VI
Robert
Lilting…it was lilting, a Celtic ballad, a waltz, distant, too distant to discern if it was a woman’s voice or a man’s sweet high tenor or no human voice at all but some eerie ancient stringed instrument still played in these hills…plaintive and lilting and distant and then gone. Sara waited to hear the music again, someone’s car radio maybe? or someone singing? the wind and the creak of trees bending away from the wind, a stream closer than she remembered? All these sounds mingled in an exquisite conspiracy to hide the voice. Then she fell deeply asleep and dreamed the music loud and clear and danced in the woods in her dream, whirling, slowly waltzing among the trees until Robert came to watch and she stopped, her blood still whirling through her body to the unbearable music but her limbs still as stone. She dreamed that Robert came intending to kill her, he said so, and she cried out to a shadow passing through the woods she thought she recognized, but the man simply waved and walked away. Robert waved back at him but Sara could not move. Finally, dying of terror, she realized she could save her own life if she woke up, and in her dream she did wake up and realized she was only dreaming and went back to sleep again, all in her dream.
She awoke for real at dawn and decided to walk awhile, shake the lingering terror of the vivid dream, but she fell back asleep needing to calm her pounding heart and didn’t actually get up to start her day until the sun was already high in the sky, 8 o’clock she guessed.
Sara started a small fire to brew her coffee and heat wash water and then Robert was there sniffing the coffee and nodding Sara a good morning. She was standing and bent at the knees to reach the coffeepot and rose easily to pour him some in a blue tin cup and handed it to him and walked around the fire to move away from the smoke and bent her knees again to carefully replace the pot on a flat rock on the rim of the fire pit. She moved slowly and remembered the waltz of her dream and felt her heart pounding again when Robert followed her around the fire as the smoke spiraled and twisted around him and it was a kind of graceful waltz they performed there in the forest, each listening intently to the birds, waiting for the other to speak. Sara felt intimacy growing in that lilting silence and knew only words could break it, so she spoke first.
“Did the Alderson Library have my book?”
“No but Agatha’s ordered it for me. She loves tracking down stuff when I ask her.”
“I’m sure. She loves her job.”
“That she do.”
“I’d bet she could recommend other books about anthropology…if you’re interested.”
“That fellow wrote about them headhunters like it was no big deal, them killing folks for the hell of it.”
“He was trying to be objective, writing about another culture, a culture very different from our own.”
“You and me don’t have ourselves a culture. Culture here in these hills is different from yours. Why else you be here to study on it? My guess is that guy figured people got to be educated to be evil. Some folks got this idea that primitive types are naturally innocent. Like they never heard of Adam and Eve. Its OK to kill folks for the hell of it if you hain’t had no schooling. That’s what he thinks.”
“What do you think, Mr. Awk…”
“Call me Robert, everyone else do.”
“OK, Robert, what do you think?”
“I think god made us in his image and god has a mean streak a mile wide is what I think.”
Sara smiled, thinking it made sense but who would admit to such a belief?
“That is certainly an original idea, Mr. …Robert, certainly original.”
“No, it hain’t. It is just modern namby-pamby folks want to see ‘good’ in everything and especially in god: don’t want to have be afraid ever day. Now those old guys wrote the bible knew god could be cruel. They didn’t worship and bend they knees to god because they thought god was ‘good,’ no sir. Hell, they knew they’d damn well better honor god or they’d get they asses whupped good. Now that’s a good one: god’s goodness being in how good a whupping he could give a man.” Robert laughed at his strange pun and went on talking: “Yeh, god be the one with the power, the smart ones are gonna worship god all right.”
“Do you honor god, Robert?”
“Aw, that was then. Now is different. Humankind got so out of hand, even god can’t keep up with it: too damn many of us.”
“So you figure you won’t get your ass whipped because god won’t notice you in the crowd?”
“Well the way I look at it, god gets rid of as many of us as he can with the floods and hurricanes and forest fires and whatnot, and they be all kinds of other bad luck gets folks one at a time: life be a regular minefield and some of us will just make it through and die quietly in our beds, unless of course you count bad dreams, and others are gonna step on some of them mines and have a rougher time of it and it’s all just a matter of luck. Do you see any rhyme or reason to the way life is?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Bet you thought you’d find out something more satisfying in them books, or maybe even from these people in these hills, but you should know, it’s all just stories, just stories, some good, some sad, some funny but just stories, no sense to any of ’em.”
“The Jews say god created human beings because he loves a good story.”
“Them Jews be pretty smart I hear. Yeh, as good a reason as any I guess.”
“So…what do you think?”
“I done tole you what I think.”
“Yes I guess you did.”
“Guess that means I’m done and should be getting on my way.”
But Robert didn’t move, and Sara did not want to appear inhospitable so she offered him another cup of coffee before he went, and he said no thanks but if it was OK with her he’d set a spell and smoke, pretty spot there in the woods. He slowly rolled his cigarette with tobacco from a small leather pouch. After a few thoughtful drags, he asked her about her work.
“You gonna put what I tole you in your book?”
“I might. Do you mind?”
“Not at all, young lady, not at all. I hope you will. Not many folks pay me much mind, laugh at me mostly, them that aren’t afraid.”
“Afraid?”
Robert didn’t answer, just gave her a look like she was supposed to understand why the primitive innocents of that back Appalachian holler should be afraid of Robert Awkman. Sara didn’t understand at all but she accepted it on faith and was suitably afraid.