HIS DREAMS WERE SERENE PASTORAL images, white picket fences, old log barns silver in the moonlight. An ornamental tin sun set high in the eaves of a farmhouse, tinstamped rays fanning upward. When the light subtly altered he saw that the pickets were stakes sharpened for impaling, something stirred in the strawstrewn hall of the barn, and there was a persistent ringing beyond the serrated treeline the illogic of dreams imbued with dread. Then he became aware of Beth’s leg flung across him in sleep, the smell of her hair, the ringing of the telephone, and he realized where he was, and that he wasn’t a child after all.

He wondered how many times it had rung. Here in these clockless hours past midnight.

Hello.

It must have rung several for the voice was harsh and preemptory. I’ve got to have some help over here, she said.

What is it? He could hear the ragged hasp of her breathing.

I’m having some kind of attack. A heart attack.

All right. I’m on my way.

He was fumbling for his shoes. He found one sock, the other seemed to have vanished. Beth arose and he heard her stumbling toward the bathroom. Water running. He gave up on the sock and was hauling on his pants.

Your grandmother?

Yes.

Another heart attack.

He looked up. She was standing naked on the threshold of the bathroom, her face enigmatic in the dark bedroom, backlit by the bathroom light. Framed so against the yellow rectangle the light was a nimbus in her fair hair, and she seemed to be in flames.

Do you need me?

Stark and depthless against the light she looked like erotic statuary. Something in her hipslung posture lent her words an ambiguity he couldn’t deal with just now, everything about her lately seemed subject to various interpretations.

I’ll be back when I get back, he said. He slid his wallet and cigarettes into his pocket and went out.

He pushed the door back open. Lock the door, he told her, but she didn’t say if she would or she wouldn’t.

He drove out toward the farm, off the blacktop onto a cherted road so bowered by trees the moonlight couldn’t defray the darkness, the road descended like a tunnel of black velvet, like a cleft in the earth itself he was driving off into. A whippoorwill swept up in the headlights, dark wings enormous, eyes wild and red as blood. Mailboxes, sleeping watch dogs, darkened houses shuttered against the night. Then the row of cedars, the lit farmhouse beyond them.

She was in the bentwood rocker. She sat twisted in agony. Her head in her hands, her breathing a thin panting.

Do you need an ambulance?

I’ve called it already. It should have been here.

Well, he said. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It’d all been said before. Somewhere a clock ticked, a series of clocks deafening in the silence that stretched, stretched to a thin sharp wire. A tall grandfather clock whirred into life, gave three solemn and measured bongs.

I can’t breathe. I’ve got to have some oxygen. Why won’t they hurry up?

I think I hear them, he lied.

She was clutching her chest like a parody of agony. I’m on fire in here, she said. Behind the thick glasses her near colorless eyes were stricken, afraid. He felt a detached and impotent pity.

Is there anything I can do?

Get me a glass of orange juice. Maybe my sugar’s gone down, I’m having some kind of attack.

He took a carton from the refrigerator and poured a glass of juice. He carried it to her. When she had drunk from the glass, he asked, Are you feeling any better?

Maybe a little.

Are you sure you want to go to the hospital? It never accomplished anything before. I can hire a nurse. I can stay myself.

I’ve already called it, she said. Something has got to be done. I’m not putting up with this.

He went out onto the porch. Where the porchlight tended away the yard lay silver in the moonlight, it glittered as if viewed through a veil of ice. Beyond it lay darkness, a veritable wall of insect sounds. From the ebony trees nightbirds called, cries so lost and forlorn he wondered what the configurations of such birds might be. Far up the road he could hear the whoop of the ambulance. Closer now homing down the walls of night. Its lights pulsed against the bowering trees like heat lightning. He lit a cigarette and waited.

The ambulance backed to the edge of the porch. An attendant leapt out and threw open the rear door and hauled out a gurney. Everything seemed rehearsed, every movement preordained, they’d been here before. Déjà vu all over again, he thought.

She needs oxygen, he said.

The driver came around and helped with the gurney. The paramedic took out a chromium oxygen bottle, a mask appended by a thin transparent tube. They seemed to have divined something unsaid from his face for their movements had become less hurried, more studied. He held the door open and they went into the living room with the gurney.

She seemed reassured by such an authoritative presence. The paramedic was kneeling at her feet adjusting gauges. The other had immediately commenced monitoring blood pressure, heartbeat. She was reaching for the mask. He could hear a thin hissing. Here you go, Mrs. Wildman, the attendant said. You just relax now. She grasped the mask greedily the way a baby grasps its bottle, a drowning man a straw. As if the very essence of life itself had been distilled and concentrated in this chromium bottle, the ultimate spraycan.

They were already gently helping her onto the gurney, adjusting straps. Hand me my bag, she told Wildman. When he laid it beside her she clutched it possessively with a thin ravaged arm. They were rolling her through the doorway. I’ll see you early in the morning, he said. The door creaked to on its keeperspring. Gurney wheels skirling across the oak porch. After a moment the rear door of the ambulance closed. The ambulance pulled away, siren shrieking, parti-colored lights pulsing through the window, the wall across flickering in crimson neon. The wails grew faint and fainter and then he could hear whippoorwills calling one to the other.

Wildman sat in the room where he’d been a child. Where he’d crawled about the floors amongst his playthings. Images of himself at various ages adorned the walls, the table. He leant to study one. From across time the face seemed to be studying him back. Dark calm child with disaffected eyes. In the end time waylays you, he thought. It can outwait you, what does it care, it’s got you outnumbered. There is just so damn much of it.

The room was begarbed with knickknacks, geegaws and ceramic cats and statuary he couldn’t fathom the source of. They’d just accumulated with the years, so many years, had settled like dust motes out of time. Across the room a bookcase where she kept the highschool annuals. She’d been a teacher and she’d saved them all the way a traveler might save maps of places he’d been. Suddenly the room was claustrophobic, the walls were sliding inward on oiled tracks, he couldn’t breathe. He put his cigarette out in a coffee cup and arose and went out into the night. Where the moon was a washedout ghost of itself and the sky was already faint with rosecolored light, the day lying somewhere east of him.

THE JEEPSTER COULDN’T KEEP STILL. For forty-eight hours he’s been steady on the move and no place worked for long. He’d think of somewhere to be and go there and almost immediately suck the life from it, he could feel it charring around him. He felt he was on fire and running with upraised arms into a stiff cold wind but instead of cooling him the wind just fanned the flames. His last so-called friend had faded on him and demanded to be left by the roadside with his thumb in the air.

The Jeepster drove westward into a sun that had gone down the sky so fast it left a fiery wake like a comet. Light pooled above the horizon like blood and red light hammered off the hood of the SUV he was driving. He put on his sunglasses. In the failing day the light was falling almost horizontally and the highway glittered like some virtual highway in a fairy tale or nightmare.

His so-called friend had faded because The Jeepster was armed and dangerous. He was armed and dangerous and running on adrenaline and fury and grief and honed to such a fine edge that alcohol and drugs no longer affected him. Nothing worked on him. He had a pocket full of money and nine-millimeter automatic shoved into the waistband of his jeans and his T-shirt pulled down over it. He had his ticket punched for the graveyard or the penitentiary and one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train. He had everything he needed to get himself killed, to push the borders back and alter the very geography of reality itself.

On the outskirts of Ackerman’s Field the neon of a Texaco station bled into the dusk like a virulent stain. Night was falling like some disease he was in the act of catching. At the pumps he filled the SUV up and watched the traffic accomplish itself in a kind of wonder. Everyone should have been frozen in whatever attitude they’d held when the hammer fell on Aimee and they should hold that attitude forever. He felt like a plague set upon the world to cauterize and cleanse it.

He went through the pneumatic door. He had his Ray-Bans shoved on the top of his shaven head and he was grinning his gap-toothed grin. Such patrons as were about regarded him warily. He looked like bad news. He looked like the letter edged in black, the telegram shoved under your door at three o’clock in the morning.

You seen that Coors man? The Jeepster asked the man at the register.

Seen what? The man asked. Somewhere behind them a cue stick tipped a ball and it went down the felt in a near-silent hush and a ball rattled into a pocket and spiraled down and then there was just silence.

The Jeepster laid money on the counter. I know all about that Coors man, he said. I know Escue was broke and he borrowed ten bucks off the Coors man for the gas to get to where Aimee was working. Where’s he at?

The counterman made careful change. He don’t run today, he said. Wednesday was the last day he’s been here. And what if he did run, what if he was here? How could he know? He was just a guy doing Escue a favor. He didn’t know.

He didn’t know, he didn’t know. The Jeepster said. You reckon that’ll keep the dirt out of his face? I don’t.

They regarded each other in silence. The Jeepster picked up his change and slid it into his pocket. He leaned toward the counterman until their faces were very close together. Could be you chipped in a few bucks yourself, he finally said.

Just so you know, the counterman said, I’ve got me a sawed-off here under the counter. And I got my hand right on the stock. You don’t look just right to me. You look crazy. You look like you escaped from prison or the crazy house.

I didn’t escape, The Jeepster said. They let me out and was glad to see me go. They said I was too far gone, they couldn’t do anything for me. They said I was a bad influence.

WHEN THE WOMEN CAME BACK from the rest area, slinging their purses along and giggling, Dennis guessed that someone had flirted with them. He hoped they’d keep their mouths shut about it. He was almost certain that Sandy wouldn’t say a word, but you never knew about Christy.

Well, we got flirted with, Christy said. She linked an arm through his and leaned against him, standing on his feet, looking up at him. The sun was moving through her auburn hair, and there were already tiny beads of perspiration below her eyes, on the brown, poreless skin of her forehead. She smelled like Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

Dennis unlaced his arm from hers and stepped back and wiped his wire-rimmed glasses on the tail of his shirt. He was wearing jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves scissored out at the shoulders. He glanced at Wesley. He put the glasses back on and turned and looked at the river. Moving light flashed off it like a heliograph. I guess we need to get the boats in the water, he said.

Wesley had both of Sandy’s hands in both of his own. Her hands were small and brown and clasped, so in Wesley’s huge fists they looked amputated at the wrists. Who flirted with you? Wesley asked.

Sandy just grinned and shook her head. She had short dark hair, far shorter than Wesley’s. Wesley was looking down into her sharp attentive face. The best thing about her face was her eyes, which were large and bluegreen and darkly fringed with thick lashes. The best thing about her eyes was the way they focused on you when you were talking to her, as if she was listening intently and retaining every word. Dennis had always suspected that she did this because she was deaf. Perhaps she didn’t even know she did it.

Sandy had once been beaten terribly, but studying her closely Dennis could see no sign of this now. Perhaps the slightest suggestion of aberration about the nose, a hesitant air that she was probably not even aware of. But her skin was clear and brown, the complex and delicate latticework of bones intact beneath it.

Nobody was flirting with us, she said, smiling up at Wesley.

If they did you flashed them a little something, Wesley said.

If I couldn’t get flirted with without flashing them a little something I’d just stay at the house, Christy said. She was giggling again. The big one said his name was Lester, she told Wesley. But don’t worry, he was ugly and baldheaded.

Lester? What the hell kind of redneck name is Lester? Was he chewing Red Man? Did he have on overalls?

You know, Wesley’s not the most sophisticated name I ever heard, Christy said. Nobody’s named Wesley, nobody. Do you know one movie star named Wesley?

It occurred to Dennis that Christy might be doing a little flirting herself, although Wesley had been married to Sandy for almost two years and he supposed that he was going to marry Christy himself, someday sooner or later.

I don’t know any movie stars named anything at all, Wesley said. I’ll make him think goddamn Lester. I’ll Lester him.

Wesley wore cutoff jeans and lowcut running shoes with the laces removed. He was bare to the waist and burnt redblack from the sun so he looked like a sinister statuary you’d chopped out of a block of mahogany with a doublebitted axe. He’s been in the water, and his jeans were wet, and his hair lay in wet black ringlets.

Nobody was flirting with anybody, Sandy said carefully. She enunciated each word clearly, and Dennis figured this as well was because she had been deaf so long. Now she had an expensive hearing aid smaller than the nail of her little finger, and she could hear as well as anyone, but this had not always been so.

Are you all going to get the boats and stuff? Christy asked.

Let’s get everything down from the camp, Dennis said. We can pick the girls up there.

Then let’s go, college man, Wesley said.

They followed a black path that wound through wild cane, brambles, blackberry briars. It led to a clearing where they’d spent the night. On the riverbank were sleeping bags and a red plastic ice chest. Dennis began to roll up the sleeping bag he’d slept in with Christy. Sometime far into the night he had awoken, some noise, a nightbird, an owl. Some wild cry that morphed into Sandy’s quickened breathing as Wesley made love to her. He wondered if Wesley still beat her. He looped a string round the sleeping bag and lashed it tight. When the breathing had reached some frenzied peak and then slowly subsided to normal, he had turned over, being careful not to wake Christy, and gone back to sleep. He turned now and tossed the sleeping bag into one of the two aluminum canoes tied to a hackberry depending out over the river.

When the canoes rounded the bend through the trailing willow fronds, Dennis saw that a red four-wheel-drive Dodge truck had backed a boat trailer down the sloping bank to the shallows. On it were two aluminum canoes that might have been clones of the ones Dennis and Wesley were rowing. Two men were in the bed of the pickup, two men on the ground. The man unbooming the boats did indeed have on overalls. He was enormous, thicker and heavier than Wesley. He wore the overalls with no shirt, and his head was shaved. The top of his head was starkly white against the sunburned skin of his face, as if he’d just this minute finished shaving it.

Son of a bitch, Wesley said.

This is by God crazy, Dennis said, but Wesley had already drifted the canoe parallel with the shore and was wading out. Don’t let this canoe drift into the current, he said over his shoulder. He went up the bank looking at Sandy and Christy. Sandy’s face was as blank as a slate you’d erased, but a sort of constrained glee in Christy’s told him what he wanted to know. He turned to the men grouped about the red truck.

Lester, I heard you were trying to hit on my wife, he said.

The bald man was turned away, but there were so close Wesley could smell the sweat on him, see the glycerinous drops seeping out of the dark skin of his back. The man had a malignant looking mole the size of a fingertip between his shoulders, where the galluses crossed. The man fitted a key into a lock clasped through two links of chain securing the canoes. The lock popped open, and he freed the chain and locked the hasp through another link and picketed the key. He turned. He looked up at the two men in the back of the truck and grinned. At last he glanced at Wesley.

The electronic age, he said, and laughed. I reckon it’s been all over the news already. He wiped the sweat off his head with a forearm and turned to inspect the women. They’d seated themselves on the bank above, and they were watching like spectators boxseated before some barbaric show.

Which one’d be your wife? Lester asked.

Faced with the prospect of describing his wife or pointing her out like a miscreant in a lineup, Wesley hesitated. Sandy raised her arm. That would be me, she said.

Did I hit on you? Say anything out of the way?

No. You didn’t.

The man looked Wesley in the eye. He shrugged. What can I say, he said.

Hey, loosen up, good buddy, one of the men in the truck called. He turned and opened an ice chest and began to remove cans of beer from it. He was bare to the waist, and he had straight, shoulderlength hair that swung with his movement when he turned from the cooler. He tossed a can to Dennis: Unprepared, he still caught it onehanded, shifted hands with it. One for the ladies, the man said, and tossed them gently, one, two. When he pitched a fourth to Wesley, Wesley caught it and pivoted and threw it as far as he could out over the river. It vanished without so much as a splash.

Lester looked up at the longhaired man and grinned. Not his brand, he said.

Don’t try to bullshit me, Wesley said.

I wouldn’t even attempt it, friend, Lester said. He turned to the boat, his back to Wesley, as if he’d simply frozen him out, as if Wesley didn’t exist anymore. He unlooped the chain and slid the canoes off the sloped bed into the water. The two men leapt from the bed of the truck and with the third began to load the boats with ice chests, oars, boxes of fishing tackle. They climbed into the canoes and headed them downstream into the current. Lester turned to the women. He doffed an imaginary hat. Ladies, he said.

Wesley seemed to be looking around for a rock to throw.

Let it go, Dennis said.

I could have handled them, Wesley said. All that fine help I had from you.

Dennis turned and spat into the river. Hellfire. You didn’t need any help. You made as big a fool of yourself alone as you could have with me helping.

I ain’t letting them shitkickers run over me, Wesley said. Hell I got a good Christian raising and a eight-grade education. I don’t have to put up with this shit from anybody.

But Wesley’s moods were mercurial, and he seemed to find what he had just said amusing. He repeated it to himself, then looked toward the girls. Let’s get organized, he said. As soon as Jeeter Lester and his family get gone we’ll start looking for that Civil War cave.

He waded out to the canoe containing the red cooler. But first let’s all have a little shot of that jet fuel, he said.

Dennis was watching Sandy, and a look like apprehension flickered across her face and was gone. No more than the sudden shadow of a passing cloud. Wesley had removed the lid from the cooler. He had somewhere come by an enormous quantity of tiny bottles of Hiram Walker. They were the kind of bottles served on airlines, and Wesley called them jet fuel. He was fumbling under sandwiches, dumping things out. Jet fuel, jet fuel, he was saying.

I’m sorry, Wesley, Sandy called. I left that bag setting on the kitchen table.

Wesley straightened. Well it’ll do a whole hell of a lot of good setting on a table fifty miles from where I am, he said. He sailed the lid out over the river like an enormous rectangular Frisbee.

I said I was sorry. I really am.

Regret is not jet fuel, Wesley said. He hurled the cooler into the water. Everything went: cellophaned sandwiches, a sixpack of Coke, apples bobbing in the rapid current. A bottle of vin rose.

Shit, Dennis said.

Wesley came wading out of the river, Sandy and Christy were buckling on life jackets. Dennis glared sharply at Wesley’s face. He stood up and put his folded glasses into the pocket of the denim shirt.

I don’t think you’re supposed to be throwing crap in the river like that, Christy said.

Oh no, Wesley said. The river police will get me.

Dennis was staring out at the lighthammered water. Lester and his cohorts had drifted out of sight around the bend. Now where is this famous Civil War cave? He asked.

Supposed to be somewheres close, Wesley told him, relaxing visibly. He turned to the women. Can you all handle a canoe?

I can row as good as you can, Christy told him. Maybe better.

You all check out one side of the river and me and this fine defender of southern womanhood’ll look on the other. Check out every bluff, look for anything that might be a cave. It’s supposed to be about halfway up. If you find a cave, sing out as loud as you can and we’ll be there.

OK?

OK.

And keep those life jackets on. If you have to take a leak or just whatever, do it with the jackets on.

I’m not sure I can do that, Christy said. She turned and gave Dennis a look so absolutely blank it cold have meant anything. It could have meant, You showed common sense staying out of that argument he had. Or it could have meant, Why the hell weren’t you backing him up?

Wesley was looking out across the river. Goddamn it’s hot, he said. Did anybody see where that beer hit?

They drifted with the current, and Dennis shipped the oars, only using one occasionally to steer clear of trees leaning into the water. Huge monoliths of black slate and pale limestone towered above them, ledges adorned with dwarf cedars twisted and windformed. The river moved under them, yellow and murmurous, flexing like the sleekridged skin of an enormous serpent.

Snipes, Wesley said suddenly.

Dennis thought he meant some kind of bird. He was scanning the willows and cane; he had a mental picture of some kind of long legged bird, one foot raised out of the water, a fish in its mouth.

Where? He asked.

Wesley by God Snipes, Wesley said. Ain’t he a movie star?

Yes, he is.

I’ll have to tell Christy about that when we catch up. They’re done out of sight around that shoal yonder.

After a while Wesley told him again the story of the Civil War cave.

The guy always called it that, the Civil War cave, as if the entire Civil War had been fought inside it. He said it was where Confederate soldiers hid out one time. You can’t even see it from the ridge; you have to find it from the river. He said there was all kinds of shit in there. Artifacts. Old guns, lead balls. And bones too, old belt buckles. He didn’t even care, can you feature that? Said the guns was all seized up with rust.

In the lifetime he had known Wesley, Dennis had heard this story perhaps a hundred times. He had his mind kicked out of fear, coasting along, listening to the river mumbling to itself. He thought of the look on Sandy’s face when Wesley had turned from hurling the cooler into the river, and he thought about gauges.

Once, long ago, on one of the few occasions when he had been blind, falling-down drunk, it had occurred to Dennis that life would be much simpler if everything had a gauge on it, the sort that on an automobile measure the temperature of the engine and so on. If the brain had a gauge you would know immediately how smart a certain decision was. You could start to act on it, keeping an eye on the needle all the time. You could proceed, pull back, try another approach. If the heart had one you’d know how in love you were with somebody. And if you could read their gauge…you could live your life with one eye on the needles and never make a foolish move.

Dennis had made several foolish movements in his life, but he had never wavered in the conviction that Wesley had a gauge in his heard. It measured how close he was to violence, and when from zero into uncharted deep red, and every moment of Wesley’s life the needle hovered, trembling, on the hairline of white that was all that stood between order and chaos.

Dennis had long ago quit going to bars with Wesley. At a certain point in his drinking, as if a thermostat had clicked on somewhere, Wesley would swivel his stool and survey the room with a smile of good-natured benevolence, studying its contents as if to ascertain were there inanimate objects worth breaking, folks worth putting in the hospital.

Six months after he married Sandy, he had eased into the bedroom of an apartment in the housing project and studied the sleeping faces of Sandy and a man named Bobby Joe Seales. He had slammed Seales full in the face with his fist, then turned his attention to Sandy. He had broken her arm and nose and jaw and shifted back to Seales. The room was a scene of carnage, folds said, blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling. He had ripped the shade from a lamp and used the lamp base as a club, beating Seales viciously. Folks came screaming, cops. Dennis did not hear this story from Wesley, or from Sandy, but he had heard it plenty of other places, and Wesley stood trial for aggravated assault. The son of a bitch aggravated me, Wesley had said. So I assaulted him.

Seals had been on the Critical List. Folds always spoke of it in capital letters as if it were a place. A place you didn’t want to go. Don’t fuck with Wesley Deavers, Folds said. He put Bobby Joe Scales on the Critical List. It looked like they’d been killing hogs in there.

Did you hear something?

Dennis listened. All he could hear was the river, crows spilling raucous cries from above them, doves mourning from some deep hollow he couldn’t see.

Something. Sounded like yelling.

Then he could hear voices, faint at first, sourceless, as if they were coming from thin air, or out of the depths of the yellow water. Then he heard, faint and faint: Dennis. Dennis.

They’ve found it. Wesley said. He took up his oars and turned the boat into the swift current. Let’s move it, he said. The voices had grown louder. If this is the right cave we’ll map it, Wesley said. Make us up some charts so we can find it again.

The river widened where it shoaled, then began narrowing into a bottleneck as the bend up. Dennis could feel the river quickening under him, the canoe gaining urgency as it rocked in the current.

Dennis. Dennis.

I wish she’d shut the hell up, Dennis said.

All right, all right, Wesley yelled. We’re coming.

That must be one hellacious cave.

But the cliffs had been tending away for some time now on this side of the river, and when they rounded the bend they saw that the bluffs had subsided to a steep, stony embankment where Christy and Sandy were huddled. Dennis couldn’t see their canoe. They were on their knees and still wearing life jackets, their hair plastered tightly to their skulls. Sandy was crying, and Christy was talking to her and had an arm about her shoulders.

Now what the fuck is this news, Wesley said, and Dennis felt a cold shudder of unease. He remembered something Dorothy Parker had purportedly said once when her doorbell rang: What fresh hell is this?

They tipped us over, Christy said. Now she began to cry as well. Goddamn them. They were waiting for us here and grabbed the boat. All four of them, two boatloads. They tried to get us into the boats with them and when we wouldn’t go they got rough, tried to drag us. I hit one with an oar, and that baldheaded fucker tipped us over. They took the boat.

Wesley seemed actually to pale. Dennis could see a cold pallor beneath the deep tan. It seemed to pulse in his face. Sandy, are you all right? Wesley asked.

She can’t hear, Christy said. When we went under it did something to her hearing aid, ruined it. Shorted it out or something. She can’t hear a thing. I mean not a goddamned thing.

Oh, Wesley cried. He seemed on the threshold of a seizure, some sort of rage induced attack. Eight hundred fucking dollars, he said. Eight hundred dollars up a wild hog’s ass and gone. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to absolutely fucking kill them.

Wesley made twelve dollars an hour, and Dennis knew that he was mentally dividing twelve into eight hundred and arriving at the number of hours he had worked to pay for the hearing aid.

Where’s the other oars?

I don’t know. They floated off.

I’m gone. I’m going to kill them graveyard dead.

He turned the boat about to face the current.

Hey, Christy called. Wait.

Stay right here, Wesley said. And I mean right here. Do not move from that rock till we get back with the boat.

Let them keep the goddamned boat, Christy screamed, but Wesley didn’t reply. He heeled into the current and began to row. He did not speak for a long time. He rowed like a madman, like some sort of rowing machine kicked up on high. I’ll row when you get tired, Dennis said. Fuck that, Wesley told him. After a while he looked back and grinned. How dead am I going to kill them? He asked.

Graveyard dead, Dennis said.

Wesley hadn’t missed a stroke rowing. After a time he said, There will be some slow riding and sad singing.

Trees went by on the twin shorelines like a landscape unspooling endlessly from one reel to another. A flock of birds went down the metallic sky like a handful of hurled slate. Dennis guessed the Lester gang was long gone, into the tall timber, their canoes hidden in the brush, laughing and drinking beer, on their way back across the ridges to pick up their truck.

What were you going to do, back there, kick my ass?

Dennis was looking at the sliding yellow water. What?

Back there at the camp when my jet fuel was missing. You got up and folded your little glasses and shoved them in your pocket. You looked for all the world like a schoolteacher getting ready to straighten some folks out. You think you can kick my ass?

I wouldn’t want to hurt you, Dennis said.

Wesley laughed. How long have you known me, Dennis?

You know that. Since the third grade.

Third grade. Have I ever lied to you?

I don’t know. How would I know that? Not that I know of.

I never lied to you. So I’m telling the truth now. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them with an oar, not flat like I was paddling their ass, but sideways like I was chopping wood. I’ll take their heads off. Do you want out? I’ll ease over and let you out.

The boat hadn’t slackened. The oars dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled, with no variation in their rhythm. The boat seemed to have attained its own volition, its own momentum.

No, Dennis finally said, and he knew with a cold horror that Wesley was telling the truth.

Do you really think I’d stop long enough to let you out?

You never lie.

No.

I can ask you the one right question and you’ll lie.

Ask it then.

But before he could ask it, Wesley suddenly shouted. A hoarse cry of exultation. Dennis looked. They were aligned on a sandbar far downriver, three of them, the three canoes beached on the shore like bright metallic whales. Tiny dark figures in attitudes of waiting, watching them come.

Shouts came skipping across the water. Now he could see that Lester had his hands cupped about his mouth like a megaphone. It took you long enough, he yelled.

Wesley might not have heard. He was leaning into the oars, the muscles in the arms that worked them knotting and relaxing, knotting and relaxing.

They stood like the last ragged phalanx of an army backed to the last wall there was. They each held an oar. When the boat was still twenty feet from the shoreline Wesley bailed out. Oar aloft like God’s swift sword. He seemed to be skimming the surface, a dark, vengeful divinity the waters would not even have. He knocked Lester’s oar aside with his own and drew back and swung. The oar made an eerie, abrupt whistling. Blood misted the air like paint from an exploding spray can. Lester went to his knees clutching his face, blood streaming between his fingers. Wesley hit him across the top of the head, and a vulval gash opened in the shaven flesh. Dennis slammed the longhaired man backward, and he stumbled and fell into a thicket of willows and wild cane. He advanced on him, swinging the oar like a man killing snakes. An oar caught him across the bicep, and his left arm went suddenly numb. He turned. A man with a fright wig of wild red hair and clenched yellow teeth broadsided him in the shoulder with the flat of an oar just as Wesley broke his own oar across the man’s back. Wesley was left with a section half the length of a baseball bat. The redhaired man was going to run through the cane, and Wesley threw the stub of the paddle at him.

The longhaired man had simply vanished. Dennis had driven him into the cane, and he’d just disappeared. Dennis was almost giddy with relief. It seemed over before it had properly begun, and it had not been as bad as he had feared it would be.

Lester was crawling on his hands and knees away from the river. He crawled blindly, his eyes full of blood, which dripped into the sand below him.

Wesley picked up a discarded oar and walked between Lester and the growth of willows. He had the oar cocked like a chopping ax. Lester crawled on. When his head bumped Wesley’s knee he reared backward, sitting on his folded legs. He made a mute, armsspread gesture of supplication.

Wesley, Dennis yelled.

Kill this motherfucker graveyard dead, Wesley said.

Dennis crossed the sand in two long strides and swung onto Wesley’s arm and wrested the oar from him. Wesley sat down hard in the sand. He got up shaking his head as if he’d clear it. He crossed the sandbar and waded kneedeep into the river and scooped up handfuls of water and washed his face. Lester crawled on. Like something wounded that just won’t die. When he was into the willows he struggled up and stood leaning with both hands cupping his knees. Then he straightened and began wiping the blood out of his eyes. Dennis lay on his back in the sand for a long time and stared into the sky, studying the shifting patterns the clouds made. Both arms ached, and he was slowly clasping and unclasping his left hand. The bowl of the sky spun slowly clockwise, like pale blue water emptying down an endless drain.

He could hear Lester lumbering off through the brush. Wesley came up and dropped onto the sand beside Dennis. Dennis had an arm flung across his eyes. He thought he might just lie here in the hot weight of the sun forever. His ribs hurt, and he could feel his muscles beginning to stiffen.

I wish I hadn’t quit smoking and I had a cigarette, Wesley said. Or maybe a little shot of that jet fuel. Chastising rednecks is hot, heavy work, and it does wear a man out so.

Dennis didn’t reply, and after a time Wesley said, You ought to’ve let me kill him. I knew you weren’t as committed as I was. I could see your heart wasn’t in it. You didn’t have your mind right.

He was dragging off like a snake with its back broke, Dennis said. What the hell do you want? Let it be.

We need to get these boats back to where Sandy and Christy are. Damned if I don’t dread rowing upstream. Bad as I feel. You reckon we could rig up a towline and pull them along the bank?

I don’t know.

You don’t think they’d go back to where the girls are, do you?

I don’t know.

We better go see. No telling what kind of depravities those inbred mutants could think of to do with an innocent young girl.

Dennis suddenly dropped the arm from his eyes and sat up. He could hear a truck engine. It was in the distance, but approaching, and the engine sounded wound out, as if it were being rawhided over and through the brush. He stood up. The truck seemed to be coming through the timber, and he realized that a road, probably an unused and grownover logging road, ran parallel with the river. They know this river, he thought. The fourth man went to get the truck. Through a break in the trees chrome mirrored back the light, the sun hammered off bright red metal. The truck stopped. The engine died. Immediately Dennis could hear voices, by turns angry and placating. They seemed to be fighting amongst themselves, trying to talk Lester either into or out of doing something. A door slammed; another or the same door slammed again. When he looked around, Wesley had risen and gathered up two of the paddles. He reached one of them to Dennis. Dennis waved it away. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, he said.

We got to get the boats.

To hell with the boats. We got to move.

Something was coming through the brake of wild cane, not walking or even running as a man might, but lurching and stumbling and crashing, some beast enraged past reason, past pain. Wesley turned toward the noise and waited with the oar at a loose port arms across his chest.

Lester came out of the cane with a.357 Magnum clasped bothhanded before him. It looked enormous even in his huge hands. Lester looked like something that had escaped halfbutched from a meatpacker’s clutches, like some bloody experiment gone awry. His wild eyes were just black holes charred in the bloody suet of his face. The bullet splintered the oar and slammed into Wesley’s chest. Wesley’s head, his feet, seemed to jerk forward. Then Lester shot him in the head, and Wesley spring backward as if a spingloaded tether had jerked him away.

Dennis was at the edge of the canebrake running full out. He glanced back. The pistol swung around. He dove sideways into the cane, rolling, and running from the ground up as the explosion showered him with sand, the cane tilting and swaying in his bobbing vision. The horizon jerked with his footfalls. Another shot, shouts, curses, men running down from the truck. He’d lost his glasses, and trees swam into his blurred vision as though surfacing at breakneck speed from murky water. Branches clawed at him; a lowhanging vine hurled him forward like a projectile blown out of the wall of greenery. He slowed and went on. He could hear excited voices, but nobody seemed to be pursuing him. He went on anyway, his lungs hot as if he moved through a medium of smoke, of pure fire. The timber deepened, and he went on into it. He fell and lay across the roots of an enormous beech. The earth was loamy and black and smelled like corrupting flesh. He vomited and lay with his face in the vomit. He closed his eyes. After a while the truck cranked and retreated the way it had come, fast, winding out. He raised his face and spat. There was a taste in his mouth like a cankered penny, and he could smell fear on himself like an animal’s rank musk that you can’t wash off.

When he finally made it back to the sandbar, the first thing he did was hunt his glasses. They were lying in the cane where he’d dived and rolled, and earpiece bent at a crazy angle but nothing broken. He put them on, and everything jerked into focus, as if a vibratory world had abruptly halted its motion.

Wesley was on his back with the back of his head and both hands lying in the water. He looked as if he’d flung his arms up in surrender, way too late. Dennis looked away. He took off the denim shirt and spread it across Wesley’s face.

He dragged one of the canoes parallel with the body and began trying to roll Wesley into it. Wesley was a big man, and this was no easy task. He was loath to touch the bare flesh, but finally there was no way round it and he picked up the legs and worked them across the canoe and braced his feet and tugged the torso over into it. The boat lurched in the shallow water. By this time he was crying, making animal sounds he did not recognize as coming from himself. He threw in two oars and, running behind the boat, shoved it into deeper water. When he climbed in, he had to sit with a foot on either side of Wesley’s thighs in order to row. In the west the sinking sun was burning through the trees with a bluegold light.

Twilight was falling when he came upon them, a quarter mile or so downriver from where they’d been left. They were straggling along the bank, Christy carrying what he guessed was a stick for cottonmouths. He oared the boat around broadside and rowed to shore. He waded the last few feet and dragged the prow into the bank, turned toward the women. They were looking not at him but at what was in the boat. All this time he’d been wondering what he could say to Sandy, but he remembered with dizzy relief that she was deaf and he wouldn’t have to say anything at all. There didn’t seem to be any questions anyway, or any answers worth giving if there were.

Christy’s face was a twisted gargoyle’s mask. Oh no, she said. Oh, Jesus, please no.

Dennis sat on the bank with his feet in the water. Rowing upstream had been hard, and he had his bloody palms upturned on his knees, studying the broken blisters. Sandy rose and climbed down the embankment, steadying her descent with a hand on Dennis’s shoulder. She stood staring down into the boat. She knelt in the shallow water. Dennis stood up and waded around the boat and steadied it. He looked curiously like a salesman standing at the ready to demonstrate something should the need arise. He could hear Christy crying. She cried on and on.

Wesley lay with the bloody shirt still flung across his face. He lay like a fallen giant. Treetrunk legs, huge bronze torso. Sandy took up one of his hands and held it. The great fingers, thick black hair between the knuckles. She held the hand a time, and then she began folding the limp fingers into a fist., a finger at a time, tucking the thumb down and holding the hand in a fist with her own two hands. She sat and looked at it. Dennis suddenly wondered if she was seeing the fist come at her out of a bloody and abrupt awakening, rising and falling as remorselessly as a knacker’s hammer, and he leaned and disengaged her hand. The loose fist slapped against the hull and lay palm upward.

He thought she might be crying, but when he looked up her eyes were dry and calm. They locked with his. Nor would she look away, as if she were waiting for his lips to move so she could read them.

We’ve got to get him out of here, Christy sobbed. A road somewhere maybe; somebody would stop.

Nobody answered her. Dennis wasn’t listening, and Sandy couldn’t hear at all. He wondered what it would sound like to be deaf. What you’d hear. From the look on Sandy’s face across the body of her fallen warrior he judged it must be a calm and restful sound, the sighing of a perpetual wind through clashing rushes, a lapping of peaceful water that never varies or ceases.

THE COURT HAD AWARDED HER custody of the motorcycle, they were going this day to get it. Edgewater was sitting on the curb drinking orange juice from a cardboard carton when the white Ford convertible came around the corner. A Crown Victoria with the top down though the day was cool and Edgewater had been sitting in the sun for such heat as there was. The car was towing what he judged to be a horse trailer.

Claire eased the car to the curb and shoved it into park and left it idling. She was wearing a scarf over her dirty blonde hair and an air vaguely theatrical and when she pushed her sunglasses up with a scarlet fingernail her eyes were the color of irises.

What are you doing in this part of town, Sailor?

Just waiting for someone like you to come along, he said.

You ready to roll?

He got in and slammed the door. Ready as I’ll ever be.

This was Memphis Tennessee, the middle of April in 1952, the convertible already rolling, washed-out sunlight running on the storefront glass like luminous water. She was driving down a series of side streets into a steadily degenerating neighborhood. Where winos and such streetfolk as were yet about seemed stunned by this regenerative sun and so unaccustomed to such an abundance of light that they drifted alleyward as if extended exposure might scorch them or sear away their clothing. Bars and liquor stores contested for space on these narrow streets and both seemed well represented. They had a stunned vacuous look to them and their scrollworks of dead neon waited for nightfall.

She glanced across at him.

God I hate the way you dress, she said. I’m going to have to buy you some clothes.

Edgewater was wearing a Navy dungaree shirt and jeans held up by a webbed belt the buckle of which proclaimed US Navy. I’m all right, he said.

Listen. You’re going to have to bear with me on this. Just hang in there no matter what happens, okay?

Wait a minute. What does that mean, no matter what happens? I thought we were just picking up your motorcycle.

Well, you know. They were my in-laws, after all. There might be a few hard feelings.

Here were paintlorn Victorian mansions where nothing remained of opulence save a faint memory. Rattletrap cars convalescing or dying beneath lowering elms. Shadetree mechanics stared into their motors as if they’d resuscitate them by sheer will or raise them from the dead with the electric hands of faithhealers.

Past a rotting blue mansion with a red tiled roof she halted the car and peering backward with a cigarette cocked in the corner of her mouth she cut the wheel and backed the trailer expertly over the sidewalk and down a driveway bowered by lowhanging willows.

Showtime, she said.

All polished chrome and sleek black leather the motorcycle seemed waiting and coiled to spring, setting alien and futuristic in the back yard.

Claire got out and slammed the door. Edgewater followed, climbing slowly out of the car like someone cautiously easing into deep cold waters. There were a couple of two-by-eights in the bed of the trailer and he aligned them into a makeshift ramp and turned to the Harley Davidson leaning on its kickstand.

A screen door slapped loosely against its frame. A short heavyset woman had come onto the back porch and she was crossing the porch rapidly in no nonsense strides and she was rubbing her hands together in an anticipatory way. Put one whore’s hand on that motorcycle and you’ll pull back a bloody stub, she said.

Hurry, Claire said.

He’d no more than raised the kickstand and angled the front wheel toward the ramp when the woman began to scream. You ruined my son’s life, you bitch, she yelled. She was coming down the steps two at a time and Claire turned and took a tentative step away but the woman closed on her remorseless and implacable as a stormfront and slapped her face hard then laid a hand to each of Claire’s shoulders and flung her onto the grass and fell upon her.

Shit, Edgewater said.

He had the motorcycle halfway up the ramp when the screen door slapped again and a man with a torn gray undershirt came out with a doublebarreled shotgun unbreeched and he was fumbling waxed red cylinders into it. He dropped one and was at feeling wildly about the floor for it.

By the time Edgewater heard the gun barrel slap up he’d rolled the cycle off the ramp and straddled it and kickstarted it and he was already rolling when the concussion came like a slap to the head. He went through shredded greenery that spun like windy green snow, skidding blindly onto the street then across it and through a hedge before he could get the motorcycle under control and out onto the street again, leaning into the wind and houses kaleidoscoping past on either side like the walls of a gaudy tunnel he was catapulted through.

The imaged street rolled in and out of the rearview mirror then the white Ford appeared and followed at a sedate pace. Edgewater slowed and turned the motorcycle into the parking lot of a liquor store and she turned in beside it. The Harley idled like some fierce beast that wasn’t even breathing hard. She was laughing.

Hard feelings my ass, Edgewater said.

Do you believe this? My brother-in-law had to run out and wrestle him for the gun. He shot the shit out of that tree, did you see that?

I rode through it, Edgewater said.

Ahh Baby you got it all in your hair, she said, brushing it away with a hand.

They had to manhandle the cycle onto the trailer because she hadn’t thought it wise to stop for the boards and Edgewater lashed it upright to a support with the rope she’d brought.

That’s twice I’ve wrestled this heavy son of a bitch up here, he said. My first time and my last.

You’re in a good mood she said, grinning, getting into the car.

I’m not real fond of getting shot at, Edgewater said.

She eased the car out into the street and headed north, glancing in the rearview mirror to check was the cycle secure. You’ll feel better tonight, she said. We’ll get you a sport coat somewhere and go out to a really good restaurant. Italian maybe, we’ll get a nice bottle of wine. Okay?

Okay, Edgewater said.

The prospective motorcycle buyer lived in a town called Leighton east of Memphis and they drove toward it past tract houses and apartment complexes and onto a flat countryside of housetrailers and farmland beset by tractors that Edgewater watched move silent down cottonfields that seemed endless.

He turned to study her against the slipsliding landscape. There was a faint blue bruise at the corner of her right eye and a scratch on her cheek but with the wind blowing her hair and the silk scarf strung out in the breeze she looked rakish and well satisfied with herself. In the brief time he’d known her she seemed always to be playing some role. Seldom the same one twice. Just the star of whatever movie today was. He’d had the impulse to glance about and see were cinecameras whirring away, a makeup man with his potions at the ready.

Then as he watched her profile seemed to alter. The flesh itself to sear and melt and run off the skull and cascade down the linen blouse she wore and the linen itself blackened and rotted and the wind sucked tatters of it away and when she turned to grin at him bone hand clutching the steering wheel the hollow eyesockets of her skull smoked like a charred landscape beyond which a faint yellow light flickered and died. Her grinning teeth had loosened in their sockets and there was a blackened cavity where the right canine joined the jawbone.

They were coming up on a white stucco building with a Falstaff beer sign framed by a rectangle of light bulbs. Carolyn’s Place, the sign said.

Pull in there, Edgewater said.

What?

Let me wait here for you. I have to make a phone call.

She’d already begun to slow but she turned to frown at him. This doesn’t make any sense, she said. We’re almost to Leighton. You can call from there. Besides, who would you call? You don’t know anybody.

He was out almost before the car stopped rolling. Pick me up after you get your business transacted. I’ll be in there drinking a beer.

She glanced toward the sign. Just make damn sure you keep your hands off Carolyn, she said.

Edgewater crossed a glaring white parking lot of crushed mussel shells. Carolyn’s Place was set on earth so absolutely bare of tree and shrub that the stuccoed honky-tonk seemed to have sucked up all the nourishment for miles around. Dancing Saturday night to live music, a placard in the window promised, but Edgewater was already touched by a rising desperation and he promised himself that by Saturday night he’d be dancing somewhere else.

He went into a cool gloom that smelled of hops and cigarette smoke and all seemed touched by a silence so dense it was almost cloistral. A man seated at the bar watched him cross the room. Edgewater’s eyes were still full of the April light from outside and the room seemed a cave he was walking into, the drinkers seated at the tables troglodytes who’d laid aside momentarily their picks and were taking respite from their labors.

Let me have a draft, he told the barkeep. He withdrew a worn and folded five dollar bill from the watchpocket of his jeans. The barkeep filled a frosted mug from a tap and raked the foam into a slotted trough and slid the beer across the counter. The barkeep had vaselined red hair parted in the middle and a red freckled face and brownspotted fingers like sausages.

Edgewater took a long pull from the beer and lit a cigarette and sat just enjoying the silence. Even the drinkers at the tables were quiet, as if still contemplative of whatever had befallen them the night before. He could feel the silence like a comforter he’d drawn about him and he was glad that Claire and the motorcycle were rolling somewhere away from him.

There was something jittery about Claire that precluded calm. She was always in motion and always talking. He’d watched her sleep and even then her life went on, her face jerking in nervous tics at the side of her mouth, her iriscolored eyes moving beneath nightranslucent lids like swift blue waters. Her limbs stirred restlessly and he’d decided even her dreams were brighter and louder and faster than those allotted the rest of the world. Watching her sleep he felt he’d stolen something he did not want but nevertheless cold not be returned.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up. The man two stools downbar was watching him. He was a heavyset man in overalls whose tiny piglike eyes were studying Edgewater in drunken fixation. He seemed to be trying to remember where he’d seen Edgewater or perhaps someone like him. He made some gesture near indecipherable to the barkeep and the barkeep brought up from the cooler a dripping brown bottle and opened it and set it before the man then refilled his shotglass with something akin to ceremony.

What are you lookin at? the man asked Edgewater.

Nothing, Edgewater said. He looked away, to the mirror behind the aligned green bottles. His reflection dark and thin and twisted in the wonky glass.

He took up three of the dollar bills and slid them across the bar. Let me have some change for the telephone, he said.

Was you in the war? The man downbar asked him.

Edgewater thought of the concussion of the shotgun, the drifting shreds of willow leaves. Not in one of the official ones, he said.

Change rattled on the bar.

What the hell’s that supposed to mean?

He raked the change and cupping it in a palm went past a silent jukebox to the rear wall where a telephone hung. He stood watching it for a time as if puzzled by its function or manner of operation, the fisted change heavy in his hand and he could feel sweat in his armpits and tracking coldly down his ribcage. He turned and went through a door marked MEN and urinated in a discolored trough and washed his hands and face at the sink and toweled dry on a length of fabric he unreeled from its metal container. Above the sink there was no mirror, just four brackets where a mirror had been. On the spackled plaster some wag with a black marker had written: you look just fine.

He went out and used the phone, heard it ring in what by now seemed some other world entire. Yet the room where the phone rang and rang was real in his mind and he wondered idly was anything missing, anything added, had they painted the living room walls.

Finally a young woman answered he phone. Edgewater’s sister.

I’d about give up on you, Edgewater said.

Billy? Is that you? Where in the world are you at?

How is he?

He’s how I said he was the last time you called. He’s dying. Why ain’t you here?

I’m on the way, he said. I’ll be there. I ran into a little bad luck.

She knew him, she didn’t even want details. You’d better get here, she said. He has to see you. Has to. He wants to make it right. He’s tryin to hang on until you get here.

He said that? He said he’s trying to hang on until I get there?

You know some things without them bein said, she told him. Or ought to. Would you want to go before your maker carryin all that?

I’m not looking forward to it carrying it or emptyhanded either, Edgewater said.

Well. You and your smart mouth.

I’ve got to go, Edgewater said.

There’s something wrong with you, she said. If you weren’t so–

He quietly broke the connection and cradled the phone. Then he took it up again and held it to his ear and it seemed a wonder that there was only the dialtone. No news good or bad, just a monotonous onenote electrical drone, sourceless yet all around him, the eternal hum of whatever powers the world slowly diminishing. He recradled the phone.

The man at the bar had swiveled his stool to watch Edgewater and Edgewater had seen the look on his face on other faces and he thought: Fuck this. He picked up his beer and what remained of his change and moved to the corner of the bar.

You’re out of uniform, the man called after him.

I’m discharged, Edgewater said. I’m not in the service.

The man struggled off the stool and drained the shotglass and turned up his chaser and drank, adam’s apple pumping spasmodically. He set the bottle back and lumbered heavily toward Edgewater like a gracelorn dancing bear. Edgewater wished for a pool cue, magic winged shoes. A motorcycle.

You disrespectin that uniform whether you in or out. Them’s Navy workclothes, don’t think I don’t recognize them. What I wore all durin the war. You got on them clothes and you’re not even covered.

I got discharged, Edgewater said carefully, straining for clarity. In Long Beach, California. I’m out. I served four years and I’m on my way home.

He picked up his mug and cigarettes. He pocketed the Luckies and moved farther up the bar. Let me have another draft, he said.

Don’t fuck with Ed, the barkeep said. He’s bad news.

He damn sure is, Edgewater said. But I’m hoping it’s for somebody else.

How about you fuckers? The man asked. He’d approached again and was leaning forward into Edgewater’s face. Edgewater could smell him, see the cratered pores of his skin, veins like tiny exploded faultlines in his nose, feel his angry pyorrheic breath.

While I was over there across the waters fightin and dyin you fuckers was over here drinkin all our whiskey and screwin our wives. What about that?

Hellfire, Edgwater said. I wasn’t even old enough for that war. How about leavin me the hell alone?

Fought and died for you fuckers. Got medals to prove it.

How about that beer, Edgewater said.

Maybe you ought to just to drink up and move along, the barkeep said. His head gleamed like a metallic cap. You’re not a regular customer.

I might become one, Edgewater said.

Then again you might not.

You was probably one of them, one of them conscious objectors, Ed said.

Edgewater drained the mug and set it gently atop the bar. He turned to go but before he’d taken the first step a heavy hand fixed on his shirt collar and jerked hard and he felt the buttons pop away and the shirt rip down the back. It all happened very quickly. He whirled and grasped the mug and slammed Ed in the side of the head with it. It didn’t even break and while he was looking at it in a sort of wonder the barkeep disdaining normal means of approach vaulted the bar with a weighted length of sawnoff pool cue and slapped Edgewater hard above the left ear. Edgewater’s knees went to water and he pooled on the floor. The world went light then dark. Somebody kicked him in the side and a wave of nausea rocked him. His vision darkened gray to black and after a while when he came to he could hear sirens. The old man is finally dead and here comes the ambulance, he thought. He looked about. Ed was at the bar downing a shot and the barkeep was at his station and the troglodytes seemed not to have glanced up. Whoop whoop whoop the siren went. A wave of vomit lapped at his feet. Edgewater spat blood and pillowed his head on his arm and closed his eyes.

THAT YEAR THERE SEEMED NO place to keep warm. Wintertime in New York town, the wind blowing snow up and down the streets, sleet spinning against the glass storefronts, wind coming gritty and razorous out of the mouths of alleys, cutting through your clothing to the bone. This was the last of 1963, the cusp of ‘64: Kennedy was in the graveyard and Johnson in the White House, and something was in the wind. The first hints of disquiet in the air. Some dire chord had been strummed, the vibrations were rolling outward, wars and rumors of wars.

Drunk on the rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe, I had left my home in the South and come looking for experience. I had determined to open myself to everything the world had to offer, good and ill, to accumulate life and hoard it like a miser and, at some more contemplative point, try to make sense of it. I had joined the Navy, and now I was in Brooklyn, where Thomas Wolfe had walked the midnight streets and chanted: I wrote ten thousand words today. The Navy had promised travel and experience, and so far it was working out. I was new at the job, but already I had been hassled by cops and hustled by folks in the financial end of the love business, beaten up by Canadian Airmen in Esquimalt, by a street gang in Brooklyn and by a surly bartender in Long Beach. Experience was unfolding itself to me like a flower.

I even had a girl. Her name was Sara and she had almond eyes and long, straight chestnut hair. She was a freshman at a city college and she was into social causes like the burgeoning civil-rights movement. She loved poetry and books and music. She even believed me when I told her I was going to be a writer. We had met in the summer and been together as often as we could through the fall and winter. It was understood that we were soulmates, that we would always be together.

We hung out mostly in the Village, looking for the already ancient footprints of Ginsberg and Kerouac, listening for the fading chants of the Beat Poets, listening to jazz and folk music and blues in the cafés and coffee houses. I was in my civilian clothing, trying to blend, but already the world was aspiring toward a hip scruffiness the Navy wouldn’t tolerate and I had to make do with my regulation haircut and polished shoes.

One Night we were in a coffeehouse when a girl sang a song unlike anything I’d ever heard. This place was a basket-house, a club where musicians who didn’t have paying gigs could perform a set then pass the basket around the audience. If you liked the songs you’d drop a half-dollar or handful of change.

This song seemed to be called, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” —that was the refrain that ended every chorus. It sounded full of contradictions — traditional in form yet new in sentiment, a love song and a kiss-off, hard and soft, tough and tender at the same time. It was a way of looking at things, a way of turning a hard exterior toward a world always looking for your weaknesses, and it came at you from all over the place. It was bathed in a gothic twilight, roosters crowing at the break of dawn, with more departures down long lonesome roads than a noir novel. It was love and bitterness swirled together: Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.

I have to talk to her, I told Sara. I want to know where she learned that song.

I don’t think so, Sara said. You just want to meet that singer.

We met her anyway.

Haven’t you heard of Bob Dylan? This is a Bob Dylan song. He’s got a lot of others, too, and they’re all great.

Bob Dylan. I had a vague memory of reading his name in a Nat Hentoff Playboy article on folksingers. But Hentoff hadn’t mentioned this.

The next weekend Sara took me uptown to a record shop she said carried everything, and I bought two Bob Dylan albums. The second one, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had “Don’t Think Twice” on it. Listening on the phonograph in Sara’s bedroom I realized the words were only half the story: the song was at least half attitude, acting, role-playing something. As if James Dean had merged with Rimbaud and Raymond Chandler and strapped on a flat-top Martin.

And I realized something else. You couldn’t duplicate this; this was a one-time thing. Spend a lifetime learning the picking, and you couldn’t get it the same way twice. Learn every shading and nuance of voice, and this would still be the only one in the world. Even Dylan couldn’t duplicate it, try to Xerox it and the machine would short-circuit and smoke and burn. I felt there was no precedent for this that you could trace folk music back through its entire history, and you would not hear anything like this. The song and the song’s performance came out of someplace raw and powerful, painful as an open wound. It was a way of looking at things in a single frozen moment of time.

Of course there were other songs on the album, and sure enough, they were all great. There was even a song that evoked Sara, a Girl from the North Country, where snowflakes fall and the wind hits heavy on the borderline, a girl with hair that hung long and rolled and flowed all down her breast. Of course, more properly this was the East, not the North, but to the heart, the points of the compass are not only useless, but irrelevant.

In the fullness of time, “Don’t Think Twice” showed up on all the jukeboxes. Not by Dylan, but by Peter, Paul and Mary, who’d made it a moderate hit. Every bar and restaurant we went to, I rolled a lot of change down the throats of jukeboxes.

I didn’t notice that Sara was becoming much vexed with the song until it was too late. I had suspected something was amiss. Long silences had crept into conversations that previously held no space for them. I would glance at her, and she would be watching me in a sort of speculative way. Perhaps our souls did not interlock as perfectly as we’d thought.

I’m sick of that damn song, she finally said. And I may have misjudged you. Your taste. He can’t sing, and not only that, but he’s not a poet, the way you say he is. It’s ridiculous, that rooster crowing at the break of dawn crap. Does he assume everyone owns a rooster? I’ve never even seen a rooster. And he’s always walking down those long lonesome roads. It’s just sentimental bullshit.

I was outraged. Sentimental was the kiss of death, bullshit was even worse. Her own taste was now being called into question. It’s not sentimental. Romantic, maybe, but not sentimental.

Romantic sentimental narcissistic bullshit. You only like it because it’s the way you think. Or the way you’d like to think. And it’s not only that. He’s got into your head. You’ve gotten too far into this stuff, and you’ve let him into your head. It’s warped your whole philosophy.

My philosophy? Well, this was a hell of a note. Here I didn’t even know I had a philosophy, and the damned thing was warped. Broken before I even had a chance to use it. I tried to protest. This wasn’t another girl. It wasn’t another guy. It was a song, and I should be able to turn this thing around.

If you’d think about it, I said, if you could change your mind and stay.

Her eyes went cold. She was receding already, accelerating through the red shift, a girl from the North Country seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I had inadvertently paraphrased a line from the song, and naturally she’d recognized it.

Stabbed in the heart. Here on the dark side of the road. The future yawned before me. Years of the Navy to go, I was barely out of the starting gate. Our lives together forfeit. Our house unbuilt, our children unconceived. Nothing to do, nothing to say. Except goodbye’s too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say farethee-well.

I’M NOT AN ARTIST, I just paint for the reasons most people do the things they like, because they’re fun and because of the satisfaction you get when you have completed (or decided you’ve completed) a picture. And because you have an idea in your head, you try to paint pictures that equal it. They never do, but the feeling that you get a little closer each time is part of that satisfaction.

The first painting that ever affected me deeply was by Andrew Wyeth. I was in elementary school, about the fourth grade. Wednesday was library day, and although most of the books were off-limits to fourth graders, I looked forward all week to roaming around the shelves, and picking out titles that I promised myself I would read one day.

The librarian controlled us with an acerbic tongue and a fierce eye, but she liked me for a couple of reasons: because I could refold a newspaper and keep all the sections in order (If he can do that, I don’t know why the rest of you can’t) and because I had once asked her how much she had to pay to be in charge of all those library books.

She noticed that I was always drawing pictures, comic-book panels with Zane Grey Westerners pummeling each other with their fists or battling with six-guns.

She was also the high-school librarian, and one day she brought down from there a coffee-table book of prints of great American paintings. She told me I could take it home and study it for a few days. Look at something besides trash, she said. But don’t tear it. And don’t spill anything on it.

The picture that grabbed me was Christina’s World. Wyeth had painted a woman crouching on a grassy slope, who awkwardly faces away from the viewer, toward a New England farmhouse. Years later I read that the woman was disabled and that Wyeth had painted her climbing the hill in the only means of locomotion available to her. But the knowledge was not necessary to appreciate the painting. What affected me about the painting was its mystery. The background story neither deepened the mystery nor explained it. It was like that Frost poem about stopping by the snowy woods, miles to go before you sleep. The woman seemed affected by the gravity or enormity of something just out of view. To me, as a child, Christina’s World needed an explanatory panel before and following it.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED OR MAYBE HAPPENED OR IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED:

Adams, Tennessee, is in Robertson County, five miles from the Kentucky line. In 1804, when John Bell moved his wife and six children and slaves to a thousand-acre farm he’d bought on the Red River, Adams was a virtual wilderness. Skirmishes with Indian war parties up from the south were less than twenty years in the past. The Indians didn’t live here, but it was sacred ground to them and had been for thousands of years since the time of the Mound Builders. It was also theirs by right of treaty. As was often the case, the treaty had clauses and fine print and footnotes, and the land was soon settled by prosperous white landholders, most of them from North Carolina.

John Bell was prosperous, too, but he seems to have had a clouded past. There were rumors of his being involved in the death of his former overseer. By all accounts he was a close man in a business deal as well, and it wasn’t long before he found himself in Robertson County civil court accused of usury in a slave trade with a woman named Kate Batts.

These things about Bell, by the way, are not folklore or hearsay: They’re a matter of public record, but they are not mentioned in the early books about the Bell Witch, which paint John Bell as a sort of stoic martyr.

Because of his legal trouble, Bell was excommunicated from the Baptist Church, and in a small community where almost every social function is tied in one way or another to the church, this was a big deal. Living in such a close-knit community of God-fearing folk, Bell must have felt like a pariah.

Then things got worse.

In 1817 John Bell saw an animal in his cornfield. It looked like a black dog but not exactly. When he fired his rifle, it vanished. Not long after, Betsy, Bell’s thirteen-year-old daughter, was picking flowers and saw a girl dressed in green swinging by her arms from the branches of a tree. The girl in green vanished.

There were noises in the house. Something gnawing on the bedposts, rats maybe, the sound of something enormous and winged flying against the attic ceiling, the sound of chained dogs fighting. Lights flitted about the yard. Covers were yanked from folks trying to sleep. Hair was pulled, jaws slapped. Betsy seemed to catch the worst of it.

This went on almost every night for a year before Bell confided in anyone outside the family. According to M.V. Ingram’s An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, published in 1894 and based on an account written by one of Bell’s sons, things had come to such a sorry pass, nerves were frayed, nobody was sleeping that Bell had to have help and opinions. Two preachers were consulted, James Johnson and Sugg Fort.

Bell was a stern and autocratic man who had been able to keep the news of the disturbances confined within his family. But as soon as he confided in others, the cat, or whatever the hell manner of beast it was, was out of the bag and gone.

The self-styled investigators soon determined that there was an intelligence behind the phenomenon. It would respond to knocks and answer questions: one knock for yes, two knocks for no.

Odd as this may be, it did not set a precedent. A similar case had taken place in Maine in 1800. It happened again in Surrency, Georgia, and again in 1848 in Hydesville, New York, to a family named Fox. The Foxes were more amenable to this sort of thing, and within months they were holding séances and playing the ectoplasm circuit, giving birth to the great Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century.

The witch, they had begun to call it this almost by default; no noun seemed adequate thrived under all the attention she was getting. At night the yard would be full of wagons and buggies, the house full of folks putting the manifestations to the test. Apparently Bell turned no one away: He was hoping somebody could figure out all of this and put it to rest. So word spread, and the witch became a source of entertainment. Recreation was in short supply in Robertson County in 1817, and this was better than a pie supper, a church social, a cornhusking as long as you could go home when the show was over and leave it where it was.

The Bell family couldn’t do this. The witch seemed to have moved in to stay. Then she developed a voice. First a sibilant whisper, than a strangled sort of gurgle. Eventually she began to sing gospel songs and to speak. From contemporary accounts (and there are a lot of them), the voice was very odd-sounding: Metallic and somehow mechanical, it did not sound much like a human voice at all. From today’s perspective it seems the witnesses were trying to describe a computer-generated voice, perhaps like the one in your telephone that asks you to punch a number for more information.

And information was what they wanted. What are you? Where do you come from? What do you want? they asked her.

There was no shortage of answers. In fact, she appeared a little perplexed herself. Pressed for the truth, she seemed not to know what she was, and as parapsychologists have discovered, if spirits exist, they’re terrible liars.

I am a spirit that has always been and will always be, she told them. I am everywhere and nowhere. Or she was the spirit of an Indian whose bones they’d disturbed. Or she was the spirit of a man who had buried an enormous amount of money on the Bell farm and wanted them to find it. Finally she said: I am no more or less than Kate Batt’s witch, and I am here to torture and kill old John Bell.

The Bell family came to refer to this four-year period as Our Family Trouble, and during that time there was a seemingly endless stream of folks arriving and departing. A few years before he became president, Andrew Jackson even considered it an adventure worthy of his reputation. He came with an entourage and wagons and tents and provisions, planning to stay a couple of weeks. But the spirit took offense to a professed witch killer they had brought along and ended up pulling his hair and humiliating him with slaps.

After two days the group unceremoniously packed up and left.

Many came intent on proving that the whole thing was a hoax. People had noticed that Betsy went into a trance before the entertainment commenced. The family thought of these as fainting spells, and it was only after Betsy came out of these trances that the spirit would speak. Some folks felt that she was drawing some sort of energy from her. Others decided that Betsy was a ventriloquist and that the whole thing was an elaborate put-on. But according to a contemporary account, a man once grasped Betsy and held a palm tightly across her mouth, and the voice went on unchanged and undeterred.

The entertainment apparently varied from the gospel to the x-rated and all points in between. The witch was a malicious gossip, and she delighted in relating the sexual doings of the crowd. Betsy was by now engaged to Joshua Gardner, and she was fond of taunting Betsy with knowledge of indelicate matters that should have been private. The witch had a scatological sense of humor, and the house was often filled with the odors of vomit and excrement. If one can suspend disbelief long enough to picture it, the scene must have been like a rustic talk show, reality TV and an Early American motif and a disembodied host dealing in dirty linen and guilty secrets.

The witch had two stated purposes: to kill John Bell and to break up Betsy’s impending marriage to Joshua Gardner. Bell died in 1820, a year before the cession of the haunting. There is controversy about what he died from, but, predictably, the witch took credit, claiming that she had poisoned him. At his death, she filled the house with celebratory laughter and bawdy songs. According to Ingrams’s 1894 book, she sang Row Me up Some Brandy-o at Bell’s funeral.

Her energies seemed much dissipated by Bell’s demise. Though a shadow of her formerly robust self, she still had the strength to prevent Betsy’s marriage. To quote from the diary Our Family Trouble by John Bell’s son Richard.

Yet this vile, heinous, unknown devil, torturer of human flesh, that preyed upon the fears of people like a ravenous vulture, spared her not, but chose her as a shining mark for an exhibition of its wicked stratagem and devilish tortures. And never did it cease to practice upon her fears, insult her modesty, stick pins in her body, pinching and bruising her flesh, slapping her cheeks, disheveling and tangling her hair, tormenting her in many ways until she surrendered that most cherished hope which animates every young heart.

The witch left in 1821, saying that she would return in seven years. According to John Bell Jr., she did reappear but only to him and only briefly. No one was interested in her anymore. She was yesterday’s news, and the Bell family was weary beyond measure of the whole affair. Slighted, the voice promised (or threatened, perhaps) to return in 107 years.

By now the Bell children had largely dispersed into homes of their own on the original property. Betsy married her former schoolteacher and remained in Adams. Her mother, Lucy, stayed behind to live, by herself, in the old farmhouse. John Jr. lived in his own home across from her.

The rest is a matter of legal documents: marriages, probated wills, death certificates. After Betsy’s husband died in 1848, she moved to Panola County, Mississippi. Lucy died in 1837, and the old log house was subsequently dismantled: No one would have it, and none of the Bells wanted to move back and live there.

But the story was too outrageous to die. In the 1850s the Saturday Evening Post ran a story on the Bell Witch, postulating that Betsy was a ventriloquist and had faked the whole thing. Betsy sued for libel and won, settling for an undisclosed amount of money. Most of the family, as well as young Gardner, had scattered out of Adams County. It was as if everyone wanted some distance between himself and the growing legend.

In 1894 M.V. Ingram, after years of unsuccessful attempts, acquired the diary of Richard Bell and incorporated it into his Authenticated History. This account of the haunting was anathema to the remaining Bells as well as to their offspring, who considered the Family Trouble a shameful episode and their personal business. They were angry all over again in 1934 when Charles Bailey Bell published his own book, which included a recounting of his conversations with his great-aunt Betsy.

There are tales about bad luck following the Bells, about a family curse, but the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.

So what, if anything but the birth of a folktale, happened?

Everyone who went looking for a solution found one, so there are ultimately more answers than questions and more culprits than victims.

1) It was a hoax perpetrated by Betsy Bell for reasons unknown, possibly a prank. She acquired the art of ventriloquism and put it to use.

2) It was a hoax perpetrated by one Richard Powell, who wanted to get rid of Joshua Gardner and John Bell and marry into the well-to-do Bell family.

3) It’s true as told, and in the world as we know it there is no explanation.

4) Something happened, a poltergeist perhaps, but it’s been grossly distorted by time and retelling.

5) It was black magic. Kate Batts was a witch, and this was her revenge on Bell.

6) Something happened. It’s tied to a secret concerning Betsy Bell and her father, and the whole haunting is rooted in abnormal psychology.

7) The Bell farm is located on an ancient source of power, sacred to the Indians and whatever race came before them. Spirits have always been there, and they sometimes draw on energy wherever they can find it. According to theories about poltergeists, an unhappy household filled with adolescents would provide an almost inexhaustible supply of energy. (It might be worth pointing out that the spirit’s powers waned as Betsy passed from adolescence to womanhood.)

There are other explanations, but this seems sufficient.

The first possibility seems least likely if any weight can be attached to newspaper accounts and sworn testimony. Hundreds of people apparently witnessed her. They all can’t be lying. As for the second, it’s hard to imagine how he did it, even if only a fraction of the accounts are true. Also, motivation seems questionable, and if you can sustain a practical joke for four years, naïveté must have run deep in Robertson County.

The last two reasons are more interesting. Nandor Fodor was a psychiatrist who investigated and wrote about poltergeists. In the 1930s and 40s he postulated that Betsy was sexually assaulted by her father when she was a child. She repressed the memory, but this repression erupted at the onset of puberty in violence against her father. Fodor points out that the witch came down hardest on Betsy and the elder Bell, implying at once that Betsy had feelings of revenge and guilt: Bell had to die, and to punish herself Betsy had to give up the man, Joshua Gardner, she loved.

But this theory isn’t based on much, and Freudian psychology isn’t the gospel it once was. It’s about as easy to believe in malevolent spirits as it is disrupted psyches slamming things around and poisoning folks. It also seems to me a little tacky to accuse even a dead man of child molestation if you don’t have the goods to back it up.

Colin Wilson is a British philosopher and an investigator of the paranormal. Poltergeists are pretty much his specialty, and he started out believing the conventional theory about adolescent energy. But he came to think that teenage energy running amuck didn’t cover everything. He theorized that spirits that haunt places of power can utilize the frustrated energy of adolescents. Excess energy, violence, and unhappiness seem to provide a breeding ground for poltergeists and, Wilson says, spirits can come upon this energy and use it the way a child might kick around a football that he finds lying in a vacant lot.

In the end it seems you can twist the story to any frame of reference, hold it to the light, and turn it until it reflects whatever you want to see.

After the destruction of the Bell home, folks came to believe that the witch had taken up residence in a nearby cave, now called the Bell Witch Cave. The path to it is well-traveled. It has been worn down by writers, reporters, television crews, parapsychologists, skeptics, true believers, and throngs of the merely curious. The path winds steeply down the face of an almost vertical bluff.

The present owner of this section of the old Bell farm is Chris Kirby, and she’s carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and leading the way. Underfoot is crushed stone, and the earth is terraced with landscape timbers to prevent the trail from eroding into the Red River, which is flowing far beneath us.

Past the guard rail you can see the river where the Bell sons used to flatboat produce down to the Cumberland and on to Mississippi and New Orleans. You can see the bench-like area of rock and brush that lies between the riverbank and the point where the bluff rises sheerly out of the bottomland. This is perhaps the only part of the Bell geography that remains virtually unchanged since 1817.

Betsy Bell, dubbed Queen of the Haunted Dell when she became the focus of the mystery, used to come here with Joshua Gardner and other young people on lazy Sunday afternoons after the services at Red River Baptist Church. They’d fish in the river and picnic by the waterfall in the shade of the same huge oaks and beeches that are here now. At some point the young folks would separate into couples and go their own ways. Looking into the trees you can almost see them; your imagination can transform the sound of the waterfall into soft laughter.

At the mouth of the cave Chris turns toward us.

People sometimes have problems photographing the entrance to the cave, she says. Sometimes there’s a mist that blocks the front of it, or maybe things that look like faces or orbs of light turn up in the pictures. Things that weren’t there. Sometimes cameras just fail.

Thirty feet or so into the cave there’s a heavy steel gate.

People kept breaking in, and it’s dangerous further back, Chris says, fitting a key into the padlock. That’s why you had to sign a waiver. Kids keep trying to slip in here with their girlfriends to scare them.

If fear is an aphrodisiac and if a tenth of the things told about the cave are true, then this is the ultimate horror movie.

Inside the cave the first thing you notice is the temperature. It’s a constant fifty-six degrees, and the Bell family, among others used to store perishables here. The second thing you notice is how impressively cave-like it is. This is no two-bit roadside attraction, no world’s largest ball of twine, but a real cave, three stories laid one atop the other like a primitive high-rise, connected by crawl holes that wind upward through the first-floor ceiling.

A kid got stuck in one back in the 1800s, Chris says, shining the light into a jagged ascending tunnel. He was really stuck, he couldn’t get out, and all at once a voice said, Here, I’ll get you out, and the witch jerked him out. He was scared to tell his folks about it, but that night the witch told his mama, You better put a harness on that boy so you can keep up with him. Chris is fascinated by the Bell Witch story, and it’s a fascination that predates her ownership of this cave. She’s read all the books, and she says she’s heard and seen a couple of things herself.

In the first large chamber there’s a crypt perhaps a foot and a half wide by four and a half feet long, a child’s crypt, chiseled out of rock. Large, flat rocks were shaped to fit vertically around the edges, and the body of a young Indian girl had been laid inside. More flat rocks for a lid, the hole covered over with a cairn of stone until a few years ago, when the cave’s previous owner accidentally found it. The archaeologist who examined the bones said they were between two and three hundred years old.

If you can imagine someone laboriously chipping away at the rock and placing in the body, then it’s not hard to see how private and personal this was, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing you should be paying five dollars to see.

In the next chamber Chris shows us where she saw a strange haze shifting in one corner. Farther back, five hundred feet or so into the bluff, the cave narrows until it’s inaccessible. She shines the light. It’s almost absorbed into the wet dark walls as the tunnel veers crookedly out of sight. You’d have to be a spelunker to crawl back in there.

That’s where I heard the scream coming from, Chris says. Not any kind of animal, but a woman screaming. That’s what that Tennessean camera crew heard, too.

We fall silent and listen, but all you can hear is the gurgling of underground water. If you listen intently enough, it becomes voices, a man and a woman in conversation, a cyclic rising and falling in which you can hear timbre and cadence but not the words, and in the end it’s just moving water.

Outside in the hot sunlight you’re jerked into another century. Inside it was easy to feel that all these events were layered together and happening simultaneously: The haunting, a wall smoked black by Native American fires, the crypt of bones, the laughter of young lovers exploring the cave. Outside it’s just Adams, Tennessee, circa 2000, and a vague nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been and can never go.

Chris is locking up the cave. Some people might talk to you, she says. But a lot of people won’t talk about it at all. After that Blair Witch movie came out, this place was sort of overrun with reporters and writers. But some people around here don’t think it’s anything to joke about. Some of them have seen things and heard things and feel the whole business should just be left alone.

I don’t really know what to think, Tim Henson tells me. I know something happened, but I’ve never really seen anything myself. I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they have. A friend of mine was fishing down in front of the cave and swears he saw a figure, a human figure, that just disappeared. And people say they see lights around that property. But I’m particular about finding an explanation for things I see and hear. And so far I’ve always been able to find an explanation that satisfies me.

Henson’s the superintendent of the water department in Adams, but he’s also the town’s unofficial historian, a walking encyclopedia on the Bell family and their troubles, who can quote courthouse records and church rolls from the nineteenth century without having to look them up. He’s the man that people come looking for when they’re doing a book or a documentary about the Bell Witch. Most recently, he spent some time being interviewed for The Learning Channel. Henson comes across as a shrewd and intelligent man, and his take on the legend makes as much sense as any other I’ve heard.

It doesn’t matter to me if it’s true or not, he says. I guess something happened. There’s about forty books now about it, and you don’t write forty books about nothing. There’s been three in the last year or so, and just the other day a fellow gave me a piece on the witch from an old 1968 Playboy. But I keep an open mind on all that. What I’m interested in is the story and the history, the Bells themselves and the way they interacted with their neighbors. There was a bunch of students down at Mississippi State University who tried to prove it was all a hoax, that Joshua Gardner hoaxed the whole county just to marry Betsy. But it’s hard to say.

But folks still believe in it her? I asked.

Oh yes. Some do. And they figure it’s not too smart to make fun of it or to get into it too deep. There was a couple here, a descendant of John Bell and one from Joshua Gardner. They fell in love and courted all their lives, but they were afraid to marry because of the Bell Witch.

When I was kid I read an issue of Life magazine about the seven greatest American ghost stories, and that was the first time I heard of the Bell Witch. Later my uncle, who was a great storyteller and had read the early books, fleshed out the tale. I found the books and read them myself, and for my money it’s the quintessential ghost story. I figured that someday I’d go to Robertson County and see the Bell farm, which seemed to me an almost mythic place existing only in its own strange fairy-tale geography.

It was years before I made my first visit, more years still before I made my second.

The first I made with my uncle, whom I held in great esteem. I was beginning to read Steinbeck and Algren, and he seemed to be one of their characters come to life. He was sort of a restless-footed hard drinker, hard traveler, barroom brawler. Plus he had a tattoo on his bicep: a dagger with a drop of blood at its tip, a scroll wound round the blade that read, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. He had lied about his age to get into World War II, then crouched seasick and heartsick in the prow of a landing craft while the beaches at Normandy swam toward him like something out of a bad dream. He fought yard by yard across France and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a hero, and he had the medals to prove it, though he didn’t think they amounted to much.

After the war he bummed around the country, working where he could and riding freight trains, sleeping sometimes in places you don’t normally want to associate with sleeping: jails, boxcars, graveyards. He was an honest and an honorable man, but he’d been down the road and back. He was what they used to call “a man with the bark on.”

By the time we rode out to the Bell farm, a lot of time had passed, and he had settled down, quit drinking, and become a respectable family man.

At the time the cave was private property (it still is, but it’s set up as a tourist attraction), and we weren’t allowed to see it, let alone go inside. So we talked to a few locals, went looking for the graveyard and whatever remnants of Bell’s old log home that might remain. The graveyard is in a cedar grove a mile or so off U.S. 41, and it’s not easy to find. But it’s been found time and again by vandals, who stole Bell’s original tombstone and even dug up some of the graves. All that remains of the house are a few of the stones it used to stand on.

It was dark before we found our way out of the woods, and though we were trying to maintain a degree of detached curiosity, it was undeniable that this was an eerie place.

A few months later my uncle and his wife turned up at my house in the middle of the night with a strange tale. H looked nervous and haggard, far from the cool and collected man I was accustomed to. Something had jarred him, and he didn’t take long getting around to it.

That thing has followed me home, he said.

Life had gone on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. What thing?

That Bell Witch, or whatever it is. We keep hearing things, seeing things. It’s about to drive us crazy.

What kind of things? I asked.

We’ve heard voices. People mumbling, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. A hell of a racket that sounded like you’d dropped a chest of drawers from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor. You go look and there’s nothing there. The other night I looked out the kitchen window and saw this ball of blue light just rise up from the ground and move off into the woods.

I didn’t know what to say.

We want you to sleep in that bedroom where we hear that stuff, he said. If you hear something, at least we’ll know we’re not going crazy.

There was no way I wanted to do that. But by now I was trying to get down the road and back myself, and I had a reputation to maintain. I was also hoping this would turn out to be his idea of a practical joke.

All right, I said.

This is what I heard, or think I heard:

I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a light on. At about three in the morning I was reading an old copy of Reader’s Digest when I heard a chuckle, a soft, malicious chuckle of just a few seconds’ duration. It seemed to come from no particular point in the room.

I thought it was a joke. I jerked open the bedroom door. There was no one there. I went through the house. Everyone was asleep.

It was a long time until daylight.

What did I hear? I don’t know. Did I really hear it at all? I don’t know that, either, and I wouldn’t argue it either way. It doesn’t seem to matter. You hear what you believe you hear.

My uncle lives in West Tennessee near a town named after Joshua Gardner’s brother, and I called him the other night.

Did you really hear all that stuff in that house, or were you just pulling my leg? I asked him.

We heard things right up until we sold the place and moved, he said. It sort of died down, but every now and then we’d hear something. You’ll notice nobody lives too long in that house. It’s changed hands several times since we sold it.

I told him I had been back to Robertson County and that I was writing an article about the Bell Witch.

It might be best to leave that stuff alone, he said.

I don’t know if there’s any truth in all this business. Because almost two hundred years have passed since the original haunting supposedly occurred, I don’t suppose anyone else will know. But I do know that the world is a strange and wondrous place. There are mysteries on every side if you care to look. I also know that I don’t know nearly as much now as I thought I did at twenty-five. If I stacked the things I know next to the ones I don’t, I wouldn’t have a very tall stack

Every question is multiple choice, and truth depends on your frame of reference. It sometimes seems an act of hubris to even form a conjecture.

I’d leave that stuff alone, I heard time after time from one source or another, and it might be worth remembering that the Bell Witch saved her strongest malice for scoffers and debunkers. It might be wise to keep one’s disbelief to oneself.

On the other hand, she was clairvoyant. So it might be best not to think about that stuff at all.

SEE IT AS A TREASURE CHEST or, more aptly, a Pandora’s box unleashing into the world not evil or hardships or death but ruminations and lamentations and commentaries upon them, fading picture postmarks mailed from a world that was already growing remote in 1952. That was the year Harry Smith released his Anthology of American Folk Music, and it must have been something to see: eighty-four songs on six LP records, two discs each for the three volumes, each volume with a title: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. All in an elaborate, metal-hinged album accompanied by Smith’s surreal liner notes in a homemade booklet festooned with occult and arcane symbols.

The LP format was new in 1952. No longer was a record restricted to one song per side. Now each side could contain a series of songs, and the producer could play with them, arrange them in any order he chose. This was a revolutionary concept, and Harry Smith made the most of it.

The Anthology is a case of the sum being greater than its parts, and Smith achieved this because he heard sounds not just as themselves, but in relationship to other sounds, and set out to make a sort of aural hologram. Perfectly ordinary voices, even pleasant voices singing pleasant songs, are interred side by side with brief three-minute vignettes of darkness that light will not defray, horror that is only heightened by its contrast with the ordinary, so that some of the voices sound like screeches and mumbles and whispers leaked through mad-house walls, while the normal world continues without a misstep or altered heartbeat.

His thinking, in the sequencing of the Anthology, is so strange as to be almost beyond comprehension, but there’s a clue on the cover of the original liner notes. A drawing shows the hand of God tuning a dulcimer to the Celestial Monochord, tuning it to a Heavenly harmony that unites Air, Fire, Water, And Earth. His plan was to tie together the four volumes of the Anthology in a similar fashion, but only three were released in ‘52. (the fourth, which Smith apparently meant to represent Earth, was put out last year by Revenant Records.)

There wasn’t much of a market for folk music in 1952, other than prettified versions of songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Goodnight Irene”, sweetened and made palatable enough for Your Hit Parade. To a generation of ears attuned to Perry Como and Patti Page, the Anthology’s old hardscrabble songs full of loss and death must have sounded totally alien, rantings and ravings and exhortations from another dimension.

Although the bulk of the songs was recorded only twenty-five or so years earlier (between 1927 and 1932), they seemed to be coming out of a world far more remote than that. This was not easy-listening music, it was not soothing Muzak played in the background as you lived your life. This was darker stuff. There was something there, crouched down out of sight, but you had to squint to see it. You had to meet these songs halfway, and the halfway point was not always a pleasant place to be. Sometimes it was alien, too: A coal mine in West Virginia; a plank road that began nowhere and led circuitously back to the same place; a claustrophobic block in the French Quarter that existed nowhere save in the geography of Richard Rabbit brown’s James Alley Blues; an old railroad camp (where Bob Dylan would find a verse he’d later use, like scrap lumber replevied to shore up “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”); an unreal geography in a cold, sourceless sepia light.

Stage props abound, jarring and dissimilar as symbols slid from the surface of a Dali painting: Kassie’s watch, Dock Boggs’s red rocking chair, the folding bed Furry Lewis’s woman welcomed him to. It seems to be the setting for a thousand tales told long ago or tales not yet created.

Almost all this music came from the South, but it was a South folks figured themselves well shed of. There was something almost shameful about it. The South was trying to turn a face to the future, to catch up with the rest of the country in its pursuit of the American Dream. Post war prosperity had hit, rock n’ roll was on the horizon, people wanted gleaming appliances in every kitchen and fish-finned cars in every garage. People wanted what was new, and this stuff was decidedly not new. It was primitive and unsophisticated, and folks would just as soon not hear it. It was the idiot child chained to the bedpost, the great-uncle who went to Texas and was hanged as a horse thief.

Which is all to say that the country was not waiting with bated breath for Harry Smith’s Anthology. What is amazing is that enough copies fell into just the right hands. Hands that were maybe already tuning guitars or that would be compelled to pick up guitars by the sheer magnetism of the music these records contained— enough of the right hands to sow the seeds for the ‘60s folk revival and subsequent ones (or you could say that it never went away, just dropped off the Hit Parade). The present alt-country Americana movement and bands like Wilco still owe a debt to Harry Smith, which magazines like No Depression freely acknowledge. The whole Greenwich Village-Cambridge-San Francisco scene derived from it as did clubs like Gerde’s Folk City, the Bitter End, the Troubadour and a panoply of performers as diverse as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Saint-Marie: The whole thing being chronicled in Sing Out! and Broadside magazines in a heady movement that in retrospect seems forever poised before the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, a time when it seemed perfectly logical to believe that a song could change the world.

Van Ronk said, The Anthology was our Bible. We all knew every word of it, including the songs we hated. They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire house would rise in a body and finish the quote along with them. It was like that.

And then there was Dylan. It is not such a stretch to postulate that without Harry Smith, Dylan the folk singer would never have been. He certainly would have been different. Part of the legend he has propagated about his early years is that he once played piano in Bobby Vee’s band. Vee was a minor teen idol around 1960, and there is an aching void between Bobby Vee and Harry Smith. So Dylan might only have been a variation on Bobby Vee or a white Little Richard, whom he used to emulate with his high school rock band.

It is unclear where Dylan first heard the Anthology. It is probably in the late 50s, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota and playing gigs at a folk club in Dinkytown, a raffish and bohemian district in Minneapolis. What is clear is that he heard it and took it to heart. (That’s where the wealth of folk music was, he later said. It’s all poetry, every single one of those songs.) His first album, released in 1962, contains his take on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, from volume three of the Anthology, and one of his earliest songs, Hard Times in New York Town, is a virtual rewrite of the Bently Boys’ Down on Penny’s Farm, from the second volume.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong in this. From Robert Johnson to John Hurt to Furry Lewis, these old images and calls and responses roll down the years like echoes, like memories. Folk music and the blues have been constantly borrowed back and forth, reshuffled lines, put them in new surroundings, as if there is a vast supply of lines and metaphors and archetypes that serve as pieces that can always be assembled into new puzzles.

Popular culture critic Griel Marcus wrote an entire book to prove that the Anthology was the invisible substructure to The Basement Tapes, the fabled sessions that Dylan and The Band recorded in Woodstock in 1967, and the case he makes is more than persuasive.

But in the long haul none of this changes what Smith did, and from a perspective of time it seems scarcely to matter. None of this Dylan, The Band, John Cohen’s New Lost City Ramblers, the folk movement, the fact that the Anthology resurrected the careers of musicians presumed long dead sums up Smith’s accomplishment. In the end, the Anthology stands on its own as an eerie, prescient, and elusive piece of work, as if it had neither antecedent nor forebear.

Sometimes the Anthology is a historical document. Sometimes it is a subjective comment on itself. Sometimes it’s a mirror reflecting life back at you, casting a normal reflection, but then you move, and it’s a warped fun-house glass that sends back the comic or grotesque or both. Occasionally it’s even a scryer’s crystal that lets you see further into the human condition than you wanted to see.

In an essay on the Anthology called Smith’s Memory Theater, Robert Cantwell wrote, Listen to I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground again and again. Learn to play the banjo, and sing it yourself over and over again, study every printed version, give up your career and maybe your family, and you will not fathom it.

WHEN FURRY LEWIS WAS REDISCOVERED in Memphis in 1959 by Sam Charters, nothing much happened. The folk revival, when scholars and musicologists and collectors of worn 78 records on strange labels like Black Patti and Okeh would prowl Mississippi back roads looking for the old men who long ago recorded the music that was strange as the labels, did not come along until the early 60’s. When it did, bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Furry Lewis found themselves on the road again, playing to new audiences at the Newport Folk Festival and the East Coast coffeehouse circuit. Those old country-blues songs that had been dismissed, almost forgotten, were popular again.

Furry was born Walter Lewis in that fabled, near-mythic birthplace, and graveyard, of the blues, Greenwood, Mississippi. Just when is a matter of conjecture; Lewis was prone to altering his past history to suit the needs of the moment (he asserted that he invented the bottleneck style of guitar-playing that Robert Johnson used and that he was a protégé of W.C. Handy). The consensus is that he was born in 1893.

He didn’t tarry long in Greenwood. His family moved to Memphis when he was seven years old. Before he was out of school, he was playing with folks who would one day be hailed as Beale Street legends Will Shade, the Memphis Jug Band, and Handy, the man credited with igniting the first blues craze.

Furry was soon touring Arkansas and Mississippi with the medicine shows that were prevalent in the rural South of that time. By his teens, he was playing the jukes with Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He claimed to have learned the rudiments of guitar as a child from a street musician known to him only as Blind Joe. The rest he learned on his own, writing original songs in a tablet, and recasting ragtime pieces and popular songs with lines from the stockpile of interchangeable blues poetry that has been dipped into by everyone from Jimmie Rodgers to Bob Dylan.

In the late 1920’s, Furry recorded twenty-three songs. Thus, Furry was squarely part of the 1927-29 historical musical outpouring that was probably the richest period in American recording. Men like Ralph Peer were scouring the South for talent, but no one had yet figured out what would sell and what wouldn’t. The playing field was momentarily level and everyone had a shot, black bluesmen from the Delta and white string bands from the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Virginia. At least until the Great Depression hit and the record business nearly stopped, and then many musicians went back to doing what they were doing before.

What Furry had been doing before, aside from making music, was working for the city of Memphis. Despite losing a leg in a railroad accident in 1917 (doctors had replaced it with a wooden stump), Lewis got employment in 1922 as a street sweeper, a job he would hold off and on for the next forty-four years.

Those twenty-three recorded songs formed the strongest part of Furry’s musical legacy. Mostly based on the twelve-bar blues pattern and played in open tunings, his songs featured familiar blues motifs that bobbed in and out like debris in turbulent waters, railroads and highways, cops and authority, empty beds, women who cling too tightly or won’t hold on at all and all shot through with sardonic humor and violence that lies around the next bend in the road.

“I believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my own”, he sings in Furry’s Blues, his tone confiding, as if he’s passing on hard-won knowledge, “I’m gonna kill everybody that have done me wrong.”

Impending violence fuels his songs. Frustration and anger seethe just under the surface and there is a feeling that things could go south at a moment’s notice. “If you want to go to Nashville men and they ain’t got no fare”, he sings, “Cut your good girl’s throat and the judge will send you there”.

When things get too heavy, there’s dark humor: “I went down to the I.C. train, laid my head on the I.C. tracks,” he sings in Cannon Ball Blues. “Seen the I.C. comin’, Lord, and I snatched it back.”

Furry’s masterpiece is Kassie Jones, a long, imaginative reworking of the traditional song about the death of engineer Casey Jones in a 1900 train wreck in Canton, Mississippi. But Furry makes it his own, literally. The song begins typically enough with an account of Casey as a folk hero, but takes a trip to the surreal when Furry himself emerges as a character: Chased to his woman’s gate by the police, welcomed to her folding bed, then on the road again, his name on the back of his shirt, “he’s a natural-born Eastman don’t have to work.”

Driven by Furry’s hypnotic percussive bass strings, the song sounds like something Sam Phillips would have recorded at Sun Studio thirty years later.

In the 1970’s, age had enfeebled his musicianship to the point that he was forced to get by on the tricks and showmanship of his medicine-show days, but, paradoxically, a brief fame touched him. In 1975, he opened in Memphis for the Rolling Stones, and in 1976 Joni Mitchell wrote Furry Sings the Blues about him. He even appeared in a movie that stars Burt Reynolds, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.

Furry had attended John Hurt’s funeral in Greenwood, and most of the other country bluesmen were in the ground, too. By the time of his death in 1981, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. The strife and hard times Furry had written about were still around but they were being addressed by a different kind of music. The blues had gone Big City, and the acoustic country blues were practiced mostly by purists and academicians.

Maybe Furry himself said it best, in his reworking of St. Louis Blues, Time done been/Won’t be no more.

WHEN EMISSARIES OF THE BBC showed up at the Ryman Auditorium in 1946 to record performances by country musicians no doubt to allow perplexed Londoners back home to hear what the rustic folks in the colonies considered entertainment. One of the first musicians they spotlighted was the Dixie Dewdrop. That would be Uncle Dave Macon, David Harrison Macon from Rutherford County, Tennessee, already seventy-six years old in 1946 and as unlikely a superstar as country music has ever seen.

But no one at the Opry was surprised. How could they not have chosen him? Who could compare to Uncle Dave? Macon in full-tilt abandon was like a natural force unleashed, and when he got unwound and release arrived it would be like watching destruction from the eye of a hurricane. He buckdanced and flashed his gold-toothed grin and twirled his banjo like a baton, brought it to his shoulder with the neck pointed at the audience and sprayed notes like a musical Gatling gun. His stamping and percussive rapping on his instrument rendered the idea of a rhythm section laughable: You couldn’t duplicate this pandemonium, any effort would be the palest echo of the seemingly infinite energy he expended. Uncle Dave must have been hard on banjos.

He had arrived at the Ryman by a circuitous route, and in his quieter moments of reflection, late at night and winding down and alone in the Nashville Hotel where he finished out his days, he must have pondered the string of coincidences and singularities that had moved his life in so peculiar a direction.

Macon traveled a path that was to become familiar to the rural musicians who made it to the recording studios in the late 1920’s their names are legion. But that path is now lost, it was unique to its time and place and simply does not exist anymore, no one will travel it again.

The Macons were a prosperous family before the Civil War. They owned upward of two thousand acres and various businesses, including distilleries and sawmills. But the cards fell wrong for prosperous farmers in the South, and by the time David Harrison Macon was born in 1870, things weren’t looking so optimistic. Yankee Reconstruction had its foot on the region’s neck and was pushing hard. Dave’s father, John, struggled until 1883, and then decided, like a lot of other folks, that better times lay in the cities instead of the hardscrabble countryside. So he sold the house and what was left of the land, far fewer than two thousand acres, and loaded furniture and children onto the wagon, hitched up the mules, and started out the long sixty miles to Nashville. Dave was thirteen years old.

They went into the hotel business, and this, in retrospect, looks like the making of Uncle Dave the entertainer. The place they ran was the Broadway House. This was a time when a motley of entertainers would play the line of theaters on Broadway in downtown Nashville, and all these traveling performers had to stay somewhere. A lot of them chose the Broadway House, partly because they could use the huge open basement for rehearsals. These were performers of various stripes, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and magicians, animal acts and blackface minstrels and rube comedians.

These were also the days when audiences demanded showmanship. They’d come to be entertained, to be taken out of the ordinariness of their lives for the duration of the show, and they would settle for nothing less. Style weighed as heavily as content. Incertitude rang hollow, and mediocre showmen didn’t last too long. Dave saw a lot of rehearsals, and he was soaking up influences from all of them.

About this time a circus turned up in Nashville and pitched its tents in a vacant field. There Macon saw a comedian banjoist named Joel Davidson. The experience must have been revelatory, for Macon himself later wrote, in the often overblown language of the times:

It was Joel Davidson who proved to be the spirit that touched the mainspring of the talent that inspired Uncle Dave to make his wishes known to his dear old mother and she gave him the money to purchase his first banjo.

By 1887 all this had changed by a pocket knife: Macon’s father lay dead in a street altercation and the trial ended in an acquittal for the assailant. Soon the family had abandoned Nashville and the widow Macon headed them for Readyville, a town between McMinnville and Murfreesboro where there was a waystation for stage coaches. She figured that travelers would always need food and a place to sleep. Essentially, they were still in the hotel business.

It is probably here that the idea of becoming a professional musician first entered young Dave’s mind, for he built a makeshift stage atop a barn from which he could give impromptu shows for the travelers who were staying over. One can imagine this: A teenage boy with his open backed banjo and apparently boundless confidence, the end of the day and a skeptical crowd, Dave up there in the falling dark tuning his banjo while the nighthawks dart and check, the audience gauging him and Dave gauging them right back, trying to figure what will work and what won’t for an embryonic repertoire he doesn’t even know he needs yet.

All this time he kept learning songs, collecting them, writing them, stealing them. He also developed a distinctive introductory roll, almost like an invitation, a quiet caesura before the action starts, a musical hand gesturing you inside the song where the story commences, that would kick off most of his later songs.

At the age of twenty-nine, Dave married Matilda Richardson, who over the next twenty years would bear him seven sons. In 1900, with a child on the way, he looked about for a way to make a living. Ever a mule man, he went into the freight business. With a double team of mules, he hauled wagonloads of provisions and building materials and whiskey into towns the railroads did not accommodate. He was barely ahead of the internal combustion engine, but he wasn’t put off by its arrival. He didn’t trust the horseless carriage and he didn’t expect it to last. In From Earth to Heaven, a song he wrote about the freight business, he sings: I’ll bet a hundred dollars to a half a ginger cake/I’ll be here when the trucks is gone.

When he became a more prolific writer of protest songs, this was a theme he returned to again and again: Change is not always for the better, and change for the sake of change is never better. He seems like an early agrarian or one of Robert Penn Warren’s Fugitives, trying to hold on to a mythic South that had been slipping through Southern fingers ever since the War. He believed in flesh and blood. He had more faith in a beast of burden he could talk to rather than some mechanical contrivance that would not do his bidding. In days to come he would own cars and even write a paean to Henry Ford’s invention, but he never learned to drive one and he was always a little surprised when they performed as they were supposed to.

Now here’s a stop on the road that doesn’t exist anymore. Fiddlin’ John Carson had a Victrola record released that sold way beyond expectations. It was the first country-music hit. Folks scraped up the money to buy it and hoped later they could scrape up the money to buy a phonograph to play it on. It seemed an occasion of country people embracing one of their own who’d in some manner made good and transcended them but managed to keep intact the roots they held in common.

The record companies were amazed, but they were not stupid. They began to look around for other rural musicians.

Records were largely a sideline then, carried in furniture stores rather than music shops. The Sterchi brothers owned a chain of furniture stores that carried a line of Vocalion recordings. Dave had hauled a lot of furniture, and by now he was the best-known musician in the region. He’d been performing informally (one can’t imagine a formal performance by Uncle Dave Macon) for years at dances and private parties or wherever anybody wanted to hear a banjo played. He even had a partner now, a young man named Sid Harkreader who played guitar and fiddle and sang harmony with him. So when Vocalion asked the Sterchi brothers to help line up new talent, the first name out of the hat was Dave Macon’s.

It must have been a potent moment: He’d been making music for free all his life and now he had the chance to perhaps get paid for it and lay everything else aside. But he was already fifty-three years old, a little late in life to be changing careers. But there seemed little choice. The freight business he knew had been supplanted by automobiles and he still had children at home to feed. He signed with Vicalion and headed for New York, not knowing that he was blazing a trail that countless musicians would follow: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, plus scores of others whose epitaphs are just names on old phonograph records.

His first recording was Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy, a song that in later years he would say he learned from a black man named Tom Davis, but history has forgotten Davis’s story and no one knows where he learned it or how close to the original (if such a thing exists) Macon’s version is. By making it his first record, Macon must have considered it his best shot at launching a new career and it is a song he returned to again and again and recorded numerous times, as if striving toward some ideal of musical perfection.

All the versions have the same feel of not only lost landscapes and lost times but a lost people, a race supplanted. The banjo rolls hollowly out and it seems to be coming from some place enormously distant, from some alternate world outside time itself, and the voice when it comes, conspiratorial and amused, jerks you abruptly into a plot that’s already started: There’s stolen meat in your knapsack, hounds on your track, and you’re pulling for your shanty home where Mandy is waiting. The song is all motion and action, there’s no time for rationalization or introspection but, above all, it is so caught up in the joy of life that everything else seems incidental.

In this song and in songs like Way Down the Old Plank Road and Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line (both included by Harry Smith, no slouch in taste, on his Anthology of American Folk Music), the music creates a visceral three-dimensional world then draws you in to a time that doesn’t exist anymore but stills feels prescient. Times and circumstances alter, the music says, but the eternal human frailties and verities remain the same. There’s always that sense of being vividly alive. In Way Down the Old Plank Road, the feeling of desperate abandon when Macon cries KILL YOURSELF! sounds as if the words could be either a command or a mental note to himself. Hard times or good times, there is a stoic, dark-humored core that seems to render qualifiers or modifiers irrelevant. It is not the good times or the bad times that matter but the experience of living itself.

The reaction to these first recordings was immediate. There seemed to have been an audience already poised and waiting on Uncle Dave, and all that was needed was this connection to bind them together.

When he was booked into the Loews Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, there weren’t enough seats for all the folks who wanted to sit in them. A two-week engagement extended to five, and still the place was packed. The theater manager was arrested by the fire marshal for permitting too many fans inside.

Soon Macon was playing the Loews chain from Boston to Florida and beyond. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, Uncle Dave Macon was on the road to becoming country music’s newest superstar.

Macon was far luckier than most: The crash of 1929 sent most rural musicians back to sharecropping and coal mining, but Macon had a job on the Grand Ole Opry, and he always had a label willing to release his music.

He wrote protest songs about prohibition (Dave took it personal that it had become so hard to buy a decent drink of whiskey), about the downtrodden farmer (Eleven Cent Cotton), and about whatever peeved him at the moment always with a stoic humor that regarded the world with a sort of sardonic fatalism.

Not long after Blind Willie McTell graduated from the school for the Blind in Macon, Georgia, he turned up in Atlanta. (There’s a theory that says he’s Blind Willie McTear, that an instructor at the school misheard McTell and wrote the name down wrong, so perhaps the mythic weight of having your name committed to some sort of legal document in that time and place made you beholden not only to the authority that signed the papers and affixed seals of legality, but to the lesser authority that served and interpreted them.) Something was beginning to happen in American music, and a lot of it was happening in Atlanta. Street musicians dependent upon coins tossed in guitar cases or passed hats were drawn there by the city’s size and relative prosperity. If you only counted the blind musicians and ignored the sighted, you’d still come up with an impressive number.

Truly there must have been giants on the earth in those days. All those blind blues singers were steady on the move, crisscrossing the South like black spores on a glass slide, setting up on street corners and opening their guitar cases, ears attuned for the clink of change, always alert for a new song they could borrow and make their own with lines from the floating debris of a thousand other blues songs. They lugged their guitars and coat-hanger harmonica racks, uncertain where they’d be when night fell on them, whose floor they’d sleep on, where the next meal was coming from and when it would get there. The corners on Decatur Street must have thronged with them; the competition for prime locations must have been fierce. Imagine the traffic jams, the fortunes a seeing-eye-dog franchise could have made. It was a harsh and provisional world McTell had come into. You had to be tough just to survive.

Dark was the night, cold was the ground. When Blind Willie Johnson turned up in Atlanta, McTell almost immediately hooked up with him. Johnson was a slide-guitar player of great technical proficiency, and he was also a Baptist minister, and between them they covered the field, both the secular and the washed in the blood.

Riley Puckett was there. He was a white guitarist (blind too, of course, and also working the streetcorners) who within a couple of years would play lead guitar with the Skillet Lickers, his innovative picking and odd bass runs helping the Skillet Lickers to sell a lot of records and making this white string band the Rolling Stones of their day. (Bootleggers rejoiced and laid on an extra shift when the Skillet Lickers came to Atlanta to record.)

A lot of things will remain mysterious about Blind Willie McTell, and not the least of them is whether or not he ever played with Puckett. But the odds are that they met. Some of the Skillet Lickers’ recordings, like Georgia Rag and Razor Ball, have the ragtimey feel of McTell songs, and there was at this time an enormous amount of cross-pollination going on in music. You are what you hear, perhaps. McTell’s own music is more Piedmont than Mississippi Delta blues. His voice is higher and more nasal than the conventional blues singer’s voice, and the music is more accessible than, say, Son House or Charley Patton. (Having recorded McTell, the archivist John Lomax initially declined to release the sessions. He had recorded McKinley Morganfield and Son House, and being more familiar with the traditional country blues sound, he complained that McTell did not sound enough like a blues singer.)

Of course, if you’re playing for an audience and you expect to get paid, the idea is to play something the audience wants to hear. A background of performing in carnivals and tent shows and the picnics that at the time were part of the African-American social scene had given McTell’s repertoire a broader sweep than most Bluesmen. Listening to his catalogue, you hear music that ranges from traditional twelve-bar blues to ragtime to sly, ribald songs that must have made him the life of the party, to songs that existed for no other reason than to allow him to do some virtuoso guitar-picking, and that hat must have come back heavy then. The conclusion that he knew what he was doing is incontestable.

McTell and Blind Willie Johnson traveled what was known as the Georgia circuit: Atlanta and Augusta, Savannah and Macon. Had they wandered south and stumbled across the fabled crossroads where a decade later Robert Johnson would deal with Satan, McTell might have bargained for his vision: He had been blind all his life and he could already play the guitar.

Still, he was luckier than most. He’d learned at the blind school in Macon not only to read words but to read music by feeling out the shape of the notes with his fingertips, in a time when even most sighted musicians learned and performed by ear. And he could take care of himself. He’d been a hard worker since his early teens, working with carnivals and traveling medicine shows and minstrel shows.

He was born in Thomson, Georgia, either in 1898 or 1901, depending on which source you want to believe. By the time the McTells (or McTears: there’s another story that someone on the father’s side of the family had changed the name from McTell because of trouble with whiskey stills and government revenuers) had moved to Statesboro, Willie had been shown the rudiments of guitar playing by his mother, and he gathered more skill from neighbors and visiting pickers and whomever he met, soaking it all up. Already he was writing songs in his head and changing other tunes to his liking and already he was developing an affinity for wandering, a habit that would stay with him all his days.

By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he’d also taken up the twelve-string guitar. He’d learned on the six-string, but had seen that for his purposes the twelve was infinitely better. With its complementary strings tuned an octave higher than the regular strings, not only was there more volume, but whether fingerpicking or using a bottleneck, the higher strings enriched the melody and elaborated on it. It also set him apart from other street musicians.

All these street pickers were living too close to the ground to know that they were part of the dawning of the richest, most complex period of American music. This period began around 1926 and would last only until the beginning of the Depression, and it would not come again.

Though McTell couldn’t have known it, by 1926 the record business was turning toward him. The sales of phonograph records had grown exponentially, and things were to a point where there was a lot of money to be made. To the surprise of executives in New York, people in the rural South bought a lot of music. A record by a fiddle player named John Carson sold faster than Atlanta record stores could restock it. This was the sort of news that got noticed in New York. People so poor they sometimes had to choose between a phonograph record or a new pair of shoes were opting for the music, choosing the magic over the practical, the mystery and wonder of their lives encoded into spiraling grooves of shellac.

McTell sings in Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo:

I’ll take all my money

THE WEEK BEFORE MERLEFEST I went by to check on Grady, and he was putting a fuel pump on his RV. It was a huge RV so ancient it looked like something the Joads might have fled the Dust Bowl in, and something was always going wrong with it. Grady had skinned knuckles and a half-drunk beer and a home-rolled Prince Albert cigarette stuck to his lower lip that waggled when he talked.

He was not in the best of moods.

I don’t think I’m going to this one, he said. It’s got to where all this traveling around costs too much money. I believe I’ve about seen everything anyway.

I looked at the RV. It was emblazoned with hand-pained legends memorializing bluegrass festivals past. The Bean Blossom Festival, the Foggy Mountain Festival, MerleFest ‘96, ‘97, ‘98. Maybe he had seen everything. He told me about Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, cracking a bullwhip and preening as the newly crowned King of Folk. Another time at Newport, his RV had been parked next to the one belonging to Mother Maybelle Carter. They had sat in lawn chairs and watched twilight come on, and she had shown him how to play the autoharp, placing his fingers just so to form the chords.

Grady told me a lot of things, but he had the goods to back it all up. The walls of the house he rented were papered with surrealistic collage of photographs of the high and the mighty, the late and the great: Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Don Reno and Red Smiley. Grady was in a lot of the pictures. Bill Monroe was embracing him like a long-lost brother in one, and there were pictures of Grady’s own band, the Greenbriar Boys, skinny guys in Hank Williams suits standing before old-timey WSM microphones as if they were frozen back in the back and white ‘40s.

If you go, go up and talk to Doc Watson, Grady said.

I may. I always wanted to know where he got that arrangement for Sitting on Top of the World.

He got it off that old record by the Mississippi Sheiks.

I heard that record. That’s not the arrangement.

Well, hell. Just go up and ask him. Walk right up to him, he’ll tell you. He’s not stuck up like a lot of them are. He’s a hell of a nice guy.

Well, he’s blind. Maybe that makes him a little more approachable.

Grady didn’t want to hear it. A blind man can be a prick the same as anybody else, he said. He’s just a hell of a nice guy.

Early in the morning of October 23, 1985, Arthel Doc Watson received the worst news a father can get: His son was dead. Eddy Merle Watson had been plowing on a steep hillside when the tractor he was driving overturned and rolled on him.

It was a blow that Doc almost did not recover from. It was a blow that resonated on a number of levels: Aside from the incalculable loss of a child, Doc had lost a friend and a fellow musician. For a time it seemed he might even lose the music as well, because Merle and Doc and the music were inextricably bound together.

In 1964, when he was fourteen, Merle had learned to play guitar while his father was away. He had learned to play it so well that when Doc went back on the road, Merle went with him. That fall they played Berkeley Folk Festival, and he was all over the place on Doc’s next album, Southbound. They toured and recorded together for the next twenty-one years, right up to that morning in 1985.

Merle became a proficient blues guitarist, and some of the albums subtly reflect his love for the genre. But he could pick flattop guitar with the best of them, and he could frail the banjo in the style of country performers like Uncle Dave Macon. When he died he was a few days away from winning Frets magazine’s Bluegrass Picker of the Year award.

In what may be one of the few purely altruistic gestures in the music business, a handful of folks decided to do something. A friend of Doc’s, Bill Young, together with Townes and Ala Sue Wyke, approached Doc with a proposition. Townes is Dean of Resource Development at Wilkes Community College, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and the three of them convinced Doc to play a benefit concert on the campus. The funds raised would be used to create a memorial garden in Merle’s honor.

Doc agreed, and a few of Merle’s friends, including the banjoist Tim O’Brien, volunteered their time and ended up playing from the beds of two flatbed trucks.

That was the first MerleFest, in 1988. By contrast, the festival in 1999, while still held on the college campus, was a vast sprawl of tents and stages and concessions accommodating more than a hundred performers and over sixty-two thousand people in the audience.

There was not a flatbed truck in sight.

JMW I’ve seen several interviews with you recently in various magazines around Nashville. Seems like the most substantive was the one you did a couple of years ago for Water Stone.