It is an invincible fact: When a man finds himself outdoors without a pair of britches to his name, his whole world can be reduced to this lack. He has one thought only, like a giant magnet in his mind, forever tugging the iron of his will back to it. That thought is britches. And how can I get me some.

I myself can speak to this phenomenon for I have walked fifty-four miles through the Blue Honey Mountains, from Hickamaw to Nuckton without the benefit of a solitary sock. And let me tell you, until you feel the ice of wind across your hinterparts, you just don’t know how lonesome a body can grow for a patch of cloth.

Need can be emboldening, and so can be the cold, so when I strode into my hometown that hapless day in late September of 1849 I did not slow my pace. A wagon driver saw me and whoa-whoa’d his horse. The sounds of hammering faltered. A mother shushed her child. A fella pulled the pipe from his mouth and followed me up the road with his eyes, but what can you do? You either got pants or you don’t. The Lawsons’ general store was near enough the edge of town and I bore the mixed hope that after six years gone they’d still remember me there, after which they’d summarily forget. I stamped up the porch and went directly in.

“Low there,” I says, tipping what would have been my hat to the girl at the counter. She over-poured corn from the sack she was weighing, one side of the brass scale clanking against the counter and little kernels skittering across the floor like beads. The look on her face I found difficult to read, but I began to relax some, for it appeared nobody was going to reach for a rifle.

What’s more, I believed I knew that clerk. It was Rachel Lawson, the storeman’s daughter, standing there in her blue lace apron, looking sort of froze-like, staring, hands at her ears to hold back her curtain of locks. Rachel had one of those faces so pale, her eyelashes were practically invisible. That’s Rachel Lawson. And quite a nice girl if I recall.

“How come you ain’t got no britches on?”

None too delicate in her observations, though.

“Long story. Look here, how about setting me up with a pair of them overalls you got on the shelf back there.” We’d never spoken that I could recall, but I knew of her good. Good old Rachel Lawson. “And while you’re at it, might as well take down a couple of them licorice ropes for yourself. It’s on me.”

She let her hair fall back into her eyes. “And how you plan to pay for it all?”

Looking around, it seemed folks in the store were starting to take some notice of my situation.

“Pay?”

“Yeah. Pay.”

“Welp,” says I. “That is the thing of it. As I don’t seem to got much on me right now.”

“Now that’s a fact.”

Shrewd too, that girl. Though she failed to fathom that between money and britches, money was by far the lesser of my two predicaments. “Listen,” I says. I tell her, “Listen here, I’m trusting you to see these are extra-ordinary circumstances. A fella does not choose to go thus clad, and on account of this fact you might be willing to forego all your little fancy conventions and allow me to—”

“My little—my—wait, what do I got?”

I tried to clarify with a vague wave of my hand. “Payment,” I says. “You know, payment. Let me work for them denims. I ain’t asking for charity, just a set of overalls and the labor to pay for it.”

She just looked at me a while. A long while she looked. She seemed to be debating the seriousness of the affair, batting it around in her mind like she was watching someone in a clown suit trying to touch off a stick of dynamite. And I can tell you, there are a good deal more than sixty seconds to a minute when you’re standing around, counting them naked.

By and by, old Rachel, she clucked her tongue in recognition. “Wait, I remember you! You’re one of them Lereaux, aren’t you! From up Blackwater Hollow? You’re that Dannon one, that Dannon Lereaux.”

It was the truth she spoke, and I told her so.

“You been gone long enough,” she says. “So where you been?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Huh,” she says, laying her forearm on the counter and sweeping the corn back onto an open newspaper, then leaning forward on both hands all contemplative-like. “Dannon Lereaux. Isn’t that something. So what are you, like eighteen now? So what you been up to? You’re doing well?”

“Oh, well, you know,” I says. Then recalling my manners, I added, “So how’s your daddy been?”

“You know Daddy? Oh, what am I saying, course you do. Yeah, he’s doing good.”

“Good. That’s good,” I says. “Yeah, and your mama? She’s doing fine?”

“Mama? Oh she’s doing good. Yeah. Yeah she’s doing real good.”

“Good,” I says. “That’s real good. Listen, about them denims—”

“But wait! I just thought of a thing! Didn’t you used to be the water-witch or something around here?”

“Dannon the Lereaux boy?” says an old fella in suspenders, one of the several onlookers now forming a crescent at my back. “He was a dowser all right. That you boy? You member me?”

I saw right off it was old man Willard. Old Willard Lee that’s got the game eye from a horse-kick to the side of the head. Cocking his thumb at me, he says to Rachel, “I swear to you, this boy could locate a rain puddle in China. And if you had a drill could dig deep enough, I’d prove it to you, yes I would. He’s the one that dowsed me my nigra well, and I ain’t never seen nothing like it.”

“Well I knew it!” cried Rachel, who’s now all fired up. “Cause I remember good now! They used to say you dowse scientific-like. Like you never miss a well. That so?”

“More than less,” I tell her, and then to expedite the matter I laid out how I needed willow switches to do it. A pair of them, and had to be willow. It had been a while, but I suspected I could still locate a spring of good water within ten feet of precision. Good water, mind you. “All goes fine, I can tell you how many gallons per minute you’ll be getting too,” I added, and old man Willard confirmed this with a ‘Hyup’ and a nod, that game eye of his rolling round in his head.

Now dowsing’s one of those things I’ve been doing so long I can’t remember if I was ever taught proper or just figured it out on my own during my days as a lonely youngin in the Blue Honeys. Either way, I was born to it I suppose. I have a skill in the matter, and as this girl tells me her daddy’s looking to dig a second well prior to winter I agreed to the transaction. New clothing for water suited me fine.

Thing is, as she turned around to fetch me my overalls from the shelf, I saw the hem of her dress was tucked up into the back of her underdrawers, which gave me quite a sight of her backside. Course she didn’t know this and I could have told her, but something about the irony of a pretty girl in such a sorry state can help a man, who is standing dumb and naked in the middle of a gawking crowd, to salvage the smallest fragment of dignity from what would otherwise be everlasting ruination.

R

My Pa, he says when I was born I was big as a prize bass, and about as ugly too. His opinion of me never changed much either. I was the middle child of nine, and the only one still alive when Pa declared it wasn’t all the loss that stole his faith in God, but our Lord choosing me for the living.

That’s Phineas Lereaux for you. Good old Phinny, about as fixed in his path as the Shallewapre River and a heart the color of her mud. His back, too, was slouched as her undercut banks, and I could not walk that river without recalling my old man, hunched in his chestnut rocker, getting cornliquordrunk and ornery.

But I cannot complain, for the man was good enough to kill himself off early on in my days. I was approximately twelve the night his favorite hound dog got killed. By another hound, no less, and old Phinny, he was a fourth generation coon-hunting man who rightly believed God’s sole plan, from Adam on down, was expressed in a man and his hound dog running varmints up a tree. Well old Phineas drank himself a fifth of whiskey in his grief and took a long walk down a short path to the river.

Mama said, “Tis’ to our good fortune,” and complained only that old Phinny never buried a dime. But if my pa said one word of truth in his life it was on this very topic, that of fortune, the ruthlessly benevolent nature of which this story is really all about.

The day he drowned himself, old Phineas, he tied up all the hounds in the feedshed till the echoes of their baying came back off the mountains. Shoulders humped, he came back out carrying a bucket of corn slop, for reasons no one would ever divine, and chucked the whole of it against the south wall of our cabin. In shape, the spill took the likeness of a turkey, wattles and all, as it spangled the timbers of our log-built and my pa stared at it for the longest while as it dripped slowly to the earth. He was like a madman gazing at himself in the mirror. I could only guess what he saw.

“Fortune.”

Then he spat. But even when he didn’t spit he had a way of speaking made you think of it. “For-tune!” he says again and then sniffed back something big. I was scattering a pan of corn to the yard chickens, my eyes fixed on Pa, never once thinking to turn away. Somehow I knew, beyond the innocence of my young years, that I would never again encounter a man more generously disgusted with life than my pa was right then. “Mind yourself, Dannon,” he says to me then, though his gaze never left the slop on the wall. “Mind yourself boy, because fortune’ll abandon you. Like death and certain mules it knows no master, you hear? Death and mules.” He turned and chucked the empty pail into the heap of chickens that scattered and arced across our muddy yard. “Even if a man should grab hold of fortune for a time and believe he tugs upon the reins, he is a fool for thinking it.”

Slowly, deep in thought-like, he scraped the bottom of one bare foot clean and then the other against the sagging steps of our porch, leaving little crests of mud to dry with the others. “Death and mules…”

That night old Phinny found death all right. As to the mules part of it all, I wouldn’t learn till later. For it wasn’t long after Pa died they sent me away.

R

Old Rachel, the storeman’s pale-face daughter, she was good as her word. She set me up with the overalls and a decent hat, and a plug of black tobacco near big as my fist. She gave me a new hankie for my pocket too, a nice pocket hankie, only it was red, which I cannot see on account my color blindness. Daltonism, they call it. Mixing up my reds and greens. They say it probably has to do with all the haywire in my head and would straighten itself out if I could only stop talking so crazy all the while.

Anyhow, while Rachel restocked the shelves and portioned up a barrel-shipment of glue into quart jars, I waited around on the porch of her daddy’s store, just chawing and spitting and watching folks go by. It had been more than six years since I’d been back. Three at the one place, then the three more soldiering. That’s a powerful long stretch to be gone from a place and it made me feel half a stranger.

Across the road I saw some McCotts with their youngins, who I recognized by their mama’s straw-hair. Then some of those Dowleys, you know those folks that cluster their cabins like frogs’ eggs around the base of Little Partridge, never conversing to nobody but kin? Saw a couple of them. They were trying to sell those speckled eggs they were always toting about in baskets, even when I was a youngin. I would have bought one myself, fresh speckled egg, just snap it right open and drink it down, but I was still considerably bald with respect to finances. So I made do watching a couple those Turner boys shoe a horse for an old fella with a wagon full of lumber. I knew they were Turners right off because every Turner you ever saw has legs bowed as a pair of sickles and little black eyes on either side of his head. Mama used to say that’s because those folks live on the backside of Little Partridge where visitors were too few and church too far, which is a shame and blight respectively. But that was just Mama’s way of saying every Turner in Nuckton was related thrice over.

Well Rachel, she took her leisure with that glue. By the time she locked up shop I was a good way through the plug she’d given me. Her daddy’s land lay two or three miles north up Lazy Boy Hollow, hollows being what we call those little dells that go back deep into a mountain. So the Lawsons’ place was a big place at the end of the hollow, and we walked it fairly fast so there would be light enough for me to see by and dowse a good well, or so my thinking went. But as I stated, I knew of Rachel. Good old Rachel Lawson. Even before I’d left Nuckton or so much as chipped my chin on a razor her name was known to me. She’s what we boys used to call ‘deciduous’ in her habits, shedding garments like leaves for anyone who would give her a good shake.

More than once Rachel Lawson suggested we depart from the road and step down to the creek for a peek how high the rain might of brought it. By and by, I agreed. The creek wasn’t much higher than I remember, though quick as gypsies, and the cottonwoods were beginning to turn. Yellow leaves were collecting all along the bank and you could smell the mulch of it. More than anything it was this smell that made me realize I was back. I was home. The horrors I had left behind were left behind.

I pointed out the lights. White and blue. I saw them swinging about, just under the water but Rachel Lawson professed not to see. I figured she saw all right, and knew what it meant too, only she didn’t care much for the meaning.

Besides, she was taken up with a powerful notion about then. Deciduous as ever, she made to get plenty friendly down there in the shady seclusions of the creek. This time she lifted that dress with a purpose.

Now some’ll say a womanfolk’s beauty, her everlasting charm, is inversely proportional to her scruples. I’m of a different camp. I’m no saint, mind you, and will gladly thump the man that slanders me so. But my heart just doesn’t work like that. Old Rachel Lawson, I wasn’t mean to her, but I told her how it is.

“I love another,” I says, plain and simple, and to this statement her little forehead wrinkled up, incredulous-like. She barked a quick laugh, cut it off sharp with a look of seriousness, eyebrows drawn, lips all pouty, then burst into laughter again. “Dannon Lereaux, I ain’t asking for your love! Just a quick tumble down here by the creek!” She laughed, not with me, as the saying goes, and you might of thought I was a fool by the way she kept smirking at me sideways as she shimmied out those skirts. “Now come on and get them overalls back off you. We don’t got a world of time.”

Thing is, I did love another. Only the time wasn’t yet right for us to be together. There would come a day, howsoever, of this I bore no doubt. There would come a time when I would lay with my love and leave her heavy with kisses and shelter in the bonds between us.

Except I wasn’t thinking about that right then, for Rachel Lawson, what with that pale little face, was making good headway in the transposition of her garb and it took most all my strength to keep that girl clad. So I picked her skirts back up from the leaves and pressed them into her arms. “My apologies,” I says. “I just don’t work like that.”

It took powerful encouragement, but we made our way back to the road. The sun was just dipping behind Henry’s Backbone, but there was light yet, mountain light, which is different from the stuff you see elsewhere. The west slope stayed bright with the last rays of the sun while the east slope came alive with crickets. And I listened. I walked and I listened till I faded away, just disappeared, with nothing left but a bunch of crickets all singing this mind.

That time of year, the Blue Honeys are a dream. A misty, luscious, horse-drawn land as colorful as any paint-smeared palette. The old country roads are all hemmed with long grass and meander as aimlessly as the cow that first made them. And follow any road far enough, any road at all, and you’ll find yourself winding up and up into hazy blue mountains, finally vanishing into the shade of dark woods.

The road up Lazy Boy Hollow was no exception. Almost immediately, it tapered down to no bigger than a trail, a muddy path rutted with hooves. We stayed mostly to the grassy shoulder, except where the cockleburs grew wild and pushed us back in. As we climbed, we passed many a sight that was like pure ache to my memories. Back in a copse of dogwood there was that old pine barn, empty and leaning, just like I remembered, where I used to pull nails by the pound and sell them for books. Then there was the old Nuckton silo, peppered with rust, where Mama said the skull of a dragon had been dug up in her youth, packaged in plaster and sent on to Washington Museum. Then the Hamptons’ bottomfield, pumpkins coming on. A dead snake on their fence to draw rain.

I saw a nanny goat peeking through a split-rail fence, and she saw me. And there ain’t nothing in this world like the Holy Spirit seeing the Holy Spirit in another.

Now these woods were nut-bearing woods, which are best in summer, but you can pretty well gather nuts off the ground all through autumn. Old Rachel, she stopped to collect herself a lapful of walnuts. The grass beneath the trees was littered with them. I’m not much for autumn nuts myself as they have a way of sneaking worms into your mouth without your noticing till it matters. But Rachel, she appeared not to mind and commenced to cracking them up between two stones, when I says, “Be getting dark soon.”

She scowled out the corner of her eye and kept cracking at those nuts.

“If I’m to be dowsing this day, perhaps we best keep on.”

“Don’t take but two minutes to crack a wad a nuts!”

That Rachel was in a huff. Shorn of her ardor, she was in quite a huff. So I squatted down there beside the path and let her crack up those nuts while I listened to the bonk of geese overhead. I watched a woodpecker berate himself. I smelled the sweet rot of autumn and saw a manbug itch a ladybug’s back.

It has long been a failing of mine to get caught up in the sound of a thing, even a word, at the exclusion of its meaning. Don’t ask me why, just something that happens in my head. When Mama first taught me to write, I filled whole notebooks with, “Chaos is a pretty haos by the C.” When she would ask what it means, I’d ask what she meant.

So as Rachel stood up to leave, with all the accompanying boot-scuffing and rustlings of departure, I failed to make the connection till she shouted, “All right! I’m done! We can go now!” Then she stamped up the path with an apron full of wormy nuts. Half of them, at least, she ended up pitching away upon closer inspection. She’d chuck them hard as she could, and I asked her how come girls always throw with their wrong arm, and she says how come men don’t bother to wipe the tobacco juice from their beard and let it dry there like they was goddamned mammals, and I says, I don’t know, do I got tobacco juice in my beard, and she chucked another wormy nut with the wrong arm.

Before long the Lawsons’ gates were clacking shut behind us. Rachel let out a long sigh and took me kindly by the arm and says sorry about all that, all that silliness back there. She says, don’t mind her, it was just the glue talking, and I was left to marvel at the labyrinth of her world and the twisting paths of her emotions as they had traveled between our first meeting and the present, realizing it is no wonder women complain of exhaustion. Surprise, suspicion, intrigue, passion, frustration, regret, kindness. She had just walked a hundred miles to my two.

She perked up when her daddy Lawson came out on to the veranda, and she introduced us cordially. Theirs was a big old place with stone chimneys either side, Lawsons being some of the only slaveholders in all of Nuckton, with a host of magnolia trees out front and plenty of bean rows climbing up the mountain, corn rows where the hollow was flattest. The slaves were thick as kindling running about the place fetching this and that. How the Lawsons afforded them, nobody knew, so the talk goes it was them that found the treasure of the Barbary pirates. Only now that I’ve traveled some and seen the distance to the sea I have some doubts about landlocked buccaneers in the Blue Honeys. Still, it is a mystery. The Lawsons are just mountainfolk like the rest of us, always have been, talk like us, church like us, only sometimes they pretend a difference, folks say, and take on airs what with their fancy manor and all those slaves.

But I never pay much mind to talk. Old man Gideon, who was Rachel’s daddy, he was plenty kind in my book. Before they sent me away I knew him good, as everyone did, him keeping up the only general store in Nuckton. He was one of those opal-haired old fellas with stubble goes gold in the sun and says shick-shick real satisfying-like when he brushes his knuckles up his cheek.

Mr. Lawson, he pumped my hand real good out there on the veranda and says, “I know this boy! A Mr. Dannon Lereaux needs no introduction here! Welcome home son. How is it, how long you get back?”

But I was momentarily distracted by a moth on the sill, this side of the window—once beautiful, maybe, but now quite dead.

Little legs pointing to the sun.

“Dannon?”

“Sorry, what? Oh just now, sir. Yeah, I am just getting back now.”

“Just now, just now. Well that’s fine. With the war over, I suspect you boys will be trickling in by and by. Well it’s an honor to have you. I’m sure your folks, God bless, would have been proud to have you back safe and sound too. But you’ll have to come in and tell me all about it. Mexico! By God! You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

“Actually, sir, I come by to help with—”

“Laurel!” he called back into the house. “Laurel, the first of them’s coming back from Mexico! The heroes is here! We got a guest needs something thirsty!”

With my new hat wadded up, I pointed back over my shoulder. “Like I was saying,” I says when his eyes came back to me, small and watery and blinking all over the place like his glasses were mislaid. I says, “It’ll be getting dark fairly quick now, and Rachel here tells me you need a well found. I thought if I could just—”

“Now who is it?”

Rachel’s mama. She flew out onto the veranda in a vapor of excitement, all homecooking smiles and smoothing her dress. She wasn’t near as old as old Gideon, being the second of his wives, but old enough to have those marionette-lines running down from her cheeks to her chin. And she had puffy cheeks too, which only added to the look. Another girl, just coming on to womanhood herself, she came out with Laurel but hung back some, staying near the door. This one looked electric-shocked or scared, I don’t know which, her eyes all big and bug-like. Only she always wore that look, no matter what she was staring at.

“Well don’t just leave him standing there, Gideon, introduce the man,” says Laurel, who I sort of remember from way back, but not really.

“It’s Dannon, hun! The Lereaux boy, from up Blackwater Hollow! You remember Dannon, what used to hang about as a littlun out front the store, scaring folks with his queer talk. Oh you did boy! I’ll reckon you don’t remember that!”

“Well he ain’t a boy no more. Look at him Gideon! He’s grown giant!” She took a step closer, hands on her hips, appraising me like a slave on a trading block. “Well Dannon, it’s a pleasure, and more so getting you all back in a piece. We get mighty bad reports of the fighting went on. Was it bad?”

A little fighting’s bad. A big fighting’s worse. A good kind of fighting is mighty hard to come by. “Some maam. Not much.”

All fairness to her, these were still the antebellum days. We hadn’t yet fought our Civil War and this little foray into Mexico constituted one of our country’s first marches against a foreign nation.

Laurel gave me a nice doting smile, maternal and naive. The other girl, the hanging back one, I saw now she was ready to pure litter. She had a woolen shawl around her shoulders, which covered her belly too, but it wasn’t hard to tell. Her arms and legs poked out spindly as a spider but her goddamn belly looked complete to bust. “You go on hun,” Laurel tells the littering one, whose name is Ducie. Ducie Lou. “Ducie, you help the nigras get something together for our guest now. He looks like he could eat a load.” She smiles. “What brings you out this way, Dannon?”

“He’s trying to tell you all,” says Rachel, puffing the hair from her eyes. “He’s here to dowse your well, Daddy. Just give him a pair of willow switches and he’s good as done.”

I was promptly fitted out, and by the time the fireflies came blinking out, as they like to do upon an autumn eve, I had located three spots for well-digging. None of them satisfactory. The first water was too deep, near a hundred foot, and would’ve needed the negroes’ quarters get torn down. The second came straight out the mountain at the edge of their property, but the water was no good, reading like sludge. I mean real slow. Less than a gallon a minute. The last site was my hope. It was dead center of their corn, which was still standing brown and unturned, south side. Plenty of good water, maybe twenty feet down. My switches were going wild there, crossing and flipping to where I commenced to feel that feeling I get, as if the water in my body and that in the earth is all skipping up my spine in a fountain of purest nectar. It is a delicious sensation unlike anything in this world, except maybe the shiver you get after a good piss in the cold.

Problem was, old Gideon already had a well-digging company come out there and they found the same site, only the stone getting down to the watertable was too thick to bust with a drill. Old man Gideon, he was pleased all the same, feeling satisfied my switches had found what the company had, claiming it was something of a peaked experience watching me work. He seemed especially fond of me after that.

Naturally there was a supper. I was plenty hungry, what with walking all the way from Fort Brown on the Rio Grande, twelve weeks in coming with scant rations at best. But old man Gideon, he had fought the war in 1812 and so kept pressing me for campaign stories, features of the battles in Mexico, shot and slash type stuff, wanting to know if General Taylor actually led his charges like they say or just commanded from the rear. I didn’t have much to tell on that account. Fact is, I’m not much proud of it, or anything else I did south of the border. We were the invaders so far as I am concerned, and the only bullets fired in the right were aimed at us.

The women kept on about this and that, mainly just jabbering to keep the rhythm of noise at a certain pitch. Even Ducie Lou, the hanging back one, was bailing words out of her mouth like too much water. “He did what?” she whispers across the table when she thinks me and old Gideon were too caught up to hear. “What did he do?”

And that Rachel, she leans forward with an elbow on the table, her hand at her cheek to shield her words. “He came strutting right in, like nothing was amiss, and asks me for a pair a denims as though he wasn’t wearing nothing but his party suit on.”

Her ma. “You mean his birthday suit, dear. His birthday suit you mean.”

Rachel. “That’s right. Nothing at all. But you should have seen him. It was like—”

Her ma. “Now Ray hun, let’s not poke fun. We don’t know nothing about him except he’s had a hard life, and we ain’t got no right passing judgment on another’s tribulations.”

Gideon. “Now it is one thing to shoot a man at a distance, but the charge… bayonets lowered, bugles trumpeting. Now that is glory. Something you take with you. Was you boys fighting hand to hand, sabers and all, or was it all musketwork down there?”

Rachel. “Ma! I ain’t passing judgment. I’m just trying to say he carried himself better as a naked man than most ten others in their Sunday best. More dignity-like, I mean. What if Daddy were to help him out some? Give him some work?”

Gideon. “Oh ho yes! I remember a time, back when they had us down in Norleens and the British was coming down on us, a company of us, and we set up behind a stack a cotton bales and I seen a man get blown straight—”

Her ma. “Now Ray, we don’t know nothing about him. For all we know he—”

And so it went. On the whole I was itching to leave. I was damn near to just coming out with it about the devil at the crossroads that stole my clothes and bidding everyone fare thee well. Let them sort it out on their own, I figured.

Nevertheless, I stuck around, my skin crawling in a juxtaposition to such unnatural talk and manners. Do I just take a bite from my plug of tobacco, or do I offer it around? And when I blow my nose, does the napkin go back like a hankie, or do I leave it setting in my lap just so? I never did know how to conduct my own with such folks, me the only one at the table without shoes.

The fare, however, was pure fine. Corn pone and fresh corned beef. Turnip greens and butter. As it was Ducie with the negroes that engineered the meal I offered her my thanks. She nodded, not at all warm-like. Figuring she expected more from me in the way of conversing I says, “So how far along are you?” And upon that remark, my mistake bucked up in my chest, me taking notice of the looks all about me. Only I never was much a wizard with words.

“How far along what?” says Ducie.

Not at all warm-like.

The big clock in the parlor must have tocked five or six times. I cleared my throat. “Well maam,” I says, letting go the towrope. “Either I am mistaken, or you are with child.”

Someone dropped a fork. Someone else coughed. All credit to Ducie who kept a calm face, but whose voice was tight with emotion. “You are mistaken.”

Never did a silence roar louder in your ears. Sometimes, when the artillery stopped thundering and the musket-smoke hazed the field, the ringing hush that followed seemed to creep right up from the depths of death itself. Yet it was nothing compared to this. I could hear the blood pulsing through my ears, and the ears of everyone present, as though we pulsed together as one, in harmonious horror at my wayward tongue, until old man Gideon got up the nerve to clear his throat.

“Reckon you’ll be looking for work, now you’re back,” he says to me, and everyone appeared plenty grateful for the break in tension.

“Work? Oh I reckon, sir. I reckon. Only not much.”

There was another pause. So many looks crossed that table they would have made a cat’s cradle with thread.

“Sure. Sure, I understand,” says old Gideon with good-natured approval. “A fellow likes to take it easy after three years in the fray. Lay up and enjoy life some.”

“I reckon, sir,” I says. “Only I don’t know about work.”

“Oh there’s a plenty, when you’re ready of course. You looking to get back into your pa’s line? Millwork? Not a bad way to go for a man like yourself. Put them long arms of yours to use.”

My old man Phinny, he may have been a drunkard and an ass, but every soul in Nuckton knew he could work like a Clydesdale. After he died it took four men to replace him at the mill.

“No sir,” I says. “I mean I don’t know I’m up to it.”

“Up to what?”

“Work.”

Old man Gideon, his face got kind of queer. His lips sort of sawed back and forth like he was tonguing a sore inside his cheek. “I understand. I understand. I myself, as a young man subsequent to 1812, I vowed not to work upon any day had either a P or Y in it. Ha ha! P or a Y! Get it? But things have changed, as you can see. Things have changed. You grow up some.”

There was an uncompanionable silence.

Thing is, that P or Y bit, I cannot stand a poor joke. It gets me down, thinking about the person saying it and how they thought themselves pure comical at the time when, point in fact, they are just another ordinary soul trying so hard to be special.

And that got me down. Real low like.

“Welp,” says I, untucking my napkin. “Reckon I best be on. I thank you.” I scritched back the chair and walked out the door.

R

When I came to the road it was plenty dark, and none too inviting without a place to go. I looked down that path all funneled with trees. Just dark. Nothing but dark, and somewhere out there a place, maybe, where I could rest this threadbare soul. For it wasn’t until that very moment I came to understand, with a most abrupt and heart-sinking lucidity, returning home to Nuckton just wasn’t what I hoped for. Not where I was supposed to be.

The porch lantern flickered as something passed before it, and I turned back to the house. Above the creaking of treefrogs I heard the gates clap shut and understood, more than saw, she was coming back out again.

“You know she’s got a bellyworm,” says Rachel, halting in the dark before me. “She’s got a bellyworm that does it. Makes her belly like that.”

“Yeah, well,” I says, looking around for my escape. “You really can’t hardly tell.”

Rachel glanced back over her shoulder. She looked up at me. “Sure I can’t interest you in nothing? Last chance.” Her face was so pale. I could smell the corned beef when she breathed.

“Nope. I best be on.”

“You’re sure now. We can do it right quick.”

“Nope. I best be on.”

“Fine then,” she says, only she didn’t go away. She just stood there, so small in the dark, and I saw by her silhouette she was holding something in her hand, about big as a satchel. Finally she comes out with it. “I won’t begrudge you your love. What I came for was to give you these.”

It was a pair of boots. Fine made too. Truth is, I’d never worn anything on my feet till the day I volunteered, but I got used to it marching about in Mexico. Shod was now my preferred mode of travel.

“I thank you.”

“Belonged to my brother,” she says. “You ever recall a Will? A Will Lawson?”

“Nope.”

“Well you pray you don’t. He is a world of trouble. No matter now, as he ain’t home, gone to town with his nigra, and I’m plenty glad to help you along at his cost.”

I returned the boots. “These boots ain’t mine then, if they’re belonging to him.”

“Oh that’s all right,” she says, pushing them back into my arms. “He’s got two pair. Besides, it’s me what’s stealing them, which makes them my own. And now I’m giving them to you.”

I pondered on that one, weighing all sides till my head got so scrambled it hurt to think. Just to be done with it, to be done with this place and the ache in my chest and all these feelings that wouldn’t stop jabbing me, I says, “Well in that case, I thank you.” I took the boots and turned to go.

“But if you do meet him, just don’t tell him it was me.”

“It was you what?” I says, turning back.

“What gave you them boots. William had them special made. They were his Sunday boots, only wore them on Sunday, but as he ain’t much a churchgoer these days I don’t see the point. Still, I reckon he’d know them right off. Just don’t tell him it was me what gave them to you.”

“I’ll do,” I says. “I thank you.” And I strapped on those boots and started down the road, fireflies blinking. Treefrogs singing. I was just itching to be shut of that place. But here I was with new plumage, so to speak, right down to the boots and with the soft thud of them upon the earth of the road I commenced to swell up right grateful. I stopped, turned around. There was Rachel, still standing in the dark. Her face so small, just looking at me.

Now up till this point, my schooling in chivalry added up to Pa telling me to wipe the outhouse seat before a woman set down. I was sort of winging it here. I walked back to Rachel and before I really knew what I was doing, I’m giving her a kiss, a nice one, right there upon the softest lips you ever imagined.

“You know I ain’t like that no more,” she says in the dark. “The way I used to be. I ain’t like that no more.”

“I know it,” I says, because I did. I knew it was true.

“I just didn’t want you to go away,” she tells me. “And my old habits come upon me like a fever. I know it’s foolish, you coming into Daddy’s store without a stitch, and me falling for you like that. But it is the way it is. Something about you, Dannon Lereaux. Even Daddy knows it’s so. Still, I don’t begrudge you for going. I thank you for the kiss though. It was a fine kiss.”

A fine girl too, that Rachel Lawson. Maybe she really didn’t know what those lights meant.

“So long,” I says.

“So long.”

I headed back down the road.

R

Because the thing is, I spent much of my youth trying to get out from under the boot heels of this world, what with having a pa like mine, then none at all, then discovering my own way of seeing things just doesn’t balance with the rest.

Mama, who had taken to sucking on lozenges since The Loss, she used to say to Pa, “He ain’t crazy, Phineas, and not another word of it. The boy just ain’t got no guiles is all, and no fist of yours is gonna bring it on. Now leave him be.” A hundred lozenges a day she sucked. All for loss.

Nevertheless, I’ve been called crazy in one form or another most all my life. And it may be. The way I figure, if I am crazy then it’s the truth, and there’s no use in denying it. And if I’m not crazy, then it’s not the truth, and therefore ain’t worth getting worked up over.

It was the parson in particular who first spited me and told Pa my skull was good for nothing but driving piles and such. I never did understand why.

“Hi there! Hi, Mr. Parson?”

“Yes, what is…oh no. No. Please, boy. Not you again. Not today.”

“Well, sir, I was just a’wondering.”

“Can’t you see I’m walking, son? I can’t be always—”

“Yeah, well I was just a’wondering. If all the bad folks go to Hell, and only Pentecostals go to heaven, then where do all the good folks go when they die?”

“Son,” says the parson, pausing to sigh at the sky. “You are a chancre in the heart of the Lord.”

Far as I could tell, most folks shared this opinion and liked it best of all when I did not speak. Others, my pa among them, took special delight in making sure I knew I was dumb.

“What you talking about, Dannon, not going to meeting this Christmas. Are you stupit? Huh? You want to go to Hell, is that it?”

“Naw sir.”

“You think the parson’s stupit?”

“Naw sir.”

“What then? Tell me what.”

“Well, sir, if Jesus was born on Christmas, and even he never went to no meeting, what are we all fussing to do there?”

“Hide idgits like yourself from the devil, is what. Now get your damn coat on. And not a word to the parson.”

So it may be I’m a little slow in some respects; maybe even missing a few buttons, but given the chance I can cough up words nearabout half a foot long, and I reckon I’ve read more books than most five men together. I read Cervantes. I read Dante. I read Virgil and Homer. I even read that new fella, what’s his name. Dostoyevsky. For a while there I read history, and then politicking and government. I tried to read William Shakespeare once but had to put that man down, figuring I was better off waiting for the English translation.

I even read the King James, cover to cover, not once, not twice, but seven times for it was the only book in our cabin till the age of nine, but never could I understand our Lord being three things at once, because frankly speaking I’ve seen the Holy Ghost in most every object a person could imagine, from axle grease to musket-wadding, to cows on the road and their dung, not to mention the shine of a person alive which burns so bright in some as to make your eyes tear up. Anyhow, lacking any means to square up my seeing of the world with that of most holy scripture I more or less set the whole thing down.

“Touched,” they would say. “That boy is patent bizarre.”

But I figure sometimes a whole thing can come about by mistake. Take the word ‘solemn’. The way I figure, it was just somebody mispronouncing the word ‘calm’ and then another body figuring it was word enough on its own and thereby worthy of a second spelling. Like that. That’s my take on dogma and said trappings. Somebody mistaking one thing for another, nonsense for fact, and giving it a new name to suit. Had nobody ever devised a pew or a hymnal, I reckon the Holy Ghost would be here all the same.

I used to walk to the edge of Nuckton where the road broke off leading to the Presbyterian. And I’d look down that road, ‘Church Road’ we called it, green with the growth of six days neglect because Sunday tread just ain’t enough to keep a path clear. And that means something. Even if no one else cares to see it, the meaning’s there plain as day.

So people call me crazy. Maybe I am. But I’d rather be crazy than fool.

R

A good mile out from the Lawsons’ place I paused for a set beside the path. The woods were thick here. Mountains run up like a cliff of shadow to either side, and in the slot between them I saw the sky was soft and smooth as velvet. The moon, corn-colored, was just hanging its chin over the V of Coalstoke Ridge and Little Partridge and the insects were pulsing like blood. I had nowhere to go.

Nowhere that meant anything, anyhow. After we, the Union element, overran Mexico and sacked her capital, held president Santa Anna hostage and enticed him under duress to sign that pretty little treaty that doubled Union landmass overnight, president Polk told all us boys, “Now come on home. You all made your country proud in the eyes of God.”

Problem was, home ain’t always a place on earth, and pride is but a gnat in God’s eye. So the army booked steamers, take us anywhere could be reached by sea. Lots of men heard of gold out west and decided to try their luck. But that was a long, long trip by way of Magellan’s straights, and busting into the earth for gold just didn’t interest me. Besides, I felt sorrowful enough about having just stolen the whole territory of California from thy neighbor. To get dripping rich off her now would just be rubbing Mexico’s face in it.

But truth be known, I wasn’t about to get on a steamer of any kind. No thank you. ‘Seasickness’ is too tame a word to describe the inglorious tempest that sweeps through my bowels the moment I step foot upon deck. I swear to you, seeing the waves upon a bowl of whipped cream is enough to put a sweat on my skin. It’s the reason why you won’t hear me making all those nice authoring metaphors about ‘sterns’ and ‘bowsprits’ and ‘navigating the seas of life’ and such, for frankly speaking I hate all things kin to a ship.

“But it is a straight shot across the gulf to old Norleens,” they try to tell me. “And from there you can book passage up the Mississippi.” And I said I would gladly walk to Beijing before I booked passage upon anything floats, so it was only natural I would find my way home by footing it. Except I didn’t give much thought beforehand as to where I should go. Thusly I strode twelve weeks over hill and dale to get back to Nuckton and the Blue Honeys only to discover ‘Nuckton’ was just another way saying ‘default.’

Our family’s cabin, if it wasn’t cannibalized for cordwood, would have gone straight to the bank after Mama died. The rest of my relations would be holed up down in the bayou of Louisiana somewhere, producing unholy spawn and eating banjos and gators for all Pa told me of the place, though I never met a one of them. I did once hear of a Lereaux out of Dorinville, a hemophiliac glasscutter they say, man of impeccable faith, but Pa said we weren’t kin but in name. All down in Baton Rouge, he said. Still, old Phinny hated everything about that place and vowed we were to be Blue Honey folk from here on out, and if the south ever seceded from the Union, as the talk often went, well then Pa would choose his allegiance according to whichever way Louisiana went for he was sure to go exactly opposite.

Anyhow, standing out there beside the path I could smell the smoke of a woodfire off somewhere. The woods were plenty thick, as I stated, and it is no small thing tracing out smoke on a breeze but I got myself a sniffer. Quite a sniffer, in fact. I dipped into those trees and picked my way through the brush until I came upon the steaming coals of a hunter’s camp. Not long abandoned. The skins and inners of two or three squirrel lay heaped on the rocks ringing the fire, all oozy and dried and sticking to the stone like worms trapped overlong in the sun. The coals were fresh, however, so I stirred them up till I had a decent blaze. As good a place as any for the night, I reckoned. Someone had swung the skinny end of a long deadfall into camp, lining it up beside the fire like a bouncy bench, so I tucked in, keeping close to the fire for warmth. Overalls were fine for daylight but without a shirt of any kind the night would be pure bitter.

A whippoorwill started up in the big limb over my head and then the lights commenced their bouncing through the trees. I watched them for a while, feeling all the melancholy and the joy come together in my heart.

And that’s typically when I start pining most for my love, the girl I once saw and vowed to care for. It was three years ago, and happened in a nameless little town, twenty mile south of Carter, just before I enlisted with the volunteer regiment and got on a coach headed south and west. Where she was from I did not know, but when I first saw her there in that old country store I knew she was from somewhere else. Somewhere farthest away. Another world, it seemed to me.

I myself was out front on the porch, chewing a plug, minding my own so to speak when in comes this girl, the hues dancing about her head so bright I nearly choked and swallowed my chaw.

She wore a bonnet, tied low at the ears, with just a sprig of black curl coming out underneath. Her eyes were dark, but real dark, so they lit like candles. She was little Bo-Peep all full grown and blooming in a nice clean dress, and so far out of my league I was a fool to consider.

Thing is, I knew she was for me. It sounds odd, I know, what with me barefoot and mountain-wild, fresh from the asylum. Next to her I wasn’t better than a tag on a pretty dress, but I knew the heart of that girl like I know my own, and they were not two things but one.

She went straight up to the counter, me following behind with about as much choice in the matter as her shadow. She asked if her paints were in. That was all. She asked if her paints were in yet, and the young man at the counter, he says, “No maam. Afraid not. Everything coming in from Bethel this week is stalled. But I can have them sent up to Valhalla for you when they arrive.”

Valhalla. The girl from Valhalla.

I hadn’t the first idea where that was, or if they’d let me in when I got there, only that all things shiny on earth and above had convened in this golden person. And should my poor station in life ever take a turn for the better, should I ever unsnarl all those tangles in my head, become presentable, upright, wiped clean of perdition, well that’s where I would go. Valhalla. To find my girl and love her.

She wrote something down on a piece of paper, an address I figured, and I took notice how she used her own ink, a bottle produced from the deep well of her handbag. As she wrote I stepped closer, and I saw the little wingbone in her back wriggle beneath the white of her dress as she maneuvered her quill upon the counter. The hues leaping from her skin were like sparks from the sun, and I could smell her, that musky skin-scent that comes natural off a woman though she bears no awareness of it. It was too much for me.

So lost was I in fever and flood, that when she turned to leave I didn’t think to move and she near slammed into my chest. But she didn’t, and we stood like that, her looking up without blinking, and me deafened by a clock-stop glory. For we were two sides of a window, one soul split in two, and her bearing showed she knew it too.

She took one breath, long and slow, smiled the smile that has become the signature of my salvation and then stepped past me and out the door. That was it. I never saw her again, that girl from Valhalla. She walked out that door, never speaking a word and my world’s been five feet smaller ever since.

But sometimes I suspected she left me something. She’d tucked it deep in my skin like a secret missive I might one day read. And if I could just decipher that moment and everything she said without speaking, I reckoned that ache in my chest would uncoil and sigh and I could rest easy for the remainder of my days.

The moment I lost sight of her my head commenced to spin. It took a good minute to catch my balance. I went directly to the clerk at the counter, who didn’t look up. He had mislaid something and was busy shuffling around the counter, yanking out drawers, then noticed his quill setting right there in the inkwell and plucked it out to write two words atop that paper, the paper she gave him. Two words.

“I need to see that a minute,” I says, breathless.

He straightened and set the quill down, blinking at me in confusion. “Wait, who are you?”

“Dannon Lereaux. I need see that there receipt,” I says, pointing, for I saw then that it was a bill of sale she had written upon. Problem was, the bills from that store were green. Green paper, they got.

“And… wait a minute, were you—”

“Don’t you mind. I’ll give it right back.” I slapped my hand down on the bill of sale before he could fuss and turned to the door for better light. Only problem was, I saw then the bill wasn’t just green, but my girl, my love, the right pinecone of my heart, she had written whatever she had written in red. Red ink.

I believe I cried out. I must have yelled, “Red!” like it poked me with a stick, for next thing I heard was the clerk saying, “It’s like her trademark. Some reason she always writes in red.”

I couldn’t read a fleck of it, what with the red from the green, especially with the fuzzy fibers of that cheap receipt-paper breaking the script all up. My eyes went all screwy just from trying, but it was no use. The only thing I could read were the words at the top, the two words the clerk had printed in black after she left.

Madder Carmine.

Her name was Madder Carmine.

R

Something you should probably know. By medical standards I am, in point of fact, a little touched in the head. Mentally ill, they say. But I don’t buy it. Acute Onset Mania with Episodic Hallucinations and Secondary Daltonism (Color Blindness); a diagnosis tailored special for me, I am told, when all other Latin failed to wrap proper about the haywire in my head. First they said ‘Epilepsy’, but without the fits. Then they thought ‘Phrenitis’ but without the fever. ‘Melancholik’ without the sorrow. Neurosis. Dementia. Idiocy. They didn’t know what to make of me. Did I drink paint as a child?

Had I suckled from a slave? I told them about the breath that night, the night my siblings all died, and my mama’s demon lover on the mountain, and they summarily plunked me with a title too fancy for a duke: Acute Onset Mania with Episodic Hallucinations and Secondary Daltonism (Color Blindness).

But I don’t buy it.

It all came of pure spite, if you ask me. After Pa died, when I was twelve years of age or so, I learned to thrum the washboard fierce as a Hittite. Supernatural rhythm, I was told. Even the negroes were in agreement. So I started up a jugband which I aimed to call ‘Parson Farted’ only the man himself took up and had me sent to Carter once and for all, on account of they have an asylum there for the mentally downtrodden. The Pain of All Saints. Established 1804. But to us residents it was simply known as the shriekhouse.

Mama was heartbroken and took to sucking lozenges day and night, never less than two in the pouch of her cheek. But the truth is, I didn’t mind being there. The shriekhouse is where I got to read all those books I mentioned. I don’t think a day went by I wasn’t reading Don Quixote or the Inferno, particularly the Inferno, so all-in-all it was a decent show. Sure I had to do the icebaths and the swinging chairs. And they shackled us more than I generally like. But it gave me plenty of time to sit and think, to try and build some sense around the goings-on in my life which had hitherto been chiefly calamitous. Besides, it was during my sojourn at the old Pain of All Saints that I began to fathom the meaning of the lights, all those hues I’ve always seen dancing about every living thing. I am grateful for that, the time I spent there. The hues have come in mighty useful since, but never more so than my first night back in Nuckton, tucked in there by the fire, just off from the Lazy Boy road, for it was the hues that set me off to the trouble brewing.

I had tossed a moist log onto the fire and now the sparks were popping up a storm. I jumped back with a whoop and swatted the sparks from my face. I stopped, looking out into the trees. Something about the way my whoop carried, it got me thinking.

Whoop. I did it again. It occurred to me with the force of thunder that it is a pure miracle we can speak at all. I figured the earth, given this grave task some many years ago, would’ve had to muster some real know-how to up and fashion its mud and rocks into animals like myself with lips and tongues and voice-strings.

I whooped again. Quite a miracle. Whoo-oop. Whoop whoop. Only with all the ruckus I was making I managed to draw some attention from the woods. I heard something big coming, horse probably, then one man’s voice to another in low tones.

There wasn’t much to do now but set and wait and see what I’d brought on. I’d banked the fire pretty good so I was fireblind as all hell, and couldn’t see much beyond the yellow dome of it.

I heard a faint bray through the trees, then a mule snort. Then a man bowed his head through the brush and stepped into camp, hard as winter, barely glancing my way as if we were already acquainted. With his back to me, he snapped a middling branch off a nearby birch, about head high, and hooked the loop of his mule’s reins over the snag. He untied the end of a lead rope from the mule’s saddlebag and gave it a good tug, and into the light stumbled a negro, bound at the wrists.

Now I could tell you this negro was a hefty-looking negro, going a little bald up top with a skein of white fuzz scattered round his chin and jaw. I could tell you his face was wide and shiny, handsome, baby-smooth, with nostrils like a bull and a gray ascot about his throat and the sort of trousers and coat as a tramp might use for bedding. But such words tell you nothing but the weather of a man, as likely to change as mean nothing at all. For there are souls out there who jump free of all words and trying to describe them is like corralling a fog.

The white fella, he tugged again at that rope and then turned toward the fire. “You keep quiet,” he says over his shoulder to the negro as he resets his floppy hat and comes toward me with rope still in hand. He was a big man, this man, and about as affable as broken glass, and everything nose-up stayed put in the shadow of his hat.

That negro, he stayed put too, eyes on his toes while the big one set himself down across the fire from me, slow and easy, hands on his thighs as he let himself down, and goddammit if he didn’t remind me of a thunderhead lounging. He rubbed the back of his neck, which was stump-thick, and studied the coals some. Lastly he picked up a stick and poked about.

“Now you get out from behind me,” he says to the fire, and the slack in his rope drew taut as his negro stepped around to the side and into his view.

“Little closer now,” he says, still stabbing at the coals. “That’s right. Little closer. And you stay.” He tossed the stick into the fire and went quiet, sucking his teeth.

And I may as well tell you the hues coming off those boys were bright and dark, just like their skin. Only their hues were in reverse, with the negro all haloed up so bright his face was just a blur a light.

“You found my camp,” says the sitting one to the fire.

I tossed my chin at the negro. “He a runaway?”

To the fire, the sitting one, he says after a good suck on his teeth, “Reckon a man with a drink might share it around.”

I didn’t say anything, for the plain fact I didn’t have any drink.

The sitting one, he hawked up something thick. “A fella, he might take offence,” he spat into the fire, “if another stumbles into his camp and then holds on his liquor.”

This time I made a sound, only it wasn’t on purpose. It was like my belly set to squawking, but way up in my throat so it came out like the vowels of a baby. And the sitting one says to me, “Did you, did you just coo at me?”

“No,” I replied. “Or not much.”

He threw me a look somewhere between disbelief and disgust, and I says to him, “Got me some chaw though. And you’re welcome to it.”

He spat in reply, but through his teeth and without moving them. It was like a click of his tongue, and I have since tried but failed to duplicate it. I tossed him my plug through the flames. He caught it, turned it over once and then took hold with his teeth before sawing off a powerful big chunk with his knife. His teeth were bad. Real bad. Only he didn’t give that plug right back. He just kept turning it over in his hand, testing its weight, waiting for a challenge-like.

“Keep it,” I says.

“Nah.” But he didn’t give it back.

Next thing he reaches into his belt and tugs free his pepperbox, a rotten old pistol he must have dug direct from the earth by the look of it. The hammer looked bad as his teeth. But he commenced to play with that hammer, setting it and releasing it, setting it and releasing it, sighting the barrel by firelight and checking for burrs, all the while talking, talking, but never meeting my eye.

“We was tarring and feathering a thief back in town,” he says, glancing at my boots. “Should have been there.”

My eyes kept drifting back to that negro. Standing there, staring at his toes.

“Tarring and feathering. Which is pretty kind handling in my book. I’d rather see a thief lynched.” Still toying his pepperbox, then pumping in some wadding and a ball. “Or barring that, make him too leaky for mischief. Six holes’ll do if one will. But I’m sure you got ideas on how a thief is best treated.” He snapped the hammer back, sniffed, and looked up at last, staring me dead in the eye.

“You are mighty close to my folks land, I noticed.”

The hues floating about him, they were black. Black as hate. I tried to brighten them but those hues just wrestled me back like a catamount.

“If my nigra here hadn’t slowed us up so, we’d be home about now. As it is, we had to stop for a bite, but I figures the delay, it come about because he is lacking in boots.”

That negro, he didn’t move a muscle.

“What I mean to say is, my nigra, this one standing here, he ain’t got no boots. But you there who is setting got a whole pair to yourself. Not much sense in that, is there.”

I didn’t say nothing. Nothing to say when a man’s hues are black.

“Mind if I take look? Cause them boots look mighty familiar.”

“You saying you want my boots?”

“Ho now! And so we come to the knuckle of it! It is only the knuckle of a thing that matters, am I right? Because, you see, you asking me if I want your boots. Which is a funny thing. Because I already know they’re mine.”

“I ain’t a thief.”

He pointed that damn pepperbox at me. “Why don’t you tell me how you came by them boots, then. If you ain’t a thief.”

And I wondered to myself, but aloud, which will sometimes happen, “I wonder what a measure of honesty do for me about now.”

And he says, “Perhaps earn you one last demerit in Hell, for I am about to send you there.” So I stood right up and upon the clack of his misfire I threw a few fists in his face and he fell right over. For I much preferred not to lie about those boots.

R

I don’t know why it is we’re in such a hurry to get back up when we fall. You might think we would just lie there for a spell and rest awhile. Leastways, that Will Lawson had it right.

Once I climbed back onto the Lazy Boy trail, I commenced to walking. I’d reclaimed my plug, which was only right, and tore myself off a goodly chaw. I had that rhythmic heel-slap gait you get when you’re going downhill fast, and all the sudden I came around a bend and got slammed with a view so dramatic it stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the Nuckton river valley all spread out below, the Shallewapre gliding its course. The trees on the hills were dense as black but the river, lit by the moon, was total clear. It made a dull, sad, distant sound like the haaaaa of a bottomless exhale.

From up here, looking so far down, the town proper looked small. It was just a handful of flickers like stars dropped from the night, but the sight of those lanterns got me thinking about Mexico again, and how I had once imagined this homecoming scene exact, for home was never finer than when remembered from afar.

There was a time, just after I’d arrived at Camp Camargo down on the San Juan River in northeastern Mexico, when I would have traded anything to be back here in Nuckton. I hadn’t so much as been issued a rifle and taught to shoot when I heard the beddy-beat beddy-beat of First Lieutenant Beighman come galloping up through the mud on that gray mare of his. It was a stormy night and we were camped up on the bluffs of the San Juan, but you couldn’t barely hear it over the sound of the rain. Yet I heard that mare of his whinny, for she was just outside my tent, and then the fwapping of canvas as the doorflaps were thrown back. Lieutenant Beighman stood hunched in my entry. I saw the puddles around his boots go bright with lightning.

“Son, get you hat on.” Swiping the rain from his shoulders.

“Yes sir. How come sir?”

“I said get you hat on. You going to see the chaplain.”

“Yes sir. I got it right here, sir. But how come?”

“Because she is dead, son. You mama’s gone to glory.”

A sorrier bulletin I never did hear. Seems the roads all through the Blue Honeys had slumped out, some of them swept away completely by the rains that year, and there wasn’t another shipment of remedies due into Nuckton for at least two months. Even the traveling wagons that sold snake-oil weren’t venturing that deep into the mountains, and Mama was clean out of lozenges and most likely hankering like the devil. So she set out.

That’s right. Mama, who had never in all her life ambled more than twelve miles from our front porch, set out to find her some lozenges. But in the haste of delirium she started east instead of west, crossed the Blue Honeys entire and keeled over dead of exposure and exhaustion just across the Carolina border.

Thing is, I had to come all the way back here, twelve weeks walking, before I understood more than Mama had died in these misty blue mountains. Home, too, had passed from a place on Earth to a dim corner of my mind and now there was nothing left for me in this world but the Holy Ghost, a ripe ache in my chest, and the promise of a girl in Valhalla.

The Lazy Boy path widened here, becoming a road proper, falling straight and steady the rest of the way to Nuckton. Mist was already fingering about the lower slopes of the mountains but I could still see the odd haystack of light over on Little Partridge. I thought to keep on, maybe find something in town, maybe crawl under a wagon or find an old springhouse to sleep in, when I heard a ruckus behind me and spun in the road. Out into the moonlight steps that negro again, with a great big straw hat on this time, and behind him was the mule going buckwild at the end of his rope. He was a regular squall, that mule, like he’s seeing nightmares and nothing else.

I ran back to proffer a hand. But that mule just wouldn’t quit. He near to kicked my head off and the negro’s too until I thought to blindfold him. That’s a trick I learned, way back in my gold-eating days.

“Give me your hankie,” I says. Then I tied the negro’s hankie to my own and made a blindfold for the mule. He went immediate calm the moment I covered his eyes.

“I know how it is,” I says, stroking his muzzle. “Sometimes I don’t like to see neither.”

“Mighty grateful for you cutting off them bindings like that,” says the negro. “That Mista Lawson, he cold-blooded in his heart, but you done him up good. You done him real good. And now we got us a mule.”

“He’s ain’t mine, that mule. And I’ve no use for a slave.”

“Nor do I wish to be one, suh,” says the negro to myself. “Fact is, I run off tonight once already. But that Mista Lawson, he caught me and bumped me up good. So I says to myself, I just try again later. I says, I just take this here spade he keep a’tied to his mule and slap that Mista Lawson up the head.”

“So you’re the ruthless type then, are you?”

And he replies, “Nawsuh. I got plenty ruth in me yet.”

Which was plain already, for this negro, he wore the sun on his brow and ain’t no man with such hues going do me harm.

“Welp,” says I. “This mule ain’t mine. And I don’t want no slave. I don’t know what you’re gonna do, but there ain’t much use tailing with me. For the sole reason I don’t know where I’m headed for.”

“Oh that’s all right, suh. I already know where I’m a’headed,” he says. “Right back to my Miss Odessa. She was my masta previous, you see, and kind as the baby Jesus. Before she sold me to that Mista Lawson she says to me, I don’t like it, but you got to go. And when the time is right, I spect you be coming right back to me Virgil vol Krie. That’s what she says to me. You be coming right back when the time is right, and I figures the times ain’t getting no better. So that’s where I’m a’headed. Back to my Miss Odessa.” He gave the mule a friendly slap on the haunch and looked me direct, and I saw his eyes were deep-water blue. “Reckon you can come along if you like.”

Imagine that. Never did I hear a suggestion more queer, and never was I more willing to oblige.

“But that mule,” I says. “That mule’ll have to go back. He ain’t ourn.”

“Oh I hear you, suh. I hear you,” says Virgil vol Krie, who’s king of the slaves so far as I’m concerned. “But I think I’ll keep him around some. He’ll be belonging to me now.”

“Can you even ride a pack mule?”

“I don’t see why not,” he says with a smile. “But then again I don’t know a first thing about mules myself. Do you?”

I didn’t, not beyond what Pa told me the day he died. “Welp,” I says. “That chattel then. Them saddlebags got to go. Leave the saddlebags and we’ll make do with your mule.”

“You sure, suh? Oh but this a powerful good musket Mista Lawson got here. Might come in handy down the road.”

“Nah,” I says. “I’d be beholden to him, and that won’t do. Return the chattel and we’ll be on our way.”

So Virgil, he slung those saddlebags over his shoulder like an ox, musket spade and all, and humped it back to the very man who would probably kill him if he could.

Not ten minutes later Virgil popped back into the road. I kind of smiled to myself when I saw Will’s other pair boots on his feet. “That Mista Lawson,” he says to me, “You sure done him good. He still cold out. Still a’lying right where you set him. Where you learn to brawl like that?”

Me on one side of the mule, Virgil leading him on the other, us walking down the road to Nuckton.

“I ain’t never seen a fella brawl like that before,” he says. “Where you learn to brawl like that?”

“Just learned.”

“Learned where? I ain’t seen nothing like it.”

“Just learned, is where. Learned myself, as I had to.”

“What you mean, had to?”

“Well I’m coming back from a’warring, is what I mean. Just give two fellas hell, then tie them at the wrist and they’ll learn to fight all right.” The blindfold was starting to slip, and that mule was building up. I retied it and says, “Reckon that’s the thing about warring. You either figure it out, or you don’t. No three ways about it.”

“So you figure it out then.”

“Yeah,” I says. “I figured it out.”

Then Virgil vol Krie, who’s not like any negro you ever hear of, he says, “Then tell me what you figure.”

And so I looked at him and I looked away, and I says, “Ain’t nobody wins a war.”

R

Now slaving’s one of those things makes about as much sense to me as feeding bacon to the hogs. It strikes me odd that there we were in the year 1849, at the very peak of modernity so to speak, where a fella could hop on a train and fling himself across the country at the breakneck speed of eighteen miles per one hour and yet fail to see slavery goes both ways round. Which is to say, no man’s so free as to escape a good whipping from his own conscience.

“I never hear of a negro with a last name,” I says. “Virgil vol Krie. Where you get a name of vol Krie?”

“Oh yessuh. A Miss Odessa, she gave it to me. On account of that’s her name too, and she say I could use it long as I stay true to her service.”

“You’re loyal then.”

“Oh yessuh. Mighty loyal when folks done me good. And that Miss Odessa, she kind as the baby Jesus.”

“And the Lawsons?” I says. “They weren’t good to you?”

“Some was. Some wasn’t. But that Will Lawson, he extra bad.”

Me and Virgil, we were about a half mile straight shot down the road from our little treaty with the Lawson boy. Which is the approximate distance, you should know, that a musketball can travel when fired in a line. Half mile.

“Welp,” says I. “Whichever way you put it, you are a runaway Virgil vol Krie. At least in the eyes of another. That puts you and me both in a position, until you catch up with your Miss Odessa anyhow.”

“So happens I been thinking on that, suh,” says Virgil. “Thinking perhaps it is best if I says I belong to you. Should anyone ask.”

About that time I heard something click behind me. I spun about and by light of the moon I saw something tiny, just a blur of movement, as it skipped off the packed clay of the road. And coming right for me. It skipped again, slower this time, then once more, and as it rolled to a halt at my toes I picked it up. It was about the size of a cherrystone and near hot as a coal. I held it up.

And may I burn in hellfire if I wasn’t holding a musketball right there in my hand, and at the very moment I heard it too. Crack, it says, right there between my thumb and forefinger, for it took that long for the sound of Will’s rifle to reach me.

Now I don’t know if other fellas, holding the bullet aimed to kill him and hearing it same, experience what I did, but my mind turned something like this:

I am told it is a rare man that realizes his potential. But I say rarer still is the man that realizes his potential ain’t very much but does best he can with what’s been granted. An honest man, so to speak.

“Perhaps we should keep on, suh,” says Virgil. “That Will Lawson is most like reloadin’ about now.”

“I am eighteen years old,” I says, staring at that musketball. I suppose every bullet has to drop somewhere.

“That right, suh? Well then, you plenty young still. Plenty reason to keep on and not fool about here on the road.”

“I am eighteen years old, and younger today than I will ever be again. I believe that means something.” That musketball, it was longer in the middle. Not perfect round any more. “You understand what that means?”

“Nawsuh. What’s it mean?”

“I don’t know,” I says. “Something.” I slipped that ball into the chest pocket of my overalls. “Something, though.”

Thing is, that something hit me right then and there. The moment that musketball slipped in next to my heart, it hit me all at once, like I was a man shot true. I realized, with the brassy-hued-cymbal-splash of revelation in my soul, there simply isn’t any time for atonement. No time to wait about. The haywire in my head isn’t likely to fold itself neat. And while no man can say for certain what lies ahead, he can be certain hanging onto the past ensures a miserable future.

“I reckon,” says I, “it means I don’t need to lay about any more, feeling sorry and tainted, like I ain’t good enough for what’s right. I reckon,” says I, “it means it’s time I take myself to Valhalla.”

R

Upon those words, that Virgil vol Krie, he grabbed me hold at the shoulder and pulled me off the road and into the woods. Except they weren’t woods any more, but a trail through them I ain’t never seen.

“The hell are we?” I asks him, and he just smiles. Him with that old straw hat and that great big negro stride, and he just smiles and says, “Why, we on the road to Valhalla, just like you says.”

“Then I suspect I should be leading us.”

“Fine by me, suh. You lead, and I just tell you where to go.”

That damn smile of his. I’d never seen a thing like it. Then I saw the sun on his brow and I says, “Are you a king, Virgil vol Krie?”

The paper-white of his teeth. “Nawsuh. I just a messenger. My Miss Odessa, she said I might be bringing a body along. And here we are both headed the same place. Val-halla!”

“You know where it is?”

“I do, suh. Yes I do. It’s where me and my Miss Odessa is originatin’.”

Now this news near took my top off, for I had yet to meet a person in all these mountains that could find the place. I asked around plenty, but there wasn’t a soul that could give me directions without tying their tongue or drawing me up a sailor’s knot on paper.

“Is it close?” I asked. Somehow I always imagined my Madder lay a world away, beyond the veils of my Herculean sorrow.

“Oh I reckon,” says Virgil. “But it’s a ways too. Folks don’t know it. That’s why you need old Virgil vol Krie to take you there. Not quite Kentucky, but not quite Tennessee neither.”

“Virginia then?”

“Oh you’ll see. You’ll see.”

And I suspected I would, too. And something about the notion of a colorblind dowser and a runaway king leading a blindfolded mule to a land not entirely of this world appealed directly to my curious sensibilities.

Which is what the whitecoats called them back at the shriekhouse. My curious sensibilities. I had a friend there by name of Erasmus, next cell over, who used to say he could read a fella’s future in the graffiti of our walls. So each day he had me write down whatever was written upon the bricks beside my bed and shoot it over to him through a tiny hole in the wall. Then late that night, after a good think in the dark, he would stuff his lips into that hole and translate for me, in the hellfire voice of a preacher, what was to be the makings of my days to come.

So anyhow, along came a day when I wrote to Erasmus, I wrote to him, “Root knows water. In every blossom lies the distance to the sun.” Only I didn’t tell that old fella it was me who etched those words into the wall with the burred edge of my own shackle. Still, just like ever before, I woke up in the middle of the night to old Erasmus hollering at me through the wall, “The message is clear, young fella! In his glory and grace, the good Lord has deigned to speak to me, his humble servant once again! Though I am a God-fearing man and a sinner too, I have unciphered the text which he has laid before us, this message which near to smote my soul. That the Lord says ‘Root knows water’ means in the source is your salvation. Only in the source will you step free from captivity. And when he says ‘blossom’, he is here a’speaking of your soul, my young friend, which is mightier than most, but he lets on to say how your mortal lot is to be constant mistook in this world. Ever will man swap your genius for dust. Dust, I say! But alas, there are some among us who shall comprehend the glory of your torment. And I am one. And I say unto you, nigh is the day of your judgment, my friend. A choice like no other shall be placed in your care, and the grooves of your life shall be determined. On the one road is your blood, for it shall be a’wrenched from your veins, and on the other road is the blood of many another.”

Then I heard the sound that old man makes when the invisible lizards come to get him, for he had taken off his slipper and begun to splash it about the cell.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but very next morn, who should enter my cell but a solitary whitecoat with a document and a quill. Seems a new treatment was being made available to folks like myself, folks who failed to respond to all others. It was called ‘Moral Management’ and meant our cells were to be made more homey-like, believing a domestic feel might eradicate our troubles. Only this doctor didn’t believe a word of it, he says, apart from “the environment playing a vital role in a patient’s recovery.” His job was to move us stragglers along, and that was all. This doctor, he says what I need is something drastic, something to put the lead in my soul and drag my skyward mind back to earth. Something like, say, a war he says, which happened to be brewing south of the border just as we speak. The harsh realities of combat were sure to put a fix to my delusions, and if I was willing, I could just sign away right here.

And why not, I thought to myself. Armies had ever relied upon the able-bodied and warped to conduct to earnest business of slaughter. And volunteers, the doc says, were in such heightened demand that boys like myself were being welcomed like royalty.

Option number two was not a new treatment, he went on, but about the oldest around, saved special for folks without a hope. But I needn’t worry. That old doc assured me the survival rate for bloodlettings here in the Pain of All Saints had gone up considerable in recent years. Five, at times six in ten lived to tell of it later, and an encouraging percentage of them had shown improvement.

So there were my roads, just as old Erasmus predicted: Bloodletting, or the letting of blood. Such are the ways in which we choose our destruction. Even as I signed I knew the true nature of that covenant, for a man does not enlist with the devil unknowingly. And for all my days after I regretted that choice, and denied myself others in retribution.

Like my Madder. The pinecone of my heart.

Who at long last I was set to find.

R

For all the haywire in my head, you might be thinking I raised pure bedlam as youngin. Truth is, I stayed in line pretty good. My mama, what with nine children tugging at her skirts, she had a right preternatural sense of mischief and wasn’t afraid to skip a plate off your skull if the occasion called for it. Generally speaking though, it wasn’t us little ones but mostly Pa she laid into the when the Lord’s wrath took hold of her throwing arm, especially after he got some drink in him. That’s when he’d get to ‘feeling downright religious’ and take up with his ‘poetree,’ which Mama spited like a backtalking devil.

You see, down there at the mill it became plain that old Phineas Lereaux had a middling mind, and if they could just keep him off the drink long enough to learn him his letters, well they could promote him, on account of they were in need of someone crafty enough to look after the books. So that’s what they did. And Pa learned his letters all right, and like a child with a shotgun, wasted neither time nor discretion in exploring the limits of the damage he could wreak. He’d come home from work, go straight to his desk and stay up all night with that quill scribbling away. Thus dawned a new chapter in the evolution of smut.

Between coon hunting and beating on me, Pa’s choice of a nice summer evening would be to get ripping drunk right there in his old chestnut rocker and recite his verse out loud to Mama and us little ones in his boomenest voice; lines so crude and depraved as to put color on a sailor’s ears. And Mama would flip benches and chuck pans about the cabin like grain at a Roman wedding.

So anyhow, I kept my nose pretty clean back then. Besides, apart from the small issue of my eating gold, my queerness wasn’t ever more than half-awake in those days. It wasn’t till after The Loss that things started swapping about in my head.

Even the whole Daltonism thing, nobody knew till I was instructed to pick apples one day and came back with a sack all mixed up with reds and sour greenies. But it’s not like you think. It’s not like I mistake red for green, or even the other way round. It’s like I can’t tell them apart. They both look the same in my book, the way it does for you, I’m told, when the reds and the greens get all blended up into gray when you’re seeing them in a calotype photograph.

Welp, me and Virgil and that mule on a rope, we were deep in the mountains that night, and getting deeper still, when Virgil says, “I believe I call him Jimmy Brown On A Rope,” he says. “Yessuh, Jimmy Brown. A fine name for a mule like this.”

And when the wind blew you could hear the whole forest go fluttering, and the moonlit leaves just raining down like gold flakes.

Old Virgil with his straw hat and new boots, he stayed just ahead of me on the trail, leading a blindfolded Jimmy Brown between us. I could hear him whistling in the moonlight, a nice negro tune, and when he turned about on the trail I saw his big white teeth in the night.

“Hows about we set on down, have us a little lazy awhile. Could use me a decent set on the ground.”

So we sat down with our backs against a pair of oaks, facing each other across a whole scatter of leaves. “Nice night, ain’t it?” he says, looking up at a patch of sky. Enough light was coming down through the canopy that the earth between us appeared all glowed up.

By and by, Virgil slipped a hand into his coat, into the pocket of his vest and pulled out a beat-up square of sandpaper, unfolded it carefully, the creases white, fuzzy, torn through in places, and then from another pocket hauled out what looked like a ball of mottled gray marble, about half the size of a lettuce head. He hummed quietly to himself, shaving away at it with the sandpaper, so satisfied with the pastime as to make my own mind fall still.

“Chaw?” I says, holding out my plug.

“Oh nawsuh. I don’t mess round with that stuff. Nawsuh, I’m a snuff kind a man myself.”

From a third pocket, this one in the breast of that tattered old coat he withdrew a little cloth sack. He opened the drawstring and dipped out just enough tobacco snuff to make a nice acorn-cap on his thumbnail. “Try some?”

“Might as well.”

I gave it a good snort, straight from his thumb, and goddammit if it didn’t put a circus up my nose. My eyes went pure fire and I kept coughing up slime, ropes of drool stretching to the ground, and all the while that Virgil vol Krie slapped at his thighs and cried “Who-boy!” when he wasn’t choking himself blue on the laughter.

I sniffed one last time and spit up a clump of something awful.

“I thank you,” I says, struggling to stay ahead of the coughing. My voice was all parched up and morning-raw. I palmed the tears from my cheek.

“Can I have another?”

And that Virgil vol Krie, I couldn’t hear a thing in the dark, but the way his straw hat was shaking up and down I knew he was just gone with laughter.

“Oh yessuh. That you can. That you can.”

R

And the door to the woodstove would creak as Mama slammed it shut, locking it with a twist of the handle, and she’d say to me, clanking down a skillet, she’d say, “Dannon, if any single day don’t find you a better person at the end, you failed to live that one.” The lively crackle of pork-fat. Cracking eggs with one hand. “So how about it, little Dan? You live today?”

By that reckoning I suspect I’d lived two, maybe three years total. Just enough to eat without a bib and throw a quality tantrum. So it didn’t make sense that I should be all on my own, walking this world without a guide. Who, if not Virgil, could tell me why a leaf might throb with such splendor, or come alive as it fell; why my heart should keep busting open and open. Here I was with the devil on my heels and all I could think to say was, “Hell sure is mighty nice,” and old Virgil would say back, “Oh yessuh. Folks don’t know it.”

Sometimes the ridgelines in the east would spit up stars slow as honey and I’d imagine my darling belle in bed. Sleeping, her breath soft as silk, bright-cheeked and downy, lips parted in insatiable innocence. I could watch her sleep in my head forever.

And then not one moment longer—for I would be compelled to lean in, smell the perfume of her skin, my senses taut, tuned, induced by her scent, I am intoxicated by the play of light in her hair, and then ever so gently, because I have not the power to stop, I lean a bit closer, feeling the sweet brush of her breath, mad with longing and the tyranny of love, I drink in her sigh and let it roll through my soul as I place my trembling lips upon hers.

Back at the shriekhouse I used to have the same dream night after night. Mama would be tossing me in the air, just tossing me and catching me, with everyone all around shouting, “He can talk! He can talk!”

Then one day, one of those whitecoats took a look in my records and said it was so. Said such a thing happened when I was a youngin. He told me there was a good year or so, right after The Loss, when I refused to talk at all. But what alarmed me most wasn’t that such a thing took place. It was that I could forget it. My past was all slipping away, trackless as boats a’row. Of my eight sisters departed I could only name six, and the only one of them I could still see in my mind was little Maggie, who we used to call “Little Magus” and was but a biddy baby when she died. Memory of my youth had become a pathless wasteland with the solitary exception of The Loss, for I will recall The Loss unto my dying day.

At the approximate age of seven I was not yet an only child. Four sisters older. Four of them younger. Me right smack in the middle. Then one night the heat-lighting took up. It was all over Little Partridge, flashing so close the whole mountain lit up, and yet silent as a breath of wind. We children all went to sleep, stacked like trout in the bed, but Mama stayed up praying as she knew something wasn’t right. The way she told it, a queer wind raced down from the mountain. It swept all through the cabin, unnatural as could be, and next morning not one child woke up but me.

From that night on I couldn’t see red any longer, for my colorblindness set in with the wind. But Mama said not to tell anybody on account of she was ashamed. Said she knew that wind was the breath of her demon lover, come back to haunt her with sorrows galore. True or nay, nothing went right for a Lereaux ever since.

R

Me and Virgil and Jimmy Brown On A Rope, we were treading through a thick stand of pine, the smell of it sharp in my nose when a mourning dove let loose with a couple sad cries. Mourning doves are one of the few birds you’ll hear at night. “Best we stop here, suh, till we figure what he saying.” Virgil searched the trees for the dove. “Or least see if he’s got more to say.”

Our trail was wide, near enough to be called a road, and cut sidelong into the slope. You could see the exposed roots of trees in the cut of it, some of them gripping stones in their fists and the fiddle-neck ferns looked blue in the moonlight. The dove cried again, and Virgil says, “There you go, suh. I knew it. We got company. I just knew we should have kept that rifle along.”

We both turned to squint back down the trail. I listened, but couldn’t hear a thing. I stood so still I could see the moon shake, ever so slightly, each time my heart pumped blood through my eyes. Then someone stumbled and cursed, not twenty paces down trail. My back went straight. Next thing I knew a silhouette detached from the main, about the size of a person, and crashed sidewise into the brush alongside the path.

“The hell?”

“Good Lord.”

Virgil tugged on the lead rope and we went back down the trail for a look. We could hear whoever it was struggling to get themselves vertical again, cursing and clawing at the soil as if there was no more menacing a force on earth than gravity. I saw someone, a form, crawl slowly out onto the trail on their hands and knees and then push themselves up, one tottering leg at a time, until they stood before me, but in the way a broomstick stands when you balance it on end and know the miracle cannot last.

“You there!” a man cried with finger upraised, and the heat of liquor hit me so hard I blinked back tears. “I got a message for you!”

The man took a step forward, then lunged back two just to square his balance. The whole world appeared to be wheeling beneath his feet.

“Your salvation is near at hand!” he cried, and I knew right then I was in the presence of a saint. Not for the words he spoke, but because he should have been dead of poison. This was no common-type drunkenness before me on the road. No, this was a whole new level achieved, a feat of mystical immoderation. The man held out his hand and I took it with reluctance. He had a handshake made you think of a horse’s lips. When I let go, he fell back a step and then cried, “Ho!” like he’d seen something there in the road. With a crack of the knees he stooped down to fetch it, swayed there a moment, put one hand on the ground to steady himself, then came back up, and goddammit if he wasn’t holding a hoe.

Not a bad one, either. At the spade-end of it was tied his bundle, containing Lord knew what, and he slung the length of that hoe over his narrow shoulder. “Name’s Levi,” he says. Though actually he said about four-five names after that. Levi Such-and-Such-and-Such-and-Such, except I didn’t catch any of it but just the Levi.

Reason was, my mind began to foray, thinking about how I’d always been rather partial to the name of Levi. If Madder would have it, I even reckoned we’d name our first son as such. He would be little Levi Lereaux and she’d teach him to paint and mix colors in a palette and how to stretch a canvas across a frame and I’d say, “Levi, my son, Levi how about you and me doing some of them things boys and their fathers are meant to like doing?”

But now that I’d met this drunken old coot, the name of Levi was suddenly tarnished in my head. Whereas most folks are named after hotshots from scripture and revolutionary generals and great-grandpappies dead in the grave, I was named after three days of drunken revelry by a father who once knew a sot by the same name, and I did not wish to carry this tradition.

So this Levi fella says, he sways there on the road and says to me, “Name’s Levi Such-and-Such.” And he says this while staring, tranced-like, at a point precisely between me and Virgil, patting Jimmy Brown with a wooden motion. “And I tell you what,” he says. “I am in sorry company. Ain’t none of you going to drive me away?”

“Not that I planned on.”

He slumped down onto a log with a whoop and began to unlace his boots. “I got no trust for a man that trusts the likes of me,” he says. “Not that I am iniquitous, mind you. Lord no, I am a God-fearing man. There ain’t a wicked bone in this body, but to look upon it in a mirror is a fright to my heart and ain’t no man in his right mind gonna shake my hand in the dark.”

He slipped off one boot and started in on the other. For the first time the moonlight caught him good, as he leaned down for that boot, and I saw this fella was small and wiry as hell, like scrambling mountains was something he did for a salary. This Levi had a billygoat’s beard and long oily hair which in color was either green or red. I could see through to the shine of his scalp. His cheeks were hollow and weather-bitten as a sailor’s with a nose swollen purple with veins. In all the time I was to know this man, I never saw him eat a bite. Got all his corn from the jug, as the saying goes.

“Well, I got good news and bad news,” he said as he peeled off a threadbare sock and went about flossing his toes with it. “Which one you want first?”

And I says, “Don’t matter, so long as you speak true.”

“All right then. The bad news is you fellas ain’t the first I encountered on this long and lonely road. No sir. There is another not far behind, says he’s fixed entire in a murdering way. Says he’s on the path of the man stole his mule, and the nigra what run away.”

“That would be us,” I says, and saw Virgil throw me a look like I was a million dollars on fire. “Only not quite like he tells it,” I quickly added.

“Well he is a’telling it to many. I passed him up whilst he was near to preaching your shame to a pair a fur trappers right there in the road. They was offering him up supplies that very moment.”

And Virgil says, “So he a ways back then.”

“Oh yeah. A ways. Several mile maybe. But the manner he is going about it, he’ll be upon you before long, and most like have something of a posse.”

I wasn’t overly concerned. For one thing, I had old Virgil along, my guide through the night. I doubted Will Lawson would ever find Valhalla alone. I said as much aloud.

“Well, that’s all fine and goodly,” says Levi. “But insofar as this Valhalla is concerned, I been just about every part of these mountains and unless Valhalla got another name to go by, it is doubtful to exist.”

It occurred to me that for all the juice in his veins and the spinning compass in his eyes, this Levi spoke clear as a bell. As if he could no longer recall the last sober notion invaded his skull, and so like a blind man walking home without a falter to his step, had long ago learned to operate smoothly at a deficit.

“The good news,” says Levi, slowly, carefully untying the knot of his bundle, “is I meant what I said.”

“About being in sorry company?”

“Chuu! Come on now, don’t you know wit when you hear it? No sir. I mean about your salvation being near at hand.”

R

I figure there are three kinds of hisses come to mind when a person says, ‘hiss’. The first is the hiss of a log when you throw it on the fire and the steam spits out, high and sudden and makes you jerk in your seat. The second kind I actually forget, but I had it a minute ago, and it was a perfect example, a really good one, and the last kind, the third kind of hiss is the sort nobody likes to hear, not underfoot anyhow, or without good warning and a stick.

“Can you keep a secret?” says old Levi, untwisting the neck of his sack.

“That would depend on a number a things,” I told him, for a promise is not something I take lightly.

“Won’t do,” says Levi, “as I need something of a collateral before I show you my hand. There’s those who’ll prosecute me and my kind.”

“Fair enough,” says I, “I can pledge secrecy to you, allowing for the terms is within practical reason.”

I had to say that, to add the “within reason” bit, otherwise I’d be obliged to keep mum under all manner of torture, and I hadn’t known this man but a minute.

Old Levi, he grunted and scratched at his jaw, and then opened the sack wide and I leaned in for a peek, and that is when I heard the third kind of hiss. You’ve never seen so many serpents knotted up in a pile. Copperheads and water moccasins and no lack of fat rattlers. I jerked back just as one lunged at my face and that Levi, he just gave the sack a quick twist, tied a rude knot and giggled like a shriekhouse regular.

“What exactly are you and your kind?”

“Revivalists!” says he, lifting the sack like a trophy-fish. “Folks who ain’t afraid to put their faith on the line. For the good Lord sayeth, Mark sixteen verse seventeen, ‘they shall take up serpents and drink any deadly thing and they shall not know harm!’ And you, my young friend, are cordially invited to a tent meeting.”

A tent meeting. Imagine that. I quickly explained I was no stranger to Christianity. Beyond the velvet-pistoned elegance of the word itself, I had next to no use for the thing, and I told the man so. Well, he came back and says his meetings were different, of a different sort entire, and salvation was all him and his lot were fixed upon. And I told him my salvation was in Valhalla. It was my Madder Carmine. And the color red.

And he says, he says to me then, that is three things I am speaking of.

Three things, whilst in salvation there is but just the one.

R

So that’s how I came to join up with old Levi Such-and-Such, and me and Virgil and blindfolded Jimmy Brown On A Rope, we followed that coot up hill and dale with his sack of snakes swinging side-to-side from the end of a hoe. He said we were headed for Stilton, which the Cherokee call Adayahi Tsilihu Digugodisgi, or something along those lines, being the more lyrical way of saying, ‘Grove of Sleeping Judgment’.

So we walked. Sometimes the moon was so bright it burned my eyes like the sun. At intervals in our passage, old Levi would sally from the road to flip rotten logs with his hoe, poking round for serpents. I saw him catch two myself. Just as often however, it wasn’t serpents he was after but those little liquor-stills tucked back in the hollows. Without warning old Levi would peel away from the path, cutting into the woods, declaring it was time to, “say how-do to a friend.” He had quite a knack for hunting out the rogue element in those hills, seeming to find them by some imperceptible change in the sound of a creek, for creek water was always preferable for the setting of a good still.

General speaking, they were little camps we came across. Little one-horse operations, for any bigger was likely to draw the taxman’s eye. You could pretty much count on finding yourself a bit of dried possum and a tater or two, and of course a cauldron of sour mash going over an ashwood fire, for ashwood was near to smokeless, copper run-off coils bursting every which way and one or two fellas passing a jug. Old Levi seemed to know them all.

“That good?” they would say, pouring from their jug to his tin cup.

“Very,” says Levi, angling the jug on his own. “And more is ever the better.”

Virgil was only a little less shy, never asking for more, but never covering his cup to seconds. Me, I’m more a connoisseur of cheap wine myself, but I’ll allow for a taste of good whiskey. Except I never could get over to the custom in those parts, which was to let raw meat ferment in their brew to give it “that mellow spice.”

We never stopped long for these sojourns. Exactly how long is difficult to say, given the nature of our visits, but you had to hand it to old Levi Such-and-Such. He had it down to a method. He could locate his next liquor-still like a point on a map, tanker himself up, offer a few slaps on the back and we would be on the road again before you could say fare thee well.

And old Virgil. Good old Virgil striding alongside me, never saying more than enough. Usually it was just wink and a smile, and then back to whistling those warbly little tunes like he wasn’t really among us but on a whim. Sometimes I’d look over, and he’d catch me looking, but he’d stare straight ahead, trying to whistle through a smile like he was stuffed so tight with mirth he was set to bust. “Just you wait,” he seemed to be saying in the space between notes. “Just you wait, Dannon Lereaux, for all things broke gets fixed in the end.”

So we followed that Levi up and up in the mountains, him staggering about in his infallible zigzag, chattering on like a tree full of jays. There seemed no end to the topics he could speak upon without the least response from myself. I reckon he was the sort of person would see nothing amiss in conducting a lengthy conversation about people who talk too much. Clever though, in a witless sort of way, a phenomenon best related to you by means of his unsavory dialogue:

Him. “You got littluns?”

Me. “Littluns? Not yet I don’t, but I aim to have about as—”

“You’re lucky!” he says. “With littluns it’s the same thing, every damn day. Never let up. Tugging at your coat. Pawing your leg. Whining and whining. Can we have some food? How come we ain’t got no food? All our friends is got food. Wah wah wah, till you get so fed up, you finally find them some food, and then you know what? You know what happens? Starts all over. Very next day. I say the human race is better off without them, thank you very much. Now this here hoe, howsoever, you see this here hoe? Am I right in saying this is a fine-made hoe?”

Our path was burnished with moonlit leaves, the air was autumn sharp. We were coming upon a stream that played across the trail and sang songs like tinkling glass. In regards to the hoe, I wasn’t quite in agreement, for the spade-end had been refashioned all queer, rendering the tool useless for all but hooking serpents.

“Guess how much,” says Levi, not slowing one jot before picking his way over the creek stones.

“Go on. Guess. Now don’t, now don’t touch it! Christ Almighty, you want a get bit through the sack? Sweet Lord, now just step on back and guess before I crack you one.”

“Don’t know,” says I. “Never bought a hoe. A dollar?”

“Chuu! A dollar! Listen to you! What if I was to tell you this here hoe, this fine-made hoe didn’t cost me a red cent.”

“I’d say you was a gambler, and luckier than odds.”

“You’d say I was—now listen here. You ever hear a place called Indya? Well now in Indya they got them a phosophy what’s called karma. No, I says kar-ma. Like karma. That’s right. And don’t forget it, for it works mighty smooth-like, about as useful as any apparatus you’re like to find. So let’s say you done something right and good, for a sample. Well then life pays you back, and with interest to boot. And when you done something lowdown, say, well life finds a way to bring you up square. So I sees this here hoe, just sitting lonesome in a shed, and I says to myself, Hell, Levi, you sure could use you a hoe, and the bank won’t give you no credit. But with this here karma business, you can take what you need now and circumstances will bill you later-like.”

“You sure you worked that one right?”

The unspoken lesson here seemed to be that, according to Levi, for the small toll of self-loathing a man could have just about anything he wanted from life.

“Darn straight I got it right!” he replied with heat. “I have it on high, for my late brother-in-law, God bless, was a English spice-trader what used to play poker with the sultan.”

The brother-in-law got himself a hand-chopping for thievery, finally dying of privations in a dungeon, but that was beside the point, as Levi so ardently assured us. The real point was that there was system in place, a divine coordination. And if you were astute with the Lord you could work it like any other.

We dropped down into the dry riverbed of a shallow canyon and the trail quickly scattered itself among the stones. We had to scramble to find it, following the cairns people stack on boulders to show wayfarers the trail. Jimmy Brown stumbled all over, his hoofs making scraping noises as he swatted for purchase. Yet still that mule would not let Virgil remove the blindfold. He’d snort and bray like a squeaky-rust-door the moment you even touched it, preferring blindness altogether to sight. Suddenly that mule froze, right there in the canyon.

A howl geysered up from the woods, way up on the bluffs above us and Levi, he gripped his hoe a little tighter and says, “Just wolf. They’ll be following our scent, see what we’re up to.”

And I says, “Rascal,” for that was the name of my Pa’s favorite hound, the one that got killed the night Phineas threw himself in the Shallewapre. That was Rascal all right, howling away. I’ll grant you a wolf and a hound will sound alike on a wind, but I reckon I was nigh weaned onto the yowling of hounds, and I’d know that Rascal about anywhere.

Old Rascal, he howled again and Levi grimaced, saying, “Haste now, come on. Let’s get on up that gap and be done with it.”

I glanced up and saw him, that Rascal. Just a flash in the dark, eyes bright as huffed coals, but I saw six of them. That is to say, I saw three pair of eyes for each his three heads because in these mountains he wasn’t Rascal but Cerberus.

“Who-eee,” whispered Virgil, nudging Jimmy Brown along. “He don’t like the sound a that one. Let’s go, Jimmy. Nah, this way. Let’s go.” And I could tell Virgil knew the difference same as me.

Some time ago, can’t say precisely when, but back when Mama and Pa were still around, I used to hanker for gold the way other youngins did sugar. Whenever gold came into the cabin, I felt it all through me. It didn’t happen frequent, mind you, but when there was gold in the cabin, I knew it true, just as I know water when it’s flowing deep in the earth.

And every time it was the same. Late that night I would get up and hunt around in my sleep till I could find that gold and eat it. Whether bauble or coin, I would swallow it down and wake up next morning with a bellyache. Then I would stumble around, shaky as colt, moaning and slobbering till I stuck a finger down my throat and chucked it up again.

Welp, this went on for a number of years till one morning I woke up with a bellyache like no other, having dreamt I swallowed Mama’s own wedding ring. I lay there curled up like a prawn and hollering till I could cough it up proper. Then I cleaned it off real good and gave it back to Mama, saying, “Here you are, and I am sorry, Mama, for I didn’t mean to go and swaller your ring.”

And she put a hand to her heart, and then real quick to her mouth and her chin commenced to get all quivery, and she says through her fingers, “Bless your little soul, Dannon Lereaux, if it’s not the very ring I dreamt of last night, and on so many another. For your Pa never found need to give me such a thing.”

I never ate gold again after that. But when Pa found out about that gold band, he went and took it from Mama and sold it in town for the money to buy Rascal with. Needless to say, I never was too fond of that hound, and had little doubt he was now the herald of pure trouble.

We climbed up and out of that canyon, steep going, filed through a rocky gap and came down the other side a little ways. We paused along a broad outcrop that was near to bald on top, except for a stack a flat boulders. Those boulders jutted out from the slope like a row of felled dominoes with one of them, the biggest, hanging over the edge of the mountain like a perfect platform put their for your private viewing of the valley below.

“There you are,” says Levi, stabbing a knobby finger at the distance. “That’s your Stilton. Just cross the River Caroline, down there in among them oaks.”

But I had my qualms, you see, on account I couldn’t see anything but the river and the woods, and suspected this Stilton lay beyond the gates of earthly vision. To Virgil vol Krie I says, “You reckon I’ll make it?”

And he says to me back, “I reckon you got to. Unless you want to turn around, there ain’t no other way to where we is a’headed.” But the look in his eye said I was in for a ride.

Then old Levi pointed out the steeples of several tents, some of them huge, rising out of that oak grove down below. When the wind blew, I even saw the flicker of firelight through the trees. But there was something queer about those oaks. For the life of me I couldn’t say what. Just gave me a feeling, is what it was, a feeling that defeats all narration, and I noticed Virgil was watching old Levi like a hawk.

The River Caroline was all brighted up like a silver thread below, working its way down through the valley. You could hear it too, faint and rippling, like the applause of a thousand unseen hands. We scaled our way down the knoll till we came into a patch of willows and the sounds of the Caroline grew louder. Soon it was a roar in our ears and we popped out from the trees and bumped right up against its reedy banks. Levi had us hunting all through them, swatting around, until we found the raft his folks kept moored there. He ferried us across, me clenching my teeth and holding my guts until we could clamber the far bank and come right up on the verge of those oaks.

Instantly, I saw what was wrong. Those oak trees, the whole forest of them, they were all lined up in perfect rows the way fir trees are when a man plants timber. They fashioned avenues all side-by-side with great hoary arms going every which way, eerie as all hell and sent my nerves into turmoil just to enter.

“I ain’t never heard such a hush,” says I, listening to the hollow whispers of our footfalls on grass. And Levi, he says we were in the Grove of Sleeping Judgment, as the Cherokee so named it, for the Cherokee were nigh the only ones who still attended these woods.

Levi said these oaks were all that’s left of the village called Stilton, for the whole habitation of them died of smallpox more than a hundred years prior. They had lain, bloating, without a solitary survivor until along came a young Cherokee trapper who was collecting ginseng one summer and found the complete village all rotted asunder. The Cherokee boy’s name was Big Water, they say, and he razed the place to the ground. Then he dug a thousand-and-one graves with his dark lonesome hands and the hickory paddle he carried to prize up roots. And as he laid each body to rest, just before he backfilled the pit, that boy placed an acorn in the mouth of the deceased. Now it was those acorns, said Levi, that took root and drank bones till these oaks were all that remained of old Stilton.

I asked Virgil if this was the way he had come, and he reckoned it was close enough, and we were arriving none too soon what with old Will Lawson making headway behind.

Before long the keen of a fiddle, somewhere ahead of us in the grove, came haunting through the trees and I swear it was the voice of desperation itself. It whined and it cried and made leaves shiver and float. They were playing a downright wicked fiddle whoever it was, and as we closed in, the ting-tang-tang of a banjo picked up and began to roll about the wood, a sound that always reminds me of a pair of dice tumbling down hill.

And it was upon the sound of that banjo, plucked by the devil’s own hand, that I felt the slipknot of destiny yank tight upon my throat. I would have stopped right there and run back the way I’d come if I didn’t know reining up would’ve choked the life clean out of me.

R

But that fire, that great pagan blaze! It was through a break in the trees I first saw them dancing around it, demons shrieking and leaping about. Satyrs and maidens, diabolical grins, bodies writhing in a gloss of animal sweat.

I had to blink twice, three times, then give my head a good shake before the caprice of my vision retreated. Then it was just regular folks dancing, just a bunch Christians stomping their feet, clapping to a dosey-doe.

“Shew!” I hissed to myself as we entered the light of their fire, trying my damdest to recover from the apparition, when without warning old Levi hollered out: “Behold, I give you the power to tread upon serpents, and nothing by any means shall harm you!”

The fiddle screeched to a halt. The grove filled to bursting with the echoes of whoops as folks spilled every which way to greet us. “Always does it,” says Levi, shifting his hoe from one shoulder to the other. “Nothing’ll rile them up like Luke ten-nineteen. But just wait till they see the mixed load we’re bringing them. It’s been a tolerable stretch since we’ve had fresh rattlers to play with.”

The fiddle burst back in with “Fox in the Holler” and a whole bushel of folks commenced stomping about the fire, their shadows swinging round on the tents. There was a whole camp of them, like they’d been here for weeks, living off nothing but acorns and Jesus-meetings and music to taste.

Suddenly old Levi thrust the hoe at me. “Here, take it. Take it!” Overcome by zeal, he did something that looked like a jig but near laid him to the earth, his knees unequal to his fervor. It is a well known fact that holiness folks is disallowed from liquor so Virgil, in his intransigent kindness, took Levi by the back of the shirt and held the old man up so he could dance right into camp under the auspices of his own steam. With that sack of serpents over my shoulder I followed behind, leading old Jimmy Brown On A Rope.

“Brother Levi!”

“Hows about it!”

“Ho, what you got now! Let’s have a look!”

Half-naked children chased a dog through the crowd. Women twirled and yodeled and clapped hands above their heads. Levi slapped me firm on the back. “Now you’re about to see the Lord’s true hand at work. This here’s a Jesus jamboree!”

Virgil slipped back into the shadows, just watching and smiling, scratching old Jimmy about the neck. He got right in under that straw hat of his so there wasn’t any way to tell his thinking.

That fiddler, he was a pear-shaped fella with a beard down to his belt, and he played that fiddle from the hip, sawing away at it while calling out dance steps through his nose. Folks clomped, clapped, swung little girls around. Levi’s sack got passed around with all the fanfare of applecakes, and folks peeked and poked and exclaimed such approbations as to make me wonder what precisely I’d missed.

Someone shouted a particular murky verse from scripture, and all those revelers piled back into the main tent with whoops and barking dogs and a whole heap of excitement. I helped Virgil water Jimmy Brown. Then we hitched him up among the teams of horses and mules already corralled beneath the oaks.

When I turned around, Virgil was gone, and a wave of panic overtook me. But he’d only let himself down in the grass, his back against a tree. Without a word to me, he’d taken to shucking away at that ball marble of his, scuffing it round with the sandpaper.

“What do you say, Virgil vol Krie?”

“Oh, I say they strange folk, these folk you got here. Strange folk. But you got to do what you got to do.”

Good old Virgil. I says to him, “So you coming in?”

“Oh, nawsuh. Ain’t nothing in that tent for old Virgil vol Krie,” he says. “Nawsuh, I stay right here, mind my own. You go on ahead though, for you got to do what you got to do.”

I took that as a sign. Virgil would never tell you a thing straight out, but he let you know. He let you know what had to be done all right.

But that tent. It was pure humming with menace. I could feel the shadow of it, like a thing alive, and knew a trial lay just within. “You reckon there is another way?” I glanced down at Virgil, shuck shucking away at his orb, then I saw him face down in the dirt. Dead. The blood flowed out back of his head and mixed in a puddle of my own. Our blood, all mixed up in the dirt. Then it was just him again with that ball marble.

Shuck. Shuck. Shucking away.

“Ain’t no other way I know about.”

R

You could tell the water moccasins from the rest because when they opened up to hiss the insides of their mouth were all white as cotton. The copperheads, they were actually kind of pretty with their burnt gold banding and yellow caterpillar-looking tails which they used to lure in small victuals. And the rattlers, well anyone can tell a rattler. They were all three kinds dumped together in a wooden crate, hissing and writhing with nothing but drunken Levi and his hoe to keep them from climbing back out and spreading about the tent.

From amidst the pile I saw something spring-like, which was a mouth, thowing itself forward and then recoil into squirming anonymity. “Oh don’t mind it. They’s more afraid a you.”

Old Levi assured me they were the serenest class of serpent, and I pointed out there were three, and every one of them showed colicky, and asked how a man makes his choice between them.

“It’s the good Lord does that. Ain’t no choice a man makes but the wrong one.”

Apart from those serpents, the tent was empty save for a couple coal-oil lanterns, a few rows of stump-seating and a rude cross nailed together from fallen oak limbs. The folks were already hallelujah’n left and right and throwing their hands in the air and shammying their heads like a dog coming out the water. Their eyes were either pinched shut with passion or else open and bewitched, while one of those folks, the most feverish of the lot, thumped a leather-bound bible and shook his fist in the air.

“So the good Lord spoke unto Jesus!”

“Amen!”

“Who was received unto heaven!”

“Hallelujah!”

“Jesus, who sat at the right hand of God!”

“Praise be!”

“And went forth and preached ever where he could!”

“Go Lord!”

“From Nazareth to Galilee!”

“To Galilee!”

“From Gethsemane to Jerusalem!”

“Take me home!”

“And then the good Lord a’sayeth!”

“Glory be!”

“In thy name ye shall cast out the devils!”

“Ain’t no Satan here!”

“And ye shall speak with new tongues!”

“Tell it like it is!”

“And ye shall take up the serpents!”

“Hallelujah!”

“And drink any deadly thing without harm!”

And upon that last one, about the swallowing of deadly items, that last one appeared to be the cue for everybody in the tent to go pure buckwild, frothing at the mouth and scooping up serpents like sideshow bushmen. They weren’t gentle either, like you’d think folks would be with five or six copperheads in their fist. No, they hopped about like they were barefoot on a griddle, shivering and shaking till they went cold-out and flopped around on the earth spouting gibberish.

It was getting downright feral in there, to say the least, and when the music took up again I saw a spare banjo lying about with no one to play it. I felt the spirit move on me, instant-like.

Now if I had known then, as I rightly do now, this was the very banjo Satan had played I have no doubt I would’ve kept my distance. But as I’ve stated, I’ve got something of a natural rhythm in me, and it drew me in thick, and even though I never played any banjo I could pluck out a mean tempo on just about anything. All around me folks were shouting me on, hopping around in a sweat and trying to press me with those quart jars of strychnine they were drinking from.

“Who-boy! Look at him go!” they would holler and then jerk back like something punched them in the chest and start jabbering away in tongues. I swear there was smoke coming clean off my fingertips. I was pure whipping it. Then one of those folks, a man total heaped in serpents all round his neck and arms, he asks me if I wished to testify to our Lord. And I said that sounded about right. And so he asks if I might like to tote a deadly serpent. And I said I believed I did. So he up and placed a rattler about my neck like a diamondback-scarf and goddammit if the Holy Ghost didn’t go sprinting through my inners.

I set down that banjo and took hold of that rattler and next thing I know I’m up and dancing with the rest of them. I was voltaic with joy, just zipping with vigor. I was Dannon Quixote, primed to take on the world, and so I holler, “Open your doors, Avernus, for I am a’ready!” and that bearded fella with the fiddle, he looked up at me queer, halting his bow midstroke with the kind of sound makes your toes curl up in your boots. On the instant, everybody fell hushed and a howl pierced the veil of night.

Rascal.

It was that Rascal again. I heard him clear, only this time he was howling in harmony, what with those three heads of his, and that rattler bit hold of my arm.

R

If I learned one thing from it all, it is don’t ever play the devil’s banjo. Any man doesn’t take my advice is setting himself up for a whole succession of woes. I suspect it is even written somewhere.

“I believe I been bit,” says I.

You might think a fella would know right off, but when a rattler takes hold of your arm you don’t feel the pinch of teeth first thing. Nope. Feels more like a blacksmith just cracked you with his hammer. It’ll jolt you up pretty good, but unless you saw the actual bite, you don’t know what happened right off.

I looked down and saw the twin beads of indeterminate color pooling upon my forearm, and I says, “Yessir, I believe this here serpent just took a taste.”

It was Levi himself who yanked that rattler from my neck. Only he just passed it to the woman beside me, her all barefoot and jolting with a suckling child in one arm and my rattler in the other, for the music had picked back up again. I looked around and saw folks laying-on-hands and fish-flopping on the ground like the doors to bedlam clean busted.

“Levi,” I says. “Levi, I am a might bit befuddled here.”

Still dancing, his whole face opened into a grin and he slapped me on the back. “Bible says take them up! Never says they won’t bite you!”

Granted, I wasn’t feeling particular organized in the head about then, but I seemed to recall a bit about “ye shall know no harm” and wondered if the good Lord wasn’t splitting hairs when he drew the lines between hurting and harming.

And it was about this time I began to feel mighty poor. An unspecified number of mallets commenced to thumping at my skull and I had to blink hard to keep the black away. Only the black kept getting heavier, and filled up in my chest and then spilled down my limbs. I looked down and saw a bruise, about the size of a potato, already purpling my arm and the room began to spin with considerable vigor, though no one else appeared the worse for it. The odd one of those folks stopped jolting and babbling long enough to shake my hand, saying the Holy Ghost had done taking a liking to me, having chosen me out select at my very first meeting.

And I says, “I wonder if perhaps you got some place a fella can lay up and die proper.”

And those folks, they were regular bastions of solicitude. They hooted it up and elbowed my ribs. “You hear that? Listen to the man speak!” They pressed me with those jars of strychnine, wanting to know right then if I’d join up with their outfit. I said I’d consider it, should I survive the ordeal. But happy as those folks were, I reckoned I couldn’t do this sort of thing every week. My liver would put up a fuss, or just plain abscond, and I reasoned I couldn’t rightly commit to anything in this world when I was just setting up to leave.

Without warning, something up and cracked me in the head and I says, “Umph.” Then I opened my eyes and saw the beautiful face of old Virgil vol Krie crouched over me, for it was only right he’d be coming along. He hefted me up from the ground and says, “Lord damn you heavy. I can’t be carrying you all the way now. Come on now, can’t you stand?”

“We still friends?”

“We got to get you on that mule, is what. Get us outa here before old Will Lawson come in. That be him just outside the tent now. You here that? That be him a’ pushing and hollering to get in here. Now stand you up and walk like a man.”

“You coming with me?”

“Course I coming with you. Oh no you don’t, git back up. Come on now, stand on up.”

“We in Hell now?”

“We in a fix, is what we is. Can’t you stand none?”

“We’re in Hell proper, right?”

Old Virgil, I felt him come around behind me and lace his arms about my chest, dragging me out back of the tent. And as the blackness came over me, pushing the last vestiges of this fine world from mine eyes, I heard old Virgil vol Krie mutter between breaths, “Hell. Oh yessuh, I spect it for real now.”