One night, after everyone in North Bangor, Michigan, had gone to sleep, and only one woman was left to sing the night-song shift, Blank Itzikoff snuck out of his bedroom window and walked through the black field toward the ruins of South Bangor.

On his way through the tall corn, he spotted Nit Stevens mounted on a pedal-driven noisemaker. That Nit had the energy to pedal the thing was surprising. He was an incalculably old man, older than Dumb Maxwell and all the other learned men. Blank could hear him breathing heavy above the wooden clop of the noisemaker. Blank tried to sneak behind him and had barely crept a dozen feet before he heard Nit’s voice call his name.

“Itzikoff! What are you doing sneaking around?” Nit hollered.

Nit Stevens had picked up the Mad Hatter’s tremor; Blank could hear it in his voice, and though it was a warm late-summer night, Nit shook like it was winter. He smiled, and his gums glittered like pink rocks in his mouth.

Blank shouldered his way out of the corn and made himself visible. “Your head on top of that corn looked like a Ping-Pong ball floating in a tub,” Nit yelled, breathlessly. Nit never stopped pedaling the noisemaker. He had to shout to be heard.

“I’m going to scavenge some rubber gloves,” Blank said.

“What do you need those for?”

Blank couldn’t think of a lie. “I want to take up learning, like you and Dumb Maxwell.”

Nit Stevens kept on him with a wet, wild look. Then he burst out laughing. “You find any rubber gloves out in the ruins, you bring some back to me, you hear? You give me a little taste of them rubber gloves,” he said.

Blank gave Nit a distrusting look. He thought he would get whipped for sneaking right out there in the field. “I’m free to go?”

“You ain’t going to find nothing in the ruins, boy, but you’re young and full of mosquito piss. You’d find some way anyway. You got your whistle?”

Blank showed him his whistle.

“Get back before sunup. Don’t tell no one I sent you. And watch the ground.”

Silence was a fact, like the Earth, and it always took some implement to beat it back. Blank held his whistle between his teeth and kept his eyes away from the fascinating old Kozy Inn and Dawg ’N Burger signs that hung crookedly above his head. He kept his head toward the ground. A few silvery shapes scuttled across the road ahead of him, but nothing touched him.

After a few hours of searching, he found a waterlogged old house two rows to the back of the State Road. Its upper floors had all given way, giving the house the large, empty feeling of a barn. The concrete basement was carpeted silvery black, and when Blank pointed his whistle at it and blew, the floor came alive. The mercurials Blank usually saw shaped themselves like common things — the odd salamander or chipmunk. Yet some of the creatures that scurried away in that basement caught the moonlight, and Blank could see long legs and heads, weird things, reflected there.

After some searching, he found a sealed packet of gloves among some rotten rags. They looked thinner than Dumb Maxwell’s and might have had holes, but there were a lot of them, and he had to start somewhere.

A few hours before sunup, Blank found Nit Stevens fallen asleep astride his noisemaker. His beard had bunched against his chin and his feet were kicked up on the handlebars. He did not wake the old man.

That morning one of the skinny cows was dead, and another one — a fat, useful one — was wobbling and drooling out in the field. The whole village had come out to see. Dumb Maxwell led them, banging a cowbell with an old gray spoon.

Dumb Maxwell was always telling about things, and some of those things were well beyond Blank’s imagining. There wasn’t a villager old enough to remember the day the silver bodies slanted out of the sky and covered the earth, but Dumb Maxwell knew more about them than anyone else, and they were the subject of most of the fearful tales he had to tell about. They poisoned wells and crops, he said, but the worst thing about them was that on rare occasions they liked to burrow into warm, living fat. And so one of them had crawled into the cow’s ear or mouth or asshole early in the evening as Nit Stevens slept, and by morning the cow was sick and would probably die.

Dumb Maxwell, Frittering Jane, Stupid Hess, and a few other learned folks banged bells and buckets up and down the cow’s body. Nit was there, too. He was yelling at Dumb Maxwell about how he wasn’t going to find anything in that cow, and Dumb was telling Nit to shut up. They banged and hollered for a good fifteen minutes near the cow’s head until she fell on her front knees with a wet-sounding bellow. Mucus trailed from her nose in great clumps, followed by a braid of shimmering mercury. Dumb Maxwell caught the mercury in a bucket and sealed it with a lid. Later that day the cow would be slaughtered and stripped for her skin, and her meat would be buried far away from the village.

“That ain’t on my watch,” repeated Nit. “No sir.”

Blank half expected Nit to call Blank out for the sneaking, to take the tanning off himself. But Nit was lost in thought now, kind of sad looking. “Not on my watch,” he said, and Hess and Jane looked at him, hard and sort of crossly.

Dumb Maxwell, scowling, walked back to his home with the bucket beneath his arm. Blank trotted to catch up with him. “I’d like to see what you do with that,” Blank said.

“You worry about you and yours,” Dumb said.

Blank stopped and called after. “Let me get scarecrow duty, now that Nit’s not gonna be on it. How ’bout then? Then you can show me what it does.”

“You ain’t of age yet,” said Maxwell over his shoulder. He drummed the bucket. “And that there’s a mystery.”

It was Maxwell who first showed how the creatures died when you pulled a seed out of them, how that seed vibrated so as to make the rubber on the tips of your gloves purr. It was Maxwell who first showed in class especially how loud noises made the seed stop purring altogether, which felt like an answer to Blank’s own fear.

Tuesday-evening service was sparsely attended. Folks were always welcome to listen to the sermon from the comfort of their homes, since sermons could be heard in all directions for five miles around, but that was not a privilege the Itzikoffs commonly took. All three of them — son, mother, and father — were wiry people, not easy to distinguish from the other farm people sitting around them. They, too, had multiple tattoos strung around their arms, which celebrated both the fruitful harvests and the low; professed in dense calligraphy the names of their wives, husbands, sons, and daughters; and enacted in fleshy ink lines the fearful fights of the mercurials in the forms of snakes, Rodentia, whales, squid, demons, dragons, mad dogs, and wildcats. They wore the same clothes to church they wore in the fields, shirts dyed in sacred black with fat stitches, black leather stripped from the limp-looking cows out in the fields and dyed with the same tannin-and-iron dye they all used. If anything distinguished Joe Itzikoff, it was that he was rangier and taller than most, a trait Blank followed.

Fulsome Chet, the church caretaker — not rangy himself but tall in the way of a large man — opened all the windows and the large barn doors of the church, while his wife, Hannah, took care of the outside, making sure the loudspeakers had not drooped or craned away from the fields by the wind. On the field’s edge, the foot-pedaled noisemakers and bells were still, and behind the wind chimes just a few crickets sounded. The moment before congregation was the only silence the town of Bangor, Michigan, ever knew, and one could feel the presence of the mercurials closing in on that silence, waiting to take up space.

Priest Waverly, so partial to the color black he took to dying his great tousle of hair and beard in it, took the stage with a great clomping of boots. He was followed by two of his retinue. They had raccooned their eyes with campfire pitch and were dressed in fine-looking leather. The congregation waited. Priest Waverly nodded to Fulsome Chet, who from offstage began to crank the wheel of North Bangor’s only working dynamo. The dynamo squealed, tearing into the silence of the church, and began to raise sparks.

Priest Waverly plugged his bass guitar into the dynamo-powered Marshall stack, as the drummer sat behind his equipment with an ambient rattle. The guitarist plugged in with an electrical burst. None of them said a word as they prepared.

So they began. The night’s sermon would be bottom-heavy, slow, and repetitive, in the chords of G and F. Blank looked over at his father, who had long been a partisan of the F chord. His eyes were shut, and his face had gone slack in the warm bath of the congregational sonics. The sermon had a physical presence, like wind blowing through an open window, and Priest Waverly sang in a voice sunk low in thunder and fat:

Let me down

Down to the sea

Right silver rabbit

Right black bird

Carry me down

Intangible flame

Down to the sea

Bu-u-ry me

Bu-u-ry me

Between the candlelight of the church and the fading dusk outside, the two great stained-glass windows began to assert themselves. On one pane, a demon threatened to fling a crucified farmer from a hand sling. In another, hook-kneed demons fell before a long wall of orange flame, beneath writing that had always puzzled Blank. Once he saw a few drops of tannin fall into a pail of milk, where they whorled and furred like a living thing; the writing looked like that, formed of dizzying spikes and jagged curls.

Dim Henry, the eldest of the learned, sat trembling next to Dumb Maxwell in the back row. Nit Stevens was a piker when it came to the Mad Hatter’s syndrome, compared to Old Dim Henry; Dim was now generally acknowledged to be the very stupidest of the learned ones. Tonight’s sermon was in his honor, because today he’d be retiring from work and noisemaking. He smiled, and his patchily shaven face showed a single yellow tooth.

Priest Waverly and his retinue played for an hour. The dark sonics entered the church and forest like varnish soaking into wood. When the hour was done, the guitarist dropped out first, then the drums went silent, and finally Priest Waverly’s lead bass guitar rang one final, heavy note that dissipated slowly, like salt on the tongue. Chet stopped turning the dynamo, sweating through his leather vest. Every face was turned to the ceiling, where silence and mind briefly mingled.

“Well, then,” said Priest Waverly. He nodded to Dim Henry, which elicited grunts of approval from the old ones in the pews. Nit Stevens was not to be found among them. The priest started packing up his bass.

Dumb Maxwell led Henry through the front door and to the back of the church, proudly pointing his lightning-streaked orange beard before him like a dowsing rod. Henry kept talking about his grandson’s birthday, though his grandson had left Bangor many years back. The congregation stood, each in his or her own time, and left the church. A few wandered off to scarecrow duty, to get the noisemakers running again. Still more went home, as there was work to be done in the morning. Many, including the Itzikoffs, followed Dumb Maxwell to the back of the church. Blank’s dad put a hand on Blank’s shoulder.

“Why don’t you get on back to the house,” he said.

“I want to see Old Dim get his retirement,” said Blank.

“You get on back and boil up a pot of water for your ma’s tea,” said Blank’s father. Blank expressed an unhappiness but did as he was told.

Coming back from the church, Blank found Nit Stevens sitting on his porch, staring out into the black wood across the field. He trembled as he looked into the dark.

“Why ain’t you at Old Dim Henry’s retirement?” asked Blank.

“You think I gotta go to everybody’s fuckin’ retirement?” The retort was sharp.

A few houses away, Judy Glick began singing a song about a place called Miami. She always led the first night-song shift. All the women’s songs were about cities, how bright they were, how many people lived in them, how the women there danced all the time, just danced and danced.

“I didn’t say you got to do anything,” Blank said, his voice lowered. “Pa says you and Henry go back a ways.”

“We go back a ways, that’s true. We was kids together forty years back.” Nit Stevens frowned deeply and looked at the floorboards of his porch. “But that’s an end of it.” There was a little bit more of the wise Nit present here, as if Nit had sat down and focused on being wise the better part of the day.

“It’s just, I never seen you miss a service,” Blank said. “I remember all those times you used to sing with the congregation. You were funny when you used to sing.”

Nit did not reply. Things were silent between them for a moment. Blank was thinking he ought to go but reluctance held him, and then a notion took him.

“Hey, I found them rubber gloves we was talking about,” Blank said.

Blank thought he saw a worried look pass across Nit’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy.”

“It’s the gloves I was looking for in the ruins, Nit,” Blank said. “You remember.”

Nit looked back out to the woods. “I don’t remember shit, boy. Get on.” This last the old man yipped, like a dog, so that Blank turned and ran off.

An empty seat was held open for Dim Henry for a month, by way of custom. By the time it filled again, the sermons sounded earlier each dusk, and North Bangor had begun the harvesting of corn. From morning through the afternoon in those shrinking days, all was corn in the village, and Blank worked every day. Corn was broken from its stem and collected by the men and women and detasseled by the women and the children and by Blank. The women sang songs about Chicago and Providence and Houston as they worked.

Corn was apportioned to each family, who roasted and ate it every night. Corn was set to dry and was ground as meal. It would be turned throughout the winter into every manner of pone, bread, biscuit, and tortilla. The greater share of corn was set aside in the better-made barrels and stacked in the large barn, which served as the village commissary. In the morning in the schoolhouse, Blank was compelled to do figures in terms of how many corn kernels, or to multiply these bushels of corn against these others and see what you came up with. In the afternoon Blank would work, and every night the congregational sonics were about corn or hard work, or both, or about the winter to come. They would alternate: lively, then dirgelike, and back to lively. Priest Waverly’s retinue would play chunk chunk chunk chunka chunka, as folks stumbled into church with blistered hands and aching backs. As congregation wore on, the sonics would slow into the long, muscle-soothing bwooowm, which indicated the work would soon be done.

By this time, Blank had snuck into the ruins two more times. It was a relief from corn. He knew Bangor a bit from the one time his dad took him there, but now he had a street map in his head. Blank had collected the gloves, plus a dead clock, some edible mushrooms, and an old jar for his efforts, all of which he kept under his bed. He felt he was ready for the next step. He intended to catch a silver body. He’d keep it under his bed, too, and study it. Eventually he’d find the seed inside of it and stop it and show Dumb Maxwell or Nit Stevens what he’d done.

The best thing about being learned, Blank thought, was that you didn’t have to be musical or good with plants, and you didn’t get yelled at all the time for dropping things.

Nit Stevens was no longer on scarecrow duty, and Bill Kingdom, who took his place, was a big fat boy who couldn’t concentrate on anything but pushing his pedals nice and loud. Blank found it easy to pass him by. The path to the ruins led Blank to a moonlit section of the dead interstate near the old schoolhouse. From the outside the brick walls of the school were rotten, as if a giant had swung hammer blows to the corners and knocked out great chunks of masonry. The bangor high school sign that had been affixed to the brick wall had lost its individual letters and were instead ghosted on the wall and smothered by decay. Blank snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. He held his jar before him like an offering, his whistle between his teeth.

The shadows scattered. Once, when Blank was young, he fell into a trough and snorted a gout of water, which seemed to fill him up to the eyeballs. If a silver body got up inside of his face, through his nose, he wondered if it would feel like that, like drowning, or worse than that. A couple of shadows got close, and he blew his whistle at them.

Soon one silver-dark lizard, a big one, was playing near his shoes, and he let it stay there. It wiggled in and out of the moonlight. Before Blank knew it, the thing was running up his leg.

Capturing it was a mighty struggle. The thing was cold as ice and would not easily be caught. It scrabbled from his leg to his chest and then around to his back. Blank danced like a child possessed. When Blank finally stopped using his gloved hands to catch it and used the jar instead, the thing right walked into it from his hip. Blank twisted the lid tightly and there he had it. He felt learned as hell at that moment.

Blank looked at his jar. The silvery thing inside, larger than the one Dumb Maxwell had shown him, had become sleek and rabbitlike, and it was surprisingly heavy. Blank had to hold on with two hands as the weight shifted within the glass, making him feel vulnerable.

He came to the town a few hours before sunup, as was usual, and snuck past Bill Kingdom, who had slowed his pedaling but was concentrating all the harder for it.

Blank was telling himself how easy it all had been when, to his surprise, he found Nit Stevens was waiting for him, slumped on a beam on Blank’s father’s front step. He looked as if he’d just snapped awake. Blank quickly hid the heavy, awkward jar behind his back.

“I remembered about the gloves you promised,” said Nit. “I seen you sneak out to the back forty again through my window. What you hiding there?”

Blank, barely able to hold the jar, was about to deny everything. Then he dropped the jar, which shattered on the dirt walkway behind him.

The mercurial, newly freed, did not run. It was shaped like a large rat now. It had a nose too long to be natural, from which mercury dripped like snot. This poked at the air between itself and Blank, who had scrambled next to Nit Stevens.

“Tuck tuck tuck,” Nit said. “Now now now.” He held his arm toward the rat, who, after a moment’s hesitation, crawled onto it. Nit snaked his arm back and forth, and the Mercurial snaked with it. “You are a cold one, aren’t you?” said Nit to the thing. He held his arm just a foot from his face, and the silver body traveled to the end of his curled fingers and stuck its nose out in the space between them.

“You’re like to kill yourself screwing around that way,” whispered Blank.

Nit looked back at him with a gap-toothed condescending smile. In the dim not-quite-dawn, his eyes seemed to travel a mile backward in his skull. “It won’t hurt me,” Nit said.

Blank watched the creature climb up and down Nit’s arm. Man and mercurial moved well together, like flotsam against water.

“How do you do it?” Blank whispered.

“They’s explorers, like us. They won’t get inside you if you keep ’em busy, doing something else. They like to move, to explore new surfaces.” They both watched the silver rat for a moment as it clambered up and down his forearm. “Look at him,” said Nit. “It’s as if he was trying to communicate.” Blank saw something in this, how the rat synchronized its movements with his. “Would you like to try?” asked Nit.

“No,” said Blank, but his eyes watched the rat with painful longing.

Nit up and walked off with the mercurial.

“That there is mine,” said Blank, with no conviction. He heard his father stirring inside the house and a light went on.

“You come on by my place after harvest,” said Nit, walking into the shadows. “Maybe I’ll trade you for them gloves you promised.”

Blank could hear the dusk sermon begin. As he knocked on Nit’s door, his hands were sore from detasseling, he was ripe with sweat, and he was tired.

Blank had been in just about everybody’s home before, but never Nit Stevens’s. It was a marvel of beautiful scavenge. There were sculptures and bas-reliefs of tractors and sandwiches and people, women in hot colors and rich fabrics, with painted lips and cheeks and eyelids, though the color of these plastic sculptures had faded to the beige of an eggshell. There were large aquaria all hooked together. Inside, mercurials flattened themselves against the floor of their tanks as the music of the sermon bore through the house. In one jar, Blank thought he saw his own mercurial. It was nearly turtle shaped but about the right size. The sermon flattened this one, too, and made it seem to melt. It must have come from a real silent place to hate sound so much.

“I brought them gloves you wanted,” said Blank, and handed them over. Nit took them, frowningly looked them over, and threw them back toward Blank. “Keep ’em,” he said.

There were books stacked neatly on shelves. Impulsively, Blank reached out for one. It puffed with dust as he lifted it. He caught a brief glance at the cover, featuring planetary bodies swooping through broad illustrated orbits, before Nit Stevens snatched the book from Blank’s hand and tremblingly but firmly pressed him into a chair.

“You gonna give back my critter?” Blank asked.

Nit pulled a box out from underneath a table as if it were in answer to the question. It was full of hard square paper tablets, larger than a dinner plate. Nit motioned to Blank that he should take a look. There were dead people on the tablets, and demons with pitchforks, and that spilled-tannin-in-milk calligraphy. He saw a picture that was just like the stained glass in church, demons plummeting before a great wall of flame. It, too, said “South of Heaven.”

“Me and Dim Henry and Maxwell used to collect these records when we was young men,” said Nit. “This was back when you could still power up a proper record machine or a computer to play recorded music on. Now all I got is this.”

Nit picked up a record, and with some trouble unsheathed the black disc from its cover, which featured a drawing of a skeleton pulling out the intestines of a living man. The writhing man’s hands grasped at nothing. It was called “Cannibal Corpse.” Nit put the record on a kind of pottery wheel and wound it up with a hand crank. When the wheel’s axle started spinning, sermon-type music came out of a tin horn wound from the wheelbox. The music sounded far away and seemed to ride in the dips and valleys of a wave, slowing down in places, speeding up in others. It sounded awful.

“You want to give back my critter?” Blank repeated his question.

“I oughtn’t,” said Nit.

“But you said you would.”

“I said I’d do you a trade. I still got the sense to know he’d be swimming up your brains before breakfast if I let you have him.”

They sat looking at each other.

“Does that mean you ain’t gonna give me back that critter?” A desperate tone crept into Blank’s voice. “How am I gonna get learned if I can’t get a look at that critter, Nit, huh?”

“Maxwell’d have my skin,” said Nit. Even when his eyes were bright, which was rare, his mouth slacked off toward an empty smile. “I’ll tell you what. Take a couple of jars off my shelf. You fill ’em up and bring ’em back to me, and we’ll call ’em shared property. Then I can show you a thing or two.”

Blank was put out at first, but the night after he caught a small silver centipede near the edge of the wood dragging its way from the town during the congregational sonics. He brought it to Nit, and the old man showed him how, when two silver bodies get near each other, they sort of shock each other with electrical arcs.

Blank was enthusiastic.

A few nights later, Blank went out and came back with a big one. He’d only ever seen cats in books; this one looked like a cat that crawled like a hurt thing. Here Nit showed him how a gaggle of mercurials would sort of fuse their bodies into one large body and could lift themselves off of their bellies that way.

That night Gerta Stevens came by to bring her father a basket full of corn-and-apple fritters. Gerta’s family had a living apple tree in their yard, which was accounted a thing of great wealth. She was a sweet woman with a fine voice who had a tattoo of an octopus wrapped around her right arm.

She stuck around and joked with Nit in a sort of sad way. But when she asked where he’d gotten all the new specimens, Nit became cagey and winked at Blank, and so Gerta gave Blank a worried look.

A few nights after that, it was too close to dusk and Blank was too close to the edge of the field, so that Fay Harbush saw him catch something, a little sparrow with dripping silver wings, while she was out collecting wildflowers. She screamed and ran when she saw what Blank was doing.

When he came home that day, he found his father, his mother, Dumb Maxwell, and Nit Stevens hovering around the kitchen table, waiting for him. Blank’s mom had served them all big plates of corn bread and bacon. Now she put out a cold plate for Blank, too. Dumb Maxwell was standing. He was a large man, and his body filled the house. He was wearing his leather apron and leather gloves, with his goggles snapped up over his forehead. He was covered in cow blood from the day’s work.

“Get yourself a chair, boy,” said Blank’s father. Nit frowned and looked at the ground. Blank did as he was told. Then Maxwell swung out a chair of his own.

“Your dad tells me you been sneaking out at night, skipping sermons,” said Dumb Maxwell.

“Naw, he don’t know about that,” said Blank.

Nit Stevens snorted, but Maxwell let that hang for a second, until Blank knew what he said was a dumb thing.

“Let’s try that again,” said Maxwell.

“I’ve been sneaking,” said Blank, trying not to meet Maxwell’s or his father’s eyes. “I snuck into town a couple of times.”

“And what did you find out there?”

“I collected a jar and some rubber gloves. For safety.” Blank thought Maxwell would be impressed by that safety part. “I even caught and cornered one of those critters. Nit seemed real impressed.”

Maxwell shot Nit a look.

“You could have killed yourself,” Maxwell continued. “Never mind the critters. You walk into the wrong house in Bangor, and the whole thing could have come down on you. Could have been highwaymen in town.”

“No, uh-uh. I stuck to the concrete floors just like when I went out with Dad the one time. I stayed well out of sight.”

“Blank, you’re a thick kid,” said Maxwell finally. He turned to Blank’s father. “No offense, Joe,” he said, to which Blank’s father replied there was none taken. Maxwell turned back to Blank. “You’ve got that dumb look in your eye, like things ain’t processing and things ain’t gonna process. But you’re curious, and in that you’re a hell of a lot like me when I was your age.” He looked away, seemed to turn over a thought. “You can read?”

“I can read real good,” said Blank. “Most of what I read, anyway.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m gonna borrow this one a second, Joe,” said Maxwell. “Nit, you’re coming with us.”

Together they went to Maxwell’s, in a line, Blank thought, like a family of ducks.

Outside of Maxwell’s home, Maxwell turned to Nit. “Now, I said what I said to you earlier, and I meant it, and that’s all. What you got to say?”

Nit, already frowning, frowned more. “I ain’t got shit to say, Maxwell.”

Maxwell grabbed Nit by the scruff of his neck and held him up to his own face, but there was nothing rough in it. The big man held his feelings pretty close, but now, Blank noticed, Maxwell’s emotions showed out, and his face was like Gerta’s a few days before and concerned in the way of family.

“We go back, don’t we, Nit?” said Maxwell.

“We do.”

“Remember when you named me Dumb?”

“That I remember.”

“So hold on.” Dumb Maxwell tried to catch Nit’s eye, but Nit kept frowning, his eyes kept darting around. “You hold on, Nitwit. Keep your fucking head down, and keep out of trouble.” He let go of Nit, and Nit took off.

Nothing inside of Maxwell’s home looked sized to fit him right. His table and chairs looked like they were made for a doll, compared to Maxwell.

“What was it about what you said to Nit?” asked Blank. “I mean about what you said earlier.”

“Shut the fuck up and sit down, boy,” said Maxwell. Blank did as he was told. He did not say it sharp, because he was already going through his bookshelf. He took down three books and handed them to Blank. They were Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 7th Edition, a book called Electronics for Sound, and another called First-Aid Safety and Wilderness Survival. He pointed out particular chapters on heavy metals and on poison prevention, symptoms, and treatment.

“You keep those indefinitely,” said Dumb Maxwell. “You come back to me when you’ve read those chapters. Look up any words you don’t know in the dictionary. Most important; you don’t understand something? Ask me about it. It’s the real dumb ones who clam up when they don’t know a thing. That’s the first lesson; you don’t know, you ask.”

Then Maxwell took Blank out back of his house.

He took out an eight-pound hammer, set a chestnut on a tree stump, and told Blank to set down the books and pick up the hammer.

“Joe wants me to find something you’re good at. Now, see if you can’t hit that walnut with that hammer,” Maxwell said.

The hammer was not much heavier than the hammer Blank’s father used. He hit the nut, just off plumb, so that half of it split off and bounced against Dumb Maxwell’s knee.

“Almost true on your first try,” said Maxwell. “You keep practicing that and read them books. And stay away from Nit Stevens.”

Blank was pulled out of school, which suited him, and spent three mornings a week with Dumb Maxwell instead. Blank was permitted to miss evening service to stay home and read, which he did every night with the crossed brow of a tortured penitent, and still heard it buzz and echo against the valley until the fat sonic force of it seemed to fill the sky and melt the sun like butter back of the trees: and it distracted him, so he had to read and read a sentence again before he understood it. He started with Electronics for Sound and then moved on to the book about first aid. He had to look up the meaning of “induce” and the meaning of “vomiting,” and a thousand other words. The meaning of “chellate” wasn’t even in the dictionary. He fell asleep regularly with a book over his face, filled with vexing questions. These questions entered his dreams as silver bodies cutting through moonlight.

Every morning he practiced with his father’s hammer and little nuts and pinecones he found at the edge of the wood.

One time Maxwell took Blank to see Fulsome Chet, who showed him how the dynamo got oiled and what the back of the Marshall stack looked like. Blank recognized some of the dusty old wiring in the back from the book Maxwell had given him. As Chet explained the pedal that Priest Waverly used to fuzz the guitar sound, he got a faraway sort of look. Maxwell yelled his name, and Chet came to, apologizing, and continued his explanation.

Maxwell and Blank shared a look, and Maxwell raised a lone eyebrow. Blank did not understand the secret Maxwell was trying to convey with that look, but he was damned edified to be sharing it with him.

When the autumn days got shorter and all there was left to do was gather the hay and turn the soil for next year, Maxwell gathered Blank for his first day of scavenge, not in the darkness but in broad daylight. They took along Bill Weathers and Frank Weehawken, neither of them especially learned, but both of them large men who knew how to handle a gun, as well as Stupid Hess, who had a special need for lubricating agents. Together these large men seemed to bend the cart they rode in toward the earth, and the skinny horses carrying them frothed beneath the effort.

Blank was thoughtful and quiet. The night before, Nit Stevens had come to Blank’s window. He was shaking so badly, he made the pane rattle.

“You come on over, boy. I got a critter on the Bunsen burner,” Nit said. His eyes rolled around in his head.

“You get on, Nit,” said Blank. “I ain’t supposed to see you no more.”

“You never saw those critters react to an open flame,” Nit said. “It’s the sparkingest thing you ever saw.”

Something about Nit scared the hell out of Blank then, and he yelled at him to get away from the window. Soon Blank’s father showed up and shooed him off.

So Blank was still tired the day he was invited on scavenge and cursed Nit secretly for it.

“Bangor’s played out,” said Maxwell, as they rolled along the old railroad path, well known to caravans but not to highwaymen. “I’m surprised you found what you did there, in fact. Time was, we used to go to South Haven and Kalamazoo for good scavenge, but the squareheads and highwaymen have those places locked down good and proper.”

All along the path, living mercury skittered back and forth, met by the whistling and bell ringing of the men in the cart. In good sunlight their mirrored bodies sometimes blinded a person.

“Let me see them muscles,” said Maxwell. Blank showed him. “See them muscles?” said Maxwell to Stupid Hess. Hess said they’d do.

They got to Hartford when the sun was still high. In town they found a few syringes in a home medical kit, about a dozen small jugs of motor oil, and a lot of threadbare towels and shirts and things that could be mulched into paper. Best of all, Maxwell found a pack of playing cards wrapped in cellophane and fresh as the day they were printed. He nearly clicked his heels over the find and said he’d show Blank how to play euchre as soon as they could find doubles.

Near the end of the day, Maxwell had Bill climb a water tower, where he found something of immense value: an old thermometer. Everywhere the mercurials had burst thermometers and absorbed the mercury from them, said Maxwell. It’s only in high places you found unspoiled examples of mercury anymore.

“It goes to show,” said Dumb Maxwell.

“Don’t show nothing,” said Stupid Hess. Together they fell into the rhythm of what seemed a long-ago argument.

“You can’t get that kind of mercury on Earth. It’s too much.”

“Naturally occurring mercury’s rare, okay. These things’re Earthbound as a dog’s dick, and they synthesize the stuff.”

“They come from space, and they brought their own with ’em.”

It was dark, and Blank was tired and happy by the time they got home. Service should have been sounding across the valley, but Bangor was quiet. As the track widened and the men came closer to Bangor, they could hear yelling. The smell of burning wood and leather reached their noses.

By the time they got home, the damage had been done. It was Priest Waverly who’d led the fire fight, pulling water from the town pump and the icehouse. They had stopped it spreading from the Stevens house to their neighbors, but that was all. Nit’s house was lost. Every sort of mercurial had slithered out of the fire, and people in the town hollered and sang to catch them out and drive them back to the woods.

After the fire was out, they all sat in the church. Priest Waverly did not so much play for them as absently tune his instrument. It sounded hollow and weak without the dynamo turning.

Nit approached Maxwell. Nit wrung his hands out, gripping one hand with the other, trying to keep them from shaking. It only made them shake worse.

“Maxwell, you remember that time?” Nit said. It was a placating tone, never before found in irascible old Nit. Maxwell ignored him, frowned hard at the floor. He was covered in ash. Nit giggled. “You remember that time when you fell in the river, and I gave you your name?”

The next day Maxwell said he had a few more books to show to Blank.

At his house Dumb Maxwell dragged out a box. From within, he pulled out a large book. The book was full of small columns of print and lots of pictures. It was magazines, all pressed together and bound like a book. The magazine was called The New Yorker.

“I found these back when I was your age, in a library. Well, you couldn’t believe how excited I was just to read something other than crop rotations and old operating instructions. The people in these magazines were paid their share just to think, back before the mercury come down,” continued Dumb Maxwell. “Except they’d bring up a big notion, then they’d punch it up full of holes, to let you know they don’t give a rat’s ass. I used to ask myself why. These folks had everything you could want. They had telescopes floating in geostationary Earth orbit you could see whole galaxies with. They had lamplight cartoons they made out of photographs. They could draw in and around the lamplight. They could make it seem like men and ladies were cavorting with — oh hell, what have you — aliens, talking donkeys, whatever.”

Blank continued to watch Maxwell with expectant fascination.

“See, here’s a movie review,” continued Maxwell. “It says a robot got its druthers up and turned into a lady, of all things. And all this inside of a spaceship! Well, I’d pop if I saw something like that! And the reviewer of the movie, he says he’s bored. Says he’s seen it all a thousand times.

“Well, when I found these things, I didn’t know which end was up. How could these folks act so nonchalant about the miracles they had all around ’em?” Dumb Maxwell asked. “Then I started thinking about those mercurials out there. They can’t be said to have a thinking mind among them. All they got is a curiosity, a curiosity that don’t distinguish between pig shit or living guts. They got a means to convey themselves around the stars, but nothing is valuable to them. Ain’t nothing precious, not even life.”

Maxwell pulled out a box of records. These had churchlike images on them too, same as Nit Stevens had.

“I used to hate these records. I used to hate church service especially. The imagery, the music, everything about them battered my brains.”

After a moment, Maxwell sort of deflated.

“If we didn’t need the noise, I’d just as soon cure ’em all with these magazines instead.”

Blank continued to watch Maxwell, his eyes turning from Maxwell’s face back to the books. He was wondering which book he’d get next to read.

“Get on,” Maxwell said. He sounded sad. “Go practice that hammer.”

One November night soon after, Nit closed his eyes and rocked slowly to the congregational sonics. Priest Waverly’s service came on very loud that night. Blank’s stomach — his “bowels,” as he liked to say, now that he’d learned the word — felt loose and slippery in the deep reverberation. Maxwell stuck close to Nit, with his arm around the man’s shoulders.

“Wooah-wow-wow,” Nit said, mimicking the music, making fish faces.

Priest Waverly played a long time, perhaps an hour and a half, by Blank’s estimation. He could scarcely hear, much less discern, the cryptic poem Priest Waverly recited over the din, the one he recited, with small variations, at every retirement party:

Run silver rabbit

Run black rabbit

Into the sea

Down to the sea

Mercurial fire

Bu-u-ry me

Mercurial flame

Bu-u-ry me

Bu-u-ry me

When the music ended and the dynamo whirred to a stop, the people sat in silence a long time. After a while, Blank could hear the chirruping of nighttime animals past the silence of the church.

“Well, then,” said Priest Waverly. He nodded to Nit Stevens, which elicited grunts of approval from the old ones in the pews. Then he started packing up his bass. “That’s all right,” said Nit. “That’s okay.” It made Blank sad to see what a lively and playful man Nit used to be, and how stupid and serious he was now. Some folks reached out to pat him on the back.

Dumb Maxwell led Nit Stevens out before the rest, proudly pointing his lightning-streaked orange beard. Nit kept talking about how things could spark in a Bunsen burner. The congregation stood, each in his or her own time, and left the church. Many, including Blank, followed Dumb Maxwell and Nit Stevens to the back of the church. Out on the field began the familiar cloppity rattle that would last all night, and in town some of the women were singing.

In back of the church, a hunk of slate rested on an old stump. Leaning next to that was an eight-pound hammer. Dumb Maxwell, Priest Waverly, and a few other men gave Nit Stevens great backslapping hugs, while Nit talked about tea, what kind of tea he’d like to make for everybody.

Gerta kissed her father sadly on the cheek and put a yellowed oak sprig in his shirt pocket. Dumb Maxwell lifted Nit Stevens by the knees like a wheelbarrow, and Nit’s head fell awkwardly on the stump. The old man’s hands grasped weakly for purchase against the gnarls of the old stump’s roots.

Fulsome Chet spit into his thick leather gloves and lifted the hammer. He was slow about it, and left Maxwell to struggle with the legs some, but finally Chet brought the hammer down on Nit’s head once, and that was all it took. Chet had done this job for many years, and he knew his mark. Blank watched the man with close attention, trying to learn a thing.