Never Whistle Past the Old Barn After Dark — Here’s What the Hill Folk Knew

Part 1

In the folds of the Cumberland, people knew better than to call a barn only a building.

That was a flatland way of thinking. A barn stood on ground, and ground was older than timber, older than nails, older than the hands that raised a roof and gave a place a name. Some ground would take a cabin well enough. Some ground would hold a field, a church, a graveyard, a springhouse, a road. Some ground received the weight of human use and went on sleeping beneath it.

Other ground remembered.

The old Culver barn had stood for more than 70 years in a hollow above Perry County, Kentucky, near a creek called Little Sook Fork. By the time the story of Osias Trundle began, the barn had gone gray with age. Its boards had warped and pulled away from the frame. Its loft door hung sideways on 1 hinge, leaning out from the dark like a broken jaw. Yellowroot grew thick around the yard, spreading bright and stubborn in the damp soil. The branch ran past one corner, shallow most of the year but talkative over stone. No other building stood within a mile of it.

Hill people did not pass it after dark unless they had to. If they had to, they passed without open flame, without answering voices from the trees, and without whistling.

Those rules were not written anywhere the county kept its papers. They were kept in kitchens, in porch talk, in the way an old woman looked at a road just before sundown. Men at the courthouse in Hazard might have smiled at them if asked in daylight. The same men, caught in fog on the ridge road after dark, would have kept their mouths shut.

Osias Trundle was 44 years old the fall he went up into that hollow, and 44 years old the winter he came back down. Every man who knew him afterward said the man who returned was not the same one who had gone in.

He worked as a timber cruiser for the state forestry office. Kentucky had taken federal money that summer of 1934 to examine and purchase cut-over land in the eastern counties, and somebody at a desk in Frankfort had drawn a circle on a map. Inside it lay 42,000 acres of ridge, bench, creek bottom, second growth, old growth, abandoned clearing, and standing timber that needed to be walked by a man with a compass, a notebook, an increment borer, and a Biltmore stick.

Osias Trundle was that man for one particular hollow above Little Sook Fork.

He was a lean man, 6 feet even, though he stood a little bent at the shoulders from 20 years of carrying a pack through steep country. He wore wool in all weather and a felt hat that had begun life dark brown and had ended up the color of an old dog. His face was long and clean-shaven, uncommon enough in those hills to make him look more official than he cared to appear. His eyes were gray with a little brown in them, the color of standing rainwater over dead leaves. His hands were narrow, but they were hard, and across the meat of his right palm ran a pale scar from a spooked axe when he was 22.

He kept his notebook in the breast pocket of his coat. By October, it was already 3/4 full. Its pages held numbers, tree diameters, slope notes, stand conditions, water access, estimates of board feet, and occasional comments about weather. It did not, at first, hold the warnings. He trusted numbers more than he trusted old talk, not because he was arrogant in any loud way, but because measurement had served him well. Trees had rings. Acreage could be walked. A slope could be graded. A stand of yellow poplar could be valued. A county map could be wrong, but it was wrong in a way a man might correct.

His wife, Loretta, had died the winter before in the flu that swept through Somerset. She had been ill 6 days. On the 7th, her hand had cooled inside his. They had no children. No family of their own. Osias told people he took the Perry County assignment because the work was there, and that was true. He did not tell them that since Loretta went into the ground, he had come to prefer sleeping beneath roofs that were not his own. He preferred being a stranger. He preferred walking country that did not know him well enough to pity him.

There is a kind of grief that keeps its bags packed.

He carried that grief up the wagon road above Little Sook Fork on a Tuesday afternoon in October of 1934, riding in the bed of a rattling Ford flatbed driven by a mail contractor named Vester Ceridge. Ceridge was a narrow man with tobacco in his cheek and a habit of glancing at the tree line as if expecting it to step closer. He drove as far as the road permitted, then a little less. When the track narrowed and the ruts deepened under fallen leaves, he stopped.

“Last I go,” he said.

Osias paid him 50 cents, thanked him, shouldered his pack, and watched the flatbed turn around in a 3-point struggle of engine, mud, and complaint. Then he walked the last miles alone.

The Cisk place came into view after a half mile of switchback. It sat on a bench cut into the ridge: a 2-story dogtrot cabin with a sagging porch across the front, a smokehouse behind, and a hand-pump well between them. The chimney was working in the late afternoon, sending a thin blue thread into the cold air. A brindle dog on the porch lifted its head, decided Osias was neither food nor threat, gave a low, formal huff, and lay back down.

The man who came out to meet him was Frell Cisk.

Frell was 56 that fall. He had been a blacksmith down in Buckhorn until the mines gave out and work thinned to nothing. After that he had come up to his wife’s people’s homestead and taken to farming a rocky hillside that gave back less than it took. He was broad in the chest, short in the leg, and his forearms still carried the old smith’s density, knotted and scarred from burns. His face was weathered brown, his beard gray with the last of the black showing through. He shook Osias’s hand and did not smile, but there was no hostility in him. He was careful, which was a different thing.

His wife, Verie Cisk, stood in the doorway behind him. She was 52, small and sharp-faced, with quick hands and a clean apron. Her hair was tied in a plain knot. She had a way of looking at a man not only to see who he was, but to see what had followed him in. She looked at Osias that way for a long moment. Then she stepped aside.

The upstairs room they rented him held a rope bed, a washstand with a chipped basin, a chair, a mirror the size of a hymnal, and a west-facing window that looked across the hollow. The floorboards dipped toward the middle. The quilt was clean. From the window he could see the far ridge already darkening though sunset had not yet come.

“Supper’s at 6,” Verie said. “You wash at the pump. Soap’s in the jar on the shelf by the door. You empty your own basin when you go out walking of an evening.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She did not leave.

“There are 3 things I ask you to keep in your head,” she said. “I will speak of them once.”

Osias was tired, half sun-blinded from the westward walk, and only half listening. He had heard mountain cautions before. He knew not to laugh at them in front of people, but he did not always grant them much weight.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Do not carry an open flame down the ridge road after dark. If you must have light, use the closed lantern in the shed. Not a pine knot. Not a candle. Not a match. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Second thing. If you are walking home in the dark and you hear somebody call your name from off the road, do not turn your head. Do not answer. Do not stop. You keep walking, and you sing something in your own voice loud enough to cover it. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Third thing. When you come down along the branch and pass the old Culver barn, and you will know it because there is not another building for a mile in either direction, and the loft door hangs sideways on 1 hinge, and the yard is thick with yellowroot, you do not whistle. Not going by. Not near it. Not within the sound of it. Not any tune. Not part of a tune. Not 1 note to keep yourself company. Do you hear me?”

He heard her. He said he heard her.

Later, he would understand that hearing and listening are different matters.

That first week he did his work. The state had given him a section map folded into quarters, marked in red pencil, with drainage lines that were right in some places and hopeful in others. He walked ridges and benches. He bored trees, measured trunks, marked stands, noted slope and access. He wrote in his small, neat hand. He came back to the Cisk place at dusk with mud on his boots and leaves caught in the cuffs of his trousers.

Frell was usually splitting wood, mending harness, or working some small iron repair by lamplight. Verie kept supper plain and good: beans, corn cakes, side meat, greens when there were greens, coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. They spoke of weather, which was clear and cold. They spoke of the road down to Buckhorn, which was passable. They spoke of the state buying land and of men in Frankfort who believed paper could make a mountain behave.

They did not speak of the barn.

On his 4th evening, Osias asked Frell about it.

Frell was oiling a hoe handle in the kitchen, turning the wood slowly in his hands. He did not stop.

“The Culvers left the winter of 1899,” he said. “The way they left is a question the hollow answers 1 way and the county answers another. The county wrote diphtheria. The hollow says something else. That is all I will say to you at my own table, Mr. Trundle. Please do not ask me again.”

Osias did not.

On his 5th day in the hollow, he met Alva Renfroe.

She lived alone in a 1-room house half a mile up the ridge from the Cisks, in a stand of hemlocks so dense the sun did not reach her yard until 11 in the morning. She was 72, small enough that Osias thought he might have lifted her under 1 arm if she had cared to allow such a thing. Her face had the folded severity of a walnut shell, and her pale gray eyes looked as if they had seen too much and forgiven none of it.

She had been the hollow’s midwife for 40 years. She had washed the dead and sat with the dying. She knew who had been born too early, who had died without a preacher, who had hidden silver under a hearthstone, who had lied about a fall, and who had walked into the woods with fever and not come out. People said she knew every foot of ground for 6 miles in any direction. They also said she knew what lay under it.

Osias had gone up near her place to mark a stand of yellow poplar when she stepped onto the porch with a shotgun broken open across her arm and asked what business he had.

He told her.

She studied him a long while.

“Come sit,” she said.

He sat on the porch. She brought him sassafras tea in a chipped mug and sat beside him. For a while neither spoke. Wind moved through the tops of the hemlocks, high and soft, while below them the hollow held its afternoon quiet.

“You’re staying at Frell’s,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Verie told you the 3 things.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you will remember them?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at him.

“Say the 3rd one.”

He felt, for a moment, like a boy called up in school. He was a state employee with a degree from Lexington. He was being made to recite a superstition by an old woman with a shotgun on her knees. But something in Alva Renfroe’s face did not allow mockery, even private mockery. He repeated the rule.

When you pass the old Culver barn, do not whistle.

She nodded.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, “because Frell will not, and Verie will not tell it right. You look to me like a man who thinks he has already got the answer in his pocket. That is the kind that gets took.”

She set down her mug.

“The Culver barn was built in 1861,” she said. “On ground the Cherokee would not set foot on, and the Shawnee before them would not set foot on, and the folks who came before the Shawnee would not set foot on. There was a spring in that hollow, right where the barn sits now. Old Silas Culver was the first man dumb enough or hungry enough to think a spring was only a spring. He capped it. Built a barn on top of it. Put his cattle on top of it. His wife and his grown children lived on the ridge, and they worked that place 38 years until the winter of 1899.”

She looked out toward the hemlocks.

“You can ask the county what happened. The county will say diphtheria. I will tell you the county wrote diphtheria because the man who signed the paper could not bring himself to write down what he saw when he came down the ridge road on the 5th of January.”

Osias held the mug in both hands. The tea was cooling.

“There is a thing in that hollow,” Alva said, “that will use your own voice against you. That is the plain of it. It will take what you give it and give it back a little wrong. If you have not got the wit to notice the wrong of it, it will walk you home. Only it will not be your home. It will be that barn, and you will not remember getting there.”

She let that sit between them.

“In 1913,” she said, “a hunter came up out of Leslie County. Name was Amos Wickham. Good man. Sober. Married. He got caught in the dark on the ridge road in November and was whistling as he came around the bend past the Culver place. Whistling for company. That is what a man does in the dark. He whistled. Something whistled back. He whistled again, thinking it was 1 of the Cisk men playing a joke, back when there were more Cisks up here. It whistled back a tune he did not know. Amos was a man who liked a good tune, so he learned it. He whistled it back. Then it taught him another. Then another.”

She turned her gray eyes on Osias.

“Amos Wickham woke 2 days later on his own front porch 10 miles away, sitting in his own rocking chair with his boots on and his hands folded in his lap, and his wife screaming. He did not say 1 word from that morning to the day he died in 1921. Not 1 word, Mr. Trundle. He would hum. He would hum tunes his wife had never heard. But he did not speak.”

The wind moved again through the hemlocks. It seemed colder now.

“The sheriff wrote it up as sunstroke,” Alva said. “In November. That is the county for you.”

“With respect, ma’am,” Osias said carefully, “do you believe that?”

“I do not have to believe it,” she said. “I was the one who put him in his box the day he died. I laid him out. I washed his hands. I closed his eyes. Finest set of teeth I ever saw on a hollow man because he never wore them down talking. Do I believe it?”

She leaned back.

“I put a coin on each of his eyes and sat with him through the night. Along about 3 in the morning, he began to hum. He had been gone 9 hours.”

Osias did not write that in his notebook. When he left Alva’s porch and walked back to the Cisk place in the last of the afternoon light, he wrote instead about the yellow poplar stand.

That evening Verie fed him corn cakes, beans, and a piece of side meat. Frell did not speak. Osias slept without dreams.

On the 7th day, he saw the barn for the first time.

He had gone down the branch trail to inspect a bottomland stand of walnut and hickory. He was late returning. The light had begun to leave the hollow in layers. He came around the shoulder of the ridge and looked down.

There it was.

Everything Verie had said was true. No other building stood within a mile. The loft door hung sideways on 1 hinge. The yard was thick with yellowroot, and in the fading light the plants had the color of old brass. The branch ran past the near corner. The barn itself sat not as abandoned buildings usually sit, sagging into forgetfulness, but with an odd attention. Its dark openings seemed less empty than waiting.

Osias stopped on the trail 200 yards above it.

The sun had gone behind the ridge, but there was still light in the sky. In the loft doorway, he thought he saw something move.

It could have been a bird. It could have been a shadow. It could have been the door shifting on its hinge in a gust of wind. There was, in fact, a gust of wind. He felt it on the back of his neck a moment later, coming up the trail toward him.

But it did not look like a bird.

It looked like someone standing in the loft doorway, watching.

He stood until the light failed further. Then he lowered his head and walked. He did not whistle. That much he remembered later. He did not whistle.

When he came into the yard at the Cisk place, Frell was on the porch with a shotgun across his knees. Frell looked at Osias, then past him toward the trail. After a while, without a word, he stood and went inside.

At supper, Osias asked Verie 1 question.

“When you say not to whistle,” he said, “is that only past the barn, or anywhere on the ridge after dark?”

She set her fork down and looked at him.

“Anywhere it can hear you,” she said.

Part 2

For the next 11 days, Osias kept to daylight.

He rose early, washed at the pump while frost still silvered the grass, ate whatever Verie set before him, and went out with his pack while the eastern sky was just beginning to pale. He worked carefully and returned before dark. He wrote in his notebook by lamplight, sharpened pencils with his pocketknife, and made clean copies of rough figures. He read a 2-week-old copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal until the words blurred. On Sunday evening, Frell coaxed a preacher’s voice through the static of an old crystal set, and the 17th Psalm came thinly into the kitchen from Lexington.

Osias did not go past the barn.

He told himself there was no reason to. The section map was large enough; other stands needed walking; other ridges had to be counted and marked. The barn lay where it lay. It had no concern with him.

Then he began to sleep badly.

At first, he blamed Loretta. Grief had a habit of waiting for him in the middle of the night. He would wake from a dream of her hand in his, or of the way she had looked past him during her last fever, as if already seeing a room he could not enter. He would lie in the rope bed in the upstairs room at the Cisk place and listen to the house. There was no shortage of ordinary sounds. The boards settled. The wind moved under the eaves. Somewhere out on the ridge a screech owl called. The brindle dog on the porch huffed in its sleep. Frell coughed once in the room below and turned over.

All of it belonged.

But sometime in the second week, between 2 and 4 in the morning, Osias heard something that did not.

Whistling.

It was faint, so faint at first he thought he had brought it up from sleep. It came the way a whistle comes over a ridge from a long distance, half eaten by trees and hollow air. It was not any tune he knew. It was not fast. It was patient. It came from the direction of the branch, which meant it came from the direction of the old Culver barn.

He lay still until dawn.

The next night it came again.

And the next.

By the 4th night, he was sitting upright before he knew he had moved, listening with both hands gripping the quilt. The whistle held itself just beyond recognition. It seemed almost familiar, then shifted away when his mind reached for it. It repeated a little phrase, or seemed to, though he could not have written the notes down. It was not loud enough to wake the house. It was meant for him alone, or so it felt in the dark.

At breakfast on the 12th day, he mentioned it to Frell.

Frell drank his coffee, eyes on the table.

“I do not hear anything after I lie down,” he said. “I will thank you not to mention it in the house.”

Osias apologized. He meant it. After breakfast, he walked up the ridge to Alva Renfroe’s place.

She was on the porch. She appeared to have been expecting him.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat.

“You have heard it,” she said.

He nodded.

“Not close,” he told her. “A long way off. Down toward the branch.”

“How many nights?”

“4 in a row.”

She looked at him for such a long time that he began to feel the silence as a weight.

“That is an invitation, Mr. Trundle,” she said. “That is what it is. It is asking you to answer. Have you answered?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You keep from answering. You keep from humming it. You keep from putting it in your head. If it comes into your head of its own, you let it go out again. You do not sit and try to catch it. You do not remember it. It wants to be remembered.”

“I understand.”

He was lying a little, though he did not know it. He had already begun trying to remember the shape of the thing he had heard. He had done so without deciding to. That is what the ear does with music. That is what a lonely man does with any voice in the dark. He follows it just far enough to see whether it knows his name.

Alva saw it in him. She reached out and placed her old hand over the back of his where it rested on the chair arm. Her hand was warm.

“Osias,” she said, using his given name for the first time, “go back to Frankfort. Tell them your business up here is done.”

“My business is not done, ma’am.”

“Your business will kill you,” she said.

He walked back to the Cisk place and sat on the porch until dark. He did not go inside for supper. After a while, Verie came out with a plate of cornbread and beans and set it on the porch rail beside him. She did not speak. He ate standing up.

That night he slept.

The whistle did not come.

It did not come the next night either.

He began, as men will, to think he had imagined it. He began to feel embarrassed by the force of his own unease. The mountain was lonely. The room was strange. The wind might have moved through some split in the old barn boards and made a sound like a tune. The mind, half awake and grieving, could make almost anything out of air.

That was when it caught him.

The night it caught him was Wednesday, October 17, 1934.

Osias had gone down the branch trail that morning to a bottomland stand he had not yet cruised. It was 3 miles from the Cisk place, and he knew before setting out that it would be a long day. He packed lunch, compass, notebook, Biltmore stick, small hatchet, canteen, and the increment borer. He also put the closed lantern from Verie’s shed in the inside pocket of his coat without telling her. He expected to be late. He told himself he was being prudent.

The bottomland stand was better than he had expected. Old yellow poplar rose there, some trunks 3 feet through at breast height, with hemlocks behind them dark as iron. The ground was soft under leaves. The branch moved nearby over stone and root. He worked slowly because the timber deserved slow work. He measured carefully and took clean notes. At noon he sat on a fallen log and ate cold corn bread and side meat. In the early afternoon, he cored a poplar and counted its rings.

The tree had begun life in the summer of 1789.

Osias sat with his back against its trunk for a while, thinking of the man who might have first noticed that tree as a sapling. He wondered whether that man had stood on the same square foot of ground, whether the same branch had sounded the same, whether the hollow had already been avoided then. He wondered whether ground warned people differently before maps came.

It was 2 in the afternoon when he finished. He began walking at 2:15. On a clear day, he would have had ample light. The trail back climbed the branch for 2 miles, crossed it at a stone ford, then went up along a bench of the ridge. That bench passed within 50 yards of the old Culver barn. There was no other way back to the Cisk place unless he cut straight up through laurel and risked being benighted on the slope.

He had known this going in.

Then the fog came up.

Fog in a Kentucky hollow in October is not a curtain that drops. It rises. It comes from the creek and follows water. It fills low places first, then climbs the banks and slides between trunks, collecting in folds of ground and whitening every distance. It moves slowly enough that a man can keep walking and believe the day has merely dimmed. Then he looks up and finds the world shortened to a few yards of gray.

Osias was still a mile from the barn when he realized the air ahead had thickened. He was half a mile from it when he could see no more than 40 feet. He was a quarter mile from it when the light began to fail in earnest.

He had the closed lantern. He did not light it.

Verie’s first rule returned to him with sudden force. Do not carry an open flame down the ridge road after dark. If you must have light, use the closed lantern. Not a pine knot. Not a candle. Not a match.

The lantern was closed. Still, he left it in his coat. He did not want light. Light would show him how close he was to things he could not see.

He walked.

He came around the shoulder of the ridge and started down the bench that would take him past the barn. By then the fog was to his waist. He could see the tops of the trees above it and the sky beyond them, dim and gray. He could not see his own boots.

He was 50 yards from the barn when he began to whistle.

He did not decide to whistle. That was the part he would later insist upon. His mouth did it before thought could interfere. It was a tune his father had whistled when Osias was young in Somerset, a tune with no name, or none Osias knew. His father had whistled it shaving in the morning, oiling a saw, walking to the well, hitching a mule. It had entered Osias in childhood and lived there without need of memory. It was as much a reflex as breath.

He whistled 4 bars.

Nothing answered.

He kept walking. He kept whistling because he was frightened, and whistling was what he did when fear came but had not yet taken the whole of him. He had whistled at Loretta’s grave. He had whistled walking home after her funeral. He was that kind of man.

He reached the 8th bar.

Something whistled back.

It came from behind him. Close. Not far in the trees. Not across the hollow. Close. Perhaps 20 feet. Perhaps 30. Behind him and just to his left in the fog.

It was his tune.

Same key. Same tempo. Same little catch in the 6th note where his father’s whistle had always caught because his front teeth had a small gap and the note came out a hair sharp.

Same catch.

Osias stopped.

The whistling behind him stopped.

He stood on the bench above the old Culver barn, hearing his own breath, his blood in his ears, and the branch somewhere down below. He told himself it was an echo. He knew it was not. Echoes returned what was given. They did not add a dead man’s teeth.

After a while, the whistling began again.

It was no longer his father’s tune.

It was something new.

The whistler in the fog had, in that silence, decided to teach him something. It began slowly. 4 notes, a pause, 4 more. Simple. Plain. The kind of tune a man might whistle to a horse. The kind a woman might hum to settle a room. It was not threatening. That made it worse. It sounded friendly.

Osias stood in the fog and listened as the phrase played through, then repeated, then repeated again. It waited for him.

He knew what it wanted.

He wanted to whistle it back.

Later, he would tell that part only once, and only to Alva Renfroe, in her house with the shotgun across her knees. He wanted to whistle it back more than he had wanted anything since Loretta died. It was such a small thing. 4 notes, a pause, 4 more. He could feel the shape of it in his mouth. He knew where his tongue would go. He knew the exact place against the roof of his mouth where the 2nd note would break.

Then he thought of Amos Wickham sitting in his rocking chair, boots on, hands folded, no word left in him.

Osias clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached for a week.

The whistling behind him played the phrase again. Slower. It played it again.

Then it stopped.

A voice said his name.

It came from off the trail, down and to the right, toward the barn.

“Osias.”

It was his father’s voice.

His father had been dead 19 years.

Osias did not turn his head. He did not answer. Verie’s 2nd rule returned to him the way a drowning man remembers to hold his breath. If you are walking home in the dark and hear somebody call your name from off the road, do not turn your head. Do not answer. Do not stop. Keep walking, and sing something in your own voice loud enough to cover it.

He fixed his eyes forward, though forward was only fog. He put 1 boot in front of the other. Because he could not whistle, and because he dared not answer, and because he needed a sound in his own throat, he began to sing.

He sang the doxology.

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

His voice was low and unsteady.

“Praise Him, all creatures here below.”

It cracked on the 2nd line. He sang louder.

“Praise Him above, ye heavenly host.”

The voice off the trail said his name again.

“Osias.”

It was closer.

“Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

He sang it through once. Then again. Then a 3rd time. His mouth dried. The fog moved around his waist, thick as wet wool. Somewhere to his left he felt the barn.

That was the word he used later.

Felt.

Not heard. Not saw. Felt.

The barn seemed to pull at him. It was like walking past the mouth of a well when thirst had become the largest thing in the world. He felt his feet wanting to angle down the slope. He felt his shoulders wanting to turn. He corrected his course. Then, without meaning to, drifted left again. He sang louder.

After perhaps 80 yards, he realized he could no longer hear the branch.

It should have been on his right. He had been walking along it all this time, hearing it below him over stone. Now there was nothing.

He stopped.

The fog pressed close.

Slowly, carefully, he turned his head to the right.

The branch was not there.

The trail was not there.

He was standing in yellowroot. He could feel it against his calves.

He was in the yard of the Culver barn.

He had walked 30 yards off the trail and down the slope while singing the doxology and had not felt himself do it.

The barn stood 10 feet in front of him.

The loft door was open.

There was a shape in the loft.

It was not standing in the doorway exactly. It stood back inside the dark, far enough that Osias could see no face, no limbs, no clothing. He could only see that the darkness there had mass. It had stillness. It had patience. Empty air did not stand that way.

And it was whistling.

4 notes, a pause, 4 more.

Osias tried to move his feet. He could not. His boots seemed rooted in the yellowroot. The tune came down from the loft, gentle and plain. It sounded as if it had all night to wait.

Then, from up on the bench in the direction of the Cisk place, another voice called his name.

Not his father’s.

Frell Cisk’s.

“Osias Trundle.”

A lantern glow moved in the fog, low and yellow. A closed lantern.

“Osias, you call out.”

Osias understood dimly that he was meant to answer. He also understood Verie had told him not to answer a voice from off the road. Frell was on the road. That was the thin edge of safety left to him, and he took it.

He drew a breath. His tongue stuck to his mouth.

“Frell,” he croaked. “Where are you?”

“Where are you?” Frell called.

“The yard,” Osias said.

There was a pause.

“Do not move,” Frell said. “Do not turn your head. You wait for me. I am coming to you. Do not answer anything else you hear.”

The lantern light came down the slope. The whistling in the loft did not stop. Frell appeared out of the fog walking sideways, 1 hand on his rifle, 1 hand holding the closed lantern. He did not look at the barn. He did not look at the loft. He came directly to Osias, placed a hand between his shoulder blades, and said, “Walk.”

Osias walked.

Frell walked behind him.

The whistling continued for a while, then stopped.

They left the yard, crossed the stone ford, and the branch was there again, speaking over rock as if it had never ceased. The moment Osias’s boots touched the far bank, the fog began to lift. That is what Osias said later. It is what Frell said. It is what Alva said when she came down the next morning. The moment they crossed the water going away from the barn, the fog went off them.

They reached the Cisk place in silence.

Verie stood in the doorway with a shotgun. She took 1 look at Osias’s face and stepped aside.

He sat at the kitchen table. She put coffee before him. His hands shook so violently he could not lift the cup.

“Did you whistle back?” Verie asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Did you answer the voice?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did you cross the water going in?”

He thought about the ford. He remembered dimly stepping on stones before the fog thickened. He could not be sure.

“I do not know.”

Verie looked at Frell.

“He crossed it both directions,” Frell said. “Both times. I saw the wet on his boots.”

“Then he will keep his voice,” Verie said. “But he will have something in his head that does not belong to him. That is the price of it. Do you understand me, Mr. Trundle?”

He said he understood.

He did not.

Not yet.

Part 3

Osias slept 12 hours.

When he woke, it was Thursday afternoon. The light in the upstairs room was thin and clear, the fog gone from the hollow as if it had never existed. For several moments he lay in the rope bed without knowing where he was. Then the memory of the barn returned, and with it came the tune.

4 notes, a pause, 4 more.

It was in his head as plainly as if someone stood beside the bed whistling into his ear.

He tried to push it away. It remained. He turned onto his side, shut his eyes, and silently recited figures from his notebook: diameters, acre estimates, section lines, stand conditions. The tune waited beneath the numbers. He sat up and rubbed his face. Without meaning to, he hummed the first note.

He clapped a hand over his mouth.

Downstairs, Alva Renfroe was already at the kitchen table. She had walked down from her place early that morning and brought a small canvas satchel with her. She had not slept. Frell stood near the stove. Verie worked at the counter without turning around.

Alva looked at Osias when he entered.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat.

“You have it,” she said.

He nodded.

“You cannot hum it. Not out loud. Not to yourself. Not in a house where somebody is sleeping. Not near water. Not in a barn. Not in a shed. Not in a room where the walls remember. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are not going to lose it,” she said. “You will have that tune in your head for the rest of your natural life. It has taken up a room in you. You cannot make it leave. You can only keep the door of that room shut.”

He said nothing.

“You are going down the mountain today,” Alva said. “You are not going to finish the survey. You are going to write the state and tell them the terrain does not permit the work in the time given. You will give that section to another man. I would ask you to write in your letter that no man be sent up here in fall, and no man be sent after harvest, and no man be sent up here at all. But you will not write those things because you are a man and you have a job. So write what you can write.”

He nodded.

“And you will not come back,” she said. “Do you understand me? Not for the state. Not for a hunt. Not for a friend. Not for a woman. Not for a dying man. You will not come back into this hollow.”

“I understand.”

Alva reached into the canvas satchel and took out a small cotton bag with a drawstring. She placed it on the table before him.

“What is that?” Osias asked.

“Something to keep in the room with the tune.”

“What is it?”

“You do not need to know what it is. You need to keep it in your pocket. You keep it there for the rest of your life. When you go, they bury it with you.”

The bag was no larger than a walnut. It weighed almost nothing. He took it because he did not know what else to do. He placed it in his coat pocket and felt, for a moment, the faint pressure of it against his thigh. It was absurdly small to be trusted with anything so large as fear.

That afternoon Frell hitched the wagon and took him down to Buckhorn.

Verie packed food in paper and tied it with string. She did not say goodbye. She stood on the porch with her arms folded and watched as he climbed into the wagon beside Frell. The brindle dog lay with its head between its paws, eyes open.

The ride down was cold and quiet. The road twisted through timber and washed-out turns. Once, far below, Osias heard water over stone and had to bite down hard as the tune stirred in his head. Frell did not look at him.

At Buckhorn, Vester Ceridge was there with the mail truck. Frell stepped down, handed Osias his pack, and shook his hand. He held it a moment longer than courtesy required. He looked at Osias as if deciding whether to say something more. Then he released him, climbed back into the wagon, turned it around, and went up the road toward the hollow.

Osias rode the flatbed to Hazard, took the train to Somerset, and by the following Monday morning sat at his own kitchen table. The house felt too familiar and too empty. Loretta’s chair remained near the stove. Her sewing basket was still in the corner. The room remembered her in a way that hurt more than any strange place could have done.

The tune was with him.

4 notes, a pause, 4 more.

He wrote the letter to the state forestry office. He kept it plain. He reported that the terrain in the assigned section did not permit completion within the allotted time and recommended reassignment under different seasonal conditions. He did not mention the barn. He did not mention the fog. He did not mention the voice of his dead father calling from off the road.

He signed the letter and sent it.

In due course, the state assigned the section to another cruiser, a young man named Delmar Poe. Poe went up in the spring of 1935, when the ground was green and the fog stayed low along the branch. He completed the survey in 8 weeks, came home without incident, married, had a long life, and died in 1968 in his own bed of natural causes.

There was no more to the Delmar Poe story than that.

Not everyone who entered that hollow came out changed. Some ground shows what it is only when the year is right.

Osias Trundle lived 32 more years.

He never remarried. He stayed in the Somerset house he had shared with Loretta. He kept working for the state until he retired in 1959. His colleagues liked him. They called him quiet and steady. He kept a small garden behind the house and a good dog that slept near the back step. He read the Louisville Courier-Journal. He paid his bills on time. He attended church irregularly but respectfully. He did not trouble people with the private weather of his mind.

He also did not whistle.

That was the thing friends noticed. As a young man, Osias had been a whistler. He whistled while working, while walking, while waiting on a train, while mending tools, while standing in a doorway looking at rain. After the fall of 1934, the habit went out of him and never returned.

If someone asked, he gave a plain answer.

“Lost the habit,” he said.

He kept the little cotton bag from Alva Renfroe in his pocket. When coats wore out, he moved it to the next coat. When trousers were mended, he made sure the bag was moved before they went to the woman who did the sewing. In summer, when he wore lighter clothes, he kept it in a vest or shirt pocket. He never opened it. Whatever was inside remained inside.

At times, the tune pressed close. It came when water moved in gutters. It came when wind passed through a cracked window frame. It came sometimes in church, when the congregation paused between hymns and the silence held a note too long. He learned the discipline Alva had named for him. He kept the door shut.

But a closed door is not an empty room.

In the last year of his life, after retirement had made his days quieter than was good for him, the housekeeper who came twice a week noticed changes. Her name was Mercedes Blye. She was a practical woman, not given to fancies, and she had known old men before. She saw that Osias sometimes paused in the middle of a room and listened. She saw him put his hand over his mouth once when he thought she was not looking. She saw how he avoided standing too long near the parlor chimney when wind came from the west.

After his funeral, Mercedes told a preacher that in those last months she had heard a whistle in the house.

It came in the small hours from the parlor.

At first she thought it was a bird in the chimney. She checked. There was no bird. Then she thought it might be wind in the flue. She checked. There was no wind. She heard it perhaps 6 or 7 times that year. It was a plain little tune, she said. 4 notes, a pause, 4 more.

It did not frighten her at first.

“It was almost friendly,” she said.

The preacher wrote it down in his notebook. He kept the notebook. Decades later, his grandson gave it to a folklorist in Berea. By then the old people who had known the hollow were nearly all gone, and most of the places named in their stories had changed beyond easy recognition.

Osias died in 1966. Mercedes found the little cotton bag in the pocket of the coat he had been wearing. She did not know what it was. She left it there. He was buried in that coat in Somerset beneath a small stone.

The old Culver barn came down in a windstorm in 1967.

No one remained in the hollow to see it fall. The Cisks were gone. Frell and Verie had both passed out of the county’s living memory. Alva Renfroe had died in 1951. The ridge road grew over in briar, poplar saplings, and laurel. The yellowroot came back heavier than before. The branch kept running past the place where the near corner had stood.

The barn was gone.

The ground remained.

That is what the hill people had always known. They knew that some ground remembers. Not all ground. Some. They knew that when a building is set on ground that remembers, the building begins to take on the memory. The memory begins to want a voice. If it has none of its own, it will use what is nearby.

A whistle is an old voice. Older than singing in some ways. Older than words, or close to it. It is the voice a farmhand uses in the dark when he is not brave enough to sing and not frightened enough to stay silent. It is a small human offering to loneliness. A man whistles to prove he is not listening too hard.

Something under the Culver barn had listened.

Silas Culver built there in 1861 because he thought a spring was only a spring. He capped it, set his barn above it, and gave the ground cattle, tools, hay, footfalls, labor, and voices. Whatever lay beneath learned its first tune in the winter of 1862. It listened through the years that followed. It listened when the Culver family worked and when they left in 1899 under a word the county could bear to write. It listened to Amos Wickham in 1913, and Amos Wickham gave it tune after tune until there were no words left in him. It listened to Osias Trundle in the fog of October 1934 and gave him back his father’s whistle with the dead man’s flaw in the 6th note.

By now, if such a thing can be said of what waits in ground, it has a repertoire.

The county never found a word for that. County forms have places for exposure, fever, accident, sunstroke, misadventure, natural causes. They do not have a line for a tune that enters a man and stays. They do not have a place to write down ground that calls in a borrowed voice. They do not have a place for a barn that is not empty even after it falls.

So the papers remain clean.

The story does not.

Somewhere above Little Sook Fork, beyond a road mostly vanished and a bench of ridge that no longer appears on ordinary maps, the hollow keeps its shape. In October, fog still comes up from the branch. It fills the low places first, then climbs. It gathers in yellowroot. It shortens the world until a man can see the treetops and the dim sky but not his own boots.

If a state cruiser ever goes up that way again, and if he comes down the old ridge road at dusk on a Wednesday in October, and if the fog rises from the branch while he is still too far from home, there are rules he would do well to know.

No open flame.

No answering voices from off the road.

No whistling near the place where the old Culver barn stood.

Because if he is a man who whistles when he is afraid, and most men are, he may hear something behind him in the fog. Not far away. Close. 20 feet. 30. Behind him and just to his left.

It may give back his own tune.

Then it may improve upon it.

4 notes, a pause, 4 more.

Plain. Patient. Almost friendly.

And after that, the county may have another paper to file under the wrong word.