Here the old man found the cup of wine in his hand and he regarded it for a moment with mild surprise, raised it and took a drink. He closed his eyes for a moment,
the high wagon and them coming up to the house, wagon and house both belonging to his uncle, and him owning nothing more than he could carry in his two hands, her things in an old leather trunk tied down behind the seat.
That her? he asked.
Yessir.
He walked around the wagon slowly, studying her as a man might a horse. Then he said, Well, light.
He got down and she was still sitting there.
What’s she? goin to put the mule up?
Nosir, he said. Ellen. Here.
He took her hand and she got down.
You go on with Uncle Whitney, he said. I’ll get the things.
Helen, he said.
It’s Ellen, she said. The wagon moved away behind her.
Ellen.
Daddy said he’d kill him, she said.
Ain’t nobody goin to kill nobody, he said. Here, watch the mud.
She said something else. He watched them go in.
What happent then, Uncle Ather, Warn said.
Hmm? Oh, well I’d done lost three of them I think it was then. That was three more’n I was willin to lose and two more’n I thought I would lose without I caught somebody. Aside that it looked like I would lose jest as many as whoever I was losin em to was willin to take, which probably meant all of them. So I was mad-scared. Ellen, she claimed I’d gone to sleep on the roof, but I knowed better.
That was late of a summer. I was stit on the road crew and workin twelve and fourteen hours a day and here I got to come home nights and set up with a bunch of hogs. But we never lost no more for a week or better. Then one night Ellen went to the door to thow out a pan of water and I heard her holler. I run out and she grabbed on to me like she’d seen a hant or somethin, and I ast her what it was but she jest stood there and shook like she’s freezin to death. I walked her back in and went out and looked but I never seen nothin, so I got the pan and come on in. Somethin had scared her real bad but she couldn’t tell me what all it was. After a while all she’d say was I don’t know, or I couldn’t tell what it was.
The old man paused again, arrested but for the rise and fall of his breathing, the slow mechanical rotation of his jaws, gazed upward — the image of the lampflame on the ceiling, the split corona a doubling egg, like the parthenogenesis of primal light.
He kept on for a week, coming back each night to the dark and empty house. Then he stopped going to work. That morning he took out the few things she had left — a housecoat, odds and ends, and put them on the bed. He sat and looked at them for a long time. When he got up it was evening.
He stayed for five more days, wandering about the house or sitting motionless, sleeping in chairs, eating whatever he happened to find until there wasn’t any more and then not eating anything. While the chickens grew thin and the stock screamed for water, while the hogs perished to the last shoat. An outrageous stench settled over everything, a vile decay that hung in the air, filled the house.
On the sixth day he went out and knocked a plank from the back of the barn with the poll of his axe, cut from it two boards. On one he carefully incised her name with the point of his knife. Then he chopped a stake-point on the other board and nailed the two together in the form of a cross. He took it and took her clothes and a spade down to a corner of the lot where he scooped a hole, buried the clothes, and with the shank of the spade pounded the cross into the ground. Then he walked straight through the house and out again, across the yard, to the road and toward Sevierville. He had gone half a mile before he noticed the shovel in his hand and pitched it into the weeds.
I know you cain’t, he said.
I ain’t goin back.
I’ll go out tomorrow. Corne on, you clean up and eat some.
What?
And get some rest, sleep. I’ll go out tomorrow.
Well, you can. I ain’t.
I was goin out anyways. R. L. come by yesterday mornin to see if you was comin back. You goin back?
I don’t know. No. I ain’t goin back.
You aim to sell your place?
It don’t… I don’t care.
Well. I do.
He looked at him for the first time, the older face, dark and hard as a walnut. Why? he asked.
Count of you owe me two hunderd dollars, mainly.
Oh. He thought for a minute, then he said, Yes. Here, I got to clean up.
The old man was swaying slowly in his rocker holding the cup before him in both hands like a ciborium. After a minute Warn said, Did you ever find out what it was?
The old man turned and spat into a coffeecan.
That goddamned bibledrummer, wadn’t it?
Don’t say nothin else.
Well, nobody never died from it.
Don’t say nothin else I told you.
Yessir, he said. It was the old she-painter, come after the little one. You boys care for some more wine?
They still had some. The old man labored up from his rocker and went to the table where he had set the wine, refilled his cup. Yep, he said, that had to of been what she seen.
Did you shoot it? the boy asked.
Nope. Never even seen her. I lost one more hog and then I give it up. I turnt the little one loose and that’s the last I ever seen of it and the last hog I lost. You see, he said slowly, darkly, they’s painters and they’s painters. Some of em is jest that, and then others is right uncommon. That old she-painter, she never left a track one. She wadn’t no common kind of painter.
Early next morning the old man worked his way up the mountain, following the prints of the two boys. The snow was drifted deeply in places and it was hard going. He stopped often to catch his breath, leaning on the shotgun, the stock sunk cleanly through the crust to the depth of the triggerguard. By the time he reached the road he was winded and leg-weary. From here he could see out into the valley, through the stark trees standing blackly in an ether of white like diffused milk, glazed and crystalline as shattered ice where the sun probed, the roofs thatched with snow, pale tendrils of smoke standing grayly in the still air.
He could smell smoke, but he didn’t think about it until it occurred to him that it had a sharp and pungent quality about it and he realized that it was cedar burning — postwood, not firewood — elusive in the cold air, in his nostrils, faintly antiseptic.
He turned up the road and walked steadily until he carne to the cut-off to the pit. The snow was dry and powdered as marble-dust on his trouser legs. Now he could see the faint pall of smoke through the trees. The tracks turned here and furrowed in two drunken lanes, curving into the woods. He followed them, moving faster, stumbling in and out of the snow ruts, shadowed by some presentiment of ruin, into the clearing.
When he saw the smoke rolling up from out of the pit he stopped for a moment and he could feel the old fierce pull of blood in power and despair, the pulse-drum of the irrevocable act. And it was done, what soul rose in the ashes forever unknown, out of his hands now. He squatted on one knee in the snow, watching. On his face a suggestion of joy, of anguish — something primitive and half hidden. The pale eyes burned cold and remote in their hollows like pockets of smoldering gas.