Part 28 (1/2)

somewhere.

Stobrod bowed a note or two from Cindy, and then some other notes, seeming at random, unrelated.

He went over them and over them, and it began to be clear that they made no sense. But he suddenly gathered them up and worked a variation on them, and then another yet more precise, and they unexpectedly fell together into a tune. He found the pattern he was seeking, and he followed the trail of notes where they led, finding the way of their logic, which was brisk, brittle, effortless as laughing. He played the run of it a time or two until Pangle had his chord changes down and had spun off a series of quick answering notes, bright and harsh. Then they set off together to see what sort of thing they had composed.

Though in form it was neither jig nor reel, it was yet right for dancing. Their stomachs, however, were still in such a rage that neither of them could have shuffled out a step. Pangle, nevertheless, had one foot patting ground on the offbeat and his head was nodding and his eyes were loose-closed so that there was but a trembling rim of white showing between the lashes. Stobrod played a run of notes and then lowered the fiddle from under his bristled neck so that the b.u.t.t of it rested against his chest. He beat out the rhythm on the strings with his bow. Pangle caught on and did the same with his flattened hand against the groundhog hide of the banjo head, and momentarily there was a sense that the instruments they played were just elaborations on the drum. To the thumping, Stobrod put back his head and sang out a lyric he was making up at the moment. It had to do with women whose bellies were hard as the necks of mules. Such women, the song proclaimed, were cruel beyond the generality of their s.e.x.

When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat, which some name General Was.h.i.+ngton's tune. This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life.

Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit's took them now.

None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle's use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod's fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature. There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream-his or some fictive speaker's-said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the pa.s.sage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green.

The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world.

When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good G.o.d, these is holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me.

Teague sucked on a tooth and looked off in the distance as if trying to remember something. He stood and squared his coat lapels and twisted at his pant waist until he had his britches adjusted to his satisfaction. He took his Spencer's from the ground and brought the muzzle of it to bear on the s.p.a.ce between Stobrod and Pangle. He had the forestock of it resting across the back of his left wrist and the hand drooped down calm.

-Stand up against that big poplar, he said, looking at Stobrod. And take that boy with you.

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For lack of a better idea, Stobrod went and stood at the tree. It rose near a hundred feet straight and clear and monolithic above him before there was a limb. Even then there were but two, the size of regular trees themselves, rising in curves like the arms of a candelabra. The crown of the tree had broken off sometime in the previous century, and the mossy stout cylinder of it lay remnant on the ground nearby, slowly melting into the dirt, so soft with rot that you could have kicked it apart like an old dung pile and watched the hister beetles scuttle away.

Stobrod held the fiddle before him in the crook of his arm. The bow hung from a finger and twitched slightly, in time with his heartbeat. Pangle stood beside him, and theirs was the proud and nervous pose men struck when having ambrotypes made at the start of the war, though instead of rifle musket and Colt pistol and bowie knife, Stobrod and Pangle held fiddle and banjo before them as defining implements.

Pangle put his free arm around Stobrod's shoulders as schoolboy companions once did. The Guard raised their rifles and Pangle grinned at them. There was not a bit of irony or bravado in the smile. It was merely friendly.

-I can't shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said, half lowering his rifle.

-Quit grinning, Teague said to Pangle.

Pangle twisted his mouth up and worked to straighten it, but then it twitched and went back into a grin.

-There is nothing funny here, Teague said. Not a thing. Compose yourself to die.

Pangle wiped both hands down his face from hairline to chin. He pulled down the corners of his mouth with his pair of thumbs and when he let them go they sprung back up on him so that his face broke open in smile like a blossom.

-Take your hat off, Teague said.

Pangle took his hat off and, still grinning, held it two-handed at waist level by the brim. He turned it around and around as if in demonstration of how the world turns.

-Hold it over your face, Teague said.

Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where b.a.l.l.s struck after pa.s.sing through the meat of the two men.

black bark in winter -And when they finished up jerking their trigger fingers, the horses all jumped and spooked and the head man went to cussing them and took his hat off and went and slapped them all in their faces with it. They didn't cover them or even go stand over them to say words except that one of them said that what had pa.s.sed might fairly be called a shootout since shots had been fired. Then one of them laughed and one of them went and made water in the fire and they mounted up and rode off. I don't know what kind of place this is that I'm in, where people do one another that way.

The Georgia boy's bearing was of a man in the near aftermath of fright. He was yet excited, and there was urgency in his desire to express a tale he believed to be thrilling yet truthful.

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-I seen it all done, he said. Seen it all.

-Then why were you not killed or taken, if you were close enough to witness? Ada said.

The boy thought about it. He looked off to the side and he raked his hair off his brow with splayed fingers and then flipped at the gate latch with his thumb. He stood on the road side of the yard fence, Ada and Ruby on the other. They talked over the gate palings, and they could smell the woodsmoke in his damp sweated clothes, his wet unwashed hair.

-Heard it done, anyways, he answered. Heard what I didn't see, would be more as it was. I'd stepped into the woods, back a piece into the laurels. Of a necessity, like.

-Yes, Ada said.

-For the privacy, so to say.

-We took your meaning, Ruby said. What's the upshot of all this?

-It's what I'm trying to tell you. That I left them a-laying there b.l.o.o.d.y and dead in a heap under a big poplar. And then I run all the way here. I remembered where the fiddler said you lived. I went to that picture rock where we stopped yesterday for food. And I run down from there till I found the house.

-How long? Ruby said.

The boy looked around and examined the flat grey clouds and the blue ridgelines as if trying to get his bearings. But he could not call in which quarter west lay, nor did the sky give much a.s.sistance in saying what the hour might be, for it held no bright spots, only the few colors of an old axehead.

-It's three, Ada informed him. Two-thirty at the earliest.

-Three? the boy said, as if mildly surprised. He looked down and examined the beaten ground at the threshold to the yard. He pressed his lips together and worked his mouth. He was counting back.

He reached up and gripped two of the palings in his fists. He blew out air between his lips in a way as not quite to make a whistle.

-Seven hours, he finally said. Six or seven, I'd say.

-And you running all the way? Ruby said.

-Some of it running, he said. I was scared. It's hard to recollect, but I run till I give out. Then I run some and walked some. First one and then the other.

-We'll need you to guide us back there, Ada said.

But the boy did not wish to go back up on the mountain and would, he claimed, rather be shot where he stood than visit it again. He'd seen all of it he cared to see. Every companion he'd had there was now dead in its woods. He wanted to be home, was his only desire. And by his way of keeping tally, the news he had brought ought of its own to be worth some food and another blanket and a thing or two else he might need on the journey.

-Many another man would have left the two lie where they fell and not care that the wolves would soon strip them to bone, he said. And he told the women he reckoned wolves had already gotten to 2004-3-6.

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