Free The Long Home by William Gay Page B

filing up with birdsong and she thought she’d never seen a brighter day. So bright a day to lie dying on. She was touched with horror, with a desperate need to hurry.
    Her shoes made flat little plops in the roadbed and little clouds of dust arose like phantoms pursuing her. She increased her pace and the hash green world became a world in motion, a bobbing wall of greenery like murky water, and even the cries of birds were muted and distorted like sound filtered through fire.
    Amber Rose did not believe in miracles. He is dying, she thought. She thought of a casket lid being closed. No one will open it, ever, she thought in wonder. The concept of forever struck her with the force of a blow. It yawned before her, all engrossing, awesome. She stopped in the curve of the road and looked back.
    The house sat full in the sun, its roof growing dull green, its walls myriad shades of weathered gray. Brooding so in the morning light it seemed pulled magnetically by the anomalous shadows from the hollow. She whirled and hurried on.
    Through the moving windshield of the Packard he watched with wry amusement their progress up the dusty roadbed, two figures imbued with haste, hurrying jerkily towards him like puppets dragged along by strings.
    He slowed the Packard as he neared them, braked to a stop when they were almost parallel with the car. He cut the switch and sat watching them, an arm on the sill of the window.
    “Looks like you had a long, hot trip for nothin, Miz Winer,” Hardin said. “Brother Hovington passed away a minute ago. I thought I’d save you the rest of the trip.”
    “It wadn’t no trouble,” the woman said. Her voice sounded stilted and formal beneath the rim of her bonnet. “I have to hear about Mr Hovington.”
    “Well, I guess he can rest easy now. Get in and I’ll run you back home.”
    “I’ll just go on I reckon and see if I be of any help to Mrs. Hovington.”
    “We can manage. I’m sorry we drug you into our troubles.”
    “Folks got to help one another.”
    “I reckon. We’ll manage though.”
    The girl came around the side of the car, opened the door, and got in without speaking. The woman stood awkwardly in the roadbed as if awaiting enlightenment. “What was it he wanted me for anyway?”
    “He never said,” Hardin told her.
    The girl sat staring across the fence where Oliver’s goats grazed the bright tangle of bitterweed, though she did not see them. She thought, they will have to break his back to ever get him in a casket. A sense of horror suffused her, she fell to thinking on how this could come to be. Surely there were tools for this, no ordinary hammer would suffice. Beyond the grazing goats her mind dreamed implements of brass and gleaming bronze, folds of purple velvet to mute the blows.
    Hardin had said something.
    “No, I’ll just walk,” Mrs. Winer said.
    “Suit yourself then,” Hardin said. He started the car and began to turn it in the road.
    She sat watching her hands fold pleats in her blue skirt. She thought she ought to cry but she didn’t.
    William Tell Oliver straightened from the milling goats amidst the halfmusic glangor of the bells to watch the stately passage of the hearse, the corn spilling forgotten from his hands, the polished black of the hearse winking back the midday sun, its sides already dulling with a film of dust.
    Hovington, he thought, fascinated by the windows curtained by red velvet, the hearse’s low, sinister configuration somehow profound and appalling against the border of sumac and blackberry briars, diminishing then, content this time with another.
    Winer went three times to the Red Diamond Poultry Farm. The first two times there was no one about at all and no sign of Weiss’s car. The chickens were halfstarved. He fed and watered them. The third time was on a Wednesday and Weiss’s car was parked in the drive and the front door was ajar though no one answered his call. He stood uncertainly in the clutter of the porch and after