From the barn door continued the hollow resounding of the thrown stones. From the inside came squeals of pigs
and the fierce rustling of their bodies. One by one the snakes dropped their heads and their broken angular bodies hung limp. The boys carried on with pitching their stones, breaking the snakes' bodies, until the cut bloodless pieces fell away and gathered on a bed of chaffy earth.
“Are you listening to me?” the old man demanded.
Robey took a deep breath to say he was.
“You have also done bad things,” the old man said. “Bad men can talk to each other. Bad men can understand the other. For thousands of years we have understood this, but that doesn't change anything.”
“No,” Robey said, regretful at having spoken even as he spoke. “I haven't,” he continued, and he knew the sound of his voice betrayed his words.
“Maybe not yet,” the old man said. “But you will. You are experiencing one of life's great lessons. Specifically which one, you do not know, but in time you will know.”
IN ANOTHER TOWN
was a baseball game and he had never seen such before so he stopped to watch. When he became noticed he moved on again, content with only the witless beeves and skulking dogs and mild cows watching his slow passage.
He continued to think about what else the old man had said to him. The old man told how he was now worthless and no good to anyone anymore because he was filled with despair, and despair was useless in times such as these. He told him to remain angry, because anger was more useful than despair and would deliver him. But to despair would surely lead to failure and tragedy.
They were the words of an insane, but he could not escape
them. They were committed to his mind and once learned he could not unlearn them. It was fate, he thought. Then he thought how people loved to talk so very much and even had a weakness to talk. He himself had done so and it made him laugh at how foolish his gliding mind. The bay shortened and tossed its head at his sudden outburst. He quieted the animal and let his hand to the long-barreled pistol he wore in his belt. It was an odd piece of indeterminate make and had been a gift from the maundering old man.
He traveled on, following the rumors of great armies encamped to the east on opposite banks of a river, but in the days that came his long slow ride through the landscape of war became so like chasing the wind that when one night a cold wind swept the open land, he took refuge in the scorched shell of a burned house.
The bay tethered, he entered cautiously, as if testing the floorboards. Outside its stone walls was a constant moaning of the soft wind streaming through the trees. He had at first mistaken the pump in the yard to be the black silhouette of a figure, and even after he knew his mistake he kept looking to the yard to assure himself it was not, kept looking to the trees where the bay was tethered.
He lit a tallow candle inside a box lantern of punched tin and cautiously passed from one room to another and upon determining that he was alone in the house, he built a tiny fire in the hearth and it soon lit the room with a warm glow. He reclined on the hardwood floor and with the fire's coax the aches of the day began to melt from his limbs. There was a burned stairway to the second floor and from the fire-gutted ceiling hung a beautiful chandelier, its pendants like carved diamonds.
At first he had thought it a spangle of stars in the night sky and then he understood it was the stars through the room's charred ceiling and the shaped and fitted glass that gave to him such a sparkling sight. He could only think that someone had hung the glass after the burning for how its icicles were clear and untouched and cast prisms of light from the fire.
The wind outside died away and ceased its quiet moaning in the trees. The sound had existed beneath sound and he'd forgotten it until now it was disappeared. In the new silence came a ticktock sound, ticktock. He searched the room to find its source and then was a clean and unlikely striking sound and a tiny door unlatched and he found the source just as the cuckoo shot forth.
Someone had wound the clock and hung the chandelier, and however pitiful the gestures, they were trying to return to a time that he was afraid they would never see again. It was a time on earth he realized that he himself had never witnessed because of his seclusion on the mountain, but was seeing it now in its havoc and devastation. What was life like before all this? What did people do and what did they think about before they warred and thought about war? He tried to remember what he did before he left the mountain and what he thought about in his seclusion. He recalled chores and quiet and solitude. He knew there was more than that, but he could not remember and he knew it had not been so far back in time. He tried hard to recall who he had been and what he was back then then, but however much he longed to he could find nothing to remember.
He banked his small fire with the kindling he'd gathered, the wood spurting blue and red flame, and the room took on
more light and he found other moments of longing and desire. There was a wooden inlaid box filled with shiny stones. There were other boxes, tin and copper and lacquered, and woods he did not recognize and could not name. Inside their shells were coins and buttons, ribbons, marbles, pins, tiny bones, a doll's leg.
There was a mildewed bench with a hinged seat and while the inside was empty, its interior smelled of wool and lavender and contained a porcelain-faced doll wearing a blue felt hat and long hair made of straw-colored yarn. A leg had been torn away from the torso, but when he polished the dirty face with his sleeve it shown in the firelight as if newly made. In the silence, the burning wood made hissing and cracking noises and there was a sudden flicker of shadow in the air as vesper bats took flight and filled the chamber with their silent wing beats, black on black, spearing the air and fleeing the lighted room through the empty doors and windows.
He set a pot of coffee to boil and fried the last of his bacon in a tin pan. He made a thin dough of water and salted cornmeal and set that to bake in the open fire on the blade of a broken hoe. He thought how he'd boil his coffee and scumble his biscuit into it. That would taste fine and feel good in his mouth and warm his throat down into his belly. His hunger grew and as the food heated he fixed his gaze on the porcelain-faced doll he'd propped at the fireside. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his scalp where the healing skin felt as if pulled by tiny paws. He fit the doll's leg to her hip and it matched.
He wanted to feel the hatred that possessed him when he dragged himself off the ground that was drenched with his blood. He wanted the anger the old man told him he must
have to survive. He wanted it lodged inside him like an iron spike, but tonight it wasn't there. Tonight he was too tired to hate and hoped in the morning when he was rested he would hate again.
“What do you have to say?” he asked the porcelain-faced doll, and when there was no reply he whispered the word “nothing.”
When the coffee was boiled he poured half a cup into the drippings and could not wait, but was so hungry he burned his fingers and mouth. He slid the cake off the hoe into the gravy and ate the slurry with his fingers. He scraped the sides and the rapidly cooling bottom of the pan with the backs of his fingers and licked them clean and wiped at his mouth and then licked the back of his hand and then it was over. He knew enough to know he'd eaten like a ravenous dog and how disapproving his mother would be if she had witnessed such and how nice it would be to someday again not eat like that.
“Soon,” he sighed, and sat close by the fire, exhausted for how voracious his hunger had made him and still amazed at how quickly the food had disappeared. He knew he should climb the stairs to sleep, or crawl under the floor, or go outside and sleep with the horse. He could not help but mistrust the dead calm stillness of this night's windless turn.
But his belly was full and he was tired and wanted to sleep and for so long now he had been vigilant. He closed his eyes and bars of fire darted across his eyelids. Sleep came and overwhelmed him as if a slowly crushing weight, though he fought it the best he could. Its strong hand brought ache and defeat and then relief, and when he knew he could not hold it off any longer he finally collapsed beneath it.
When he lurched forward he saw the fire in the hearth had died and gone to the an orange glow of mere embers. The porcelain-faced doll was slumped beside the fire as if she too had been asleep. He righted her and as he stood to stretch his aching body, he concentrated on the faint sound that had awakened him. A muscle in his stomach began to flutter. Then he heard the sound coming from outside the stone walls. It was a man goading an ox, and then came the scrape of a travois on the hard ground and then a woman's voice, thin and plaintive, complaining how difficult her situation. He kicked at the fire and stamped out the sparks. He gathered his kit as quickly as he could and as they were almost in the yard, he could do no other than climb the charred stringers and escape to the second floor.
A
T THE TOP
of the stairwell, the roof was open to the sky and the weakened and ravaged second floor was cast in the shadows of the stone-built gable walls. Up there the night was not so dark under the sky, and from where he stood in the gable shadows he could see an ambling gaunted ox approaching the house. There was a man and a girl attendant. They were walking beside the ox, and riding on the jouncing travois was a woman. She was large and rode as if in repose, but when the ox stopped she slowly climbed erect and clasping her hands under her belly she lifted its weight as if she were lifting herself. The girl hastened to help the woman stand and the woman thanked her. The man told them this was the place from where he smelled the fire and the bacon and the coffee cooking. He made a show of sniffing the air and then a scraping cough from depths of his chest expanse doubled him over. The man was otherwise robust and wore a born thickness in his wrists and neck and shoulders. He was built wide and drumlike and conducted himself with raptorlike self-regard.
“You get a fire started,” he said to the girl, pushing her in the direction of the doorway. The girl stumbled and cursed him over her shoulder as she went inside and then the man led
the woman inside, and through the fire-ravaged second floor he could watch the progress of their spectral shapes passing underneath him, moving from place to place as if they were blown by a steady wind.
The girl found embers in the fire he'd left and momentarily looked about but made no mention of them to the man and woman. She stirred the embers to red life with an iron rod. She fed the fire with one of the small wooden boxes and in the first light that held her he could not see her face because it was flanked by her hair, but when she drew her hair together and draped it to one side he could see how thin and hollow her young face.
“I fear we've reached bedrock,” the woman moaned. She held her arms stretched out before her as if discovering her next place in the air while she moved in the direction of the fire's warmth. Her hands found her way and she eased herself onto her knees on the bare wooden floor, touched the floor with her hands, and settled on her hip.
“Get the parfleches,” the man said to the girl.
He spoke to her harshly and she responded in kind, as if an old enmity festered between them. The man fished in a gunny-sack until he found a green bottle, which he held between himself and the firelight to measure its content. He then uncorked the bottle and took a drink. In the light of the fire he could be seen for his sparse white hair, his powerful neck, his white mutton chops and all black livery. Some minor affliction was tormenting his leg as he kept scratching and cuffing at it. After a second drink he gave a final cough and seemed content.
“Get them yourself,” the girl said, not moving from the fire she was kindling to life.
“If I have to get them you're going to get it good,” he told her.
“They empty,” the girl said, and the woman groaned, clutching at her swollen sides.
“Don't sass me,” the man said, crossing the room to strike the girl a fierce blow that knocked her down when she stood to meet him. Robey flinched, watching.
“It's her time,” the girl said, as she cowered on the floor.
“It ain't her time,” the man said, taking another drink. “It ain't her time until I say it's her time.”
Robey's body pressed more tightly to the stone wall of the standing gable as he watched them move underneath him. He let his hand to the grips of the pistol he carried in his belt, its long barrel extending past his hip. The wood of the grips was smooth and the chambers were recently primed. He would not be shot again. That knowledge was as deep in his bones as a knowing could possibly be.
“There'll be a black frost tonight,” the man said, and then surveying the empty room, he said, “I wonder where they went off to? They couldn't have gone off for very long.”
“They probably scared off when they heard us coming,” the girl said, her voice a bitter sulk. “There won't be any frost,” she said, as if it was the most recent of crazy ideas.
“Help me with these boots,” the man said, sitting on the bench. “Or I'll lick you again.”
The girl stood and approached him warily and then she was tugging at his boots and letting each of them drop to the floor. The man then paced the room in his stockinged feet, scratching at his leg again. He told the girl to get busy and gather up what would burn so at least they should not freeze to death on this cold spring night.
“It ain't gonna freeze,” she said as she found another of the boxes. This one she studied for a moment without opening it and then set it gently in the fire. She then found the cuckoo clock and this too she placed in the rising flames.
“That there too,” the man said, indicating the bench with the hinged seat. “That's wood. That'll burn good.”
The girl tipped the bench over and began kicking at it until its wooden pegs broke loose and it came apart at the joints. While she worked, the man stood in the center of the room drinking from the green bottle and to his own amusement began whistling poor imitations of night birds, the more complicated ones requiring him to pocket the bottle so to twine his fingers and cock his clasped hands. He waited, but he received no countercalls.