Part 10 (1/2)

All around the house were beehives. Some in gums made from sections of the hollow trunks of black-gum trees, holes augured in them and oriented with the points of the compa.s.s. Others in straw skeps, grey as old thatch and starting to soften up and cave in at the crowns. Despite neglect, though, bees worked thick in the suns.h.i.+ne, coming and going.

-If we were to rob one of those gums it would be some good eating, Veasey said.

-Go to it, Inman said.

-I take a bee sting hard, Veasey said. I swell up. It wouldn't do for me to get in amongst them.

-But you'd eat the honey if I went to get it, is what you're saying?

-A dish of honey would hit the spot and would give us strength for the road.

Inman could not argue with that point, so he rolled down his s.h.i.+rtsleeves and tucked his pant cuffs 2004-3-6.

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into his boots and wrapped his head in his coat, leaving but a fold to sight through. He walked to a gum and slid the roof off and dug out handfuls of honey and comb into his pot until it was heaped over and running down the sides. He moved slowly and deliberately and was stung little.

He and Veasey sat on the edge of the porch, the pot between them, and ate the honey by the spoonful. It was black as coffee, having come from every sort of flower, and it was full of bees'

wings and had toughened up from not being robbed in some time. It was nothing if compared to the clear honey from chestnut blossoms that his father had collected from wild bees by lining them to their tree hives as they flew through the woods. But still, Inman and Veasey ate it like it was good.

When the honey was nearly gone, Inman lifted out a chunk of the comb and bit off a piece.

-You eating even the comb? Veasey said, a note of disapproval in his voice.

-You say that like there was a rooster in the pot, Inman said. He chewed at the waxy plug.

-It's just that it looks like it would stopper a man up.

-It's good for you. A tonic, Inman said. He took another bite and reached out a piece to Veasey, who ate it without relish.

-I'm still hungry, Veasey said, after the pot was empty.

-That's it unless you can scare up something for us to shoot, Inman said. And we need to be walking, not hunting. This kind of traveling puts a curb on your appet.i.tes.

-There's some say that's the way to contentment, get to where there's nothing you crave, where you've lost your appet.i.tes. Which is lunacy, Veasey said. Contentment is largely a matter of talking yourself into believing that G.o.d will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers. There's few I've seen who benefit from believing that on the Day of Judgment, moon turns to blood. I know I don't wish to give that belief too much credit.

Inman jumped from the porch and set out. They traveled at a fair pace for another hour until the road became but a path that climbed a rolling ridge and then followed the fall of a little twisty stream for a while. The water ran down the hill in a series of white riffles broken now and then by quiet bends and little pools where the land terraced or curved, so that if one were not too careful about the particulars it might be taken for a mountain stream. The damp cove too had the smell of the mountains to Inman's nose. The fragance of galax and rotted leaves, damp dirt. He ventured to say as much.

Veasey put his head back and sniffed. Smells like somebody's a.s.s, he said.

Inman did not even comment. He was tired, and his mind worked at random. His eyes kept to the bright thread of water before them. The path it had found to make its way to lower ground was as coiled as a hog's bowel. He had learned enough of books to think that gravity in its ideal form was supposed to work in straight lines of force. But looking on the creek as it made its snaky way down the hill, he saw such notions to be just airy thoughts. The creek's turnings marked how all that moves must shape itself to the maze of actual landscape, no matter what its preferences might be.

When it reached flat ground, the creek gentled and became a watercourse little better than a muddy ditch and displayed no further reference that Inman could find to a mountain stream. Veasey stopped and said, Well, look yonder.

There in the creek, which was deep but still narrow enough to step across with scarcely a hop, was a catfish that looked longer than a singletree for an ox team, though much greater in girth. In fact it 2004-3-6.

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was stout as a tub. It was ugly in the face with its tiny eyes and pale barbels run out from its mouth and wagging in the current. Its lower jaw was set back to make sucking up bottom trash easier, and its back was greeny black and gritty-looking. Though it was but a runt compared to what Inman had imagined in the depths of the muddy Cape Fear, it nevertheless looked plenty hefty and must have taken a woefully wrong turn somewhere to find itself here in water so narrow it could reverse its direction only if it had a hinge in its middle.

-He would be good eating, Veasey said.

-We lack tackle, Inman pointed out.

-I'd give anything for a pole and a line and a hook baited with a big wad of greasy wheat bread.

-Well, we don't have it, Inman said, disgusted at such custom of flatland fis.h.i.+ng. He had no more than moved a foot to walk on when the fish spooked at his shadow on the water and wallowed off upstream.

Veasey followed Inman as he walked away, but he kept turning back and looking up the creek. He made it clear he was sulking. Every hundred yards of progress they made he would say, That was a big fish.

When they had gone only about a half a mile, Veasey stopped and said, There's nothing else but that I've got to have me that catfish. He turned and set into a jog trot up the trail. Inman followed at a walk. When Veasey got near to where the fish had been, he led them off into the woods and thrashed ahead, circling through them for some time so that when he came back to the water they were well upstream. Inman watched as Veasey began scouting into the woods for downed limbs and dragging them into the stream. He piled them up and jumped on them to pack them down. Eventually he had built a kind of weir, all p.r.i.c.kly with limbs.

-What are you up to? Inman said.

-You just wait right here and watch, Veasey said.

Then he circled in the woods again and struck the creek downstream of where he figured the fish to be. He jumped in the creek and walked upstream, kicking the water as he went, and though he did not ever see the fish, he knew he must be driving it before him.

When Veasey neared the weir, Inman could finally see the catfish nosed against the branches trying to find a pa.s.sage. Veasey pulled off his hat and threw it onto the creek bank. He waded to the fish and bent and dipped his upper half into the water to grapple it out. Fish and man came up thras.h.i.+ng, spilling water offin sheets. Veasey had the fish in a hug about its middle, his hands clenched at its white belly. It fought him with all it had. Its neckless head beat back against his, and the whiskers whipped about his face. Then it bent like a great strong bow, sprung straight, and shot from his arms back into the water.

Veasey stood wheezing for air. His face was marked with long red weals where he had been stung by the whiskers of the fish, and his arms were cut from the spined fins, but he bent and took it up out of the water again and wrestled it to another draw. He tried over and over but failed each time until he and the fish both could hardly move from exhaustion. Veasey climbed wearily from the stream and sat on the bank.

-Could you get down in there and try your hand at it? he asked Inman.

Inman reached to his hip and took out the LeMat's and shot the catfish through the head. It thrashed 2004-3-6.

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for a minute and then lay still.

-They G.o.d, Veasey said.

They camped there that night. Veasey left the building and tending of the creekside fire to Inman, as well as all the cooking. He apparently knew to do nothing but talk and eat. When Inman cut the fish open, he found among the contents of its stomach the head to a ballpeen hammer and a bluebird that had been swallowed whole. He set them aside on a flat rock. He next peeled the skin off a part of the fish's back and sides and whittled off fillets. Among the stores in Veasey's packsack was a waxed paper parcel of lard. Inman melted it in the pan and rolled pieces of the fish in his own cornmeal and fried them up brown. As they ate, Veasey looked at the rock and speculated on the catfish's diet.

-You reckon it swallowed that hammer entire a long time ago and then the juice in its stomach ate off the handle? he said.

-Might be, Inman said. I've heard stranger things.

But the bluebird was a puzzler. The only satisfactory way Inman could account for it was that a better cla.s.s of fish, a wondrous trout, say, had risen from the water and taken the bluebird from a low limb of a creekside tree, and then that fine trout had immediately died and the catfish sucked it up whole from the bottom and digested it from the outside in, so all that was left was the bluebird.

They feasted on the fish through the evening, eating until all the meal and lard was gone. Then they just cut chunks of fish and skewered them on green sticks and roasted them bare over fire coals.

Veasey talked on and on, and when he tired of relating his own history, he tried to draw out Inman's story. Where his home might be. Where he was heading. Where he had been. But Veasey could get hardly a word in answer. Inman just sat cross-legged and looked into the fire.

-You're about as bad off as Legion, I believe, Veasey finally said. And he told Inman the story of the man whose wounded spirit Jesus comforted. How Jesus found him naked, fleeing mankind, hiding in the wilderness, gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth on tomb rocks, cutting himself with stones. Turned wild by some ill fortune. What few thoughts Legion had just rampant.

-Always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying and wailing like a dog, Veasey said. And Jesus heard of him and went to him and straightened him right out quicker than a dose of salts running through you. Legion went home a new self.