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.
Like visitors in some curious museum they stood side by side looking at a painting. Faint mottled light from a dingy bedroom window. The picture showed a graveyard. Tombstones capsizing, graves exploding upward, the air full of cemetery dirt. Folks in their graveyard shrouds or funeral silks ascending skyward like startled birds, their arms stretched winglike in supplication or benediction, their faces rapt in the beatific light that hovered over them.
That’s the rapture, she said. When the dead awakes and them what’s goin goes.
Her voice was touched by a nostalgic yearning, as if she had her ticket in hand and foot already raised to climb on board.
Where do you reckon you’ll be on that great getting up morning?
Tyler thought about it. He studied the picture. As far away from this mess as I can get, he said. I reckon I’ll just wait till they get up another load.
I know where you’ll be, she told him with satisfaction. And you’re not goin to like it.
They went out the front door and around to the back of the house. The generator was behind the shed. delco, raised letters on the side said. She had found a bucket of paint and an old illcleaned brush. He pried the lid off the paint bucket with the blade of his pocketknife. The paint was turgid and a vile green. A slick, oily scum rode the top of it. He stirred it with a stick. The woman had brought a lawn chair and seated herself to watch with the gun laid
