Winsor told that that oldest girl of Lester’s said that Hardin was there with her mama when Lester come in and caught em. He cut for the bathroom and was halfway out the winder when Lester busted in on him. Said Hardin shot him though the heart and climbed back in and Lester’s wife fixed it so it looked like he shot hisself.”

“Course, Hardin birdhuntin with Judge Humphries ever few days didn’t hurt nothin.”

“I spect not. Nor all that money passin under this table at that.”

He prospered during these years. The war brought him a seemingly endless supply of thirsty soldiers and their women. The lights stayed on all night at Mormon Springs these years, the jukebox he brought from Memphis sang sad songs to closedancing couples, bereft or lonesome women, men touched by the shadow of war, the shadow of something dread that was creeping up on them.

Shifting hues of red, white and blue neon dissipated the shadows, bathed the dancers in the romantic hues of the unreal. The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy. Overalled farmers side by side with furloughed or shellshocked stateside soldiers, momentary virgins from godforsaken hollows where the owls roosted in the shade trees, old painted women washed up like refugees from the poolhalls, the all-night cabstands, the shotgun coaloil shacks. Old stringy women with ribald mouths and furious, outraged eyes as if life had done them some grievous wrong. Among these demifamiliars Hardin moving like some perverse host, eyes watchful for the salesman on his way to Memphis, the cattleman back from the auction, the fat leather wallets on plaited fobs hanging like fruit for the harvest. For those with high tolerances for alcohol he had envelopes of white powders folks did not resist so well and he had knuckles fashioned from the handles of a galvanized washtub and what he called his Sunday knucks made from brass. An amorous drunk might step into the bushes, Pearl’s arm about his waist, or he might just ease out into the bracken to relieve himself. Where Hardin would relieve him as well, rising from the brush like some grim specter, the handkerchief-wrapped knucks finding just the right spot, quick hands to the pockets and fading back into the dark.

Morning. A hot August’s sun was smoking up over a wavering treeline. Such drunks as were still about struggled up beneath the malign heat slowly and painfully as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber. The glade was absolutely breezeless and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific. The sweep of the sun lengthened. Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire. Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbered as the whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed from the foxglove and nightshade. Strange creatures averse or unused to so maledictive a sun, they were heir to a curious fragility as if, left to the depredations of the sun, their very flesh would sear and blacken, their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.

The cool breath of the abyss drew them through the undergrowth like a magnet aligning iron filings on a glass slide. Hardin went down with his morning coffee. Silent, unjocular. In fact the glade seemed permeated with silence and appalled hush in response to the night’s bedlam, as if ultimately all things must balance. The air rising from the pit seemed to emanate from some reversal of the seasons at the earth’s core. The far-off voices were murmurous, vaguely placating. The undergrowth was more luxuriant here, darkening perceptibly toward the pit, the earth mounding in a fashion vulval, the cleft in the rock mysterious, enigmatic.

And how would you lock him out? Short of killing him, how would you ensure the sanctity of your home, your family? Doors will burn, windows melt and slide viscous and flaming down the sills, locks blacken and lie unrecognizable among the ashes. If you expect him you can prepare, but he is cunning. When will he come, what will be the hour? He has all the time in the world, he can pick and choose, all the time you have is the moment of his arrival. He is a bearer of grudges, trifles drive him to limits an ordinary man only reads about.

“Wood will burn,” the note he sent the widow Bledsoe said.