Chapter 8: Sealed

The piece they played was a duel.

The man behind the cloth talked for a while and then quit, with the band going under him the whole time, and two men walked out onto the sheet with swords, flat and black, and went at it.

I could not have told you whether those two were men standing behind the cloth with a lamp on them or figures cut out of tin and carried on wires. I stopped asking myself about it as soon as it started.

The lamps were hot. My mouth was dry as a boot, and it had been dry since before I sat down.

There were three of us at the table that I could see. The old woman sat in the middle chair in the black dress with the beads on it. Ruthie sat on my right. I sat on the left, with the plate in front of me that I had already eaten off, and the young women stood along the back wall where the light did not reach them.

The play went the way a good play goes, which is that you do not notice it going. Two men fought on a road, and one of them went down, and a woman came out of a house and knelt over him, and it was all happening on a piece of cloth twenty feet away, and I was as far into it as I have ever been into anything.

I had the cup in my hand. I don’t know why I turned my head.

The old woman was eating and she was happy.

She had the red glass tray of dried apples in her lap, and she was taking them one at a time and putting them in her mouth, and she kept her face turned to the sheet the whole while. The duel was still going. She liked it. She had the smile on her that people have at a thing they have waited a long time to see.

And her mouth was working.

I have described this over the years and I have never got it right, so I will say the plain thing. Her jaws went and her throat went, a slow pull, in and in, like a hen working down something it has to get down. She did it over one apple, and then she did it over the next one. There was not a tooth in her head.

My grandmother outlived her teeth, every one of them, and my grandmother ate like a person.

I don’t know what I thought she was. I know I was sitting at the same table with it, and there was a plate in front of me, and there had been food on it.

The cup went out of my fingers and hit the boards and broke.

Her head came off her neck.

It went down on the floor beside the pieces of the cup and turned over once and lay with the face up, toward the sheet, and her jaws were still going. She was watching the duel. She was still eating the apple.

Two of the young women came around the end of the table. They did not hurry. The one in front bent down and took the head up in both hands, one hand under each ear, the way you lift a bowl of something hot out of an oven, and carried it back around the table. The other one had the shoulders, and between them they set it back on the collar and worked it down until it sat, and then they smoothed the hair on either side of the neck and stepped back.

The band did not miss a bar.

I did not get up. I sat there with my hand open where the cup had been and watched the rest of the duel to the end, and the old woman in the middle chair nodded along to it.

How long that went on I could not say.

Then I had the gun in my hand and Ruthie by the wrist and I was on my feet, and I was going for the dark end of the room.

She came. I will give her that. Whatever else was true about that place, she came with me.

The drift ran a hundred feet to the bend, and the lamp was still lit where I had found it lit, and then it was the dark with Ruthie’s wrist in my hand, and I ran it blind, and then there was the gray square of the mouth with the sky behind it. We came out onto the grass and the track. It was cold. It was going gray in the east over the far ridge.

Behind us the ground took a blow. Not a shot — nothing like a shot, no crack in it, just a long low sound down under everything, and it came up through the rails into my feet, and then the ground was moving.

I ran. I don’t remember the next minute. What I have is the sound going on behind me, and then it stopped.

I stopped at the bottom of the grade and turned around and looked back up at it.

There was no hole.

The grass ran up the slope to the rock. The rails came out of the grass and went into the rock and stopped, both of them, side by side. Where the timber frame had stood there was nothing. There was no lamp. There was the mountain.

Half a minute. That was the whole of it. If the cup had held in my fingers we would have been in there.

We went down the draw to the Nine Springs.

Ruthie came the whole way and did not say a word, not once, not then. I never found out what she was thinking.

I got to the water and I was going to sit down on the gravel, and then I wasn’t sitting, I was on my hands and knees with my forehead almost in the creek. It came up in the middle of me and took hold like a fist. The sweat came out cold all over my head and my back, and I threw up into the shallows everything I had eaten up there, and it came up the way it had gone down, which is to say with no taste in it at all.

When it was over I sat back on my heels in the water and thought about my grandfather, because he was the only man I ever heard talk about what a person ought to do when somebody sets a table for him in a place that isn’t his.

He had it two or three ways. The men went under the ground, and the table was set down there, and some of them sat down to it and ate. Some of them came back up. None of the ones who ate came back all the way. He did not tell it as a story with an end on it. He would say it over the stove and then he would say something about the wood, and you would be left standing there holding it.

The rule he gave out of all of it was short. He said: they don’t feed you because they like you.

I had eaten. I had not been able to taste a bit of it going down, and I had got it up onto the gravel, and I knew, the way you know a thing when you are on your knees at a creek, that getting it up had not got it out of me.

There were two people coming down the far side of the cottonwoods. The one in front was a girl with her hair tied back, and I knew her — Dolores Salazar — and I was so glad to see her that I got up onto my feet.

That is the last thing I have from that morning.

I came up out of it three days later in my mother’s front room, on the couch, under a blanket that wasn’t ours, with the fire going hard enough that the room looked bent. I was seventeen.

Tank was in a chair by the door with a bowl on his knees. When he saw my eyes open he set the bowl on the floor.

“Well,” he said.

He did the bear first, because that was the part he wanted.

“That bear laid under that tree till it was light,” he said. “We had our belts through the forks. It bled out under us in the dark and it never moved the whole night.”

“It was a black bear,” I said.

“It was the biggest bear ever killed in this county,” he said. “I’m going up for the hide. When I’m sixty and I’ve got a store and a wife I’ll tell it and you’ll say I’m lying.”

He told me he had gone down off the mountain to the road and got a ride into town and brought the doctor back up with him in the dark. He told me I had run a hundred and four the first night, and that the doctor had said it could have been a hundred and five.

“Ruthie Tobin,” I said. “Where is she.”

“They came and took her home,” he said. “She hasn’t opened her eyes.”

I could hear Tank’s voice out in the kitchen later, going over it for my mother, and he was telling it in the version he liked.

Her father had come into our yard that first night with his hat in his hands. He came again for her, and my mother talked to him at the door, and I could hear the shape of it through the door without the words. I could have gone out to him and I did not. He took her home. I never saw him again after that, and I never saw her.

She had told me up there that she got turned around above the second spring and that the ladies took her in and fed her. I have set that down next to what I saw maybe a thousand times since, and it has never fit. She said they fed her. She has not opened her eyes. I ate at that table and came off that mountain on my own two feet.

That was the first one. In that valley it goes like this. A person goes up the canyon past the second spring. Then you do not hear that they died, because nobody knows whether they died. You hear that they went up there. After a while you do not hear anything at all, and nobody in the family will tell a stranger any different, because there is nothing to tell him.

I did not tell it to anybody for a week. Then I walked down to the Salazars’ and told it to Dolores’s father, on account of he was the only man in that valley who knew the mountain.

Tomás Salazar was a small man with hands like a plasterer’s. He listened to the whole of it without moving, and he did not laugh at any of it, and when I was through he asked me one question.

“What did you eat up there?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

He sat and looked at me for a while, and then he let it go.

Then he told me what the old people in the valley call it. The Dead Show.

The version he had from his grandfather was this. The mine above the second spring was worked for silver by a company that came in and went out again and left the man who ran it behind with the deed. The man died. The widow had the deed and the house and nothing to do with her days. There was a troupe came up that summer, and the old people always had it that there were fourteen of them and a band.

I said that the card on that table had said the same thing, and that the date printed at the top of it was May of 1907.

He did not say anything to that. He got up and put the kettle on and stood at the stove with his back to me until it went.

When the troupe had finished playing, the widow had the mouth of that mine walled up with the whole company inside it, and paid the men who did the work, and sent them out of the county. That was 1907. The mine never worked after.

I asked him why she did it.

He said nobody knew, that the men who told it never said, and that there was an old woman in the village when he was a boy who used to say the widow had paid for the show and had meant to keep it.

“You’re not the first,” he said. “Twice before that I know of, a man came down off that mountain and told me what you have just told me. One of them was a cousin of mine.”

“What happened to them.”

“They were all right,” he said. “And then they went up there again, the both of them, and after that nobody got it out of them.”

He walked me to the gate. Before I went through it he said, “And you don’t go past the second spring.”

“I know it.”

“Say it back.”

“Not past the second spring.”

“All right,” he said.

I did not say any of it to anybody else for years after that. I have told it since, and it does not come out the same twice, and there has never been a night in my life when I would have sworn to all of it in front of a judge. Some of it I have and some of it I have been told. The old women in that valley have always said it was something I ate, and they may be right.

And I left the card on the table. I have wanted it ever since.

Nothing else came up out of that canyon, that winter or the two after it.

I got older. I did work. And I did not go up past the second spring again.

In February of 1969 the letter came.

My mother read it standing at the kitchen window with the door open, because she would not sit down for a thing like that. It said I was to report, and it gave a day in March.

My father read it after her and folded it up along the creases and set it on the table and said they would get it sorted out.

The bus came through the valley at ten past six in the morning. My mother put food in a bag for me and my father carried my canvas bag down to the mailbox and stood there holding it. I had seventeen dollars.

The bus came and I got on it and it went north, and the road came up out of the valley and over the saddle and around, and the ridge came up between the window and the canyon, and after a while there was nothing out the window but country I did not know.