firm in a lip-thin smile to match the set of his eyes.
“Toad frogs matin’ to have young’uns . . . devil horses racin’ at midnight, when it’s lightnin’, runnin’ to a spot in deep woods where the sun nor moon don’t fall. The place where the spirits lives . . .” He held his finger in the air, a thumb cocked against it to show the length of a devil horse.
“I’ve seen the hole in the river where the sun goes down. Ain’t you never heard it hissin’, way off? Ain’t you smelled fish boilin’ when it goes? I’ve knowed the very spot. I been there. Ain’t you never wondered?”
Leon leaned close to Milton’s ear, and his lips spoke his words straight into the boy’s head, calm and measured: “Let’s go . . . while they’s still enough light . . . to run.”
But Milton didn’t answer. He was looking down at his own two hands, baby-smooth without any creases. He imagined how they would look if he could take hold of dark secrets and carry them around like jewels.
He heard a fish jump into the air, a mile or more away, and roil the water with its tail, trying to flee the holocaust of sun that was setting. But the fish never fell, the tail-slap never came, and Milton decided that giant birds probably wait near the sunhole every evening to snare frantic food out of the air and then swoop down to safety under dark trees while the sun boils away to night.
Milton Cardwell was the first to stand up. His smooth white jaw jutted; his eyes were believing. Leon’s arm showed itself, grabbing at the convert’s bony wrist, but Milton slung it away like a swimmer in thick seaweed. He stood firm.
“Godamighty!” came a whisper from the vines. “He’s a crazy man . . .”
“But he knows stuff,” Milton said over his shoulder. “About everything.” He walked forward into the forbidden yard as he talked, and Leon Butler heard every word because he followed.
They stopped in the center of the grassless patch around the porch; Leon, a head taller, peered over Milton’s firm-arched back.
The old man wasn’t startled. He lowered his head from its bird-tilt slowly and spoke as casually as if they’d been there all afternoon.
“You want to see it, first, while the sun’s right, I guess. Yes, uh . . .” He shaded his eyes with mummy-veined hands.
“Yessir,” said Milton, in deep contrition, not knowing what else to say. The old man got up and they followed his bent, slow-paced steps to the cellar door. He opened it back and stood aside, stretching out his arm to point the way.
Milton and Leon looked into each other’s eyes, one second. They felt the coldness of the dug-away dirt through their shoe soles, one second. A guinea-fowl far past Mulberry Fork cried out death along the water, one second.
They went inside.
The cobwebbed window that sat above ground in the far mud wall let in blood mixed with honey, a blinding orange shaft of sun that shattered at the square pane and flooded the cellar with a sleetstorm of light, bouncing off ten million glass-hard forms to dazzle the eye and the mind.
A piece of light would fall, here, and spark to strawberry red, then burst up again like a fountain to fall in turn, there, on shards of junebug green and penny brown and snake-eye tints of smoky blue—amber and azure, emerald and gold, all of them god-lucent, all of them a haze of bright shimmerings in the dank cellar air.
“Bottles . . .” The lips of Leon Butler shaped to say the word, but never did. There was no need, for they were there to see, and splendidly so. They were arrayed on shelves of hand-cleaved pine attached to a scaffolding of wood that stretched from the bare dirt to the planked ceiling of the room, crisscrossed with V’s and Z’s of narrower lumber, strips in endless profusion, spaces to hold more.
Bottles.
The burst of sunlight began to fade. The old man’s head stuck through the door behind them, smiling.
“I guess you’ll be wantin’ to know the secrets, now,” he said. Milton and Leon nodded to him, and to each other, and through a sheen of cricket calls they walked with him up the two dirt stairs and around the house, where darkness was already too thick for the rising wind to blow it away.
May 3, 1862
Louisa,
How are you?
The little house here is ringed around with tiger lilies. Mrs. Davis says they are so orange in the sun that, on first waking, you can look out and think the yard is on fire. That is only her memory talking, I think. The sun has been gone for weeks, and the flowers all look pitiful. They catch the rain like little cups, and then in the evenings they spatter our dresses when we brush them walking past.
Last night the sand bottoms flooded. I watched out my window until very late, the lights of the torches running, past the woods. At breakfast today I heard they saved the cattle, and most of the things from the barns. From here we can just see a long line of grass washed up, like on some beach, where the level reached before it went back down.
I have been reading the book you lent me. Thank you for it. Isn’t she a silly girl in it, that Evelyn, to keep three such nice boys on hooks, just for the sake of play? I have not reached the end of it yet, but I am hoping she will grow up a bit and choose one, and be a lady about it, and tell the rest she is sorry for being such a flirt. Don’t tell me if she really does or not. I want it to be a surprise.
How is little Wendell? Does he have full use of his foot yet? Before I left, the last I heard was it might be most of the summer in healing. I could have cried for him if it had helped. He does love running so much, never being still. I guess he is like your other brother in that. I remember the same of Jerem when we were small.
Oh! Tell Wendell I have figured what caused his bad luck. Remember that evening last fall he came running up to us on the porch, with a ragged bird in his hands that he had scared up from the brush heaps and killed with a rock? And him proud and laughing at the strength in his hands, that he could bring a fast little thing to the ground so easy. Shake your finger at him for me, stern as you can, and tell him it is his punishment for so free a killing that he should tangle his foot in the wagon spokes like he did, and be forced to sit around with the old ladies all through spring. Ha! I’ll bet that is the worst of it for him, even more than the pain.
The yellow thorny rose your mother taught me is nearly finished. Thank her for sending extra thread with me, even though I did not think I would need it. Some days the road to town has been too high in water to pass, and even when it is not, the store is always out of one color or another.
I had started sewing the rose in the wagon, coming here, on a piece of floursack I brought. But when Mrs. Davis saw it she said black, black, it must be black. She gave me a nice piece of velvet so I started over, to please her. It does set off the yellow and green well. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep it to frame, or make it a pillow, or just edge the bias and wear it for a shawl.
Can you see me in a black shawl, out haunting the spotted lilies, up to my shins in the wet sand? It would chill the blood of any worthwhile spirit, my face as sad as it has been.
Let me hear from you. Cheer me.
Yours,
