Morning in Blackwood Hollow never arrived with light. It arrived with grease.
A pale, sour film coated the cold tea left on the sideboard, the dull steel of the kitchen cutlery, and the tiny oval pane set into the back door. Samuel scraped the heel of his palm across that glass, leaving a clean streak through the condensation to stare out at the yard.
The frost had not melted. It clung to the hemlock needles like crushed salt, refusing the weak, amber smear of dawn that struggled to climb the western ridge. Out past the dead orchard, where the stunted cherry trunks stood bent like crippled beggars, the ground lay iron-hard. Except in one place.
Beside the sunken foundation of the old cistern, a fresh mound of yellow clay had been turned over.
Samuel watched it over the rim of a tin cup filled with lukewarm water. His eyes burned with the sand-grit ache of a night spent rigid beneath a wool quilt. The digits on his bedside alarm had finally unglued themselves at sunrise, skipping erratically from 12:07 directly to 6:14 AM without the decency of an intervening hour. That was how the hollow stole from him—not in minutes, but in whole parcels of life sliced away while he lay waiting for a latch to give. You let the lime dry out. The chorus still vibrated against his cheekbone, a lingering vibration like the hum of a struck tuning fork. He set the tin cup down on the oilcloth table. From behind the cast-iron stove, he retrieved his work boots. The leather was stiff, chilled to the density of cured meat, and the eyelets were frosted white. He forced his feet into them, his teeth gritting against the pain in his numb heels, and picked up the ring of iron keys hanging from a brass cup-hook near the lard tub. He did not want to go out to the sheds. Every nerve firing down his spine urged him to pack his grandfather’s canvas duffel, walk down the gravel road toward the county highway, and flag down the first milk tanker that rattled past the hemlocks. He had tried that when he was nineteen. He had made it three miles past the township marker before his lungs filled with the sudden, metallic reek of wet riverbed clay, his throat closing as though two cold, waterlogged thumbs were pressed into the hollow beneath his jaw. The hollow held its dependents on a very short leash. He pulled his sheepskin jacket over his flannel work shirt, threw the heavy deadbolt, and stepped onto the back porch. The air smelled of marsh gas and iron slag. The wooden stairs gave their customary shrill protest beneath his boots—four steps, each warped into a concave bowl from seventy years of heavy heels—and he dropped down into the yard. The weeds in the path were brittle, snapping underfoot with the brittle crackle of thin bones. The shed stood eighty yards from the house, half-swallowed by wild blackberry briers whose thorns grew as thick and yellow as dog canines. It was an older structure than the main house, built of hand-hewn chestnut logs chinked with horsehair mortar. Samuel stopped at the threshold. The padlock hung loose from the hasp. The U-shaped shackle was unlatched, swinging slightly in the draft that rolled down from the hemlock ridge. He reached out, his hand wrapped inside his coat sleeve to avoid the cold iron, and lifted the brass lock. The metal bore no scratches or file marks; the tumbler simply sat open, as if a gentle pressure had coaxed the spring loose from within. "I locked it," he muttered. The words puffed out in gray vapor and vanished into the briers. "Thursday noon. Three turns of the key." He pushed the door inward. The hinges screamed—a dry, metal shriek that seemed to echo down into the hollowed floor beneath the yard. Dust billowed out to meet him, not the gray, fluffy lint of an attic, but the blinding, alkaline powder of slaked lime. It bit into his nostrils and burned the moisture from his eyes before he even crossed the sill. Inside, three hundred-pound cedar barrels sat in a row along the dirt floor. Two of them were stove-in. Their thick wooden staves were splintered outward, the iron retention hoops snapped like dry twigs. The lime, which had been hauled up from the rail depot in sacks before the old man died, lay spilled across the packed dirt in a series of wide, ghostly fan shapes. Samuel approached slowly, lifting the hem of his collar over his mouth and nose to filter the stinging white dust. The lime was bone-dry, chalky and dead. But running straight through the center of the largest pile was a line of prints. They were not footprints. They were too narrow, too elongated, like the indentations left by someone walking on the knobby joints of their forearms, dragging something heavy and soft between them. The track led out from the broken timber of the third barrel—the only one that still stood intact. Samuel stepped closer, his boots kicking up clouds of white powder that settled over his trousers. He leaned over the rim of the standing barrel. The lime inside was gone. In its place, curled inside the cedar staves like a dried grub in an oak gall, lay a single burlap flour sack. It was bound at the neck with three twists of rusted baling wire, and the coarse weave was stained from the inside out with dark, circular grease rings that had turned hard and black in the frost. From the woods behind the shed, near the sunken cistern, the sharp clink of iron on fieldstone split the morning quiet. Thump. Samuel jerked upright, his head clipping a low cedar rafter. The lime dust swirled violently around his face, blinding him for an instant. Thump. It was broader daylight now, the pale fog curdling against the gray hemlock trunks, but the digger was not stopping. The third rule of the house had dissolved into the morning: the things in the earth no longer waited for the grandfather clock to choke on the dark. Through the tears burning his eyes, Samuel looked down at the flour sack again. The baling wire around the neck had begun to untwist. Slowly, steadily, one stiff turn at a time.