This same thought seemed to have occurred to those in the lodge, for when he got back he found them all frantically packing up to leave. Since most of their luggage had been in the cabins, they had to use blankets and sheets to tie up what little there was to take—food and dishes and cooking utensils, some bedding and clothing, and of course the weapons. As soon as a bundle was readied and tied, one of the O’Briens would carry it out to the lakefront, where Newman and Jagger would load it into the rowboats. Most of the older members—Mama Dawson and the Goffs and the Baggses—just stood off to the side, watching. Smiley and Flossie were holding on to each other and weeping, as if they knew that they would not likely see their beloved Point again.
As Stone approached the lodge, Eddie came up to him.
“You leaving with us?” he asked.
“No.”
Eddie looked over at Eve, who was standing at the far end of the porch, gazing out at the lake. “I think she’d like you to come. She’s through with Jag. But then I guess you know that.”
“I don’t know anything. And if I did, it wouldn’t matter. I’ll be traveling alone.”
“You still pissed about Kelleher?”
“Pissed?” If he could have, Stone would have laughed.
“You know what I mean.”
Dawson had joined them. “We’d all like you with us, Walt. We could use your help.”
Stone wondered if he had heard him right. “Like this afternoon?” He did not wait for a response. Walking on past Eve, he went inside to get his things. Edna Goff followed him. She came up and took hold of his hands.
“I’m going to miss you, Walter,” she got out. “I wish you’d come with us.”
He said that he would miss her too, and she tried to laugh.
“I’ll bet.” She stood there for a few moments longer, looking up at him, waiting. And when he said nothing more, she nodded her understanding and turned away.
As she left, John Kelleher emerged from the kitchen carrying a dishpan full of pots and silverware. Stone came close to asking the man if he did not have a body to bury, but Kelleher already looked as if he were suffering about as much as a man could. His eyes appeared sightless and haunted, and he shuffled as he walked.
Picking up his backpack, Stone went on outside, past the trees bordering the lane. The sun had already set and the November light was failing rapidly. In an hour it would be dark. It was still light enough for him to see Valhalla, however, and the narrow road circling up to it. He could not see any Mau Mau on the road yet, nor any of the junkman’s family in the courtyard above. A few electric lights had gone on inside the buildings, but that was customary. Within a quarter hour the outside lights would come on too. He looked down at the blacktop and the land beyond, from which he had first seen Valhalla and the lake. And again, the Mau Mau were not in evidence. He began to wonder if they simply had gone on, staying on the blacktop and forgetting about the mountain. A slender hope began to rise in him.
As he stood there watching, Eve came over to him. She too was looking across the cove.
“You think they’ll attack?” she asked.
“It’s what they do.”
“Maybe Newman’s right. Maybe the junkman will be too much for them.”
“Or maybe he’ll just sic ’em on the next place in line.”
“You sound bitter,” she said.
“Well, I can’t say this has been the proudest day in my life.”
She made no comment on that, just stood there for a while gazing with him up at the one-time monastery. “Eddie says you’re not coming with us,” she said finally.
“That’s right.”
“Gonna be a loner again, like when you found us?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Would it make any difference if we asked you to come with?”
Stone glanced at her, finding it incredible that she looked now, after this long and horror-filled day, just as she had when he first saw her: cold, private, beautiful. He doubted if she had washed her hair in weeks, yet it somehow looked clean and luxuriant. And her eyes, her fine large model’s eyes, had that same vast calm in them, as if the terrors of the day were nothing she had not already imagined and dealt with in her mind. Stone admired her, he wanted her, he probably even loved her—that had not changed. But sometime during the last long night and day he evidently had come to agree with her that love and romance had no place in this new world of Mau Mau and Valhalla.
He repeated her question.
“If we asked?
Who’s
we?”
She smiled slightly, “All right, if
I
asked?”
“No, not even then.” He glanced at the others in the boats. “I’m not sure I’d fit in anymore. But if you and Eddie want to stay with me, fine. We could travel together. Again.”
“But they’ve got all the food. And all the guns.”
“And they’re so good at using them, aren’t they?”
Her eyes had teared. “What if I said that we need you? That
I
need you?”
Stone looked away from her, back across the cove at Valhalla. He wanted to keep his resolve.
“I’ll be staying here tonight,” he said. “And tomorrow I’ll be going on alone.”
She forced a smile. “That’s final enough, I guess. Well, it’s been nice. Real nice.” Smiling still, looking brittle and sardonic, she thrust out her hand for him to shake. He ignored it.
“For what it’s worth, I guess I love you,” he said.
She shook her head, in regret or disbelief, and turned away. At the pier, the others were calling her. The four aluminum rowboats were already loaded, each carrying four or five passengers and a few sacks of provisions. Two of the boats had cast off, a third was in the process of doing so, and the fourth, with Eddie at the oars, was waiting for Eve. Stone stood there watching as she walked toward it across the sere and patchy lawn. In one of the boats he saw Jagger glumly staring at him, indulging his animosity one last time. Some of the women were waving to Stone, and he waved back.
Reaching the pier, Eve took Eddie’s outstretched hand and stepped down into the boat. She was just taking her seat when the first shots sounded.
For Stone, the next few minutes were much too crowded. He wanted to watch Eve all the way out of sight as the tiny armada rowed away, but the battle already had begun on Valhalla. At the same time he suddenly learned that he was not alone at the Point. Without his knowing it, Tocco
and Annabelle had stayed behind, and now they came over from the lodge to join him. Neither of them commented on his look of surprise, evidently assuming that he had known they were not leaving with the others.
“Goddamn, it’s started, huh?” Tocco said.
“So it seems.”
Across the cove, a half dozen antlike figures were working their way up the curve of the road under Valhalla. A rattle of automatic gunfire erupted and the figures scurried for cover.
“Saved by Newman and Jagger,” Tocco said. “Ain’t it the pits?”
“What do you mean,
saved?”
Stone asked.
“Like the Mau Mau are up there, and we’re down here—
alive.”
“And you think Jagger and Newman are responsible for that?”
“I hate to admit it.”
“How about Rich? And now the junkman? They figure in too?”
“Well, that’s life.”
“Not for them, it isn’t.”
“Better them than us.”
Stone said nothing more. All he could think about now was what he saw happening on Valhalla and what it meant for the two girls and their little brother. He kept thinking of them almost as figures in history, unfortunate children of outmoded privilege trembling in some ancient castle keep under attack by barbarian hordes. And the place did in fact remind him of a castle, almost a Rhine castle, an improbable confection of stone and overweening ambition perched atop a rock formation that itself seemed wholly
out of place, as if it had broken away from the limestone bluffs across the lake and floated over to this side, to lodge where it was on the lakeshore, an incongruity, a lithic fantasy compounded by the sprawling edifice man had erected upon it.
But at the moment the Mau Mau were turning that castle into little more than an anthill, a mound made for their swarming. Through his binoculars, Stone could see a few of them climbing over the iron gate at the top of the road. Others had clambered up the rocky face above the road and now they began to shoot over the parapet there toward the buildings. Two of them recklessly tumbled over the top and charged the main structure in the background, of which Stone could see only the red-tiled roof.
There was another rattle of automatic gunfire and then more Mau Mau began to spill over the parapet into the courtyard, joined by those who had made it over the iron gate. And abruptly all the outdoor lamps came on, a sunburst in the growing dusk, lighting up the attackers like stage players. But they kept coming anyway, charging on into the courtyard and out of sight. And for a minute or so the gunfire continued, some of it muffled, as though it came from indoors. Altogether, the whole affair sounded not like a battle so much as some cheap, distant fireworks display, intermittent and muted.
Suddenly Stone remembered Eve and he turned to look, expecting to see the boats a hundred yards out or so. But they were not there, had vanished in the mists that rose up out of the lake these late fall evenings like some punctual evil spirit.
“She’s gone,” Annabelle said. “Just sailed out of your life forever, swallowed up in the fog. A real Gothic romance.”
Stone said nothing. He looked at Tocco. “What are your plans? You gonna stay here, or move on?”
Tocco laughed.
“Stay here?
You gotta be kidding. By the time them spades are finished with Valhalla, we gonna be long gone.” He put his arm around Annabelle and hugged her to him. “Yeah, she stood it as long as she could, not gettin’ regular Sicilian dick. Now she’s happy again. Right, baby?”
“Congratulations,” Stone said.
It was an uncomfortable moment, and he was hoping they would go off and leave him alone. Across the cove, the gunfire now was infrequent and random, probably only in celebration. And this was confirmed when the outdoor stereo suddenly came on, turned higher than Stone had heard it before. But as soon as one record would begin to play—Streisand, Sarah Vaughan, the Beatles—it immediately would be taken off and another tried in its place, only to suffer the same fate. Evidently the junkman’s taste in music was not that of the General and his gang.
Stone was about to turn away then, thinking that the whole sickening show was over, when two Mau Mau came to the parapet carrying a body by the feet and hands. The youths got up onto the low stone wall and began to swing their burden back and forth, like victorious college oarsmen about to dunk a coxswain. On the third swing, they let go of the body and it fell about fifty feet before it struck a rock outcropping and tumbled the rest of the way down into the lake. Over the next few minutes the same act was repeated five more times, and of these only one of the bodies, that of a little boy, made it all the way down to the water. The remaining four had lodged on the rocky, sloping face of Valhalla.
“Looks like the junkman bought it,” Tocco observed.
Stone lowered his binoculars. “Two of them were black,” he said. “Mau Mau.”
“Any of them women?” Annabelle asked.
Stone shook his head. “I don’t know. The last one, I couldn’t make out.”
Back in the lodge, Tocco and Annabelle ate sparingly of the canned vegetables they had secured before the others left. Stone, however, ate hungrily. Despite his seeing over and over in his mind the bodies plunging down toward the water, and despite what he imagined was happening at Valhalla even at that moment, he still was hungry. And for some reason he decided to satisfy that hunger and forget about tomorrow—it just did not seem important anymore. He had creamed corn and peas and stewed tomatoes, a half Mason jar of each. As he devoured it all, Tocco and Annabelle told him of their plans.
They hadn’t gone with the others, Tocco said, for obvious reasons. A troop of misfits wandering around together, trying to find food and shelter, that wasn’t for him. And he figured they would be breaking apart soon anyway, so he and Annabelle had decided to take the plunge now. They were going to sleep a few hours and leave before dawn, heading north,
away
from Valhalla. The first good crossroads they came to, they would turn west and then south and just keep going.
“We figure in time we’ll hit civilization again, someplace the goddamn colored haven’t turned into hell.”
“You’re welcome to come along,” Annabelle said. “I guess the more guns the better.”
Stone declined, saying that he didn’t know what he was going to do yet. “Probably hang around here another day and then take off. Alone.”
Even in the darkness Stone could see Tocco’s grin.
“Hey, don’t try to con us. You’re planning on going after the Lady Eve, right?”
Stone did not respond. He finished eating and got up. “Well, there’s a body to be buried—your savior, remember him?”
Neither of them answered.
“You want to help me?” he asked.
Tocco looked down at the floor and shook his head. “I can’t. I’m too tired. I couldn’t stay awake.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I am.”
Stone let it go. “Okay. When I’m finished, I’ll stand watch—till one or two. You can do the same while I get some sleep. If you leave at dawn, that should be early enough. That sound okay?”
“Sure.” Tocco got up and yawned. He put his hands on Annabelle’s shoulders. “Hey, we’re gonna be all right,” he averred. “We’re gonna come through this just fine. We’re gonna come out on top. Right, baby?”
Annabelle said nothing.
It took Stone over an hour to bury young Kelleher. All his life he had felt squeamish in the presence of the dead, and this night was no exception. Rich was a big man, weighing a good one-eighty, and Stone had to labor to get his body down out of the tree and carry it back to the garden, where he knew that the fall-plowed ground would be softer. He found a spot along the far edge and dug there, always fearing that a stray pack of wild dogs would make an appearance and cause him to dig all the deeper. As it was, he went down at least three feet before rolling the body into the grave and covering it. It was hard work,
the kind that would have made his heart bang in his chest even if it had not been nighttime, and cold, and even if he had been digging only a pit in the ground instead of a grave. So he was exhausted when he finished, sweating heavily in the freezing air. He thought of saying a few words over the grave and then gave up the idea. Rich could not hear him and if there was a God, He knew it all anyway.