Old Nathan, Second Edition, page 5
“Thin I guess,” Old Nathan said, “thet you kin leave, for I druther have your space thin your presence.”
The cat sauntered in, licking cobwebs from his fur. He’d hidden under the cabin when the strangers arrived, showing that he didn’t care any more for the folk than his master did.
“Wouldn’t mind a bowl of milk,” the cat yowled. “Seein’s as you won’t fetch me a dollop of good bloody meat.”
Old Nathan bent sideways to scratch the ears of the big yellow tom. He kept his eyes on the human visitors and didn’t answer the animal.
For a moment, the two men were all stillness and silence. Then Bascom Hardy shook the tension loose with a laugh and said, “Didn’t mean to start off on the wrong foot. My name’s Bascom Hardy, and I’ve come t’ make a business offer t’ you. Ned”—he didn’t look around at the half-breed—“whyn’t you set on the porch while me ’n Mister Nathan, here, we talk business.”
“No more juice to either of ’em thin woods rats,” the cat remarked scornfully. “Though they might be fun t’ kill, specially”—he eyed the half-breed slouching onto the porch as ordered—“the squatty one.”
“Set, then,” the cunning man said grudgingly. He gestured his visitor to the straight-backed chair and sat in the rocker himself. “What is it you come t’ see me for?”
Hardy lifted the offered chair closer to the table in the center of the single room. He glanced around with a false smile as he seated himself.
The cabin had few amenities, though they were all the owner required. Two chairs—the rocker to set in, and the straight chair by the table for when he ate, wrote, or did figures. Chests along one sidewall with stored clothing and a handful of personal items—nothing that would tempt a thief. On the table, an alcohol lamp; and on the chimney board above the walk-in fireplace, five fine porcelain cups, a plate, and a few knickknacks of less obvious purpose.
Hardy focused again on the cunning man’s hot green eyes. “Waal,” he said, “I guess you’re a man wouldn’t be feared of a spook, now, would ye?”
He thought nothing of the sort. His voice cajoled, encouraging Old Nathan to create a fearless self-image which would agree to do whatever the rich man wanted done—but feared to do himself.
“Say yer piece,” Old Nathan said flatly. The chair rocked minutely beneath him, scritch-scritch; the high pine back moving no more than an inch at a stroke.
A pair of titmice, blue-gray with a black tip to their crests, flew in the cabin’s open front door and perched for a moment—one on the underside of a roof pole and the other on the muzzle of the cunning man’s rifle.
“My brother Bynum died over t’ Maury County nigh three months ago,” Bascom Hardy said. “A day past the new moon. He was a rich man, rich as rich.”
“Tsk! There’s a cat here,” chirped one of the titmice as it fluttered from the gun to the roof, then out the back door in concert with its companion. “Tsk! But he can’t ketch us!”
“Like you are yerse’f,” Old Nathan stated flatly. He knuckled his beard, black despite his age, with his knobby right hand.
The cat’s head turned to watch the birds. His tail beat twice. The second time it made a soft thump against the puncheon floor. The big tom got up from beside the rocker and walked toward the visitor’s chair with an evil look in his eyes.
“That’s true, I am,” Bascom Hardy said. His tone was half between irritation at being interrupted and pride at what he took for flattery. “But that’s not a speck t’ do with my brother, and my brother Bynum’s the reason I’m here.”
He glanced around again, unable or unwilling to keep his lip from lifting in a sneer.
The cat rubbed firmly against the visitor’s ankles, leaving a track of hair against the fabric of the black trousers. Hardy squawked, jerking his legs aside as though his boots had slid him into a cesspool.
“Cat!” Old Nathan snapped, coming up off the rocker. “You git back from there!”
The cat lifted his nose. “Hmpf,” he said. “That un don’t half hate cats, don’t he?”
The cunning man’s left index finger pointed. A spark of static popped in the air between Old Nathan and the animal.
“All right, all right,” the cat grumped. “Keep yer britches on.” He padded across the floor, then disappeared out the back door in a single fluid bound.
Bascom Hardy settled himself again in his chair. “That’s better,” he growled. He indicated the roof poles with a lift of his clean-shaven chin. “If thet dirty beast comes up t’ me again, I’ll kick him right through yer shakes.”
Old Nathan remained standing. “Did you hear thet I don’t eat meat, Bascom Hardy?” he asked.
Hardy raised an eyebrow. “I heard thet,” he said. “I don’t see how it signifies.”
“But,” the cunning man rasped, “ye never heerd I was a Quaker as wouldn’t larrup a man to an inch of his life ifen he kicked my cat in my home. Did ye now?”
He grinned at his visitor. His eyes flashed like sparks of burning copper.
“I beg your pardon,” said Bascom Hardy. His voice was sincere, at least in its undertone of fear.
Old Nathan relaxed and walked again to the water barrel. “Tell yer tale, Mister Hardy,” he said. “Tell yer tale.”
“I reckon Bynum knew his time or purty close to it,” Bascom Hardy resumed. “For nigh a month, he’d been sellin’ his notes and his land holdins—at a discount to shift ’em fast, like he’d gone out of his head!”
Hardy’s voice lowered from its tone of shrill disbelief. He bent forward and added, “But he turned it into gold, all his paper and land into gold; and there must ’ve been a mort of it, rich as Bynum was!”
Old Nathan felt his skin tingling. There was nothing he could put a name to, no image or echo from the words his visitor had spoken; but there was something here waiting, and mayhap waiting for the cunning man himself. . . .
Old Nathan saw the image of gold coins tumbling across the surface of the rich man’s mind, as though the brown eyes were windows to Hardy’s thoughts. “Go on,” he said. “Tell yer tale, Bascom Hardy.”
The rocker still nodded from the vehemence with which the old man had risen from it; back and forth, a skritch and a squeal against the wear-polished pine floor.
Hardy blinked and returned to the present moment, but his voice was husky with memory as he said, “Bynum ’n me, we didn’t git on, never had from childhood. We split Pappy’s holdings when he died, and I don’t mind tellin’ ye that Bynum would hev cheated me on the settlement—but I was too sharp fer him!”
“You were full blood kin, you and your brother?” Old Nathan asked suddenly.
Bascom Hardy blinked again. “Eh?” he said. “The same mother, you mean? Thet’s so, but I don’t see how it sig . . .”
His voice trailed off as he heard it echoing previous words.
Old Nathan reached into the air above and behind his head. His eyes were open but fixed somewhere far beyond the solid log walls of his cabin. He felt . . . and it was there, his fingers closing on the bone-scaled jackknife as they always did when he twisted them just right.
He wasn’t sure where the knife was or how he found it; but he did find it, this time and each time before, and perhaps the next time as well.
His visitor’s eyes narrowed. Hardy was sure that the knife had come from Old Nathan’s sleeve, or perhaps had been hidden all the time by the cunning man’s long knobby fingers . . . but it looked as though—
Old Nathan handed the knife to Hardy and said, “Take it, take it. There’s no magic t’ this.“
No more was there; but wherever the knife had been was cooler than the late-August air of the cabin.
Bascom Hardy frowned as he took the knife. It was an ordinary two-blade jackknife, with German-silver bolsters and scales of jigged bone. The shield in the center of one yellow scale was the only thing to differentiate it from thousands of other knives brought into the territory in peddlers’ packs. The inset was true silver, which Old Nathan himself had hammered from a section of ten-cent piece and fixed to the knife by a silver rivet.
“Rub the silver plate with yer thumb ’n hand it back to me,” the cunning man directed. Hardy obeyed, but he frowned both at the brusque tone of the command and his inability to tell what the older man had in mind.
“Tell your tale, Bascom Hardy,” Old Nathan repeated quietly. He held the knife with the shield facing him. When he whispered a few words under his breath, the silver became a clouded gray.
“When I heard the discounts Bynum was takin’, I rid right over to him,” Hardy said. “Fust time I’d seen him since we settled Pappy’s estate, but blood’s thicker ’n water.”
“And gold’s thicker nor both,” the cunning man muttered, his eyes on the shield.
“Lived in a little scrape-hole cabin not so big as this,” Bascom Hardy said scornfully. “Bynum never knew thet if money was power, then power was money too. You got to put out to bring in, the way I do. He was the elder by a year, but I’m the one who got the sense.”
“Some families,” said Old Nathan, “the one child’s as big a durned fool as the next.” If he had glanced up as he spoke, the comment would have been pointed, but the cunning man continued staring at the knife in his hand.
“He’d took to his bed,” Hardy continued. “He knowed he was failin’, thet was sure. Didn’t own a thing no more but the cabin and a few sticks o’ furniture—” The visitor’s eyes danced around the room in which he sat. “And gold. He’d sold all thet land and all them notes-of-hand for gold. And he wouldn’t tell me where it was he kept the gold.”
A figure formed, on the silver shield or in Old Nathan’s mind; he couldn’t be sure, nor did it matter. A crab-faced man, his skin stained yellow by the lingering death of his liver, lying on a corn-shuck mattress with a threadbare blanket pulled up to his throat. The man was bald and aged by sickness, so that he might as easily have been Bascom Hardy’s father as brother.
“He warn’t able t’ care for that gold!” Bascom Hardy added bitterly. “He warn’t able t’ care fer nothin, him a-layin’ there on the bed and not a servant in the house. Couldn’t get up to fetch a dipper of water, Bynum couldn’t!”
“Hadn’t any neighbors in t’ he’p him, then?” Old Nathan asked.
Bascom’s voice had caught when he mentioned the dipper of water. The cunning man did not need his arts to imagine the hale brother at the bedside, tempting the sick man with sight of a cool drink that could be his if only he spoke where his wealth was hidden. . . .
“Bynum didn’t hold with neighbors pokin’ their noses in his business,” Bascom Hardy said sharply.
Old Nathan smiled at the silver. “No more do you,” he said.
“Thet’s as may be!” his visitor snapped. “I told you once, it’s not me thet’s your affair, d’ye hear?”
“Say on, Bascom Hardy,” the cunning man said.
Hardy settled back in his chair, though he couldn’t have been said to relax. “He said he’d come back and tell me of the gold whin the moon was new again,” Bascom said.
On or through the knife’s silver window, Bynum’s jaundiced image mimed the words Bascom spoke aloud.
“ ’Come back here’, that was how he put it,” Bascom continued, “and then he died.” Hardy frowned at the memory. “Didn’t even ask fer a drink, though I had the dipper right there.”
He looked up, his brown eyes full of purpose and as hard as polished chert. “I want you t’ set up in Bynum’s old cabin when the moon goes in, three nights from now. You listen t’ what he says and you won’t be the loser fer it, you hear me?”
Old Nathan was in a dream state where all knowledge was bounded by the blurry walls of the tunnel which linked him to the shield on the knife scale. It was broad daylight in the world of the cabin, but formless gray in his mind.
Bascom Hardy’s voice penetrated with difficulty to the cunning man’s consciousness. The cries of birds and animals going about the business of their lives were lost in the shadows.
“Hit’s been nigh three months since your brother died,” Old Nathan said. The face on the silver was changing to that of a hard, square man of middle age. His front teeth were missing. “Who did ye put t’ setting up afore me?”
“I don’t see it signifies,” Bascom Hardy grumbled. His host’s blurred consciousness disturbed him, though he had no idea of what was going on behind Old Nathan’s hooded eyes.
After a moment, Hardy said, “Gray Jack it was. I have enemies, you kin see thet. He looked out fer me, the way Ned does now. I figgered when the new moon come again, Jack could spend a night in the cabin. If anybody come by t’ speak—waal, he was a brave man, so he told me.”
Old Nathan’s lips twisted into an expression that could have been a smile or a sneer, whichever way a man wanted to read it. “You didn’t say to him thet it was your dead brother would come t’ speak, did ye?” he said. His voice echoed from the gray tunnel of his mind.
“How did I know it was?” the rich man blazed in defensive anger. “Anyhow, Jack didn’t ask me, did he? And there’s an all-fired mess of gold thet my brother hid somewhur, a mess of gold, I tell ye!”
“There’s a well in front of yer brother’s cabin,” Old Nathan said as images streamed across the silver and through his mind.
“There’s nothin’ to the well but water ’n a rock floor,” Bascom Hardy said dismissively. “D’ye think I didn’t try thet the first thing out whin Bynum died?”
“Sompin come out of the well,” the cunning man said. “What I cain’t tell, because my mirror’s silver and there’s things silver won’t show . . . but I reckon it was yer brother.”
“Gray Jack said nobody come,” Bascom said harshly. “I knowed he was lying. Shook like an aspen, he did, whin he tole me in the morning. I figger he run away soon as he seen Bynum.”
“You figger wrong,” Old Nathan said, too flat to be an argument. “The cabin has one door only, and Bynum was to thet door afore yer man heard him. He’d hev run if he could, but he hid under the bed. And yer brother, he et the supper and went out t’ the well again.”
“There’s nothing in thet well, I tell you!” Bascom shouted. “Nor in the cabin neither! I warrant I searched it like no cabin been searched afore.”
He swallowed, then continued more calmly, “Bynum, he’s burried t’ the back of the plot, not the front. I’d hev put him in the churchyard down t’ Ridley, but the Baptists wouldn’t hev him. I reckon they figgered I oughta pay them—but how was I t’ do thet, I ask you, whin I haven’t found airy cent of Bynum’s money?”
Old Nathan smiled again. “Don’t guess money was the problem, them not wanting yer t’ bury yer brother,” he said. The distance from which he spoke took the edge off the words. “What happened t’ Jack, Bascom Hardy?”
The rich man looked up at the roof poles. A strip of bullhide dangled from them, the horns at the top and the coarse hairs of the bull’s tail-tip brushing the floor. “I reckon,” he lied, “Jack went off on his own.”
“He hung hisself,” said the cunning man.
“And what if he did?” Bascom Hardy shouted. “Hit was his own choice, warn’t it? Just like the poor folk, they don’t hoe their crop ’n thin they blame me when I buy their land at the sheriff’s sale!”
“Was a woman the next time,” said Old Nathan as the images in his silver-washed mind changed. “Old Mamie Fergusson from Battle Branch down Columbia way.”
Bascom Hardy had come to Old Nathan because of the cunning man’s reputation, but he squirmed nonetheless at proof of the reality behind that reputation. “Guess hit might hev been. She come t’ me. I reckon she thought she’d find the gold herse’f, but what she said was she’d sit up fer me.”
“Calls herse’f a witch,” Old Nathan said quietly. “There’s other folks as call her worse.”
“What’s thet to me?” his visitor demanded. “Anyhow, who’re you to speak?”
“The Devil’s loose in the world, Bascom Hardy,” Old Nathan said without emotion, staring into the silver pool. “But I’m the Devil’s master, depend on it.”
Hardy grimaced, upset by the thought and the turn of conversation. “Don’t signify,” he muttered. “Anyhow, she didn’t he’p neither. Guess she run off too.”
“Guess she would hev chose to,” said Old Nathan, “but she didn’t get thet pick. Hit was at the door, and she hid in an old chest while hit et her supper. Your brother Bynum did.”
“Warn’t nothing in thet chest worth hauling off,” Bascom Hardy said uncomfortably. “Nor the chest itself, neither.”
Forestalling the next question, he added, “The old woman, she went off with her daughter. I reckon they’ll put her in the State Farm if she don’t quit shoutin’ and carryin’ on, but thet’s not my business neither!”
Layers of thick gray felt peeled back one by one from around the cunning man. Sunlight streamed into his consciousness, but for a moment he could only shiver despite its warming impact. The knife trembled in his hand, but he didn’t trust his control to put it away just yet.
Birds chirped in fear and anger. One of Old Nathan’s heifers complained loudly at a rabbit which had hopped across the meadow and startled her.
“What’s the matter with you?” Hardy demanded. He was concerned not with his host’s condition, but that the condition might somehow threaten him.
Old Nathan shook himself. He gripped the back of the rocking chair. The solid contact was all that had kept him upright for a moment. “You mind yerself,” he muttered. “Nothin’s the matter with me.”
The yellow tomcat stepped into the cabin again with his head high. There was a titmouse in his jaws. It peeped and fluttered one wing minusculy.
“Whyn’t you set up fer your brother yerse’f, Bascom Hardy?” the cunning man asked.
His visitor looked away from the probing green eyes. “Bynum ’n me, we didn’t git along when he was alive,” Hardy said. “Don’t guess him bein’ dead ud change thet fer the better now—ifen it is him comin’ back, the way he said he would.”
