“He ain't like anybody I ever met,” he said, “and I have met some odd ones.”
“You can't listen to him talk or he'll change you,” she whispered as if it was a mortal secret. “He is the mesmerizer. He opens his mouth and begins to preach and they're walking the aisles, ya-hooing and boo-hooing.” She deepened her voice and mock intoned, “How does a black cow eat green grass and produce white milk, yellow butter, and orange cheese? Don't you tell me there isn't a God. Ya-hoo. Boo-hoo.”
He asked her who she was to the man and the woman and how they came to be traveling together.
She told him her father was a preacher in Baltimore and had answered a call to mission in Africa for two years. She told him her father was a true man of God who always said there's a thick black line between okay and the right way. It was when her mother and father left for Africa the man and the woman were assigned to be her guardians until their return. But her mother and father were killed in that far-off country.
“Their riverboat overturned and they swam ashore and were attacked by a lion.”
“A lion?” he said, as if their existence were confirmed.
“A lion.”
“God, I never knew anyone kilt by a lion.”
“It's not an everyday thing,” she said.
She continued to talk as if once begun she could not stop. She told him one day he'd scream at her and the next day he'd beg forgiveness. He commanded her life and no decisions were her own.
“I was going to run off,” she said, “but I guess I just run off too late for my own good.”
“A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough,” he said.
“Not that,” she spat, and then she turned her back and went silent on him and they did not speak again before sleep.
Late that day when he broke from sleep it was because he could not breathe. He thought to feel hands on his chest and at his throat, so difficult it was for him to receive air. He turned over and on all fours he hacked and coughed. His eyes stung and his face was as if poisoned. The stable was filled
with smoke, the horses stamping and screaming, their hooves knocking on their wooden stalls. At first he could make nothing of this noise and smoke. His mind moved slowly and then all at once. The stable was on fire.
Half suffocated, he crawled naked for the door, but it would not open. The flames were close and had begun to roar for the heat they generated. He kicked at the door with both his feet and it gave with each blow but fell back and he could not hold it enough to squeeze through. It was chained or jammed, he did not know which. He pawed at the earth beneath it and then finding a broken shovel he dug with that and flattening his body he was able to scrape underneath. Outside, he waited to be shot, but the shot never came. He held to the earth and breathed deeply and from where he lay he could see gray smoke pouring from the windows and snaking across the roof. Above the door the track had separated and a wheel was stuck in the gap.
He cut away his hold on the earth and lifted and tore at the door with all of his strength until the door, track and all, fell away from the opening and a wall of black smoke poured from the opening. He crawled back inside, breathing the lean air close to the ground and found her lost and struggling and fought with her and dragged her free as the coal black horse found the opening and bolted through with the bay mare following behind.
From that moment on her panic returned and would not abate. Her hands shook and her thoughts came from her in a frenzy or not all, but mostly not at all. He thought how barn doors, worn with constant use, were always coming off their tracks and it could have been just that, but he did not know
how the flames could have started or why. He searched his memory as to when they ate and where they built their cook fire and whether or not he sufficiently doused it. And if it was someone who'd lit that fire, why did they not shoot him when he crawled to the air? He could not answer these questions, and as night fell on that day he concluded he never would.
In those next hours they experienced the sense of being pushed before consequence while carrying it with them. Their bodies were in the fugue state of turmoil and relentless fatigue that is felt by both the hunter and the hunted. They rode out of there, abreast and in step, the horses' hooves powdering the red-soil dust of the valley floor. He carried the Springfield floating upright, the butt resting on his thigh, as they dodged through the dense forests enameled green in the unfriendly daylight and the horses played and lathering, they continued on, traveling into the night, all the while looking back and waiting for the gunshots that never came.
He insisted they travel the long way by woodland lanes and pathless crosscuts and from time to time they took refuge in cool starlit woods where they hoped they would be safe. When he heard hoof beats, they bushed up and waited in blackness and soon he could hear the ring of so many pounding hooves it was as if an entire calvary was pursuing them. He understood there was no reason for them to be pursued, but he wanted no encounter, no delay, no possibility of all the trouble there was to be found on the roads in those days after Gettysburg. They waited and watched and the sound grew and then it bore off and there were no sounds and the night returned to silence.
He pointed to her the stars that guided him in case she
needed them. In the northwest was Ursa Major, the bear, and in the northeast of that month the first stars of the Great Square of Pegasus were rising above the horizon. There is Polaris, he told her, the North Star.
“If anything ever happens,” he said, “don't you worry about me. Just start running.”
She assured him he had nothing to worry about on that account.
They waited until they were sure the road was clear and then crossed over and struck through the open countryside and by then it was close to morning. They found a path, a ribbon that went winding between the willow stems and it was there they lost the bay. She came up lame in her right foreleg, so tender she would not let down her leg. A hairline crack in the hoof wall had split open and the frog was likewise split and hot and raw.
He hiked Rachel into the saddle of the coal black horse and led them for a while and then he mounted behind her and they rode double under the waning moon, a half shell in the sky, west through the measureless dark forest.
W
HERE THE MERCANTILE
had once stood was burned over and now a blackened patch of ground. The fire had spread and consumed the lean-to stable where first he had seen the coal black horse. It had climbed to the rock walls that stood behind the stable and now the rocks were scorched black and leaked variegated runnels of coppery water. The smith was likewise burned to the ground and where it had stood was now a junkyard of iron and charred timbers. In the center stood the great anvil, untoppled and settled upright, as if it rode the burning stump upon which it rested down to the ground to wait patiently for the next hammer that would presume to strike it.
There was no sign of old Morphew or the hunchback German or the upside-down boy. There was no sign that human life had been recent and one day would resume. The site was lonesome and haunting and its borders already greening and closing over with the nature that would repossess it.
They did not linger in that place but rode on into the hollow in precise reverse of the descent he had made what seemed so long ago. He was now different. He was older and born over and had lived out the ends of so many men's lives, his father's life.
In this dry season the leaned-out Canaan was pools and riffles fed by tiny veins of feeder streams. The Twelve Mile was the same, but its water was colder and blacker and its banks more grown and wild with the tough and sunless varieties. Trees had toppled into the moaty water and raised to the air great fans of scrabbled roots that clutched boulders in their twisted fingers. Sweeping trunks of mountain laurel met, intersected, and wove together and all about was as if a ferocious and violent nature had walled the mountain in waiting for his return.
They rode on, higher and higher, and found a sunken place near the bridge that once spanned its surface where stone and gravel had washed in. The coal black horse, without hesitation, stepped off from the bank and forded the slow cooling flow, belly deep and sure-footed.
The air closed and cooled around them as they continued their ascent and late that day they came upon the old fields grown with mullein and yarrow and then was the high meadow in the sling of the mountain wreathed in juniper, and it was a flash of wet grass in a startle of sunlight when they broke from the rock walls and stepped out on what seemed the top of the world.
The cabin, when he finally saw it, was smaller than he remembered and in the time since his departure seemed to have endured a great weather. Its logs were cracked and silvered and its cedar roofing was lifted, twisted, and ramshackled by the torment of a vagrant wind. Slivers quilled the rounds, and moss and vine were abundant in their reclamation. No aspect was square. No surface had yet to begin its return to nature and yet all seemed perched and more precarious than a balanced eye.
But there was a greenness and an abundance he'd not imagined possible. It was as if the garden, the fields, and the mountain had blossomed. There were new lambs gamboling on the hillside and stiff-legged spring calves blatting for their mothers. A litter of mewling pups gadded about. It was as if his mother had bred animals and increased nature to replace men and children. It was as if he had returned to the realm of dreams.
He dismounted and crossed the cabin's threshold. She could see him in her mirror when he stepped through the doorway. She was touching her wild hair as if anticipating an arrival, as if it were an aspect of her being newly recognized.
“Who's there?” she said fondly, because she already knew it was him. “Come out of the shadows where I can see you,” she said, and it was only then the dogs flattened their ears and rose up bristling for how fooled they were by his approach. They exploded with deep shocked barks, slobbering and clacking jaws and the scratching of the paws skittering on the rough floor to reach their lumbrous bodies between her and him. They could not hide their embarrassment when they saw who it was.
“They've known you were coming,” she said in their defense. “They just didn't know when. They have been antsy for days.”
Her hair had whitened and her face had taken on the purity that is found in the sick and the holy and the season-changing sky. She moved about with steps so silent she was as if nature in transit drifting the floorboards. She'd not seen another human being since he left. She'd not heard another human voice and had long since left her own voice inside her head as
the faintest whisper of sound enough for the animals to hear when they were called to milk or feed or from one pasture to the next.
“You've been gone a very long time,” she said. “Are you really here?” She touched his face in the manner of the reading sightless.
“Did you receive my letter,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It hasn't come yet, but it will.”
It was then she let go the slender hope that her husband, her son's father, was still alive. She knew then he would not come stamping across the threshold and take her in his arms and lift her off her feet.
But she had long since entered the world of loss and enduring silence and now was the beginning of its infinite and companionable grief. Later she would tell him she'd dreamed his father was dead and admitted she was not shocked when he did not arrive home. She just didn't know until then it was actually true. But she'd never dreamed Robey dead and so looked for him every day and thought he would surely come home to her.
“You must be tired,” she said looking past her son to the girl.
“I need to lay down,” she said. “I am so tired and my shoulders ache.”
His mother directed her to sit by the window in the cushioned chair and then he followed her into the kitchen where, composed and inhabiting herself again, she daubed grease into a skillet.
“Who is she?” she finally said as the grease popped and she let the eggs slide in to fry. “Where does she come from?”
“I don't know much about her,” he said.
When she turned and looked at him, she could see that he had changed. She could not imagine what he had seen while he was gone. She could not imagine the black curve he carried inside him. But no, he hadn't changed. He was her son and the change was from a boy to a man and that was to be expected.
“What did she tell you?”
“We talked some.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I wonder about that sometimes.”
“I'd like your part of the story,” his mother coaxed, but this conversation was not her interest. It was simply an effort to fill the silence.
“She said her mother and father was killed in Africa.”
“That seems an awful place to die.”
“There are better ones?” he asked.
“I think I'd prefer my own bed for one, but then I am not the world traveler you have become.”
His face flushed red with shame and he wanted to apologize, but he said nothing. He sat with her while she cooked eggs and bacon and there was bread in the warming oven. She gave account of the farm, its progress, and the necessary work to be done now that he had returned.
THAT NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN
while the women slept, he sat outside in the cool summer air, the coal black horse staked to a long lead. In the farthest distance he could see the faint glimmer of a light and then another one. They were miles away and lights he'd never seen before. When his mother
came out she was wearing her nightgown and a sweater and carrying for him another plate of food. He apologized to her for being a smart mouth and wished to take it back and she accepted his apology and agreed to let him.
“That's a fine horse you've brought home,” she said.