Cold and weary, he'd come down from this day's aerie, an overlook made, he speculated, where rocks had gathered when rocks were sentient and moving, as pretime pilgrims had arrived and were exhausted from their difficult journeys and so slumped together against one another. Below this place was the concealing snow and above this place was the bottom of the wintry universe, and when he stood there he could not resist his desire to reach out with his hands in the hope he might touch them both.
The sun was lost in the sky, eclipsed by the deep cut he rode and had been so for several days, as if it was ruled by darkness this winter and so it was cold and frosted and the rock walls were blackened with frozen water. It was early evening still, and already the lights of the night had been set in motion.
The winter thus far had been the one he wished for: prolonged cold, snow and ice and a penetrating darkness that
came in the late afternoon and the body never so tired as to sleep through it. There was nothing but long dark winter and the endless evergreen forest that fell from sight to the horizon miles away. There were cows to milk and feed in the wet barn and there was waiting while Rachel changed daily before his eyes as her time grew imminent.
These months spent in gestation she had remained for the most part closed to him, dark and angry and forlorn, yet she needed to be near him and always know where he was. She told him of the strange-bodied feeling of her ribs un-sticking and spreading to accommodate her belly. The pains that flashed through her like wildfires. Her small bones stretching. Her faints and haunts, and sins. At times she did not seem to know where she was or how she got there or what day of the week it was and when she did know she did not care. He'd come to know fear again but not for himself. It was for how dear her life had become to him.
Last night, her voice ragged with tears, she told him she was ready to die and wanted to do so. She told him if she could not go back to the beginning she would just as soon get this life over with and be born again. He felt a shiver working into his chest bones.
The coal black horse suddenly snorted and tossed its head and scraped at the ground in stride. Robey had heard nothing odd on his own ear but retrieved the Springfield from the saddle scabbard and slipped off the road and dodged behind a dense screen of root-sprouted coppice shoots.
“This could be a bad day for someone,” he said to the steady horse. Then he could hear the snow-muffled stride of a rider approaching. He did not know the outcome and that moment
did not care in the least. He knew he had found what he was looking for. What would follow would be a rest of one kind or another.
He made a sound and the coal black horse rose and pitched forward into the road. The horse wheeled as he drew rein and then willfully spun in place one more rotation, jumped straight sideways, and held. He sat the horse barring the road with no perceptible movement to be seen in the hands or bit, the rifle balanced as if a scale across his lap.
The man was coming on, riding a sorrel with a white mane and four white feet. After his long search the rider was bringing conclusion as fast as he could without even knowing it. He did not stop until he brought the sorrel abreast of the crossed coal black horse.
Beyond mild surprise, the man had nothing in his eyes, but the face of him recalled the bone midden of those killing fields he'd ridden away from so many months ago, leaving his father dead and buried beneath the signifying tree. It recalled to him the night in the fire-gutted house and Rachel and the blind woman and his own head wounded by the little goose man and dressed in the torn garments of a murdered woman.
“I know you,” the man said, and at first seemed pleased to have suddenly met up with him. “I been looking for you,” he said.
But it went without saying. There was only one reason to be on that road and being lost wasn't likely. The man's eyes were now lively and fleeting about their sockets and it was then he determined they were not the eyes of the killer but the eyes of one fleeing sin and consequence and death.
“That's a fine horse,” the man said. “Any man who'd seen that horse once would know you again.”
“The hell with you,” Robey told him.
“But I have caught you,” the man said, setting his jaw on the words, cold and fixed. He then smiled in an attempt to take back a degree of his provocation.
“What part have I in your life?” Robey asked.
“That is what I am here to talk about.”
Kill him, he thought. Put him through, he told himself, and a prefigured order of ideas deep in the map of his mind illumined as if divine. There would be no discernment, no discretion, no proportion to his justice.
“We are already dead,” the man said, “you and I,” and he swept a hand to indicate the high stony walls of the narrow sepulchral hollow. “Ours are the souls of the ruined,” he observed with delight.
Then the shot rang out in that sunless, starless, timeless place, but by then the man was collapsed upon the neck of the sorrel horse and the unchecked horse was rising up and the man was sliding off the back of it and falling heavily to the beaten ground as if thrown down from the highest place. Midway to the snowy earth the man turned his body and folded and he landed on the point of his shoulder and with a great exhalation of pain he slumped to his back.
And it was only then the shot Robey fired across his lap was heard shattering the air.
Before dismounting he stepped the coal black horse forward and horse and rider stood over the man's fallen body. The bullet had entered his chest but had not come out. It had traveled bone and lodged in his shoulder. Eely blood trickled
down his face where his skull had broke open when his head bit the stony road. An incessant groan was the best the man could do in the furor of his pain. He breathed heavily as his mind was delivered a commotion of messages that did not conflict. In his agony was the escape of his earthly and spiritual power, the tenebrous and the menace and the dark energy that ruled his life.
“I believe you hit the mark,” he gasped, and tried to look down at the bubbles that pocked his chest.
“You believe that?” Robey said, dismounting and standing over him.
“Yes, I believe I do.” Blood was fogging the red wheels of his glassy eyes. His colorless lips tried to shape more words, but it took several tries. “Should I not?”
“You should.”
“Tell her the woman is dead. She'll want to know.”
“I ain't telling her nothing,” Robey said.
“My head is so heavy,” the man said. “Like lead.”
Nothing more was said as they waited together. He thought to feel remorse for his actions. Had he now made enough of his own needless contributions to the world's killing? No matter how just and righteous his actions? Had he not ended life the way others had ended his father's life? He thought of guilt and invited it inside himself, but it would not enter his mind or heart and it remained a cold and dormant place inside him. Did he kill himself when he first killed and so was already dead?
When his work was done he mounted the coal black horse, caught the polished reins of the sorrel, and rode toward home. As he traveled that thin stony path, he thought how a kind of
wickedness had died, but what it left behind could not be undone or unremembered. Ahead could be seen the light from the flaring lantern shining through the windows. He thought how the wickedness lived inside his own house but could not be killed when it was born and must be loved without condition. He wished to shudder or tremble. He wished to regret his actions, to lament, to cry. He wanted to long for the past when he was a boy and lived as a boy.
But he could do none of these. His bygone days were mere shapes and scenes played against a shadowy wall. He had no past because he was too young. He had no past, except the past of a child: hunger and satisfaction, heat and cold, wet and dry, squares of yellow light on a wooden floor, companionable animals, the love of a mother and father. There was no bite of conscience, no thought to retrace the life and live it differently from what was done before. He wanted nothing to do with such wandering thoughts or feelings. He was so minded as he rode through the evening vapors, away from the man he'd killed beneath the moon's rising face.
That night she wandered barefoot into the room where he sat. The only light was the nimbus of a tallow candle centered on the table where they ate their meals.
“What is it?” she said.
“Can't sleep?” he said.
“My eyes won't close when I sleep,” she said.
She stretched until her body refused to go any farther and then she made a surprised sound and let it back. She came close to him and tapped his knees that he should make them a place for her to sit. She looked like a child with long tangled lashes that wove and unwove each time her eyes closed and
opened. She scrutinized the palms of her small hands and then let them fall helplessly against the round of her belly.
“You ought to put on your stockings,” he said. “The night's cold.”
“It is surely cold,” she said, and as if in agreement came a swoop of wind that scattered snow like buckshot against the cabin walls.
“This is the cold that brings the warm,” he said, and she told him it was the same thing his mother said.
He wondered what she might be tonight. Her mind seemed improved. Would he tell her? Could he not?
“What's your idea of heaven?” she said urgently. “Do you think we are saved by hope?”
“I don't know,” he said. “I don't have any answers like that tonight, nor no questions.”
“Do you pray?”
“No,” he said. “I don't think I do.”
“Well. If you decide to start, just don't do it where I can hear it.”
“I will remember that,” he said.
“What is it?” she said again. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I seen him,” he said, and she turned her eyes on him with all their clarity.
“You seen him?”
“He told me the woman is dead.”
“Was it bad?”
“He didn't tell me and I didn't ask.”
“Where'd you see him?”
“On the road. He's dead too.”
She then looked off to a place that was inside her mind. He
watched her thoughts as they crossed her eyes. In her head were mysteries he could not decipher.
“Are you sure he's dead?”
“He's dead,” he told her, his voice resolute, and yet he realized that even in the state of death, life-blind and quelled, the man would haunt her and he would continue his possession of her forever. He wondered if there would ever be enough peace to stop this turning for the wound that had been cut into her memory.
The room filled with a great pressure and it was as if the air was being squeezed through the cracks and jambs. The stove banged again as the fire's temperature increased and there came the visitation of memory from Gettysburg, the portal through which the past might come into the present. The stove joints ticked with expansion and a beam in the wall pealed out as it chafed on a peg. Outside the wind was running and in the morning would be white sculpted fields, the ground swept bare and strangely grassy and in other places the earth would carry hanging drifts higher than his head.
“His was the blackest soul,” she said as if the news of his death was all so long ago.
She held out her hand, a fist unfolded, her mouth open and wordless. For days she'd struggled to find the strength to bear down on the pain. She thought she must get it stopped before it continued. For days she'd felt her tiny bones shifting and moving, finding positions of accommodation. She prayed for the strength, but it just hadn't come. She suddenly groaned and cried out as her leg was seized by a cramp. She stretched the curled leg and held it in the air above the floor where its muscle quivered beneath her skin and finally loosened. The
infant was ready to be born, and known only to her it was rushing its birth.
“The pain when it comes is worse than knives,” she said. “I want to die.” Then she said, “Lift me up,” and when he did she said, “Come to bed,” and he followed her to bed where she asked he lay down behind her and press his knuckled hand against her back.
“Don't rub,” she said, her voice reed thin. “Just push hard. Push as hard as you can with your fist.”
When the pain subsided she wanted him to hold her in his arms and rock her gently. He found the back of her neck with his face and breathed deeply her sleepy smell. She moved her back into his chest and pulled his arm to her chest, his hand to her breast. There was about nothing left of her, not back or shoulders or chest, her belly so huge. She moved his hand to her belly and there her skin was stretched and taut and it was holding her this way they slipped into the lull of exhausted sleep.
He did not remember when he fell asleep but his gesture upon waking was to resume the pushing with his fist. Yet when he lifted his hand he found nothing to touch and when he crawled up through sleep, he could not find her and the bed was cold and soaking wet. He stood from the wet bed and with his first drink of water rinsed the taste of sleep from his mouth and with the second slaked the thirst brought on by the dry heat of the wood fire. He thought to have found her in the darkness by now, but he didn't.
Then he called out to her and tore the quilt from the bed and barefoot he was running for the door.
Outside the night was blue and vivid and continuous with
its blanket of scraping winter light. He could hear his mother come from sleep and calling out his name at his back. In the forest the pines wore their mantles of snow and from the barns and stables was drafted a strange and serene silence. He called out her name in the stillness and the sound of his voice ran out to distance across the brow of the snow-covered summit.
“Rachel,” he cried. “Rachel.”
He felt the sting of cold in his lungs. His heart was pounding in his chest, but there was no answer returned. In the sky Pegasus was due west and the Big Dipper stood upright on its handle. The flight silhouette of an owl, its shallow wing beats passed over his head and he looked off in its telling direction.