“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.
Bone was aware of the silence between Archie and Deacon, the way they moved around each other like nervous cats. There was no poker tonight, no debate. Only the sound of the rain drumming on the sod roof.
Archie stood up impulsively not long before darkness set in for the night. He stretched, shot a glance at Deacon, said, “This fuckin’ place!” and ducked through the door in the direction of the outhouse.
Deacon, seated on his bunk, watched the other man go. As soon as Archie was hidden by the rain he stood up.
“I’ll be out for a bit,” he told Bone. “You stay here. You hear me? Stay put.” “Deacon—” “Shut up.”
Bone recoiled from the force of Deacon’s voice. “Shut up,” Deacon whispered fiercely, “and stay put, and that’s all I want to hear from you.” Bone sat still.
Deacon moved out into the rain as Archie had, but in a different direction: toward the farmhouse.
Bone was still waiting—gazing at the rain, his knees pulled up, rocking in rhythm with the Calling inside him—when Archie came back, staring at Deacon’s empty bunk. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and turned almost tearfully to Bone. “Where is he? Oh, Christ! Did he go out? Did he go there!”
Bone pointed toward the farmhouse—a dark shape in the rain through the door.
Archie staggered as if from a physical blow. He looked suddenly small, Bone thought. Small and old. His grief was like a dark aura. “Oh, Christ, Bone— come on, come with me, we gotta stop him, stop him before it’s too late!”
The demand was so heartfelt that Bone did not question it. He ran behind Archie into the rain. He was cold and wet instantly, water slicking his stubble hair, running past the collar of his pea coat into his torn checked shirt and down the knobs of his spine. They reached the farmhouse, and Bone pressed up against a kitchen window. Condensation frosted the glass; he could not see inside; but one wet pane gave him back his own reflection, sunken-eyed, pale, and huge. The kitchen was dark. Archie shouted: “Bone! Bone, the door’s locked! Knock it down, for God’s sake, he’s inside there, Bone—”
But then a light flashed twice in the darkness, the noise of it ringing painfully in Bone’s eardrums. It was Darcy’s big shotgun, Bone guessed. The one that had hung on the wall. And in the eerie silence that followed there was only the drumming of the rain, the rattle of a fallen copper kettle from the kitchen, and the wail of Archie’s weeping.
Digging the hole, Bone thought about death.
The darkness was absolute, though the rain had tapered to a drizzle. He worked methodically with the Darcys’ broad-bladed shovel, fighting the wet ground and the mulch that littered the wheatfield, turning up the rich dark soil. The night wind on his wet clothes made him tremble, and Bone gritted his teeth and drove the shovel savagely into the resistant earth. He smelled of his work.
Death was not such a bad thing, Bone thought. He had wondered, at times, if it was not in fact death that was Calling him, whether that elusive sweetness might not be the sweetness of release from this misshapen body. In some way it might be… but he had been offered death many times and had never accepted. The body resisted. There was an incompleteness about it.
Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll too casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.
Bone had made the hole shallow but wide. It looked less like a grave than like some kind of crater, broadly dish-shaped, now filling with black water. Bone guessed it was good enough and when he stood up and turned toward the farmhouse he saw the halo of Archie’s lantern bobbing toward him across the denuded wheatfield. Archie had stopped weeping, but his face was set in a rictus of grief, his eyes heavy-lidded and bruised-looking.