The Culvert

My sister Della liked to say that our mother died on a Sunday and our father on the Tuesday after, which explained everything about me and explained nothing. What I know for certain is that I was seven years old, that the two of them lay under one flat stone on the ridge above Ridley Hollow, and that I had taught myself to read their names off it before I had taught myself to read anything else.

The stone said PRYOR. The man who cut it had been in a hurry, or had drunk his lunch, because the last letter leaned. Under the names were two sets of dates and the words at rest, which I took for a long while to mean that they were tired.

Above the graves, higher up the ridge, the flare burned.

It was a methane flare on a steel stack at the sealed mouth of the old Ashby mine, and it had been burning since before I was born. The company had poured concrete across the entrance in the eighties and run a pipe through the concrete so the gas would not come up through people's basements, and the gas had come up through the pipe ever since, yellow at the tip, shivering in the wind. My father had worked in that mine. His father had died in it.

Adults called it the flare, the way you would name a dog. Nobody looked at it. It lit nothing but itself.

I was reading the stone out loud, because I did that when I was afraid, when the weeds behind me moved.

A man came up out of the culvert ditch with his hands out and his eyes on me, and the first thing I understood about him was that he was somebody's news. He wore a canvas jacket with no shirt under it. There was a black cuff around his ankle with a broken strap hanging off it, and a red ring of skin under the cuff going green at the edges. His hair was wet. His mouth was shaking, which confused me, because he was the biggest man I had ever seen and he was the one who was frightened.

"Stay still," he said. "Stay still and don't holler, and I'll be gone by first light."

I stayed still.

"What's your name?"

"Cal Pryor."

"Pryor." He looked at the stone. "That your people?"

"Yes, sir."

"You seen anybody else down here tonight? Anybody with a light?"

"No, sir."

"Say it again and mean it."

"No, sir."

He nodded slowly, as if I had passed something. Then he crouched, which cost him, and I saw how much he wanted to sit down.

"Now, Cal Pryor, I want two things, and I want them before the sky turns gray, and you'll bring them to me here. First, something to eat. Anything. Bread, meat, a can, cold is fine. Second—" he closed his hand around the cuff and shook it, and the steel clicked "—something that will cut. Not a kitchen knife. They snap. Pliers. A bolt cutter, big as you can carry. Or a hacksaw blade, the blade by itself, wrapped in cloth. Mind your hand."

"Why can't you get them yourself?"

"Because every road out of this hollow has a cruiser on it and every cruiser has my picture," he said. "And because a boy walking home at dark is a boy walking home at dark."

He said it plainly, as if it were arithmetic. That was the first time in my life a grown man had explained a thing to me instead of over me, and I still do not know what to do with the fact that the man was a fugitive.

"Down the bank there, in the water, there's another one of me," he said. "If you hear him before you hear me, run. He'd cut your throat for the coat off your back and think about it after."

"What's his name?"

He considered the question a long time, longer than I had ever seen a grown man consider anything, and then he said, "Lyle," and said it the way you say a bad word in church.

"Now go."

I went. Down the ridge road, past the culvert, past the seam of coal that had slid out of the bank and lay there shining, as if the hill had spilled its own pocket. Behind me the flare stood on its stack and burned at nobody.

Emmet, who had married my sister the year our mother died, was at the shop working late, which meant Della was alone in the trailer and would be for hours. I stood in the yard and thought about my sister's hands and what they did to the side of my head. Then I thought about the man in the ditch, and the question he had taken seriously, and I chose.

That is my whole character in one fact, and I have never made it look better than it is: I stole for the first time in my life for a man who had asked me a question and listened to the answer.

The pie was on the sill, cooling under a cloth. That was the easy part. The hard part was the shop, where Emmet's hacksaw hung on its nail with the spare blades in a coffee can under the bench, and where I stood for a long minute with my hand out and my heart going like a bird in a box, because taking a blade was a different order of crime from taking a pie: a pie was a thing that would be eaten and gone, and a blade was a thing that would still be in the world in ten years.

I took one blade and wrapped it in a rag, and I was back at the culvert before the sky turned. He ate standing up with both hands, and he never looked at me while he ate, which I understood later was the only courtesy he had left to give.

He was gone by first light. I found the blade in the grass three months afterward, rusted into the shape of the weeds, and I kept it, and that is a fact I will come back to.