THE PIT by William Gay

THE PIT by William Gay

(The unpublished chapter of the original manuscript now known as The Long Home)

His name was Dallas Hardin, but this had not always been so. Growing up in Cullman, Alabama, he had been named Herrin. His legs were long and ungainly and leant him a stilted birdlike look so it was inevitable that folks would think of him as Heron. Behind his back. Nobody ever thought it to his face; early on he had displayed a natural facility for cutting folks with pocketknives and before he was eighteen he had waylaid and killed the man he suspected of impregnating his sister, not out of any deep filial affection but out of some fierce sense of pride and outrage, the feeling that the fatal deed had been contemptuous of him, had deemed him no threat to be reckoned with. Folks knew he did it but they didnt say that to his face either. He had carried the body to an abandoned houseplace and rolled it off into a dry cistern and covered it with stones. So he was Mr Herrin to his enemies and acquaintances. He didnt have any friends.

He was still Mr Herrin that day in August when he was on his knees a few yards from his whiskey still. He had the blade of his pocketknife under the root of a stalk of ginseng and was carefully prying it free when he heard the hammer click back and he was running from the ground up with feet and arms as well: in the interval between the dry click that might have been a stick breaking but was not and the voice calling "Hold it" he was up and gone. The man watching his flight down the blued length of rifle barrel stayed his fire not out of any compunction for backshooting but out of simple awe that human legs could so devour the distance. He was fairly flying toward the mouth of the hollow. The government agent just lowered his gun and watched him go and stood grinning and listening to the brush pop in a volume that diminished with Herrin's progress and then squatted down to rest his legs and to wait for the three men at the hollow's cedared mouth to step from hiding.

Which they did. Herrin was three days and nights in the Falkville jail while his young wife pleaded with her father to sign his bond. So on the fourth night he was able to arise from beside her sleeping body and with shoes and overalls in his arms pass naked and spectrelike from the musky dark of the cabin to the shadow-latticed moonlit yard. He pulled on the overalls and shoes and then moved furtively out of the yard.

He fled through the sleeping countryside he had been raised in without looking back or to the side. The moon rode high and remote over his left shoulder, wrought his shadow fearful and twisted ahead of him on the dusty roadbed. All elbows and joints and angles he looked like something halfcomical and half menacing, some dark experiment gone awry and escaped.

He crossed the Tennessee line on the back of a sideboarded truckload of scrapiron, old cultivators and hayrakes and mowers chained and unsure of their moorings so that they kept him wary and constantly shifting his position among these mobile and deadly shadows.

Known now to himself as Dallas Hardin (the Hardin after a gunfighter he read about in a Street and Smith western magazine) he progressed across west and toward middle Tennessee and besides the clothing he wore he possessed three things: a pair of dice, a pack of cards, and a fighting cock. The dice were loaded and the cards marked and if there had been any way to shave the edge for the cock he would have done that too: the cock he bore along in a burlap bag like a bright familiar and fed on corn he husbanded from farmers' fields, perhaps the selfsame farmers he had relieved of greasy greenbacks, them cursing their dead roosters but dragging out their wallets to pay him. For the cock was vicious, an ugly composite of meanness and ambition, a scaled-down and feathered model of himself perhaps.

Swinging east through Lawrence county he misjudged a farmer's gullibility and the number of his sons. He lost the cock and a fiftydollar set of cockheels he had in turn stolen from somebody else and he lost as well a great deal of the skin off his face. He awoke a mile down the road face down in a gully choked with old castoff autotires and old carseats and a motley of garbage.

If a man can be said to have a start in life then surely this was his. Going back up the road his mind seethed with rage, sorted among such poor reprisals as were available to him: a kind of twisted honor forced him on, a need for balancing things to the level of the distorted and counterweighted mental scales he went by.

From the edge of the woods he watched them scurrying out of the blazing house like rats, framed black and depthless and insectsize against the moiling orange, darting in and out the flames like some anomolaec byproduct of the fire itself. So distant it seemed a dollhouse burning silently away in the night, furiously animate dolls harrying into the earth yard such chattels as they could and whirling back for more until the decking went and he could see for a moment the stark outline of the rafters black against the turmoil then they fell too in a crescendo of sparks rushing upward and they ran out this last time and aligned themselves at the periphery of the quaking heat and just watched it burn.

Lying in the brush he watched it and he had no name for what he felt. There had been bestowed upon him some dark gift of power and knowledge and freedom. His pockets were empty and his ribs throbbing yet in the space of seconds he had relieved a man of what had taken him a good portion of a lifetime to accumulate: with a match to be had for the asking he had seen home and possessions go shrieking upward into the night, left them worthless bits of ash to drift and fall like anomalous snow.

By fall he was coming up the old Natchez Trace and his possessions had increased to include a gaudily spotted horse like something evoked live and snorting from an electric dayglo circus poster and a pearl-handled .32 automatic plated with nickel. Still keeping to the woods and backroads and always suspecting pursuit from one quarter or another he was almost constantly on the move, though he did not know where he was going. He divined rather than thought that he was headed someplace he would recognize when he saw it. He was just going.

Leaving in his wake a thousand small plagues, the seeds of untold others. He was what the wife did not tell her husband when he came home at night, he was where the rent money went on Saturday. What he saw that he wanted he took and already behind him were rising tales about this gaunt outrider but by the time they were told once he was gone, rolling steadily north like some malign cell infecting others as he went.

Heavy timber he moved through here, great yellow poplar three feet in diameter quickly baring in autumnal winds, he moved through the bluely translucent light of Indian summer and a great stirring of leaves, huge golden leaves as big as his hand. A man with nothing much ever to say passing through a land that was itself inundated in silence, just the click of the horse's hooves on an occasional stone and the weary creak of the harness, the cries of geese borne south and their cries so faint and high his face upturned to watch them go might have dreamed them.

Just at dusk he passed a community called Napier, no store or post office, simply a warren of houses huddled together as if in protection from something unnamed biding its time in the gathering night or just some idiosyncratic conspiracy of carpenters: fording a stream in a rising fan of water opaquely silver in the waning light and the clatter of steel on stone he stopped out on a high packed roadbed and in the murky dusk below was a brush arbor, faint singing, families strung out across the fallow fields with lanterns and into the scrub timber and the lanterns winking at him through the boles of trees like fireflies.

He camped by the site of an old abandoned iron ore mine and late that night heard in the darkness the sound of a horse approaching up the Trace, whoever it was drawn to his fire. He could smell the horse and he strained to see but he could not. There was a wind restive in the trees and he could see the slim pines rocking to and fro and he could see behind them a constant wave of other trees in motion too and the air was full of leaves he could hear but not see: the world looked chimerical, illusory, then against this tapestry a horse and rider gaining solidity as if he were watching the spectral reformation of the past, ghostly revenant from these old mines or wraithlike cutthroat up the Trace from old Natchez.

Yet the wispily bearded face beneath the flatbrimmed hat was benign. When Hardin pocketed his pistol and stepped from the brush he'd been concealed in the face turned toward the sound and looked up from the fire lacquered red with its flames as if Hardin himself was the interloper and not this roundfaced young man in a circuitriding preacher's frock coat sitting with his hands extended to the fire.

"Hidy."

Hardin didnt reply. He went back to eating hardtack from a bag and offered it once but the man shook his head no. When Hardin put away the hardtack he took up a quart jar of whiskey and drank and wiped a sleeve across his stubbled face and silently offered the jar as well but the man again shook his head.

"I been preachin over at Napier, we havin a meetin over there. You know where Napier is?"

"I come through it."

This young man of God seemed restive, intent, perhaps whatever demons he'd exorcised from others had thrown their lot with him. He seemed unwilling to let Hardin go unsaved: he began to preach at him in a curiously stilted voice. He took out his Bible and read from it by the flickering light, tilting it so that the failing fire washed its pages in a wavering light faintly strobic in random irregularity, read Hardin the doings of old men long dead Hardin had barely heard rumored and he thought he'd never heard a stranger tale.

Hardin sat for a time listening and then he said, "I've thought some about takin up that line myself. The money's easy and I reckon a preacher must get a right smart of pussy."

"Do what?" The preacher closed the book and turned to where Hardin watched him from the log he sat on and the face he peered at looked far away and abstracted. The fire was dying, a wind blew, a few sparks shot upward. The trees sighed. The thin bearded face with its nocolor eyes just watched him, remote below the ruin of a hat, this preacher seemed a thing of no moment, just something the night had conjured up for Hardin's amusement.

"I member when I was a boy I used to go to them tent meetins and brush arbors," Hardin said. He drank from the jar, set it between his booted feet. "Them preachers'd get to windin up about ten o'clock and everbody hollerin and talkin in tongues and all you'd have to do was take them old gals by the hand and guide them to the woods. Time you got em laid down they'd done be ready and they'd be haulin their drawers down, and it was like they was pullin em down for Jesus."

The preacher's face was young, unformed: below the wispy red beard he looked ascetic, remote, as if the workings of the world did not quite go to suit him and he had already achieved a certain remove from it and shared no complicity with its faults.

"I guess they's sin most everwhere," he finally said.

"There most surely is," Hardin assured him and then fell silent, drinking again from the jar, canting it against the windy stars to gauge its contents. "Have a little drink."

"I reckon not. I dont hold with spirits." He sat staring at Hardin as if Hardin was not flesh and bone bound by the ways of law or natural order but some diabolic manifestation given brief corpeality and set across from him to test the depth of his salvation. "I got to get on," he said uneasily.

"Not just yet," Hardin said, a voice devoid of threat or request, a voice you might use to make a comment on the weather. Then they sat in a deepening silence, a sinister silence that wore on and on and when Hardin showed no inclination to break it the preacher said: "I aint but nineteen year old."

"Nineteen," Hardin said ruminatively. Though he was only two years past it himself he seemed to view nineteen from some lofty structure erected from years. The preacher seemed unformed, naked, clay the years would shape to their liking. "When I was nineteen I'd done everthing I could think of and was on the road day and night huntin for more," Hardin said. "I wish I could swap places with you awhile. I bet you aint never done nothin. I bet you aint never even eat no pussy."

No reply. A curious desperate silence, a heartfelt wordless admonishment for whatever desire for companionship had drawn him toward this light.

"Have you?"

The round face sweeping the circle of windy trees, the windy night might blow up other travelers, a cataclysmic shift of the earth's poles, a miracle bright and incandescant in October dark. "I never heard of no such," the preacher said in a low voice. His eyes were held hard and fast by the nickelplated pistol Hardin was holding on his knee, not pointing, just dandling it there, a child fondling a toy.

"Bein it's supposed to be a sin I figured you was at least on speakin terms with it. You aint never preached a sermon against it?"

"No."

"Get you a little drink there."

"I dont drink."

"Then it's high time you started." He swapped hands with the pistol and handed the jar across the dying fire and the preacher held it a moment and then smelled it and looked back at Hardin's nocolor eyes and raised the jar and took a birdlike sip. He swallowed a time or two.

"Good aint it? Get you anothern."

The preacher drank again and set the jar aside and his lips began to move as if he were praying to himself.

When he got underway before first light he left the preacher's horse but the morning had a hint of winter to it so he took the frock coat and the heavy woolen shirt the preacher had been wearing. The preacher sat on a log and watched him turn pockets wrongside out until he found the little poke of nickels and dimes and the few crumpled bills. The horse's breath steamed in the cold air. First light showed a ghost of frost on the ground, spectral fall of ice silver in the morning light tending away to nothing northward along the Trace, and with the first warmth of the sun there was a sere brittle smell to the woods. He mounted, the saddle creaked, his eyes swept the burntout fire and the preacher's vacuous eyes but did not remark them, they were yesterday, used up, forgotten. He turned the spotted horse and was gone into the mist so abruptly the preacher might have thought him the protagonist of a nightmare save for the sound of hooves and finally that was gone too.

The nights were cold now and there was a steely threat of winter in the air. The air looked blue as smoke and the world smelled crisp and dry. Cold came in the nights and hovered on in the mornings and he rode now with an old blanket cut like a poncho. Along about midmorning the day would warm briefly then with the afternoon's slant light it would again grow chill. He felt it must be November.

He crossed through a place called Metal Ford and he saw no soul about: cut timber as if this had once been a lumber camp. Old tilting shanties gray and weathered so that looked like nothing man had had a hand in, just something that had happened. Machinery left for the oxydization of the weathers, old saws long unsharped, thickened with scaly orange accretions of rust. Silence here palpable, dense, he caught himself listening for voices, the ringing of axes, the slide of timber through the brush. He heard only the liquid call of a thrush and the cawing of crows, dislocated, far from any cornfield he had seen. He seemed the only soul in all the world. Old unglassed windows caved and blind. Buildings left to the dirtdaubers and rats and foxes. They smelled of burntout fires, the dead ashes of the past. He found nothing worth salvaging.

On past here he began to come upon the wreckage of houses, once he saw with interest an intact barn roof sitting in the middle of a fallow field, its tin a warm umber drawing off the light. A wide path through the timber where the horizon had been cleft by a blow of unimaginable magnitude, the trees wrenched branchless, twisted and splintered, shards of lumber and sections of houses perched in trees where folks had never built them. A shanty on a hillside that had simply collapsed on itself, folded, its tarpaper roof still skewered by its rusted stovepipe.

The evidence of all this disorder awed him a little, he would have liked to see such a storm but he couldnt have said from where. Veering off the stormpath as if wary of its imminent return he came onto a steadily rising countryside, a gradual ascension through thinning timber and looking back the world he'd come through lay a dreamy tapestry of pastoral colors, shrouded in vague mist and fading out now that he no longer needed it.

Graves. A series of them enclosed in a rusted fence. Old graves from the look of them, sunken, the earth fallen cleanly downward in oblong obscission as though gravity was forcefully aberrant in this sacred spot or had had a deeper attraction for the earth. Yet the markers were newlooking. He read them from horseback. Elder Spiess, Elder William, Elder Kirk. Others. Here were the graves of women. A few of a more diminutive size. All had perished alike on April 24, l884. For a reason he couldnt fathom the place fascinated him. A reaper gone berserk or drunken, flailing tirelessly and indiscriminately with the scythe.

A worn road followed along the backbone of the ridge and he crossed narrow flinty fields of acidlooking land and halted near the summit. Below him a house set on a V-shaped plot of land at the mouth of a hollow, behind it the timber thickened and he could hear the far spill of water and from where he sat the horse he could see its white fall cascading down a bluff. A stream lay like a coiled ribbon of silver. A thread of smoke curled from the chimney. He sat and watched the house for a time. After awhile the back door opened and a woman came out and threw dishwater into the yard and turned and went back in. He heard the screendoor slap to.

He dismounted and took a coiled rope off the saddle and unrolled it and picketed the horse and fed it shelled corn from a flour sack. He took out some hard bread and pieces of fried meat scorched and blackened almost unrecognizable with smoke and came back through the windy sedge to the crest of the ridge and sat against the bole of a whiteoak and ate, chewing slowly, wiping his greasy fingers on the legs of his trousers. After he ate the last of the meat and bread he went back to the horse and got the fruitjar and drank and carried it back with him to the oak.

A man came out of the house and walked across the yard. He walked with a stick. He was bent over so that from where Hardin sat he could see the humped flesh where it pressed against the white shirt and he could see the back of the man's head. His hair looked black for one so wracked with whatever afflicted him. He walked on scanning the ground and he seemed to be searching for something he'd lost. Where the bracken thickened near the spring he went out of sight into it and it was a few minutes before he came out. Hardin rolled and lit a cigarette, sat smoking. He watched with an air of infinite patience, there was no look at all in his eyes, as if by some dark alchemy he controlled the events unfolding and whatever transpired here would be just what he wanted to see all along.

A darkhaired girl who appeared to be five or six years old came out and began to throw rocks at a few scragglylooking chickens. He could hear the chickens cackling and taking on and see them running about the yard while she peppered them with rocks. The screendoor flew open and the woman came onto the porch yelling something and the girl cut down on her with a rock. She ran across the porch and into the yard and grasped the girl up like a sack of grain and shook her. She carried her tucked under her arm back inside and Hardin could hear the girl's outraged yell and the door fell to again.

The man came out of the woods. He was carrying a jug along in his hand and heading for the porch. Well, Hardin thought to himself. Is it water or not? Why not a bucket, if it is? What have we got here, anyway? He knew it wasnt water. If he wanted water he would have sent the woman.

The day wore on. Four or five cars came in the course of the afternoon, no one lingering to visit. Few even getting out. The man or the woman would come out to the car then back to the house and return to the car. Money would change hands. The first time he saw light gling off a bottle, he said well, well, well, though he knew already it was a bootlegger.

Late in the afternoon the woman came out to the end of the house and hiked her dress and pulled down her drawers and squatted in the earth yard. In a minute she arose and pulled her underwear up, let the skirt fall. Hardin sat watching her with his expressionless face. She went back in.

Just about dusk she came down from the house toward the barn carrying a milk bucket in her hand. In the hall of the barn she hung the bucket on a nail and went into a crib and came out with a lardbucket of sweetfeed and carried it into the cow stall. She came back after the bucket and commenced milking, the milk singing off the rim of the pail.

Going back she passed a stall out of which a hand seized her and jerked her into the haysmelling dark. She stumbled wideeyed through the opening and a fist caught her alongside the head and she toppled sidewise and fell heavily against the unchinked pole wall and slid to the floor. The bucket of milk slammed against the opposite wall and poured foaming down it and puddled then seethed across the floor in a miniature tide of chaff and humus. She was on her hands and knees. Light fell in latticed segments through the slotted walls. "Goddamn," the woman said thickly. She turned her head from side to side slowly. She looked up. Up at this tall gaunt figure leaning stilted on unlikely legs, strange goat's eyes staring down at her and his hands already working at the buttons of his jeans. "You son of a bitch," the woman said. "You dont have to come on so rough. I dont know why you cant just ask like anybody else."