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William Tell Oliver came out of the woods into a field the Mormons used to tend but which had grown over in sassafras and cedar, the slim saplings of sassafras thick now as his arm: though not as thick as his arms had once been, he reminded himself: he was old and his flesh had fallen away some. He didn't dwell on that though, reckoned himself lucky to still be around.
Oliver was carrying a flour sack weighted with ginseng across his shoulder. His blue shirt was darkened in the back and plastered to his shoulders with sweat. It had been still in the thick summer woods and no breeze stirred there, but here where the field ran downhill in a stumbling landscape of brush and stone a wind blew out of the west and tilted the saplings and ran through the leaves bright as quicksilver.
He halted in the shade of a cottonwood and unslung the bag and dropped it and looked up, shading his eyes: the sky was a hot cobalt blue, but westward darkened in indelible increments to a lusterless metallic gray, the color he imagined the seas might turn before a storm. A few birds passed beneath him with shrill broken cries as if they divined some threat implicit with the weathers and he thought it might blow up a rain.
Standing so with his upper face in shadow the full weight of the sun fell on his chin and throat, skin so weathered and browned by the sun and aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years it had taken on the texture of some material finally immutable to the changes of the weathers, as if it had been evolving all his life and ultimately became a kind of whang leather impervious to time or elements, corded, seamed and scarred, pulled tight over the cheekbones and blade of nose that gave his face an Indian cast.
He hunkered in a shady spot to rest. He had been smoking his pipe in the woods to keep the gnats away from his eyes and now he took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the fire from it against a stone, taking care that each spark was extinguished for the woods and fields had been dry since spring and he was a man of a thousand small cautions.
Below him Hovington's tin roof baking in the sun, the bright stream passing beneath the road, the road itself a meandering red slash bleeding through a world of green. He sat quietly, getting his breath back, an old man watching with infinite patience, no more of a hurry about him than you would find in a tree of stone. The place was changing. A new structure had been built of concrete blocks and its whitewash gleamed harshly. New-looking light poles followed the road now, electrical wires strung to the end of the house.
Yet some old strain of secondsight from Celtic forebears saw in the lineaments of house and barn, the gradations of hill and slope and road, something more profound, some subtle aberration of each line, some infinitesimal deviation from the norm that separated this place from any other, made it sacred, or cursed: The Mormons had proclaimed it sacred, built their church there. The whitecaps cursed it with their annihilation, with the rows of graves their descendants would just as soon the woods grew over.
All his life he'd heard folks say they saw lights here at night, they called them mineral lights, corpse candles. Eerie balls of phosphorescence rising over money the Mormons had buried. Oliver doubted there was any money buried, or ever had been, but he smiled when he remembered Lyle Hodges. Hodges had owned the place before Hovington bought it for the back taxes, and Oliver guessed that Hodges had dug up every square foot of the place malleable with pick and shovel. It had been his vocation, his trade; he went out with his tools every morning the weather permitted working at it the way a man might work a farm or a job in a factory, studying by night his queer homemade maps and obscure markings, digging like a demented archeologist searching for the regiment and order of elder times while his wife and son tried to coax crops from soil that would ultimately produce only untaxed whiskey. even now Oliver could have found the old man's brush-covered mounds of earth, pockmarked craters like half-finished graves abandoned in hasty flight. Hodges worked on until his death, his dream sustaining him. Oliver reckoned there was nothing much wrong with that, his own dreams had not weathered as well.
