By the end of that week they had finished the last of the threshing; the grain was ready to be trucked to the elevator in town and offered up for what the farmer Darcy said were “foreclosure prices”— twenty-four cents a bushel. The workload had eased and Deacon and Archie spent more time together, playing cards after dark by lantern-light, the sound of Deacon’s voice as relentless and oddly comforting as the ticking of a clock. Deacon talked about the Darcys more often. And Archie, often, was sullen and silent.
“They’re childless,” Deacon said, “and with the harvest over there’s nobody within miles of here. The opportunity is perfect.”
“No,” Archie said. “What you have in mind, that’s courting the worst sort of danger.”
“In hard times,” Deacon said sagely, “taking risks is the only way to get ahead. You want to be a bindlestiff forever? Live out your life in some pasteboard Hoovertown? By God. How else do people get rich, if not by taking money from some other person? It’s cruel—of course it’s cruel—but it’s how the world operates, and you can’t argue with it, you might as well argue with rocks or water.”
“But if we take the money,” Archie began without real hope, and Deacon interrupted:
“They have land. They own this spread. We’re not hurting them as much by taking it as we are hurting ourselves by leaving it. Darcy could not have made his harvest without us—you heard him say so. We did the work and we deserve payment for it. In a way it is our money”
Bone listened with a pained incomprehension. He did not understand about money. The money came from the wheat, somehow, and the wheat was Darcy’s, wasn’t it? He guessed Deacon knew what he was talking about… but there was a bad feeling in the air, the steely odor of Archie’s fear and Deacon’s imperious needs.
“People have seen us,” Archie said. “They know what we look like. We’ll get caught.”
“Do they?” Deacon said. “Will we?”
“The sheriff who brought us over,” Archie said, “the men Darcy had in for the wheat harvest—”
“Look at yourself. Look at me! Think about it. We could be anybody. Any redball freight, there’s fifty guys who look just like us.”
“But Bone—”
“They see Bone. Exactly! Who was at the farm? Well, there was two guys—hoboes—and this geek. If they look for anybody, it won’t be for us.”
Bone understood that Deacon was plotting a theft, that the Darcys would be the victims of it. The idea disturbed him, but he turned on his side and closed his eyes. Whatever was imminent, it could not be helped. He had parceled out his loyalty; he could not retrieve it now.
“But the Darcys,” Archie said patiently, “they’ll know it wasn’t Bone who took the money.”
“That,” Deacon said softly, “is another problem.”
Archie took him aside the next evening at sunset. It had been a hot blue day, the wind stirring dust in the stubbled fields. The denuded earth was like scar tissue. The binders had done all their work, Bone knew; Darcy had cleaned them and oiled them and stored them under tarps, their sleek angles hidden for a season.
“You have to understand about Deacon,” Archie said. “The kind of guy he is.”
Bone liked Archie. He was fascinated by Archie’s wisp of beard and by the way he held Deacon’s mirror for him. Now, though, Archie was frowning, and Bone smelled the fear that had in recent days begun to cling to him. They leaned against a rail fence, Archie’s eyes furtive in his small face.
“I been with him a long time,” Archie said. “He’s a decent man. Many a time I wouldn’t have eaten but for him. Full of plans, full of schemes. You know that.”
Bone said nothing.
“But he’s ambitious,” Archie said. “I’ve seen it happen before. It’s like shooting craps. The same thing. Get him started and he won’t be able to stop.”
Archie’s hands trembled. Bone perceived the fear that was bottled inside the smaller man. The fear was infectious; it was like a fog, Bone thought, oily and clinging.
“What he wants to do,” Archie said, “it scares me. I’m not stupid. It won’t end here. I know that. If it starts, Christ knows where it’ll stop. You understand?”
But the words came too fast. Bone looked at Archie emptily. The sun had gone behind the farmhouse, shadows lengthened and darkened.
“In a way,” Archie said, “I think it started back in California, back during that raid, when you killed those farmers, when you knocked down that scissorbill like, I don’t know, some kind of crazy man, throwing those big goddamn fists around… you didn’t see his eyes, Bone, how they lit up, like for the first time in all his life he saw some guy with a club or a uniform get kayoed. For the first time, understand, it wasn’t him on the ground, it was the other guy, and I think that made him a little crazy, crazy with the wanting of it. …” Archie paused, swiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Every time he looks at you, that’s what he sees.”
“It’s not my fault,” Bone managed. “It’s in him.”
“Deep in him. You draw it out.” “Look at me,” Bone said. “What do you see?” Archie gazed at him. Bone felt the smaller man’s confusion.
“There’s no harm in you,” Archie relented, almost tearful now, “I never said that! But, Bone, listen, we have to stop him! If we don’t, these people, the Darcys, they won’t just get robbed, they might get something worse, they might get hurt—killed, maybe—I mean, I’ve seen the way he looks at them, the way he looks at this spread, and he’s working hard at hating ’em, hating ’em for what they got, hoarding up envy like sour bile inside him—”
But the words fled comprehension. There was only the fear clinging to Archie like a bad smell. Bone wished there was something he could do. But he could not control Deacon.
Deacon looks at me, Bone thought, and what he sees is Deacon: Deacon killing that scissorbill, Deacon with his big fists clenched.
And Archie looks at me, he thought, and sees Archie—Archie trembling, Archie wanting to help, Archie helpless.
He might have said something, might have tried to explain… but the smaller man’s fear crested like a wave over him, and the words became dim and elusive.
Frightened, Bone turned and fled to the barn.
That night in his bunk he dreamed again of the Jeweled World and woke before the cock’s crow, shivering in the darkness. The Calling was plaintive in him and it blended, somehow, into the howl of a distant train. So close now. So close.
He could not delay any longer.
He stood next to Deacon that morning, soaping himself at the wooden trough. Bone washed clumsily. His naked body was huge and strange, sinews and joints oddly linked, only approximately human. Deacon and Archie had long since ceased to remark on it, but this morning he was painfully aware of his own peculiarity. He longed to know what he meant, what he was… and knew that the only answer was in the Calling.
“Tonight,” he told Deacon. “I leave tonight. I can’t stay any longer.”
Deacon ceased toweling his face and gave Bone a long thoughtful look.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Tonight it is.”
The sky was livid with dawn.
By midmorning an overcast had moved in. The gray clouds hung from horizon to horizon all through that day, thinning but never breaking, and when they were darkest a hard rain came down. Deacon, Archie, and Bone were confined to the hired men’s quarters. The gloom was so intense that their lantern did little to penetrate it.