Bart lit his ovens at three. By five the heat has come through the bakery wall into the lane, and the frost on the step has gone to a dark wet square the size of the doormat.
Jasper stands on the wet square with his hands in his jacket pockets.
Nobody sent for him. Sylvie put the toe of her boot against his shoulder on the hearth at half past four and said, "Bart's. They'll want a hand to hold the pencil," and went out the back door into the dark. He has slept two nights on her stones now, and the stones have learned his hip.
He lifts the latch.
Heat closes over his face. Rye, and under it the char of a loaf left a minute too long. Bart stands at the oven mouth with the long wooden peel in both hands. He draws it out with four round loaves riding the blade and tips them onto the rack. He keeps his eyes on the bread.
"Shut it," Hettie says from her sack. "You're feeding the lane."
Jasper shuts it.
The room has filled before him. Hettie sits on a sack of rye flour with her goat-rope looped around one wrist out of habit, the goat nowhere in sight. Garrity sits on the next sack with his pink knuckles around a mug. Delphine perches on the corner of the long table with the guestbook flat on her thighs. Dr. Voss stands at the window with her bag between her feet. Milo sleeps against the flour bin with his mouth open, and Biscuit lies across the boy's shins.
At the head of the table Sylvie sits with the cigar box closed under her palms. Cassius sits at her left with the fiddle case standing on end between his boots.
Wren stands at the back against the shelves of bread tins with her arms folded. A fresh smear of ink runs along the inside of her left wrist. Her eyes cross the room to the door, rest on him for the length of one breath, and go to the oven.
Hollis stands at the counter with his back to all of them, counting coins onto the wood for a loaf. He buys his bread at five on Fridays. He has bought it at five on Fridays for eight years, and if a ring sits on Bart's flour sacks while he does, that is the ring's business.
Jasper takes the low stool by the door, the one Bart keeps for children who come begging heels. His knees come up near his chin. He opens the notebook and uncaps the pen.
"How," Sylvie says.
The room settles toward her.
"We said whether last night. This morning is how. I don't want it to take three hours. Bart has bread to sell, and Hettie has a goat loose."
"She's tied," Hettie says.
"She was tied."
Hettie half rises, peers through the steamed window, and sits back down with her mouth working.
"Spoon's in the grange," Garrity says.
"Grange is cold." Bart sets the peel against the wall and picks a steel scraper off the table, the flat blade he cuts dough with. Its wooden grip has gone black from thirty years of his palm. He lays it in front of Sylvie. "It's what I've got."
"It'll do."
Nobody reaches for it.
Then Wren unfolds her arms. She comes down the length of the table and picks up the scraper and holds it the way she holds a composing stick, level, her thumb along the edge.
"One sheet," she says. "Whatever we say goes on one sheet. Anybody who wants a line writes their own, in their own hand, on whatever paper they've got. Bring it to the shop before noon. I'll set them in the order they come through my door. I won't change a word."
"Mine'll be spelled wrong," Garrity says.
"Then I'll set it wrong." She lays the scraper down. "That's why we're doing it."
She goes back to the bread tins.
Delphine slides off the table with the guestbook pressed to her stomach and takes up the scraper in her free hand.
"I want my table," she says.
Hettie groans.
"I want my table, Hettie, and you can groan into your rye." Delphine turns the scraper. "I want them off the green and away from that cord, where they stand around with their telephones up like they're waiting for a bus. Inside somewhere warm, with chairs. Six at a time. They come in and sit down to eat, and one of us talks to them in our own voice. When they go, they get the sheet. Going out the door. Not before."
"Inside where?" Dr. Voss asks.
"Here."
Bart stands by the oven with his arms spread, flour sifting off his forearms onto the boards.
"My tables. My bread. I've fed this town thirty years." His round face works. "They'll want to see the window where I turned around. Let them sit at it and eat my rye. I'll be facing the right way this time."
Delphine's mouth opens. Nothing comes out. She sets the scraper on the table as though it might wake, and presses both palms flat on the guestbook.
"They won't put their telephones down," Hettie says.
"A basket." Delphine has found her voice. "I'll tie their names on with string. They get them back with the sheet."
"They won't do it."
"Then they won't get supper."
Garrity laughs into his mug. Coffee slops over his knuckles.
Sylvie lifts the scraper herself. "I'll tell them why we came. Once an evening. The way it happened, which is longer than they'll want and duller than they've been told."
Dr. Voss leaves the window and takes it next, both hands at her waist, the way she held the spoon.
"I'll talk about the medicine. Twenty minutes. Here." Her eyes go to Sylvie. "Not in my clinic."
"Not in your clinic."
Cassius lifts the scraper by its grip and lets the blade hang, the way a bow hangs between tunes.
"Everybody who comes up that road has eight bars of me in their ear," he says. "Eight bars somebody built out of eleven seconds in a room. I'd rather they had one tune, played once, whole." He sets it down. "Hollis has a tape machine in the shed. Reel-to-reel."
Milo's head comes up off his chest.
"It's broke," he says, thick with sleep. "The belt's gone to tar. Pinch roller's hard as a doorknob."
"Then it wants fixing."
Every head in the room turns to the counter.
Hollis has stopped counting. His shoulders stay square to the shelves.
"I said I wouldn't carry it," he says to the shelves.
Cassius turns the scraper over on the table. "I'm asking about a belt."
Hollis pushes the last coin across the wood and tucks the loaf under his arm.
"Bring it by at noon." He turns, for the first time, and his eyes stop on Cassius. "I'll fix the machine. What you put on it is yours."
He walks to the door. Jasper pulls his knees aside. Hollis steps past them without looking down, and the cold comes in around his boots, and the door shuts on it.
Milo is on his feet now, one hand on the flour bin.
"Dodo can carry tape," he says. "Hold the machine up to the mic. The highs go first. But it'll carry. Whoever's on nineteen. Truckers. Kentucky, some nights." His eyes flick to the stool by the door. "A few hundred miles, when the sky's right. Nothing like the tower."
"Only what the ring's heard first," Sylvie says.
"Only that."
"Then the ring hears it here tonight, after the last six go home. And then the boy sends it." She puts her hand flat on the cigar box. "One more thing. Somebody writes it down."
The room goes still.
"All of it. Who said what, and who came to listen. What the boy sends and who answers him. Every day until this is over. In a hand. For the drawer."
Her eyes stop on the low stool.
Jasper's pen rests on the page. He has written Friday. Bart's. 5:10 and the names in the order they spoke, and nothing after the names.
"He writes fast," Hettie says.
"He writes too well," Garrity says. "That's the trouble with him."
Wren speaks from the shelves without unfolding her arms. "He writes what's said. Names and times. Nothing he thinks about it." Her eyes come down the length of the room and settle on him. "Can you do that?"
His eyes drop to the page. The names stand in his slow, upright hand with white space under them.
"I don't know," he says.
The ovens tick.
"Yes. I can do that."
"Who reads it?" Garrity asks.
"The drawer," Sylvie says. "Then that's how."
The sacks empty. People go out into the blue lane with bread under their arms, and Delphine goes last with a tape measure from somewhere in her scarves, saying tables under her breath.
Jasper stays on the stool and writes.
Wren: one sheet, own hand, set in order received. Delphine: six at a time. Bart: here.
He leaves here alone on its line.
A shadow comes over the page. Bart stands over him with the heel of the first loaf in one floured fist, split down its ridge and steaming. He holds it out.
Jasper takes it. The crust burns his fingers.
Bart stands there with his big face working over something he has not decided to say. Then he turns back to the oven and picks up the peel.
"Chew it," he says to the oven mouth. "You city people swallow everything whole."
The hiss comes through the tarpaper walls of the shed before Jasper reaches the door. Four hundred and twelve radios. At noon the door stands open a hand's width.
"Door's open," Hollis says to the machine on his bench. "Don't touch anything."
Jasper steps in and puts his back against the wall of dials, amber and green in the gloom. Cassius sits on an apple crate with the fiddle across his knees. On the bench under the milky window lies a gray metal case with its lid off and two empty reels standing up out of it, the size of dinner plates.
Hollis hooks a fingernail under a black ring around two of the pulleys. It comes away as tar and strings out like warm caramel.
"Forty years in a box," he says. "Rubber goes back to what it came from."
He wipes the pulleys with a rag dipped in something sweet and sharp, loops string around them, cuts it, lays it against a steel rule.
"Eleven and a quarter."
From under the bench he brings up a bicycle inner tube patched in three places with red squares. He pins it under the vise, marks it with a thumbnail, and draws a razor along the mark in one pull. A black band no wider than a shoelace drops onto the wood.
"From a tire," Cassius says.
"From Milo's tire. He ran it over a harrow in August." Hollis seats the band and turns the wheel with one finger. It runs true.
Jasper writes. 12:06. Belt cut from inner tube (Milo's). 11 1/4 in. Hollis has not told him to stop.
The pinch roller comes off its post and rings on the bench like a bead of glass. Hollis wraps emery cloth around a pencil and turns the roller against it, patient, until black dust gathers under his hands and his thumbnail leaves a crescent that fills back in.
He threads a reel of tea-colored tape past the heads with fingers twice the size of the path they follow. It goes the first time. He presses a key the color of old piano ivory. The reels turn. He plays back ten seconds, and the shed doubles itself, thin and tinny, and falls silent.
"Machine's fixed," he says.
Cassius sets the fiddle on his shoulder.
Hollis crosses to a gray box by the door and puts his hand on the lever. "You want them on or off?"
Cassius keeps his eyes on the wall of small lights.
"Off. For this."
Hollis pulls the lever.
All four hundred and twelve go dark in one blink. The sound goes out of the shed the way water goes out of a pulled plug, and what it leaves behind has no floor to it. Jasper's ears ring with the lack. A fly bumps the window. The work lamp buzzes, a sound that has run under the hiss the whole time.
Hollis sets a squat steel microphone on the bench, presses two keys, sits, and folds his arms.
Cassius draws the bow.
The first note comes out low on the G string and holds. Then it walks. Nobody in Fair Hollow has played this tune before. It climbs by small steps and hangs at the top as though it has forgotten what comes next, then remembers something different and comes down by another road. Every rasp of hair on the string comes through in the dead shed, and Cassius's breath through his nose between phrases.
Halfway through the second pass, the bow skips on the D string. A quick, ugly chatter. The note cracks in half.
Hollis's hand comes off his arm toward the keys.
Cassius lifts one finger off the neck without stopping and shakes his head the width of a hair.
Hollis's hand goes back to his arm.
On the third pass, the tune comes down a long falling run to the low G where it started, holds, and the bow comes off the string.
The needle sinks to its pin.
Hollis winds back and plays it. The tune comes out of the little speaker a size too small, skip and all, and the three of them sit in the dead shed and listen.
"What's it called?" Jasper asks.
The question leaves his mouth before he can stop it.
Cassius opens his eyes. The question leaves no mark on his face.
"It gets a name when somebody else plays it." He lays the bow across the strings. "That's Friday. I won't play it that way again."
Jasper writes. 12:31. Radios off. C.R. played one tune, three times through. Bow skipped. He kept it. No name.
Hollis pushes the lever up. The hiss comes back from every wall, and Jasper's shoulders come down from where they had climbed.
Hollis stays by the lever. He takes the pencil from behind his ear, pulls a pink parts receipt from his coveralls, and flattens it against the wall. He writes on the back in block capitals, the pencil grinding. Halfway down, he stops, counts on the fingers of his left hand, counts again, and writes.
He folds the slip twice and holds it out to Cassius.
"Take that to her. You're going that way."
Cassius turns it over without opening it. "You're in it, then."
"It's what I said. I said it whole. She can set it whole or leave it in the case."
On his way, Hollis stops at Jasper's shoulder. His eyes stay on the open notebook long enough to read it.
"Write down it was the belt," he says. "Anybody asks what was wrong with that machine, it was the belt."
"It's down."
Hollis grunts and goes out onto the cinders.
Jasper writes 12:40. H.V. wrote his line. Gave it to C.R. He does not write what the line says. He has not seen it.
By two o'clock the slips have stopped coming.
Jasper has counted them from the far side of the ruts, his back against Hettie's fence, opposite the black felt under Wren's eave. She told him to stay off her step. She said nothing about the far side of the ruts at noon.
12:18. Hettie. Purple crayon, seed packet.
12:24. Garrity. Lined paper, folded small.
12:30. Woman in the green shawl. Maudie Lisle (asked Hettie). Envelope.
1:05. Delphine. Two pages. Went back in, came out with one.
1:34. Cassius. His own and the pink one.
1:48. Sylvie.
Twenty-one in all. The two girls who carried the kitchen chair pushed each other through the door together, came out giggling and ran.
Through the window above the press, a shape bends and straightens. A small dry clicking crosses the lane, like a hen picking at gravel. Type going into a stick.
His feet have gone numb in Delphine's green socks.
The latch lifts.
Wren stands in the door in her canvas apron with the composing stick in one hand. Her eyes cross the rut to him and drop to the notebook on his arm.
"You counted who came in," she says. "What they brought is in here."
He keeps his back on the fence.
"I need a feeder. Garrity's wife has the grippe and Delphine's laying tables." A muscle moves along her jaw. "You fed sheets for a week in October. You were bad at it. You got better."
He comes across the ruts. At the foot of her step, he stops.
She steps back out of the door to let him by.
The shop smells of linseed and cold iron. Along the bench below the window lie the slips in a row, edge to edge, in the order they came, a lead slug on each corner. A seed packet. An envelope. A brown paper bag torn flat. The pink receipt. Above them, in the steel frame on the stone, the lines stand set, backward and gleaming.
"Read them," Wren says. "So you can write them down. Leave out what you think of them."
She goes to the press.
Hettie's purple crayon runs across the seed packet in capitals: MY GOAT IS A GOOD GOAT. I SAID A FUNNY THING AT THE RING, AND THEY CUT IT. COME, AND I WILL SAY IT AGAIN.
Garrity's pencil leans left, pressed hard: They took us apart and sold the pieces. Here is some of us back in one piece.
His pen stops.
"Say it," Wren says. She has her back to him, rolling ink across the disk.
"Pieces. He spelled it..."
"The way Garrity spells it. I set it the way he spelled it. That's the job."
"My hand wanted to fix it."
The brayer stops.
"Mine too," she says. "I set it twice. I took it out and put it back." The brayer goes on. "Write that down if you want."
He writes the slip as Garrity spelled it.
Maudie Lisle's blue paper slopes like rain. To my daughter Ruth in Calder, if this gets there. I am all right. We sat in the grange for six minutes, nobody said anything, and it was fine. Come at Christmas. Bring the boy. Mum.
Bart's brown bag carries a floury thumbprint. I turned my back on a man in my shop window. I am sorry for it. I tell the goat story right, in my shop, any afternoon between four and six. Ask.
Dr. Voss has used a prescription slip, every letter separate. I count a pulse for fifteen seconds. While I count, the patient talks. Most of what I need to know, they tell me before I reach fifteen.
Delphine's single page has a line struck through at the top so hard the pen tore the paper. Under the tear: Sign my book. Stay for supper.
Milo's exercise page has grease on it. IT WAS A DOG. Squeezed in at the edge, smaller: (two people and a dog).
Cassius's strip of sheet-music margin: Six minutes before anybody spoke. That's the tune.
The pink receipt lies face up; Calder Auto Parts, a column of figures, a total. The pencil has pressed through from the back, raised capitals legible to a fingertip.
He leaves it face up. In the notebook he writes: Hollis Vance. Pink receipt. (Not read. Set.)
Sylvie's seed envelope is filled on both sides. We came up the road in a school bus in April with eleven people and a sack of beans. We had no plan for the town. We had a plan for the beans. Fifty-one years. We still decide everything slowly and out loud and in front of each other. Come and watch. It's dull.
The last slip on the row is a square of dampened newsprint torn by hand, five words in a hand that has set a thousand letters in front of him.
Set by hand. Pass it on.
No name under it.
"Yours goes last," he says.
"It came last." Wren lays the brayer in its cradle and turns. Her eyes go along the row to the bare wood after the newsprint, where room remains for one more.
"You didn't bring one."
"It isn't mine."
She studies him across the bench. Then she lays a slug on the newsprint square.
"Get the paper. Top shelf. The cream. Two hundred."
She cuts the string on the ream and fans the stack with her thumb.
"Left hand takes it off the stack. Right hand lays it to the pins. Then you take your hands back. All the way back. The platen doesn't care whose fingers they are."
She sets her foot on the treadle.
The press breathes the way it breathed in October: the iron arm going back, the rollers riding up over the inked disk with a wet kiss, the platen tipping open like a mouth, then closing on the forme with a soft, heavy chunk that comes up through his boots. His left hand goes to the stack before his head tells it to.
He lays a sheet to the pins. He takes his hands back.
Chunk.
She lifts the sheet off by a corner and turns it to the light. FAIR HOLLOW across the top in the big wooden letters with the nick in the H. Under it: THE RING, IN ITS OWN HANDS. Then the lines, each with its name, down to Pass it on.
Her eyes go down it. Halfway, they stop on the longest block, eight lines deep, and go down it twice. She lays the sheet on the drying rack without a word, face up, alone.
"Again."
They go on. Her foot on the treadle, his hands to the stack and the pins and back. He counts strokes in his head the way she taught him, so his hands know where the platen is without his eyes. The light in the window goes from white to gold.
At forty, he lays a sheet a little crooked, and the print comes off running downhill a quarter inch to the right.
"I'm sorry. I'll..."
"Leave it." She lays it on the rack. "Somebody'll take it."
"It's crooked."
"So's Garrity's spelling. Next."
At a hundred and fifty, his shoulders ache in a line across the top, and his fingertips have gone gray. At a hundred and eighty-one, she stops the treadle and stands with her foot on it, breathing.
She holds a rag out without turning. He wipes his fingers. The gray has gone into the whorls.
"Soap and a nail brush," she says. "Tomorrow."
"I remember."
She takes the rag back. For the space of a breath, both their hands hold it, her black ones and his gray. Then she draws it away.
"That's the first thing I've printed since the tower," she says to the press. Her palm rests on the cold flywheel. "My hands kept stopping at the bench this morning. Six seconds in. They'd stop by themselves, and I'd have to tell them to go on."
The lamp buzzes.
"They went on." She takes her hand off the wheel. "Nineteen more. Then Delphine can have them."
Bart has wiped his window down to the glass, and the lamplight lies across the lane in a long yellow slab. In the slab, on the frozen ruts, the visitors stand in a line. Twenty-two. The man in the gray fleece near the front. Danielle and her friend in their parkas, stamping. A woman in a knitted hat with a small bright bead winking above its brim.
At the door, Delphine stands behind a table from her shop with an egg basket lined in a dish towel, a ball of string, and a stack of brown tags.
"Good evening! Come in out of that wind; look at you, you're blue. Telephones in the basket. Name on the tag, tie it on. You'll have them back going out, with a sheet."
The man in the fleece holds his phone against his chest. "Are you filming?"
"Nobody's filming anything. That's rather the idea."
He stares at the tag. Then he ties it on, his big fingers fumbling the knot, and lays the phone on the dish towel and stands with his empty hands at his sides.
The woman in the knitted hat holds out her phone. Delphine ties it and lays it down. Then she lifts her eyes to the brim.
"That too, love. It's a hat with an eye in it. Basket or back to the green, and I'll give you tea to take with you. I'm not unkind."
The woman stands with her hand on the brim while the line shuffles behind her. Then she takes the hat off. Her hair stands up with static. She ties the tag to the pom-pom, and the bead winks up out of the basket at the porch rafters.
Jasper writes 6:04. First six. One hat (camera) and goes around to the side door.
Bart has pushed his worktables end to end and covered them with split flour sacks. A loaf on a board at every place, and in the middle a black pot of potato and leek steaming under the lamp.
The six sit with their coats on. The man in the fleece keeps touching the chest pocket where his phone used to be.
"Eat," Bart says, ladling. "Nobody talks till you've eaten. My mother's rule, and she was right about most things except my father. Tear the bread. You cut it, it remembers."
Jasper takes the low stool by the flour bin and writes Bart: tear it, don't cut it.
Spoons on crockery. The friend in the parka says oh with her mouth full, and Danielle says I know, and they stop talking and eat.
Sylvie comes in from the back when the bowls are half empty. She sits at the head of the table in a gray work shirt with the cigar box shut in front of her, and waits until the man in the fleece puts his spoon down. Then she waits longer.
"Fifty-one years ago," she says, "I couldn't decide what to make for supper."
Danielle laughs, a startled hiccup, and stops.
"There was a voice in my kitchen in the city. It knew what was in the cupboard and what my blood said that morning. It told me every night, and it was right every night. One night the power went out in our building for an hour. I stood there with a pot in my hand and couldn't choose between rice and potatoes. Forty minutes. I was thirty-one years old. I cried over a pot."
Nobody at the table moves.
"That's the whole beginning. There's no speech in it. Eleven of us found each other because each of us had stood in a kitchen with a pot. We bought a school bus at auction for six hundred dollars and drove it up that road in April with a sack of beans. It broke down at the bottom of the rise, and it's still there." She lays her hand flat on the box. "We didn't know how to do anything. We learned it in front of each other. Badly. That's what we're protecting. The badly. The in front of each other."
The man in the fleece clears his throat. "But why not use it for the hard things? Medicine..."
Sylvie tips her head toward the window. "Ask her."
Dr. Voss stands there with her coat buttoned and her bag in her hand. She sets the bag on the bench.
"Give me your wrist."
He pushes up his sleeve and lays his arm on the sacking, palm up. She lays two fingers below the heel of his hand. Her eyes go to the clock above the oven. Her lips move without sound.
"Where are you from?"
"Dayton."
"What do you do there?"
"I manage a warehouse. Well. I watch a screen that manages a warehouse."
"Do you like it?"
"I..." His eyes go to her fingers on his wrist. "No. Four years now." He laughs, short. "My companion says I'm in the top decile for job satisfaction. It shows me the graph."
She takes her fingers away.
"Eighty-eight. A little fast for a man sitting down after soup. A machine gives me that number in a quarter of a second, and it's right, and it's the only thing I learn." She folds her hands at her waist. "In fifteen seconds you told me about the four years and the graph. I'd want to know about the four years before the eighty-eight."
He pulls his sleeve down over his wrist.
"I trained with the machines for eight years," she says. "They watched my patients so well that I stopped watching. A woman came in once with a pain in her side. Every number was fine. I sent her home. She'd told me in the first fifteen seconds that she couldn't taste her coffee anymore. I wrote it down. I didn't hear it." She picks up her bag. "That's the medicine. You count, and while you count, you listen. When you get it wrong, you know whose hands they were."
At the door to the back, she stops.
"The four years I'd see about."
She goes out. The man sits with his hand over his wrist, red to the ears.
Jasper writes I wrote it down. I didn't hear it. His pen stops on that line.
Danielle turns on her bench. Her eyes go from the notebook to his face, and light up.
"You're Jasper. From the..." She waves a hand at the dark window and the green beyond it. "We watched you leave. What does it mean? All of it. You were here. What's the real story?"
The table turns to him. Six faces.
Under his breath, low, a sentence rises out of six years of habit: Jasper Cole looks up from the notebook and tells her
He shuts his teeth on it.
He points the pen at the head of the table. "Ask her."
Danielle turns to Sylvie. Sylvie meets her eyes and waits.
"What does it mean?"
"Eat your bread," Sylvie says. "We'll get to it."
Jasper writes it down.
At the door, going out, Delphine hands each of them a sheet with the phone laid face down on top. The man in the fleece holds his up to the window light while his phone buzzes in his other hand, a stack of small bright messages climbing its face. He lets it buzz.
Halfway down, he reads the same place twice.
"Pieces. They spelled it wrong."
"Garrity did," Delphine says. "Mind the step."
He folds the sheet in quarters and puts it in the chest pocket where the phone goes, and the phone in the outside pocket, and goes down into the dark toward the tents.
On the counter by the till the guestbook lies open on a dish towel. Under his name, the man from Dayton has written Soup. Pulse 88.
Jasper writes that down too.
The ring hears the tape at a quarter past nine, on Bart's sacks where the strangers sat.
Each of them has read their own line into the microphone around the table. Hettie in her big flat voice that makes the needle jump. Maudie Lisle in a voice Milo has to catch an inch from her mouth. Garrity read pieces the way he spelled it. Bart read his and then told the goat story into the tape, the whole of it, and Hettie's laugh at the end is on the reel too.
Hollis did not come. Cassius read the pink receipt in his own voice, slow, without looking at the room. Nobody said anything when he stopped.
Then the tune. Then Wren's five words, in a voice Milo had to play back twice to be sure the reel held it.
"Palms," Sylvie says.
They come down on knees and flour sacks. Jasper does not count them. His hands lie on the notebook.
"Then the boy sends it."
The hollow at midnight smells of spruce pitch and frost. The sky over the ferns has cleared, and the stars stand thick as salt spilled on a stove.
Milo crouches at the foot of the oak with Dodo open on a slab of bark, a steel box the size of a bread tin with a red bulb behind a cage of wire. Cables run up the trunk to the copper. Beside it in the ferns sits a car battery Hollis brought down the path at eleven on a hand truck and clamped on, red and black, without a word.
Hollis sits on the oak root now with his back in the worn place and the thermos between his boots. Biscuit lies across his feet.
"I'm minding the boy," Hollis says, to nobody, when Jasper comes down into the hollow. "Ring said nobody sits out here alone."
"I know."
Jasper sits on a stump at the edge of the ferns. The little hooded lamp throws a coin of red light on the dials, and none of it reaches him. He writes blind, by feel. 11:58. Hollow. M.F., H.V.
Milo flips a switch. A hum comes up out of Dodo, and under it the hiss of nineteen, wide and empty, a dark room a thousand miles across.
He presses the bar.
"Breaker one-nine." His voice comes out high. He clears his throat. "Breaker one-nine. This is Fair Hollow. We've got something to play, if anybody's got ears on."
The hiss.
Overhead, the copper sings a faint high note that buzzes in Jasper's back teeth. Biscuit points his nose at the box.
"Again," Hollis says.
"Fair Hollow. We've got something to play."
The speaker crackles.
"Fair Hollow." A man's voice, far off and tired, with a long Kentucky vowel. "That's a name I know. Go ahead. You got the Paducah Mule."
Milo freezes with the microphone halfway to his mouth. Hollis's thermos stops halfway to his lips.
Jasper's pen stops on the page. The voice from the ferns on the source. The dog shakes her head at the drops. That was the dog's right.
Milo's thumb shakes on the bar. "Mule, this is Fair Hollow. Is Ronda with you?"
The hiss runs a long time.
"Now how in the hell would you know Ronda?"
Milo looks across the ferns at Jasper, his face gone young in the red light, all eyes. He presses the bar.
"I've heard you. A lot of nights. Talking to her about the dog's ear."
A click, and the open air of a truck cab, a diesel growl, a turn signal ticking. A woman's voice, sleepy, close.
"Hal, is that the boy from the TV? That's him. That's the boy on the tower in Nashville that hears us." Her voice comes up clearer. "Honey? Are you all right up there? They made it look so lonesome."
Milo's mouth works. He takes his thumb off the bar and sets the microphone down on the bark the way a person sets down something hot, and puts both hands over his face.
"Honey?"
Hollis reaches over without getting up and picks the microphone off the bar. He holds it out to the boy.
Milo takes his hands off his face. He takes it.
"I'm all right, ma'am." His voice cracks in the middle and comes out the other side. "It's fine up here. The lonesome is what they added. I've got something to play for you. All of us."
"We've got all night," the Mule says. "Go ahead, Fair Hollow."
Milo sets the tape machine on his knee and holds the microphone against its little speaker, the bar pressed under his thumb. With his other hand he presses the ivory key.
The reels turn.
Out of the little speaker, up the cord and the oak and out along the copper into the black over the ridge, Hettie Pruitt says that her goat is good.
Garrity says pieces. Maudie Lisle tells her daughter Ruth to come at Christmas. Bart tells the goat story right, and Hettie laughs at the end. Dr. Voss counts a pulse. Delphine asks them to stay for supper. A boy says it was a dog. Cassius reads a man's whole sentence off a pink receipt.
Then the fiddle, thin and too small, its highs gone. It climbs by its small steps and comes down another road. On the second pass the bow skips and the note cracks in half, and the tune goes on. On the third, it comes down the long run to the low G and holds there, and stops.
Last, barely over the hiss, a woman says: Set by hand. Pass it on.
Milo lets go of the bar.
The hiss runs. Wind goes through the spruce. Far up the oak, the copper sings its one high note.
On the far end, the click. The diesel growls. Nobody speaks on the Mule's side for a while, the bar held down, the truck cab coming over nineteen into the hollow with its engine and somebody breathing.
"Hal," Ronda says, away from the microphone. "Pull over."
The engine note drops. Gravel crunches under tires a thousand miles off.
"We're pulled over," the Mule says. "Play it again."
Milo's eyes drop to the machine on his knee, then lift to Hollis. Hollis unscrews the thermos cap, pours, and steam goes up into the red light. He holds the cap out to the boy.
Milo shakes his head. His hands are full.
Hollis holds the cap out until the steam thins. Then he turns on the root and holds it out the other way, toward the stump, into the dark where Jasper sits.
Jasper crosses the ferns and takes it. The tin burns his fingers. Tea, stewed black, sugared past bearing. He drinks it standing and keeps the cap.
Milo winds the reels back. Then he holds the microphone out across the ferns, past Hollis, to Jasper.
"You want to say anything? They know who you are. They've seen you leave."
The red light lies across the microphone. Jasper's thumb knows where the bar goes.
On the far end, on the shoulder of a road, a man and a woman sit in a parked truck with the engine idling and wait for Fair Hollow.
Jasper shakes his head.
"Tell them I'm writing it down."
Milo holds his eyes a long while. Then he presses the bar.
"He's here. The one from the TV. He's writing it down."
The hiss.
"Huh," says the Mule.
Milo presses the ivory key.
Jasper goes back to the stump and sets the tin cap beside him and opens the notebook on his knee. The tape begins again across the ferns, small and far.
He finds the page by feel.
12:16. Paducah Mule answered. Ronda with him. They pulled over. Asked to hear it again.
Under it he writes 12:17, and the word again, and nothing after it.
Then he sits with the pen in his hand and the book open on his knee, and listens to Hettie Pruitt tell a thousand miles of dark road that her goat is a good goat.