The Nameless Method

Chapter 2: Seven Strokes

PART ONE: THE SEVENFOLD ORDER

He was up above the last house in the hollow, on the old cut-over where Sourwood took its stove wood, and he had been there since before the sun cleared the gap.

Four bundles of hickory tops were tied with green withe and stacked on the bank behind him. His hat sat on a stump with two inches of berries in it. Two bundles to go, and the withe was running thin, and he had a wasp sting on the back of one hand that he had not stopped work for.

Above him, farther up the cut, the posts started — chest-high, one every forty or fifty steps — and each one had a fan of seven strokes cut into the top of it. Past the posts the timber stood so thick a man could not see fifteen feet into it, because nobody in the hollow cut on that side, and nobody in the hollow had ever seen the ones who did.

Where the cut opened he could look up the valley. The roofs sat in the gap behind the second ridge, tin and shingle both, more of them than Oxbow had, with smoke off them all day and a light at night that never moved, which he had watched more than once from the yard with the door open behind him.

The whole name was the Sevenfold Order. He had heard the whole name said maybe four times in his life, and every time it had been somebody from off the mountain. Down here it was the Order, or it was nothing at all.

The Order kept the road. Below the spring house it was an ordinary road — rootbound, washed out at the second bend, bottomless in March. Above the spring house it was graded. The ditches were open, the crown was rounded like the back of a hand, and the culvert at the crossing had new pipe in it with the ends still clean of rust, so whoever put it in had put it in that summer.

He heard the wagon on that stretch before he saw it, because the road was solid underneath and the wheels said so.

He came down off the bank to the tree line and looked.

Four mules, harness leather from the collars back, not one length of wire anywhere in it. That was the first thing. Good gear, and he looked at it longer than he looked at the mules. He had never had his hands on gear like that.

The wagon was loaded — barrels, sacks, and a crate with a mark burned into the lid. The letters painted along the box were too small and too far off to read, and under the letters was the same fan of seven strokes that was cut into the posts. That same fan was burned into the ends of the crates in the back room at Bert's roadhouse.

The driver had his hat down and did not say a word to anybody.

The other one walked. That was the second thing. Four mules and a graded road, and he was walking anyway, in a canvas jacket the color of the road, with a flat book under his arm and a tin box.

The store at Oxbow kept a book with the Vances' name in it, and a line under the name that got longer every time somebody went down for salt. Bert kept a book of his own, on the shelf behind the bottles at the roadhouse. And the hollow kept one more list, all of it in everybody's head at once, of who was behind and who was ahead, and it was not a long list.

Hollis knew the shape of it. Paper went to the houses that owed.

He took the hat off the stump and put it inside his coat against his shirt, and stood with his hands at his sides.

"Hey," the man said. He had stopped in the middle of the road below the bank. "Up there."

Hollis stepped clear of the trees.

"Spring house. Somebody in it?"

"The old woman," Hollis said.

"Right now?"

"She's there."

The man looked up at him for a while. Wide, clean face, no hurry in him anywhere, and he had come up from the crossing without being out of breath. Under the canvas he was wide across the chest, and the hands that came out of the sleeves were big.

"Vance," the man said. "You're Bert Vance's."

"He's my uncle."

"He said he had a nephew."

The strap of the book was hooked over his thumb. Hollis kept his hands where they were and kept his face still, and the berries pressed cold through his shirt, and he did not say that the same seven strokes were burned into the crate ends in his uncle's back room.

He had one question of his own, and it was about boots — whether a boy went up to Redcliff on a wagon that was sent for him or walked, and what a pair of boots would cost him if he had to walk. He did not ask it.

The man waited another second, the way a man waits when there is nothing left that he came to ask, and glanced once at the four bundles stacked on the bank. Hollis did not say they were his, or how long he had been at them, or how many he had left to cut.

Then the man went on up the road, unhurried, boots on the crown of it, and stopped at the spring house and knocked three times.

Hollis went back into the cut-over and cut the two tops he still wanted, and tied them off, and stacked them, and did not look at the road again.

He heard the door open. He heard no voices at all, not one. Then the door shut, and the boots came down off the step to the road, and after a while the wagon started and went on up the branch past the culvert, and there was nothing on the road then but the flies and the sound of the water going through the new pipe.

He took his six bundles down the hill on the upper side of the road instead of the lower, and came out at the spring house from behind and went by on the bank.

The paper was under the water bucket on the step. Folded twice, one corner working out from under the bucket, a rule drawn across the middle of it, and a line at the bottom that was a number. He knew a number by the shape of it the way he knew a hen by its feathers. The rest was words.

He did not stop, and he did not touch it.

At the bottom of the branch the trees opened on the fence line. The house stood back of it with the door shut, and anybody standing at that door would have watched him come out of the upper side, so he took the hat out of his coat and put it back on his head.

He stacked the six bundles at the woodpile and squared them against the wall. There was light left. In a few days his uncle would be up the branch for him.

He set the hat with the berries in it on the step, where Polly would come on it, and took the bucket down off its nail and went to the pen to count the hens in — eleven hens and the rooster — and wired the gate shut behind them.