After Eli
After Eli
By Terry Kay
Copyright 2012 by Terry Kay
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1981.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Terry Kay and Untreed Reads Publishing
The Year the Lights Came On
After Eli
Terry Kay
For
Tommie, who has endured and loved and believed
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant
—Plato
FOR TWO DAYS the Irishman had watched the house and waited.
The house was below him, on a flat shelf of land that spilled off the mountain like the after-matter of an ancient volcano. A stream, as slender and wild as a break of lightning, curled from the mountain around the house, turning sharply below the shelf. In the sun—when the sun was high—the stream glittered like a silver necklace dangling from a throat of trees. He knew the water would be cold and sweet and clean.
The house was old. Its unpainted lap-plant siding had darkened into weathered ribs and the roof was covered with rusting sheet tin. The spine of the roof sagged in the center. The front of the house had a porch, full-length, covering the front door and windows like a lip. The two side windows were small and high in the walls; windows made for seeing out, not in. There were two chimneys, holding the house between them like bookends. He had seen smoke from only one of the chimneys; it would be from the kitchen.
There were three other buildings: a barn, a corncrib, and an outhouse. And a well, sheltered by a roof of wood shingles. A barbed-wire fence looped in a circle from the back of the barn, crossed the stream, and disappeared into a windbreak of pines. He had seen a cow and a calf and two mules in the pasture, and pigs in a slab fence outside the wire fence. There
were chickens, also, but no dog. It was strange there was no dog.
In the two days he had watched the house from the mountain, the Irishman had noticed only one man and a woman there. He knew they were young—not long married, he believed. In the mornings, the man walked to the side of the road at the foot of his house, where the shelf fell into a strip of level valley, and waited for a truck. The truck was filled with other men who seemed tired and methodical. In the late afternoon, before sundown, the truck returned, slowing but not quite stopping, and the man slipped from its tailgate and walked to the house without looking back. Sawmill hands, the Irishman decided. In the day, from where he camped on the mountain, he had heard the dull, ringing cry of saw blades from far away.
The woman was not often outside. On the first day the Irishman had seen her at the well, dressed only in her slip. She seemed thin. Her elbows were drawn into her sides, and her shoulders were stooped. The silk shine of her slip flashed like frost in the sunlight and the Irishman remembered a woman in another place, whose body had signaled to him its unending secrets. She, too, had been thin.
* * *
He did not know why the house had stopped and held him for two days. He was tired, he knew that. And the rest had refreshed him. But it was more than being tired. It was the house itself. The house intrigued him. It yearned to speak, and he could not leave until it did. A soft and distant music played in the Irishman when he watched the house. It had the sound of a single lute, with high, splitting notes breaking into soprano voices and the soprano voices were whispering secrets to him. There was something about the house. Yes. And the voices would tell him. He knew the voices would tell him if he did not hurry them. The voices had always told him, and he trusted them. The Irishman knew patience. Patience was his artistry and his genius.
He sat on the ledge of the mountain, protected from the March wind by a granite cave, and waited for the house to trust him with its secrets. He did not know where he was in the great Appalachian range. North Carolina, he thought. Perhaps Georgia. The mountains were brown and borderless and he had traveled for weeks through small villages huddled to themselves like vagrants needing companionship. He himself was a vagrant, skilled only in his patience and in his gift for belonging to the moment and place of his wandering. It was his nourishment and his way of survival in the lean years of the late thirties, and the Gypsy urge that led him from village to village became a life that was both poetic and cruel. He lived as animals live, with intense calculation and with an unerring sense of the indefinable world scurrying about him like so many bugs.
Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, the Irishman knew he had waited long enough.
* * *
He stood on the road before the house at the last finger of sunlight, when the mountains were caught in the cupped dome of gray coolness. He wore his knapsack loosely over his left shoulder and carried in his right hand a walking stick with an intricate carving of a gargoyle on the knob. He waited until the man had closed the barn door and was walking back to his house with the pail of milk.
“Ho, there, friend,” the Irishman called cheerfully.
The man whirled quickly toward the voice. The milkpail shook in his hand. He stared at the stranger on the road, but did not speak.
“Ah, I’ve put the fright in you, I have,” the Irishman said. “I’ll be askin’ your forgiveness.”
“No need,” the man replied weakly. “Wadn’t expectin’ nobody out here.”
The Irishman dropped his knapsack from his shoulder and pushed his left hand into the small of his back.
“Fact of the matter, you’re a bit better off than I am,” he said. “Leastways, you’re knowin’ where ‘here’ is, and I could be standin’ at the pearly gates with a hand-printed invitation and still be turned about.”
“Where you headed?” The question was timidly asked.
“By and by, I’m hopin’ it’s to Atlanta and then on to sunny Florida,” the Irishman answered. He laughed and added, “That is, if I’m even in the right part of the blessed globe.”
The man stared at him. The fear in his eyes faded. He said, “You goin’ to Atlanta from here, you better grow you some wings. Take you a couple of days on foot just to get in the right direction.”
The Irishman sensed the relaxation. He could see a smile playing across the man’s face. The man was younger than he had thought, perhaps twenty.
“No doubtin’ it,” the Irishman cried comically. “It’s the luck I’m havin’, and you’d think an Irishman would be a bit more blessed than that, now wouldn’t you?”
The man grinned broadly. He looked quickly toward his house, then back to the Irishman.
“That’s what you are, ain’t it?” he said. “Knowed it was somethin’ other’n what’s around here. You Irish from over in Ireland?”
The Irishman extended his arms above his head and lifted one leg in the air.
“Just the same as you, my friend. Same as the Good Father made Adam himself. Arms, legs. Two apiece.”
The man looked again toward his house and the Irishman followed his eyes. He could see the woman standing in the shadows of the screen door like an abstract painting.
“Well, friend, good to speak to you,” the Irishman said. “If you’d be kind enough to point the way, I’ll be off, thinkin’ about pickin’ up some wings along the way.”
The man hesitated. He switched the milkpail into his other hand.
“Late to be travelin’,” he said. “You want, you can put up
here in the barn tonight and share some supper with the wife and me.”
The Irishman reached for his knapsack. He counted the pause between the invitation and his movements. It was an old cadence with him, like a rhythmic dance. Then he shook his head easily and lifted the knapsack to his shoulder.
“Good of you to offer, friend, but it’d be burdensome, it would, what with the times bein’ bad, and that’s somethin’ Michael O’Rear won’t see happenin’.”
The man did not answer immediately. He looked again toward his house, toward his wife.
“Ain’t no trouble,” he replied suddenly. “Not if you don’t mind some spare eatin’. Ain’t much. The wife’s been a little sick and I ain’t pushed her to put much on the table.”
The Irishman smiled. He kicked playfully at a rock in the road. He looked away into the darkening mountains, as though contemplating the offer, then turned back to the man.
“Well, you’re a sight kinder than I’m thinkin’ I’d be under the circumstances,” he admitted. “But I’d be lyin’ if I didn’t say it sounded good, me bein’ weary and longin’ for human company to share some words with.”
A boy’s satisfaction fluttered across the man’s face. He said, “Caufield’s the name. Lester Caufield.”
“And me you call Michael,” the Irishman replied.
* * *
To Lester Caufield, who was easily impressed, Michael O’Rear was impressive.
Michael laughed and told tales that could have been read from books of stories. He had a voice that was thunder from a cave and whisper from the wind, and his words sounded like a poem read by an actor, or a preacher’s prayer skimming about in space in search of God. And words. Irish words. Like music.
And there was another thing about Michael O’Rear: You believed him. It was more than what he said, it was the way he
looked into you when he said it. Lester had never seen such eyes. They changed with his voice, like seasons, and Lester knew they were eyes that had seen farther across sadness and joy than any other man had ever seen. Michael’s eyes danced, then softened. And they looked into you.
Into
you.
Lester Caufield found in Michael an immediate friend, and felt wholly comfortable with him. Michael had been a merry guest at supper. He had praised the meager meal with soft blessings of wonder and gratitude. He had spoken of faraway places, of homes and suppers in other mountains, and of how it was possible to sit at another man’s table and feel the pulse of his life. And he was gentle. Lester liked the gentleness, and he had seen the same wonder in his wife’s silent, watching face. Michael had spoken her name—Mary—with a broken syllable that rolled musically from his mouth. “
May-rie,
” he had said. “
May-rie.
”
After the supper Lester had taken a jar of whiskey from a pie safe and motioned for Michael to follow him to the front porch. Lester sat in a straight-back chair and Michael slipped to the porch floor, leaning against the doorjamb with his shoulder, his legs stretched and crossed comfortably at the ankles. Lester read Michael’s face as he stared into the pit of the wooded night. There was melancholy in Michael’s eyes; he seemed to be seeing into another mountain in another place.
“You come along at a good time,” Lester said, offering the jar of whiskey.
“And it’s luck, I’m thinkin’,” replied Michael. “I’ve been long enough on the road, wanderin’, with no one to talk to but my own good self and the creatures.” He swallowed from the jar. The homemade whiskey was sharp and strong. He laughed and his body shook. He added, “Trouble is, the creatures come to makin’ more sense of it all than I did.”