Love and Sleep (17 page)

"Warren! Those berries aren't ripe."

"They're red,” Warren said.

"They're blackberries. When they're red, they aren't ripe."

Warren looked down at his handful.

"When blackberries are red, they're green,” said Pierce, and they laughed and pondered this and said it more times as they went up.

They had passed this crossroads before: they all remembered the little store that stood in the crotch of the road, but they couldn't agree on which branch of the road they had taken from here up to Hogback. They were already much farther from home than they had ever gone before.

"Go in,” Pierce said to Hildy, “and ask inside."

"You go in."

"Warren!” Pierce said. “Go in and ask which way to Hogback."

Warren, unafraid, went up to the porch, whose roof seemed to cringe under the sun's beating. This must be a store: a sign in the shape of a huge bottle cap was fixed to the wall, weeping rust at the nailholes, and the array of things on the porch and in the grassless yard could not have come to be there by chance, they must be for sale. But a yellow dog came out from under the porch to bare its teeth at Warren, growling protectively, and a store dog wouldn't do that.

Warren ignored the dog, making an automatic circle around it and climbing the porch stairs. He looked in at the tattered screen door. For some time the others watched and waited as Warren talked to whoever was within, while the dog sniffed him and Warren sidled away. Then he came back.

"What'd they say?"

"I couldn't understand their English,” Warren said. But it seemed they had pointed up the left-hand way, and that was the way they all agreed they sort of remembered, and so they went leftward and up.

"Come on, Warren."

"Do dogs think they're naked?” Warren asked thoughtfully from the rear. “Or do they think they're dressed?"

They took sides on this question and argued it closely as they went up; for the time that it occupied them they didn't need to think about what exactly they were doing, nor how far from home they were getting.

How anyway was Bobby supposed to be a Catholic up here alone? How was she supposed to receive the sacraments, the others that ought to follow on the purloined one they had talked her into accepting? Pierce imagined Father Midnight in his old black Studebaker climbing this road, the Host hidden under his coat, as in the stories Sister Mary Philomel loved to tell, about priests behind the Iron Curtain. The purple stole quickly slipped over his shoulders, Bobby kneeling secretly out behind the corn-crib to receive. A hot flush of shame ran up Pierce's neck at the nunnish melodrama of it, at his own complicity in it, not now ever to be withdrawn either.

"Maybe she'll run away again,” Bird said. “Maybe come live with us."

That was a story from a different book. There was another too Pierce could think of, looking into the green darkness of the pines and the holler: he and Bobby escaped together, he following her, her woodcraft and daring supplying his lack, his smarts and reasonableness hers. He could almost see their fleeing forms, hand in hand down through the clearings of the woods where sunlight fell.

They had begun to hear a constant noise from no locatable source, lower-pitched and not so various as the noise of the noontide all around. Then where the road widened for a moment and ran flat through thin woods they stopped—Pierce first, who saw it first, then Hildy behind him, then Bird—to study something inexplicable.

"Look. What happened?"

A boulder taller than Pierce stood in the woods right by the road. It was caked in clay, like a stone troweled out of a garden plot, clay which the day had dried to pale buff on its top but which was still damp beneath in shadow. Behind it, leading a long way up the mountain out of sight, ran the path it had followed as it came down: shattered aspens and firs, crushed stone and gouged earth, a big rip down through the woods, or a long rough zipper unzipped.

What on earth. The four of them stood puzzling, then each in turn drew the same conclusion, that if by earthquake or some other agency this kingsize rock had been rooted out and thrown down the mountain, just hours ago maybe probably, then any minute another just as big might follow, and might not stop before it reached the road they walked along. What anyway was that weird noise.

They went on warily. They seemed to have ascended into a space of strange earth, unpredictable; there was a smell of raw dirt in the air. The road turned sharply upward again, crossing a tumbling crick over a bridge of cracked concrete and then climbing up beside it. The crick was brown as milky coffee, and choked with foreign stone.

The little cluster of cabins and their outhouses under the mountain appeared; the road, clinging to the spur, had brought them around to it. Hogback. The noise they had been listening to was more distinct now, and was clearly engines, big ones, the backing and attacking of an earthmover, more than one probably; and it came from up above.

"Maybe somebody building something,” Warren said. “Like a school or something."

They left the main road at the turn upward, they all remembered, the last moment Sam could have turned back toward Bondieu with Bobby and hadn't, and after a sharp bend, and another bend, knowing now they were very close and drawing themselves together, they arrived, somehow suddenly.

"That's her bridge."

But across the bridge was not the same. The height of dark mountain that had stood over Shaftoe's place had collapsed, or been shattered. Pieces of it lay scattered over the sloping clearing. The green corn had been mown by tumbling stones.

"Her house got wrecked!” Warren whispered in horror.

A jagged bone of earth as big as Sam's Nash had come down the mountain on a tide of clay and stones, parting the half-grown trees of the slope and laying them down like hair; it sat now in the bathroom Floyd Shaftoe had added to his cabin, jammed deep in the cellar-hole. The tarpapered roof had been lifted half off like a tipped hat, the tub, the commode and the sink pushed out the split seam of the house into the littered yard. A roll of toilet paper had rolled away from the house toward the crick, leaving a zigzag white path behind—they all noticed that.

When they had stood staring a long minute, Bird called out: “Bobby!"

But just as she let out the name, unable to recall it (clapping her hand too late over her mouth), Floyd Shaftoe pushed open the slack screen door of the house and came out to stand on his canted porch. He wore no shirt, and the children could see running over the flinty muscle of his chest a map of white welts, scars of a long-ago rock-fall underground. He looked at the children for a while without expression, and then went back inside.

The Invisibles looked at each other sidelong, each waiting for another to say Oh let's forget it and go quick: but no one did. And Bobby came banging out of the house flinging a quick stream of invective behind her the children couldn't decipher.

She was dashing across the yard toward the bridge and the Oliphants when Floyd called to her from the house, and she stopped, outraged by whatever she heard, and shouted back; then she stood straight, and walked deliberately to the bridge.

"Y'all come over."

By now the Invisible College was a tight knot on the roadside, Hildy holding Pierce's and Bird's hands, Warren behind Bird.

"
You
come over,” Hildy called. “We'll stay here."

Bobby looked toward them puzzled. She seemed to be a similar but different person from the one they had hidden in their house: taller and stringier and duller-eyed, but more than that: at home, usual, instead of extraordinary. “Well what'd y'all come for?"

They had no simple single answer to that, and said nothing.

"I don't think your grandfather wanted us to come over,” Hildy called.

"He says he's agoin for his gun,” Bobby said sarcastically. “I don't pay him no never mind."

"Well,” Hildy said in a goodbye tone.

"No come on,” Pierce said. “We said we would.” He probably doesn't even
have
a gun, he thought, and it was crazy to threaten kids with one, irrational, who would.

"We can only stay a little while,” Hildy called, not having actually got there yet. Her sneakers as she crossed seemed not to touch the boards of the bridge. A lot later on, Hildy would sometimes dream of crossing such a little bridge, under the impression that there was someone on the other side who needed her, but suspecting that once she was across, things would not be as she thought them—knowing absolutely with a sudden starting horror that things would be very very different on the other side—and would wake then, and for a moment know that all her life she had dreamed this dream again and again, only to forget it each time: and even then she would not know from where it had come.

"He done burned all them things you give me,” Bobby said to her when she was across. “All them pitchers."

"They weren't his!” Hildy said, outraged by the unfairness.

"Said he smelt the Devil onm,” Bobby said mildly. “Look,” she said. She pointed behind her to the wreckage of her house, as though they might not have noticed. “Know who done that? Devil done it."

The day seemed to have darkened around Pierce, a strange hooded dusty dimness fallen over the sun.

"Got his mark on it,” Bobby said. “You want to see?"

"I want to see,” Warren said.

"Warren,” Hildy said. “You stay."

Bobby pulled Pierce by the hand, and the others after him, to where they could look in at the rock squatting in a nest of shattered floorboards.

"See?” she said.

Someone—Floyd probably—had outlined with a burnt stick a ridgy place in the rock, to bring out its resemblance to a knuckly, three-clawed reptilian hand. It was striking without being for a second convincing.

"Wow,” said Warren. “A claw."

"But it's make-believe,” said Pierce. The shudder of repugnance that covered him was because someone had done this, had pretended it, had wanted it to be unnatural: make-believe for real. “Just because it's a lumpy rock."

"Devil thowed it at my grandpap account of what he knows,” Bobby said. Then she shrugged one shoulder: “What
he
says. Missed him though."

"Nobody threw it,” Pierce said. “It came from up there, from whatever they're building."

"Ain't buildn nothn,” Bobby said. “Tearn down the mountain."

Then Bobby shrieked: the sheet hung in the rent of the wall was snatched aside, and Floyd Shaftoe stood looking at them, the whites of his eyes unnaturally huge and his pupils black.

"Let's run!” Bobby said, and set off away from the yard toward the woods. Pierce ran after her to stop her, having glimpsed in her face that she was almost certainly pretending, inciting their alarm for the fun of it; and Bird hurtled after him in genuine alarm, and Warren after her; Hildy last, embarrassed and afraid.

Bobby ran fast, her skinny legs scissoring rapidly; once she lost a shoe, a grownup's worn slip-on shoe too big for her, and stopped to retrieve it without missing more than a step. She led them up a track through the woods (Hildy calling from behind that they had to go home now, stop a sec) and over a hump of hill to an outcropping shelf of slate.

Panting, pleased with herself, she turned to them coming up behind. “Y'all's slow runners,” she said.

"Well you didn't
have
to
run
,” Pierce said, his eyes burning with sweat or tears. “Why did you run?"

"Lookit,” she said to him from up above on the outcrop. “Cmere."

He climbed up to where she stood. Warren had stumbled on the path and skinned his knee, and his sisters were comforting him. Warren he doesn't have a gun, it's illegal, don't cry or he'll hear you. Pierce looked where Bobby pointed.

He could see all the way up the holler toward the mountain top, through the flattened trees and the standing ones. There was the source of the noise and the stones and the dirt: big yellow cats, he could see one, were cutting a shelf of earth out of the mountain. He saw one backing up, could distinguish its gray smoke from the orange dust it raised. The matter of the mountain was being heaved off the shelf they were cutting, smashing the trees and growth beneath and covering the remainder with thick clay like butterscotch icing dripping down a cake's sides. Above the shelf a straight wall of exposed mountain rose.

"Strippn,” Bobby said.

Like eating an ice-cream cone: push a trail along with your tongue at the perimeter of the cone, lick up the excess, while on the other side the melting slob slips over onto the cone and your fingers. Tongue comes around and cleans up. Pierce could see the dump-trucks that followed after the cats to be loaded with the coal they uncovered: heavy ribbed trucks, just like the one Warren had used to play with daylong in his own pit. Gradually the mountain would be worn away.

"The Enda Days is acomin,” Bobby said in a voice not hers.

"What,” Pierce said.

"Sure. My grandpa knows. Holy Sperta God tole him.” She clutched her bony knees where she sat on the slate. “That's why the Devil flang that rock at us. So he don't tell the world."

"That's stupid,” Pierce said desperately. “Cut it out."

"All the dead hereabouts gone break open ther graves and come on out.” She gauged his response. “Not skullitons,” she said. “Gone put on ther flesh."

"
Pierce
.” Hildy had had enough; the calm authority of hysteria in her voice made Pierce jump.

"My maw's maw,” Bobby said. “My grandpap's maw. Ther maw too."

"We have to
go
,” Hildy said. “Warren is
hurt
."

"They's a witch lived up Hogback onct,” Bobby said. “Devil tore out her house too.” She clambered higher up the stones above Pierce. “Ain't gone get us, though, cause we're movn away."

"No, where,” Pierce said, a sudden awful hollow opening in his heart.

"Deetroit,” Bobby said. “Can't get us there."

"No,” Pierce said.

"Find my mawn paw."

"No."

She stood on tiptoe on the rock ledge, and looked down the trail toward the house. “Whoops, he's acomn,” she cried in mock terror. “Y'all better run."