Outer Dark

There was a prophet standing in the square with arms upheld in exhortation to the beggared multitude gathered there. […] The sun hung on the cusp of eclipse and the prophet spoke to them. This hour the sun would darken and all those souls would be cured of their afflictions before it appeared again. And the dreamer himself was caught up among the supplicants […] Me, he cried. Can I be cured? The prophet looked down as if surprised to see him there amidst such pariahs. The sun paused. He said: Yes, I think perhaps you will be cured. Then the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout. […] They waited a long time and it grew chill. […] It grew cold and more black and silent and some began to cry out and some despaired but the sun did not return.

He went on faster. With full dark he was confused in a swampy forest, floundering through sucking quagmires and half running. He did not come upon the river but upon the creek again. Or another creek. He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close in on him, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of his flesh colliding among them. Long and long after he should have reached the river he was careering through the woods with his hands outstretched before him against whatever the dark might hold. […] When he came upon the creek again he splashed into it thigh and crotch before he knew it was there. He stopped, his breath roaring, trying to listen. […] He spat. His saliva bloomed palely on the water and wheeled and slid inexplicably upstream, back the way he had come.

And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.

Her hands worked nervously. I just wanted to know where it was you put him…

In the ground.

Well, she said, I just thought maybe if you was to show me where at I could see it…and maybe put some flowers or somethin…

Flowers, he said. It ain’t even got a name.

She was twisting her hands again and he came from the table where he had been leaning and started past her.

Culla…

He stopped at the door and looked at her. She hadn’t even looked around.

We could give it one, she said.

It’s dead, he said. You don’t name things dead.

She turned slowly. It wouldn’t hurt nothin, she said.

Damn you, he said. The flowers if you want. I’ll show ye.

[He] rose up and set forth from the shelter of the cliff and through the steaming woods to the road, now a flume of ashcolored loam through which he struggled with weighted shoes, his hands pocketed and head cupped between his shoulderblades.

He reached the town before noon, mud slathered to his knees, wading through a thick mire in which the tracks of wagons crossed everywhere with channels of milky gray water, entering the square among the midday traffic, a wagon passing him in four pinwheels of flicking mud. He watched it pull up before a store, the horse coming to rest in an ooze that reached its fetlocks and the high wheels of the wagon sucking halfway to their hubs.

You married?

No. I ain’t married. He looked up at the squire. Their shadows canted upon the whitewashed brick of the kitchen shed in a pantomime of static violence in which the squire reeled backward and he leaned upon him in headlong assault. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said.

No, it ain’t. It ain’t a crime. I hope you’ve not got a family. It’s a sacred thing, a family. A sacred obligation. Afore God. The squire had been looking away and now he turned to Holme again. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said. That’s right. But shiftlessness is a sin, I would judge. Wouldn’t you?

I reckon, he said.

I’m a huntin this here tinker.

Tinker? What’d he steal?

Well. Somethin belonged to me.

And what was that?

It was just somethin.

Well come in anyway.

Thank ye, she said.

[…]

Get ye a chair, the man said.

They watched her sit, holding the bundle up before her, the lamp just at her elbow belabored by a moth whose dark shape cast upon her face appeared captive within the delicate skull, the thin and roselit bone, like something kept in a china mask. Lord, she said, I’ve not sat hardly today.

They got the awfullest jail in the state.

I ain’t never been in jail, Holme said.

You ain’t never been in Cheatham.

Holme put his hands in the bib of his overalls.

What trade do ye follow? The man said.

I ain’t got nary.

The man nodded.

I can work, Holme said. I ain’t no slack hand.

You aim to hunt work in Cheatham?

I’d studied it.

He nodded again. They went on.

He wore a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. […] He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said, Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.

She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road again. Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replieved by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered winding and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child’s song from an old dead time.

Four girls.

She sat, hands folded. The woman dampened cheesecloth to lay over the butter.

Oldest’n been near your age I reckon.

I’m nineteen, she said.

Yes. Oldest’n be just about your age. […] I don’t even know whether you’d say raised or not when they wasn’t but just young. The boy was near a growed man when he died.

Yes mam. I’m sorry you’ve had such troubles.

Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

She was watching her toes.

For nineteen year.

Yes mam.

You know snakes is supposed to be bad luck, he said, but they must have some good in em on account of them old geechee snake doctors uses em all the time for medicines. Unless ye was to say that kind of doctorin was the devil’s work. Bu the devil don’t do doctorin does he? That’s where a preacher cain’t answer ye. Cause even a preacher won’t say they cain’t help nor cure ye. I’ve knowed em to slip off in the swamp theirselves for a little fixin of somethin another when they wasn’t nothing else and them poorly. Ain’t you?

I reckon, Holme said.

Sure, the old man said. Even a snake ain’t all bad. They’s put her for some purpose. I believe they’s purpose to everthing. Don’t you believe thataway?

[…] I don’t know, Holme said. I ain’t never much studied it.

I thank ye kindly.

Shoo, the old man said. Just stay on.

Well, I best get on.

The old man took up his cane from where he had leaned it against the side of the house. Well, he said, come back when ye can stay longer.

I will, he said. He went down the steps into the yard. The hounds raised their eyes to watch him go. He half turned again at the road and lifted one hand and the old man nodded and made a little motion with his cane.

Thank ye for the water and all, Holme said.

Shoo, said the old man. I wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink.

With the soap he made a thin and transient lather, honed the razor against the calf of his boot and shaved himself, studying his face in the water and feeling out stray patches of stubble with his fingers. When he had done he splashed water at his face and took up his shirt to dry with before donning it again. He wrapped the soap in a leaf and put it together with the razor in the bib pocket once more and combed his hair briefly with his fingers and rose.

When he did reach town it was past noon, his shirt gone sour again and sweat darkening the white crusts of salt at his sleeves and the cuffs of his trousers which in their raggedness looked blown off to length, tailored by watchdogs.

Then a man came out of the building on the left and crossed in front of her and as he did he tipped his hat, a brief gesture as if swatting idly at a fly. There was a trace of a smile at his mouthcorners.

Hey, she said.

Hey yourself.

She was watching him go on. You ain’t a doctor, are ye? she called after him.

He stopped and looked back. No, he said. A lawyer. I get the winners, he gets the losers. He was standing in the middle of the road, smiling a little, his hand gone to the brim of his hat again.

Well listen, she said, where’s they a doctor at?

The lawyer tucked a long forefinger into his waistcoat pocket and fished forth his watch. He snapped it open […] He won’t be in till about one-thirty, he said. It’s ten till now.

Holme, the man repeated. The word seemed to feel bad in his mouth. He jerked his head vaguely toward the one with the rifle. That’n ain’t got a name, he said. He wanted me to give him one but I wouldn’t do it. He don’t need nary. You ever seen a man with no name afore?

No.

No, the man said. Not likely.

Holme looked at the one with the rifle.

Everything don’t need a name, does it? the man said.

I don’t know. I don’t reckon.

I guess you’d like to know mine, wouldn’t ye?

I don’t care, Holme said.

I said I guess you’d like to know mine, wouldn’t ye?

Yes, Holme said.

The man’s teeth appeared and went away again as if he had smiled. Yes, he said. I expect they’s lots would like to know that.

They went past houses and along fenced fields where late corn stripped of fodder stood naked and grotesque out of the dead scrub weeds and the intermittent bright shapes of pumpkins. The cart went along on it camshaped wheels like a crippled dog. The tinker did not speak. Yellow leaves were falling in a field and lay already deep in the stony troughs like a last crude harrowing had left. She walked looking down at her feet and her lips were moving slightly. The sound of the tinker’s cart faded to the drowsy clangor of belled cattle before she looked again and saw him far down the road. She hurried to catch up, holding her dress tight in one fist between her breasts and the cloth already dark with milk.

She touched his ragged sleeve with two fingers. What did ye give? I’ll make it up to ye. Whatever ye give. And that nurse fee.

The tinker jerked his arm away. He leaned his face toward her. Give, he said. I give a lifetime wanderin in a country where I was despised. Can you give that? I give forty years strapped in front of a cart like a mule till I couldn’t stand straight to be hanged. I’ve not got soul one in this world save an old halfcrazy sister that nobody ever would have like they never would me. I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other and you cain’t pay that back. You ain’t got nothing to pay it with. Them accounts is in blood and they ain’t nothin in this world to pay em out with.

The old lady’ll fix ye a bed here in the kitchen. You ain’t no desperate outlaw, are ye? Ain’t murdered nobody?

No sir. I don’t reckon.

Don’t reckon eh? The squire smiled.

Holme wasn’t smiling. He was looking at the floor.

Get ye fattened up a little here on the old woman’s cookin you’ll be all right, the squire said. Might get some work out of ye then. You reckon?

Yessir. I ain’t scared to work.

The squire had tilted back in his chair, regarding him. I don’t believe you’re no bad feller Holme, he said. I don’t believe you’re no lucky feller neither. My daddy always claimed a man made his own luck. But that’s disputable, I reckon.

She did not know that she was leaving. She woke in the night and rose half tranced from the bed and began to dress, all in darkness and with gravity. Perhaps some dream had moved her so. She took her few things from the chifforobe and bundled them and went to the landing beyond her door. She listened for his breathing in the room opposite but she could hear nothing. She crouched in the dark long and long for fear he was awake and when she did descend the stairs in her bare feet she paused again at the bottom in the dead black foyer and listened up the stairwell. And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.

The drover who had spoken him swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight.

Holme blinked and shook his head. The hogs boiled past squealing and plunging and the chalky red smoke of their passage hung over the river and stained the sky with something of sunset.

Well neighbor, I says, I believe ye ort. He gives ye eyes to see and then he tuck em away. And maybe you never was much of a christian to start with and he figgered this’d bring ye round. They’s been more than one feller brought to the love of Jesus over the paths of affliction. And what better way than blind? In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most. […] The grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him easy as not. It can bend him and make him crooked. And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind that’s who. Them is the one scarred with God’s mercy. Stricken with his love. Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God. Amen.

What’s his name? the man said.

I don’t know.

He ain’t got nary’n.

No. I don’t reckon. I don’t know.

They say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called somethin to get sent there. Didn’t they.

The tinker might of named him.

It wasn’t his to name. Besides names die with the namers. A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name. He reached and drew from his boot a slender knife.

Holme seemed to be speaking to something in the night beyond them all. My sister would take him, he said. That chap. We could find her and she’d take him.

Yes, the man said.

I been hunting her.

[…] The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. […] Holme saw the blade wink in the light […] and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it.

Yes, the blind man said. Is they anything you need?

Need?

Anything you need?

I don’t need nothin.

I always like to ast.

What are ye sellin?

I ain’t sellin nothin. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.

It’s good he don’t need mine. I reckon you’re some kind of a preacher.

No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.

Holme smiled. What have you got to give? Old blind man like you astin folks what they need.

I don’t know. Nobody’s ever said.

Well how would you expect to get it.

Just pray for it.

You always get what you pray for?

Yes. I reckon. I wouldn’t pray for what wasn’t needful. Would you?

I ain’t never prayed.

Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figure in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. […] He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.

Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping though the dusk. […] Holme watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.