Then, after a while, the man walking in the snow walked up to the road by our house, and I saw him close. Maybe
I wouldn’t have been scared if it hadn’t been for the way my daddy was acting, but probably I would have been. I was little then and I hadn’t ever in my whole life seen anybody without eyes in his head.
My daddy waited until he saw that the blind man wasn’t coming to our house, then he grabbed me up off the ground and hugged me so hard it hurt my chest. I asked him what the matter was, but he didn’t answer. He just started off down the road after the blind man. I went along with him, waiting for him to tell me to get on home, but he didn’t. We walked for over two miles, and every time we came to somebody’s house, the people who lived there would stand out in the yard or inside at the window, watching, the way my daddy did, and when we passed, they’d come out and join the parade. Pretty soon there was us and Jake Overton and his wife and Peter Briley and old man Jaspers and the whole Randall family, and more I can’t remember, trailing down along the road together, following the blind man.
I thought sure, somebody said.
So did I, my daddy said.
Who you suppose it’s going to be? Mr. Briley said.
My daddy shook his head. Nobody knows, he said. Except him.
We walked another mile and a half, cutting across the Pritchetts’ field where the snow was up to my knees, and nobody said anything more. I knew the only place there was in this direction, but it didn’t mean anything to me because nobody had ever told me anything about Solomon. I know I wondered as we walked how you could see where you were going if you didn’t have eyes, and I couldn’t see how you could, but that old man knew just exactly where he was going. You knew that by looking at him and watching how he went around stumps and logs on the ground. Once I thought he was going to walk into the plow the Pritchetts left out to rust when they got their new one, but he didn’t. He walked right around it, and I kept wondering how a thing like that could be. I closed my eyes and tried it but I couldn’t keep them closed more than a couple of seconds. When I opened them, I saw that my daddy and all the rest of the people had stopped walking. All except the old blind man.
We were out by the Schreiber place. It looked warm and nice inside with all the lamps burning and gray smoke climbing straight up Out of the chimney. Probably the Schreibers were having their breakfast.
Which one, I wonder, my daddy said to Mr. Randall.
The old one, Mr. Randall said.
Yes, that’s probably right.
He’s going on eighty.
My daddy nodded his head and watched as the old blind man walked through the snow to the big pine tree that sat in the Schreibers’ yard and lifted the guitar strap over his head.
Going on eighty, Mr. Randall said again.
Yes.
It’s the old man, all right.
Everybody quieted down then. Everybody stood still in the snow, waiting, what for I didn’t know. I wanted to pee. More than anything in the world I wanted to pee, right there in the snow, and watch it melt and steam in the air. But I couldn’t, any more than I could at church. In a way, this was like church.
Up ahead the old blind man leaned his face next to the guitar and touched the strings. I don’t know how he thought he was going to play anything in this cold. It was cold enough to make your ears hurt. But he kept touching the strings, and the sound they made was just like the sound any guitar makes when you’re trying to get it tuned, except maybe louder. I tried to look at his face, but I couldn’t because of those holes where his eyes should have been. They made me sick. I wondered if they went all the way up into his head. And if they didn’t, where did they stop?
He began to play the Mourning Song then. I didn’t know that was the name of it, or what it meant, or anything, but I knew I didn’t like it. It made me think of sad things, like when I went hunting by myself one time and this doe I shot fell down and got up again and started running around in circles and finally died right in front of me, looking at me.
Or when I caught a bunch of catfish at the slew without bait. I carried them home and everything was fine until I saw that two of them were still alive. So I did what my daddy said was a crazy thing. I put those catfish in a pail of water and carried them back to the slew and dumped them in. I thought I’d see them swim away happy, but they didn’t. They sank just like rocks.
That song made me think of things like that, and that was why I didn’t like it then, even before I knew anything about it.
Then the old blind man started singing. You wouldn’t expect anything but a croak to come out of that toothless old mouth, but if you could take away what he was singing, and the way he looked, you would have to admit he could really sing. He had a high, sweet voice, almost like a woman’s, and you could understand every word.
Long valley, dark valley ... hear the wind cry!...in darkness we’re born and in darkness we die...all alone, alone, to the end of our days...to the end of our days, all alone...
Mr. Schreiber came outside in his shirtsleeves. He looked even more afraid then my daddy had looked. His face was white and you could see, even from where I stood, that he was shaking. His wife came out after a minute and started crying, then his father, old man Schreiber, and his boy Carl who was my age.
The old blind man went on singing for a long time, then he stopped and put the guitar back over his head and walked away. The Schreibers went back into their house. My daddy and I went back to our own house, not following the blind man this time but taking the long way.
We didn’t talk about it till late that night. Then my daddy came into my room and sat down on my bed. He told me that the blind man’s name was Solomon, at least that was what people called him because he was so old. Nobody knew how he lost his eyes or how he got around without them, but there were lots of things that Solomon could do that nobody understood.
Like what? I asked.
He scratched his cheek and waited a while before answering. He can smell death, he said, finally. He can smell it coming a hundred miles off. I don’t know how. But he can.
I said I didn’t believe it. My daddy just shrugged his shoulders and told me I was young. When I got older I’d see how Solomon was never wrong. Whenever Solomon walked up to you, he said, and unslung that guitar and started to sing the Mourning Song, you might as well tell them to dig deep.
That was why he had looked so scared that morning. He thought Solomon was coming to our house.
But didn’t nothing happen to the Schreibers, I said.
You wait, my daddy said. He’ll keep on going there and then one day he’ll quit.
I did wait, almost a week, but nothing happened, and I began to wonder if my daddy wasn’t getting a little feeble, talking about people smelling death and all. Then on the eighth day, Mr. Randall came over.
The old man? my daddy asked.
Mr. Randall shook his head. Alex, he said, meaning Mr. Schreiber. Took sick last night.
My daddy turned to me and said, You believe it now?
And I said, No, I don’t. I said I believed that an old blind man walked up to the Schreibers’ house and sang a song and I believed that Mr. Alex Schreiber died a little over a week later but I didn’t believe any man could know it was going to happen. Only God could know such a thing, I said.