They did not behave.

He blamed his gear. The rod was too heavy, one of the cheap starter sets that came in a plastic package, difficult to get into without a good blade. He looked upstream toward the big boulders where a couple of tourists in sun hats and neoprene waders had caught and released half a dozen sizable rainbows in the past half hour. He hadn’t put a single fish in his creel.

He reeled his line in and secured the hooks before climbing up the steep bank to his truck. It was getting on late in the afternoon and he knew he’d have to come up with alternate supper plans. Lavada was expecting him within the hour, and supermarket fishing would have to suffice.

He drove down into Canon City to get some filleted catfish and bread crumbs at the Super Wal-Mart. He inspected the greens, picked up some asparagus, but it was limp and thin, so he set it back. On impulse, he got a bouquet of red roses from the florist’s cooler near the checkout. The ugly girl at the register smiled at him while she rang him up.

On the way out of town he saw a vegetable stand still up, though it looked like the man was packing it in for the day. He pulled off slowly, careful not to raise too much dust on what was still laid out. He got out and said hello to the young man folding up a tarp. The man said nothing back at first, looking at him with cheeks hollowed from an intake on the cigarette tight between his lips.

“We’re about closed,” he said finally.

“I was just hoping for greens of some stripe,” Dennis said, coming forward and chancing an easy smile.

The young man bent back to his folding. “Prices are on the boxes,” he said.

Dennis nodded sharply, not accustomed to such stiff treatment. He was surprised at the good quality of what he found. He ransacked his pockets for some folded bills and handed them toward the sullen man. The man looked at them and then back at the counting table.

“Set it over there. I don’t have change,” the man said.

Dennis watched the grocery man for a minute, the cigarette smoke blooming around his head every few seconds. He felt sudden anger part from caution.

“You sell all that much with this kind of attitude?”

The man paused in his work, his head tightly pivoting.

“I don’t see any sign around here saying I’ve got to sell you a goddamn thing .Why don’t you do yourself the biggest favor of your life and run along in that pretty little truck of yours.”

Dennis saw something dangerous boil up in the man, a controlled and precise violence that unnerved him. He sensed more than mere threat in his bearing. He tossed the collard greens on the ground and stormed back to his truck, cranking the engine and ripping gravel from his tires as he swung back on to the hardtop. He watched the market stand grow smaller in his rearview mirror.

In the time it took him to clear town and drive down to the hollow, his blood eased. He despised the thought of backing down. Yet what kind of man threw a punch, actually threw a punch at a stranger? No, it was best that he’d exercised some restraint, some common goddamn decency. He rolled down the drive and parked beside Lavada’s Honda. She was sitting out on the porch in one of her sundresses. She smiled at him, and like that, his mood turned, his day becoming absurdly fine.

“How was the fishing?” she stepped down to embrace him. Her breath warm against his neck.

He handed her the paper wrapped bundles of catfish, along with the flowers.

“That good?”

She kissed him again and went inside.

Sam was before the empty fireplace, rocking and reading from one of his editions of Hawthorne. His bifocals were low on his nose. When he saw Dennis he clapped the book shut and rose toward him.

“Son, what took you so long?”

Dennis had overcome his initial discomfort when Sam had first talked to him this way. It was an oddness that simply insinuated itself into normalcy somehow, this term of affection that was more than that. Something inside of Dennis softened at the thought of belonging to the old man, to claim him as a kind of father. It was sad to think it only a mistake, a carelessness of phrase.

“The fish wouldn’t cooperate. Stingy about giving themselves up for supper, I guess.”

Sam smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “Come on, come sit down while Lavada gets things ready. The fire is warm.”

They sat before the dead grate, watching the smoothly swept brick and nothing more. Sam’s eyes were afflicted with some kind of pleasant abstraction.

“I’ve seen the robins coming finally,” the old man said after a while. “It’s late for them. The cold weather, I suppose. The future, you know, is always predicted by the way the birds behave. You remember when I taught that to you as a boy, don’t you?”

Dennis glanced at Lavada, but she did not look up. He could not tell if she fully registered what was becoming of Sam. To him, the old man’s decline was increasingly apparent. But what good was there in pointing that out now?

“Yes, of course,” he answered, almost embarrassedly. “What have you been doing with yourself, Sam? Giving that fiddle hell still?”

The old man’s face wrinkled into a guarded smile. “I’ve scratched a lick or two, to keep in practice, you understand?” He was having fun with him, teasing before he made the inevitable retrieval. Despite what things his mind had surrendered to dementia, Sam remained a repository of tunes, mountain and flatland alike, though Dennis preferred above all his Irish drinking songs. Sam opened the fiddle case and struck up one of his favorites, “Whiskey in the Jar.”

When Sam played, the rest of the world fell by the way, his eyes shut tightly against the light. Dennis admired this passion in him. There was a quaking in the old man when he laid the bow against the fiddle, some bright force on the verge of ripping through him. That was a kind of joy Dennis had never known. His own life had been quiet, subdued. He was a foundation stone for others, a place to build up against. He did not desire the heartache of living too stringently. There was a kind of art, he knew, in living his life in support of those he cared for. He was content to let it remain so, regardless of what people might think or say.

While Sam continued to play, Dennis crossed the room and set the table for them, watching Lavada work in the kitchen. A corkscrew of loose hair clung damply at the nape of her neck. A signature of her private self. He thought the moment unbearably lovely. She turned and caught him staring. If he was to be given to any kind of recklessness at all, then he was glad it sprang from her.

Once he’d helped her put the plates down, they sat and ate, listening to Sam’s recollections of songs he had learned since he taught himself fiddling thirty years before, his mouth a continual vehicle of sound above the steaming food. His voice never wavered in uncertainty, his mind grasping hold to the specifics of his memories like anchor flukes.

After they were full, all three took the evening air on the front porch. Sam rocked and played mournful music while Dennis and Lavada walked among the trees, looking at the stars in the splash of overhead night, moving with arms joined, just beyond where the old man might overhear their lowered talking.

“I know it’s not long now,” she said.

“Not long?”

“Not long before he’s too much for me to handle.”

He squeezed her hand. “You’ve done a lot for him.”

She shrugged, pressing her back against the rough skin of an oak and facing him. “I’m not sure how much that’s worth in the end. Or if he’ll remember it at all. He talks about you a lot when you’re not here, you know. His idea of you, anyhow”

“He thinks I’m Mason.”

She did not look at him, though she nodded her head. “You’re something else to him, I think. A wish. Something he wants to believe in. It matters to him a great deal that we’re together.”

“I hope he’s not the only one.”

She kissed him, and they moved back toward the house, the best qualities of night surrounding them. He tried to tell himself that he did not mind her silence.

MASON FLUNG THE TARP IN ON top of the last of the boxed produce, cursed the bastard for dumping perfectly good collards on the ground, sat in the cab of the old man’s truck. He counted out what he’d earned in a day of watching the stand, deducting his wages from the take home envelope before he cranked the engine and drove to the BP station to buy a six-pack of Bud and a bag of ice for the cooler. He drank from some of Hammond’s Old Crow while the beer iced, decided to get just one cold one from The Slab Tavern down near the county line before heading back to the general store for the night.

The parking lot was full, a Thursday evening. He could hear Blake Shelton on the jukebox, bragging about what a good country boy he was. Inside, under a poster of a high skirted woman spread across a Mustang, he found an empty seat and ordered a pitcher.

“Can’t sell a pitcher to one customer. It’s the law,” the curly headed waitress said. She popped gum when she talked. Her red tongue moved inside her red mouth.

“My buddy’s in the john.”

“He is, is he?”

“Got the bladder the size of an English pea.”

She didn’t smile but still went behind the bar and pulled the tap. When she came back she set two pilsner glasses besides a full plastic pitcher. He watched her behind as she walked away. That just made him feel worse. He began to drink, and in a little while that did too.

He had not had a woman since the last night before he’d been arrested for the charge that would send him up to the pen. A teenage girl named Kayla, one of his best customer’s daughters. He’d driven up to the Plum River turnaround and sat smoking and waiting for old Tom Parrish to come down for the order of Oxycotin he’d called in earlier that afternoon. It was a quiet and warm night, stars unwinding above the low river. He was undisturbed that Parrish had not come at the appointed time. He enjoyed the calm of the evening, a momentary retreat from the drawing on of the mask of personality. When the girl had shown up in her father’s stead, it was on foot and with sweat on her like she was something new. Urgent, untidy, a shadow to what may have been her better portion.

He took her from behind, her hands and forearms braced against the trunk of a hemlock, bare toes pinching at the mulch. She gasped and begged him to come. Once he did, she reached back and drew her shorts up to her waist before leaning forward against the old tree, catching his hand between the bark and the jumping pulse of her belly. He didn’t let his better flesh stay trapped long.

He went down and washed his face in the river before driving home, leaving the girl at the end of the long dirt drive of Parrish’s riddled trailer before moving on. Easing the long back roads. Listening and seeing everything like it had been scratched and later smoothed over clean. The tree frogs in chorus. The moon pausing in a thin signature of empurpled cloud. The sea smell of strange unseen blooms. He could have dreamed it all that way if the world hadn’t.

When he pulled into the hollow the cabin’s lights were out, Lavada and the old man having gone to bed. Whether they heard him come in didn’t matter. Their senses might record his physical shape and presence, but what he left behind in their minds would evaporate quickly. He knew he had already begun to change in their eyes, to flicker away. This last night meant pressing up close against the pieces of a life that was no longer his, but he was prepared for that far better than they. He was ready for the break between what was given and stolen, met and taken.

He stripped but did not shower. When Lavada turned to him in bed he could feel her tense, smelling the stranger on his body. She called him a goddamn sonofabitch before she kissed him on the throat and worked her hand around his slack cock but got nothing in return. She began to cry then and did not shrug away when he put his arms around her. When he fell asleep he had dreamed of diving through oceans and never finding bottom.

The pitcher of beer went down too fast and when he stood to pay his tab his knees were loose in their joints. He braced up against a cedar column at the end of the bar while he peered down into his slim wallet. Someone may have laughed. He thought of knocking them on their ass, but he was too tired to venture so much.

It was dark out and he leaned against the side of the truck a long time before he could match the key to the door lock. He settled himself with one quick pull from the Old Crow before he cranked the engine. The curves were quick as bullets, and before long he’d sweat the best part of his beer and nerve out, hands aching from where they gripped the steering wheel. He was afraid to drive too slow, knew the cops would have him. He pulled over and sat with his head out the passenger’s window until he vomitted a long clear trail that cleaned his thinking. He put the shift back into drive and horsed the engine further down the road, cutting over the centerline before jerking back. Nobody was around to notice.

Memory crawled up through him. Without knowing he intended it, he found himself slowing at the head of the familiar hollow, headlights doused. There was room enough in a big oak grove to drive down and sit, to listen to the night and what was spread out in the evening country. He could not make out the distant cabin despite the unleafed hardwoods. Had he been sober, nothing could have brought him here. Pride and daylight were brothers, but nighttime hurt was surely different.

He closed the truck door and walked down the gulch, staying clear of the gravel drive. The ground was stony above the creek bed. He knew it all. Remembered something like a boyhood here. Evidence that time did not obey the laws we prescribe it.

He stepped among the windfelled branches, voices ahead drifting in the twilight like summer smoke. He watched from the cover of tall trees, arrested by the sound of her speaking and the broken music of his father behind her softly scratching his fiddle. This was their world without him, an empire of quiet. No power of his will could ever change that.

He saw the man with her, but could not hear him if he spoke. This brother of the night walking along the trails of everything remembered but no longer known. Mason could not hate him. He could only look on, hidden, recused from caring for something so clearly lost.

He left without once being seen and drove the empty roads to the general store where the dog stood to meet him, ears erect. He got out and fed it, talking sweet nonsense and scratching its dusty coat until dirty clouds rose before letting it inside with him where they curled together like corn sheaves on the bed in the back room. Mason drank his cooler of iced beer while he listened to the timbers of the store settling. The dog closed its brown eyes and slept with its long snout against his chest, snoring and yelping while it dreamed.

Deep night sounds woke him. He lay still, listening to what sounded like the living groans of the building itself. The dog did not wake, but that meant nothing. What wildness the animal had in the past was worn smooth by years on the chain and plastic bowls of easy water. It would have been better to strangle it. Little more now than fleas and appetite.

He shrugged free of the mattress and crossed to the counter where the shotgun was cased. He checked the shells before shutting the breech.

Taking the stairs to the basement, he heard the scrape and shuffle again. The sound set off a tremble and scratch on the bottom of his brain. He brought the shotgun up as he moved across the cool floor, his heart convulsed. Light cut the spaces between the boards at the end of the room, faint yellow. An occasional contagion of shadow wheeled across, a theater played out on a hidden stage. He placed his free hand to the horizontal boarding, seeking some latch or door but the way was sealed.

Outside the wind blew and trees scratched busy shadows by the moon. He walked through this, moving around the side of the building and along the natural decline of the yard. Vines clung to the store’s cinder block foundation, clothing it. A broader growth of weeds and snarled bushes surrounded the way in. He cautiously picked through, discovering a path, a wicket. He had to bend deeply to go on but when he did he found the right-of-way eased. The dirt was firmly packed and rutted. He followed it all the way to a painted door.

He squatted by the hinges and listened but the wind was too strong to hear anything. After waiting one moment more, he braced his shoulder against the door and shoved in. A sudden warm room and a man who twisted his neck to face him, calm as sleep. Mason looked in. A scavenged table, hot plate, a pyramid of dented canned goods: corn, stewed tomatoes, Van de Kamp’s beans. The wheelchair in which the man sat, spokes thin and rusted.

His hair was gray and fine, soft as a dog’s ear, grown to his shoulders. One eye glanced off from the steady line the true one held.

“I live here,” the man said simply. “Knock.”

“Does Hammond know?”

The man shrugged, turned back to his hot plate with its open can of burbling red sauce.

“You won’t need that scatter gun.”

Mason looked down at what he held before leaning it against the block wall within reach.

“You got anything to tell me?”

The cripple answered like one well rid of patience, “All of this tells enough, don’t it? I got nothing else. Nothing has me. Call the fucking cops if you want.”

Mason turned some of the cans to read their labels. Weighed the contents in his palm.

“This is expired. Come up tomorrow and I’ll see what there is we might swap out.”

He didn’t wait for the man to answer before he went back out and softly closed the door behind him. The wind continued to bark through the nightscape, brandishing the world.

SHE WOULD TAKE SAM TO TOWN for a new suit. He had been awakened by the spring, made better. She could see it in him, something working its way through his chemistry, solving inner riddles. How long the reprieve might last didn’t matter. Only that he was alive and aware, surfacing from the poor distractions of what had held him under for so long.

She dressed finely. A peach wraparound dress tied off over the hip. A tilted straw hat that pricked her shoulders with small holes of overhead sunlight. Perfume on her clavicle. Lipstick and nail polish bright as cardinals. She wore it all like armor.

She had seen Mason three weeks before, tending the small vegetable stand in town. The first sight of him flipped her stomach and brought heat into her face, but she had kept driving on, managing the difficult science of keeping the car in its lane all the way home. Once she was stopped she had leaned over while long grieved breaths sucked out of her and the sky bleached palely. Her head began to throb, but as the pain entered her some sense of what was real did too. She steadied. The ground would not open to consume her.

Now she no longer feared seeing him. If he was back and had not come home, the decision was already made. Drifting in his absence had been all she could endure for those two years. There was another life to live, another sadness to obey. Sam and later Dennis had been enough to command her loyalty and prove her trust. Mason, however, was a face out of another time, a marriage to a part of her that had become impossibly distant and uncanny. He had killed that version of her long before he’d been sent to prison, made sure it was buried under for good.

Sam met her at the car. This trip in had been his idea, but as soon as he had uttered it she knew it was what they both had needed. She placed a call to his nurse to let her know she wouldn’t be coming in for the day. Dennis too had given her no problems about a day off on such short notice. The stolen day had been exonerated.

On the drive in they saw early blooms: pears and plums, wisteria heavy and full. The whole valley gorgeously festooned, occupied with new life. They parked on Main Street and walked Canon City’s small downtown, the great courthouse on the hill looming over everything like a writ. She took his hand in hers and they watched gliding twins of themselves in the sunlit facades of the stores, talking easily through a peerless half hour.

At Spivey’s department store they met a kindly young man who took Sam’s full measurements while he stood on a small platform near the back. The boy chatted, discussing the weather, the coming Memorial Day parade, the new pastor at First Baptist Church. He advised a seersucker for the hot months ahead. Sam momentarily lost his concentration when his eye was caught by a shelf of porkpie hats, and Lavada feared she might have lost him, but he sharpened when the boy brought out the chalk to mark the final tailoring lines. He stood as trim and correct as a recruit.

They stepped around for lunch while the alterations were made. It was a slow afternoon workwise and the tailor said he was happy to turn the job around within a couple of hours. Sam drank coffee and waited for sandwiches made behind the counter at the drug store. Lavada sipped a vanilla coke, kicking her legs from the high stool.

“Why doesn’t my son live with us, Daughter?” Sam spoke casually as he watched his reflection in the buffed metal flashing above the soda fountain. He did not appear upset by his distended image.

“Who are you talking about, Sam?”

“My son, the one who comes to see you. Whom you walk with.”

Her breath eased. He meant Dennis.

“He has to work, Sam. To pay his way. He’s very responsible. It’s something to be proud of.”

Sam grimaced, trying to find sense in the strangeness of her words.

“He should be with us, though. With family. That’s always best, isn’t it?”

Lavada did not tell this to Dennis when she saw him the following night in Pennington. He lived above the restaurant in a small one-bedroom apartment. The iron balcony out back looked over a deserted block where a textile mill had once supplied the community with its primary industry. The sky was bright, humid and clean above the shuttered windows of the derelict building. Dennis would let her smoke there on the balcony and sit beside her with the local weekly paper folded across his knee, swatting at carpenter bees that circled and ducked. She liked the desolate peace of dusk, the thin current of cigarette smoke unspinning from the tips of her fingers before it was caught by a breeze and tumbled away. On the corner above the post office the American flag snapped and huffed. She wondered if it might rain.

That evening neither was very hungry, so after a couple of beers and some crackers with cheese they decided to go for a walk. Except for the occasional passing of one of the two cruisers manned by the on-duty sheriff’s deputies, the streets were empty and they strolled down the double painted center strip. Mourning doves were going to roost in the power lines.

They found themselves at the railroad switching yard, freight cars sleeping in a long iron line. Dennis stepped up to an open car first and helped Lavada in beside him, their legs hung over the side. At one distant end an engine was coupling, slamming down in a great metal shuddering, coming fast and loud before it was through them and suddenly gone. It frightened and exhilarated her. She clutched his arm, her fingers like arched spiders.

Not much later they returned to his apartment. She called Sam’s nurse to see if everything was alright. It was a new girl named Peggy, a young woman working on becoming an RN at a small two-year college over in Asheville. Lavada liked her, trusted her. Knew she was that rarest creature, a caretaker who treated her charge with dignity. While she talked to her on the phone, the cord curled itself around her finger like black vine.

“It’s gotten later than I meant for it to,” she said, looking at the main street below. A quieted storm had stacked itself under the moon glare. Rain pattered down on the cooling sidewalk.

The phone was silent on the other end. She was almost to the point of giving up when Peggy answered, “Why don’t you just stay over. I can sleep here tonight.”

She could feel pricks of sweat rising along the backs of her arms, her neck.

“Thank you, Peggy. That would be wonderful if you could. If you really wouldn’t be too put out.”

She could feel something being given to her across that distance. A pardon. The room seemed to become smaller, more definite.

“Of course, Mrs. Laws. I’ll see you in the morning.”

The line clicked dead and Lavada held on to the receiver a moment, pleased by the numbed weight in her hand. She set it back on the cradle and turned to Dennis. He had switched on a standing lamp and was sitting with one of the books Sam had given him, some of the old volumes from when he’d been a professor.

“What are you making of that?” she asked, amused that he’d wade through such old things, scrawls out of an imagined world.

He answered with a thin smile, hefting it up on one flattened palm like a platter. He turned the cover so she could see it, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown.

“Slow, but good. Stormy.”

He set the book down, disinterested in anything in the room but her. His eyes were soft as old maps. She went to him.

He was unhurried, kissing her and making her take off everything she wore before he reached between her legs. His hand laid upon the surface of her sex for a long time, drawing out the heat until she began to press against his palm. The friction quickly eased as she wet him and he spread her slick up into her wiry hair and belly, rubbing into her skin what she’d given up.

As he rolled onto her she could feel her breath catch sharp, an unexpected pain driving up through her throat as he went into her, bringing a small white cry. He stopped to see if she had been hurt but she drew him on, bringing their bodies together in an agreement of skin. He loosened in her with a gasp, eyes drunk, face tight as rope. Later, they coiled together and let the darkness cleanse them.

In her dream she was alone in a large building, grey walled and sparely lit. Thin ice frailed the windows. She was wandering room to room, the smooth floor polishing the soles of her feet. Mason was shooting pool in the back by himself. She could not see him but she could hear the faint clicking of the balls as he ran the table, racked and ran the table again. She wanted to go to him, but her legs were impossibly tired and he receded in time, replaced by a vision of her grandmother’s face, pained, close to the hour she died.

It was a counterfeit of a face really, a strange wronging of features, the paralyzed remnants after the second stroke. Lavada wanted to take her hands and pass them across the tangled muscles, iron the sickness away. When she reached for her, the old woman slackened, her inner form giving way so that the skin left behind was as light and drawn as a wish.

She sat awake, spent tears beginning to dry. Dennis slept deeply beside her. She moved slightly to see if he would stir but he remained sealed in his own weighted world. She went to the window and looked down on the faintly lit street. It had stopped raining. A few shallow pools gleamed blackly.

She dressed and still Dennis did not wake. She did not write him a note, waiting to slip on her flats after she had descended the steps and locked the restaurant’s front door behind her. She looked up the long and empty street only once before she stepped into her car and cranked the engine.

The digital clock on the dashboard told her it was just shy of four. She drove slowly, letting the road string her home, as if she and the car were a paired realization of its mere surface, its distracted truth. Once she came into Sanction County she wanted to keep on and she drove past the hollow and beyond that the Smokevine National Forest, an abiding yield of loamy silence. The radio would not tune to any strict signal, so she rolled the driver’s window down and let the sound of the vehicle’s own slipstream beat softly against her like a voice.

She had not thought of her grandmother in so long. She had stepped through that regret, defied it, but now it rose up in her, captured her reason. The old woman had been the closest thing Lavada knew of a mother, before her body had revolted against herself, made her a bitter and unpredictable version of the person she had been years before. She of the long elegant arms and who played bridge and practiced calligraphy. The unexpectedly galloping laugh, quieted when Lavada signed her over to the home. Attendants in fuchsia scrubs, pants lisping as they walked down the hall to check on detached IVs, shit bedsheets. The rare visits growing ever rarer. The broken and squandered time.

She pulled into the empty lot where she had seen Mason with his vegetable stand. A gypsy was what he was, a weakness. She closed her eyes and tried to root out what he infected her with. How long that had been the case. The trying and the failing. The severe fact of him, like a blow. Dennis was too good. He would learn to desire a life apart. Even with him inside her a piece of her retreated, played a sick brand of impersonation. Hating Mason is what sealed her devotion to him. Loving Dennis, she feared, would divide her from him forever.

When she admitted this to herself something uncoiled inside her belly. The phantom of the daughter Mason and she had together and lost. Never born, but miscarried in the final trimester the year before he’d gone away. The loss of the child and then the loss of the man. Like the sea drying up before the river feeding it. The barren and cracked bed. But not everything was dry. Even now, she still held milk, and it would sometimes rise sorely to the faded burst of her nipples. But it was never enough to stain.

She smoked for a long time, not knowing what stayed her until she saw the first dawn light picking up the heavy bull neck of the distant ridge. Perhaps he would come and say something to her. Make the slightest promise, the injury of hope. There was a time she would have died on his whims, but this, she decided, was a poor day for tragedy. She started the car and drove.

Teach me, Son. Tear down the truth I’ve learned. Now that you are back, now that you are true. Break apart what we’ve lost, what I’ve raised like castles of cloud. You have seen the ache in me, the vagrant hopes. All my mastery of words and the words behind the words, the bedrock of genius, the dreams of great men. All that slipping from me, sifting down like sand into an iron pipe. The burial of everything that has comprised your father’s heart.

Remember when times were hard? When I was awake late into the nights over my Hawthorne and you were always at your mother’s side? That was the poverty of a scholar’s life. The hidden price for a chance to delve into pages, sound out the minds of men dead for a century. Not a pursuit for the average man. The prudent one either, I admit. But it was a tool in my hand that had to be used. I wanted to escape the physics of an ordinary, productive life. I wanted to bend meaning, to see things new. Like all fathers want from their sons, I wanted you to love me for my ingenuity.

But you were not born yet, even though I imagined you, even though I saw you lingering in the house like a haunting not yet realized. Those were the lonesome years, the fraught labors. Anticipation of a life I was never meant to have. There are these two lives inside me always, these competing realities that have set me along a strange path.

HAMMOND SOON gave Mason larger responsibilities. A low slung brick building with a dozen separate units just down the road from the general store. It overlooked a small river dam where the poor would come to fish with kernels of canned corn. These apartments belonged to the old man, but he was derelict in his attention and the rooms had a tendency of finding premature ruin. He wanted Mason to put a few coats of interior paint on the walls and to repair what other varied elements of the building might be repairable. In exchange, he was to be allowed to live rent free in the smallest unit, live like a man making his justified way. He accepted.

Several of the rooms were cluttered with old pressboard tables and shaky chairs. These he hauled to the curb for garbage pick-up. What remained were small single rooms with attached kitchenettes and leaky bathrooms, each unit nearly duplicating the last. Small black snakes climbed up the drains. He carried them out back to a jungle of kudzu for release. He hoped the noise of his work and the paint fumes would keep them away.

By the end of the first week he had finished three of the dozen apartments. Hammond came down with the old dog and they stood for half an hour watching Mason work. He did not say whether he was pleased with the progress that had been made but he left a pair of twenty dollar bills for the day before stepping down to the river for an afternoon’s worth of drowsy fishing. When he came back Mason saw his stringer was empty.

At night he still slept in the back room of the general store. The cripple would come to the door and tap on the glass before letting himself in. They talked long into the night while sharing bottle after bottle of Old Crow.

His name was Irving and he claimed Cherokee blood. He spoke with a lisp from missing several upper teeth, removed for undisclosed reasons. His wheelchair, he claimed, was found by the side of the road, and he used it only when the pain got past bearing. Often, he was able to shuffle along on foot, making slow distance with patient will and humility, still better than his battered wheels permitted. He told of sheriff’s deputies who pulled him off the side of the road and said they would beat him to death if he wasn’t across county lines by dark. There were some, he said, who were National Guardsmen newly back from Iraq, and when they said they would hold him under the river until he stopped breathing, he believed them.

Mason liked him and decided to bring him along to finish the work on the apartments. Irving ran errands back and forth from the truck, keeping him in beer and paint while he worked quickly, doors and windows thrown open to the bracing spring weather, wasps bouncing themselves off the windowpanes and the brick façade under the hard sun. It was a fine rhythm, a regularity that seemed to take on its own intelligence. By sundown of the first day, Mason was done with four more units and they sat together on the concrete stoop drinking the last of the day’s iced beer and watching a few college girls walk down the sidewalk toward off-campus parking.

Irving asked, “You ever think of doing that?”

Mason thought he was talking about the brunette they’d been watching and laughed.

“Hell, brother. They’d have me thrown in with the child molestors.”

“Not the women. College. Getting some education might keep you from painting walls all damn day.”

Mason looked off at all the grass that needed cutting.

“No, I’m afraid that’s not exactly my style. Dumbest people I’ve ever met have got their PhDs. I can’t afford to lose whatever brains I’ve still got. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little painting.”

That night he set Irving up in one of the finished rooms before walking back to the general store. He promised he would return early the next morning with provisions and what few possessions the squatter had stockpiled in the basement. Once back Mason filled two cardboard boxes with canned goods and a few candy bars, writing IRVING on the sides in black magic marker. It occurred to him that he might have done well to consider his own subsistence, but figured splitting these lifted wares would see them both through until he could afford a proper visit to the grocery store.

He awoke the next morning to the first smooth grain of dawn. He stood around while the coffee pot gurgled and his sleeping joints loosened, body knots slackened. Time to give himself over to the needs of the day, the demands of labor. Time for the body to relearn the merits of the working repetition he would inflict on it.

He wanted to push through and finish with the rest of the apartments by sunset. The idea of a deadline gave a pleasing form to the time ahead. Some measurable fit to what he would accomplish given daylight and able hands. The prospect of making the rooms new and habitable calmed him, eased distracted thoughts. There was a fine simplicity in having a thing to do and then doing it, putting to rest the possibility of failure and miscalculation.

Irving was still asleep when Mason began work, but stirred himself without prompting and helped with whatever he could. This mostly consisted of amiable conversation, something to listen to while Mason striped the walls with new paint, white flecking their forearms and tee shirts. White spending itself in a mist on the taped plastic and unguarded floor.

Irving eventually and shyly told of how he’d suffered the spinal injury that crippled him. Mason did not pause from his work, knowing it might stop up the natural spring of words. He did not want to interrupt the quietness and care of something so rare. He listened as a lover might, patiently, without cause or need or illusions.

Irving had been desperate for money. He had been fired from the Wal-Mart stock room for showing up late with a hangover for the third time in a week. Without immediate recourse or any activity to fill up his hours, he had turned to what liquor he still had in the cabinets at home. When a few days later he surfaced from his fruitless duel with self-pity, he staggered down to the employment office to file for unemployment insurance payments. He was denied benefits a couple of weeks later, having already fallen late on the rent. Riding out the next couple of months until the eviction papers could be processed, he did no favors for his situation, drinking on the tab of friends and eating little. When finally he was forced out, he had exhausted what little good will of the community he could call on. Drunk and foolish, he’d devised a solution.

He waited outside the UPS warehouse at dawn, concealing himself amid a row of elms fronting the property. To prepare for the blow he had emptied a pint of Everclear, but on an empty stomach it had proven to be too much. His reflexes were slowed and he stepped out farther than he had intended, presented his entire body instead of a cocked shoulder toward the oncoming delivery truck. The impact threw him clear, but as soon as he hit the ground he knew the injury was bad. A tingling in his toes and calves quickly seized into an agonizing grip along his thighs, up his twisted spine, and blasting through the top of his skull. The pain was such that he couldn’t make the first sound and for a moment he was afraid the truck’s driver would not know he had struck him and would continue driving forward, rolling the large cleated tires across his chest.

He had spent two weeks in traction at the local hospital before he remembered a doctor talking to him. Perhaps there had been earlier visits, but if so they were lost to the dream of regularly administered pain medication. The man who did see him was young, young enough that Irving could have been his father. Even so, the doctor wore thick glasses to compensate for unusually bad vision. Irving remembered wondering if this poor condition might have been why the young man pursued medicine as a career.

There was a problem with nerves, some kind of damage that would need a specialist. But there was the question of insurance coverage, the lack of it. Certain words were repeated: pain management, dosage escalation…a mysterious language largely beyond what he could take in all at once. The more the doctor talked the more certain Irving became that he was about to be turned out with little more than the clothes he had been wearing and a small care package donated by the local domestic violence shelter.

That had been nearly a decade ago. The time since had been stripped of direction. The only regulation in his life was the fact of his pain, how to allay it. Years had passed where he hardly noticed the change in the season, living by the unreliable leavings of charity and bitter chance. Derelict cabins and stove-in trailers housed him in foul weathers. Anything found was not wasted. He had learned not to fear despair.

Mason finished up with the last of the rooms around suppertime and took Irving with him in Hammond’s truck to buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in town. It was a warm afternoon with low thin clouds hunting a way through Buckner’s Gap, drawing up like a bolt of bunched cloth against the face of Callum Mountain. The sound of the river running could be heard just the other side of the road where traffic coughed by.

“I’d say we did some good work this week,” Mason said, handing over the bucket.

They sat in the parking lot with the windows rolled down, breeze huffing through, the tickle of pollen in the air. Irving looked down at the chicken, studying each piece before gingerly lifting a drumstick by the tips of his fingers and laying it across a paper napkin spread across his lap.

“You did the work, but I appreciate you saying so.”

They ate, saying little more until both had finished and put the leftovers aside. They drank their cokes from long straws. Crushed ice softly rattled in their hands.

“I’d say there’s a good chance I need you to look after the store nights, if you’re of a mind,” Mason said.

“What’s that?”

“In the evenings, once I’m moved in to the new apartments. I’ll need to be over there more to look after things. It would be good of you to move into the back room upstairs in the store and watch the place overnight.”

“What about old Hammond?”

“I’m sure he would be happy to let me run it however I want. As long as I vouch for you.”

Irving was quiet for a long while before he said, “I would sure take it as a kindness from you. I sure would.”

The next day was a Saturday and they sold vegetables together and boxed the unsold remains up early to see what kind of hand they might turn at fishing. They drove down to Hammond’s farmhouse and brought him and the old dog Quest along, their rods and tackle shivering in the truck bed when they hit a bump in the road. Hammond and Irving took to each other quickly, sharing Old Crow and a cold Pabst tall boy while Mason killed an airplane bottle of Jack Daniels. By the time they arrived at the river, all three had begun to yield to easy laughter and loud voices. The sun was a kind animal on their shoulders.

Quest wolfed at some ducks. They spooked, flying low and fast, shadows enfolding them in the distance.

Under a spruce tree Irving and Hammond set down the cooler and their folding chairs. The water was running high but the bottom looked clear, riffles chopping. Mason waded toward the submerged wreckage of a poplar trunk and cast into an eddy, the heavy artificial lure plopping in the smoothed counterwork of current. The water was cool, dam released, and his calves soon numbed. When he walked he felt like he was in the grip of some alien gravity. He plodded along, staring down at the livid refraction of his shins, white as vented steam, the movement of water tugging tight against the skin. A blue heron stilted his way along a granite shelf on the far bank, moving upstream, stealing minnows from the shallows. When Mason came too close, the heron lifted silently and glided upstream and out of sight.

Mason moved up a few yards and cast to a clear hole where a pair of rainbow trout grazed. A couple of disinterested bumps but no serious follows as he cast and retrieved for a quarter of an hour. He glanced back to the bank where Irving and Hammond were sitting a few feet apart, watching their plastic corks drift by. They looked like they might be dozing.

He worked his way over a slick boulder to get at a pool beneath the branches of a tulip tree, casting in low so as to keep the lure out of the leaves and still achieve good distance. The lure slung in close to the loamy bank. A single snagged leaf wheeled down, spinning on the slow surface. He began the retrieval. Almost at once, he felt a strong bump, like a hand jerking the line at the other end for a moment before releasing. He stopped reeling, let the lure sink, then gave play with a short sideways jerk of the rod tip. The fish struck. Mason let line strip as the trout ran down and away from the rocks, heaving for broader water. When the run stalled, he leaned back on his hip, setting the rod high just long enough to get the fish to turn upstream, tiring itself against the beating current. He reeled in hurriedly, getting back as much of the line as he could before the fish turned again, running deep and fast, headed toward the underwater timber. Mason staggered, working back to the bank where Hammond and Irving were watching him. He needed to discourage the fish from taking the line in among the snags. He needed to keep it free and fighting in the open stony bed. He needed to get it to rise.

As if the thought had summoned it, the brown trout ripped the surface. It allowed only the briefest glimpse, but must have been close to twenty-five inches, golden and powerful. Mason allowed it another short run before pulling up high on the rod, first to the left, then quickly back to the right to confuse the fight. The arced line cut a steep angle to the water, drawing steadily closer. He raked the net from where he’d tied it on to his belt loop and leaned out. The fish’s belly flashed whitely, and then it broke back once more, making strong for a stone ledge. He must wait. He must wait.

“You need some help?” Hammond called from the bank, clearly tickled.

“Just toying with him,” Mason answered, tried to laugh, but his heart clenched when the trout cut downstream once more, stripping line until the reel just cried. He waded after it, stumbling once and slipping on a mole of wetted rock. He plunged in chest deep, the cold water jolting him back to his feet immediately. He envied cold-bloodedness.

The fish was running too hard, going in among some swift water. There was too much line out, close to a hundred yards. Too much out there he couldn’t see.

And then the line went slack. Gone.

When he climbed up onto the bank Irving handed him one of the iced beers. They sat and drank, wordless, watching the metallic surface of the river wind by. Hammond flipped his line out, the hook baited with three kernels of corn. The old man looked after it like it might have been a humble prayer. Mason felt like he might throw up.

“I don’t even want to believe that happened,” Irving said, a kind of hard pain deep in his throat.

“Well, it did,” Mason said, turning up the beer. “It happened right out there. Right in front of my own eyes.”

“It was a hell of a fight though. That was some angling or I’ve never seen it.”

“You want to give it a try?”

“Me? I’ve got me a cork out there already.”

“You won’t catch nothing but pan fish with a rig like that. You got to get out there. You might be busted up in flesh and bone, but I believe you got enough in you to wade out.”

Irving rose, shuffled forward.

“The hell you say. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

Mason helped him down to the edge, mud blooming in the shallows around their ankles. He could feel fear in Irving, a sense conveyed through touch alone, but unmistakable, living. His hands on the old man were urgent and quiet songs. When they entered deeper water Irving calmed, the river meeting around them, enclosing them in a single shared space. The current had its own fluent voice. They moved toward it together like men sentenced.

Irving cast across and began a clean retrieval, listening to Mason, giving play when told, waiting. Then casting again, learning to read the surface, learning how water shaped according to the principles of force and form. The inferring of the hidden world below the water line, the mystic antagonisms. Patience instilled itself, creating its own capacity.

Time and more time.

The strike. Down and away, drawing off with smart resistance. Mason could see the realization of it explode in his friend’s eyes. He spoke little, letting the fight develop outside of him, knowing it was Irving’s alone now. The water snapped as the trout freed for a moment. Mason watched, waiting, the net unslung, imagining the movement of the line.

“Bring it to the current,” he said, the words easy and cool. Words of readiness.

He moved toward the fish, reaching to draw it in.