The Grave He Digs — Read an Excerpt
From The Grave He Digs · Part One: The Salt and the Notch · Movement I — The Terrestrial Cadence (the opening three chapters), formatted for web reading.
Chapter One
The flats took the morning before the mountains did. While the pyrgoi up on the spur still held their night-cold, the stone of them blue and shut like fists, the salt down at the water's edge had already begun to throw the light back, pan by pan, a white that hurt before the sun had cleared the headland. He was in it by then. He had been in it since the dark, when there was nothing to see but the shapes of his own pans and the lower shine of the sea beyond them, and the work did not need seeing. The work needed only the rake and the back and the going-on.
They called him o Pezós here. The man on foot. He had given them no name and they had made one out of what they saw, which was a man who walked everywhere and owned no animal and came down to the salt before the others and left after, and the name had fastened to him the way the salt fastened to the cracks of his hands, without his leave and past removing. He answered to it. A man answers to what he is called, and he was no longer what he had been called.
He worked the cypress handle of the long rake against the flat of his hip, his left hand leading, his right hand set three spans back to find the leverage. There was a specific weight to the brine before it broke—a thick, hydraulic resistance that held the timber back until the iron teeth bit the crust. He leaned his torso forward, using the mass of his shoulder rather than the strength of his arm, and drew the tool toward him. Scritch. The sound was the same at the first row as it was at the twentieth, a dry, crystalline tearing below the water's surface, and then the split. The crust came up in heavy, jagged plates, grey-white, weeping their bitter brine, and he lifted them with the side of the rake and slapped them onto the muddy bund to drain. Slap. Then the return. He swung the cypress pole back out across the grey water, the wood slick with old slime under his palms, and he found the placement for the next pull.
By mid-morning, the whiteout glare had flattened the pan until his sight-lines were gone. The limestone ridge above him and the salt beneath him converged into a single unshaded zinc line that had no shadow in it. The salt-crust began to form on his eyelashes, a fine, dry rim that smarted when he blinked, and the small muscles between his shoulders had long since stopped reporting the labor to him as labor. His hands were the worst of it. The coarse salt had been into the splits of his knuckles for three winters now and it kept them open, a fine constant burning he had ceased to name to himself as pain because there was no profit in the naming. Salt got into everything a man had that was already broken. That was its nature. It found the split and it kept it.
Below him the sea moved without hurry against the rock. Above him, very far above, where the road went up white through the thyme and the sage toward the towers, nothing moved at all. He did not look up at the towers. He had learned not to. There was a discipline to where the eyes went, and his went to the rake and the crust and the slow grey water in the pan, and not up the hill to the houses of stone that men had built tall so they could kill one another from height, generation over generation, and call it honor, and call it the order of things. He knew about the order of things. He had been an instrument of it once. The instrument was down in the salt now, raking, and the order was paving roads through the mountains it had ruled and forgetting it had ever needed men like him at all.
At midday, the kiln-men brought down the fuel carts from the brick-works above the sheds.
They were four men from the lower valley, their skin blackened by the olive-wood smoke of the fires, and they moved with the heavy, unhurried gait of people who worked by the weight of timber. They unhooked the mules and began unloading the split logs near the drying kilns. They did their work in full sight of his pan, but they maintained a precise, un-calculated dead ground around his row. They looked past him the way a man looks past an unexploded shell left in a furrow—not out of explicit malice, but because his presence carried a poisoned, ancient odor of bloodshed that the salt could not scrub off. They did not offer him a word, and he offered them none. The village managed his existence through distance.
When the ration-car came down from the master's office with the day's coin and provisions, the other laborers clustered around the tailboard at the shed to take their share from the hand. o Pezós stayed in his row, his hands resting on the cypress handle, his torso still. He watched them take their hard bread and their little measures of oil and their handful of cheap olives. One of the kiln-men took his portion—the identical, standard ration every man on the flats received—and walked twenty paces out from the shed toward the lower pan. He did not look at o Pezós. He laid the bread and the three olives down on a stained salt-sack in the dirt, set the day's copper coin on top of the loaf to keep the wind from it, and withdrew immediately back to the group. It was not charity; it was appeasement. They fed the unexploded thing so that it would remain quiet in its corner. Only after the cart had climbed back up the ridge and the men had returned to the smoke of the kilns did o Pezós cross the dry earth to collect what had been left for him in the dirt. He took the bread. The transaction was correct, but the distance was the deformity.
The salt-master came along the upper bund near afternoon and stood and watched him work and said what he always said, which was that o Pezós would kill himself in the pans for the wages of a boy, and that there was no sense in a grown man taking the worst rows and the longest hours, and what was he saving for, with no woman and no roof but the lean-to by the kilns and no name a man would give. He said it the way you say a thing you have given up expecting an answer to. o Pezós gave him none. He heaped the salt. After a while the salt-master spat into the brine and went back up to the sheds where the good salt was, the dry salt, the salt that went into the world in sacks and became money, and left him to the wet rows that paid least and broke most.
What was he saving for. The question sat in him without weight, the way a stone sits in a field. He was not saving. A man saves toward a thing. He was spending. He had understood this for some time without having put words to it, and the salt-master's idle question put the words near enough that he could see them: he was spending himself down, day on the rake, knuckle by split knuckle, the way you spend a coin you mean to be rid of. The pans were only the latest place to do it. There had been other places, lower work in lower villages, and the work was never the point. The point was the spending. As long as the body was spent there was no surplus in him, nothing left over at the end of the day to stand up and ask what came next, and so the days closed one after another like the salt closing over the floor of a pan, and that was the mercy of it. That was what the flats were for.
In the evening he went up to the lean-to by the kilns and ate what there was, the bread gathered from the salt-sack and the little oil and the three cheap olives, and when it was dark and the kiln-men had gone he took the thing down from the rafter where it lived wrapped in unwashed linen, and unwound it, and laid it across his knees.
The unwinding was the first part of the clock. The fiber released the heavy iron barrel with a soft, dry friction, turn by slow turn in the dark, until the wood of the stock lay bare. The kariofili was the one beautiful thing left in the world that belonged to him, and it was useless, and he knew both of these as a single fact and not as two. The long Albanian barrel, the stock chased with silver gone black in its grooves, the flint and the frizzen and the whole patient apparatus of a shot that took a man's breath and a steady hand and the better part of a minute to make ready. It had been his father's master's, and then o Yéros's gift to him in the years when a gift like this meant a man had been chosen, and it threw a single ball with an accuracy that nothing else on the mountain could match, once, and then asked to be loaded again while the world it had failed to kill came on. He had seen what the world brought now. He had seen, at a distance, on a road below a village he had passed through and not stopped in, a file of gendarmes with the Gras rifles slung, the breech-loading guns that ate their cartridges from a pouch and spat the brass and ate again, a man firing them as fast as he could work the bolt and think to. The kariofili against the Gras was the old order against the new in the plainest terms the hand could hold. It was beautiful and it was over, and he greased it.
He took a single, coarse hog-bristle from his pouch and cleared the touch-hole first, feeling for the tiny opening by touch alone, his finger guiding the wire-hard hair into the iron vent until it came out clean. Then he worked the grease into the breech with a rag and his thumb, into the pan, along the miquelet lock, and the smell of it came up, the particular oil-smell that was older to him than almost anything, that went under the salt-smell and the kiln-smell and the smell of his own unwashed body and reached the part of him the salt had not yet found and could not reach. His thumb explored the black-chased silver grooves along the stock, counting the lines by the thickness of the grime inside them, a mechanical inventory he did not name as memory. The hands knew the gun the way the mouth knew the words. He had not decided to keep it greased any more than he had decided to keep breathing. The hand is a servant, the oath said, and the servant forgets, and so you give the servant a thing to do with its forgetting, you give it grease and a barrel, and it does the thing and asks nothing.
When the gun was clean he sat with it across his knees in the dark and he said the catechism.
He said it under his breath, barely voiced, the way he had said it every night for longer than he could now separate from the rest of his life, sworn first to a living face in the high years and said now to a dead one. The words came in their order and he let them come.
"I do not aim with the hand," he said. "The hand is a servant, and the servant forgets. I aim with the eyes of the dead."
The dead. He aimed with their eyes. He had aimed with their eyes the whole of his fighting life, which was the meaning of the line, that a man does not shoot for himself but stands as the open eye of everyone behind him who can no longer see, and the line had been a strength once, a thing that steadied the barrel, and it steadied nothing now and he said it anyway.
"I do not fire to strike the man before me; I fire so the man behind me does not look away."
"He who kills and does not feel the dead watching has turned his face from the father."
The father. o Yéros. He felt him watching, that was the trouble, he had never once in three winters stopped feeling him watching, the old man's eye on the back of his neck in the dark of the pass where it had been the last time, where the line had gone down in the cold and the old man had gone down with it. He said the next of it.
"He who has turned his face from the father cannot say the name —"
And he reached, here, where the rite required him to reach, for the name. The catechism opened at this point like a hand opening, and into the open hand you were to set the name of the one you aimed for, the one whose eyes were yours, and he reached for hers because hers was the name that belonged there, that had always belonged there, that he had set there a thousand times in the years when she was alive to be aimed for and not toward —
and it was not there.
The place where it lived was a clean socket and the name was gone out of it, and he sat in the dark over the greased gun and reached into the socket and there was the shape of the name, the size of it, the weight the mouth remembered, and not the name. The silence held the length of one breath drawn and not let go. He had stopped expecting it to be there. He reached for it each night the way the tongue goes to the gap of a pulled tooth, knowing, going anyway. One breath. Then he said the rest, because the rite did not permit you to stop at the socket, the rite went on whether you had the name or not, that was the cruelty built into it and he had not understood the cruelty when he swore it.
"— and he who cannot say the name is already in the grave he digs for another."
He finished. He sat. The gun was a cold weight across his knees and the sea worked at the rock below and somewhere up the dark hill a dog gave two barks and stopped. The oath was whole. Every word of it had come except the one word it was built around, and that was how it came every night, whole around the hole, the armor intact and the body inside the armor gone, and he wrapped the kariofili in its cloth and put it up on the rafter and lay down on the pallet and did not sleep for a while.
He knew the story of how he had come to be in the salt the way you know a thing you have told yourself so many times that the telling has worn smooth and you can no longer feel the grain of it. The band had wintered high, the last winter, in the refuge above the pass, o Yéros and his two best men and the few that were left and her among them. The state had sent up its amnesty, its mercy, its disarm-and-be-pardoned, and the band had argued it through the cold, and while they argued, the gendarmes had come up to the pass below in numbers that should not have known the country well enough to find it, and had broken them there in the dark.
That should not have known the country. He came back to that, in the smooth telling, the way the rake came back to the same warped board in the bund. The gendarmes had come straight up. They had moved in the dark of the high country like men who had been told where the path went, where the line would be thin, where to put themselves to do the most breaking, and there was only one way they could have been told, and he knew the mouth that had told them. He had no doubt of it. He had built three winters on the certainty of it and it held his weight.
The second. The blood-brother. One who had stood at o Yéros's right hand where he himself had stood at the left, sworn into the same band over the same fire, closer than blood because blood you do not choose. The one who had been talking to the state. He had gone down to them, in the weeks before, with his reasons — there had been reasons, there were always reasons, the order was ending and the roads were coming and a man could call it survival if he needed to call it something — and he had carried the country down to them in his mouth and sold it, sold the pass and the thin place in the line and the old man's life and hers, and bought with it the thing he wore now. o Pezós had not seen the uniform himself. He did not need to see it. He knew the man was a captain of gendarmes in the country to the south, that he led the very men who hunted the last of the old fighters along the very roads the state was paving, and the picture assembled itself without his help: the blue wool, the brass, the Gras rifle slung on the back that had once carried a kariofili like his own. He had sold them and bought a uniform. That was the whole of it, told smooth. A man sells his dead and wears the price.
There was a different telling, he supposed, somewhere, in the other man's mouth. There would have to be. No man tells himself he is the thing o Pezós told himself the other man was. But the other man's telling was the other man's to carry, in the country to the south, in the blue wool, and o Pezós had his own and it was enough to rake salt by, and the two of them would not be set side by side because there was no table in the world wide enough and no one alive who would sit at it. So he did not set them side by side. He raked. He greased the gun. He said the oath into the socket every night and finished it whole around the hole and lay down and did not sleep, and in the not-sleeping the old man watched him from the back of his neck, and the name did not come, and the hunt that was the only thing left holding him in one shape waited somewhere south of him with a road being paved toward it, and he was not yet going. Not yet. He told himself not yet and meant by it something he did not examine, because the salt was for not examining, and tomorrow there would be the dark and the pans and the white that hurt, and the back, and the rake, and the going-on.
He lay and watched the square of the doorway go from black to grey. When it was grey enough he got up, because there was no profit in lying still once the body could be spent, and he went down to the flats ahead of the others, the way he always did, and the salt was waiting for him with the morning in it, throwing back a light that had not yet cleared the headland, and he took up the rake.
Chapter Two
The boy was at the edge of the flats two days before o Pezós let himself look at him straight.
He had marked him the first morning the way the body marks a wrong sound in a familiar dark—without turning the head. Through the long, blinding crawl of the midday whiteout, when the unshaded limestone glare turned the upper bund into a flat zinc wall that dissolved every margin, the boy had been nothing but a grey silhouette bleeding into the light. He did not shift his feet. When the sun went red behind the headland and the purple-grey sea-dusk came up out of the water to take the hill, his shape simply darkened where it sat, his outline hardening into the sage scrub until he looked like a feature of the rock that had been there before the pans were cut.
The salt-rakers' children did not sit like that. The salt-rakers' children ran and screamed and were beaten off the pans, and this one neither ran nor screamed nor came down, and was not from here. The kiln-men, coming down with the wood-carts at afternoon, had marked him too. They had paused between the shafts of their barrows, looking up through the smoke of the olive-logs, and they had spat into the red dirt and muttered the old words against the eye between their teeth. They recognized the posture. They knew the low, deep hams-on-heels sit of the high country—the posture of a house that was either counting its dead or waiting to make them. It was the look of a blood-holding, and the child was its runoff. They gave the hill a wide berth, crossing the lanes twenty paces clear of the slope, leaving the boy in the dead ground where they left the stranger. He watched them pass. He watched o Pezós rake. He watched the tool the way a man watches a stock he is deciding whether to buy.
o Pezós did not go up to him. He raked. He dragged the cypress handle through three more rows, the iron teeth tearing the crust with that same slow, crystalline scritch until the grey sludge was piled high enough to drain. By the second evening, the shape had come down off the bund and was sitting nearer, at the corner of the lowest pan, in the place where the wind off the sea would have been worst, which was the place a thing put itself when it did not want to be at any man's back. o Pezós understood that placement. He had used it himself. He finished his rows in the failing light and went up to the lean-to, and the boy followed him at a distance that was exactly the distance a careful animal keeps—near enough to close, far enough to break—and when o Pezós sat down to the bread and the cold and did not tell him to go, the boy came the last of the way in and sat across the small fire from him and waited.
He was perhaps ten. Perhaps less, and aged by the country, or more, and stunted by it; the Mani did not let you read a child's years off his size. His face had the dry, finished stillness of the interior, the look of a thing that had learned early that weeping spends water and water is not free. There was a feud in that face. o Pezós did not yet know how he knew it, only that he knew it, the way you know a man has been to sea by the set of his eyes against light: this child had grown up inside the long ledger of blood owed and blood paid, had learned to count it before he could count anything else, and had been spat out of it somehow and onto the road and down, improbably, all the way down to the salt at the bottom of the world. He was a thing from the high villages where the towers killed each other. He did not belong on the coast any more than a wolf belonged in a fishing net, and yet here he was, drifted down, the overflow of some interior reckoning o Pezós could not yet name and felt the edge of anyway, cold, familiar.
o Pezós pushed the pan across the stone between them.
It was the first distance he had chosen to close in three winters, a single physical movement that went across the neutral dirt of the floorboards. There was grease in it, the cold mutton fat from the bottom of the pot, gone white and seamed in the cooling, a little bread-crust stuck in it. The boy looked at it and looked at him and did not snatch. A starved child snatches; a beggar's child performs the snatching even when it is not starved, because performance is how the coast children ate. This child was a piece of patient, feral machinery. He took the pan in both hands and ate the grease out of it with two fingers, steadily, without sound, the way a man fuels an engine he means to keep running. He cleaned the fat to the iron and set the pan down exactly where it had been and wiped the two fingers on his own shin and was done. No thanks. No looking up for whether he had pleased. He had taken on fuel because the body required fuel and the fuel had been there. That was the whole transaction in it, on his side. o Pezós watched him do it and felt something in himself that was not pity and was nearer to recognition, and he put the feeling down where he put things.
Then the boy reached into the front of his shirt and brought out the iron and laid it on the stone between them, and that was the other half of the transaction, the half he had carried down from the high country to lay at the feet of an instrument, and o Pezós reached out his blackened hand and took it.
He moved it out of the firelight, back into the deep shadow of the lean-to corner where the light couldn't help him, and he read it by the meat of his thumb alone. It was a mule shoe. A cast-off, sprung from the hoof and not yet rusted, the iron of it still bright in the breaks. It was too heavy and too wide and too new. The salt-country mules went unshod or wore shoes beaten out by village smiths—light, worn smooth, mended past recognizing, each one a record of poverty and patching. This was none of that. This had been struck whole in a state foundry, the cold weight of the iron dense and uniform, both heels stamped with the mark—a crowned cipher, the new mark, the mark that was going up now on the milestones and the bridge-heads and the butts of the rifles. His thumb traced the thick heel-caulk, cut square and heavy for holding a mule's footing on mountain grades under a mountain load, and then it found the inner edge. The burr was still sharp. He pressed the split skin of his knuckle against it and the iron took the salt-crack, a quick, metallic catch that bit into his hand before the road had had time to wear it smooth. It had not traveled long. Whatever had dropped this had dropped it close, and recently, and was shod for a long carrying, and came stamped with the crown. It was the first tooth of the state's gears cutting into his dormancy, and he verified the width of it with the cold precision of an executioner.
He did not ask the boy what it was. He knew what it was. He turned it in his dark palm and read the geography off it, and the boy, watching him read it, began at last to speak, and he spoke the way o Pezós had hoped without knowing he hoped, which was not at all the way a child brings news.
He did not say a name. He did not say "they are coming" or "he is coming" or any of the shapes a story takes when it wants to be a story. He gave it as a string of things seen, flat, separated by long intervals of breath, the report of a creature that had spent its life learning that what you saw kept you alive and what you felt did not.
"Blue in the scrub," the boy said, and waited. The silence held for the length of a wood-log settling in the kiln above. "Not blue like the sea. Blue like nothing that grows. A hard flat blue moving along under the holm-oak below the saddle, and a deal of it, in a line."
o Pezós sat still. He let the flat noun land.
"Mules under load," the boy said, his voice level as the stone. "More than a village owned, walking the new cut, the straight cut, the one the surveyors had run with their poles and their chains across three men's hayfields without asking."
Another pause. The wind came off the pan and brought the cold salt-smell into the lean-to.
"And the sound of it on the white rock at first light," the boy said, "before I could see any of it. Boots, many, all striking the stone the same, all shod the same, a sound the high country does not make because the high country's feet are all different and these were all one."
The last sentence arrived, and o Pezós felt the weight of it land in his own shins before the name of the Falcon had even formed in his mind. It came up through the dirt of the floor, that single, crushing state cadence, a rhythm that was not weather and was not a man but was a survey-line closing its teeth. The boy stopped, and waited, and watched o Pezós's face for the thing he had come down the mountain to see, which was whether the man in the salt was the tool the road had promised him or only another finished man at the bottom of the world.
o Pezós gave him nothing to read, because there was, inside, nothing hot enough to show. He had expected, in whatever part of him still kept accounts against the future, that this would come as heat. He had carried the certainty of the southern captain so long, fed it so faithfully, that he had supposed the news of the man's reach extending north into this valley would arrive in him as a rising, a thing that filled the chest and wanted out through the hands. It did not. It arrived as the opposite of heat. It arrived the way the tide arrives in a pan you have cut too low—without sound, without violence, simply that the water is now where the dry was, and the dry is gone, and was never going to be permitted to stay.
A gendarmerie company, shod in a state foundry, walking the new survey line up out of the south, was in the valley below the towers. He did not have the boy's word for whose company. The boy had no whose. But o Pezós had carried the whose for three winters and it stepped into the boy's flat report and stood up in it fully formed: the blue was the Falcon's blue, the foundry crown was the crown the Falcon had bought himself into, the one sound made by many feet was the sound of the order the Falcon had traded the mountain for, coming north now, methodical, along a road that had not existed when the band still lived, toward the last country that remembered the band at all. o Pezós did not test the certainty. He never had. The certainty was the floor he stood on and he stood on it now and it held, and what it told him was very simple and had nothing in it of vengeance, which would have required wanting, and he had spent his wanting down in the salt on purpose so that there would be none of it left to trouble him.
It told him the dormancy was over. Not as a decision. He had made no decision and there was no decision to make. A man rakes salt at the bottom of the world because the world has agreed to leave him there, and the world had just walked a shod company into the valley below and the agreement was void, not because he had broken it but because the topography had. The hunt that held him in one shape, the only thing that did, had been a thing far to the south, an abstraction he could decline to walk toward for another winter and another. It was not far to the south now. It had crossed the line on the map that the state itself had drawn, the northern boundary of its own reach, and put itself one valley below him with its mules and its crown and its single sound, and a man cannot decline to walk toward a thing that is already walking toward him. There is no salt low enough.
He set the shoe down. The fire had gone to coals. Above them, up the dark hill, the towers held their black against the stars, and somewhere south and below, beyond the headland, the blue was bedded down for the night in a valley it had walked into that day, and would walk on tomorrow.
He did not take the gun down from the rafter. This was the hour he took it down, every night of three winters, and greased it that did not need greasing and said the words to the dead that he could say all of but one, and he did neither. He sat with the cold shoe in his hand and the boy across the dead fire watching him still, fueled, patient, having delivered his iron and his three seen things and waiting now to learn whether the instrument would move, and o Pezós found that the rite would not come to him tonight, that the shape of the evening that had held him three winters had simply ceased to fit, the way a coat ceases to fit a man who has changed beneath it without noticing. He would not say the catechism into the salt-dark tonight. There was no longer any salt-dark to say it into. There was only the road, resumed, and the boy who had walked down it to fetch him, and the long going north and inland and up, back toward the high country the child had come out of, back toward the country that killed itself from towers, toward the blue, toward the one sound.
"In the morning," he said. It was the first thing he had said to the boy and it was not a kindness and not a welcome. It was a fact, given back in the same coin he had been paid in.
The boy nodded once, as if a sum had come out, and lay down where he was, on the bare ground at a careful distance, with his back to nothing, and slept like the iron sleeps.
Chapter Three
They came down off the salt-country in three days and the land changed under them as they walked, the way a face changes when it learns it is being watched. Up high it had been goat-track and thyme and the old indifference of stone. Lower, the state had been at it. There was a road now where there had been a path, cut straight and metalled with crushed white rock, and the straightness of it was the strangest thing in the landscape, stranger than any tower, because nothing the country had made for itself was ever straight; straightness was a thing brought in from outside and laid down over the crooked truth of the ground like a sentence passed on it.
The march down that white channel was a long, unhurried friction. The midday whiteout came off the crushed limestone in a solid, rising heat that baked the red dust into the worn hide of his foot-dress, and at every stride the fine white powder rose to coat his ankles and his shins. A single iron wire ran beside the road on raw pine poles, and when the wind came up off the valley the wire said one long note to itself, on and on, carrying words neither of them would ever hear to offices neither of them would ever see. The monotone of it filled the open sage-slopes, a dry, metallic hum that never changed its pitch and never shifted its weight, tracking their steps across the miles like a ledger made into a sound.
On the second day they passed a grove that had been burned. Old burning—the olives were throwing new gray growth from the black of their stumps, so it was a season gone, maybe more—and one of the field walls beside it was pocked along its top course with the soft craters that lead makes in soft stone, a row of them, fired from the cover of the opposite bank by men who had wanted the men behind that wall to die and had taken their time about wanting it. The boy slowed and looked. o Pezós did not. He had read that wall before he came level with it, read it the way he read everything now, fast and complete and without appetite, and there was nothing in it for him: two houses, a grievance, the lead going back and forth across a field until the field forgot what it had been for. He had spent his curiosity about such walls. He went past it and after a moment the boy came on too, and neither of them said anything, and the wire sang.
The wayside town sat where the new road crossed an old one, a flat ugly knot of a place that existed because two ways met there and the state had decided to put its hand on the meeting. There was a customs post with the crowned board over the door. There was a shed with coal-smoke standing over it where some engine of the roadworks was kept, a low iron stink laid over the older smells of dung and dust and frying oil. And there was a khani, a long wayside house of two rooms where the carters drank, and it was into the khani, in the failing afternoon, that o Pezós walked with the wrapped gun across his back and the boy at the careful distance behind, because a man coming down into the lowlands learns the shape of the country fastest in the room where its carters drink.
The sergeant was already working the room when they came in, and o Pezós stood inside the door and let his eyes make the dark and watched him work.
He went to the bench along the far wall and sat with the gun across his knees still wrapped, and asked for wine, and was brought it in a cracked clay cup. He held the wood of the seat with his split knuckles and drank it slowly, sitting like an unexploded shell in the corner while the law ran its course.
The boy did not sit at his elbow. He went down the common wall to the corner near the wood-box, away from the glare of the tallow-lamp, and sat on his heels with his back to the bare limestone, his face total and shut. He was inside the room enough to witness, but he kept his distance; he was an exterior spectator who carried the loop's runoff, and he watched the sergeant the way he had watched o Pezós in the salt—pricing the instrument.
The sergeant was a heavy man going soft, in the blue, with the brass gone dull and a brassard on his arm and a bound ledger open on the table in front of him, and he was not a brigand and that was the thing to understand about him first. A brigand would have been simpler. This was a man with a book. He had two younger men with him, gendarmes, one at the door o Pezós had come in by and one standing at the sergeant's shoulder with a Gras rifle held across his body in the bored way of a man who has never yet needed it, and the sergeant himself sat and did paper. He was disarming the valley. That was the law now and he was its instrument: every gun in the country was to be brought in and entered and surrendered under the amnesty, the long pardon the state had extended to a land that had armed itself against Turks for four hundred years and was now to be trusted to go bare.
The paper-grind went on without a pause in the dead air. A mule-driver from the high spurs brought up an old Turkish pistol, its barrel bound with rusty wire to hold the wood from splitting. The sergeant turned it in his soft hands, logged the provenance as common iron, and dipped his iron nib into the well. Scratch, scratch. The sound of the pen on the heavy state paper was steady as the wire outside. He gave the mule-driver a printed chit and three small copper coins from his box, and the man took them and went. Then a carter came up to the table over an unlicensed axle. The argument was low, flat, and took ten minutes of the room's afternoon; the carter counted out his last five pennies onto the grease of the wood, and the sergeant slid them into the iron lining of his box with his thumb. Clink. The dry, mechanical calculation closed by the page, and the valley went bare and went poorer, lawfully, while o Pezós sat in the shadow and the boy watched from the wall.
A woman in black gave up a pistol that had been her husband's, and then gave up, when the pistol proved not to be enough, the small twist of cloth she kept her coins in, and took her chit, and went. The sergeant entered them in his book one by one as the people of the place brought them up to his table. o Pezós felt nothing he would have called feeling. He noted it the way the wire noted its one word, on and on. He would have, he believed afterward, walked out of that room and left the sergeant to his book and his box, because the sergeant's loop was the sergeant's and the country's and was no concern of the catechism, which was sworn to other dead than these—about to go on north toward the blue and the one sound and leave this small bare lawful theft to grind on behind him, if the sergeant had not, finishing with the carters and looking up and around his emptying room for whatever was left in it to enter, seen the shape of the thing across the stranger's knees and known it for a gun.
He came over himself. He left the book. That was how little he expected of it. He stood over o Pezós with the box-light behind him and said that all arms were to be surrendered, that the man had surely heard the law on the road, that he would enter the piece and the man would have his chit and his few coins like the rest, and he put his soft hand out for the bundle, and o Pezós unwrapped it for him.
He did it slowly, and the slowness was not yet anything, was only an old man's slowness with cloth, and what came out of the cloth stopped the sergeant's hand in the air. The long Albanian barrel. The silver gone black in its grooves. A flintlock, a single-shot, a thing out of the grandfathers' wars, beautiful and dead, and the sergeant looked at it and a kind of pleasure moved over his face, because this was not a fowling-piece to be valued at a tenth and boxed; this was salvage, an antique, a curiosity that would fetch a real price down in the town from an officer who collected such things or a dealer who sold them on to men who hung them on walls, and he reached again, gladder now, to take the dead beautiful thing off the finished old man on the bench and enter it in his book.
He treats the code as dead, was the nearest thing to a thought o Pezós had, and it was not even that, it was below thought, it was the place where the hand knows the gun and the mouth knows the words. The sergeant had reached for the kariofili the way you reach for a thing whose time is over, to log it, to file the order it belonged to under closed, and the reaching was the brutality of the whole room gathered at last into a single arm, and the habit fired.
It was the slowest thing in the world and the room had no language for slowness anymore.
He brought the gun up off his knees and back, away from the soft hand, and his thumb went to the cock and drew it back through the half to full, the deep oiled double click the old miquelet lock makes, and that sound—that old sound—turned both gendarmes toward him at once. The one at the sergeant's shoulder was quick. He was young and he had the Gras and he threw the bolt and fired from the hip into the dark of the room faster than o Pezós could have counted it, one flat enormous crack, and the ball went past o Pezós's head and into the wall behind him and blew a fist of limestone dust out of the stone, fast, a hand's breadth wide of a man sitting still, because speed is its own kind of blindness and the boy had been right about the high country and the low: the modern gun gave the young man the power to miss very quickly.
o Pezós did not hurry. There was no hurrying the thing he held; it had its own time and its time was the only time he had ever been able to trust. He set the heavy barrel level. He laid the bead of it on the sergeant, who was the man the room was about, and not on the young gendarme, who was only fast, and he pressed the trigger, and the flint came down and struck the frizzen and threw its spark into the pan and the pan caught with a hiss and a white flash that bloomed up between his eye and the target—the long flash, the flash that a man who has only ever fired the new guns thinks is the shot and flinches from—and then, in the held quarter-second after the flash while the fire ran down the touch-hole into the charge, the quarter-second that is the whole difference between the old world and the new, the gun fired.
The room filled with smoke. Black-powder smoke, not the thin gray of the cartridge guns but a great rolling sulfurous bank of it that went up off the pan and out of the muzzle and stood in the closed air of the khani and blinded the place, an acrid white-yellow fog that put its hand over every eye in the room at once, so that the single thing the kariofili had done was done inside a cloud and no one saw it clean. o Pezós saw it the way you see the end of a thing you have already done a hundred times: the one ball, the big slow ball, taking the sergeant under the breastbone and folding him back over his own table and his own book and his box of the valley's coins, and the box going over, and the lawful pennies of the bare poor ringing out across the stone floor and rolling away into the smoke in every direction, bright, untraceable, free.
Then nothing moved but the smoke. The young gendarme with the Gras stood with the bolt still back and the empty room ringing in his ears and the fog between him and the man he could not now find to shoot, and the other one at the door had not fired at all, and the carters had gone down under the tables, and into that suspended sulfur-stinking silence, from the corner where the oldest drinkers sat, an old man's voice came, cracked, almost gentle, naming the thing the smoke had let into the room.
"Aetós," he said.
He said it the way you would say the name of a weather, or a year of famine. o Aetós. The Eagle. The young gendarme heard it and went still in a new way, because the word had reached him too, from the other direction, from the recruiting-tales and the gendarmerie gossip and the list of names the state kept of men it had broken and men it had not finished breaking, and the name on a list and the smoke in the room came together in him and he understood, slowly, lowland-slowly, what his quick gun had missed. The old man in the corner was not afraid the way the young man was afraid. He was afraid the way you are afraid of a grave that has come open—at the offense of it, at the wrongness of the dead being up and in the room and smelling, as this stranger now made the whole khani smell, of black powder and the high cold pass and the thing nobody in this valley said aloud over their wine: the breaking of the bands, the winter the state came up the mountains, all of it, walked in off the road and let out of a gun that should have been on a wall.
No one reached for the coins. The Eagle was in the room and the coins lay where they had rolled.
The old man, when he could, told it—not to o Pezós, to the air, the way the very old say the necessary things. The blue company was below, he said. Up from the south on the new road, a captain's company, the captain's own, going where it went, and it would be through here in its time, and now there was a dead sergeant of it cooling on his own ledger and the Eagle standing in the smoke, and God help the valley between the two of them. o Pezós heard the captain's company named and did not turn his head. The word the boy had brought down to the salt stood up again here in an old man's mouth and matched itself, point for point, and closed another degree of the vise, and he had known it would.
He sat back down on the bench because his legs required it.
His chest was going like a bellows and would not slow. His hands, when he looked at them, were black to the wrist with the powder-grime blown back off the pan, the old familiar blacking, in the splits of his knuckles where the salt already lived, the two ruins layered now one over the other. The barrel across his knees was hot, ticking faintly as it cooled, reeking. The smoke was thinning toward the door. Somewhere a coin still rolled, found a crack, lay down. The boy had not moved from the wall; he stood and watched, and what he had come down the mountain to learn he had now learned, and his face showed none of it.
And in the wreck of his own breathing, with his blackened hands open on the hot iron, o Pezós said the words. He did not decide to. They came as they came, but they came slowly now, dragged up one at a time against the heaving of his chest, each clause having to wait for breath enough to carry it, so that the oath that was rigid as ever in its order came out of him broken-winded, load-bearing, hauled.
"I do not aim with the hand," he said. "The hand is a servant, and the servant forgets. I aim with the eyes of the dead."
The breath came deeper, the chest still wild.
"I do not fire to strike the man before me; I fire so the man behind me does not look away."
"He who kills and does not feel the dead watching has turned his face from the father."
"He who has turned his face from the father cannot say the name —"
One breath of silence, the same breath, the always-breath, and then his torn wind carried up the rest.
"— and he who cannot say the name is already in the grave he digs for another."
He finished. He stood when he could stand. He did not gather the coins, which were the valley's and not his and not the dead man's any longer either, and he did not look at the old man in the corner who had named him, and he wrapped the kariofili back into its cloth still hot and went out past the gendarme at the door, who stepped aside, into the white afternoon and the straight road and the wire that was already, no doubt, somewhere down the line, beginning to say what had happened here. The boy came out after him. They turned north, toward the blue, and walked, and behind them the khani let its smoke out slowly through the open door into a country that had agreed to forget, and had just been reminded.
© S.R. Clark / Notch & Salt Press. All rights reserved. This excerpt is provided for personal reading only.