Twilight (14 page)

It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. It ripped away the roof of the old Perrie mansion that had stood since the eighteen-forties, and lesser houses it reduced to kindling wood or just whisked off to somewhere else. It snapped off trees and hurled them into hollows like flung jackstraws, and when it was gone the Harrikin was more of a maze than ever. Roads and paths were blocked, streams dammed and rerouted. The woods were full of deadfalls. Most of the folk who’d been dispossessed, and some who hadn’t, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck.

A time would come within twenty-five years when all this would be changed. When timber began to thin the companies who owned these half-forgotten properties realized their potential, and paper companies bought the timber and ravaged
the land again and planted pine seedlings, and the Harrikin did not exist anymore.

But all this was not yet. When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.

BOOK TWO
BEYOND THE PALE

A
spring came out of a rocky hillside and rusted steel pipes virid with moss had been driven back into the rocks. There was a tin cup affixed to a cutoff sprout but Tyler drank from his cupped hands then washed his face in the cold water. All he could hear was the rushing water and the air was heady with the scent of peppermint.

He had come up a rainwashed gully through a clutter of floodleft debris, old bottomless buckets and washtubs and mudclogged cartires worn out so finally there were booted holes in them. The gully ascended in a tangle of blackberry briars and leveled out into a walnut grove, and he could see the back of a house. Whitewashed, respectable, middle-class. He moved to the cover of a shed and skirted a rotting grape arbor with gray deadlooking vines and past a curious machine from which wires appended to poles led to the house. He scaled a sedgecovered
slope into the sun and went on to the summit and lay in the warm grass watching the house. Somewhere off in the distance a tardy cock crowed daybreak.

After a while a heavyset woman came out of the house carrying a dishpan. He judged her to be middleaged. She went purposefully up the roadway to a gardenspot andstooped and began to gather turnip greens.

He didn’t think there was anyone else about: there was no stock to see after, and the place seemed to be going to seed, as if there were no husband about to keep it in repair. He decided to chance it, he didn’t figure he really had a choice anyway. He went around the back side of the ridge and down to the shed again and up the back steps of the house. The door was ajar as if in standing invitation to whoever might chance by. There was only a screendoor, and that was unlatched.

A cool, serried gloom smelling of years, decay. The sun was faint and heatless through dirtspecked glass. He was in a storeroom stacked nigh to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of what looked like old farm magazines, seed catalogs, newspapers. Cases of empty fruitjars. He was looking for a larder or a kitchen, and this wasn’t it. He went cautiously out.

Into a hall smelling of lemon oil and floor wax. Doors stood open, and he peered in to see if there was anyone else about. A bedroom with a cherry fourposter bed. A picture in a heavy oval frame. From it a young couple stared at him across time with vaguely accusing eyes.

The kitchen had a window above the sink and it gave him a view of the yard but not the garden and he figured he better hurry. In a cupboard there was a stack of brown paper bags folded and laid up for reuse and he took one and began to search
for food. Under a cloth on the table he found the remains of breakfast. Here was provender beyond his expectations: biscuits and leftover sausage patties and a pint jar of what appeared to be strawberry preserves. He dumped the sausages and bread into the bag and turned to look for more. In a piesafe he found a loaf of homebaked bread and twobeautifully browned pies. He slid one carefully into the bag, cradling it so as not to crush it, and turned about and stood a moment as if in indecision and then took the other one as well. He found a tin can half-full of ground coffee and took that and was already at the door and outward bound when the thought of the strawberry preserves struck him. He’d read once it was bad practice to shop on an empty stomach and so was forewarned. The strawberry preserves were his undoing. When he had them in the bag and had turned to leave there were heavy footsteps. A shadow darkened the room. There was only one door out of the kitchen and the heavyset woman was standing in it staring at him with eyes huge with surprise.

Well, if you ain’t the beat, she said. Sneakthievin in broad daylight.

Tyler was gripping the bag bothhanded and ready should she give him leeway through the door but she was standing in it with the dishpan of greens on her hip and there was not room to get past her.

What’ve you been up to, you thievin little scoundrel? What’ve you got in that sack?

Just food, Tyler said. What was left from breakfast mainly.

Well, if you don’t take the ribbon. I reckon you was just too proud to knock on the door and ask for somethin to eat. You don’t seem too qualmy about sneakin in the back door and helpin yourself, though.

I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been here, Tyler said. There’s a man lookin for me, and I’d just as soon he didn’t know which way I’m going.

I’ll just bet there’s a man lookin for you, the woman said. It’d be my guess he wears a badge and got a paper in hispocket with your name on it.

No, not the law. This man aims to kill me. I’m looking for the law, going to find Sheriff Bellwether.

Well, he ain’t in my kitchen, she said. Her eye had wandered to the piesafe. The telltale door ajar. Her eyes narrowed. And if you been in them apple pies I baked for the church social, I aim to kill you myself. Them was as fine a apple pies as I ever made, and they wadn’t made for the likes of you.

She made a tentative step or two toward the piesafe and when she did Tyler made a run for the outside world. He made the door but not through it for she had anticipated him and stepped back and slammed him with a heavy hip into the door frame then bonged his head hard with the dishpan.

Goddamn, he said.

Blaspheme in this kitchen again and I’ll lay this pan upside your head a little harder, she said. Now you set right there a minute.

She stepped across him through the door, and he heard another door abruptly open and as abruptly close and she was back with an enormous shotgun breeched down and she was fitting a shell in the chamber. The gun was nigh as long as Tyler was tall and its elongated barrel was lustreless and crept with brown lichens of rust.

Now let’s see what all you’ve helped yourself to, she said. Dump that poke out.

Tyler’s miserable chattel aligned on the kitchen floor. The pies had been illy used. He’d fallen on them and one was broken into two sections and the other was crushed flat on one side and dripping apple juice. She just looked at them in silence. After a time she slowly raised the barrel until it was pointing into Tyler’s face. Now mister, she said, you fix them pies.

Do what?

Man oughtn’t to break nothing he can’t fix. Fix em like they was.

Hellfire, he said. I can’t fix them. You can’t fix pies. They’re broken. Anyway, you did it. You pushed me down on them.

He’d fallen into the hands of a madwoman here. Someone too long alone who dwelt in a surreal realm where the punishment for piethievery was death by shotgunning and the alchemy by which crushed pies were made whole was commonplace.

He shrugged helplessly. I’ll pay you for them.

A wisp of irongray hair curled over one eye. She blew it away. She still held the gun trained on him, and she was watching him with fey cunning.

If you got money, then how come you sneakin in my back door sackin things up?

I told you. There’s a man looking for me, and I don’t want him to know where I am. He’ll probably be around here asking questions, and the less you know, the less you can tell him.

What makes you think I’d tell him anything atall?

You’d tell him all right. He’s clever. He’d find out.

Where you from, anyway?

He didn’t know why he lied, but he did. He just did it
instinctively. Shipp’s Bend, he said. Over on the other side of Centre.

I know where Shipp’s Bend is. You got a name? And this feller after you, he wouldn’t be named Tyler, would he? Man from over on Lick Creek?

What makes you think that?

She didn’t answer immediately but she lowered the gun. All the meanness around is one reason I always been in the Harrikin. Now I reckon you’ve tracked it in here. You hear about that girl getting herself killed over on Lick Creek?

No.

Tyler girl got killed in a truck wreck. Heard about it this mornin. Her and her brother both drunk and her killed when they turned the truck over. A young girl layin out dead in a field with whiskey all over her and inside her. I’d hate to meet my maker with whiskey on my breath, wouldn’t you?

I get that close I don’t expect to have much of a breath left, Tyler said. He couldn’t have told you what words he spoke. His mind was full of what she had told him about the dead girl in the field.

Make sport of me if you want to. It ain’t me found dead cut all over from a broke whiskey bottle. Nor me that’s run off and hid and bein hunted by the sheriff for manslaughter neither.

I got to get on, Tyler said.

Get on where? To find some other house to break into? I reckon not.

Just let me pay for this mess, and I’ll get on out of the way.

Oh, you’ll pay, all right. I’m still studyin on that one. In good time maybe you’ll go. Why do you think a feller would leave his sister in a fix like that and run just worryin about
hisself?

I don’t know, Tyler said.

The old woman’s eyes had turned hard and bitter. Whiskey, she said contemptuously. I wonder when folks’ll ever learn that more comes out of a whiskey bottle than card games and loose women.

Something in her vindictive tone made Tyler ask, Was your man a drinker?

Cecil was a Church of Christ preacher, she said, as if oneprecluded the other.

Anyway, I got to go.

She seemed to have come to some decision. You aim to paint that Delco before you go anywhere, she said.

That what?

That Delco. It don’t make the lights anymore, but I want it painted anyway. Things is went down around here without a man on the place. Cecil painted it ever year right up till the year he died. It quit right after that, too. Ain’t that peculiar?

I don’t even know what one is.

You just before findin out. Sack that stuff back up, and after that Delco’s painted you can have it and be gone with ye.

They went down a narrow corridor that smelled of time and solitude. Tyler could see into rooms piled nigh to the ceiling with mounded clothing and stacked newsprint. As if she expected to live forever and had laid by a permanent supply of raiment and reading matter.

She kept prodding him with the gun. Quit that, he said. I can walk without being shoved along with a shotgun.

Stop and study this picture, she told him.

She gestured wallward with the barrel of the shotgun. You
might learn something, she said. You might learn ever act you commit moves you one way or the other. Towards Heaven or towards Hell. Hadn’t you rather be moving towards Heaven as the other place? Study this picture. If you wind up down there roastin in Hell rollin and tumbling in them hot coals it won’t be for lack of bein told.