I kissed her.
She kissed back-and smiled when Toby called for us from the living room. "Later."
I released her, turned back to the sun porch door, and slid the bolt latch in place, although we usually left it unlocked. When we went through the kitchen door, I closed and locked that too.
4.
After dinner I went into the den and took from the shelves all the volumes that might conceivably help me to identify our mysterious new neighbor.
Sitting behind the heavy, dark oak desk, a short brandy at hand, the empty gun cabinet at my back, I spent more than an hour paging through eight thick books, studying descriptions, drawings, and photographs of wildlife prints and spoors.
With those animals whose marks I found altogether unfamiliar, I turned the examples on their sides and upside down, hoping to come across the prints that I was looking for simply by viewing these at odd angles. In some four hundred samples, however, there was nothing vaguely similar to what I had seen in the snow, regardless of the view that I took of them.
I was putting the books back on the shelves when Connie came into the den.
She said, "Any luck?"
"None."
"Why don't you come keep us company? Toby's working with his tempra paints, and I'm reading. I've got a pretty good FM station with lots of gutsy Rimsky-Korsakov mixed in with Beethoven."
I caught her up in my arms and lifted her off the floor and kissed her, tasting the minty tang of the after-dinner liqueur she had been drinking. She was the kind of woman a man wants to hold a great deal: feminine and yet not soft in any way, sensual yet not forbidding. Her father and her father's father had been bricklayers, yet there was a certain undeniable nobility in her face; she had the presence and the grace of one born to high position. It was inconceivable to me, just then, as I held her, that I had ever retreated from this part of reality, from Connie.
"Don, Toby is in the next room-"
I shushed her. "Dr. Cohen who is a psychiatrist and who ought to know all about these things, says that we should kiss and cuddle in front of Toby so that he knows we really love each other and so he doesn't think that I was away all that time because I wanted to be away." I kissed her again. "Therefore, this is not merely a bit of hot necking-it's psychiatric therapy for our entire family.
Can you argue with that?"
She grinned. "I guess not."
Just then Toby knocked on the half-open den door and stepped cautiously across the threshold.
We broke apart, though not with haste, Connie's hand still on my arm. "Yes, Toby?"
He had been standing there, apparently, for long seconds, trying to decide how best to attract our attention without embarrassing us. He was strangely stiff, as if he were taking part in a good posture demonstration in school. His face was pale, his eyes very wide, and his mouth loose-lipped as if he were about to be ill.
Connie saw his condition even as I did, and we hurried over to him. She put a hand on his forehead and evidently decided there was no temperature. "What's the matter, Toby?"
He looked at me and then at her and then back at me again.
Fat tears swelled at the corners of his eyes, but he made a valiant effort to keep from spilling them.
"Toby?" I said, kneeling beside him, caging him between
Connie and me, caging him in love.
He said, "I can't
" He spoke in a whisper, and his voice trailed away into confusion.
She said, "What? Can't what, darling?"
He bit his lip. He was trembling.
To Connie I said, "He's scared to death."
"Toby?"
"I can't tell," he said.
"Why not?" Connie asked, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead.
"I don't want to-to upset Dad," he said.
("There will be times," Dr. Cohen had said, that last day in his office before I was turned loose from the sanitarium, "when people-even those you love and who love you-will say things both intentionally and unintentionally, but most often the latter, that will remind you of your illness. They will hurt you, hurt you very badly. You'll be guilt-stricken for having abandoned your family.
You'll want to crawl away somewhere and be by yourself, as if you're a wounded animal. However, being by yourself is unquestionably the worst medicine, Donald.
Stay there. Face it. Push ahead with it. Do your best to conceal your wounds and try to salvage the situation." The doctor had known his business, all right.)
"You won't upset me, Toby," I said. The words were difficult to form and even more difficult to speak. "I'm perfectly all right now. I don't get upset very easily any more."
He stared at me, unblinkingly, trying to assess the degree of truth in what I said. He had stopped trembling; he was utterly still.
"Go on," Connie said, holding him against her. He could no longer restrain the tears. They slid down his round cheeks, glistening brightly, dripping from the soft line of his chin. He began to shudder- just as he shuddered when he tried to eat something that he didn't like in order to impress us with his manly fortitude.
"Toby?"
"Come on, Toby. Tell us."
"At the window," he said. It came out of him in a rush now, the words running together, expelled in gasping breaths. "At the window, right at the window, in the other room, I saw it at the living room window and it had yellow eyes."
Frowning, Connie said,
"What had yellow eyes?"
"Big yellow eyes," he said, frightening himself even more as he recalled them. "It had big yellow eyes as big around as my whole hand, really big, looking straight at me." He held up his hand to show how big the eyes had been.
Connie looked at me, raised her eyebrows.
"I'm not lying,"
Toby said.
I said, "You both wait here."
"Don-" Connie began, reaching for me with her free hand.
I wasn't going to be restrained, for I remembered the pair of amber lights at the stable window. A child might have called them "yellow".
At the time I had wondered what sort of an animal carried lamps or lanterns around with it, had decided that the only thing that did was a man, and had not considered any other explanation for those dual circles of light. And now Toby had given it to me: eyes.
But
eyes? Well, the eyes of many animals seemed to glow in the dark. Cats' eyes were green. And some of them, like the mountain lions and wildcats, had yellow eyes, amber eyes-didn't they?
Sure they did.
Yellow eyes.
But yellow eyes as big as saucers
?
In the living room I looked quickly around at the three large windows but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I went to each window then and stared through it at the brief view of snow-covered ground, darkness, and shifting, skipping snowflakes. Whatever
Toby had seen, whether eyes or lanterns, man or animal, it was now long gone.
I recalled how fast it had moved away from the barn when I had set out after it. ..
Behind me, Connie and Toby came into the living room. He clung to her with one hand and wiped tears out of his eyes with the other hand. In a moment he would stop crying; in two moments he would smile; in three he would be recovered altogether. He was a tough little man; he had had to learn to rely on himself early in life.
"Which window was it?" I asked him.
He let go of Connie's hand and walked over toward the window that lay immediately to the left of the front door.
When I went to check it again, I thought to look down at the drifted bank of snow which had built up on the floor of the front porch-and I saw the prints.
The same prints. Sharp, well defined holes in the snow. Eight holes in each grouping.
Connie sensed the new tension that blossomed inside of me. "What is it?"
I said, "Come and look."
She came; I showed her.
"Was it that animal again?" Toby asked. He crowded in between us, pressing his nose to the glass. He had stopped crying.
"I think it was," I said.
"Oh, that's all right then," he said.
"It is, huh?"
"Oh, sure. I thought it was something a whole lot worse than just some old animal." He was actually smiling now. Looking up at Connie, he said, "Can I have another piece of cake, Mom? My piece at supper wasn't very big."
She looked at him closely. "Are you feeling okay, Toby?"
"Just hungry," he said. The fear had dissipated like an electrical charge. He said, "It was only that animal. When the snow stops, tomorrow maybe, Dad and I are going to put on our snowshoes and track it down and find out what it is." When neither of us could think of a reply to that, Toby said, "Mom? The cake?"
"To be ten again," I said.
Connie laughed. She put one hand in Toby's mop of hair and messed it up, a show of affection he stolidly endured. "Come into the kitchen, me lad, where you can eat it without getting crumbs over everything."
I let them go. The whole time that Toby had his cake, I stood at the window and looked at those queer prints as the wind and the snow erased them.
5.
Later, when Toby was upstairs taking a bedtime bath and we were sitting on the sofa before the fireplace, Connie said, "Do you think you should-load the gun?"
When I had been drafted into the Army, Connie had purchased a.38 automatic which she had kept in the house for protection against burglars. We still had the pistol and the box of ammunition. In the army I had learned how to handle a gun; therefore, we weren't exactly unprepared.
"Load it?" I said. "Well
Not just yet."
"When?"
"Maybe it won't be necessary."
"But this animal might be dangerous."
"I don't think so," I said. "And even if it is dangerous, it can't get in the house all that easily."
"Well
"
"I don't like having a loaded gun lying around."
"I suppose you're right."
"It's not that I'm afraid to load the gun, Connie. If a time comes when I have to use it, I will. I'll be able to use it. I no longer feel that a gun, of itself, is evil. I've spent hundreds of hours with Dr. Cohen, you know. I can use a gun again without going to pieces."
"I know you can." She looked away from the crackling flames that enshrouded the birch logs. Her face was flushed and pretty.
"I think the first thing I should do is call Sam Caldwell and see if he can help me."
"Now?"
"It's as good a time as any."
"I'd better go up and see how Toby's getting along, make sure he brushes his teeth." When she reached the bottom of the stairs she looked back at me and said, "Don, you mustn't worry so much about what we think of you.
We love you. We always will. We love you and trust you to take good care of us."
I nodded, and she smiled at me. I watched her climb the steps until she was out of sight, and I wished that I could trust myself as much as she trusted me.
Would I, could I, load and use the pistol if the time came for that sort of action-or would the weapon remind me of the war, Southeast Asia, all of those things that I had fled into catatonia in order to forget? Would I be able to defend my family -or would I back off from the gun like a man backing off from a rattlesnake? I simply didn't know; and until I did know, I didn't deserve her smile.
In the den I dialed Sam Caldwell's number. It rang four times before he answered.
"Sam? Don Hanlon."
"You ready to be snowbound?" he asked.
"You think it'll come to that?"
"Sure do. Looks to me like we're in for the first big fall of the year."
"Well, I'm kind of looking forward to it."
"That's the proper attitude. Being snowbound is restful, peaceful."
I decided that was enough
Smalltalk. Neither of us cared much for long discussions about the weather, politics, or religion. Sam, especially, was scornful of wasted words; he was very much a taciturn, friendly, but totally self-sufficient and self-contained
New Englander.
He had come to the same conclusion a split second before I did.
"What did you call for?" he asked in that brisk, short, but not impolite manner of his.
"You hunt quite a lot."
"That's true."
"Do you know the spore of the animals most likely to be roaming through these woods?"
"Sure do."
"All of them?"
"I've hunted nearly all of them."
"Well, I've come across something pretty unusual. I never saw prints like these-and I can't seem to find them in any of the books I have out here."
"You can't learn a wildcraft from a book."
"That's precisely why I called you."
"Shoot, then."
I gave him a detailed description of the prints. I started to tell him about the amber eyes, about the creature that had been at the stable window and at our living room window-but I was cut off when the lights went out and the phone went dead at the same instant.
"Sam?" I said, although I knew that the connection had been broken.
The only response was silence.
"Don!" Connie shouted.
I put the receiver in the cradle and felt my way out of the den into the living room. The darkness seemed total at first and was only gradually mitigated by the phosphorescent glow of the snow fields which lay beyond the window and shone against the glass. "Are you all right?" I called to her.