The corner of the copper band came into view at the third flash of lightning, and Aseph Marrow understood that the valley had been waiting for him all along. It was the second Monday of May 1948, and Aseph Marrow was fifty-four years old. He was the chief tax assessor of Searcy County, Arkansas, the man the county sent when a piece of land had gone so long without paying its taxes that the court was no longer sure who, if anyone, was responsible for them. He was a thin man, neither fat nor skinny, with slightly stooped shoulders, the posture of someone who had spent thirty years carrying a bag full of title records up and down hills.

His hair had gone the color of wet ash at fifty-one. His face was long, narrow at the chin, with a wide forehead and pale gray eyes set so deep that he seemed, even when looking directly at you, to be looking at something a few inches behind your head. His hands were his most notable feature. Long fingers, steady beyond belief, and his right thumb permanently stained around the nail from the fountain pen he had used for forty years.

He could thread a needle on the first attempt, something his wife claimed was a matter of personal vanity. Her name was Reola, and she is not otherwise part of this story. He left the courthouse in Marshall with a file under his arm. On the outside cover, in a clerk’s slanted handwriting, was written: Trivathan Odia W, NE4 NW4, 29 T16N R15W, Coffee Pot Hollow.

Delinquent since 1893. Personal service failed. Repeated. No known heirs.

Status: Pending. Below that, in different ink, in hand that was perhaps twenty years younger: Attempted again 1922, surveyor did not complete the line. Below that, in pencil, in a third hand: Attempted again 1935, advised not to touch. That third line was the handwriting of Aseph’s predecessor, a man named Ernest Rook, who had retired in 1946 and moved to Hot Springs to live with his sister, and who had not answered any letter the court had sent him in the past eighteen months.

Waiting on the front steps was a man named Crispen Verlane, thirty-six years old, dark-haired, with the forearms of a man who had spent every summer of his life hunting or cutting wood. He was not a government employee. He was a mountain laborer hired by the day when the work took you past the last paved road. There were six men in the county that Aseph worked with this way.

Crispen was the one who went furthest. He had hunted in Coffee Pot Hollow as a boy, and said so plainly when Aseph mentioned their destination, not as a man boasting, but as a man telling you he had once had typhoid. They left Marshall just after eight in the morning. The road north was good gravel for the first hour.

Poor gravel for the second. By the third hour, there was no road at all, only the trace of two parallel ruts cut by spring rains and already being reclaimed by new grass. Shortly after eleven they crossed a small creek called Coffee Pot Branch, brown slow water about eighteen feet wide, shallow enough to cross without getting off the mules. On the far side, the trees changed.

This was what Aseph would remember later, when trying to explain to a doctor in Little Rock what had been wrong with the valley. The trees were the usual Ozark forest on their side of the creek: white oak, black oak, some walnut, the kind of woods where squirrels lived and ironweed grew at the roots, where wind moved the upper leaves with regularity. On the other bank, the trees were older. Not old as forests are old, but old as furniture is old.

The same trees, but the spacing between them irregular, low branches at a man’s chest height, and a stillness among them that was not the stillness of absence of sound but the stillness of a sound that had just stopped. Crispen stopped his mule at the bank, looked at Aseph, and said, “This is your last chance, Mr. Marrow. ” Aseph said, “I have work to do.

” Crispen said, “I know you do. ” Then he turned his mule, and they crossed. The Trevathan farm sat at the far back of Coffee Pot Hollow, against a north-facing bluff where the cabin was built, its door facing south over the orchard, its back to the rock. Three buildings stood.

A one-room cabin with a stone chimney that had not completely fallen. A spring house built over a seep that ran from the bluff. A half-collapsed barn whose roof beams had fallen inward like a closing hand. Behind these three buildings was the orchard.

Eleven apple trees in three crooked rows, all still alive, and this was the first wrong thing. Apple trees do not live fifty-five years without care. They die. Their branches grow wild, their trunks rot at the base, deer eat what is left.

These eleven trees had not been pruned, not exactly, but they had not died either. They stood in their rows like an old man standing in the doorway of a house he had not lived in since boyhood, neither inside nor outside. The grass beneath them was short. This was the second wrong thing.

Nothing grazed there. Crispen saw the orchard and stopped his mule. “I’ll camp at the spring house,” he said. Aseph said, “Fine.

” Crispen said, “I suppose you’re camping there too. ” Aseph said, “I’ll be in the cabin. I have papers to review. ” Crispen did not argue.

He unloaded his bedroll and his rifle, walked the mules to the spring house, and did not look at the orchard again. Aseph noticed, but did not understand it at the time. It was about two in the afternoon when Aseph pushed open the cabin door. The hinges were leather.

They held. Inside, the cabin was dark and dry, with a faint smell like a wool coat that has hung in a closet too long. Not unpleasant. Not entirely clean, either.

There was a table. A chair pushed under the table. A bed frame in the corner with no mattress, only ropes. A small iron stove on the chimney wall with a kettle on it.

The kettle was empty. The kettle was not rusty. This was the third wrong thing. But by then Aseph had stopped counting wrong things in his mind.

He put his bag on the table, took out his notebook, and wrote in his precise hand: Single-room cabin, 14 x 18 feet, log construction. Roof sound on south side, partially rotted on north. Chimney sound to the smoke shelf. Door serviceable.

Furniture in place. He underlined “in place. ” Then he went to the table, pulled out the chair, and sat down to do what he had come for. The papers were under the table, and he did not know it until he looked.

A small bundle wrapped in waxed cloth, tied with dark twine, fixed beneath the tabletop with two iron nails, folded over it like fingers. Aseph brought the bundle down and cut the twine with his pocketknife. The waxed cloth had been waxed once, and the wax had gone amber. When he opened it, the smell was old and faint, reminding him, for a reason he could not place, of the courthouse basement in Marshall in August.

Inside the waxed cloth were four things. A small ledger half filled. A folded square of paper. A tintype photograph the size of a playing card.

And a key. The key was old iron, with a long bit and a ring at the top. It was tied with dark twine to a piece of cardboard. On the cardboard, in brown ink that had once been black, someone had written in a schoolteacher’s careful hand: The trunk in the orchard, 13 feet 3 inches.

The cornerstone is the marker. God forgive me. He read those four lines, then read them again. He placed the key on the table with great care, the way a man sets down a stinging insect he does not want to crush and does not want to encourage.

Then he picked up the ledger. The first page was dated October 11, 1887. The hand was the same as on the cardboard. The first line read: “Came down off the mountain today with Malan.

Took title from the court. The land is ours, and no one else in this hollow. ”

Aseph closed the ledger. He sat for a long minute with his palm on the cover.

Then he rose and walked to the orchard in the afternoon light to look for the cornerstone. He found it in the southwest corner of the orchard, half sunk in the grass. A flat slab of sandstone about two feet wide, with a deep cross carved into its face. Not a Christian cross.

A cross with its four arms of equal length. The lines were deeper than weather alone could carve. The kind of carving a man makes with a chisel and intent. Aseph went back to the spring house.

He told Crispen what he had found. He showed him the cardboard. Crispen read it once. He did not touch it.

“Mr. Marrow,” he said, “whatever is in it, leave it for the man who buried it. Take your file. Mark the land unrecoverable.

Go home. ” Aseph said, “I have to give them an answer. ” Crispen said, “Then give them no. ”

The storm came just after dark.

It came like Ozark storms come from the southwest, with wind that was not arriving so much as already present. The rain fell hard for an hour, then stopped for ten minutes. During those ten minutes the lightning was nearly continuous, white and close and so bright it threw the orchard against the cabin’s inner window like a magic lantern slide throwing an image onto paper. Aseph was at the window when the lightning struck the apple tree, the one at the far end of the orchard, nearest the bluff, furthest from the cornerstone.

The strike was not the kind that splits a tree. It was the kind that opens it. The trunk separated from its highest point down to the root, bark fell in a long roll of steam, and the tree leaned and did not fall. In the next flash, Aseph saw the corner of something metallic.

Not a gleam. A corner. A right angle. The corner of a piece of copper on a leather trunk, sticking three or four inches out of the rain-soaked loose earth, at thirteen feet.

Aseph stood at the window with his palms flat on the sill, watching the next three flashes. The corner was still there. He went and got Crispen. They argued for about fifteen minutes in the spring house while the rain fell hard again.

In the end, Crispen said, very quietly, “I will help you dig. I will not help you open it. ” That was the agreement. Aseph accepted it.

They worked in the orchard from the time the rain let up, just after midnight, until the sun came up red behind the bluff at 5:40. They did not have to dig thirteen feet. The ground had given them most of it. The storm had ripped a circle of earth out at the base of the apple tree, perhaps four feet deep.

What was beneath it when they reached it with shovels was not compacted soil. It was loose. The kind of soil a man puts back in a hole after he has put something in it. It came out easily.

By four in the morning they were at eleven feet by the tape measure. By five, they were at thirteen feet three inches by the cardboard. The trunk was there. It was about thirty-two inches long, eighteen wide, eighteen high.

Hard leather, dark with age, stitched at the corners with copper, bound with copper bands. There was a copper plate on the lid where a name was meant to be. The plate was blank, polished by hand, the way a man polishes something he wants to empty. Two iron bands had been added later, nailed through the body of the trunk, and the bands carried a second lock below the original.

The original lock fit the iron key. The second lock did not. The second lock had been broken at some point in the past, and an iron nail had been driven through the hasp and hammered over, the way a man closes something he never intends to open again. That second lock was not Obadiah Trevathan’s work.

Aseph would confirm this later, when he had read enough of the ledger to know what was Obadiah’s work and what was not. Crispen did not put his hand on the trunk. Aseph lifted it alone. It was lighter than it should have been, lighter even than an empty trunk of that size.

When he set it on the grass at the edge of the hole, the copper band on its side was warm. Not hot. Warm the way stone becomes when someone has been sitting on it. The leather was damp and warm.

Crispen saw it and stepped back. He said, “I’m going down to the mules. ” He did not look at Aseph when he said it. He turned and walked.

He did not look at the orchard either. Aseph watched him go. That walk would stay in Aseph’s mind for the rest of his life, because it was the last time he ever saw Crispen Verlane standing in any direction. Aseph carried the trunk to the cabin.

He set it on the table. He pulled his chair to the table. He sat. He looked at the trunk for a long time in the gray early-morning light coming through the cabin window.

He listened, and heard nothing from the orchard. He heard nothing from the spring house either. He told himself Crispen was tending the mules. He told himself he could hear the mules from where he sat, which he could, faintly.

He looked at the iron key. He looked at the original lock. He picked up the key. He inserted it.

The lock turned. He raised the lid. Inside the trunk, folded carefully on top, was a dark blue wool coat, a man’s coat. It would have fit Obadiah Trevathan, as the ledger described him: a man of medium height with long arms.

Under the coat, a white shirt, folded and clean. Under the shirt, a felt hat with a polished black band. Under the hat, an empty leather wallet. Under the wallet, a Bible.

A small black King James Bible, its cover worn at the corners but the gold lettering on the spine still visible. This was the upper tray. The trunk had two trays. Aseph lifted out the upper tray and set it on the table beside the trunk with great care.

In the lower tray were three things. A thick stack of folded paper, perhaps a hundred and twenty sheets, tied with the same dark twine used on the ledger. A small wooden box the size of two cigar boxes, made of a dark wood he did not recognize, with no nails, fastened with wooden pegs. And a second tintype, larger than the first, mounted on heavy black cardboard.

The photograph was face down. Aseph took the stack of paper first. He untied it. He spread on the cabin table in the gray morning light what Obadiah Trevathan had written in the last eighteen months of his life.

It was a continuation of the ledger, same hand, same brown-black ink, same precise and patient spacing of a man who had learned somewhere from someone who had corrected him. It began in late winter of 1892. It ended on October 11, 1893. Exactly six years after Obadiah and Malan had crossed Coffee Pot Branch carrying their deed of title.

Aseph read it sitting at that table all morning and most of the afternoon, rising only once to go out and call for Crispen, getting no answer. What the papers first told him was who Obadiah Trevathan was. The ledger said that Obadiah Wexley Trevathan of Greenup County, Kentucky, had come to Searcy County, Arkansas, in the fall of 1887, after selling his half share of his father’s tannery to his older brother for $248 and a saddle. He was forty-one when he came, forty-seven when he stopped writing.

He had brought with him a man named Malan Sweet, who had worked for his father since boyhood, and who had come west with Obadiah on the understanding that the land, when proven, would be recorded in both their names as partners. Malan Sweet was thirty-eight that first fall, bigger than Obadiah, broad-chested, quiet. He was black-haired, going to iron, with a scar on the back of his left hand from a tanning hook. He could not read much.

Obadiah read to him in the evenings. This was all their household had for the first four years. Two men, eleven apple trees, four hogs, two milk cows, a pair of mules, and a hollow nobody had lived in before them, and nobody came to settle near them for the four years they were there. This last part was what began to bother Obadiah gradually.

He wrote about it first in the spring of 1891. A short entry, three lines. He wrote: “The land office in Marshall confirms there are no records in Coffee Pot Hollow before ours. Asked again why.

The clerk looked at me a long time. Said the people who were here before us left. Asked when. The clerk said it was too long ago to record.

Left. ” The next entry, two days later, was longer. He wrote that he had gone to the general store at a settlement called Witts Springs, the nearest post office, and had stood for half an hour with a cup of coffee in his hand listening to four old men talk by the stove about anything but Coffee Pot Hollow, and that when he finally spoke the name of his land out loud, all four went silent at once, the way he had only ever seen when a fifth man entered a room and the four did not want him to know they had been talking about his wife. One of the four, the oldest, a man Obadiah named in the ledger as Old Man Beauvais, walked him out onto the store porch after the others had left.

Old Man Beauvais said, plainly, “There’s a stone in your orchard. ” Obadiah said, “There’s the cornerstone, the one with the cross carved on it. ” Old Man Beauvais said, “That’s not a cornerstone. ” Obadiah asked what it was.

Old Man Beauvais did not answer. He said, “Don’t move it. Don’t dig under it. Don’t sit on it.

Don’t let your partner sit on it. And if you ever come down to my porch and tell me you hear something through it, take Malan, take what mules will follow you, and get out of that hollow, and don’t look at the orchard. Because if you look at it, it will begin to look at you. ” Obadiah wrote that down verbatim.

Reading it, you feel he hoped someone would read it verbatim someday. That was Obadiah Trevathan in full detail. He was a man who, when something happened to him that he could not explain, wrote it down in the present tense and in the same words it was said, because he did not trust his own retelling. So when Aseph Marrow found those papers fifty-five years later in a cabin at the back of Coffee Pot Hollow, there was no doubt at all about what Obadiah had heard, or seen, or believed.

Then the papers told Aseph about the spring. The spring house, where Crispen was supposed to be at that moment, sat over a seep that ran from the bluff in three places. Obadiah wrote that the middle outlet was the oldest. The other two he and Malan had cut in their second summer to widen the flow.

The middle outlet was there when they came. The middle outlet was not stone. It came out of a hole in the face of the bluff, perfectly round, about twenty centimeters across. And inside that hole, as far as a man could see by lantern light, was not Ozark stone.

It was smooth. It was the color of horn. Obadiah put his hand inside it once, in the spring of 1892. He did not put his hand inside it again.

He did not record what happened when he put his hand in. He only said afterward that the taste of the water from the middle spring was different. Not bad. Not foul.

Different. He said Malan stopped drinking from the spring house entirely after the third week of May 1892, and began going down to Coffee Pot Branch carrying two wooden buckets twice a day, and that Obadiah thought him a fool, and kept drinking from the spring. After two months, Obadiah began to hear his mother’s voice from the spring house at night. His mother had been dead since 1873.

He set the page down when he read that. He went to the cabin door. He opened it. He called Crispen’s name.

The hollow was quiet. The mules answered. Crispen did not. Aseph stood in the doorway and listened, and thought he heard the sound of the spring water flowing, the ordinary sound it had made for the two days they had been there.

He thought he heard a second sound beneath it, almost identical to the first, but half a beat off, like an echo that does not match its source. He told himself it was the sound of rain in the gutters. He closed the door and went back to the table and kept reading. Obadiah wrote that what he heard from the spring in the summer of ’92 was his mother’s voice calling his name softly, the way she had called him from the bottom of the stairs when he was a young man in the house in the evenings, wanting him to come down to supper.

She called once on July 18, about nine in the evening. Twice on July 20, at the same time. By August 1, she was calling every night. By mid-August, Obadiah had stopped going down to the spring house after dark.

By the end of August, she had moved. She was no longer in the spring house. She was in the orchard. Obadiah wrote this, and wrote it in those words.

“She has moved into the orchard. She stands at the second tree from the cornerstone. She does not call my name from there. She waits.

” Obadiah said Malan did not hear her in the spring house, and Malan did not hear her in the orchard either. Malan heard his father. Malan’s father was alive when Malan and Obadiah came west. Malan’s father died by a letter received from Greenup County on September 2, 1892.

Malan’s father never visited Coffee Pot Hollow in his life. Malan began hearing his father in the spring house on September 4, 1892, two days after the letter arrived. Two days after Malan’s father was buried in Kentucky. Obadiah wrote that night: “Whatever is in the hollow, it has read our mail.

” He underlined “read. ”

The next entry was a week later. Malan went to Witts Springs alone on foot, taking one of the milk cows, to trade for what he could. He came back with a small cloth sack of salt, a can of lamp oil, and an old church Bible someone in the settlement had given him for free.

He could not write. He asked Obadiah to read to him from the Bible that night. Obadiah opened the Bible and read the Twenty-third Psalm because Malan loved it. The next morning, the page on which the Twenty-third Psalm was printed was not in the Bible.

Not torn out. Not at the back of the book. Simply not there. The page that had held the Twenty-third Psalm was now a page about building an altar, from an Old Testament chapter Obadiah had never memorized, with the verse numbering in the usual way and the bound edge of the page perfectly clean.

Obadiah wrote: “It is not a book of God. It is a book of change. The things we carry to war change. ” He wrote that, and then he did something Aseph had not expected.

He stopped writing for nearly four months. The ledger was silent from September 11, 1892, until January 9, 1893. What he was doing during those four months, the next entry tells us, was building. He was building a chest.

A chest of wood with wooden pegs, no nails, made from a piece of dark wood he had carried in from the forest behind the bluff and cut with a handsaw only, because Malan would not touch the wood once Obadiah brought it into the cabin. The chest was the size of two cigar boxes stacked. At this point in his reading, Aseph looked up from the papers. He looked at the lower tray of the trunk.

The wooden chest was in place. He did not touch it. He kept reading. Obadiah wrote that the chest was for one thing.

He did not name it. He referred to it only as “the discovery. ” He said he found it in the second week of December 1892, while setting a trap behind the orchard, and stepped on something hard in the snow three feet from the base of the cornerstone he had dug up. He did not describe what he dug up.

He described his decision. He wrote that he decided that whatever this discovery was, it had been buried in the ground by expert hands, and the proper response, the only safe response, was to return it to the ground in a chest he had built specifically for it, with pegs touched by no one but himself. He wrote, with great care, “I will not tell Malan. He has not been right since his father was buried in Kentucky.

He thinks the spring water is his father. He goes down to it at night and sits on the bench and talks to the running water, and it answers him in his father’s voice. I no longer believe that voice is lying. ”

Aseph stopped at that line and read it twice.

He stood. He walked, the paper still in his hand, to the cabin window. He looked out across the orchard in the long afternoon light of a spring day in 1948 in Arkansas. He counted the apple trees.

The orchard was empty. The mules at the spring house were quiet now, in a way that troubled him at first. He went out of the cabin. He walked down to the spring house.

The spring house door was open. The mules were tied to the corner post. Crispen was not there. Crispen’s bedroll was folded neatly at the foot of the bench.

Crispen’s rifle was leaning against the wall, the bolt closed, the safety on, exactly as Crispen always left it. Crispen’s hat was on the bench, its brim up. Inside the hat, on the sweatband, was the square of cardboard Aseph had left on the cabin table. The cardboard with Obadiah’s four lines.

The cardboard that said, in part, “God forgive me. ” Aseph had not brought that cardboard to the spring house. It had been on the cabin table when he left. He had walked the whole distance with his hands free.

His path had not crossed Crispen’s. He stood in the doorway of the spring house and listened. The water ran in three places as it had run in three places since 1887. Its flow was perfectly regular.

Beneath the faint sound of the flow, half a beat off, there was a sound that was almost the sound of the flow, but not quite, like an echo that does not match its source. Aseph put the cardboard back in his pocket. He picked up Crispen’s rifle. He carried it with him to the cabin.

He did not go down to the spring house again that day. He read until the light failed. He lit the lantern. He read by lantern light until two in the morning.

What Obadiah wrote next is the part Aseph would not read out loud for the rest of his life. In early spring of 1893, Obadiah wrote, “Malan has stopped coming inside. ” He had moved his bedding to the spring house in late February and had not come back. He sat beside the spring at night.

He cut firewood during the day, very slowly, with long pauses. He no longer spoke to Obadiah at all, except once, to ask whether Obadiah had started hearing his father in the spring yet. Obadiah said no. Malan said, “Well, then, it’s mine alone.

” Malan went back to the spring house. A few weeks later, in the second week of March 1893, on a night when the wind was still and the moon was small, Obadiah was sitting in the cabin reading, and he heard a knock at the door. Not a loud knock. A polite knock.

Three taps. A pause. Three taps. Obadiah looked at the door.

He did not get up. He waited. After about a minute, the knock came again. The same three taps at the same place.

This time, very softly, a voice said from the other side of the door: Obadiah. It was his mother’s voice. It was exactly his mother’s voice. It was the way she had called his name when she wanted him to come down to supper.

He did not get up. He dropped the latch on the door so it could not be opened from outside. He sat in his chair. He read.

The voice tried four more times. It called his name from behind the door four more times in his mother’s voice, at intervals of about a quarter of an hour. On the last attempt, it said, very faintly, the second name. The second name she had called him only at home.

The second name he had not heard since boyhood. The second name no living person knew him by in 1893. Obadiah wrote: “The door was not knocked again after that. I sat up all night.

At dawn, I went to the door and looked at the ground before it. There were no footprints. There were no footprints in the soft earth between the door and the orchard. There were no footprints anywhere in the earth but those I knew to be mine and those I knew to be Malan’s.

And Malan’s footprints went only between the spring house and the woodpile, as they had all month. ”

That was the entry of March 11. The next entry was March 14. Four words.

“Malan is in the spring. ” Obadiah did not record whether Malan had gone there alive. He did not record whether there was anything to recover. He did not record.

Instead, he wrote what he did next. He did not go down to the spring house. He did not approach the orchard. He spent the rest of that day and that night and most of the next morning building the second part of his chest.

Obadiah had bought the trunk in Cincinnati in 1886. It had one tray. In the spring of ’93, he added a second tray in its bottom, made of the same dark wood as the chest. He had three pieces of that wood left, and he used them all.

Into the new lower tray he placed the wooden chest, which by then held the discovery, and sealed it with the wooden pegs he had cut. Beside the chest he placed the second tintype, face down, which he did not describe. Beside the tintype, he placed the stack of papers he had written to that point. He put the upper tray back.

Into the upper tray he folded his blue wool coat, his clean white shirt, his felt hat with the black band, his wallet, and his Bible. He carried the trunk to the orchard. He dug the hole himself by hand, by lantern light, between the second tree from the cornerstone and the cornerstone itself, over three nights, working from midnight until dawn, when the air was, as he wrote, at its heaviest, and the orchard was very quiet. He went down thirteen feet three inches.

He set the trunk in the hole. He closed the lid. He locked the original lock with the iron key. He climbed out of the hole.

He filled it in. He cleaned the surface until no trace remained. Then on top, just under the grass, he buried a small folded square of waxed paper containing the key, the cardboard, and one last page on which he had written the four lines Aseph had read his first afternoon in the cabin. “The trunk in the orchard, 13 feet 3 inches.

The cornerstone is the marker. God forgive me. ”

Obadiah carried the ledger and the waxed-cloth bundle to the cabin. He fastened the waxed-cloth bundle under the table.

He sat in the chair. He wrote the last entry. It was dated October 11, 1893. In the same precise hand: “The discovery is returned to the ground.

I will walk down to the hollow tonight. If I reach Witts Springs, I will write a letter to my brother in Kentucky, asking him to ask after me in three weeks’ time if I have not written again. If I have not written, he is to do nothing. He is to sell my share of the tannery and forget my name.

The hollow keeps what it takes. Malan is the hollow now. Perhaps I too am the hollow, but not yet. The cornerstone is not a cornerstone.

The middle spring is not a spring. The orchard is not an orchard. I should have listened to Old Man Beauvais. I write this so that whoever comes after me will not have to learn it the way I learned it.

If you have lifted the lid, friend, I am sorry. Put it back. Put it back exactly as it was. Do not look at the photograph.

Do not open the chest. Bury it deeper than you found it. Leave. Do not look at the orchard.

The orchard will look at you. ” The entry ended there. There was a line of ink after the period, as if Obadiah had begun to write another sentence and decided at the last moment to stop. There was no signature.

Aseph read those words by lantern light at three in the morning of his third night in Coffee Pot Hollow. He sat for a long time afterward. He listened. The orchard was quiet.

The spring house was quiet. The mules were quiet. The cabin was quiet. Even the wind, which had blown steadily for three days, was quiet.

He looked at the wooden chest on the table. He looked at the tintype, face down, on the table. He looked at his own hand, holding the last page of Obadiah Trevathan’s writing. His hand was steady.

It had always been steady. That was the part of himself he had prided himself on since he was twenty. He stood. He put the papers back in the trunk.

He put the wooden chest back in the trunk. He put the tintype, face down, back in the trunk. He put the upper tray over the lower tray. He folded the blue wool coat.

He folded the clean white shirt. He wiped the felt hat. He put the empty wallet beside the small black Bible. He put them in the trunk exactly as he had found them.

He closed the lid. He turned the iron key in the original lock. He put the key, the cardboard, and the last page in his coat pocket. He carried the trunk.

He carried it down to the orchard in the dark. He did not bring the lantern. He did not look at the spring house on his way. He found the hole.

It was still there. It was exactly as he and Crispen had left it, except that the soil at the bottom was slightly warm when he climbed down into it. He lowered the trunk into the hole. He climbed out.

He filled the hole by hand, feeling for the soil he and Crispen had piled around it the morning before. He worked until the sun came up red behind the bluff for the second time in three days. When the sun was on the rock, he leveled the surface with the back of his shovel, then laid grass and leaves over the spot as the storm had laid them. He stood.

He looked at the cornerstone. He looked at the second tree from the cornerstone. He saw nothing in the orchard. He saw no one in the orchard.

He turned. He went back to the cabin. He gathered his bag, his notebook, his pen, Crispen’s rifle, Crispen’s hat, his own blanket, and the saddle he had placed three days earlier, carefully, on the bench at the spring house. He took the mules.

He led them on foot down the hollow in the early-morning light of the fourth day, until he reached Coffee Pot Branch. He crossed. On the far side, he stopped. He looked back.

The trees on the near side of the branch were the hollow’s trees. The trees on the far side were ordinary Ozark forest. He felt the difference under his feet. He mounted his mule and rode.

He reached Marshall just after dark on the second night. He did not go to the courthouse. He went to the home of Ernest Rook’s sister in Hot Springs, telephoned from the post office, and asked her, politely, what year Ernest had stopped writing to Mr. Marrow.

Ernest Rook’s sister said, very quietly, that he had never stopped writing to Mr. Marrow. He had died in 1946, three weeks after coming to stay with her. He had not written to anyone after that.

She asked, “Why do you ask? ” He did not answer. He hung up. He went home to Reola.

He told her only that Crispen Verlane had not come back with him from the hollow, and that he would file a report in the morning, and that the report would contain what it must. He did not tell her about the trunk. He did not tell her about the papers. He did not tell her about the cardboard, or the key, or the discovery, or the wooden chest, or the face-down tintype.

He did not tell her about his mother’s voice from the spring house. He had not heard his mother’s voice from the spring house. He had not heard anyone’s voice in three days in Coffee Pot Hollow. That was the part that kept him from sleeping in the weeks after.

The hollow had not spoken his name, as far as he knew. The hollow had not learned it yet, as far as he knew. Or perhaps the hollow had spoken his name and he had not heard it, because it had not bothered to say it aloud, because it knew he was already on his way back. In any case, he filed the report on May 15, 1948.

He wrote inside the file of Trevathan Odia W, under Ernest Rook’s pencil line, in his own precise hand: Examined personally. Recommend retained. Recommend not disturbed. A.

Marrow, 1948. He closed the file in the bottom drawer of his desk. He did not take it out again in his lifetime. Crispen Verlane was reported missing on May 17.

Two parties went into Coffee Pot Hollow that summer to search for him. The first party turned back at the branch. The second party crossed the branch, walked half a mile, and turned back without reaching the orchard. Neither party saw anything that could be written down.

Both parties refused to go a second time. Crispen’s mother lived in Marshall until 1956. Aseph secretly paid the rent on her small house every month out of his own money for the entire time until her death. After her death, Aseph paid for the headstone erected over her grave in the cemetery on the east edge of town.

He asked the carver to inscribe on the stone her name, her dates, and one line he had been thinking about for eight years: “She waited on the porch, and the porch was full of the memory of her son. ”

Aseph retired in the spring of 1953. He moved with Reola to the flatland east of Stuttgart, where the land is planted in rice and the horizon runs twelve miles in every direction, and there is no hollow a man can enter without being seen all the way down. He lived there nine more years.

He died in 1962 of a stroke in his sleep at sixty-eight, a death his doctor described as a mercy. In the morning, his wife found in his bedside table drawer an envelope in his handwriting, addressed to no one, unstamped. Inside the envelope was the cardboard from Coffee Pot Hollow. The iron key was not there.

She searched. Every drawer, every piece of furniture in the house. She never found it. When she opened the cardboard, it was blank.

The four lines Obadiah Trevathan had written in brown ink going black in 1893. The four lines Aseph had carried in his coat pocket when he walked out of Coffee Pot Hollow in May of 1948. The four lines that said, in part, “God forgive me,” were no longer on the cardboard. The cardboard was perfectly clean.

There was no ink on it at all. No trace of ink. Nothing. Reola set the cardboard on the kitchen table.

She made coffee. She sat in the kitchen with the cardboard in the early-morning light until her daughter-in-law came to take her into town. She told no one for the rest of her life what had been on the cardboard. She never went to the Ozarks for the rest of her life.

The Trevathan property is still recorded in the records of Searcy County, Arkansas, in the name of Trevathan Odia W, delinquent since 1893. The orchard, by every account written about it, is still there. The cabin is still there. The spring house still stands.

The eleven apple trees still stand. The cornerstone still stands. And the hole, by every account recorded about it, has never been touched. But no one went in in 1962 to check whether the trunk was still inside it.

And no one has gone in since. And every spring, in that small frame house east of Stuttgart, in the nine years Aseph Marrow lived there after Coffee Pot Hollow, his wife said that after he was gone, the same thing happened to him. When the rains came in early May, he would wake at three in the morning. He would sit up in bed, put his feet on the floor, and sit that way, without moving.

Listening. And in the flat stillness of the countryside, in the near dark, a very faint sound, coming from somewhere outside the house, east of the kitchen window, out in the rice fields, where no one could be at that hour without being seen for miles, Aseph Marrow would hear, perfectly clearly, the sound of a shovel. A shovel in loose earth. A shovel working downward, three feet at a time, patiently, steadily, to a depth of thirteen feet.

He never told her what he heard. She never asked. She knew. And that is the story of the trunk buried thirteen feet deep at the back of Coffee Pot Hollow in Searcy County, Arkansas, in the fall of 1893 by a man who knew exactly what he was burying, and opened fifty-five years later by a man who did not.

The wooden chest was never opened, as far as anyone living knows. The photograph, the second one, was never seen. And the discovery, whatever it was, is still where Obadiah Trevathan put it, as far as anyone living knows.

And the hollow, as Old Man Beauvais said on the porch of a general store in Witts Springs in the spring of 1891, still watches everyone who looks at the orchard.