Or it might make me blow a hole in the middle of you a log truck could drive through.
The goat was trying to escape. It and Sutter making abrupt little dancing motions. Be still, goddamn you, he told it. He looked up. You might if you had a gun, he told Bookbinder.
With his left hand the old man moved the shawl. It slid off his lap soundlessly onto the porch. He was holding trained on Sutter an enormous old dragoon revolver, and its hammer was thumbed back.
It so surprised Sutter that he released his grip on the goat. When it jerked away and fled, Sutter looked down at the knife he was holding. It ain’t loaded, he said.
I done a lot of foolish things in my life, Bookbinder said, but I ain’t never threatened to kill a man with a empty pistol.
Piece of shit would likely blow up in your face anyhow, Sutter said. I don’t believe you’ve got the balls to shoot it, let alone kill anybody with it.
The old man slowly moved the barrel away from Sutter and aimed it at a locust fencepost. When the hammer fell the concussion was enormous and the top of the post exploded into fistsize chunks of rotten wood and when Sutter looked back from the post the gun was on him again. The old man was watching him with narrowed eyes.
You just crazy enough to do it, Sutter said. Hellfire. I just wanted to talk to you.
The old man didn’t say anything and the gun didn’t waver. Sutter closed the knife and pocketed it. I aim to get my rifle, he said. I’ll just be on my way.
Just don’t let the barrel point my way, Bookbinder said. Sutter retrieved the rifle. He kept the barrel pointed earthward.
You know I’ll get you for this, he said conversationally. You’re graveyard dead and don’t even know about it yet. I’ll come through your window like a cat some hot night and cut your throat where you lay.
You come ahead, Bookbinder said. And they’ll be scraping bloody pieces of you off the wall with a goddamned putty knife.
Sutter turned and went. At the yard’s edge he hesitated and would say more, but Bookbinder raised the piece and Sutter kept going. The old man didn’t lower the gun until Sutter had vanished into the darkening wood. He laid the gun aside. His hands were shaking and he clamped them between his thighs to still them.
Somewhere deep in the Harrikin Tyler began to come upon curious arrangements of sticks strung from trees, lengths of wild cane wired together in designs strange and oblique, some simple and composed of only a few sections, others intricate three-dimensional compositions, and all alike suspended by tiewire and turning slowly in the air like alien windchimes or hieroglyphs from some prior language no one knew anymore. Like messages left by some otherworldly traveler who’d gone before him and left these signs in invitation or warning. They became more frequent, a veritable forest of them, asymmetrical and random and somehow sinister.
A dead fox strung head downward from a tree by wire threaded behind the tendons in its legs. He looked at it curiously, then went on beneath the great lowering trees with wind in their upper branches and doves calling from some lost hollow, past ancient utility poles tilted and wireless that bore witness to a civilization that had come tentatively and long since gone. In a bower formed by the roots of a liveoak and sleeping in a bed of moss was a child’s doll. It lay in a miniature casket and its cheeks were rouged and shadowed by improbable lashes and upon kneeling to examine it closer he saw woven into the doll’s flaxen locks humanlooking hair of a darker shade and a wood screw had been threaded into the doll’s molded navel. He studied it a time in a kind of wonder without touching it and then he rose and went on.
Some motion drew his eye and he saw a rusted fifty-gallon drum sitting upright beneath a tree and from its concave top a huge great horned owl was watching him. He approached cautiously. The owl watched him with its great liquid eyes and he saw himself twinned and grotesque leaning toward their depths. The owl’s left leg was imprisoned in the clamped jaws of a steel trap and a chain led away over a tree branch where wire secured it. The owl had been trying to escape the trap, for its feathers were bloody, and Tyler could see that the jaws had bitten into the flesh of its leg. The owl closeup looked like some monster from a child’s fever dream but when he reached a tentative hand toward the trap it did not move just watched him blankly and slightly inquisitively and with enormous patience from beneath its great tufted horns.
He tried to open the jaws of the trap with his hands but could not and finally pried them partway with his pocketknife, then inserted a stick and sprung them enough to free the owl. He backed away, expecting it to fly, but it just stood favoring its left leg and watching him back and he went on. He’d gonea few feet when he heard the concussion of its wings and looking up, saw it pass above him with wingspan terrible like some great prehistoric bird that had outlived its time and now was fleeing this one.
He had been following the tracks of an ironrimmed wagon that had in turn been following the spectral roadway along the humped back of a long ridge, then down into bottomland grown with pinoak and poplar and maple. This bottomland was cleft by some stream nameless to him, and it seemed pasthaunted, vibratory with the traces of past habitation as if all that happened here happened still and concurrent with all other events and just out of his sight and hearing. He passed tiny log cabins mouldering down into the earth that might or might not have been slave quarters long ago or the houses of woodsprites or littlefolk and he passed a stone springhouse. A cooling box for milk and butter had been chiseled out of the solid limestone and old waterpipes gone almost entirely to rust were fed here. Turning in the direction the pipes led he saw a gently rising slope grown with cedar and hemlock and beyond and above them the looming bulk of a ruined mansion.
He went up the slope abstractedly, he’d realized he was turned around, had angled too far southeast and was in Lawrence County. This had to be the old Perrie mansion, and he knew it was not in Ackerman County. There were still miles and miles of wild country to go, and miles to backtrack. He looked upward. The dark bulk towered above him, three stories of handmade brick with four columns in front. The earth had settled under one of the end columns and it canted outward at the top. A ruined balcony dangled precariously from disintegrating masonry. He went inside. The roof was gone, lost in the fury of a long-ago storm, he could see a square of mottled sunlight falling down the curving stairway. He turned in a slow pivot, more impressed by this ruined glory than the foxes and rats and nightbirds that called it home now.
He went cautiously up a wide stair to a landing and a great hall with rooms opening off it and windowless apertures through which he could see encroaching trees.
Through a window opening he saw a brick outbuilding and a tiny wooden shanty like a witch’s house in a fable. The shanty was impaled with a length of stovepipe like a stake driven through its heart and a column of blue woodsmoke rose and dissipated. The house was surrounded by an enormous amount of ricked firewood and there was a blackened washpot sitting on its three legs over a smouldering fire. Even as he watched a woman came into view. She was laboring up a deeply washed gully dragging what appeared to be a great bundle of honeysuckle vines.
By the time he had wended his way through the bullbriars and vines that formed the lawn of the cottage, she had reached the yard and dragged the vines onto the porch. She was sitting in a willow rocker catching her breath. A tiny gnomish woman who’d come no higher than his chest, a dried and fragile elf of indeterminate but advanced age who seemed light and delicate as the fluted bones of birds found in the woods. Dressed all in homedyed black like the sole survivor of some obscure sect she’d outlived here in this lost wood, with foxes for lapdogs and whippoorwills nesting in her henhouse. The porch was well corded with heaterwood, you’d think the old woman had had word of an impending winter of profound intensity. Hidy, he said.
How do. Get you a seat there.
Tyler seated himself on the edge of the porch with his back braced against a stanchion. He had not realized how tired he was until he stopped to rest. The porch floor was strewn with soft, curling shavings of hickory.
You been making something?
Handles. You come after one?
He wondered at the degree of emergency that would drive him so far in dire need of a handle. No, he said.
I got em from tack hammer handles all the way up to axe handles.
I don’t reckon I need one.
She had a pile of sticks two feet or so long laid by the rocking chair, and now she took one up. The stick had a fork on its small end, and she looped a length of honeysuckle vine about the fork and commenced winding the vine into a ball.
I guess you come about a potion then.
