The rage and pain of it were still perceptible. It had a purpose, Travis sensed, and the purpose was to protect the Anna-thing long enough for their coupling to take place; it was hostile to every threat. And it knew him.
The monster hovered over him.
Your own deepest, hidden face.
Betrayed, he thought, deceived, yes, striking out now, unbound, no victims left but himself. But if this was himself then he could no longer deny it. He gazed without fear into those fiery eyes. The self submitting to the verdict of the self. Christ knows he had done it to others. Had turned on his dying mother, had turned on Nancy when she needed him; now himself: it was only logical. “Kill me,” he whispered. “Kill me then, if that’s what you’ve come to do.”
But the creature turned away. It went to the shack; the meadow was suddenly prosaically empty. Travis gaped up at the stars.
Nancy ran to him, weeping.
She staunched his wound and made a sort of pillow of prairie grass for him. She took off her own cloth coat and laid it over him.
The night was cold, and Travis was grateful.
Chapter Nineteen
Through what remained of the night she kept him warm. Travis was intermittently lucid. He imagined he could see the stars wheeling overhead. When the dawn came he said, “Are they in there?” “In the shack? Yes.”
He sat up, though the effort was murderous. Nancy said, “You need a doctor.”
He shook his head. He wasn’t bleeding anymore and he could move his arm. It was a clean wound and might not infect. “I need to get warm. I need food.”
“We could build a fire… but it might draw somebody’s attention.”
“Build it,” Travis said. “There won’t be anybody coming out here today.”
He warmed himself at the fire. He still did not trust himself to walk. Dizziness came and went, and nausea. Nancy brought him water from the river. But she knew he needed to eat, too.
“There’s some food left in the shack,” Nancy said.
“I wonder how long it takes.” “Don’t know. She never said.” It was unimaginable, the prodigies of healing that must be going on in there. She had seen Bone and she knew Anna and she could not conceive of a single creature emerging from that marriage of fire and water, earth and air.
Travis looked at her. “You know, we can’t go back.”
“I know.”
“There’s nowhere much we can go.” “I thought maybe west. California, maybe.” She shrugged. “It’s warmer.” He nodded.
Nancy said, “You mean it?” “What?”
“About traveling together?”
“Yes … I mean, if you’re willing.”
She gazed at him as if from a distance. “What did you see out there with Bone? What did he show you?”
Travis shrugged.
They appeared, Anna and Bone, briefly, at noon.
The sunlight made everything prosaic. The air was still cool but the autumn sun beat down with real pressure. Everything was outlined in it, Nancy thought, each stalk of grass, the grain elevators black on the horizon, a sparrow swooping across the meadow. There were dust motes everywhere.
They emerged from the switchman’s shack, a single being now. She could see none of Bone or Anna in this creature. She was reminded instead of a sort of bird—those structureless wings of light behind it, a graceful arch that suggested a body, swirls of darkness for eyes. It did not fly but hung suspended in the air, buoyant. She held her breath. The creature was difficult to look at and seemed to possess too many angles, as if a stained-glass church window had been folded and folded on itself, the delicate rose and amber light caught up in labyrinths the eye could not trace. It moved toward Travis.
Nancy thought he might struggle to his feet, even injured as he was, might run away. But he did not. The creature advanced on him and he only looked at it, his eyes wide and fearless.
Dear God, Nancy thought, what did he learn out there?
The creature hovered. She saw one wing come down. Its membrane of light moved across Travis— or through him—like a caress. The gesture was at once so tender and so entirely alien that Nancy felt a tingling at her neck. Then the creature moved away, rose up or diminished; she could not say which.
She went to Travis. With an expression of slow wonder he peeled away the bandage Nancy had made for him.
The wound was closed; there was only the hint of a scar.
“They know us,” he told her, hoarse with awe. “They know us yet.”
And then they were alone. The creature that was Anna and Bone moved away across the meadow in an impossible motion that made her blink and avert her eyes. Gone, she thought, vanished into the lanes and pathless alleys between the worlds… and for a moment she was stricken with an inexpressible longing. Her memory of the Jeweled World was strong in her and she thought, I want to follow, follow… but Bone and Anna were gone where there was no following, vanished along some invisible axis. There was only the prairie—prairie grass, buck-brush, dry foxtail and lupine running in swells to a distant shore of sky,- summer and winter, spring and fall contained in it (somehow) all at once—and Nancy thought: why, I guess it is enough. It is enough.
She moved with trepidation into the dark hollow of the vacant shack. It seemed now as if she had lived much of her life in this confined space—made alien, curiously, by Anna’s absence. The door had fallen away when Greg Morrow kicked it. Fingers of sunlight probed into all the secret places. The mattress was tawdry and stained, Anna’s old clothes in a heap on it, and Bone’s there, too, his old blue pea coat— bloodstained—discarded in a corner.
She folded the dress neatly and put it aside. It was a small gesture but soothing. The blue pea coat was heavy with blood but deserved, she thought, the same act of respect. But when she lifted it in her hand a bundle dropped from one of its pockets.
Nancy, curious, reached for it.
Coda
The freight car they rode out of Haute Montagne was crowded, and Nancy was dismayed by the people who filled it. These were not just hoboes like the men she had seen under the railway trestle but whole families, men and women and children, migrating westward with winter and poverty hard behind them. Outcasts, she thought, exiles, and how easily we might have joined them, become indistinguishable from them. … In truth, she thought, we are not much better off, despite the money that had fallen from Bone’s pea coat (enough to buy food, pay a little rent)—but, too, she thought, in some way we are different. It was written in Travis’s face.
The granaries and the water tower fell away behind them. A cold wind came through the slats in the freight car and made her press into Travis’s shoulder. He held her with a gentleness she had not sensed in him before. She looked at his face and he was frowning into the gray distance, worried, she guessed, about where they were going and what they would do there; but there was a second quality in him that was unfamiliar, utterly new. He sensed her attention and smiled at her. And it was the smile, Nancy thought wonderingly, of a man who has just forgiven someone, or who has been, himself, forgiven.
There were no funeral services held in Haute Montagne in the month of November. No one would say (though some suspected) that Creath Burack was dead. Liza lit a candle in the parlor window each night all that cold month in the hope that her husband might find his way home. But he did not, and come the first snow Liza laid away the candlestick in a bureau drawer, secure between a lavender sachet and a neatly folded linen tablecloth. For him, as for her, there was no returning.