A sluice of water shot upward.

Hovington cowered on the porch alternately praying and swearing in a desperate attempt to cover all the bases. A cloud of rock dust shifted and dissipated in the water and the spring branch had deepened perceptibly. After a while it began to fall again and everything went very quiet.

When he had his courage built up sufficiently he eased through the stones to the spring. About fifty yards from his house the earth had opened up in a shaft eight or ten feet across. A haze of powdered rock still hung over it. He could smell something like cordite.

Brimstone, he breathed. He peered down the sides of the shaft. Smooth stone fell away dizzy and plumb and all there was below was darkness. He dropped a stone and heard it go skittering away down the sides of the aperture to ultimate blackness but he never heard it strike bottom.

He cut chestnut poles and built a fence around the hole four feet high. At first there was no sound at all out of the shaft but in a few days he began to hear a murmur from deep in the earth: you had to strain to hear it but there was an indefinable far-off sound. Some folks likened it to a swarm of bees, other reckoned it was just subterranean waters. Hovington called it voices. They bespoke him with languorous foreboding and if he listened long enough he could separate the sound into different voices, point and counterpoint, query and reply. He wondered what such curious folk as these might have to talk about, what language they expressed themselves in.

Nathan Winer was a native of the county and by trade he was a carpenter who farmed a little on the side. He had a wife and a seven-year-old son who was named Nathan as well and was already much like him.

“Go through life mindin your own business and everybody else will mind theirs,” he used to tell the boy.

But in spite of minding his own business, he was forced in the spring of 1932 to go down to Hovinton’s looking for Dallas Hardin, a man who had simply moved in on Hovington, taken over his bootlegging business, and, folks said, his wife Pearl as well.

In the past year Hovington’s health had so deteriorated that he stayed in bed. His spine was bent like some metal God Almighty had heated to pliable temperature and laid hands and bent to his liking. He could not even turn over by himself. Already the disease that would kill him incubated within him. He lay curled by the window where by day he could see across the yard to whatever traffic accomplished itself on the road. By night his own lamplit reflection, the room its weary backdrop.

The house had four rooms. The long front room where Hovington slept—lived, actually—and where Hovinton’s black-haired daughter slept on a foldup army cot that doubled as a couch in the daytime. A kitchen. A bedroom where Hardin and Hovington’s wife Pearl slept. A room that was used to store oddments of junk and as a repository for the cases of beer and wine Hardin had taken to stocking.

Hardin came through the kitchen door carrying a coaloil lamp just as a rap sounded on the door. He set the lamp on the sewing-machine cabinet and opened the door a crack. Wind from the rainy night guttered the flame, it dished and wavered in the globe, steadied.

“I need to talk to you, Hardin,” Winer said. Lamplight glinted onto goldcapped teeth.

“Then come on in out of the rain.”

“I want to talk to you out here.”

Hardin took down his hat from a nail beside the door and stepped into the muddy yard and closed the door behind him. He stood coatless in the rain.

“What is it you wanted that had to be said in the rain?” he asked.

“I wanted to tell you somethin,” Winer said. He stood with his feet apart, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, his head cocked back a little, his face flinty and arrogant beneath the ruined hat. “I found your whiskey still on my land and this is what I come to say.